One of the indubitable Americanisms that was attacked with violence by the English reviewers, but all in vain, was lengthy.1 Albert Matthews has traced it to 1689, and by the end of the Eighteenth Century it was in common use in the United States. The searchers for the NED found ten examples in the writings of Jefferson between 1782 and 1786, and others in those of Washington, Hamilton, Franklin and John Adams. “This word,” says Pickering, “has been very common among us, both in writing and in the language of conversation, but it has been so much ridiculed by Americans as well as Englishmen that in writing it is now generally avoided.2 Mr. Webster has admitted it to his dictionary1 but (as need hardly be remarked) it is not in any of the English ones. It is applied by us, as Mr. Webster justly observes, chiefly to writings or discourses. Thus we say, a lengthy pamphlet, a lengthy sermon, etc. The English would say a long or (in the more familiar style) a longish sermon.” Pickering then undertakes to show how, by the use of diffuse, lengthened, prolonged, extended, extensive and prolix, lengthy might be avoided. He was, of course, wasting his energy. The word not only got firm lodgment in America; it also penetrated England, and in a little while many of the best writers were using it, notably Southey, Bentham, Scott, Dickens, and George Eliot, sometimes as a conscious Americanism but oftener not.
Pickering gave some attention to certain changes in the use of prepositions that had arisen in America, for example, the use of at before auction in place of the English by. He recorded, under averse, that American writers formerly followed this word with to, but had begun to substitute from, apparently under the prodding of John Witherspoon and other such policemen of the national speech. But he added a sensible defense of averse to from George Campbell’s “The Philosophy of Rhetoric,” 1776, as follows:
The words averse and aversion are more properly construed with to than with from. The examples in favor of the latter preposition are beyond comparison outnumbered by those in favor of the former. The argument from etymology is here of no value, being taken from the use of another language. If, by the same rule, we were to regulate all nouns and verbs of Latin original our present syntax would be overturned.
Pickering also discussed the American use of to instead of the English at or in in such phrases as “I have been to Philadelphia.” Witherspoon had denounced this practise in 1781, but it had survived, and in the vulgar speech it had produced such forms as to home. The latter have disappeared, but “I have been to Philadelphia” is today sound American.
The other early, glossaries of Americanisms were of much less value than Pickering’s painstaking work. On March 18, 1829, Dr. Theodoric Romeyn Beck (1791–1855) read a paper on Pickering before the Albany Institute, and it was printed in the Transactions of the Institute for 1830. Mathews reprints it in full, but there is little in it of any value. Beck, who was a New York physician and pedagogue, was inclined, like Pickering, to believe that Americans should follow English precept and example in their speechways, though he protested against the “overwhelming ridicule and contempt” with which the English reviewers greeted every fresh Americanism. “This, however,” he went on, “is merely an objection to the manner. The matter of their animadversions deserves more serious consideration.” His brief and far from persuasive contribution to the subject was followed by a series of articles in the Virginia Literary Museum and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, &c. on December 16 and 30, 1829 and January 6, 1830. Their author was Dr. Robley Dunglison, an Englishman educated in Germany, who had been brought out by Thomas Jefferson in 1824 to be professor of medicine in the University of Virginia. In 1833 he moved to the University of Maryland and in 1836 to Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia. He was a competent medical man, and Fielding H. Garrison says of him that he “compiled an excellent medical dictionary and wrote an amazing array of textbooks on nearly every subject except surgery.”1 But his vast energy was not exhausted by this professional diligence, and Allen Walker Read adds that “he wrote on almost any conceivable subject.” The glossary which constitutes the bulk of his three articles has been reprinted by Read2 and also by Mathews. “His sport,” says Read, “was that of many a later man: the proving that many so-called Americanisms are distinctly of British origin.” But he also made some useful contributions to the subject. He was, for example, the first lexicographer to list the word blizzard, and his entry of it in his glossary is the first example unearthed by the searchers for the DAE. He is also credited with the DAE’s first example of to cavort (in the American sense of to prance, to act up, to cut monkey-shines), to hornswoggle, to mosey, retiracy and sockdolager. Finally, he recorded a number of words that seem to have been of short life, for they are not recorded by subsequent lexicographers, e.g., coudeript (credited to Kentucky and defined as “thrown into fits”), givy (a Southernism signifying muggy weather), and mollagausauger (“a stout fellow”).
Another early glossary of Americanisms was that of the Rev. Adiel Sherwood, first published in his “Gazetteer of the State of Georgia” in 1827 and much extended in a third edition of 1837, Mathews reprinted it in Dialect Notes in 19271 and also in “The Beginnings of American English” in 1931. It is mainly interesting because of its indications of the prevailing vulgar pronunciations of the South in the 30s, e.g., arter for after, axd for asked, blather for bladder, bess for best, becase for because, beyant for beyond, crap for crop, fare for far, gimme for give me, gal for girl, hit for it, inimy for enemy, mounting for mountain, queshton for question, sacer for saucer, umberillo for umbrella and year for here, but it also shows some other curiosa, e.g., the use of to assign for to sign, Baptises for Baptists, done said, done did, flitter for fritter, to get shet of, hadn’t ought, to lay for to lie, mighty and monstrous as general intensives, prasbattery for presbytery, plunder for goods and effects, sparrow-grass for asparagus, smart chance for good deal, and to use for to feed. The DAE’s first example of bodaciously, in the sense of wholly, is from Sherwood. “It will be seen,” he said in his brief introduction, “that many of our provincialisms are borrowed from England.”
The first attempt at a dictionary of Americanisms on a really comprehensive scale was made by John Russell Bartlett in 1848, with his “Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States.” Bartlett, who was a Rhode Islander, born in 1805 and surviving until 1886, began life as a bank clerk in Providence and was later a partner in a publishing house in New York, but he attained to considerable reputation as a bibliographer and antiquarian and also dabbled in ethnology. His glossary, beginning as a volume of 412 pages, was expanded to 524 when it was reissued in 1859, and reached 813 with its fourth and last edition in 1877. From his first edition onward he supported his entries, whenever possible, with illustrative quotations, but most of them, unfortunately, were not dated. In the preface to his fourth edition he discussed the origin of new Americanisms, and defended his listing of what critics had apparently denounced as ephemeral slang. The novelties of his time, he said, came chiefly from the following sources: first, the jargon of the stock market, rapidly adopted by the whole business community; second, the slang of the “colleges and higher schools”; third, the argot “of politicians, of the stage, of sportsmen, of Western boatmen, of pugilists, of the police, of rowdies and roughs, of thieves, of work-shops, of the circus, of shopkeepers, workmen, etc.” Many of these neologisms had only short lives, but Bartlett insisted sensibly that they should be listed nevertheless, if only for the sake of the record. “Sometimes,” he said, “these strange words have a known origin, but of the larger number no one knows whence they come. Slang is thus the source whence large additions are made to our language.”1
The “Glossary of Supposed Americanisms” of Dr. Alfred L. Elwyn, which appeared in 1859, was chiefly devoted to showing that most of the 465 terms it listed were English provincialisms or archaisms, but he also listed a few words and phrases picked up in Pennsylvania. Elwyn, under ball, offered one of the early descriptions of baseball. He called it bat and ball, said that i
t was played in his youth, and hazarded the guess that it might be “an imperfect form of cricket,” though calling it, in the same breath, “a Yankee invention.” He defined lynching, with polite ingenuity, as “a Western mode of arranging social grievances,” and said that “in new countries” it seemed to be “absolutely necessary, as, without it, there would be no hope of ridding society of those who are a nuisance.” “It is,” he went on, “a rough expression of the moral sense, and frequently well directed.” M. Schele de Vere’s “Americanisms: The English of the New World,” which followed in 1871, was not arranged in vocabulary form, but included a great deal of matter not in previous works, especially a learned and valuable discussion of loan-words. Freiherr Maximilian von Schele, the son of a Swedish officer in the Prussian service and of a French mother, took his Ph.D. at Bonn in 1841 and his J.U.D. at Greifswald in 1842. He came to America soon afterward and studied Greek at Harvard. In 1844 he was recommended for the chair of modern languages at the University of Virginia by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and others, and there, save for four years service in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, he taught French, Spanish, Italian, German and Anglo-Saxon until 1895, when he retired to Washington. After coming to America he added his mother’s maiden name, de Vere, to his patronymic, but he was always known at Charlottesville as Schele. He was one of the founders of the American Philological Association in 1869, published a number of books on language, and served on the staff of the Standard Dictionary, 1893–95. He died in 1898. A second edition of his “Americanisms” was published in 1872, but since then it has not been reprinted.1 For seventeen years afterward no contribution of any importance was made to the subject save Bartlett’s fourth edition of 1877. Then, in 1889, John S. Farmer brought out “Americanisms Old and New,” a stout volume of 564 double-column pages, listing about 5000 terms. Farmer was a busy compiler and lexicographer, and is chiefly remembered for the monumental “Slang and Its Analogues: Past and Present” which he began to publish in London in 1890. This ambitious undertaking, which was enriched with dated quotations on the plan of the New English Dictionary, ran to seven quarto volumes and was completed in 1904. Beginning with the second volume in 1891 the name of William E. Henley the poet was associated with that of Farmer on the title page, and in consequence the work is commonly referred to as Farmer and Henley. In 1905 Farmer brought out a one-volume abridgment for general circulation, with the quotations omitted and no mention of the numerous profane and obscene terms listed in the seven-volume edition. His “Americanisms Old and New” contains many dated quotations from American newspapers, mainly of the year 1888. It shows but little dependence upon its predecessors in the field, and is, in the main, a workmanlike and valuable work, but Farmer occasionally fell into error in his definitions — for example, in that of to get back at —, and, as Burke says, sometimes betrayed a certain British insularity. His preface made it plain that the impact of Americanisms upon English speechways was already powerful in 1888. He said:
Latterly, for good or ill, we have been brought face to face with what has been grandiloquently called “The Great American Language,” oftentimes in its baldest form, and on its most repulsive side. The works, also, of the popular exponents of “American humour,” itself an article as distinct in type as is the American character, have made the English people familiar with transatlantic words, phrases, turns cf expression, and constructions, most of which, strange of sound and quaint in form, are altogether incomprehensible. Their influence is daily gaining ground — books in shoals, journals by the score, and allusions without stint are multiplying on every hand. American newspapers, too, humorous and otherwise, circulate in England by hundreds of thousands weekly — all this and a good deal else is doing its work in popularizing American peculiarities of speech and diction to an extent which, a few years since, would have been deemed incredible. Even our own newspapers, hitherto regarded as models of correct literary style, are many of them following in their wake; and, both in matter and phraseology, are lending countenance to what at first sight appears a monstrously crude and almost imbecile jargon; while others, fearful of a direct plunge, modestly introduce the uncouth bantlings with a saving clause. The phrase, “as the Americans say,” might in some cases be ordered from the type-foundry as a logotype, so frequently does it do introduction duty.
Whatever Farmer’s distaste, as a patriotic Englishman, for this “monstrously crude and almost imbecile jargon,” he was too good a philologian to believe that it could be stayed. On the contrary, he believed that the English of England, in the long run, would have to take in much of it, and that the preponderance of population in the United States would eventually force American speechways upon the language as a whole. He said:
Purists may object, and cry out in alarm concerning sacrilegious innovation, but on going to the root of the matter this tendency is found to be not altogether void of satisfaction when regarded as indicative of the vitality and creative vigor still enshrined in our speech. Language, like everything else, is progressive; there is no spoken language a thousand years old.
Farmer seems to have been a somewhat mysterious fellow, and the reference-books neglect him. Said G. Alexander Legman in Notes and Queries, May 23, 1942:
His productive period was from about 1885 to 1914. The name Farmer is not a pseudonym, as he appeared in court in 1890 to defend his work against a charge of obscenity brought against his printer. He was a frequent contributor to Notes and Queries, which referred to him as “Dr. Farmer.” He was known as an eccentric and believed in spiritualism, on which he published several books. These meagre oddments of information are all that seems to be known of a fine scholar whose published work totals more than thirty volumes.
His works, beside those mentioned, included “A New Basis of Belief in Immortality,” “ ’Twixt Two Worlds,” “Ex Oriente Lux,” “Musa Pedestris” (1896), and “The Public School Word Book” (1900). After his “Americanisms Old and New” came Sylva Clapin’s “New Dictionary of Americanisms,” a third-rate compilation, but valuable because of the inclusion of a number of Canadian terms. Finally, in 1912, appeared the two volumes of Richard Harwood Thornton’s “American Glossary,” and the lexicography of Americanisms was put on a firm and scientific foundation at last.
Thornton was an Englishman, born in Lancashire, September 6, 1845. His name does not appear in any of the standard reference books, and the only printed account of him that I know of is a brief sketch by the Rev. E. H. Clark, published in Dialect Notes in July, 1939. By this it appears that he was the son of a Methodist clergyman who, at the time of his birth, was a classical tutor in the Wesleyan Theological Institution at Disbury. It is possible, though I have no evidence for it, that he was related to the Dr. William Thornton (1762–1828) who was awarded the Magellanic Gold Medal of the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia in 1793 for a treatise on phonetics in which Americans were thus exhorted:
You have corrected the dangerous doctrines of European powers; correct now the languages you have imported, for the oppressed of various nations knock at your gates, and desire to be received as your brethren.… The American language will thus be as distinct as the government, free from all the follies of unphilosophical fashion, and resting upon truth as its only regulator.1
Richard H. Thornton got only a secondary school education, though he seems to have had some grounding in Latin, Greek, French and German. He passed the Oxford entrance examination in 1862, but was too poor to go to the university. Instead he got a job with a business house in London and there he remained until 1871. During this time he also tackled Italian and seems to have acquired a fair reading knowledge of it. In 1871, seeing only poor prospects in London, he immigrated to Canada, and in 1874 came to the United States. In 1876 he entered Columbia Law School at Washington, and was graduated therefrom in 1878. He was then admitted to the bar in Philadelphia, but soon moved to Williamsport, Pa., the home of his wife, Martha Sproul, married in 1877. In 1884 he went to Portlan
d, Ore., as the first dean of the Oregon Law School, and there, save for several trips to England, he remained until his death on January 7, 1925. He was naturalized in 1881. On November 3, 1923 the University of Oregon gave him the degree of doctor of laws.
When he began work on his “American Glossary” does not seem to be known, but it must have been before 1907, for in that year he was in London pursuing inquiries with respect to it. Its format, without doubt, was suggested by that of the NED, which had begun to appear in 1888. Thornton acknowledged in his preface his debt to Bartlett, to Farmer and to Albert Matthews,1 but the chief burden of assembling his extraordinarily copious materials lay upon his own shoulders. He undertook the herculean task of reading the Congressional Globe from the beginning to 1863, and also got together an immense mass of citations from newspapers, magazines and books. He endeavored to unearth dated quotations showing the use of every one of the 3700 terms he listed, and in many cases he found and presented a large number — in that of Yankee, no less than sixty. Nothing on so comprehensive a scale or following so scientific a method had been undertaken before, and Thornton’s first two volumes, issued in 1912, remain indispensable to this day. Indeed, the DAE would have been impossible without them, and it shows its debt to them on almost every page. Unhappily, the author could find no publisher for his work in the United States, and had to take it to London. There it was brought out in an edition of 2000 by a small firm, Francis & Company. Once it was in type Lippincott, the Philadelphia publisher, took 250 sets of the sheets and issued them with his imprint, but they sold only slowly and so late as 1919 the small edition was still not exhausted. It was never reissued.2 Meanwhile, Thornton kept on accumulating materials, and during World War I he tried to find a publisher willing to bring out a third volume or backers willing to stake it. In this he was unsuccessful, so he turned over his MS., in 1919, to Dr. Percy W. Long, then editor of Dialect Notes, who deposited it in the Widener Library at Harvard. There it remained until 1931, six years after Thornton’s death, when its publication was begun serially in Dialect Notes, with prefaces by Dr. Long and Sir William Craigie and the editorial assistance of Mrs. Louise Hanley, wife of Dr. Miles L. Hanley, then secretary and treasurer of the American Dialect Society. It was the expectation at the time that the publication of the volume would be completed by the end of 1933, but the chronic financial difficulties of the Dialect Society got in the way, and the last of the material was not actually worked off until July, 1939 — eight years after the beginning. The instalments were so paged that they could be cut out of Dialect Notes and bound together, but there has never been a reprint in book form. For the following brief reminiscence of Thornton I am indebted to Lewis A. McArthur of Portland, author of the well-known and excellent “Oregon Geographic Names”:
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