American Language

by H. L. Mencken

  Along with these new verbs came a great swarm of verb-phrases, some of them short and pithy and others extraordinarily elaborate, but all showing the national talent for condensing a complex thought, and often a whole series of thoughts, into a vivid and arresting image. To the first class belong to fill the bill, to fizzle out, to make tracks, to peter out, to plank down, to go back on, to keep tab, to light out and to back water. Side by side with them we have inherited such common coins of speech as to make the fur fly, to cut a swath, to know him like a book, to keep a stiff upper lip, to cap the climax, to handle without gloves, to freeze on to, to go it blind, to pull wool over his eyes, to have the floor, to know the ropes, to get solid with, to spread oneself, to run into the ground, to dodge the issue, to paint the town red, to take a back seat and to get ahead of. These are so familiar that we use them and hear them without thought; they seem as authentically parts of the English idiom as to be left at the post. And yet, as the labors of Thornton have demonstrated, all of them appear to be of American nativity, and the circumstances surrounding the origin of some of them have been accurately determined. Many others are as certainly products of the great movement toward the West, for example, to pan out, to strike it rich, to jump or enter a claim, to pull up stakes, to rope in, to die with one’s boots on, to get the deadwood on, to get the drop, to back and fill, to do a land-office business and to get the bulge on. And in many others the authentic American flavor is no less plain, for example, in to kick the bucket, to put a bug in his ear, to see the elephant, to crack up, to do up brown, to bark up the wrong tree, to jump on with both feet, to go the whole hog, to make a kick, to buck the tiger, to let it slide and to come out at the little end of the horn. To play possum belongs to this list. To it Thornton adds to knock into a cocked hat, despite its English sound, and to have an ax to grind. To go for, both in the sense of belligerency and in that of partisanship, is also American, and so is to go through (i.e., to plunder).

  Of adjectives the list is scarcely less long. Among the coinages of the first half of the century that are still in use today are non-committal, highfalutin, well-posted, down-town, two-fer, played-out, down-and-out, semi-occasional, under-the-weather, on-the-fence, flat-footed, whole-souled and true-blue. The first appears in a Senate debate of 1841;15 highfalutin in a political speech of 1848. Both are useful words; it is impossible, not employing them, to convey the ideas behind them without circumlocution. The use of slim in the sense of meager, as in slim chance, slim attendance and slim support, goes back still further. The English commonly use small in place of it. Other, and less respectable contributions of the time are brash, brainy, peart, scary, beatingest, well-heeled, hardshell (e.g., Baptist), low-flung, codfish (to indicate opprobrium) and go-to-meeting. The use of plumb as an adverb, as in plumb crazy, is an English archaism that was revived in the United States in the early years of the century. In the more orthodox adverbial form of plump it still survives, for example, in “she fell plump into his arms.” But this last is also good English. The characteristic American substitution of mad for angry appeared in the Eighteenth Century, and perhaps shows the survival of an English provincialism. Witherspoon noticed it and denounced it in 1781, and in 1816 Pickering called it “low” and said that it was not used “except in very familiar conversation.” But it got into much better odor soon afterward, and by 1840 it was passing unchallenged. Its use is one of the peculiarities that Englishmen most quickly notice in American colloquial speech today. In formal written discourse it is less often encountered, probably because the English marking of it has so conspicuously singled it out. But it is constantly met with in the newspapers and in the Congressional Record. In the familiar simile, as mad as a hornet, it is used in the American sense, but as mad as a March hare is English, and connotes insanity, not mere anger. The English meaning of the word is preserved in mad-house and mad-dog, but I have often noticed that American rustics, employing the latter term, derive from it a vague notion, not that the dog is demented, but that it is in a simple fury.

  It was not, however, among the verbs and adjectives that the American word-coiners of the first half of the century achieved their gaudiest innovations, but among the substantives. Here they had temptation and excuse in plenty, for innumerable new objects and relations demanded names, and they exercised their fancy without restraint. As in the colonial and revolutionary periods, three main varieties of new nouns were thus produced. The first consisted of English words rescued from obsolescence or changed in meaning, the second of compounds manufactured of the common materials of the mother tongue, and the third of entirely new inventions. Of the first class, good specimens are deck (of cards), gulch, gully and billion, the first three old English words restored to usage in America and the last a sound English word changed in meaning. Of the second class, examples are offered by ginn-shoe, mortgage-shark, carpet-bagger, cut-off, mass-meeting, dead-beat, dug-out, shot-gun, stag-party, wheat-pit, horse-sense, chipped beef, oyster-supper, buzz-saw, chain-gang and hell-box. And of the third there are instances in buncombe, conniption, bloomer, campus, galoot, maverick, roustabout, bugaboo and blizzard. Of these coinages perhaps those of the second class are most numerous and characteristic. In them American exhibits one of its most marked tendencies; a habit of achieving short cuts by bold combinations. Why describe a gigantic rain storm with the lame adjectives of everyday? Call it a cloud-burst and immediately a vivid picture of it is conjured up. Rough-neck is a capital word; it is more apposite and savory than any English equivalent, and it is unmistakably American.16 The same instinct for the terse, the vivid and the picturesque appears in boiled-shirt, blow-out, big-gun, claim-jumper, home-stretch, spread-eagle, come-down, back-number, bed-spread, claw-hammer (coat), bottom-dollar, poppycock,17 cold-snap, back-talk, back-taxes, corn-belt, calamity-howler, fire-bug, grab-bag, grip-sack, grub-stake, pay-dirt, tender-foot, stocking-feet, moss-back, crazy-quilt, ticket-scalper, store-clothes, small-potatoes, cake-walk, prairie-schooner, round-up, worm-fence, snake-fence, flat-boat and jumping-ojf place. Such compounds (there are thousands of them) have been largely responsible for giving the American vulgate its characteristic tang and color. Bell-hop, square-meal and chair-warmer, to name three charming specimens, are as distinctively American as jazz or the quick-lunch.

  The spirit of the language also appears clearly in some of the coinages of the other classes. There are, for example, the English words that have been extended or restricted in meaning, e.g., docket (for court calendar), betterment (for improvement to property), collateral (for security), crank (for fanatic), jumper (for tunic), backbone (for moral courage), tickler (for memorandum or reminder),18 carnival (in such phrases as carnival of crime), scrape (for fight or difficulty),19 flurry (of snow, or in the market), suspenders, diggings (for habitation) and range. Again, there are the new workings of English materials, e.g., doggery, rowdy, teetotaler, goatee, tony and cussedness. Yet again, there are the purely artificial words, e.g., sockdolager, hunkydory, scalawag, guyascutis, spon-dulix, slumgullion, rambunctious, scrumptious, to skedaddle, to absquatulate and to exfluncticate.20 In the use of the last-named coinages fashions change. In the 40’s to absquatulate was in good usage, but it has since disappeared. Most of the other inventions of the time, however, have to some extent survived, and it would be difficult to find an American of today who did not know the meaning of scalawag, rambunctious, to hornswoggle and to skedaddle,21 and did not occasionally use them. A whole series of artificial American words groups itself around the prefix ker-, for example, ker-flop, ker-bim, ker-splash, ker-thump, ker-bang, ker-plunk, ker-swash, ker-swosh, ker-slap, ker-whut, ker-chunk, ker-souse, ker-slam and ker-flummux. This prefix and its daughters have been borrowed by the English, but Thornton and Ware agree that it is American, and all of the Oxford Dictionary’s examples down to 1875 are of American provenance. Several of my correspondents suggest that it may have been derived from the German prefix ge- — that it may represent a humorous attempt to make German verbs by analogy,
e.g., geflop and gesplash. Color is given to this theory by the fact that some of the Oxford Dictionary’s earliest examples (Supplement, 1933) make the prefix che-, ca- or co-, which are all rather closer to ge- than ker-is. I offer these speculations for whatever they are worth. Certainly many ge- words must have been made by the early “Dutch” comedians in the United States, just as they are still made by college students.22

  In Chapter II, Section 1, I mentioned the superior imaginativeness revealed by Americans in meeting linguistic emergencies, whereby, for example, in seeking names for new objects introduced by the building of railroads, they surpassed the English plough and crossing-plate with cow-catcher and frog. That was in the 30’s. Already at that day the two languages were so differentiated that they produced wholly distinct railroad nomenclatures. Such commonplace American terms as box-car, caboose and air-line are still strangers in England. So are freight-car, flagman, towerman, switch, switch-engine, switch-yard, switchman, track-walker, baggage-room, baggage-check, baggage-smasher, baggage-master, accommodation-train, conductor, express-car, flat-car, hand-car, gondola, way-bill, expressman, express-office, fast-freight, wrecking-crew, jerk-water, commutation-ticket, commuter; round-trip, mileage-book, ticket-scalper, depot, limited, hot-box, iron-horse, stop-over, tie, fish-plate, run, train-boy, chair-car, club-car, bumpers, mail-clerk, passenger-coach, day-coach, railroad-man, ticket-office, truck and right-of-way, and the verbs to flag, to express, to dead-head, to side-swipe, to stop-over, to fire (i.e., a locomotive), to switch, to side-track, to railroad, to commute and to clear the track. These terms are in constant use in America; their meaning is familiar to all Americans; many of them have given the language everyday figures of speech.23 But the majority of them would puzzle an Englishman, just as the English luggage-van, permanent-way, goods-waggon, guard, carrier, booking-office, railway-rug, tripper, line, points, shunt, metals and bogie would puzzle the average untraveled American.24

  In two other familiar fields very considerable differences between English and American are visible; in both fields they go back to the gaudy era before the Civil War. They are politics and that department of social intercourse which has to do with drinking. Many characteristic American political terms originated in revolutionary days and have passed over into English. Of such sort are caucus and mileage. But the majority of those in common use today were coined during the extraordinarily exciting campaigns following the defeat of Adams by Jefferson. Charles Ledyard Norton has devoted a whole book to their etymology and meaning;25 the number is far too large for a list of them to be attempted here. But a few characteristic specimens may be recalled; for example, the simple compounds: omnibus-bill, banner-state, favorite-son, anxious-bench, gag-rule, executive-session, spoils-system, mass-meeting, steering-committee, office-seeker and straight-ticket; the humorous metaphors: pork-barrel, pie-counter, land-slide, dark-horse, carpet-bagger, lame-duck and on-the-fence; the old words put to new uses: plank, pull, platform, ring, machine, wheel-horse, precinct, primary, floater, repeater, bolter, filibuster, regular and fences; the new coinages: gerrymander, buncombe, roorback, mugwump and bulldozing; the new derivatives: abolitionist, candidacy, boss-rule, per-diem and boodler; and the almost innumerable verbs and verb-phrases: to knife, to straddle, to crawfish, to split a ticket, to go up Salt River, to bolt, to lobby, to eat crow, to boodle, to divvy, to grab and to run. An English candidate doesn’t run; he stands. To run, according to Thornton, was already used in America in 1789; it was universal by 1820. Platform came in at the same time. Machine was first applied to a political organization by Aaron Burr. Anxious-bench (or anxious-seat) at first designated only the place occupied by the penitent at revivals, but was used in its present political sense in Congress so early as 1842. Banner-state appears in Niles’ Register for December 5, 1840. Favorite-son appears in an ode addressed to Washington on his visit to Portsmouth, N. H., in 1789, but it did not acquire its present ironical sense until it was applied to Martin Van Buren. Thornton has traced filibuster to 1836, roorback to 1844, split-ticket to 1842, and bolter to 1812. Regularity was an issue in Tammany Hall in 1822. There were primaries in New York City in 1827, and hundreds of repeaters voted. In 1829 there were lobby-agents at Albany, and they soon became lobbyists; in 1832 lobbying had already extended to Washington. All of these terms are now as firmly imbedded in the American vocabulary as election or congressman.26

  In the department of conviviality the imaginativeness of Americans was early shown both in the invention and in the naming of new and often highly complex beverages. So vast was the production of novelties during the Nineteenth Century that England borrowed many of them and their names with them. And not only England: one buys cocktails and gin-fizzes to this day in American bars that stretch from Paris to Yokohama. Cocktail, stone-fence and sherry-cobbler were mentioned by Washington Irving in “Knickerbocker” (1809);27 by Thackeray’s time they were already well-known in England. Thornton traces the sling to 1788, and the stinkibus and anti-fogmatic, both now extinct, to the same year. The origin of the rickey, fizz, sour, cooler, skin, shrub and smash, and of such curious American drinks as the horse’s neck, Mamie Taylor, Tom-and-Jerry, Tom Collins, John Collins, bishop, stone-wall, gin-fix, brandy-cham-parelle, golden-slipper, hari-kari, locomotive, whiskey-daisy, blue-blazer, black-stripe, white-plush and brandy-crusta remains to be established; the historians of the booze arts, like the philologists, differ in their theories. But the essentially American character of most of them is obvious, despite the fact that a number have gone over into English. The English, in naming their own somewhat meager inventions, commonly display a far more limited imagination. Seeking a name, for example, for a mixture of whiskey and soda-water, the best they could achieve was whiskey-and-soda. The Americans, introduced to the same drink, at once gave it the far more original name of high-ball. So with soda-water and pop. So with minerals and soft-drinks. Other characteristic Americanisms (a few of them borrowed by the English) are red-eye, corn-juice, eye-opener, forty-rod, squirrel-whiskey, phlegm-cutter, hard-cider, apple-jack and corpse-reviver, and the auxiliary drinking terms, boot-legger, sample-room, blind-pig, barrel-house, bouncer, bung-starter, dive, doggery, schooner, stick, duck, straight, hooch, saloon, finger and chaser. Thornton shows that jag, bust, bat and to crook the elbow are also Americanisms. So are bartender and saloon-keeper.

  It would be possible, too, to compile a formidable roster of theological and ecclesiastical Americanisms, e.g., anxious bench, or seat (first noted in 1839), mourners’ bench, amen corner, hard-shell (1842), camp-meeting (1801), circuit-rider (1838), come-outer (1840), deacon-seat (1851), desk, for pulpit (1770), blue-law (1775), book-concern (1851), go-to-meeting, hell-robber, experience-meeting, foot-wash, donation-party, pounding, pastorium, and the verbs, to pastor, to missionate, to get (or experience) religion, to fellowship and to shout.

  3. LOAN-WORDS AND NON-ENGLISH INFLUENCES

  The Indians of the Far West, it would seem, had little to add to the contributions already made to the American vocabulary by the Algonquians of the Northeast. Most of the new loan-words that were picked up west of the Mississippi came in either through the Spanish, e.g., coyote, or through the Chinook trade-jargon of the Columbia river region,28 e.g., cayuse.29 There was also some translation of terms supposed to be in use among the Indians, e.g., squaw-man, heap big chief, Great White Father, Father of Waters, and happy hunting-grounds, but most of these, I suspect, owed more to the imagination of the pioneers than to the actual usage of the Indians. In the Oregon country Chinook is still understood by many Indians, and terms borrowed from it are heard as localisms, e.g., tillicum (friend), cultus (worthless, evil), tumtum (literally heart, used to signify belief, opinion, hunch), potlatch (feast, public meeting), skookum (strong, majestic, splendid), nanitch (a journey), and kokshut (used up, worn out, ruined).30 It is possible that hike is derived from the Chinook hyak (to hurry), but this remains uncertain. In the Southwest many loan-words from the local Indian languages are similarly in mor
e or less general use, e.g., hogan (an Indian habitation), kiva (the central building of a pueblo), sambuke (a musical instrument), tombé (another), katchina (a spirit), tisiwn (an intoxicant), and tegua (a sandal).31

  Contact with the French in Louisiana and along the Northwestern border, and with the Spanish in Texas and farther West, brought in many new words. From the Canadian French, as we have seen in Chapter III, Section 1, prairie, batteau, portage and rapids had been borrowed during colonial days. To these French contributions bayou, depot, picayune, levee, chute, butte, crevasse, lagniappe and coulee32 were now added, and probably also shanty33 and canuck.34 Prairie begat an enormous progeny during the great movement into the West. In 1828 Noah Webster omitted it altogether from his “American Dictionary of the English Language,” but Thornton shows that its use to designate the Western steppes was already common before the Revolution, and that prairie-hen and prairie-dog had come in by 1805. By 1857, according to Sir William Craigie,35 “at least thirty other combinations of the same type had been employed in the works of explorers and other writers.” The Century Dictionary (1889–91) records thirty-four prairie combinations, the Oxford Dictionary (1909) sixty-three, and Webster’s New International, Second Edition (1934), seventy-nine.

  From Spanish, once the Mississippi was crossed, and particularly during and after the Mexican War, there came a swarm of novelties, many of which have remained firmly imbedded in the language. Among them were numerous names of strange personages and objects: rancho, alfalfa, mustang, sombrero, canyon, desperado, poncho, chaparral, corral, bronco, plaza, peon, alcalde, burro, mesa, tornado, presidio, patio, sierra and adobe. To them, as soon as gold was discovered, were added bonanza, eldorado, placer and vigilante. Some of the borrowings of the time underwent phonetic change. The Spanish cincho, meaning a saddle girth, quickly became cinch, and in a little while took on a figurative significance that still clings to it. Vamos, the first person plural of the Spanish “let’s go,” became vamose or vamoose in American, and presently begat an American verb, to mosey. Chigre, which the English had borrowed from the Spanish in the Seventeenth Century, making it chigoe (the Oxford Dictionary still credits it to “the West Indies and South America”), was borrowed anew by the Western pioneers, and converted into the more American chigger or jigger. The Spanish chinche, which had been likewise borrowed by English in the Seventeenth Century but later abandoned, was reborrowed by American on the frontier, and became the still familiar chinch, a bedbug. Estampida was converted into stampede, frijol into frijole (pro. free-holay), tamal into tamale, tortilla into tortillia, and vaquero into buckaroo.36 Chile, a pepper, came in with frijole and tamale, and at the same time the pioneers became acquainted with the Mexican beverages, mescal,37 pulque and tequila. Such words as señor, se-ñorita, padre, siesta, sabe, poncho, pinto, yerba, hombre, casa and arroyo began to bespatter their speech. They converted cala-bozo into calaboose, (la)reata into lariat, lazo into lasso, rancho into ranch, and chaparejos into chaps, made free use of such words and phrases as poco, pronto and quien sabe?, and outfitted many Spanish loan-words with derivatives, e.g., ranchman, rancher, ranch-house, to ranch, to lasso, to corral, to cinch, hot-tomale, bronc, box-canyon, peonage, burro-load, -weed, -train and -trail, loco-weed (Sp. loco, crazy), locoed, and so on. It is possible that they borrowed coon, in the sense of a Negro, from the Spanish barraeon (commonly pronounced barracoon by the Americans), a rude shelter used by slaves. In the East coon was commonly applied to whites down to the Civil War, and especially to the adherents of Tyler in 1840. The precise history of its transfer to Negroes remains to be investigated.