The Secret Life of Words

by Henry Hitchings

  Today, the most immediately obvious difference between American and British Englishes is their distinct ‘tunes’, but divergence of pronunciation, while easily mimicked and ridiculed, has rarely been as aggressively targeted as disparities in vocabulary. The word Americanism was first used in 1781 by John Witherspoon, later the president of Princeton University, who wrote a number of articles for the Pennsylvania Journal about ‘ways of speaking peculiar to this country’. Briticism and Britishism were coined in the following century. Many words once stigmatized as Americanisms have since been universally adopted: a few examples are the already mentioned lengthy (a favourite of Thomas Jefferson’s) and blizzard, the adjective brash, the Germanic verb dunk (be it of a basketball or a doughnut), hindsight, roustabout, and the word bindery for a bookbinder’s workshop. In his American Notes (1842), Dickens proposed that the quintessential Americanism was fix, a word with a host of applications.

  American usage added new resonance to emancipation and abolitionist, and could popularize a usage as apparently ephemeral as sideburn – an inversion of the name of a notably whiskery Civil War commander, Ambrose Everett Burnside.8 John Farmer’s dictionary of Americanisms, published in 1889, includes a host of altogether more obscure items, such as burgaloo, the name of a type of paper (and a corruption of the French virgalieu); sapsago, a kind of cheese known to the Germans as Schabzieger; and blauser, a corruption of the Dutch name for the deaf adder. Farmer is an alarmingly insensitive guide (‘It would have been strange indeed’, he remarks, ‘had the Red Man failed to leave the most distinct impress upon the life and surroundings of the American nation’), and his celebration of ‘perverted and obsolete English words’ and the ‘rare ingenuity and versatility of the American mind’ bulges with oddities.9

  It should be emphasized that, while there is a long history of resistance outside America to American words and forms, plenty of commentators, including Virginia Woolf and Robert Bridges, have defended them. Much of what was once derided or feared as Americanism is now not even recognized as such: stampede, advisory , bandwagon, squatter, split-level, gobbledygook, isolationism, badlands, law-abiding, curvaceous, It girl, haywire, elevator, mileage, slapstick, unshakable , stunt and, in the colloquial sense, spring chicken. If we think about some of these words, even briefly, their American roots resurface, or we can imagine where they lie: stampede, for instance, comes from the Mexican Spanish estampida, and was first used of the thunderous flight of panicked cattle, and badlands is a calque of mauvaises terres, which is what the first French settlers called the rugged terrain of the upper Missouri valley. But common use has put distance between these words and their origins.

  As American society has developed along different lines from that of Britain, accommodating different proportions of immigrants and enjoying different cultural contacts, its language has inevitably assimilated its own loans and has been hospitable towards them. Many of these have been brought about by contact with Spanish-speaking peoples both within and beyond American borders. Some, like hobo and vigilante, have become very widely known. Familiar borrowings from other tongues include bogus, which was at first the name for a counterfeit coin and originated in the Hausa language of West Africa, and the name goober for a peanut, which is from Kikongo. Contact with French-speakers in North America has yielded pumpkin, crevasse, to sashay, rotisserie and praline, along with shanty, prairie and chowder, while German has introduced noodle, nix and hoodlum. As I have mentioned, words such as boss and cookie were absorbed through contact with the Dutch in North America, as were bedspread, stoop (the raised entrance to a house), caboose and sleigh, and it’s worth pausing to remark some of the place names that have the same source, notably in New York: Brooklyn, Harlem, the Bowery and the Bronx, and Gramercy Park (a corruption of the Dutch for ‘crooked knife’, krom mesje, the name of a stream that ran down what is today 21st Street). The Latin alumnus and alumni first achieved currency in American universities. More recently, words adopted in the US that have found global usage among English-speakers have included the Italian barista and the seemingly Germanic feisty.

  H. L. Mencken justly observed that ‘In the treatment of loan words, English spelling is much more conservative than American,’ noting the ‘rapid naturalization’ in America of words from French and Spanish. The original words’ accents were quickly discarded, and plurals were formed without affectation: Mencken observed that while fastidious British users would refer to libretti or sanatoria, Americans were straight away comfortable talking about virtuosos and dilettantes.10 He convicted his countrymen of a ‘spacious disregard for linguistic nicety’: in reality, American English tends to be more condensed than its British counterpart.

  Nonetheless, American English has in certain respects proved conservative and archaic. Some of the usages that seem distinctively American to British speakers of English are in fact British in origin. The habit of saying gotten instead of got reflects the standard British usage of a couple of hundred years ago. The preference for fall rather than autumn now seems distinctively American, but fall was used in this sense by Sir Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle and John Evelyn, to name but three. Equally, saying I guess isn’t a Valley Girl tic, but a locution as old as Chaucer.11 Geoffrey Hughes cites other examples: dumb as a casually unpleasant synonym for stupid, trash as a word for household waste, mad meaning ‘angry’, and skillet for frying pan.12 The word spry is almost an archaism in British English, but not in American English. Yet, just to give one counter-example, American English has lost fortnight.

  Since the early nineteenth century, native speakers of English have been in a minority among America’s new immigrants. The country has absorbed significant numbers of people who speak as their first language Spanish, Italian, Russian, German, Polish, Greek, Arabic, Persian, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Korean or Chinese, as well as a variety of other tongues including African, Indic and Scandinavian languages. But by 1800 the position of English was entrenched – America would be an English-speaking country, in perpetuity – and by the end of the nineteenth century English was the common language of a territory thirty times the size of Britain. ‘Within a single century,’ notes Nicholas Ostler, ‘a linguistic monoculture had grown to overwhelm a sparsely scattered cornucopia of over two hundred different languages.’13 Those other voices are, for today’s English-speaking majority, ‘noises off’, most of them very faintly heard.

  Benjamin Franklin, who testified to the American love of English manners and customs, was one of the architects of this, proposing that his countrymen curb the use of all languages other than English. But there have always been communities where English has barely risen above the status of ‘necessary second language’, and the bilingualism of many Americans has impregnated American English with the exotic.

  Many of its borrowings are exclusive to a single region. Literary tributes to local styles of speech have been paid by writers such as Mark Twain, Damon Runyon and Sarah Orne Jewett, yet the evidence confronts us most straightforwardly when we hear it for ourselves.

  In Louisiana, which takes it name from Louis XIV and was purchased from the French by Thomas Jefferson for $15 million in 1803, you will hear the French influence in levee, Mardi gras and lagniappe – the last of these, meaning a gratuity or something to make up good measure, a French corruption of a Spanish word learnt from Quechua – as well as in the archaic dialect Cajun. The first word of Louisiana French to find common acceptance was bayou, which comes from the Choctaw bayuk; its Choctaw abbreviation bok became in French boque, which survives, as bogue, in place names like Bogue Sound in North Carolina. 14 The dialects of the West, the Inland South and the Midland are coloured by their different clusterings of immigrants. In Minnesota, which in the nineteenth century attracted many struggling farmers from Sweden and Norway, you’ll hear Nordic words like lutefisk and idioms that are essentially calques of Scandinavian idioms – as in talk of ‘cooking coffee’. In Maine, where as much as a quarter of the population has French ancestry, you may
hear a stray hair called a couette, and in parts of Ohio please is used in the same way as the German bitte, to invite a person to repeat something just said – apparently a remnant of the bilingual schooling once available in Cincinnati. 15

  As for Spanish influence, it is one of the true distinguishing features of American English. Florida, discovered by Juan Ponce de Leon in 1513 (and named after Pascua Florida, the ‘flowery festival’ of Easter), was sold to the Americans for $5 million in 1819.16 Oregon, Texas and the Mexican territories in the south-west followed in the 1840s. Hispanisms were picked up in all these areas. The Mexican War of 1846—8 increased borrowings. English-speaking trappers, traders and woodsmen had been venturing south into New Mexico for almost half a century. The war and the campaigns and treaties that followed, together with the many new schools run by missionaries, diffused English through the region. As this happened, Spanish words, much more than Indian ones, were acquired by osmosis.

  Discussing Spanish in North America, Harold Bentley writes just a little fancifully of words ‘hauled into the English language by British seamen’ or ‘picked up on the Santa Fe trail, lassoed … by the vaqueros on the broad mesas, cultivated by the colonists of Texas, bartered by merchants, or come upon by intrepid explorers’.17 Yet the essential thrust of his account is correct. Where Spanish is concerned, farming, cowboys and horsemanship, architecture and construction have all figured prominently.18 Thus many terms to do with ranching are Hispanic in origin; for instance, the legendary ten-gallon hat takes it name from galon, the Spanish word for a band used to decorate one’s headgear. The nineteenth-century goldrushers were not the first people to penetrate California, and the Spanish legacy is evident in bronco, caporal, corrida and corral. There too English-speakers came across the abalone, with its bleedingmushroom flavour; the word was a Spanish reworking of a term long used by the Costanoan fishermen of Monterey Bay. A farm’s squat adobe dwellings, patio and whitewashed casa grande are plainly Hispanic, while bonanza ‘originally signified good weather on the ocean … [but] has come to mean a vein of rich ore in a mine’ – and, figuratively, any big payday or burst of good fortune.19 Hacienda, an estate where workers busy themselves with farming and mining, stems from the Latin facienda, ‘things to be done’. Rodeo is another word that stands out. Literally a round-up of cattle, it was employed in this sense by Darwin in The Voyage of the Beagle (1839), but has chiefly been used of cowboy stunts since around 1900. According to Bentley, ‘One of the first instances of word writing in the sky by airplane was on the occasion of advertising a rodeo in Madison Square Garden in New York’.20

  This Spanish influence has continued to the present day; at least 15 per cent of Americans are of Hispanic origin. Its charisma is strongly evident in the south-west, especially in California, Texas and New Mexico, but in Florida and the north-east too, and derives not just from Mexicans, but also from people whose origins are in Puerto Rico, El Salvador, Honduras, Cuba, Colombia and the Dominican Republic. More recent borrowings have often involved politics (Contra, Sandinista, Zapatista), food and drink (taco, fajita, nacho, picante, tequila), and questions of occupation and status (for instance, numero uno, gonzo, and the kind of US-owned sweatshop known as a maquiladora).21 A particularly fertile area of transfer is street slang. The narcotics trade in the US has deep roots in Latin America. Early on, settlers in the south-west discovered mescal and peyote, both of which are Spanish renderings of Nahuatl terms. Then the connection ramified. Today one can readily hear the word caballo used for heroin (compare the English slang horse), rojas (‘reds’) for barbiturates such as Seconal, cura for a fix, and also carne for heroin.22 Furthermore, a product of tensions between Hispanics and white Americans is the large number of derogatory or dismissive terms in common use for Hispanics – words like chico, hombre, pedro – while gringo and gringa have since the eighteenth century been used slightingly by Hispanics of non-Hispanics, and gringo was fully assimilated into English in the twentieth.

  Stereotypes of Hispanic Americans may be odious, but they have contributed repeatedly to the common American word-stock, insinuating themselves into power relationships, and reinforcing anxieties and oppositions. Cojones makes its first appearance in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon – ‘It takes more cojones to be a sportsman where death is a closer party to the game’ – and has become an emblem of ostentatious masculinity. This concept is summed up, of course, in the Spanish macho and machismo; significantly, in Mexican Spanish machismo equates simply to ‘manliness’, but, borrowed by English, it has morphed into a distinctly pejorative term. Vamos and its derivative vamoose connote a kind of butch criminality. Hasta la vista, long a popular phrase of leave-taking, gained global popularity when uttered by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s murderous cyborg in the Terminator films. Other American Hispanisms evoke a culture of slow-paced leisure. Thus for instance siesta and mañana. The latter, a catch-all for the supposedly Hispanic trait of procrastination, gained popularity in the nineteenth century; D. H. Lawrence and George Orwell both felt able to use it without explanation. And borrowings of a different stripe continue. A recent one is descanso, a Spanish term for a place of rest for a dead person, now gaining popularity as a term for a memorial erected at the site of a fatal road crash. Another is huarache – the name, in the language of the Purepecha people of northern Mexico, of a kind of sandal, adopted by Nike in the early 1990s to denote a strappy sports shoe with a shock-absorbing heel insert.

  What finds its way into the mainstream of American English will usually find its way into British English.23 A giant study – potentially fascinating, potentially stultifying – could be made of this transatlantic drift. It is a cliché of Anglo-American entente that where one of us speaks of the sidewalk and insists on ‘getting in line’, the other speaks of the pavement and ‘joining the queue’; that one of us says realtor, pants and basin where the other says estate agent, trousers and mixing bowl. American English and British English are adjacent parts of the big continuum of intelligibility known simply as ‘English’, and accounts that emphasize the differences are likely to originate in some sort of Pooterish xenophobia, or in the feigned incomprehension of social and cultural myopia. I am concerned here not with the capacity of American forms to win out over British ones (or with marvelling at the fact of one country’s preference for billfold over wallet), but rather with what American English has borrowed and with the radiation of these borrowings through the whole breadth of global English.

  American’s one-time colonial presence in the Philippines has resulted in a handful of borrowings from the most commonly spoken local language, Tagalog. The best example is boondocks. Originally in Tagalog it signified a mountain, but, when poor natives explained that they came from mountainous areas, outsiders imagined the word was a general term for any slummy or primitive place. Other examples, less intimately bound up with American involvement, are yo-yo, sampaguita (a Spanish-Tagalog hybrid term for Arabian jasmine), the card game panguingue, and the custard-fragranced flower ylang-ylang.

  A much bigger source has been Yiddish. About 2.5 million Jews emigrated from Europe to the United States between 1877 and 1917. They set up Jewish schools and shops, charities and synagogues, and the language of these institutions was Yiddish. More than 150 Yiddish newspapers and periodicals were started in New York between 1885 and 1914, and the language was central to the flourishing Jewish theatre scenes in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and beyond. Some of the words that entered American English were straightforwardly Yiddish, like schlep and kvell; others, such as schvartzer, arose ‘in response to the social context of Jewish life in the US’.24 Inevitably, Yiddish was Americanized, and many immigrants gave up speaking Yiddish in order to avoid anti-Semitic prejudice and violence. Yet, since the Second World War, pride in Jewish ethnicity has been resurgent, and whereas Jews long regarded Yiddish as a sort of lower-class jargon, in the last half-century or so many have come to look on it as a vital element of their culture.25

  Certain elements
of Yiddish are widely known across the English-speaking world. Examples are bagel, bar mitzvah and drek. Kabbalah, which is really just the Hebrew word for ‘tradition’, has come to signify a particular dogma favoured by celebrities tripping on mysticism. The well-known kosher has come to mean ‘legitimate’ or ‘good quality’, although it of course retains the fastidious sense ‘acceptable according to the rules of Jewish dietary law as executed under rabbinical supervision’.26 The almost as familiar chutzpah has been drolly defined as ‘the quality shown by the man who murders his mother and father, then asks the judge to forgive a poor orphan’ .27 Most vividly, there are the expressive adjectives – an unusually high percentage of borrowings from Yiddish are adjectives – like meshuge or zaftig. The latter, meaning ‘juicy’, tends to be used of voluptuous women, and thus increasingly of any woman who doesn’t resemble a matchstick.

  Yiddish abounds with pungent denominations for people. For instance, a nebbish is a timid, luckless simpleton. The word is related to the Czech neboky, meaning ‘unfortunate’. The classic nebbish is the sort of character played by Woody Allen in most of his own films. A nagging or disastrously boring person will be a nudnik; the word comes from the Yiddish verb nudyen, meaning ‘to pester’. A nineteenth-century example can be found in Bleak House, where Jo the crossing sweeper is described as an obstinate ‘gonoph’ – a version of the Yiddish gonef, a word for a thief. Schmuck can mean ‘penis’, ‘fool’ or ‘hypocrite’. Its German root is a word meaning ‘jewel’: it’s not hard to see how this became a slang term for a man’s favourite pendant, and any word for the penis sooner or later becomes a term of abuse. The dismissive sch sound can also be heard in schtick, schlock and shlep. Strictly, spelling these words with sch rather than sh makes them look German; Yiddishists prefer to drop the c. But it’s hard to avoid the Germanic twang. For instance, schmaltz, which is in Yiddish a term for anything dripping with corny sentiment, is the German word for ‘lard’.