American Language Supplement 1

by H. L. Mencken

  Grease-ball is most often applied in the United States to Greeks, but it is also used to designate any foreigner of dark complexion. In the argot of Sing-Sing, and perhaps of other American prisons, it designates an Italian.5 In the general slang of the country it means any dirty person, and in various occupational argots it has various special significances, all having to do with some notion of unkempt-ness. So far as I know, the Greeks in the United States have never undertaken a crusade against it, but some of the more hopeful of them endeavor to persuade Americans to use Hellas or Hellade instead of Greece in speaking of their country. This is in line with the movement toward native names which has converted Ireland into Eire, Persia into Iran, and Siam into Thai.

  Herring-choker, listed in AL4, p. 296, as a designation for a Scandinavian, is also used by the New England fishermen to mean a Newfoundlander, and sometimes also a Nova Scotian or a Canadian in general.1 The more common name for a Nova Scotian is bluenose, which the DAE defines as “a native of Nova Scotia or New Brunswick” and traces to 1837. Before this it had apparently been used to designate a New Englander. Bartlett defines it as “the slang name for a native of Nova Scotia,” but Thornton says “of Nova Scotia or New Brunswick.” Bartlett quotes the following from “Sam Slick,” by T. R. Haliburton:

  [Blue-nose] … is the name of a potato which they [the Nova Scotians] produce in great perfection, and boast to be the best in the world. The Americans have, in consequence, given them the nickname of blue-noses.1

  During the days of Prohibition bluenose was widely used to designate a Prohibitionist, and before that it had been applied to reformers in general, especially those of the sort called wowsers by the Australians. Berrey and Van den Bark say that American sailors also call a Nova Scotian a novy and a Newfoundlander a newfy or cod-hauler. Mr. Theodore Irwin, who used scoovy in his novel, “Strange Passage,” in 1935, tells me that it means “more particularly a Swede.”3 Other names for Swede, in addition to those listed in AL4, p. 296, under Scandinavian, are roundhead and swensky. Danes and Norwegians are usually called squareheads. Polack, for a Pole, is old in English, and the NED traces it to 1599. It is to be found in “Hamlet,” Act II, Scene I, spoken by Horatio.4 A correspondent calls my attention to the fact that in conversation the a is often changed to o.

  297. [The English … are free to laugh at stage Irishmen without bringing down the dudgeon of the Knights of Columbus, and they continue to use the word Jew freely, and even retain the verb to jew in their vocabulary.] To jew, in the original sense, now obsolete, of to cheat, may be an Americanism, and in the sense of to bargain for a lower price (usually to jew down) it certainly is. The NED’s first example of the former is dated c. 1845, and the latter is not listed at all. The DAE’s first example of the former is dated c. 1834 and of the latter 1870.1 The Jews of the United States have been carrying on a campaign against the use of the verb for many years, and with such success that it seldom appears in any save frankly anti-Semitic writings, though it is still heard by word of mouth. This campaign began so long ago as the 70s, when they petitioned the publishers of Webster’s and Worcester’s Dictionaries to omit it. The publisher of Worcester’s complied, but it still appears in Webster 1934, as likewise in the DAE. Webster throws a sop to the protestants by appending to its definition of the word, in the first sense, “originally used opprobriously in allusion to practises imputed to the Jews by those who dislike them” but its definition of to jew down is accompanied by no such plea in confession and avoidance. In 1939, after the publication of AL4, I received a letter from an apparently intelligent Jewish woman in Brookline, Mass., demanding that I expunge all discussion of the word from the book. Three years before this another vigilant Jew, this time a male and hailing from Chicago, undertook a jehad against the publishers of a new edition of Roget’s Thesaurus because it listed Jew as a synonym for lender.2

  The very word Jew appears to be offensive to many American Jews, and they commonly avoid it by using Jewish with a noun. This is noticeable in “Who’s Who in America,” where the majority of Jews who mention their faith at all use Jewish religion, not Jew. In New York, Jewish boy, girl, man, woman or people is often used as a sort of euphemism. In 1927 a statistician at Yale examined the replies made by 91 Jewish candidates for admission as freshman there to the question “Church affiliation?” Nineteen answered by giving the names of the congregations to which they belonged; of the rest, forty-eight answered Jewish, fourteen answered Hebrew, two answered Jewish orthodox, one each answered Judaism, reformed Judaism, Jewish temple or synagogue, Jewish faith or the like; not one answered simply Jew. There is apparently no objection to Jews in the plural to designate the whole body of Israel, but in the singular it is avoided. Not infrequently Hebrew is used instead, though it is inaccurate.1 Variety, which is owned and mainly staffed by Jews, reduces Hebrew to Hebe, obviously with jocose intent. Other sportive Jews use Arab or Mexican to designate a member of their nation.

  The deliberately offensive names for a Jew — sheeny, kike, mockie and so on —are of mysterious etymology. Webster 1934 dismisses kike as “derogatory,” with the sententious (and misleading) definition, “a Jew; Yid,” and omits sheeny altogether. The DAE ignores both, though both were in use before its upset date, 1900. Sheeny is listed in the NED and in the English-Yid dish Dictionary of Alexander Harkavy.2 The NED marks it “of obscure origin,” and traces it to 1824. Ernest Weekley, in his “Etymological Dictionary of Modern English” calls it “East End slang” and hazards the guess that it may have arisen from a “Yiddish pronunciation of the German schön, beautiful, used in praising wares.” Partridge says: “Very tentatively, I suggest that it arose from the sheeny, i.e., glossy or brightly shiny hair of the average ‘English’ Jew.” Maurice Samuel, in “The World of Sholom Aleichem,”3 suggests that it may be derived from the Hebrew phrase, meeseh meshineh, but enters upon no particulars. Barrère and Leland mark it Yiddish and say: “It is probably taken from scheina — scheina, jaudea lischkol —, a stupid fellow who does not know enough to ask or inquire.” They add: “Schien, a police man, and schiener, a house-thief, may have contributed to form this rather obscure word.” They say also that “in America a pawnbroker is sometimes called a sheeney,” but this seems to be an error, for the word in that sense occurs in none of the American glossaries of slang. But Farmer and Henley note its use in English. They also list it as an adjective meaning “base, Jewish, fraudulent.” Thackeray used Sheeney in “The Book of Snobs,” 1847, as a generic name for a Jew, along with Moses. Partridge says that the word was apparently inoffensive so late as the 70s, but by the 80s it had become very obnoxious to the Jews of both England and the United States. He notes that it is used by English tramps to designate a tramp of dark complexion, and Edward Fraser and John Gibbons say in “Soldier and Sailor Words and Phrases”1 that it is English soldiers’ slang for “a careful, extra economical man.”

  The most commonly accepted etymology for kike was thus stated in American Speech in 1926 by J. H. A. Lacher, of Waukesha, Wis.:

  In Russia there began some forty years ago a fierce persecution of the Jews.… Many found their way to the United States.… Here they offered keen competition to their brethren of German origin, who soon insisted that the business ethics and standards of living and culture of these Russians were far lower than theirs. Since the names of so many of these Eastern Jews ended in -ki or -ky, German-American Jewish traveling men designated them contemptuously as kikis, a term which, naturally, was soon contracted to kikes. When I heard the term kikis for the first time at Winona, Minn., about forty years ago, it was a Jewish salesman of German descent who used it and explained it to me; but in the course of a few years it disappeared, kike being used instead.

  A traveling salesman myself twenty-five to forty-five years ago, I know from personal experience that, soon after the Russian invasion, the credit men of that period were greatly prejudiced against firms whose names ended in -ki or -ky.… Hence it was not long before -ki and -ky disap
peared as tails to their names, and Gordensky became Gordon, and Levinski became Levin. I have even known them to drop their Slavic-Jewish patronymics and to assume German names so as to disarm the credit man and escape the odium of being kikes. There are still plenty of surnames to be found in the city directories terminating in -ki or -ky, but almost invariably they are owned by Christians. The word kike remains, however, to designate a low type of merchant.

  As I have said, this etymology, or something resembling it, seems to be widely accepted, but it by no means goes unchallenged. In 1937 Rabbi Jacob Tarlau, of Flushing, L. I., argued for a different one as follows:2

  The German Jews, from time immemorial, have had the habit of calling an Eastern European Jew, no matter where he came from, a Pollak. The word Ostjude [Eastern Jew], as used today officially but with no less sneering contempt, is of comparatively recent date. Even the Jews of the then German province of Posen were nothing but Pollaken, in spite of their rather pitiful efforts to be more German than the Kaiser. This habit of using Pollak had grown to such a degree that it came very near being a synonym for alien or stranger.… Why these German Jews should suddenly forget an almost innate habit and overthrow the time-honored Pollak and Pollaken for kiki and kikis seems to me to be far more of a puzzle than the origin of the word kike itself, especially as they had ample opportunity to do so while they lived in Germany, where they had, in proportion, met at least as many -kis and -kys as they did later in America, and where the people bearing those supposedly objectionable names did not even make an attempt to hide or change them.…

  The objectionable endings are not even -ki and -ky; they are -ski and -sky. More attractive seems to me the suggestion hinted at in Webster’s New International Dictionary [to the effect that kike may be related to keek, which is defined as, “in the clothing trade, one employed by a manufacturer to spy out the latest designs of rivals”]. But if we consider the fact that the clothing trade, until long after the influx of Russian immigrants, was almost entirely in the hands of Germans, Jews and non-Jews alike, we can perhaps imagine that keek, as used in the trade, might have become kuck or kucker, but hardly kike.

  I like to think that the first one nicknamed kike was some Polish or Galician Jew who had the misfortune to be overheard by some objector when he called a cake, in true Yiddish, a kike. This same objector might have met others committing the same offense, and might have started the ball rolling by saying, either indignantly or in joke, “There is another kike.” Naturally, this is nothing but a mere suggestion. However, it is based upon a well-known and undeniable fact — that the Polish, and especially the Galician Jew almost invariably turns the long German vowel e [as in kek, cake, a loan from English] into ei. The same fate befalls the diphthongs oe and ae, which, unpronounceable to the Yiddish tongue, first become long e and then also ei.

  Thus they would not say er geht, but er geit; not er steht, but er steit. Legen becomes leigen, schön is schein, and nötig is neitig. A very pretty girl is a schein meidel. Even der melech, the king, cannot escape from becoming meilech.

  Dr. A. A. Roback, in “Curiosities of Yiddish Literature,”1 agrees that kike is “of Yiddish origin,” but does not attempt its etymology. In another place2 he quotes the opinion of the late Dr. Gotthard Deutsch (1859–1921), professor of history in the Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, that the word may be derived from the Yiddish kikel, a circle. He says:

  According to him a certain new arrival from Russia became a drummer as soon as he set foot in this country. He could neither read nor write, but his profession required that he enter certain facts in a notebook, so he began jotting down names and figures by using a system of circles. His acquaintances would sometimes ask him how he could get along without knowing English but he produced those circles and said that his kikels were quite sufficient for the work he was doing. He came to be known as a kike, and the term was later applied to all similar persons. Most probably that particular case was known to Prof. Deutsch, else we cannot see how a story would be invented to prove a fantastic etymology.

  Despite Dr. Roback’s confidence in Professor Deutsch, it is a sad fact that preposterous folk-etymologies have been known to deceive learned men, and this case seems to offer an example. Kike has acquired a somewhat extended meaning since World War I, and now designates, not only an Eastern Jew, but any Jew who happens to be in ill favor. This extension is shown by a familiar witticism: “A kike is a Jew who has left the room.”1 A correspondent calls my attention to the fact that in the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan, the term was used to designate a Jew who opposed the ideals of that great Methodist-Baptist organization.2 “There are good Jews, and there are kikes” is still frequently heard, and not only in the Bible country. Mockie seems to be confined to the New York area. Its etymology I do not know, but it may have some sort of relation to the word mock. Goose, I suppose, embodies a reference to the tailor’s smoothing-iron, which has been called a goose since Shakespeare’s time.

  There are several English names for Jew, all of them more or less opprobrious, that have never flourished in the United States, e.g., shonk and smous(e). A. F. Hubbell suggests in American Speech3 that shonk may be a recent invention: it does not appear in any of the standard vocabularies of English slang. Smous(e) has a longer history. It was listed by Grose in 1785, and defined as meaning a German Jew. It is traced to 1705 by the NED, which suggests that it is probably derived from the Yiddish schmus, which in turn is derived from the Hebrew sh’muoth, meaning tales or news, “the reference being to the persuasive eloquence of Jewish pedlars.” It seems rather more likely, if this etymology is sound, that the reference is to the chatter of Jews among themselves, for in the DAE’s first example, from “A Description of the Coast of Guinea,” a translation of a Dutch work by W. Bosman, published in 1705, the word is introduced in a simile running “as … noisy as the smouse of German Jews at their synagogue at Amsterdam.” Partridge says that smous and smouse are now archaic in England, but that smouch and smoutch, which he thinks are variants, survive. The NED lists smouch as signifying a Jew, and traces it to 1765. To smouch. in the sense of to kiss, is old in English, and seems to have come originally from a German dialect use of schmutzen, which means to dirty in standard German. In the sense of to pilfer, to smouch may be an Americanism. I am informed by an English correspondent that shmog is sometimes used to designate a Jew in England, and that it is regarded as obscene, but it is not listed in any dictionary of English slang. In the days of the British Fascist party, which was strongly anti-Semitic, yid was used. This is also encountered in the United States: apparently it is not regarded as offensive by the Jews, who use it themselves, often in the form of yiddisher, and sometimes as a plural, yidden. The use of nose for a Jew is reported in the student slang of Ohio State University, but it is very rare elsewhere. The use of jew to designate a ship’s tailor is noted by Partridge. Christ-killer, which is not recorded in any of the dictionaries (though Berrey and Van den Bark list Christ-killer as “a Socialistic soap-box speech”), was familiar in my boyhood, but has passed out with the decay of Bible searching. Creole of Jerusalem, used in Harper’s Magazine in 1858,1 may have been only a nonce-term, for I have found no trace of it elsewhere. Galitzianer (Galician) is sometimes used by Jews of other origin as a term of opprobrium, along with the Polack already noted.

  The American Jews have succeeded in putting down two newspaper practises that formerly worked against the dignity of their people — first, the designation of Jewish criminals as Jewish, and second, the use of anti-Semitic phrases in advertising, especially of hotels. The former practise is now virtually obsolete, and the latter is under such heavy fire that it is fast going out. There was a time when hotels and apartment-houses refusing Jewish patronage advertised that refusal in terms almost as frank as the Nazi Juden sind nicht erwünscht, but the protests of Jews gradually reduced them to such equivocal (but well understood) phrases as restricted (or selected) clientele, and eventually to the single word restricted. In 1942 th
e newspaper PM, which has a large circulation among Jews, undertook to put down even restricted, and a year or so later, apparently under some pressure from District Attorney Frank S. Hogan, all the dailies of New York agreed to ban it from their classified advertising.1