American Language Supplement 2

by H. L. Mencken

  7 Pronounced Nira. Reported by Mr. Harris Booge Peavey, of Maple-wood, N. J.

  8 Found in a law report by Mr. Manuel Prenner.

  9 Negro’s Liquor Sentence is 18 Days a Gallon, Oklahoma City Oklahoman, Sept. 23, 1941.

  10 Names of American Negro Slaves, in Studies in the Science of Society Presented to Albert Galloway Keller; New Haven, 1937, pp. 471–94. A previous study by Miss Blanche Britt Armfield, of Concord, N. C., is noted in AL4, p. 523, n. 3.

  1 Acts XVIII, 24.

  2 Puckett gives authorities for all these names.

  3 Private communication, June 5, 1944.

  1 Private communication, Feb. 1, 1943.

  2 Big as Cuffy, by George Stimpson, Negro Digest, Jan., 1947, p. 194.

  1 I am indebted here to Mr. J. F. Hill, of Salinas, Calif.

  2 I am indebted here to Mrs. George Lucas, of Ogden, Utah.

  3 No Man Knows My History, by Fawn M. Brodie; New York, 1945, pp. 335–36.

  4 Exodus II, 10 seeks to relate it to the Hebrew root mashah, to draw out, but most scholars reject this etymology as fanciful. Its actual source seems to lie in the Egyptian mes or messu, a son or child. Indeed, the late Sigmund Freud wrote a book seeking to prove that Moses was not a Jew at all, but an Egyptian.

  5 Sarah to Sylvia to Shirley, by A. A. Roback, Commentary, Sept., 1946, p. 272.

  6 Roback, just cited, predicts that “the next phase will be Aldrich.”

  7 “Next in line,” says Roback, “are Eugene, Evan and heaven knows what.” He adds: “Irving came into vogue some sixty years ago. Lately, it has fallen from grace – for the obvious reason that too many Jews bear it.”

  1 I am indebted here to Mr. Moïse K. Cohen, of New York. Moïse is common among the Jews of Louisiana, and in South Carolina it is a surname.

  2 “Usually,” says Jane Doe in Concerning Hebrew Names, Reflex, Nov., 1928, p. 29, “a Jewish child is named after some ancestor. It has become a recognized custom of loyalty to take the first letter of the ancestor’s given-name and give the newly born an Anglo-Saxon name beginning with the same letter.”

  3 Harry, there, is a diminutive of Hershel, a derivative of Hersh or Hirsh, which is not Jewish at all, but German. Roback says that in the United States it has generated Henry, Herbert, Harold, Howard and Harvey.

  4 In later years Max seems to have fallen under the same blight. I once knew a politician named Max in Baltimore who lost an election because his opponents spread the report that he was a Jew.

  5 Earl and Samuel G. Wiener, in On Naming the Baby, Zeta Beta Tau Quarterly, Dec., 1926, call such names as the last eight baronial. See AL4, pp. 507–08.

  1 Block’s Book Bulletin, Jan.–Feb., 1945, p. 18.

  2 Nov. 16, p. A5291.

  3 The Guggenheims: The Making of an American Dynasty, by Harvey O’Connor; New York, 1937.

  4 Originally applied to the Jews of Germany, but later extended to those of Eastern Europe. The Sephardim hail from the Latin countries, Holand and the Levant.

  5 I am indebted here to the late Benjamin De Casseres.

  6 De Casseres himself admitted to having two female cousins named Lulu.

  7 Mr. Marcus Rosenblum, of New York, tells me of a Jewish woman who had changed her own name of Sarah to Karen at the age of sixteen, but named her daughters Drazia and Avram, both ancient Jewish names.

  1 Says William B. Ziff in The Rape of Palestine; New York, 1938, p. 189: “In Palestine, when a Jew changes his name, which is frequent, he selects the most Jewish one he can find.”

  2 I am indebted here to Mr. G. Agronsky, editor of the Palestine Post, Jerusalem. But apparently this movement has its limits. On June 11, 1947, a Major Wesley Aron, of Palestine, appeared in Baltimore to advocate the unrestricted immigration of Jews.

  3 Hebrew Names: Their Meaning and Historical Connections; London, 1944.

  4 Levene calls attention to the curious fact that Shem, from whom the Jews are supposed to be descended, has had very few namesakes among them. Some traditional Jewish given-names, he says, are not Biblical, but originated in the Middle Ages, e.g., Chaim, Hamina, Meyer, Nachman, Pesach. Chaim, which means life, may have had forerunners in the period of the Babylonian Exile. An analogue was the Latin Vitalis. Haym is a modern form. Levene says that it is added to the names of sick people to stave off death. This change of name at a time of crisis is common among orthodox Jews. I am indebted here to Mr. R. G. Wasson, of New York, and Miss Dorothy C. Walter, of Providence, R. I.

  1 A Collection of Upwards of 30,000 Names of German, Swiss, Dutch, French and Other Immigrants in Pennsylvania From 1727 to 1776, by I. Daniel Rupp; second edition; Philadelphia, 1927.

  2 Dr. Alfred Senn says in Unsere Namen, Schweizer Journal (San Francisco), Nov. 8, 1944, p. 1, that Carl or Karl was unknown in Germany until relatively recent times. In a list of 100,000 names from Breslau, c. 1400, it does not occur once. It first appeared in German Switzerland, in the form of Carli, in 1688.

  3 An excellent list of German given-names, with their meanings, is in Reclams Namenbuch, a pamphlet in the Reclam series; Leipzig, 1938.

  4 In 1947 Dr. Clifford R. Adams, of Pennsylvania State College, reported that Karen was the favorite of the co-eds there assembled, followed by Dianne, Catherine, Linda, Ellen, Barbara, Gail, Carol, Margot and Kathleen in order.

  5 Dr. Flaten’s report has not been published, but I have had access to it by his courtesy.

  1 Miss Magda Houkon, of New York, the daughter of a Norwegian pastor in Minnesota, tells me that her father once baptized two sisters, one named Lutine Clipporine Blanchine Annie-Ann and the other Purl.

  2 p. 508.

  3 I am indebted here to Mr. Hugh Morrison, who says that this addition of o occurs in other cases.

  4 I am indebted here to Mr. J. Marvin Hunter, editor of the Frontier Times (Bandera, Texas).

  1 I am indebted here to Mr. L. Clark Keating, of Minneapolis.

  2 Personal Names in Hawaii, by John E. Reinecke, American Speech, Dec., 1940, p. 350.

  3 An interesting note upon given-names in Brazil, where anti-clericalism has warred upon the ancient saints’ names, and brought in Milton, Jefferson, Newton, Gladstone and even Calvin and Luther, is in Brazil: an Interpretation, by Gilberto Freyre, New York, 1945, pp. 130–31. In Names on Puerto Rico, by Lawrence S. Thompson, American Notes & Queries, Sept., 1945, pp. 83–86, there is a discussion of the nomenclature that has displaced the old formal Spanish name system among the lower classes of the island.

  4 pp. 511–12.

  5 The pronunciation is changed to make it rhyme with fan.

  6 The Americanization of Slovak Surnames, Slovak Review, Autumn, 1946, p. 70.

  7 Newsweek, Jan. 15, 1940.

  1 I am indebted here to Mr. J. H. Young, of the Association headquarters in New York.

  2 June 1, 1935, p. 21.

  3 I am indebted here to Mr. William Saroyan, the Armenian-American dramatist and story-writer, and to Mr. Richard Badlian, of Boston.

  4 All these Arabic names are from Arabic-Speaking Americans, by H. I. Katibah and Farhat Ziadeh: New York, 1946. In The Arab Village Community of the Middle East, in the Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution for 1943; Washington, 1944, p. 537, Afif I. Tannous says that “when the first boy is born to a married couple people cease to call them by their name. Instead they are called after the name of their son – for example, Abu-Ahmed and Um-Ahmed, i.e., the father and mother of Ahmed.” This practise, of course, is abandoned in America.

  1 More examples are in AL4, p. 510.

  2 Parade, April 14, 1946, p. 18.

  3 13 Fines Assessed on Trash Counts, Baltimore Evening Sun, Jan. 4, 1946, p. 29.

  4 Chinese in the United States Today, by Rose Hum Lee, Survey Graphic, Oct., 1942, p. 419. For more, see AL4, p. 513. On Feb. 18, 1946 Donaldine Lew, a Chinese soprano, sang at the Hotel Ambassador in New York.

  1 A Japanese View of Rotary, by S. Sheba, Rotarian, March 1937, p. 5.

  2 Additi
onal Notes on Personal Names in Hawaii, by John E. Reinecke, American Speech, Feb., 1943, pp. 69–70. See also English Hawaiian Words, by O. Shaw; Milwaukee, 1938, pp. 71–80.

  3. PLACE-NAMES

  The need of a comprehensive treatise on American place-names, sufficiently well-informed to content specialists in the subject and yet written with enough sense of the picturesque to please the general reader, was met in 1945 by the appearance of Dr. George R. Stewart’s “Names on the Land.” It begins with a discussion of the lovely but somewhat repetitive names that the early Spaniards bestowed upon the coasts and rivers of their discovery, and proceeds to the banal and unimaginative town names of the New England Puritans, to those borrowed from the French, Dutch, and later immigrants, to those carried westward by the first flights of pioneers, and to those issuing from the exuberant fancy of the same.1 It does not linger long over Indian names, though they are always the first to attract the attention of a foreigner glancing at a map of the United States, but this perhaps is not illogical, for Indian place-names were in a state of chaos among the Indians themselves, and to this day the meaning of large numbers of them is in dispute or quite unintelligible.

  Consider, for example, one of the most familiar: Allegheny. “The name,” says a leading authority on Pennsylvania names, “has been a battleground for the Indian etymologists; no less than six different explanations are current.”2 More, there is no general agreement as to the spelling. The United States Geographic Board, in its heyday, made an effort to win universal acceptance for Allegeny, but in vain, and the two variants, Allegany and Alleghany, still survive and flourish.3 Two other examples are Penobscot and Milwaukee. The meaning of the former has been debated for years, but with no result save the agreement that it somehow relates to water falling over rocks.4 The latter is said by some authorities to be derived from an Indian word, milioke or miloaki, meaning good earth, and by others from mahnah-wauk-seepe, meaning a council ground near a river; yet others favor man-a-waukee, meaning a place where the Indians harvested a medicinal root called man-wau. A French map of 1648 made it Meleke; Father Louis Hennepin, the Franciscan missionary and explorer, spelled it Melleoke in 1679, and John Baisson de St. Cosme used Milwarick in 1699. The first postoffice established on the site of the present city was called Melwakee, but that was soon changed to Milwaukie, which continues to this day to be the name of a town in Oregon. Other forms in the past have been Millicki, Melwarik, Milwacky and Milwackey.5

  Great confusion prevails especially among the Indian names of the Eastern seaboard, for at the time they were adopted but little was known about the Indian languages, and since the study thereof has been tackled by competent linguists, the number of persons speaking them has greatly diminished, and in many cases fallen to zero. Moreover, those that survive have apparently changed considerably since the early days, and knowledge of most of them is still too scanty to give a sure footing to so difficult a discipline as etymology.1 Says the preface to the Sixth Report of the Geographic Board, 1890 to 1932:2

  Many of the sounds occurring in the vocables of the Indian languages were strange to the early colonists. Some of them were quite unknown to the European languages. Hence the utterance and proper apprehension of these sounds were naturally subject to the influence of two effective causes of phonetic change and corruption, namely, (1) orosis, or the mishearing and misapprehension of the sounds uttered by the Indians, and (2) the tendency to compression and abbreviation of words in order to achieve ease of utterance. Conversely, the effect of these two causes was also influenced by the phonetics peculiar to the vernacular language of the recorder – whether it was Swedish, Dutch, French, English, Spanish or Russian. Such a recorder has a strong tendency to imagine that he heard sounds peculiar to his own mother tongue, and the availing records bear clear testimony to this fact. Some sounds common to the Indian languages were not apprehended at all, which often became the source of false identification of terms with other quite unrelated words.

  The Indians themselves often forgot the meaning of their names for hills, meadows and streams: they became simply arbitrary words, like so many of our own proper nouns. Moreover, one tribe frequently borrowed a name from another using a different language or dialect, and had no more idea of its significance than we have today. Thus the Hurons got the name Susquehanna, meaning a muddy river, from the Delawares, and presently transformed it into a meaningless word which went into French as Andastoei and then into English as Conestoga, and in English became the name of a branch of the Susquehanna, of a town on that branch, and of a heavy wagon first built in the vicinity.3 A crude folk-etymology often transformed Indian names into forms that seemed (and still seem) to be of English origin. There is, for example, Crow Wing, the name of a village in Minnesota, which was originally Kakaki-wing, a Chippewa term meaning “at the place of the raven.” The first two syllables were more or less correctly translated as crow, but wing was mistaken for the English word, though there was no reference to wings in the Indian name. Port Tobacco in Maryland, originally Pentapang or Pootuppag, was transmuted into its present form when the early colonists began loading tobacco in an adjacent arm of the Potomac. The Rockaways on Long Island were originally Reckawackes and seem to have got into English by way of Dutch; Loyalhanna and Loyalsock, two Pennsylvania townships, were originally Laweelhanna and Lawisaquik,1 and Tia Juana (California), which seems to be Spanish for Aunt Jane, is actually an Indian term, tiwana, meaning “by the sea.”2

  Many other non-English place-names have been subjected to the same barbarization. The Low Freight, a stream in Arkansas, was originally the French L’Eau Froid; the Ambrosia in Indiana was the French Embarras; Gramercy Park in New York City was the Dutch Kromme Zee (crooked lake); Baraboo in Wisconsin was the French Baribault; Waco in Texas was the Spanish Hueco and so on.3 Numerous bastard names have been formed by outfitting non-English stems with English indicators, e.g., Romeroville, Glenrico, Point Loma, Ninaview4 and Pass aux Huitres5 and this process is still in full blast, especially in the naming of new resorts and suburbs, e.g., Buena Park and Mount Alta. Non-English names are naturally most prevalent in the areas in which the languages from which they come have been most spoken, e.g., Spanish in the Southwest,1 German in Pennsylvania,2 Dutch in New York, French in Louisiana3 and along the Canadian border, and Scandinavian in Minnesota.4 But some of them have wandered far, so that there are substantial numbers of Spanish names in Pennsylvania, and of German names in California.5 In most cases they were carried by immigrants, but returned soldiers also had something to do with it – for example, after the Mexican War.

  When an Indian name is borne by a place of any importance its spelling and pronunciation tend to become more or less fixed, as we have seen in the case of Milwaukee, but there is seldom any agreement about the names of smaller places. The Geographic Board and its successor, the Board on Geographical Names, have spent a great deal of time and energy settling such differences. The former, taking up the problem of determining the true name of a small lake in New Hampshire, was confronted by no less than 132 different forms. It finally decided upon Winnepesaukee, but soon afterward found reason to change to Winnipesaukee. The familiar Mohawk, the name of a river, a valley, a lake, a town and various villages in New York State, appears in the literature of the early frontier in 142 spellings, all coming down, apparently, from an Iroquois word maqua or mahaqua, meaning a bear. Even Seneca has been spelled in 110 ways, and Oneida in 103. Some of the Indian names that survive in remote places are very formidable, e.g., Souadabscook, Quenshukeny,6 Kiskiminetas, Quohquinapassakessamanagnog1 Chargoggagaugmanchaugagoggchaubunagungamaugg.2

  Worse, not a few of them, when their original meanings are dredged up, turn out to be opprobrious or obscene. The Indians often had several or even many names for the same place, and some of them were far from flattering. In other instances they had no names at all, for what was huge, obvious and inescapable seemed to them to be hardly worth naming. When a white colonist, in the former case, pressed t
hem for the name of some river, valley or hill they sometimes gave him the worst one current, and in the latter case they replied with the aboriginal equivalent of “That is a river” or “Go to hell!”3 The most reliable opinion today is to the effect that Chicago, as the sportive Indians imparted it to the first whites, meant “the place of strong smells” or Skunktown.4 At different times in the past it has been spelled Cheggago, Cheegago, Tzstchago, Stktschagko, Chirgago, Shecago, Shikkago, Shercaggo, Schenkakko, Zheekako, Ztschaggo, Chiccago, Checago, Chicawgo, Chikkago, Chiggago, Shakakko, Schuerkaigo, Psceschaggo, Stkachango and Tschakko.5

  The early English settlers were dull dogs, and, as Stewart has noted, very few of the names they bestowed upon the land showed any imagination. The Pilgrim Fathers could think of nothing better than Plymouth Rock to call the place of their landing, and their opposite numbers in Virginia, though they succumbed to a few lovely Indian names, displaced many others with such banalities as James, York, Charles, Henry, Williamsburg and Richmond.1 So many of the place-names of New England are mere repetitions of the names of English towns that there is a Namesake Town Association there,2 with a long membership and a longer list of eligibles. “The determination of the colonists,” said the Knickerbocker Magazine in 1837,3 “was to eradicate everything that perpetuated the native tribes, and the ancient names of Naumkeag, Shawmut and Mooseasuck gave place to … Salem, Boston and Providence.” The same loan was used over and over again, and to this day there are sixteen towns with names based on Newton within a few miles of Boston.4 Nor was there much improvement when the ties with the Motherland began to loosen. The first patriot to think of calling some frontier village Washington had immediate and numerous imitators and by 1839, according to Captain Frederick Marryat,5 there were already 43 Washingtons on the American map, with 41 Jacksons, 32 Jeffersons, 31 Franklins, 26 Madisons, 25 Monroes, 22 Perrys, 14 Lafayettes and 13 Hamiltons following.6 Hundreds of names were made by prefixing New to some existing name,7 or by borrowing the name of some local animal or tree. Both processes were followed by the pioneers who penetrated to the eastern end of Lake Erie toward the close of the Eighteenth Century. First, with gorgeous lack of humor, they called their village of sticks and mud New Amsterdam and then they switched to Buffalo, which was instantly borrowed for scores of other hamlets in what was then the Far West.