Of these, Carlyle seems to have actually invented environment. Stertorous had been used by medical writers since the beginning of the century, and visualized was in Coleridge before it got into Carlyle. The English, to this day, dislike complected as a substitute for complexioned, but it was already in wide use in the United States before Carlyle used it; indeed, the DAE calls it an Americanism and traces it to 1806. Vestural was another of Carlyle’s inventions, but talented was apparently introduced to England by the elder Bulwer-Lytton, who used it in his novel, “Falkland,” in 1827. It was for long regarded by Englishmen as an Americanism, and damned as such by many of them; and so late as 1886 an American writer on the language2 was alleging that it had been transplanted to England by Dickens in “American Notes,” 1842, but for this American origin there is no evidence, and the DAE does not list it as an Americanism. Carlyle’s bold use of hulls as a trope for clothes found no imitators in England, but Emerson used it in “The Sovereignty of Ethics” in 1878. Carlyle’s attempt to differentiate between lucid and lucent seems to have failed, for the NED defines the first, in one sense, as “bright, shining, luminous,” and the other as “shining, bright, luminous,” and both, in another and more familiar sense, as “clear.” Its first example of lucent is from Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes,” 1820, but it carries lucid back to 1620. The use of orient to designate a pearl seems to have been original with Carlyle, but the gem had been called pearl of orient so far in the past as c. 1440. Browning, following Carlyle, used orient in “Sordello” in 1840. Even T. B. Macaulay, one of the most enlightened Englishmen of the mid-century, took an occasional hand in the vain and irrational effort to put down neologians. On April 18, 1842, for example, he wrote to Macvey Napier to denounce the aforesaid talented. “Such a word,” he said primly, “it is proper to avoid: first, because it is not wanted; secondly, because you never did hear it from those who speak very good English.” But Southey and Coleridge had both used it, and in that very year 1842 it was being used by the immensely correct and elegant Edward B. Pusey in “A Letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury on Some Circumstances Connected With the Present Crisis in the English Church.”1
Such attempts to force the language into a strait-jacket all came to grief in America, though the schoolma’am was to continue her shrewish dos and don’ts for a long while afterward. To this day, in fact, she clings to the doctrine that there is such a thing as “correct English,” that its principles have been laid down for all time by the English purists, and that she is under a moral obligation to inculcate it. But not many American grammarians above the level of writers of school texts subscribe to any such ideas. They have learned by their studies that every healthy language has ways of its own, and that those of vernacular American are very far from those of Johnsonese English. From the early Nineteenth Century onward the speech of the United States has been marked by a disdain of rules and precedents, and an eager search for novelties, and it seems destined to go on along that path as far into the future as we can see. Said Dr. Robert C. Pooley in his presidential address to the National Council of Teachers of English in 1941:
American English may be derided by conservative critics for the readiness with which neologisms become accepted and flash overnight to all parts of our land, but the fact itself is a sign of health. The purpose of a language is to communicate; if a new word or a new phrase carries with it a freshness of meaning, a short cut to communication, it is a desirable addition to our tongue, no matter how low its source or how questionable its etymology. We need not fear word creation as harmful; what we must fear is crystallization, the preservation of a conventional vocabulary by a limited minority who resent the normal steady changes which inevitably must take place within a language.…
We are a youthful nation, exuberant and perhaps sometimes a little rowdy. But there is promise and hope in the exuberance of youth; we see in our language a lively imagination, a picturesque freshness, and a readiness to accept change which are characteristic of youth. We need not fear exuberance. What we must fear and guard against is senility, the complacency of old age, which is content with things as they are and mockingly derisive of change.2
To what extent this youth theory is sound I do not profess to judge; it is heard often, and seems to have many adherents. Dr. Pooley, in his paper, called attention to the tendency to mass hysteria which unquestionably exists in the Republic, whether it be due to adolescence or to senility, and showed some of its unhappy consequences in the field of spoken and written communication.
2. WHAT IS AN AMERICANISM?
97. [John Pickering was the first to attempt to draw up a schedule of Americanisms.] When I wrote this I somehow forgot John Witherspoon, though I was, of course, familiar with his papers in the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser in 1781, and had in fact summarized them on pp. 4 ff of AL4. There is more about them on pp. 4 ff of the present Supplement. The other early writers on the subject did not attempt to define categories of Americanisms.1 Even Noah Webster, though he had probably formulated ideas as to their nature, omitted all discussion of them from his “Dissertations on the English Language,” 1789, and it was not until he came to the preface of his American Dictionary of 1828, that he undertook any formal consideration of them. In that preface, which is still worth reading in full,2 he said:
Language is the expression of ideas; and if the people of one country cannot preserve an identity of ideas they cannot retain an identity of language. Now, an identity of ideas depends materially upon the sameness of things or objects with which the people of the two countries are conversant. But in no two portions of the earth, remote from each other, can such identity be found. Even physical objects must be different. But the principal differences between the people of this country and of all others arise from different forms of government, different laws, institutions and customs.
Thus the practice of hawking and hunting, the institution of heraldry, and the feudal system of England originated terms which formed, and some of which now form, a necessary part of the language of that country; but in the United States many of these terms are no part of our present language, — and they cannot be, for the things which they express do not exist in this country. They can be known to us only as obsolete or as foreign words. On the other hand, the institutions in this country which are new and peculiar give rise to new terms or to new applications of old terms, unknown to the people of England; which cannot be explained by them and which will not be inserted in their dictionaries, unless copied from ours. Thus the terms land-office; land-warrant; location of land; consociation of churches; regent of a university; intendant of a city; plantation, senate, congress, court, assembly, escheat, &c. are either words not belonging to the language of England, or they are applied to things in this country which do not exist in that.1 No person in this country will be satisfied with the English definitions of the words congress, senate and assembly, court, &c., for although these are words used in England, yet they are applied in this country to express ideas which they do not express in that country. With our present constitution of government, escheat can never have its feudal sense in the United States.
But this is not all. In many cases, the nature of our governments, and of our civil institutions, requires an appropriate language in the definition of words, even when the words express the same thing as in England. Thus the English dictionaries inform us that a justice is one deputed by the king to do right by way of judgment — he is a lord by his office — justices of the peace are appointed by the kings commission — language which is inaccurate in respect to this officer in the United States. So constitutionally is defined by Todd or-Chalmers as legally, but in this country the distinction between constitution and law requires a different definition.
The other lexicographers of the Webster era attempted no categories of Americanisms: this was true alike of David Humphreys, whose glossary of 1815 has been noticed, and of Theodoric Romeyn Beck, whose “Notes on Mr. Pickering’s Vocabulary” was
published in 1830. Robley Dunglison, in the articles headed “Americanisms” that he contributed to the Virginia Museum in 1829–30, contented himself with setting up two classes — “old words used in a new sense,” and “new words of indigenous origin.” He excluded old words preserved or revived in America in their original sense, for, as he said, “if fashion induces the people of Great Britain to neglect them, we have the right to oppose the fashion and to retain them: they are English words.” Also, he frowned upon native inventions that were not absolutely essential. “Those,” he said, “which have been employed to express a state of things not previously existing, which have arisen from the peculiarities of the government or people,” were “allowable,” but “those which have occurred wantonly and unnecessarily … ought to be rejected.” James Fenimore Cooper, in his chapter “On Language” in “The American Democrat,” 1838, showed much the same spirit: he was so busy rebuking Americans for faulty pronunciations and the misuse of the word gentleman that he neglected to lay down the areas in which they were free to exercise their fancy. The English travelers who roved the country between the Revolution and the Civil War, denouncing Americanisms as vulgar and heathenish, were similarly negligent about defining them, and it remained for William C. Fowler, in his brief chapter on “American Dialects” in “The English Language,” 1850, to attempt the first classification of them after Pickering.1 John Russell Bartlett followed in 1859,1 John S. Farmer in 1889,2 Sylva Clapin in 1902,3 Richard H. Thornton in 1912,4 and Gilbert M. Tucker in 1921.5 Alfred L. Elwyn did not set up categories of Americanisms in his “Glossary of Supposed Americanisms,” published in 1859,6 nor did Schele de Vere in his “Americanisms: the English of the New World,” nor did James Maitland in “The American Slang Dictionary,”7 nor did Brander Matthews in his “Americanisms and Briticisms,”8 nor did George Philip Krapp in “The English Language in America.”9 The editors of “A Dictionary of American English,” when they brought out their first volume in 1938, contented themselves with saying in their preface that “the different types of words and phrases” listed in it could “be more readily ascertained by inspection than by any attempt at classification,” but their chief, Sir William Craigie, went into rather more detail in a paper published in 1940.1 After excluding loan-words, the topographical terms derived from them, and “composite names of plants and trees, animals, birds and fishes, of the type black alder, black bear, black bass, &c.,” he listed the following categories:
1. Words showing “the addition of new senses to existing words and phrases.”
2. “New derivative forms and attributive collocations or other compounds.”
3. “Words not previously in use, and not adapted from other languages of the American continent.”
Finally there is H. W. Horwill, who distinguishes nine classes of Americanisms in his “Dictionary of Modern American Usage,”2 as follows:
1. “Words whose meaning in America is entirely different from their meaning in England; as billion, present, ruby type, solicitor.”
2. “Words whose general meaning is the same in both countries, but which, in America, have acquired a specific meaning in addition; as brotherhood, commute, dues, fit, homestead, senior.”
3. “Words whose normal use has, in America, been extended to cover certain adjacent territory; as freight, graduate, hunt.”
4. “Words that, in America, have acquired different shades of meaning and therefore carry different implications; as jurist, politics.”
5. “Words that retain in America a meaning now obsolete in England; as apartment, citizen, conclude, tardy, thrifty, town.”
6. “Words that, in America, have acquired a figurative meaning not in current use in England; as gridiron, knife, pork, stripe, timber.”
7. “Words that, in America, commonly take the place of synonyms that are more generally used in England; as faucet (for tap), hog (for pig), line (for queue), mail (for post), two weeks (for fortnight).”
8. “Words of slightly varying form, of which one form is preferred in America and another in England; as aluminum (aluminium), acclimate (acclimatize), candidacy (candidature), deviltry (devilry), telegrapher (telegraphist).”
9. “Words that, in America, go to form compounds unknown in England; as blue, night, scratch, thumb.”
It will be noted that Horwill does not mention loan-words. Some of the differences he lists will be discussed in Chapter VI, Section 2.
1 Topics of the Times, editorial page, Feb. 24. The author was Simeon Strunsky.
2 How to Suffocate the English Language, Feb. 13, p. 3.
3 Conservatism in American Speech, Oct., 1925, pp. 1–17.
1 The quotations are all from Part II, Book I, Chapter XVI of De la démocratie en Amérique.
2 America’s Language, Kenyon Review (Gambier, O.), Spring, 1940, pp. 212–25.
1 Shakespeare’s English, S. P. E. Tracts, No. XXIX; Oxford, 1928.
1 Thomas Heywood launched to diapason, sonance, moechal, and obdure in The Rape of Lucrece, 1608, and was censured for it nearly three centuries later by John Addington Symonds in the Mermaid edition of his plays.
2 Arthur Golding (c. 1536-c. 1605) published a translation of the first four books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in 1565, and followed them two years later with the remaining eleven. Despite his interest in one of the least inhibited of Roman poets, Golding was a strict Puritan, and also translated some of the writings of John Calvin.
3 The American Language, by Sean O Faolain, Irish Times (Dublin), April 1, 1944.
1 Apothegms, Sentiments, Opinions and Occasional Reflections of Samuel Johnson in Vol. XI.
2 No. 230.
1 A writer in Notes and Queries, 1864, p. 280, quoted by the NED, says that it “means that the experienced married woman shelters the youthful débutante as a hood shelters the face.”
2 An Historical Dictionary of Baseball Terminology, by Edward J. Nichols; State College, Pa., 1939, p. 15.
1 For example, in dingy, which seems to be derived from dung.
2 A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes; London, p. 62.
1 London, 1759. Robertson (1721–93) was historiographer-royal for Scotland and principal of Edinburgh University. He also wrote a History of America; London, 1777, in which he used to derange.
2 Horace Walpole and Wm. Robertson, by W. Forbes Gray, London Times Literary Supplement, March 14, 1942, p. 132.
3 The effects of that authority are hard to realize today. “In modern times,” said George Campbell sadly, in The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 1776, “the privilege of coining tropes is almost confined to poets and orators.” For Campbell see pp. 50 n and 97 n of AL4. He was a very sensible man and his book was the best thing of its sort that had appeared in English up to its time.
1 I am not forgetting, of course, Jeremy Bentham and S. T. Coleridge. Bentham not only invented a number of words that still survive, e.g., to minimize, self-regarding, international, dynamic, and unilateral; he also argued formally in favor of neologisms. See Notes on Jeremy Bentham’s Attitude to Word-Creation, by Graham Wallas, S. P. E. Tract No. XXXI, 1928, pp. 333–34. But he used such words sparingly and his writing in general was quite orthodox. Coleridge ran to somewhat wilder novelties, e.g., protoplast accrescence, extroitive, to coadunate, to potenziate, ultracrepidated, expectability, novellish, interadditive, desynonymizative, chilographic, to pantisocratize, poematic, and athanasiophagus. See Coleridge’s Critical Terminology, by J. Isaac, in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association; Oxford, 1936, pp. 86–104. But these were technical terms, and in his ordinary writing Coleridge was safely Johnsonian.
2 R. H. Barham, the author thereof (1788–1845), was a great lover of neologisms and used many of them in the Legends. In particular, he was fond of Americanisms. Into The Lay of St. Odille he introduced, for example, tarnation, and Jim Crow.
3 i.e., of Sartor Resartus.
1 Sterling’s letter is reprinted in Contemporary Comments, by E. H. Lacon-White; London, 1931
, p. 325.
2 A. Cleveland Coxe, in Americanisms in England, Forum, Oct., 1886.
1 Macaulay’s letter is in The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, by G. Otto Trevelyan; New York, 1877, Vol. II, p. 100.
2 One People, One Language, English Journal, Feb., 1942, pp. 110–20.
1 One of them, the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, alleged in the preface to his Glossary of Archaic and Provincial Words; second ed.; London, 1832, p. xlix, that the only additions the Americans had made to the English vocabulary were “such as they have adapted either from naval or mercantile men, with whom, on their first settlement, they were principally connected, or else from the aboriginal inhabitants,” but the evidence offered by a poem from his hand, printed in the same volume, was strongly against him. This poem bore the title of Absence, a Pastoral Drawn From the Life, From the Manners, Customs and Phraseology of Planters (or, so to Speak more Pastorally, of the Rural Swains) Inhabiting the Banks of the Potomac, in Maryland. It is reprinted by Allen Walker Read in Boucher’s Linguistic Pastoral of Colonial Maryland, Dialect Notes, Dec., 1933, pp. 353–60. There is an account of Boucher in AL4, p. 35, n. 1, and another in Read’s paper just mentioned.
2 It was reprinted in Encore, July, 1943, pp. 90–95.
1 Land-office is traced by the DAE to 1681, when such an office existed in Maryland, but the term did not come into wide use until after the Revolution, when the distribution of public lands to the soldiers began. The waggish derivative, land-office business, in its figurative sense, probably arose during the rush to the West, but the DAE does not trace it beyond 1865, when it was used by Mark Twain. Land-warrant is traced by the DAE to 1742, location (in the sense of “locating or fixing the bounds of a tract or area of land”) to 1718, consociation (now obsolete) to 1644, regent to 1813, and selectman to 1635. The use of intendant to designate a city official analogous to a mayor is traced by the DAE to 1789, but the word is now abandoned and forgotten. Plantation, to the English, means either a colony overseas or an area that has been planted to some useful crop (more especially, trees). In this country it began to take on the sense of a farm in the Seventeenth Century. It is still used in that sense in the South, as ranch is used in the Far West. The upper houses of some of the colonial legislatures were called senates, and the name was given to that of Congress by the Constitution, 1787. Congress was used to designate a gathering of legislators representing more than one colony so early as 1711. When the Continental Congress was set up in 1774 the word was always preceded by the, but the the began to be dropped so early as the year following. It was revived by Woodrow Wilson in 1913. Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover ordinarily omitted it, but it was revived again by Franklin D. Roosevelt. The word, of course, is not an Americanism, though its special meaning is. Neither is assembly, but general assembly, to designate a legislature, has not been found in English before 1619, the date of the DAE’s first American example. In England escheat means the lapsing of an intestate decedent’s land to the crown; in the United States it means its lapsing to the State Treasury.
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