The largest body of loan-words in American is that from the Spanish, with that from the German following hard upon it. Both have been discussed in the last chapter. Since the Civil War the chief contribution of German has been the domestication of the suffix -fest. It came in with sängerfest and turnfest in the early 50’s, but the manufacture of American analogues did not begin until 1900 or thereabout. I have encountered, among others, the following: talk-fest, swatfest (a baseball game marked by many hits), hoochfest, slugfest (prizefight), smokefest, walkfest, gabfest,177 sobfest, egofest, spooffest, eatfest, stuntfest, ananiasfest, blarneyfest, smilefest, gossipfest, batfest (baseball), bloodfest (war), crabfest, gabblefest, jawfest, singfest, lovefest, bullfest, boozefest, bookfest and applefest.178 When, on the repeal of Prohibition, American legislators began to search for euphemisms for saloon, one of the words they hit upon was the German stube, signifying, alone, simply a room, but often combined with bier (beer) or wein (wine) in bierstube or weinstube. According to Sir William Craigie, beer-garden, which came in about 1870, is “clearly from the German,” i.e., from biergarten.
The suffixes -heimer and -bund had brief vogues in 1900 or thereabout, but the former survives only in wiseheimer and the latter only in plunderbund and moneybund, the former of which is listed in “Webster’s New International Dictionary” (1934). Wanderlust seems to have come in since 1900; it is also known in England, but is used much more frequently in the United States along with its derivatives, wanderluster (Eng. rambler), woanderlusting and wanderlust-club (Eng. rambler-society).179 Like sauerkraut, it was under a patriotic ban during the World War, but recovered promptly. Living-room may have been suggested by the German wohnzimmer. The Oxford Dictionary cites a single use of it in England in 1825, but in the sense of “the room usually occupied during the day” it is called an Americanism in the Oxford Supplement, and assigned to 1867. Blizzard has been often listed among Americanisms of German origin, with that origin assigned variously to blitzen (lightning) or blitzartig (lightning-like), but the researches of Allen Walker Read reveal that it was in use to designate a violent blow (as with the fist) long before it came to mean a storm. It is probably onomatopeic.180 So-long, the phrase of parting, has been credited similarly to the German so lange (and also to the Yiddish sholom), but it is actually of English origin, and does not appear to be an Americanism. In a letter from Bayard Taylor to Edmund Clarence Stedman, dated June 16, 1865, and how is laid to “the Germans,”181 but no other evidence that it was borrowed seems to be available. On equally dubious evidence rubber-neck has been derived from a probably mythical German gummihals, and it listens well, a phrase of affirmation popular twenty years ago, has been linked with the Berlinese adage, Et jinge woll, aber et jeht nicht. Junge (from klingen) actually means to sound; the German verb for to listen is horchen. In all probability, it listens well was introduced by the German comedians who flourished before the World War. Like their Irish and Yiddish colleagues, they enriched the current slang with many fantastic locutions. The influence of Charles Godfrey Leland’s “Hans Brietmann’s Ballads” and other books also helped to familiarize Americans with many German and pseudo-German words and phrases.182 Phooey, which plainly comes from the German (and Yiddish) pfui, seems to have been introduced by Walter Winchell, c. 1930. The barbecues which began to dot the country with the rise of the automobile soon offered chickenburgers as well as hamburgers, and there are even reports of clamburgers.183 In 1930, for some reason to me unknown, Swift & Company, the Chicago packers, changed the name of their frankfurters to frankfurts, and introduced a substitute for leberwurst under the style of livercheese. The American Gelehrten, who began to resort to German universities in large number in the 80’s, brought back festschrift, seminar, semester, anlage and diener and still cling to them, and it is possible that outstanding, the favorite counter-word of pedagogues lower in the scale, was suggested by ausstehend184.
The majority of the numerous Spanish loan-words in American came in before the Civil War, but the Spanish-American War added insurrecto, trocha, junta, ladrone, incommunicado, ley fuga, machete, manaña and rurale, some of which are already obsolete; and the popularity of Western movies and fiction has brought in a few more, e.g., rodeo, hoosegow (from juzgado, the past participle of juzgar, to judge)185 and wrangler (from caballerango, a horse-groom), and greatly increased the use of others. Chile con carne did not enter into the general American dietary until after 1900. The suffix -ista came in during the troubles in Mexico, following the downfall of Porfirio Díaz in 1911. The case of cafeteria I have dealt with in Section 2 of this chapter. From the Indian languages the only recent acquisitions seem to be chautauqua and hooch. The latter goes back to the American occupation of Alaska in 1867. The first soldiers sent there were forbidden to have any spirituous liquors, so they set up stills and manufactured a supply of their own, of sugar and flour. The product was called hoocheno or hoochino by the natives, and it continued to bear that name until the Klondike gold-rush in 1897.186 Then it was shortened to hooch. Chautauqua was borrowed from the name of the county and lake in Southwestern New York. The first chautauqua was opened on the shore of the lake on August 4, 1874, but the word did not come into general use until the end of the century. It was borrowed in the first place from the language of the Senecas, and it is reported, variously, to have meant the place of easy death, the place where one was lost, the foggy place, a place high up, two moccasins tied in the middle, and a pack tied in the middle. The French spelled it tchadakoin, and in early maps and books it appeared also as tjadakoin, chataconit, chadakoin, chautauque, shatacoin, judaxque and jadaqua. In 1859, by a resolution of the county board of supervisors, the present spelling was made official.187 At the start chautauqua meant a Summer-school, permanently housed and of some pedagogical pretensions. But toward 1900 it began to signify a traveling show, often performing under canvas, and including vaudeville acts as well as lectures.
In the Concise Oxford Dictionary, which is on every literate Englishman’s desk, spaghetti is italicized as a foreign word; in America it is familiar to every child. But not many other Italian loan-words have got into American, probably because the great majority of Italian immigrants have been poor folk, keeping much to themselves. I can think of chianti (more generally known as dago-red), ravioli, minestrone, mafia and black-hand (from mano negra), and that is about all.188 Even the argot of roguery has been but little enriched by Italian words, though there have been many eminent Italian gunmen. It has been suggested that and how may owe something to the Italian e come, and that sez you may be a translation of si dice,189 but there is no evidence in either case. It may be that ambish and its analogues were suggested by Italian difficulties with English, but that also is only a surmise. At the time of the Russian-Japanese War (1904–5) the suffix -ski or -sky had a popular vogue, and produced many words, e.g., dunski, darnfoolski, smartski, devilinsky, allright-sky and buttinski, but of these only buttinski seems to have survived.190
1 Henry Cabot Lodge says in his essay, Colonialism in the United States, printed in his Studies in History (1884), that “the luxurious fancies which were born of increased wealth, and the intellectual tastes which were developed by the advances of the higher education … revived the dying spirit of colonialism.” This spirit was confined largely to “young men who despised everything American and admired everything English.” Such persons, says Lodge, “flatter themselves with being cosmopolitans, when in truth they are genuine colonists, petty and provincial to the last degree.”
2 Gould was born at Litchfield, Conn., in 1805, and died in New York in 1885. He lectured, contributed to the magazines, and wrote books and plays. In 1836 he published his Lectures Delivered Before the Mercantile Library Association, apparently as a counterblast to Samuel Lorenzo Knapp’s Lectures on American Literature (1829). In this book he deplored the whooping up of American authors, and argued for the superiority of the British.
3 A book made up of articles contributed to the New York Galaxy in 1
867, 1868 and 1869.
4 White was born in 1821 and died in 1885. He studied both medicine and law, but preferred journalism, and later had a political job in New York. He edited the Riverside Shakespeare, which is still in print. He was extremely dogmatic, and a chronic controversialist. Perhaps his chief claim to fame is the fact that he was the father of Stanford White, the architect, whose assassination in 1906 made a famous sensation. His pedantic effort to limit the field of Americanisms has been described in Chapter I, Section 5.
5 He was born at Troy, N. Y. in 1825, and educated at Harvard. He then went to India in search of a runaway brother. Settling there, he undertook the study of Sanskrit, and soon mastered it sufficiently to be made professor of it at Benares. He printed many learned editions of the Indian classics. In 1860 Oxford made him a D.C.L. and in 1862 he became professor of Sanskrit, Hindustani and Indian jurisprudence at King’s College, London. In 1864 he became examiner in Hindustani for the British Civil Service Commission, and in 1880 he succeeded Max Müller as examiner in Sanskrit. He not only had an important hand in the Oxford Dictionary, but was also a collaborator in Joseph Wright’s monumental English Dialect Dictionary (1896–1905). He died in 1901, much honored in England but hardly known in his own country.
6 That Whitman, Howells and Mark Twain were acutely conscious of the changes that were occurring in American I have shown by quotations from them in Chapter I, Section 6. Howells, by an almost incredible paradox, was praised by White and denounced by Hall. White, in Words and Their Uses, spoke of his “unobtrusive and seemingly unconscious mastery of idiomatic English,” but Hall, in Recent Exemplifications of False Philology, said that “among American writers of rising fame whose English is noticeably bad, Mr. Howells stands somewhat eminent.” He then proceeded to belabor Howells’s use of to aggravate, on the street, to anecdote, muletress, mutual friends, to discommode, to experience, reliable and unrivaledest. Some of these were obviously only nonce-words, used with humorous intent. Others were perfectly good American, and so remain. Hall’s onslaught is hardly to be taken seriously; he was simply using Howells as a club to beat White. On p. 106 he belabored Howells for using to experience and reliable, but on p. 31 he defended the former vigorously against White, and on p. 100 he defended the latter. Such are the follies of the learned!
7 Among them, Jonathan Swift. In the Tatler, Sept. 28, 1710, he contended that “monosyllables are the disgrace of our land.” “We cram one syllable,” he continued, “and cut off the rest, as the owl fattened her mice after she had bit off their legs, to prevent them running away. If ours be the same reason for maiming our words, it will certainly answer the end; for I am sure no other nation will desire to borrow them.”
8 There is an interesting discussion of such words in Otto Jespersen’s Growth and Structure of the English Language, 3rd ed.; Leipzig, 1919, pp. 170–2. See also Stunts in Language, by Louise Pound, English Journal, Vol. IX, No. 2, Feb., 1920; Essays on English, by Brander Matthews; New York, 1921, p. 107 ff; Neuenglische Kurzformbil-dungen, by Leo Müller; Giessen, 1923; and Clipped Words: A Convenience and a Custom, in Do You Talk Like That?, by Richard Burton; Indianapolis, 1929, p. 213 ff.
9 This etymology for mutt is supported by Bud Fisher, creator of Mutt and Jeff. See the Editor and Publisher, April 17, 1919, p. 21.
10 In the Thorndike-Century Junior Dictionary; Chicago, 1935, edited by Dr. E. L. Thorndike, of Teachers College, Columbia, for the use of the young, the following are listed without any indication that they are not in good usage: coon, pike, phone, gas, photo, movie, diner, sleeper, auto, smoker, bum, drape and knicker. But possum is stated to be in use only “in common talk,” and cuss, draw, talkie, flu, pep and memo are omitted altogether.
11 See College Words and Phrases, by E. H. Babbitt, Dialect Notes, Vol. II, Pt. I, 1900.
12 A long list of such forms is in Clipped Words, by Elisabeth Witt-mann, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Pt. II, 1914.
13 In 1918 William C. D’Arcy, then president of a national association of advertising clubs, condemned the use of ad in high, astounding terms. “It is,” he said, “the language of bootblacks, and is beneath the dignity of men of the advertising profession.” In 1925 Robert H. Cornell, executive secretary of an advertising men’s convention held at Houston, Tex., “asked for the cooperation of the newspapers of Houston, the local advertisers, and all local organizations that have anything to do with the convention to avoid use of the abbreviation in all printed matter and letters going out in connection with the convention.” See Associated Advertising, Jan., 1925. But Associated Advertising was forced to add that “many advertising clubs throughout the United States are commonly called Ad-Clubs, some of them even using the abbreviation on their letterheads, in their constitutions and bylaws, and in literature which they send out.”
14 Bunk seems to have come in about 1910. It was first listed in the Addendum to Webster’s New International Dictionary in 1918. The definite article often precedes it.
15 See Boost, by Klara H. Collitz, American Speech, Sept., 1926. Thornton traced boost to 1825 and to boost to 1826.
16 Aframerican was invented by Sir Harry Johnston, but remains a rarity in England. Amerind, which preceded it, was first used in the publications of the Bureau of American Ethnology, c. 1900. Dr. Robert H. Lowie tells me that he has heard that “it developed from merging the two abbreviations, Amer. and Ind., which figured on the labels of specimens in the National Museum.” Dr. Frank H. Vi-zetelly says in How to Use English; New York, 1932, p. 70, that it was coined by Major J. W. Powell of the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1899, first as Amerindian and then in the contracted form.
17 Burton Holmes, the lecturer, wrote to me as follows on Jan. 16, 1935: “In 1904 we planned an invasion of London with our lectures — a word that repels the ticket-buyer. My late manager, Louis Francis Brown, worried himself sick over the problem. When he came out of his pneumonia delirium he murmured weakly, ‘Eureka! Travelogue!’, and we proceeded to broadcast the word in our publicity. Later, the late Dr. [R. R.] Bowker [1848–1933] wrote us that he was the coiner of the word, and submitted circulars of an earlier date in which it was used thus: ‘Each of Dr. Bowker’s lectures is a complete travelogue of –––.’ He had never used the word in any other way. We never saw it in print until he sent his circular. We were the first to give it any important publicity. Then everybody borrowed it, and we dropped it for travel-revue, screen-journey, and other inventions of our own. I have heard pianologues, naturelogues and other shockers.” To these organlog, used in the movies, may be added. Mr. Holmes seems to have made an error of a year in the date of his début in London. The Supplement to the Oxford Dictionary gives the following from the London Daily Chronicle of April 16, 1903: “Mr. Burton Holmes, an American entertainer new to London, delivered last evening the first of a series of travelogues.”
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