2. NEW WORDS OF ENGLISH MATERIAL
Of far more importance than such small borrowings was the great stock of new words that the early colonists coined in English metal — words primarily demanded by the “new circumstances under which they were placed,” but also indicative, in more than one case, of a delight in the business for its own sake. The American, even in the Seventeenth Century, already showed many of the characteristics that were to set him off from the Englishman later on — his bold and somewhat grotesque imagination, his contempt for dignified authority, his lack of æsthetic sensitiveness, his extravagant humor. Among the first settlers there were a few men of education, culture and gentle birth, but they were soon swamped by hordes of the ignorant and illiterate, and the latter, cut off from the corrective influence of books, soon laid their hands upon the language. It is hard to imagine the austere Puritan divines of Massachusetts inventing such verbs as to cowhide and to logroll, or such adjectives as no-account and stumped, or such adverbs as no-how and lickety-split, or such substantives as bull-frog, hog-wallow and hoe-cake; but under their eyes there arose a contumacious proletariat which was quite capable of the business, and very eager for it. In Boston, so early as 1628, there was a definite class of blackguard roisterers, chiefly made up of sailors and artisans; in Virginia, nearly a decade earlier, John Pory, secretary to Sir George Yeardley, Deputy Governor, lamented that “in these five months of my continuance here there have come at one time or another eleven sails of ships into this river, but fraighted more with ignorance than with any other mar-chansize.” In particular, the generation born in the New World was uncouth and iconoclastic;11 the only world it knew was a rough world, and the virtues that environment engendered were not those of niceness, but those of enterprise and resourcefulness.
Upon men of this sort fell the task of bringing the wilderness to the ax and the plow, and with it went the task of inventing a vocabulary for the special needs of the great adventure. Out of their loutish ingenuity came a great number of picturesque names for natural objects, chiefly boldly descriptive compounds: bull-frog, mud-hen, cat-bird, cat-fish, musk-rat, razor-back, garter-snake, ground-hog and so on. And out of an inventiveness somewhat more urbane came such coinages as live-oak, potato-bug, turkey-gobbler, sweet-potato, canvas-back, poke-weed, copper-head, eel-grass, reed-bird, egg-plant, blue-grass, katy-did, pea-nut, pitch-pine, cling-stone (peach), June-bug, lightning-bug, and butter-nut. Live-oak appears in a document of 1610; bull-frog was familiar to Beverley in 1705; so was James-town weed (later reduced to Jimson weed, as the English hurtleberry or whortleberry was reduced to huckleberry). These early Americans were not botanists. They were often ignorant of the names of the plants that they encountered, even when those plants already had English names, and so they exercised their fancy upon new ones. So arose Johnny-jump-up for the Viola tricolor, and basswood for the common European linden or lime-tree (Tilia), and locust for the Robinia pseudacacia and its allies. The Jimson weed itself was anything but a novelty, but the pioneers apparently did not recognize it as the Datura stramonium, and so we find Beverley reporting that “some Soldiers, eating it in a Salad, turn’d natural Fools upon it for several Days.” The grosser features of the landscape got a lavish renaming, partly to distinguish new forms and partly out of an obvious desire to attain a more literal descriptiveness. I have mentioned key and hook, the one borrowed from the Spanish and the other from the Dutch. With them came branch, fork, run (stream), bluff, cliff, neck, barrens, bottoms, watershed, foot-hill, hollow, water-gap, under-brush, bottom-land, clearing, notch, divide, knob, riffle, rolling-country and rapids, and the extension of pond from artificial pools to small natural lakes, and of creek from small arms of the sea to shallow feeders of rivers. Such common English topographical terms as down, weald, wold, fen, bog, fell, chase, combe, dell, tarn, common, heath and moor disappeared from the colonial tongue, save as fossilized in a few localisms and proper names.12 So did bracken.
With the new landscape came an entirely new mode of life — new foods, new forms of habitation, new methods of agriculture, new kinds of hunting. A great swarm of neologisms thus arose, and, as in the previous case, they were chiefly compounds. Back-woods, back-street, back-lane, back-land, back-log, back-country, back-field, back-line and back-settler were all in common use before the Revolution. Back-log was used by Increase Mather in 1684, and back-street has been traced to 1638.13 Log-house appears in the Maryland Archives for 1669.14 Hoe-cake, Johnny-cake (originally Shawnee-cake or -bread), pan-fish, corn-dodger, roasting-ear, corn-crib, and pop-corn all belong to the colonial period. So do pine-knot, snow-plow, cold-snap, land-slide, ash-can, bob-sled, fox-grape, apple-butter, salt-lick, prickly-heat, shell-road, worm-fence and cane-brake. Shingle, in the American sense, was a novelty in 1705, but one S. Symonds wrote to John Winthrop, of Ipswich, about a clap-boarded house in 1637. Frame-house seems to have come in with shingle. Selectman is first heard of in 1685, displacing the English alderman. Mush had displaced porridge in general use by 1671. Hired-man is to be found in the Plymouth town records of 1737, and hired-girl followed soon after. So early as 1758, as we find in the diary of Nathaniel Ames, the second-year students at Harvard were already called sophomores, though for a while the spelling was often made sophimores. Camp-meeting was later; it did not appear until 1799. But land-office was familiar before 1700, and side-walk, spelling-bee, bee-line, moss-back, crazy-quilt, stamping-ground and a hundred and one other such compounds were in daily use before the Revolution. After that great upheaval the new money of the confederation brought in a number of new words. In 1782 Gouverneur Morris proposed to the Continental Congress that the coins of the Republic be called, in ascending order, unit, penny-bill, dollar and crown. Later Morris invented the word cent, substituting it for the English penny. In 1785 Jefferson, after playing with such terms as pistarine and piece-of-eight, proposed mill, cent, disme, dollar and eagle, and this nomenclature was made official by the Act Establishing a Mint, approved April 2, 1792. Jefferson apparently derived disme from the French word dixiéme, meaning a tenth, and the original pronunciation seems to have been deem. But dime soon supplanted it.15
Various nautical terms peculiar to America, or taken into English from American sources, came in during the Eighteenth Century, among them, schooner, cat-boat, mud-scow and pungy. According to an historian of the American merchant marine,16 the first schooner even seen was launched at Gloucester, Mass., in 1713. The word, it appears, was originally spelled scooner. To scoon was a verb borrowed by the New Englanders from some Scotch dialect, and meant to skim or skip across the water like a flat stone. As the first schooner left the ways and glided out into Gloucester harbor, an enraptured spectator shouted: “Oh, see how she scoons!” “A scooner let her be!” replied Captain Andrew Robinson, her builder — and all boats of her peculiar and novel fore-and-aft rig took the name thereafter. The Scotch verb came from the Norse skunna, to hasten, and there are analogues in Icelandic, Anglo-Saxon and Old High German. The origin of cat-boat, bug-eye and pungy I have been unable to determine. Perhaps the last-named is related in some way to pung, a one-horse sled or wagon. Pung was once widely used in the United States, but later sank to the estate of a New England provincialism. Longfellow used it, and in 1857 a writer in the Knickerbocker Magazine reported that pungs filled Broadway, in New York, after a snow-storm.
The early Americans showed that spacious disregard for linguistic nicety which has characterized their descendants ever since. They reduced verb-phrases to simple verbs, turned verbs into nouns, nouns into verbs, and adjectives into either or both. Pickering, in his Vocabulary (1816) made a belated protest against the reduction of the English law-phrase, to convey by deed, to to deed, and argued solemnly that no self-respecting attorney would employ it, but American attorneys had actually been employing it for years, and they continue to do so to this day. So with to table for to lay on the table. To tomahawk appeared before 1650, and to scalp must have followed soon after. Within the next century
and a half they were reinforced by many other such verbs, and by such adjectives made of nouns as no-account and one-horse, and such nouns made of verbs as carry-all and goner, and such adverbs as no-how. In particular, the manufacture of new verbs went on at a rapid pace. In his letter to Webster in 1789 Franklin deprecated to advocate, to progress and to oppose — a vain caveat, for all of them are now in perfectly good usage. To advocate, indeed, was used by Thomas Nashe in 1589, and by John Milton half a century later, but it seems to have been reinvented in America. In 1822 and again in 1838 Robert Southey, then Poet Laureate, led two belated attacks upon it, as a barbarous Americanism,17 but its obvious usefulness preserved it, and it remains in good usage on both sides of the Atlantic today — one of the earliest of the English borrowings from America. In the end, indeed, even so ardent a purist as Richard Grant White adopted it, as he did to placate.
Webster, though he agreed with Franklin in opposing to advocate, gave his imprimatur to to appreciate (i.e., to rise in value) and to obligate and is credited by Sir Charles Lyell18 with having himself claimed the invention of to demoralize. In a letter to Thomas Dawes, dated August 5, 1809,19 he said that he had also “enriched the vocabulary” with absorbable, accompaniment, acidulous, achromatic, adhesiveness, adjutancy, admissibility, advisory, amendable, animalize, aneurismal, antithetical, appellor, appreciate, appreciation, arborescent, arborization, ascertainable, bailee, bailment, indorser, indorsee, prescriptive, imprescriptible, statement, insubordination, expenditure, subsidize, “and other elegant and scientific terms, now used by the best writers in Great Britain and America.” But most of these, though he could not find them in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary (1755), were already in English before he began to write dictionaries himself, and some were very old.20 To antagonize seems to have been given currency by John Quincy Adams, to immigrate by John Marshall, to eventuate by Gouverneur Morris, and to derange by George Washington. Jefferson, as we saw in Chapter I, Section 2, used to belittle in his “Notes on Virginia,” and Thornton thinks that he coined it. Many new verbs were made by the simple process of prefixing the preposition to common nouns, e.g., to clerk, to dicker, to dump, to negative, to blow (i.e., to bluster or boast), to cord (i.e., wood), to stump, to room and to shin. Others arose as metaphors, e.g., to whitewash (figuratively) and to squat (on unoccupied land). Others were made by hitching suffixes to nouns, or by groping for roots, e.g., to deputize, to locate, to legislate, to infract, to compromit and to happify. Yet others seem to have been produced by onomatopœia, e.g., to fizzle, or to have arisen by some other such spontaneous process, so far unintelligible, e.g., to tote. With them came an endless series of verb-phrases, e.g., to draw a bead, to face the music, to darken one’s doors, to take to the woods, to fly off the handle, to go on the war-path and to saw wood — all obvious products of pioneer life. Many coinages of the pre-Revolutionary era later disappeared. Jefferson used to ambition, but it dropped out nevertheless. So did conflagrative, though a president of Yale gave it his imprimatur. So did to compromit (i.e., to compromise), to homologize and to happify.21 Fierce battles raged round some of these words, and they were all violently derided in England. Even so useful a verb as to locate, now in quite respectable usage, was denounced in the third volume of the North American Review, and other purists of the times tried to put down to legislate.
The young and tender adjectives had quite as hard a row to hoe, particularly lengthy. The British Critic attacked it in November, 1793, and it also had enemies at home, but John Adams had used it in his diary in 1759 and the authority of Jefferson and Hamilton was behind it, and so it survived. By 1816, indeed, Jeremy Bentham was using it in England. Years later James Russell Lowell spoke of it as “the excellent adjective,”22 and boasted that American had given it to English. Dutiable also met with opposition, and moreover it had a rival, customable; but Marshall wrote it into his historic decisions, and thus it took root. The same anonymous watchman of the North American Review who protested against to locate pronounced his anathema upon “such barbarous terms as presidential and congressional,” but the plain need for them kept them in the language. Gubernatorial had come in long before this, and is to be found in the New Jersey Archives of 1734. Influential was denounced by the Rev. Jonathan Boucher and by George Canning, who argued that influent was better,23 but it was ardently defended by William Pinkney, of Maryland, and gradually made its way. Handy, kinky, law-abiding, chunky, solid (in the sense of well-to-do), evincive, complected, judgmatical, underpinned, blooded and cute were also already secure in revolutionary days. So with many nouns. Jefferson used breadstuffs in his Report of the Secretary of State on Commercial Restrictions, December 16, 1793. Balance in the sense of remainder, got into the debates of the First Congress. Mileage was used by Franklin in 1754, and is now sound English.24 Elevator, in the sense of a storage house for grain, was used by Jefferson and by others before him. Draw, for drawbridge, comes down from revolutionary days. So does slip, in the sense of a berth for vessels. So does addition, in the sense of a suburb. So, finally, does darky.
The history of these Americanisms shows how vain is the effort of grammarians to combat the normal processes of language development. I have mentioned the opposition to dutiable, influential, presidential, lengthy, to locate, to oppose, to advocate, to legislate and to progress. Bogus, reliable and standpoint were attacked with the same academic ferocity. All of them are to be found in William Cullen Bryant’s celebrated Index Expurgatorkis (c. 1870),25 and reliable was denounced by Bishop Coxe as “that abominable barbarism” so late as 1886.26 Edward S. Gould, another uncompromising purist, said of standpoint that it was “the bright particular star … of solemn philological blundering” and “the very counterpart of Dogberry’s non-com.”27 Gould also protested against to jeopardize, leniency and to demean, though the last named was very old in English in the different sense of to conduct oneself, and Richard Grant White joined him in an onslaught upon to donate. But all these words are in good usage in the United States today, and some of them have gone over into English.
3. CHANGED MEANINGS
The early Americans also made a great many new words by changing the meaning of old ones. The cases of pond and creek I have already mentioned. To squat, in the sense of to crouch, had been sound English for centuries, but they gave it the meaning of to settle on land without the authority of the owner, and from it the noun squatter quickly emanated. Of another familiar Americanism Krapp says:
The method of portioning out the common lands to the townsmen of the first New England communities has led to the general American use of lot to designate a limited section of land.… The town of Lunenburg (1721) paid for “Travil and Expenc When The Lotts Were Drawn at Concord,” and the records contain a list of all the lots in the town with “the names of those That first Drew them.”… In the Norwalk Records (1671) the agreement is recorded that “all those men that now draw lots with their neighbors shall stand to their lots that now they draw.”… From this usage was derived also the popular saying, to cut across lots.28
Other examples of the application of old words to new purposes are afforded by freshet, barn and team. A freshet, in Eighteenth Century English, meant any stream of fresh water; the colonists made it signify an inundation. A barn was a house or shed for storing crops; in the colonies the word came to mean a place for keeping cattle also. A team, in English, was a pair of draft horses; in the colonies it came to mean both horses and vehicle, though the former meaning, reinforced, survived in the tautological phrase, double team. The process is even more clearly shown in the history of such words as corn and shoe. Corn, in orthodox English, means grain for human consumption, and especially wheat, e.g., the Corn Laws. The earliest settlers, following this usage, gave the name of Indian corn to what the Spaniards, following the Indians themselves, had called maiz. The term appears in Bradford’s “History of Plimouth Plantation” (1647) and in Mourt’s “Relation” (1622). But gradually the adjective fell off, and by the middle of the
Eighteenth Century maize was called simply corn and grains in general were called breadstuffs. Thomas Hutchinson, discoursing to George III in 1774, used corn in this restricted sense, speaking of “rye and corn mixed.” “What corn?” asked George. “Indian corn,” explained Hutchinson,” or, as it is called in authors, maize.29 So with shoe. In English it meant (and still means) a topless article of footwear, but the colonists extended its meaning to varieties covering the ankle, thus displacing the English boot, which they reserved for foot coverings reaching at least to the knee. To designate the English shoe they began to use the word slipper. This distinction between English and American usage still prevails, despite the fashion which has sought to revive boot in the United States, and with it its derivatives, boot-shop and boot-maker.
American Language Page 17