American Language
Page 24
44 Lincoln used nix come erous in a letter dated Nov. 11, 1854. It is quoted in Lincoln the Man, by Edgar Lee Masters; New York, 1931, p. 226.
45 Whether nix came into American direct from the German or by way of the English thieves’ argot I do not know. The Oxford Dictionary’s first example, dated 1789, is from George Parker’s Life’s Painter. “How they have brought a German word into cant,” says Parker, “I know not, but nicks means nothing in the cant language.” Bartlett, Farmer and Thornton fail to list it. A great many English criminals came to the United States between 1800 and the Civil War, and they brought some of their argot with them. Perhaps nix was included. Whatever the fact, the word bred a derivative, nixie, which seems to be peculiar to American. In the United States Official Post-office Guide for 1885 nixie was defined as “a term used in the railway mail service to denote matter of domestic origin, chiefly of the second and first class, which is un-mailable because addressed to places which are not postoffices, or to States, etc., in which there is no such postoffice as that indicated in the address.” Its meaning has since been extended to include all mail “so incorrectly, illegibly, indefinitely or insufficiently addressed that it cannot be transmitted.” (Sec. 1639, Postal Laws and Regulations.) The Postoffice informs me that it has no record showing when the word was introduced. Nicht is also at the bottom of nit, aber nit, nixy and nitsky, but most of them came in after the period under review. See Substitutes for No, by T. J. S., American Speech, Aug., 1927. In some of the German dialects nicht becomes nöt or nit, and nichts becomes nix.
46 Jan. 24, 1918, p. 4.
47 Nevertheless, when I once put it into a night-letter a Western Union office refused to accept it, the rules then requiring all night-letters to be in “plain English.” Meanwhile, the English have borrowed it from American, and it is in the Oxford Dictionary. It comes originally from student Latin, but has been in German for centuries.
48 Thornton’s first example shows a variant spelling, shuyster. All subsequent examples show the present spelling. It is to be noted that the suffix -ster is not uncommon in English, and that it usually carries a deprecatory significance.
49 In Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. II, 1914, p. 157.
50 See also Linguistic Substrata in Pennsylvania and Elsewhere, by R. Whitney Tucker, Language, March, 1934. Dr. Tucker discusses the phonology of the American spoken in lower Pennsylvania. Hex, meaning a witch, is in common use there, and in 1930 the sensational trial of a York county hex-doctor made the term familiar throughout the United States.
51 Some German-Americanisms from the Middle West, American Speech, Dec., 1926.
52 English As We Speak It in Ireland, 2nd ed.; London, 1910, pp. 179–180.
53 Amusing examples are to be found in Donlevy’s Irish Catechism. To the question, “Is the Son God?” the answer is not simply “Yes,” but “Yes, certainly He is.” And to the question, “Will God reward the good and punish the wicked?” the answer is “Certainly; there is no doubt He will.”
54 The newspapers often report the discovery that neither chop-suey or chow-mein is a Chinese dish. This is probably true of the former. I have been told that it is a mixture of Chinese dishes, concocted for the American palate, and that the name, in Chinese, means slops. But according to Joe Lin, national secretary of the On Leong Chinese Merchants Association (quoted in the Minneapolis Star, April 19, 1929), chow-mein is actually Chinese, though it has been “a bit flavored up for Western palates.” I am indebted here to Mr. R. S. Kelly, of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin.
V
THE LANGUAGE TODAY
I. AFTER THE CIVIL WAR
The general characteristics of American English have been sufficiently described in the preceding chapters. It has maintained them unbrokenly since Jackson’s day, though there was a formidable movement to bring it into greater accord with English precept and example during the years following the Civil War. This movement was led by such purists as Edward S. Gould, William D. Whitney and Richard Grant White, and seems to have got its chief support from schoolmarms, male and female, on the one hand, and from Anglomaniacs on the other.1 Gould, in 1867, brought out his “Good English,” the first of what was to be a long series of hortatory desk-books, by himself and other sages.2 He began by arguing that English, “within the last quarter of a century, through the agency of good writers, critics and lexicographers,” had been “in many respects greatly improved,” but lamented that there had also gone on a compensatory deterioration, and “in greater proportion.” He said that he was not opposed, in principle, to “the fabrication of new words, and the new use of old words,” but he maintained that such changes should be undertaken only by “educated men,” each of them capable of assuming “the burden of proof in support of his innovation.” For the inventions of the “ignorant” he had only contempt and contumely, and in the forefront of the ignorant he put “the men generally who write for the newspapers.” He then proceeded to denounce some of the familiar bugaboos of the English Americophobes, including to jeopardize (he agreed with Noah Webster that to jeopard was better), controversialist (though it had been used by Macaulay), leniency (though it had been used by Coleridge and even by the Edinburgh Review), underhanded, to donate, standpoint, to demean, over his signature, to open up, and try and.
White, like Gould, pretended to a broad tolerance, and even went to the length of admitting that “language is rarely corrupted, and is often enriched, by the simple, unpretending, ignorant man, who takes no thought of his parts of speech.” More, he argued in the third chapter of his “Words and Their Uses” (1870)3 that the English spoken and written in the United States was at least as good as that spoken and written in England. But at once it appeared that he was assuming that the Boston dialect was Standard American. “Next,” he said, “to that tone of voice which, it would seem, is not to be acquired by any striving in adult years, and which indicates breeding rather than education, the full, free, unconscious utterance of the broad ah sound of a is the surest indication in speech of social culture which began at the cradle.” He then proceeded to denounce most of the Americanisms in Gould’s Index Expurgatorius, with the addition of gubernatorial, presidential, reliable, balance (remainder), editorial, real-estate, railroad (he preferred the English railway), telegrapher (he preferred -ist), dirt (as in dirt-road: he believed it should be restricted to its English sense of filth), ice-water (he preferred iced), and the verbs to locate (“a common Americanism, insufferable to ears at all sensitive”), to enthuse, to aggravate, and to resurrect.4
Gould’s pedantries were attacked by G. Washington Moon, the antagonist of Dean Alford, in “Bad English Exposed” (c. 1868; 4th ed., 1871; 8th ed., 1882), and with the same weapon that had proved so effective against the dean — that is, by showing that Gould himself wrote very shaky English, judged by his own standards. White was belabored by Fitzedward Hall in “Recent Exemplifications of False Philology” (1872) and again in “Modern English” (1873). Hall was a man of extraordinary learning and knew how to use it.5 As one of the collaborators in the Oxford Dictionary he had access to its enormous store of historical material, then still unpublished, and that material he flung at White with great precision and effect. In particular, he brought heavy batteries to bear upon White’s reverence for the broad a of Boston, and upon the doctrine, set forth in “Words and Their Uses,” that “the authority of general usage, or even of the usage of great writers, is not absolute in language” — that “there is a misuse of words which can be justified by no authority, however great, by no usage, however general.” He said:
The critic neglects to furnish us with any criterion, or set of criteria, his own mandates and ordinances excepted, by which to decide when the misuse of a word becomes impossible of justification. His animadversions, where original, are, I believe, in almost every case, founded either on caprice, or defective information, or both.… We shall search in vain — for all the world as if he had been bred at Oxford — to find him conceding, as within the c
ompass of the credible, the fallibility of his private judgments, or the inexhaustiveness of his meagre deductions.
Here, it will be noted by the judicious, Hall’s righteous indignation ran away with his pen, and he wrote inexhaustiveness when he meant its opposite. His two books, with their close-packed and almost endless footnotes, presented a vast amount of philological knowledge, and should have been sufficient to destroy the baleful influence of White, whose learning was mainly only pretension. But, as George H. Knight says in “Modern English in the Making,” Hall was undone by his very virtues. His scholarly approach and forbidding accumulation of facts repelled more readers than they attracted, and so he failed to prevail against his “amateurish rivals and opponents,” though “the soundness of his methods has been generally recognized by the expert.” Gould and White thus had it all their own way, and their pedantries were accented with complete gravity by the pedagogues of the 70’s and 80’s. White’s “Words and Their Uses,” in fact, is still in print and still enjoys a considerable esteem, and there are many latter-day imitations of it, most of them as cocksure as it is, and as dubious.
But the effort made by the authors of such works to police the language, though it has always had the ardent support of certain eminent American literati and of almost the whole body of pedagogues, has never really impeded the natural progress of American. It has gone on developing in spite of them, and in innocent accord with its native genius. The collections amassed for the “Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles” show that in the very heyday of White a large number of New Americanisms of characteristic vigor and vulgarity were coming in, and coming in to stay — among them, wire-puller and to strike oil in 1867, and boom and to boom a few years after. A glance through Thornton, Bartlett and the Oxford Dictionary and Supplement turns up many another of the same pungent sort — claw-hammer (coat, 1869), mule-skinner and jack-rabbit (1870), tangle-foot (whiskey, 1871), cuss-word (Mark Twain, 1872), hoodlum (1872), dead-beat (Petroleum V. Nasby, 1872), jam and jig-saw (1873), sand (courage, Bret Harte, 1875) grub-stake and hold-up (both c. 1875), freeze-out and slate (political, 1877), heeler (c. 1877), stalwart (political) and crook (1878), set-back, joint (a low den) and spellbinder (c. 1880). To them may be added the adverbs to a frazzle (General John B. Gordon to General Robert E. Lee, 1865) and concededly (1882), and the verbs to itemize (Webster, 1864), to go through (to plunder, 1867), to go back on (1868), to suicide (1871), to guy (1872), to light out (1878), to side-track (1880) and to injunct (1880). Many of these novelties were either invented or given currency by the emerging authors of the new American school — Walt Whitman, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, W. D. Howells,6 and the lesser humorists. Others popped up in the newspapers and in the debates in Congress. Some lasted for no more than a few brief months, or even weeks, and then joined the innumerable caravan of obsolete Americanisms; others got no higher in the vocabulary than the level of slang or argot, and linger there yet; still others gradually made their way into standard usage. It is, indeed, very difficult, dealing with neologisms, to know how to rate them. The most seemly, etymologically speaking, are often rejected in the long run, and the most grotesque are accepted. Many more go on dwelling in a twilight region, ordinarily disdained but summoned out for service on special occasions. In that twilight region are large numbers of the words that everyone who investigates the American language must discuss.
2. THE MAKING OF NEW NOUNS
All of the processes for the formation of new words that are distinguished by philologians have been in active operation in the United States since Jackson’s time, and after the Civil War their workings took on a new impetus. It would take us beyond the range of the present work to attempt to trace those workings in any detail, but a few typical examples may be examined. Consider, for instance, the process called clipping, back-shortening, or back-formation — a sort of instinctive search for short roots in long words. This habit, in Restoration days, precipitated a quasi-English word, mobile, from the Latin mobile vulgus, and in the days of William and Mary it went a step further by precipitating mob from mobile. Mob is now sound English, but in the Eighteenth Century it was violently attacked by the purists then in eruption,7 and though it survived their onslaught they undoubtedly greatly impeded the formation and adoption of other words of the same category. There are, however, many more in Standard English, e.g., patter from paternoster, van from caravan, spats from spatterdashes, wig from periwig, cab from cabriolet, gin from geneva, curio from curiosity, and pun from pundigrion.8 In Eighteenth Century America, save for a few feeble protests from Witherspoon and Boucher, they went unchallenged, and as a result they multiplied. Rattler for rattlesnake, pike for turnpike, coon for raccoon, possum for opossum, cuss for customer, squash for askutasquash — these American clipped forms are already antique; Sabbaday for Sabbath-day has actually reached the dignity of an archaism, as has the far later chromo for chromolithograph. They are still formed in great numbers, and scarcely a new substantive of more than two syllables comes in without bringing one in its wake. We have thus, in recent years, witnessed the genesis of phone for telephone, gas for gasoline, photo for photograph, movie for moving picture, and auto for automobile. Some of these newcomers linger below the salt, e.g., pep for pepper, plute for plutocrat, pug for pugilist, vamp for vampire, pen for penitentiary, defi for defiance, ambish for ambition, pash for passion, beaut for beauty, steno or stenog for stenographer, loot for lieutenant, champ for champion, simp for simpleton, sap for saphead, mutt for muttonhead9 and jit for jitney, but many others, once viewed askance, are now in more or less decorous usage, e.g., smoker for smoking-car, diner for dining-car, sleeper for sleeping-car, pa for papa, ma for mamma, flu for influenza, drapes for draperies, bronc for bronco, memo for memorandum, quotes for quotation-marks and knicker for knickerbockers10. Back-formations often originate in college slang, e.g., prof for professor, prom for promenade (dance), grad for graduate (noun), co-ed from the adjective co-educational, medic for medical-student, frat for fraternity, gym for gymnasium, dorm for dormitory, U for university, Y for Y.M.C.A., plebe for plebeian,11 or in other varieties of slang, argot or dialect, e.g., skeeter or skeet for mosquito, cap for captain, con for convict, coke for cocaine, doc for doctor, foots for footlights, hon for honey, pard for partner, rube for Reuben, sarge for sergeant, snap for snapshot, diff for difference, ham for hamfatter, pop for populist, spec for speculation, typo for typographer, secesh for secession and prelim for preliminary12. Ad for advertisement is struggling hard for recognition; some of its compounds, e.g., ad-writer, want-ad, display-ad, ad-rate and ad-man are already accepted.13 Boob for booby promises to become sound American in a few years; its synonyms are no more respectable than it is. At its heels are bo for hobo, and bunk for buncombe,14 two altogether fit successors to bum for bummer. Try for trial, as in “He made a try at it,” is also making progress, though only, so far, on the lower levels.
All the other historical processes of word-formation are to be observed among the new American nouns. There is, for example, a large stock of blends in the current vocabulary. A number of such words, of course, are in Standard English, e.g., Lewis Carroll’s chortle (from chuckle and snort), squawk (from squeal and squall), dumbfound (from dumb and confound) and luncheon (from lunch and nuncheon, the first going back to the Sixteenth Century and the second to the Fourteenth), but American began to make contributions at an early date, e.g., gerrymander (from Gerry and salamander, c. 1812), and it has been supplying English with others ever since, e.g., cablegram (from cable and telegram) and electrolier (electric and chandelier). A few additional examples will suffice: boost (boom and hoist, and maybe boast),15 Aframerican (African and American), Amerind (American and Indian),16 hellenium (Hell and millennium), pulmotor (pulmonary and motor) and travelogue (travel and monologue).17 Many words of this class are trade names, made of initials or other parts of corporation names, e.g., socony (Standard Oil Company of New York),18 ampico(American Piano Company), nabisco(National Biscuit
Company), or by other devices, e.g., bromo-seltzer (bromide and seltzer) and japalac (Japanese and lacquer).19 To the same class belong such blends as Bancamerica and Bancorporation. The American advertiser is also a very diligent manufacturer of wholly new terms, and many of his coinages, e.g., vaseline,20 cellophane, carborundum, pianola, kotex, victrola, uneeda, listerine,21 postum, lux, and kodak22 are quite as familiar to all Americans as tractor or soda-mint, and have come into general acceptance as common nouns. Dr. Louise Pound has made an interesting study of these artificial trade-names.23 They fall, she finds, into a number of well-defined classes. There are those that are simply derivatives from proper names, e.g., listerine, postum; the blends, e.g., jap-a-lac, locomobile, cuticura; the extensions with common suffixes, e.g., alabastine, protectograph, dictograph, orangeade, crispette, pearline; the extensions with new or fanciful suffixes, e.g., resinol, thermos, shinola, sapolio, lysol, neolin, crisco; the diminutives, e.g., cascaret, wheatlet, chiclet; the simple compounds, e.g., palmolive, spearmint, peptomint, autocar; the blends made of proper names, e.g., oldsmobile, hupmobile, valspar; the blends made of parts of syllables or simple initials, e.g., reo, nabisco; the terms involving substitutions, e.g., triscuit; and the arbitrary formations, e.g., kodak, tiz, kotex,24 vivil. Brander Matthews once published an Horatian ode, of unknown authorship, made up of such inventions:
Chipeco thermos dioxygen, temco sonora tuxedo
Resinol fiat bacardi, camera ansco wheatena;
Antiskid pebeco calox, oleo tyco barometer
Postum nabisco!
Prestolite arco congoleum, karo aluminum kryptok,
Crisco balopticon lysol, jello bellans, carborundum!