American Language Supplement 2

by H. L. Mencken

  Loading. Materials used to condition leather, e.g., glucose and magnesium chloride.

  Ounce. The unit of thickness in upholstery and bag leather. One ounce equals 1/64 inch.

  Rawhide. Cattle hide that has been dehaired and limed, and sometimes stuffed with oil or grease, but not tanned.

  Russia. Originally a calfskin shoe leather, dressed with birch oil, but now applied to a fancy leather made of either calfskins or cattle hides.

  Suede. Leather finished by applying it to an emery-wheel, thus separating the fibres and giving the surface a nap.

  Textile-workers3

  Agafretted. Tangled or snarled work.

  Alley. A mill aisle.

  Birdseye. Woolen or worsted cloth.

  Buggy-rider. A sweeper.

  Bull. The factory whistle.

  Cut. A length of cloth, usually 60 yards.

  Doc. A machinist who repairs looms.

  Dungeoneer. A dye-house worker.

  Elegazam. Perfect work.

  Fly. Fabric particles and dust given off by the looms.

  Iron horse. A loom.

  Lint-head. A cotton-mill worker.

  Looney. A green worker.

  Nurse cloth. Colored goods woven in stripes.

  Oatmeal cloth. Cretonne.

  Picks. The number of threads to an inch.

  Race-horse. A loom geared to high speed.

  Scroop. The rustle or crunch of silk.

  Squat-head. A company executive.

  Tobacco-growers1

  Bookman, or ticket-maker. A warehouse clerk who records sales.

  Bull-gang. Laborers who handle hogsheads.

  Duckbill, or spoonbill. A small hand-truck.

  Frenchman. A stalk with small, erect leaves, worthless in quality.

  Frog-eye. A small speck on a tobacco leaf.

  Guinea. Tobacco with frog-eyes.2

  Lug. A leaf low on the stem, of small value.

  Pinhooker. One who buys privately, often at bargain prices.3

  Pole-sweat, or house-burn. Spoiling of tobacco in the process of curing.

  Smithfield. “Making a bid by a nod, but calling aloud at the same time a lower price in order to trick other buyers.”4

  Wooden ear. A buyer who raises his own bid.

  Yellowhammer. A speculator.

  Union Men in General5

  Beef-squad, or goon-squad. A gang of goons.

  Brother. Used in addressing or speaking of a fellow union man.

  Check-off. Union dues or assessments deducted by the employer and paid to the union.

  Featherbedding. Getting pay for work not done.

  Goon. Originally, a ruffian hired to intimidate strikers; now, a ruffian menacing workers who refuse to strike.6

  Hooker. “An operative who inveigles union men into acting as spies on their fellows and keeps them hooked by threatening to expose them to the union.”1

  Jimmie Higgins. A willing member who does the drudgery of a union.2

  Kickback, or piece off. A bribe paid by a workman to a foreman or union official for security in his job.

  Missionary worker. One who seeks to break down the morale of strikers.

  Noble. The commander of a strike-breaking squad.3

  Picket. A person posted at a struck plant, usually bearing a placard setting forth the strikers’ case.

  Pork-chopper. A union official who is in the labor movement for what he can get out of it.4

  Portal-to-portal. From the entrance to the plant or mine back to the same place.5

  Rollback. A reduction in wages to a former level.

  Scab, or fink. One who takes the place of a striker.6

  Scissor-bill. A non-union worker.

  Sit-down, folded arms, crossed arms, or stay-in. A strike in which the strikers remain in the plant but refuse to work.7

  Struck. Used to designate a plant in which a strike is in progress.8

  Wildcat, quickie, or outlaw strike. One not authorized by union officials.

  Wobbly. A member of the Industrial Workers of the World, or I. W. W.9

  Yellow-dog contract. A contract whereby workers agree not to join a union.10

  World War II, though it threw off an enormous number of what, to newspaper lexicographers, appeared to be neologisms, actually produced few that were really new, and not many of them have stuck. Some of the most familiar, e.g., foxhole, brass hat, M.P.11 and black market, were legacies from World War I, and others went back to earlier wars, including the Civil War, e.g., dog-tag, K.P., a. w. o. l., hike, pup-tent, gook,1 belly-robber, to bust (to reduce in rank), commando (South African War).2 What differentiated World War II from all others in history, aside from the curious fact that it produced no popular hero and no song, was the enormous number of newspaper correspondents who followed its operations, and the even greater number of press-agents who served its brass. Many of these literati were aspirants to the ermine of Walter Winchell, and as a result they adorned the daily history of the war with multitudinous bright inventions, but the actual soldier, like his predecessors of the past, limited his argot to a series of derisive names for the things he had to do and endure, and the ancient stock of profanity and obscenity. All the more observant and intelligent veterans that I have consulted tell me that a few four-letter words were put to excessively heavy service. One of them, beginning with f, became an almost universal verb, and with -ing added, a universal adjective; another, beginning with s, ran a close second to it. The former penetrated to the highest levels, and was the essence of one of the few really good coinages of the war, to wit, snafu, meaning, according to Colonel Elbridge Colby, the leading authority on Army speech, “the confusion that comes from sudden changes in orders.”3 Colby says that it is an abbreviation of “Situation normal; all foozled up,” and other lexicographers have substituted fouled for foozled, but the word really in mind was something else again.4 Nor were the two mentioned the only ones of the sort in constant use. The verb in the last clause of I Samuel XXV, 22 also had a heavy play,5 and so did the ancient Germanic word for backside.6 Nor were their lesser analogues forgotten.7

  The precise provenance of most of the terms that issued from the war is dark and disputed. Where, how and at whose hands GI came into use is not known. Colby, before cited, says that in World War I, and perhaps before, the initials stood for galvanized iron, as in GI [ash]-can and GI bucket, but that they were transferred early in World War II to general issue, as in GI soap, GI haircut and GI food. All such things were disesteemed by the soldier, mainly because they were purely utilitarian and hence unattractive, so he presently began to transfer the letters, metaphorically, to other things that he didn’t admire, e.g., GI hop or struggle, a dance at an Army post; GI girl, a female brought in to dance with him; GI war, manoeuvres; GI sky-pilot, a chaplain; GI lemonade, water, and so on. These terms soon appeared numerously in Yank, the soldiers’ newspaper, and GI Joe, for the soldier himself, and GI Jane for his female comrade-in-arms, followed inevitably.1 But the Joe part was disliked,1 and soon GI Joe became plain GI. The latter also had some vogue as an adjective standing alone, as in “Are they very GI around here?,” always expressing distaste, but it did not last for long. Neither did GI kraut, listed in 1945 as in use in the Army of the Occupation to designate a former private in the German Army.2 Of kraut itself Irwin R. Blacker said during the same year:3

  Kraut and krauthead … have a somewhat questionable … source. They were selected by one of the propaganda branches of the Army to replace the widely accepted jerry. The Stars and Stripes, early in the Italian campaign, published notification of its intention to use kraut because it gave less dignity to the enemy. The word was thereafter popular in print, but was not generally used by the soldiers.4

  But it was official fiat which substituted the euphemistic selectee for the somewhat harsh draftee of World War I. The former first appeared in the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940, along with trainee. Trainee didn’t have much prosperity, but selectee was in almost univers
al use until the end of the war. Evacuee, which raged among the English, though it was violently denounced by their purists,5 never made any progress in this country, probably because the only American citizens actually evacuated were the heathen Japanese of the Pacific Coast. Once the war was over displaced person, usually abbreviated to DP, came into use on both sides of the water.6 Stateside, in the sense of relating to or in the direction of the United States – in other words, back home – impinged upon the national consciousness during World War II, but a writer in American Notes & Queries in 19471 said that he had a vague recollection of seeing it in print “fifteen or twenty years ago, used by Americans living temporarily in United States Territories and in the Far East.”2 The introduction of the pin-up girl has been claimed by Walter Thornton,3 but he apparently did not invent the term.4 Mae West for an inflatable life-preserver used by aviators and later for a tank with two turrets, came from the English,5 as did the German blitz and its derivatives, and blackout. When blitz began to work its way into English use, at the beginning of the war, there were many violent protests from chauvinists,6 but by 1940 it had been fully accepted, along with ersatz and flak.7 Whether or not these terms will survive in the language remains to be seen; probably not. In the United States they are known, but seem to be in infrequent use.

  The English invented blackout in 1939,8 but it did not cross the ocean until after Pearl Harbor. Task-force had to wait until the resumption of the offensive in the Pacific: it is apparently American, but who coined it I do not know. V-day, VE-day, VJ-day and V-mail also appear to be of American origin, though the terms in -day may have been suggested by the German der tag, one of the chief proofs of German wickedness in World War I.1 Black market, of course, was a legacy from that war, and was possibly borrowed from the German Schwarzmarkt, which preceded it. Lend-lease was coined by some anonymous Washington onomatologist at the time the thing itself was invented, before Pearl Harbor. The enormous number of abbreviations in use during the war, e.g., WAC, Pfc, AMGOT,2 SHEAF, ETO and Seabee3 began to fade the moment hostilities ended, along with the even more numerous abbreviations designating sectors of the home front, but some of them will no doubt be revived when the bugles blow again. The device of calling a military enterprise Operation this-or-that shows some sign of enduring.4 The fate of to liberate I do not venture to predict. It signifies to loot and had a large vogue in the Army of Occupation in Germany, c. 1946, but the sentence of fifteen years at hard labor imposed upon the master-liberator, Colonel Jack W. Durant, on April 30, 1947, gave it a set-back. It has an American smack, but there is evidence that it was actually borrowed from the English.5 Quisling and its verb, to quisling or to quisle, also English loans, ran into difficulties on September 8, 1943, when Marshal Pietro Badoglio came over to the allies, though his country was still at war, and the English papers began to use badoglio, a surrender to the enemy.6

  Jeep seems to be authentically American, but the history of the word is almost as obscure as the history of the car itself. The latter was apparently first projected by Captain (later Colonel) R. G. Howie, then in command of the Seventh Tank Company at Fort Snelling, Minn., in 1932. He continued his experiments during the three years following, and in 1936 was given a small grant from Army funds by Major-General Walter C. Short. At the beginning of 1937, assisted by Master Sergeant M. J. Wiley, he began assembling the first car, and during the Autumn of that year it was completed and sent to Fort Sam Houston, Texas, for trials. They brought in favorable reports from the Army bigwigs there assembled, headed by Major-General (later Lieutenant-General) Walter Krueger, and a year later Short sought to keep the invention an American monopoly by applying for a patent on it, in his own name and those of Howie and Wiley.1 But the jeep, so far, was a rather primitive contrivance, and its operator had no seat, but was supposed to lie upon it belly-whopper fashion. In the developments which followed various other persons had some hand, and also different manufacturers, e.g., the Willys-Overland Motors of Toledo, the American Bantam Car Company of Butler, Pa., and the Minneapolis-Moline Power Implement Company. Indeed, there were so many fingers in the pie that after the jeep was adopted by the Army and became a vast success, conflicting claims of interest produced a controversy before the Federal Trade Commission,2 and it dragged on wearily.

  The first batch of seventy jeeps was produced by the Bantam Car Company in 1940, and delivered to the Army Quartermaster Depot at Holabird, Md., on September 23 of that year.3 They were given thorough tests there and at other Army posts, and it was soon resolved to order them in large quantities. It was by then apparent that the United States would soon be in the war, and the fear that the Bantam Company might not be able to produce the new cars fast enough caused the Army to let contracts for them to other companies, including Ford. The fact that the code symbol of Ford on Army cars was GP has led to the surmise that the word jeep was born there and then,1 but there is no evidence for it. Nor is there any evidence that the word came from the same letters in the sense of general purpose, for the first jeeps were not called, officially, general purpose cars, but half-ton four by four command-reconnaissance cars.2 It seems to be much more probable that the name was borrowed from that of a character in E. C. Segar’s comic strip, “Popeye the Sailor,” which also gave the language goon. Eugene the Jeep appeared in Segar’s drawings on March 16, 1936, and on April 1 of that year the King Features Syndicate, which syndicated his work, took steps to protect both the name and the character. Segar dropped both before his death in 1938, but they had caught the public fancy and survived him.3 Who first applied jeep to the new Army car is not known, but a claim has been made for a Sergeant James T. O’Brien.4 Inasmuch however, as this baptism is dated 1937, when the car was still in its early experimental stage, the evidence seems to be shaky, but there is evidence that an Oklahoma manufacturer named Erle Palmer Halliburton gave the name to a different car, half truck and half tractor, during the same year.5

  The fact is that, at that time, jeep was in the air, and many other contrivances were so called, e.g., the Link Trainer for aviators. Colby says that it was also applied to a recruit, to ill-fitting hats and coats, and to various other objects.6 At one time an autogiro was a jumping jeep, and the barracks where recruits were quartered was a jeep-town. In 1938 Jerome Barry reported that jeep was then in use among soda-jerkers to designate a slow and incompetent colleague,1 and in 1940 a writer in the Baltimore Evening Sun said that it was used among automobile finance men for “one who rides with the adjuster in order to drive back the cars repossessed.”2 The English, during World War II used it for a radio operator and also for a member of the Royal Canadian Naval Volunteer Reserve.3 In the sense of a bantam car it once had many rivals, e.g., blitz-buggy,4 baby-buggy, bug, gnat-tank, scout-car, leaping Lena, puddle-jumper, jeepers-creepers, midget, midgie, quad and plain bantam-car. Peep was invented to differentiate the half-ton car from a quarter-ton model.5 Jeep quickly passed into most of the European languages. “No Frenchman, Belgian, Dutchman, Luxemburger, Dane, Norwegian or German, and very few Poles or Russians,” says Bishop, before cited, “is ignorant of OK, GI or jeep.”6

  The English apparently preferred the European War as a designation for the conflict of 1914–18, but in the United States it came to be known as the World War, and when another round began in 1939 it naturally became World War II. But there were poets who groped for something less prosaic, and one of them was President Franklin D. Roosevelt. So late as the Spring of 1942 he was calling for suggestions, and many flowed in. The Hon. Thomas E. Dewey proposed the War for Survival, Mrs. Anne M. Rosenberg Freedom’s War, Dr. William Lyon Phelps the War of Liberty, the Hon. Henry H. Curran the Necessary War, and Jack Dempsey the Fight to Live. The Hon. Emil Schram, president of the New York Stock Exchange, put his hopes into the Last World War, and other less eminent persons contributed the War to Save Humanity, the Fight for Right, the War to Save Civilization, the War of the Ages, the People’s War, the Survival War, the War of World Freedom, the War Against Tyrants,
the Hitler War, and the World Order War. There were even cynics who proposed the Crazy War, the War of Illusions, the Meddler’s War, the Roosevelt War, the Devil’s War, and Hell. How and by whom the votes were counted I do not know, but when the uproar was over it was announced that World War II had won by a large plurality, with War of World Freedom a bad second, and War of Freedom a worse third. Soon after Pearl Harbor, in fact, the Army and Navy had adopted World War II, and by the middle of 1942 it was appearing in the Congressional Record. By the end of that year it had obliterated all the other proposed names, and prophets were already beginning to talk hopefully of World War III.

  Ernest K. Lindley and Forrest Davis say in “How War Came”1 that United Nations was coined by President Roosevelt. This was during Winston Churchill’s visit to Washington at the end of December, 1941. He was a guest at the White House, and he and Roosevelt discussed the choice of a name for the new alliance. One morning, lying in bed, Roosevelt thought of United Nations, and at once sought Churchill, who was in his bath. “How about United Nations?” he called through the door. “That,” replied Churchill, “should do it.” And so it was.

  1 Mr. Everett DeBaun, of Philadelphia, calls my attention to other apparent loans from Romany speech, e.g., benny, an overcoat (Rom. bengree, a waistcoat); can, a jail or privy (Rom. caen, to stink): to cop, to steal, and maybe also cop or copper, a policeman (Rom. cappi, booty, gain); cush, money (Rom. cushti, good); shiv, a knife (Rom. chiv, a blade), and stir, prison (Rom. staripen, a prison).

  2 Knebel’s MS. is still preserved in the university library at Basel. It was printed for the first time in Taschenbuch für Geschichte und Alterthum in Süd-Deutschland, by Heinrich Schreiber; Freiburg (Switzerland), 1839. Records of the trials were also made by Hieronymus Wilhelm Ebner, and his MS. is also preserved at Basel. It was printed in Exercitationes Iuris Universi, by Johann Heumann; Altdorf, 1749.