III
THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN
I. THE FIRST LOAN-WORDS
The earliest Americanisms were probably words borrowed bodily from the Indian languages — words, in the main, indicating natural objects that had no counterparts in England. Thus, in Captain John Smith’s “True Relation,” published in 1608, one finds mention of a strange beast described variously as a rahaugcum and a raugroughcum. Four years later, in William Strachey’s “Historie of Trevaile Into Virginia Britannia” it became an aracoune, “much like a badger,” and by 1624 Smith had made it a rarowcun in his “Virginia.” It was not until 1672 that it emerged as the raccoon we know today. Opossum has had much the same history. It first appeared in 1610 as apossoun, and two years later Smith made it opassom in his “Map of Virginia,” at the same time describing the animal as having “an head like a swine, a taile like a rat, and is of the bigness of a cat.” The word finally became opossom toward the end of the Seventeenth Century, and by 1763 the third o had changed to u. In the common speech, as everyone knows, raccoon is almost always reduced to coon, and opossum to possum. Thornton traced the former to 1839 and the latter to 1705. Moose is another American primitive. It is derived from the Narragansett Indian word moosu, meaning “he trims or cuts smooth”— an allusion, according to the Oxford Dictionary, “to the animal’s habit of stripping the lower branches and bark from trees when feeding.” It had become mus by 1613, mose by 1637, and moose by 1672.
To the same category belong skunk, hickory, squash, caribou, pecan, paw-paw, chinkapin, persimmon, terrapin, menhaden, and catalpa. Skunk is from an Indian word variously reported to have been segankw or segongw, and on its first appearance in print, in William Wood’s “New England’s Prospect” (1643) it was spelled squunck, but it had got its present form by 1701. Hickory, in the form of pohickery, has been traced to 1653, and persimmon, in the form of putchamin, is in Captain John Smith’s “Map of Virginia” (1612). In its early days the stress in persimmon was on the first or third syllables, not on the second, as now. Caribou came into American from the French in Canada during the Eighteenth Century, but it is most probably of Indian origin. In the same way pecan came in through the Spanish: down to Jefferson’s time it was spelled paccan. Paw-paw, in the form of papaios, is to be found in Purchas’s “Pilgrimage” (1613, a compilation of traveler’s tales), and terrapin, in the form of torope, is in Whitaker’s “Good Newes From Virginia” (1613). Menhaden seems to be derived from an Indian word, munnawhattecug, which appears as a verb, munnohquahtean, meaning to fertilize, in John Eliot’s Indian Bible (completed 1638). The Indians used menhaden to manure their corn, and the fish is still used for fertilizer. Catalpa comes from one of the Indian languages of the South; it was adopted into American in the Eighteenth Century. Most such words, of course, were shortened like munnawhattecug, or otherwise modified, on being taken into colonial English. Thus, chinkapin was originally checkinqumin, and squash appears in early documents as isquontersquash, and squantersquash. But William Penn, in a letter dated August 16, 1683, used the latter in its present form. These variations show a familiar effort to bring a new and strange word into harmony with the language. By it the French route de roi has become Rotten Row in English, écrevisse has become crayfish, and the English bowsprit has become beau pré (beautiful meadow) in French. Woodchuck originated in the same way. Its origin is to be sought, not in wood and chuck, but in the Cree word otchock, used by the Indians to designate the animal.
In addition to the names of natural objects, the early colonists, of course, took over a great many Indian place-names, and a number of words to designate Indian relations and artificial objects in Indian use. To the latter division belong hominy, pone, toboggan, pemmican, mackinaw, moccasin, papoose, sachem, powwow, tomahawk, wigwam, succotash and squaw, all of which were in common circulation by the middle of the Eighteenth Century. Thornton has traced hominy to 1629, pone to 1634, moccasin to 1612, moccasin-flower to 1705, moccasin-snake to 1784, powwow to 1613, and wigwam to 1705. Finally, new words were made during the period by translating Indian terms, whether real or imaginary — for example, war-path, war-paint, pale-face, big-chief, medicine-man, pipe-of-peace, fire-water, and to bury the hatchet —, and by using the word Indian, as a prefix, as in Indian-Summer, Indian-file and Indian-giver. The total number of borrowings, direct and indirect, was larger than now appears, for with the recession of the Red Man from the popular consciousness the use of loan-words from his dialects has diminished. In our own time papoose, sachem, tepee, samp, quahaug and wampum have begun to drop out of everyday use;1 at an earlier period the language sloughed off ocelot, manitee, calumet, sagamore, supawn and many others after their kind, or began to degrade them to the estate of provincialisms.2 A curious phenomenon is presented by the case of maize, which came into the colonial speech from some West Indian dialect, apparently by way of the Spanish, went over into orthodox English, and from English into French, German and other Continental languages, and was then abandoned by the Americans, who substituted corn, which commonly means wheat in England. Mugwump, which is now obsolescent, is also an Indian loanword, but its meaning has been narrowed. It was originally spelled mugquomp, and signified a chief. When the Rev. John Eliot translated the Old Testament into the Algonquian language, in 1663, he used it in place of the duke which appears so often in Genesis xxxvi in the Authorized Version. During the following century it began to work its way into American, and by the beginning of the Nineteenth Century it was in common use to designate a high and mighty fellow, and especially one whose pretensions were not generally conceded. Its political use began in 1884, when James G. Blaine received the Republican nomination for the Presidency, and many influential Republicans, including Theodore Roosevelt, refused to support him. Most of these rebels were in what we now call the higher incometax brackets, and so it was natural for the party journals to hint that they suffered from what we now call superiority complexes. Thus they came to be called mugwumps, and soon they were wearing the label proudly. “I am an independent — a mugwump,” boasted William Everett in a speech at Quincy, Mass., on September 13, 1884. “I beg to state that mugwump is the best of American. It belongs to the language of the Delaware Indians; it occurs many times in Eliot’s Indian Bible; and it means a great man.” Until the end of the century any American who took an independent course in politics was a mugwump, but after that the word began to fade out, and we have developed nothing that quite takes its place.
Caucus is probably also an Indian loan-word. John Pickering, in his “Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to be Peculiar to the United States” (1816), hazarded the guess that it might be “a corruption of caulkers’, the word meetings being understood,” but for this there was no ground save the fact that caulkers, like other workingmen, sometimes had meetings. In 1872 Dr. J. H. Trumbull, one of the earlier American specialists in Indian philology, suggested that the word was more probably derived from the Algonquian noun caucauasu, meaning one who advises, urges or encourages. Caucauasu is to be found in Captain John Smith’s “General Historie of Virginia” (1624) in the formidable form of cawcawaassough — but Smith was notoriously weak at spelling, whether of English or of Indian words. Trumbull’s suggestion is now generally accepted by etymologists, though with the prudent reservation that it has yet to be proved. Caucauasu is said to have given rise to another early American word, now obsolete. This was cockarouse, signifying a chief or other person of importance. Caucus apparently came in very early in the Eighteenth Century. The Rev. William Gordon, in his “History of the Rise and Independence of the United States” (London, 1788), said that “more than fifty years ago [that is, before 1738] Mr. Samuel Adams’s father and twenty others, one or two from the north of the town where the ship business is carried on, used to meet, make a caucus, and lay their plans for introducing certain persons into places of trust and power.” Down to 1763 a caucus seems to have been called a caucus-club, for it so appears in John
Adams’s diary for that year. “Caucusing,” explained Gordon, “means electioneering.”
From the very earliest days of English colonization the language of the settlers also received accretions from the languages of the other colonizing nations. The French word portage, for example, was already in use before the end of the Seventeenth Century, and soon after came chowder, cache, voyageur, and various words that, like the last-named, have since become localisms or disappeared altogether.3 Before the Revolution bureau,4 batteau and prairie were added, and soon afterward came gopher, bogus and flume. Carry-all is also French in origin, despite its English sound. It comes, by folk-etymology, from the French carriole. So is brave, in the sense of an Indian warrior. But the French themselves borrowed it from the Italian bravo. Other French terms came in after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. They will be noticed in the next chapter.
The contributions of the New Amsterdam Dutch during the half century of their conflicts with the English included cruller, coleslaw,5 cookey, stoop, sleigh, span (of horses), dope, spook, to snoop, pit (as in peach-pit), waffle, hook (a point of land), scow, patroon, boss, smearcase and Santa Clause.6 Scheie de Vere credits them with hay-barrack, a corruption of hooiberg. That they established the use of bush as a designation for back-country is very probable; the word has also got into South African English and has been borrowed by Australian English from American. In American it has produced a number of familiar derivatives, e.g., bush-whacker, bush-town, bush-league, busher, bush-ranger and bush-fighting. Dutch may have also given us boodle, in the sense of loot. There is an old English word, buddle or boodle, signifying a crowd or lot, and it remains familiar in the phrase, whole kit and boodle or whole kit and caboodle, but boodle in the opprobrious American sense is unknown in England save as an Americanism. It may have come from the Dutch boedel, meaning an estate or possession. Dutch also influenced Colonial American in indirect ways, e.g., by giving reinforcement to the Scotch dominie, signifying a clergyman. It may have shared responsibility with the German of the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch for the introduction of dumb in the sense of stupid — dom in Dutch and dumm in German — a meaning almost unknown in England. Certain etymologists have also credited it with statehouse (from stadhuis) but Albert Matthews has demonstrated7 that the word was in use in Virginia in 1638, fifteen years before a stadhuis was heard of in New Amsterdam. George Philip Krapp suggests in “The English Language in America” that the peculiar American use of scout, as in good scout, may have been suggested by the Dutch. He offers quotations from various authorities to show that in New Amsterdam the schout was a town officer who combined the duties of mayor, sheriff and district attorney. He was thus dreaded by the lower orders of the population, and “a good scout was notable chiefly because of his rarity.” On this I attempt no judgment. Dutch, like German, French and Spanish, naturally had its largest influence in those areas where there were many settlers who spoke it as their native tongue. It was taught in the schools of New York until the end of the Dutch occupation in 1664, and it was used in the Dutch Reformed churches of the town for a century afterward. Up the Hudson it survived even longer, and Noah Webster heard Dutch sermons at Albany so late as 1786. Many Dutch terms are still to be found in the geographical nomenclature of the Hudson region, e.g., dorp, kill and hook, and in isolated communities in the Catskills there is still a considerable admixture in the common speech, e.g., clove (ravine), killfish, pinkster (a variety of azalea), speck (fat), fly (swamp), blummie (flower), grilly (chilly), sluck (a swallow of liquid), and wust (sausage).8
Perhaps the most notable of all the contributions of Knickerbocker Dutch to American is the word Yankee. The earlier etymologists, all of them amateurs, sought an Indian origin for it. Thomas Anbury, a British officer who served in the Revolution with Burgoyne, argued in his “Travels” (1789, Ch. II) that it came from a Cherokee word, eankke, meaning a coward or slave; Washington Irving, in “Knickerbocker’s History of New York” (1809, Ch. VII) derived it (probably only humorously) from yanokies, “which in the Mais-Tschusaeg or Massachusetts language signifies silent men”; and the Rev. John Gottlieb Ernestus Heckewelder, a learned Moravian missionary who published “An Account of the History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States” in 1822, maintained therein that it was simply a product of the Indians’ unhappy effort to pronounce the word English, which they converted, he said, into Yengees. Noah Webster accepted this guess, but other contemporary authorities held that the word the Indians were trying to pronounce was not English but the French Anglais. There were, however, difficulties in the way of all forms of this theory, for investigation showed that Yankee was apparently first applied, not to the English but to the Dutch. So early as 1683, it was discovered, Yankey was a common nickname among the buccaneers who then raged along the Spanish Main, and always the men who bore it were Dutchmen. Apparently it was derived either from Janke, a diminutive of the common Dutch given name Jan, or from Jankees (pronounced Yoncase), a blend of Jan and Cornells, two Dutch names which often appear in combination. Analogues in support of the former hypothesis are to be found in the use of dago (Diego) to indicate any Spaniard (and now, by extension, any Italian), and of Heinie or Fritz, Sandy and Pat to indicate any German, Scotsman or Irishman, respectively; and for the latter there is reinforcement in such familiar back-formations as Chinee from Chinese, Portugee from Portuguese, tactic from tactics, and specie from species. But how did this nickname for Dutchmen ever come to be applied to Englishmen, and particularly to the people of New England, male and female alike? To this day no satisfactory answer has been made. All that may be said with any certainty is that it was already in use by 1765 as a term of derision, and that by 1775 the Yankees began to take pride in it. In the latter year, in fact, John Turnbull spoke of it in his “McFingal” as connoting “distinction.” But he neglected to explain its transfer from Dutch pirates to New England Puritans, and no one has done so to this day. During the Civil War, as everyone knows, Yankee became a term of disparagement again, applied by the people of the South to all Northerners. But its evil significance began to wear off after the turn of the century, and when in 1917 the English began applying it to the men of the A.E.F., Southerners and Northerners alike, the former seem to have borne the affliction philosophically. At that time a characteristic clipped form, Yank, came into popularity at home, launched by its use in George M. Cohan’s war song, “Over There.” But Yank was not invented by Cohan, for it has been traced back to 1778, and the Confederates often used it during the Civil War. Incidentally, the verb to yank, in the sense of to jerk, is also an Americanism, and its origin is almost as mysterious as that of Yankee. That the two have any connection is doubtful. It seems more probable that the verb comes from a Scottish noun, yank, meaning a sharp, sudden blow.9
The Spanish contributions to the American vocabulary are far more numerous than those of any other Continental language, but most of them have come in since the Louisiana Purchase, and notices of them will be deferred to the next chapter. There was relatively little contact between the first English settlers and the Spaniards to the southward; it remained for the great movement across the plains, begun by Zebulon M. Pike’s expedition in 1806, to make Spanish the second language in a large part of the United States. The first Spanish loan-words were mainly Spanish adaptations of Indian terms, picked up by the early adventurers in the West Indies. Of such sort were tobacco, hammock, tomato, tapioca, chocolate, barbecue and canoe. But with them also came some genuinely Spanish words, and of these sarsaparilla and sassafras have been traced to 1577, alligator to 1568, creole to 1604, pickaninny to 1657, key (islet) to 1697, and quadroon to the first years of the Eighteenth Century. A good many Spanish words, or Spanish adaptations of native words, went into English during the Sixteenth Century without any preliminary apprenticeship as Americanisms, for example, mosquito, chocolate, banana and cannibal. But cockroach (from the Spanish cucaracha, assimilated by folk etymology to cock
and roach) is first heard of in Captain John Smith’s “General Historie of Virginia” (1624), and most of the Oxford Dictionary’s early examples of mosquito are American. Mosquito suffered some fantastic variations in spelling. The original Spanish was mosquito, a diminutive of mosca, a fly, but in Hakluyt’s “Voyages” (c. 1583) it became musketa, in Whitbourne’s “Newfoundland” (1623) muskeito, in Hughes’s “American Physician” (1672) muscato, in Cotton Mather’s “Magnalia” (finished in 1697 and published in 1702) moscheto, and at the hands of Benjamin Franklin (1747) musqueto. The jerked in jerked-beef was fashioned by folk-etymology out of a Spanish word which was in turn borrowed from one of the Peruvian dialects. The noun barbecue came from a Haitian word, barbacoa, signifying a frame set up to lift a bed off the ground. But it got the meaning of a frame used for roasting meat soon after it appeared in Spanish, and the derivative word has had its present sense in American since about 1660.
Before the Revolution a few German words worked their way into American, but not many. Sauerkraut has been traced by Thornton to 1789 and is probably much older; so are noodle and pretzel. But lager, bockbeer, sangerfest, kindergarten, wienerwurst, ratskeller, zwieback, turnverein and so on belong to the period after 1848, and will be noticed later. Beer-soup (probably from biersuppe) goes back to 1799, but beer-garden (from biergarten) has not been found before 1870. As I have suggested, German probably helped Dutch to put dumb, in the sense of stupid, into the American vocabulary. It also, I suppose, gave some help to smearcase. The native languages of the Negro slaves, rather curiously, seem to have left few marks upon American. Buckra is apparently of Negro origin, but it was never peculiar to America, and has long since gone out. Gumbo seems to be derived from an Angolan word, ’ngombo, but it came into American relatively late, and may have been introduced by way of Louisiana French. Okra, which means the same thing, was first used in the West Indies, and may have had a Spanish transition form. Yam is not Negro, but apparently Spanish or Portuguese. Banjo is simply a Negro perversion of bandore, which was also of Latin origin. Whether goober and juba are Negro loan-words is unknown. Thornton’s first example of the latter is dated 1834, Webster’s New International (1934) ascribes the former, somewhat improbably, to a Congo source, ’nguba, and it may have come from jubilee. Voodoo was borrowed from the Dahoman tovôdoun, still in use in West Africa, but it seems to have come in through the French. Its American corruption, hoodoo, probably owes nothing to the Negroes; moreover, the earliest use of it recorded by Thornton is dated 1889. The early slaves, of course, retained many words and phrases from their native languages, but they have all disappeared from the speech of their descendants today, save for a few surviving in the Gullah dialect of the South Carolina coast.10
American Language Page 16
