by Bill Bryson
But it wasn’t just money terms that America developed in the nineteenth century. A flood, a positive torrent, of words and expressions of all types came out of the country in the period. The following is no more than a bare sampling: to make the fur fly (1804); quick on the trigger and to whitewash (1808); having an ax to grind (1811); keep a stiff upper lip (yes, it’s an Americanism, 1815); no two ways about it (1818); fly off the handle (1825); to move like greased lightning (1826); to have a knockdown and dragout fight (1827); to sit on the fence and to go the whole hog (1828); firecracker, hornswoggle, non-committal and to be in cahoots with (1829); ornery and talk turkey (1830); horse sense and nip and tuck (often originally rip and tuck; no one knows why; 1832.); conniption fit barking up the wrong tree and to keep one’s eyes peeled (1833); close shave and rip-roaring (1834); hell-bent (1835); stool pigeon (1836); to have a chip on one’s shoulder and to raise Cain (1840); to scoot (1841); to pull the wool over one’s eyes and to get hitched, in the sense of being married (1842); hold your horses (1844); beeline (1845); to stub one’s toe (1846); to be a goner (1847); to back down, to dicker, by the great horn spoon and highfalutin (1848); to face the music (1850); to paddle one’s own canoe and to keep one’s shirt on (1854); one-horse town (1855); to knock the spots off and stag party (1856); neither hide nor hair (1857); deadbeat (1863); to knuckle down (1864); to go haywire (1865); con man and to slather (1866); to go back on, as with a promise (1868); to get in on the ground floor (1872); to eat crow (1877); underdog (1887); cagey in the sense of shrewd (1893); and panhandler and to be out on a limb (1897).
In addition, there were scores more that have since fallen out of use: ground and lofty (once a very common synonym for fine and dandy), happify, to missionate, to consociate (that is, to come together in an assembly), dunderment (bewilderment), puckerstoppled (to be embarrassed), from Dan to Beersheba. This last, alluding to the northernmost and southernmost outposts of the Holy Land, was in daily use for at least two hundred years as a synonym for wide-ranging, from A to Z, but dropped from view in the nineteenth century and hasn’t been seen much since.
Sometimes the meaning of nineteenth-century neologisms is self-evident, as with to move like greased lightning or to have a close shave. To go haywire evidently alludes to the lacerating effect of that material once a tightly wound bale is loosed, and to talk turkey may owe something to a once popular story about an Indian and frontiersman who often went hunting together. According to this tale, each time they came to divide the kill, the frontiersman would say, ‘You may take the buzzard and I will take the turkey, or if you prefer I will take the turkey and you may take the buzzard.’ After several such episodes, the Indian interrupts the frontiersman and says, ‘But when do I get to talk turkey?’ or words to that effect. The story is of course apocryphal, but it was widely told as a joke and thus perhaps is responsible for the popularity of the phrase.
More often, however, we are left with words and phrases that seem to have sprung from nowhere and that do not mean anything in particular – even steven, fit as a fiddle, easy as a lead pipe cinch, to take a powder, to peter out, to paint the town red, to talk through one’s hat, to josh, to root hog or die. Explanations are frequently posited but all too often on unpersuasively flimsy evidence. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that josh may be connected to the humorist Josh Billings, but in fact the term was current at least as early as 1845 and Josh Billings was unknown outside his neighbourhood until 1860. To face the music, first recorded in a publication called the Worcester Spy, may allude to a soldier being drummed out of service or possibly it may have some theatrical connection, perhaps to a nervous performer having to face the audience across the orchestra pit. No one knows. The mild expletives doggone and doggone it both date from the early nineteenth century, though no one has any idea what they meant. The mystery deepens when you realize that the first recorded citation has it as ‘dog on’t’, reminiscent of the earlier ‘a pox on’t’ and other like formations.
Phoney has been linked to any number of possibilities, from the Gaelic for ring (fauney or fawney; the explanation being that a street vendor known as a fauney dropper would show the gullible purchaser a ring of genuine quality, then slip him a cheap fauney) to an unscrupulous businessman named Forney. Ballyhoo, blizzard, hunky dory, shanty, conniption fit (at first also spelled caniption or kniption), bogus, bamboozle and many other durable Americanisms are of unknown, or at least decidedly uncertain, derivation. To root hog or die, first found in A Narrative Life of David Crockett in 1834, is similarly bewildering. The expression, meaning to fend for oneself or perish, evidently refers to the rooting practices of hogs, but precisely what Mr Crockett (or his ghostwriter) meant by it is uncertain. His contemporaries, it seems, were no wiser. They variously rendered the expression as ‘root, hog, or die’ (as if it were an admonition to a pig) or as ‘root, hog or die’ (as if presenting a list of three options). Clearly they hadn’t the faintest idea what they wanted the poor hog to do, but the expression filled a gap in the American lexicon, and that is what mattered. As Gertrude Stein might have put it, an expression doesn’t have to mean anything as long as it means something.
For a long time the most American of Americanisms, OK, fell resoundingly into this category. The explanations for its etymology have been as inspired as they have been various. Among the theories: that it is short for only kissing, that the semi-literate Andrew Jackson wrote it on papers as an abbreviation for oll korrect (in fact he was not that ignorant), that it came from Orrin Kendall crackers, that it was an abbreviation for the Greek olla kalla (’all good’), that it was from a prized brand of Haitian rum called Aux Cayes, that it was an early telegraphic abbreviation for open key, that it was from the Choctaw affirmative okeh, that it came from the Indian chief Old Keokuk or from the nickname for Martin Van Buren, Old Kinderhook (he was from Kinderhook, New York).
Learned papers were written in defence of various contentions. The matter was discussed at conferences. By 1941, when Allen Walker Read, a professor at Columbia University, began looking into the matter, OK was already the most widely understood Americanism in the world and the search for its origins was the etymological equivalent of the search for DNA. It took Read some twenty years of searching to nail the matter down, but thanks to his efforts we now know that OK first appeared in print in the Boston Morning Post on 23 March 1839, as a jocular abbreviation for ’Oll Korrect’. At the time there was a fashion for such concoctions – KY for ‘Know Use’, RTBS for ‘Remains to Be Seen,’ KG for ‘Know Go,’ WOOOFC for ‘With One of Our First Citizens.’ In 1840 Martin Van Buren ran for President, the Democratic OK Club was formed to promote his election, and OK raced into general usage, where it has remained ever since.10
As well as creating new words by the hundreds in the nineteenth century, Americans also gave new meanings to old ones. Fix and its offshoots accumulated so many uses that the Dictionary of American English needs nearly seven columns of text and some 5,000 words to discuss their specifically American applications. They added prepositions to common verbs to give them new or heightened significance: to pass out, to check in, to show off, to beat up, to collide, to flare up, to start off, to stave off, to cave in, to fork over, to hold on, to hold out, to stay put, to brush off, to get away with. They cut long words down – turning penitentiary into pen, fanatic into fan, reformation into reform – and simplified constructions, preferring to graduate over to be graduated. They created nouns from verbs – dump and beat, for example. Above all they turned nouns into verbs. The practice began as early as the late seventeenth century (to scalp, first noted in 1693, is one of the earliest) and continued throughout the eighteenth, but reached a kind of fever pitch in the nineteenth. The list of American verb formations is all but endless: to interview, to bankroll, to highlight, to package, to panic, to audition, to curb, to bellyache, to demean, to progress, to corner, to endorse, to engineer, to predicate, to resurrect, to notice, to advocate, to splurge, to boost, to coast, to oppose
, to demoralize, to placate, to donate, to peeve (backformed from peevish), to locate, to evoke, to rattle, to deed, to boom, to park, to sidestep, to hustle, to bank, to lynch, to ready, to service, to enthuse – all of these, and many more, are Americanisms without which the language would be much the poorer.11
The nineteenth century was in short the Americans’ Elizabethan age, and the British hated them for it. Among the many neologisms that stirred their bile were backwoodsman, balance for remainder, spell in the context of time or weather, round-up, once in a while, no great shakes, to make one’s mind up, there’s no two ways about it, influential, census, presidential, standpoint, outhouse, cross purposes, rambunctious, scrumptious, loan for lend (not actually an Americanism at all), portage, immigration, fork, as in a road, milage, gubernatorial, reliable, and almost any new verb.
The first recorded attack on an American usage came in 1735 when an English visitor named Francis Moore referred to the young city of Savannah as standing upon a hill overlooking a river ‘which they in barbarous English call a bluff and thereby, in the words of H. L. Mencken, ‘set the tone that English criticism has maintained ever since’.12
Samuel Johnson, who seldom passed up a chance to insult his colonial cousins (they were, in his much quoted phrase, ‘a race of convicts, and ought to be grateful for anything we allow them short of hanging’), vilified an American book on geography for having the misguided audacity to use such terms as creek, gap, branch and spur when they had not been given a British benediction. Another critic attacked Noah Webster for including the Americanism lengthy in his dictionary. ‘What are we coming to?’ he despaired. ‘If the word is permitted to stand, the next edition will authorize the word “strengthy”.‘13 One Captain Basil Hall, a professional traveller, writer and, it would appear, halfwit, spoke for many when he remarked that America’s penchant for neologisms was unnecessary because ‘there are enough words already’.14
By the 1800s, the American continent fairly crawled with British observers who reported with patronizing glee on America’s eccentric and irregular speech habits. Captain Frederick Marryat, best known for the novels Mr Midshipman Easy (1836) and Masterman Ready (1841), recounted how one American had boasted to him that he had not just trebled an investment but ‘fourbled and fivebled’ it. It was Marryat who also reported the often recounted – and conveniently un-verifiable – story of the family that clad its piano legs in little skirts so as not to excite any untoward sexual hankerings among the more impressionable of their visitors.
The classlessness of US English – the habit of calling every woman a lady, every man a gentleman – attracted particular vituperation. Charles Janson, a British writer, recorded how he made the mistake of referring to a young maid as a servant. ‘I’d have you to know, man, that I am no sarvant,’ she bristled. ‘None but negers are sarvants.’ She was, she informed him solemnly, her employer’s help.15 Though easy enough to mock, such semantic distinctions contributed mightily towards making America a less stratified society. Moreover, they underscored the essential openness of the American character. As Henry Steele Commager put it: The American was good natured, generous, hospitable and sociable, and he reversed the whole history of language to make the term “stranger” one of welcome.‘16
Before long, it seemed, Americans could scarcely open their mouths without running the risk of ending up mocked between hard covers. Abuse was heaped upon the contemptible American habit of shortening or simplifying words – using pants for trousers, thanks in favour of thank you, gents instead of gentlemen. ’If I were naked and starving I would refuse to be clothed gratis in a “Gent’s Furnishing Store”,’ sniffed one especially fastidious social commentator.17 Pants, a shortening of pantaloons, is an Americanism first recorded in 1840 and attacked as a needless lexical affectation within the year. Incidentally, but not without interest, panties came into American English in 1845 and for a long time signified undershorts for males. They weren’t regarded as a woman’s article of clothing until 1908.
The British appeared unaware that their mockery had the capacity to make them look priggish and obtuse. Dickens, in his American Notes, professed to have been utterly baffled when a waiter asked him if he wanted his food served ‘right away’. As Dillard points out, even if he had never heard the expression, he must have been a very dim traveller indeed to fail to grasp its meaning.18
Always there was a presumption that Americans should speak as Britons. In 1827 Frances Trollope, mother of the novelist Anthony Trollope, came to America at the rather advanced age of forty-seven to found a department store in Cincinnati. The enterprise failed and she lost everything, down to her household effects, but the experience gave her ample fodder for her enormously successful Domestic Manners of the Americans, published in 1832. Among her criticisms of American behaviour, she was struck again and again by how rarely during her time in the country she had heard a sentence ‘correctly pronounced’. It appears never to have occurred to her that Americans had a perfect right, and sometimes possibly even a sound reason, to pronounce words in their own way.
All this would have been fractionally more bearable had the commentators not so often been given to blithe generalizations and careless reporting. Emerson noted with more than a hint of exasperation that most Americans didn’t speak in anything like the manner that Dickens suggested. ‘He has picked up and noted with eagerness each odd local phrase that he met with, and when he had a story to relate, has joined them together, so that the result is the broadest caricature.‘19 And all the while they were making capital out of America’s foibles, the British observers were unwittingly picking up American habits. It was, ironically, Dickens’s use of many Americanisms, notably talented, lengthy, reliable and influential, which he had absorbed on his travels and unthinkingly employed in American Notes, that at last brought them a measure of respectability in his homeland.20
For their part, Americans showed a streak of masochism as wide as the Mississippi. When American Notes was published it was such a sensation that people lined up fifty deep to acquire a copy. In Philadelphia it sold out in thirty-five minutes. Mrs Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans was even more successful, going through four editions in a year and so capturing America’s attention that a British visitor was astonished to discover that her barbed observations on American social habits had almost entirely displaced a raging cholera epidemic as the principal topic of news in the papers and conversation in the taverns.
The attacks came from within as well as from without. In 1781 the eminent president of Princeton, John Witherspoon, a Scot by birth but one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence – indeed a fierce proponent of American independence from Britain in all things but language – wrote a series of articles for the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser in which he attacked the lax linguistic habits that predominated in his adopted country even among educated speakers: using notify for inform, mad for angry, clever for good, and other such ‘improprieties and vulgarisms which hardly any person in the same class in point of rank and literature would have fallen into in Great Britain’.21 In the course of these writings he became the first to use Americanism in a linguistic sense, but by no means the last to use it pejoratively.
There was, it must be said, more than a dollop of toadying to be found among many Americans. When the Scottish philosopher David Hume criticized Franklin for employing colonize and other such New World novelties in his correspondence, Franklin contritely apologized and promised to abandon the practice at once. John Russell Bartlett compiled a Dictionary of Americanisms, but far from being a celebration of the inventive nature of American speech, the book dismissed Americanisms as ‘perversions’. James Fenimore Cooper, in The American Democrat, opined: ‘The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity and a turgid abuse of terms.‘22 Henry James, meanwhile, complained about the ‘helpless slobber of disconnected vowel noises’ that characterized American speech.
; Many sincerely believed that America would cut itself off from its linguistic and cultural database (as it were) by forming an effectively separate dialect. Linguistic isolation was not a sensible or desirable goal for a small, young nation if it wished to be heard in the wider world of commerce, law and science. The Knickerbocker Magazine saw the ‘greatest danger’ in America’s tendency towards linguistic innovation, and urged its readers to adhere to British precepts.
A few pointed out that the American continent required a more expansive vocabulary, like the anonymous essayist in the North American Review who plaintively noted: ‘How tame will his language sound, who would describe Niagara in language fitted for the falls at London bridge, or attempt the majesty of the Mississippi in that which was made for the Thames?‘23 Or as Jefferson put it with somewhat greater simplicity: ‘The new circumstances under which we are placed, call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects.’
Others saw Britain’s linguistic hegemony as presumptuous and imperious. ‘Our honour requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government,’ argued Noah Webster in 1789. Echoing his sentiment, Rupert Hughes asked: ‘Why should we permit the survival of the curious notion that our language is a mere loan from England, like a copper kettle that we must keep scoured and return without a dent?‘24
Still others tried the defence – accurate if somewhat feeble – that many of the objectionable words were not Americanisms at all. Chaucer, it was pointed out, had used gab; Johnson had included influential in his dictionary; afeared had existed in English since Saxon times. Son of a gun, bite the dust, beat it, I guess and scores of other detestable ‘Americanisms’ all existed in England, it was explained, long before there were any American colonies. As the poet James Russell Lowell drily put it, Americans ‘unhappily could bring over no English better than Shakespeare’s’.25 One dedicated scribbler named Alfred Elwyn compiled a Glossary of Supposed Americanisms in which he asserted passionately, but wrongly: ‘The simple truth is, that almost without exception all those words or phrases that we have been ridiculed for using, are good old English; many of them are Anglo-Saxon in origin, and nearly all to be heard at this day in England.’
