Made In America

by Bill Bryson

  Though they were by no means linguistic innovators, the peculiar circumstances in which they found themselves forced the first colonists to begin tinkering with their vocabulary almost from the first day. As early as 1622, they were using pond, which in England designated a small artificial pool, to describe large and wholly natural bodies of water, as in Walden Pond. Creek in England described an inlet of the sea; in America it came to signify a stream. For reasons that have never, so far as I can tell, been properly investigated, the colonials quickly discarded many seemingly useful English topographic words – hurst, mere, mead, heath, moor, marsh and (except in New England) brook, and began coming up with new ones, like swamp (first recorded in John Smith’s Generall Historie of Virginia in 1626),7 ravine, hollow, range (for an open piece of ground) and bluff. Often these were borrowed from other languages. Bluff, which has the distinction of being the first word attacked by the British as a misguided and obviously unnecessary Americanism, was probably borrowed from the Dutch blaf, meaning a flat board. Swamp appears to come from the German zwamp, and ravine, first recorded in 1781 in the diaries of George Washington though almost certainly used much earlier, is from the French.

  Oddly, considering the extremities of the American climate, weather words were slow in arising. Snowstorm, the first meteorological Americanism, is not recorded before 1771 and no one appears to have noticed a tornado before 1804. In between came cold snap in 1776, and that about exhausts America’s contribution to the world of weather terms in its first two hundred years. Blizzard, a word without which any description of a northern American winter would seem incomplete, did not in fact come to describe a heavy snowstorm until as late as 1870, when a newspaper editor in Estherville, Iowa, applied it to a particularly fierce spring snow. The word, of unknown origin, had been coined in America some fifty years earlier, but previously had denoted a blow or series of blows, as from fists or guns.

  Where they could, however, the first colonists stuck doggedly to the words of the Old World. They preserved words with the diligence of archivists. Scores, perhaps hundreds, of English terms that would later perish from neglect in their homeland live on in America thanks to the essentially conservative nature of the early colonists. Fall for autumn is perhaps the best known. It was a relatively new word at the time of the Pilgrims – its first use in England was recorded in 1545 – but it remained in common use in England until as late as the second half of the nineteenth century. Why it died out there when it did is unknown. The list of words preserved in America is practically endless. Among them: cabin in the sense of a humble dwelling, bug for any kind of insect, hog for a pig, deck as in a pack of cards and jack for a knave within the deck, raise for rear, junk for rubbish, mad in the sense of angry rather than unhinged, bushel as a common unit of measurement, closet for cupboard, adze, attic, jeer and hatchet, stocks as in stocks and bonds, cross-purposes, livestock, gap and (principally in New England) notch for a pass through hills, gully for a ravine, rooster for the male fowl, slick as a variant of sleek, zero for nought, back and forth (instead of backwards and forwards), plumb in the sense of utter or complete, noon*8 in favour of midday, molasses for treacle, cesspool, home-spun, din, trash, talented, chore, mayhem, maybe, copious, and so on. And that is just a bare sampling.

  The first colonists also brought with them many regional terms, little known outside their private corners of Britain, which prospered on American soil and have often since spread to the wider English-speaking world: drool, teeter, hub, swamp, squirt (as a term descriptive of a person), spool (for thread), to wilt, cater-cornered, skedaddle (a north British dialect word meaning to spill something noisy, such as a bag of coal), gumption, chump (an Essex word meaning a lump of wood and now preserved in the expression ‘off your chump’),8 scalawag, dander (as in to get one’s dander up), chitterlings, chipper, chisel in the sense of to cheat, and skulduggery. The last named has nothing to do with skulls which is why it is spelled with one l. It comes from the Scottish sculdudrie, a word denoting fornication. Chitterlings, or chitlins, for the small intestines of the pig, was unknown outside Hampshire until nourished to wider glory in the New World.9 That it evolved in some quarters of America into kettlings suggests that the ch- may have been pronounced by at least some people with the hard k of chaos or chorus.

  And of course they brought many words with them that have not survived in either America or Britain, to the lexical impoverishment of both: flight for a dusting of snow, fribble for a frivolous person, bossloper for a hermit, spong for a parcel of land, bantling for an infant, sooterkin for a sweetheart, gurnet for a protective sandbar, and the much-missed slobberchops for a messy eater.

  Everywhere they turned in their new-found land, the early colonists were confronted with objects that they had never seen before, from the mosquito (at first spelled mosketoe or musketto) to the persimmon to poison ivy, or ‘poysoned weed’ as they called it. At first, no doubt overwhelmed by the wealth of unfamiliar life in their new Eden, they made no distinction between pumpkins and squashes or between the walnut and pecan trees. They misnamed plants and animals. Bay, laurel, beech, walnut, hemlock, the robin (actually a thrush), blackbird, hedgehog, lark, swallow and marsh hen all signify different species in America from those of England.10 The American rabbit is actually a hare. (That the first colonists couldn’t tell the difference offers some testimony to their incompetence in the wild.) Often they took the simplest route and gave the new creatures names imitative of the sounds they made – bob white, whippoorwill, katydid – and when that proved impractical they fell back on the useful, and eventually distinctively American, expedient of forming a new compound from two older words.

  Colonial American English positively teems with such constructions: jointworm, glowworm, eggplant, canvasback, copperhead, rattlesnake, bluegrass, backtrack, bobcat, catfish, blue-jay, bullfrog, sapsucker, timberland, underbrush, cookbook, frostbite, hillside (at first sometimes called a sidehill), plus such later additions as tightwad, sidewalk, cheapskate, sharecropper, skyscraper, rubberneck, drugstore, barbershop, hangover, rubdown, blowout and others almost without number. These new terms had the virtues of directness and instant comprehensibility – useful qualities in a land whose populace included increasingly large numbers of non-native speakers – which their British counterparts often lacked. Frostbite is clearly more descriptive than chilblains, sidewalk, than pavement, eggplant than aubergine, doghouse than kennel, bedspread than counterpane, whatever the English might say.

  One creature that very much featured in the lives of the earliest colonists was the passenger pigeon. The name comes from an earlier sense of passenger as one that passes by, and passenger pigeons certainly did that in almost inconceivably vast numbers. One early observer estimated a passing flock as being a mile wide and 240 miles long. They literally darkened the sky. At the time of the Mayflower landing there were perhaps nine billion passenger pigeons in North America, more than twice the number of all the birds found on the continent today. With such numbers they were absurdly easy to hunt. One account from 1770 reported that a hunter brought down 125 with a single shot from a blunderbuss. Some people ate them, but most were fed to pigs. Millions more were slaughtered for the sport of it. By 1800 their numbers had been roughly halved and by 1900 they were all but gone. On 1 September 1914 the last one died at Cincinnati Zoo.

  The first colonists were not, however, troubled by several other creatures that would one day plague the New World. One was the common house rat. It wouldn’t reach Europe for another century (emigrating there abruptly and in huge numbers from Siberia for reasons that have never been explained) and did not make its first recorded appearance in America until 1775, in Boston. (Such was its adaptability that, by the time of the 1849 gold rush, early arrivals to California found the house rat waiting for them. By the 1960s there were an estimated one hundred million house rats in America.) Many other now common animals, among them the house mouse and the common pigeon, were also yet to make their first trip acros
s the ocean.

  For certain species we know with some precision when they arrived, most notoriously with that airborne irritant the starling, which was brought to America by one Eugene Schieffelin, a wealthy German emigrant who had the odd, and in the case of starlings regrettable, idea that he should introduce to the American landscape all the birds mentioned in the writings of Shakespeare. Most of the species he introduced failed to prosper, but the forty pairs of starlings he released in New York’s Central Park in the spring of 1890, augmented by twenty more pairs the following spring, so thrived that within less than a century they had become the most abundant bird species in America, and one of its greatest pests. The common house sparrow (actually not a sparrow at all but an African weaverbird) was in similar fashion introduced to the New World in 1851 or 1852 by the president of the Natural History Society of Brooklyn, and the carp by the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in the 1870s.11 That there were not greater ecological disasters from such well-meaning but often misguided introductions is a wonder for which we may all be grateful.

  Partly from lack of daily contact with the British, partly from conditions peculiar to American life, and partly perhaps from whim, American English soon began wandering off in new directions. As early as 1682, Americans were calling folding money bills rather than notes. By 1751, bureau had lost its English meaning of a writing desk and come to mean a chest of drawers. Barn in Britain was and generally still is a storehouse for grain, but in America it took on the wider sense of being a general-purpose farm building. By 1780 avenue was being used to designate any wide street in America; in Britain it implied a line of trees – indeed, it still does to the extent that many British towns have streets called Avenue Road, which sounds comically redundant to American ears. Other words for which Americans gradually enlarged the meanings include apartment, pie, store, closet, pavement and block. Block in late eighteenth-century America described a group of buildings having a similar appearance – what the British call a terrace – then came to mean a collection of adjoining lots and finally, by 1823, was being used in its modern sense to designate an urban rectangle bounded by streets.12

  But the handiest, if not always the simplest, way of filling voids in the American lexicon was to ask the local Indians what words they used. At the time of the first colonists there were perhaps fifty million Indians in the New World (though other estimates have put the figure as high as one hundred million and as low as eight million). Most lived in Mexico and the Andes. The whole of North America had perhaps no more than two million inhabitants. The Indians of North America are generally broken down into six geographic, rather than linguistic or cultural, families: those from the plains (among them the Blackfoot, Cheyenne and Pawnee), eastern woodlands (the Algonquian family and Iroquois confederacy), south-west (Apache, Navaho, Pueblo), northwest coast (Haida, Modoc, Tsimshian), plateau (Paiute, Nez Percé), and northern (Kutchin, Naskapi). Within these groups considerable variety was to be found. Among the plains Indians, the Omaha and Pawnee were settled farmers, while the Cheyenne and Commanches were nomadic hunters. There was also considerable movement: the Blackfoot and Cheyenne, for example, began as eastern seaboard Indians, members of the Algonquian family, before pushing west into the plains.

  Despite, or perhaps because of, the relative paucity of inhabitants in North America, the variety of languages spoken on the continent was particularly rich, with as many as 500 altogether. Put another way, the Indians of North America accounted for only 5 per cent of the population of the New World, but perhaps as much as a quarter of its tongues. Many of these languages – Puyallup, Tupi, Assinboin, Hidatsa, Bella Coola – were spoken by only a relative handful of people. Even among related tribes the linguistic chasm could be considerable. As the historian Charlton Laird has put it: ‘The known native languages of California alone show greater linguistic variety than all the known languages of the continent of Europe.‘13

  Almost all of the Indian terms taken directly into English by the first colonists come from the two eastern families: the Iroquois confederacy, whose members included the Mohawk, Cherokee, Oneida, Seneca, Delaware and Huron tribes, and the even larger Algonquian group, which included Algonquin, Arapaho, Cree, Delaware, Illinois, Kickapoo, Narragansett, Ojibwa, Penobscot, Pequot and Sac and Fox, among many others. But here, too, there was huge variability, so that to the Delaware Indians the river was the Susquehanna, while to the neighbouring Hurons it was the Kanastoge (or Conestoga).

  The early colonists began borrowing words from the Indians almost from the moment of first contact. Moose and papoose were taken into English as early as 1603. Raccoon is first recorded in 1608, caribou and opossum in 1610, moccasin and tomahawk in 1612, hickory in 1618, powwow in 1624, wigwam in 1628.14 Altogether, the Indians provided some 150 terms to the early colonists. Another 150 came later, often after being filtered through intermediate sources. Toboggan, for instance, entered English by way of Canadian French. Hammock, maize and barbecue reached the continent via Spanish from the Caribbean.

  Occasionally Indian terms could be adapted fairly simply. The Algonquian seganku became without too much difficulty skunk. Wuchak settled into English almost inevitably as woodchuck (despite the tongue-twister, no woodchuck ever chucked wood). Wampumpeag became wampum. The use of neck in the northern colonies was clearly influenced by the Algonquian naiack, meaning a point or corner, and from which comes the expression that neck of the woods. Similarly the preponderance of capes in New England is at least partly due to the existence of an Algonquian word, kepan, meaning ‘a closed-up passage’.15

  Most Indian terms, however, were not so amenable to simple transliteration. Many had to be brusquely and repeatedly pummelled into shape, like a recalcitrant pillow, before any English speaker could feel comfortable with them. John Smith’s first attempt at transcribing the Algonquian word for a tribal leader came out as cawcawwassoughes. Realizing that this was not remotely satisfactory he modified it to a still somewhat hopeful coucorouse. It took a later generation to simplify it further to the form we know today: caucus.16 Raccoon was no less challenging. Smith tried raugroughcum and rahaugcum in the same volume, then later made it rarowcun, and subsequent chroniclers attempted many other forms – aracoune and rockoon, among them – before finally finding phonetic comfort with rackoone.17 Misickquatash evolved into sacatash and eventually succotash. Askutasquash became isquontersquash and finally squash. Pawcohiccora became pohickery and then hickory.

  Tribal names, too, required modification. Cherokee was really Tsalaki. Algonquin emerged from Algoumequins. Irinakhoiw yielded Iroquois. Choctaw was variously rendered as Chaqueta, Shacktau and Choktah before settling into its modern form. Even the seemingly straightforward Mohawk has as many as 142 recorded spellings.*9

  Occasionally the colonists gave up. For a time they referred to an edible cactus by its Indian name, metaquesunauk, but eventually abandoned the fight and called it a prickly pear.18. Success depended largely on the phonetic accessibility of the nearest contact tribe. Those who encountered the Ojibwa Indians found their dialect so deeply impenetrable that they couldn’t even agree on the tribe’s name. Some said Ojibwa, others Chippewa. By whatever name, the tribe employed consonant clusters of such a confounding density – mtik, pskikye, kchimkwa, to name but three19 – as to convince the new colonists to leave their tongue in peace.

  Often, as might be expected, the colonists misunderstood the Indian terms and misapplied them. To the natives, pawcohiccora signified not the tree but the food made from its nuts. Pakan or paccan was an Algonquian word for any hard-shelled nut. The colonists made it pecan (after toying with such variants as pekaun and pecaun) and with uncharacteristic specificity reserved it for the produce of the tree known to science as the Carya illinoensis.

  Despite the difficulties, the first colonists were perennially fascinated by the Indian tongues, partly no doubt because they were exotic, but also because they had a beauty that was irresistible. As William Penn wrote: ‘I know not a l
anguage spoken in Europe, that hath words of more sweetness or greatness, in accent or emphasis, than theirs.‘20 And he was right. You have only to list a handful of Indian place names – Mississippi, Susquehanna, Rappahannock – to see that the Indians found a poetry in the American landscape that has all too often eluded those who displaced them.

  If the early American colonists treated the Indians’ languages with respect, they did not always show such scruples with the Indians themselves. From the outset they often treated the natives badly, albeit sometimes unwittingly. One of the first acts of the Mayflower Pilgrims, as we have seen, was to plunder Indian graves. (One wonders how the Pilgrims would have felt had they found Indians picking through the graves in an English churchyard.) Confused and easily frightened, the early colonists often attacked friendly tribes, mistaking them for hostile ones. Even when they knew the tribes to be friendly, they sometimes took hostages in the decidedly perverted belief that this would keep them respectful.

  When circumstances were deemed to warrant it, they did not hesitate to impose a quite shocking severity, as a note from soldiers to the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony during King Philip’s War reminds us: ‘This aforesaid Indian was ordered to be tourn to peeces by dogs, and she was so dealt with.‘21 Indeed, early accounts of American encounters with Indians tell us as much about colonial violence as about seventeenth-century orthography. Here, for instance, is William Bradford describing a surprise attack on a Pequot village in his History of Plimouth Plantation. The victims, it may be noted, were mostly women and children: Those that scaped the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others rune throw with rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatchte ... It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyre ... and horrible was the styncke and sente there of, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice.‘22 In 1675 in Virginia, John Washington, an ancestor of George, was involved in a not untypical incident in which the Indians were invited to settle a dispute by sending their leaders to a powwow. They sent five chiefs to parley and when things did not go to the European settlers’ satisfaction, the chiefs were taken away and killed. Even the most faithful Indians were treated as expendable. When John Smith was confronted by hostile savages in Virginia in 1608 his first action was to shield himself behind his native guide.