1 This is from his 1907 paper, p. 25. Why he regarded -ier as a characteristically Anglo-Saxon ending he did not pause to explain. It is actually rare in English, and appears mainly in words showing French influence, e.g., brigadier, cashier, financier, cavalier, grenadier, brazier, soldier and farrier.
2 Hoosier Inquiry Started by Queen, Bridgeport (Conn.) Post, July 30, 1944.
1 Not, of course, to be confused with the Hon. John W. Davis of Wall Street, W. Va., Democratic candidate for the presidency in 1924.
2 Ray had been Governor of Indiana from 1825 to 1831.
3 By May 10, 1834 the Indianapolis Journal was reporting that the Hoosier (it spelled the word Hooshier, though Ray and Tannehill had used Hoosier) had “sunk into repose.” Greencastle is now the seat of De Pauw University, founded in 1837. There is a weekly called the Hoosier Democrat at Flora, another called the Hoosier State at Newport, a Hoosier Business Woman at Monticello, and a Hoosier Banker, Farmer, Legionnaire, Motorist and Sentinel at Indianapolis.
4 London, 1835.
5 Vol. I, p. 223.
6 Dunn, 1907, p. 4.
1 Iowa: a Guide to the Hawkeye State; New York, 1938.
2 Her maiden name was Eleanor T. Dunlap and she was born at Portsmouth, N. H., in the early years of the century. She suffered the pangs of conversion in her youth, and was preparing to go to Palestine to save the Jews when she met Edwards. He was born in Boston on Jan. 23, 1802, and for some years worked there as a printer. In 1826 he and Eleanor met and loved, and she quickly fanned his sense of sin. They were married on Sept. 14 of the same year, and in 1829 went to Jacksonville, Ill., then a sink of frontier carnality, as missionaries. They failed in this capacity, but when, in 1830, Edwards set up a pious paper called the Western Observer he seems to have spread a passion for printer’s ink among the boys of the vicinity, for during the years since then they and their sons and grandsons have made many notable successes as editors and publishers. In December, 1831, giving up the salvation of the Jacksonvillains as hopeless, he changed the name of the Western Observer to the Illinois Patriot, and on March 24, 1838 he moved it to Fort Madison, Ill. It died soon, and on September 1 of that year he set out for Burlington, then a booming frontier trading-post. There he set up the Burlington Patriot, which gave way on June 6, 1839 to the Iowa Patriot, the progenitor of the Hawkeye and Patriot of today. As I have noted, Hawkeye was added to the title in 1839. The paper suffered various changes of name afterward, and in 1843 was suspended for a few weeks, but Hawkeye survived in its title. I am indebted here to two papers in the Palimpsest (Iowa City) for March, 1938, one by Philip D. Jordan and the other by John Ely Briggs.
1 A Guide to Burlington, Iowa; Burlington, n.d., produced by the Federal Writers’ Project, says that “Edwards was the man who originated the appellation of Hawkeyes for the people of the Iowa country,” but no evidence for this is offered.
2 Burdette (1844–1914) was born in Greensboro, Pa., and educated in Illinois. He served in the Civil War as a private. He began his newspaper career in Peoria, Ill. His writings in the Hawkeye attracted nation-wide attention. In 1876 he took to the lecture platform, and in 1887 he was converted to Christianity and became a Baptist preacher. From 1887 onward he was pastor of the Temple Baptist Church in Los Angeles, and helped to lay the foundations of that great city as the theological capital of the United States. He belonged to the flight of American newspaper humorists headed by Eugene Field and Bill Nye.
1 Squatter is marked an Americanism by the DAE and traced to 1788, when it was used by James Madison. It was listed by John Pickering in his pioneer Vocabulary of 1816 and defined as “a cant name in New England for those people who enter upon new lands and cultivate them without permission of the owners.” Squatter sovereignty meant the right of settlers in the Western lands to make their own laws. It is traced to 1854, and squatter law to 1857.
2 Cyclone is apparently not an Americanism. The DAE traces it in this country to 1856, but it was proposed in 1848 by an English nautical writer named Piddington. Cyclone-cellar, however, is an American invention, traced by the DAE to 1887.
3 When Sunflower State came in is uncertain. A writer in Harper’s Magazine for June, 1888, quoted by the DAE, reported that it was already used “affectionately” at that time.
4 Mr. Charles B. Driscoll, a native, tells me that it is never Jayhawk, but always Jayhawker.
5 Jayhawkers, by Rockwell D. Hunt, Nation. April 30, 1903, p. 374. Hunt gave as his authority Death Valley in ’49, by William Lewis Manly, pp. 321–22. In describing the trip of a party of young emigrants from Illinois through Death Valley during the Winter of 1849–50 Manly said: “These Illinois boys were young and full of mirth and fun, which was continually overflowing.… One of the boys was Ed Doty, who was a sort of model traveller in this line.… One day when Doty was engaged in the duty of cooking flap-jacks, another frolicsome fellow came up and took off the cook’s hat and commenced going through the motions of a barber, giving his customer a vigorous shampoo, saying: ‘I am going to make a Jayhawker out of you, old boy.’ Now it happened at the election for captain in this division that Ed Doty was chosen captain, and no sooner was the choice declared than the boys took the newly elected captain on their shoulders and carried him around the camp, introducing him as the King Bird of the Jayhawkers. So their division was afterwards known as the Jayhawkers, but whether the word originated with them or was some old frontier word used in sport on the occasion, is more than I will undertake to say.” Manly added that when they returned to Illinois they formed an organization called the Jayhawkers’ Union.
1 Cf. Nebraska Pioneer English, by Melvin Van den Bark, American Speech, Dec., 1933, p. 50.
2 The Mythical Jayhawk; Topeka, 1944, p. 2. Albert Matthews in the Nation, April 9, 1903, p. 291: “The noun Jayhawk … and the verb [to] Jayhawk … were used in Kansas as early as November or December, 1858, at which time they were applied to James Montgomery and his men, who, in retaliation for the atrocities committed on Free-State settlers by the Border Ruffians, raided the pro-slavery settlers and their abettors from Missouri.”
3 Discovered: Ancestor of Jayhawkornis Kansasensis. Graduate Magazine of the University of Kansas, Lawrence, April, 1932, p. 10.
1 I am indebted to Miss Ellet for a copy of this editorial.
2 Is There a Santa Claus?, Sept. 21, 1897. It is reprinted in Casual Essays of the Sun; New York, 1905, pp. 1–3.
1 The Mystical Jayhawk, p. 6.
2 See Supplement I, pp. 245–252.
3 For many years the battle-cry of the University of Kansas students at football games was Rock Chalk! Jayhawk! K.U.! I am indebted here to Mr. L. V. Graham of San Francisco, a former Kansan.
4 Americanisms, p. 407.
1 See Supplement I, pp. 597 and 631n. See also Creole and Cajan, by William A. Read, American Speech, June, 1926, p. 483, and Creole and West Indies, by E. C. Hills, American Speech, March, 1927, pp. 293–94.
1 Nov. 30, 1918.
2 New York, 1912, p. 656.
3 Its European counterpart is the glutton (Gulo luscus or articus). Both belong to the Mustelidae, and are related to the otters, minks and badgers.
1 pp. 181–82.
2 I am indebted for this to Dr. Joseph M. Carrière, of the University of Virginia.
3 St. Paul, 1900, pp. 242–44.
1 In her Letters From the United States, Cuba, and Canada; New York, 1856, p. 324, the Hon. Amelia M. Murray called it the Wolverine State, but this was an obvious slip. I am indebted here to Dr. Joseph M. Carrière.
2 Vandiver (1854–1932) was a pedagogue turned politician. He served in Congress from 1897 to 1905. His later years were mainly devoted to the insurance business, though he was assistant United States treasurer at St. Louis from 1913 to 1920.
1 Reprinted as Why Is Missouri the Show-Me State?, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 11, 1941.
2 Published in two volumes in 1921. Stevens (1848–1939) was a native of Connecticut, but went to work for St. Louis new
spapers as a young man. He was secretary of the St. Louis Exposition of 1904, and in that office picked up a glittering battery of foreign decorations. His first book, Through Texas, was published in 1892. After that he wrote more than twenty others, including a history of St. Louis, lives of various local worthies, and two volumes on Robert Burns.
1 I am indebted to Mr. Gazzam for this letter, and also for the Wellman article above quoted. He tells me that he found the phrase current among the miners of South Africa in 1903.
1 Before that the office was only a commissionership. Colman was the last commissioner and first secretary. He served under Grover Cleveland. He was born in 1827 and died in 1911.
2 In a prefatory note to Huckleberry Finn; New York, 1884, Mark Twain said: “In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri Negro dialect; the ordinary Pike-County dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork, but painstakingly and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.”
3 Letters from two Missourians, protesting against Puke, were in Life, Nov. 2, 1942, pp. 8 and 10. The editors replied that “like it or not, Missourians have been called Pukes for years,” though “nobody knows just why.” They added that certain unnamed “scholars” traced “the inelegant term to the Galena, Ill., lead-mine boom of 1827,” when “so many Missourians rushed to the mines that the blunt miners said Missouri ‘had taken a puke,’ meaning it had vomited up all its people.” The first occurrence of to puke in English is in Jaques’ famous “All the world’s a stage” speech in As You Like It, 1600: “At first the infant, mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.” It is possible that Shakespeare invented it, but it is much more likely that it was borrowed from some branch of German, and is related to the modern German verb, spucken, to spit.
1 Congressional Record, 1945, p. A1264: “The Anaconda Copper Corporation, which owns and operates the great copper mines of Butte, Mont., has for years endeavored to keep a tight rein on Montana politics. Owning or controlling, also, most of the State’s vast industries – lumber, coal, silver, zinc, public utilities, hydroelectric plants, etc. – it has also added to its assets nearly all the daily newspapers in the Treasure State.”
2 The full text is given by Shankle.
1 This is used in the subtitle of the State Guide brought out by the Federal Writers Project. Lovell traces the name to 1851. In The Background to Mark Twain’s Vocabulary, American Speech, April, 1947, p. 96, he traces Silverland to 1863.
1 Why is Ohio Called the Buckeye State?, Historical Collections of Ohio (Columbus), 1890, Vol. I, p. 202.
1 A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English; New York, 1937, p. 801.
1 It appears in the subtitle of the guide to the State brought out by the Federal Writers’ Project under the sponsorship of the State Department of Conservation.
1 Texas Protests: You Shouldn’t Say Panhandler, May 7, 1936. In Southwestern Slang, by Socrates Hyacinth, Overland Monthly, Aug., 1869, Texas is called the Rawhide State, but this was probably only a nonce use.
2 Political Americanisms, by Charles Ledyard Norton; New York, 1890, p. 64.
3 Ether II, 3.
1 See Supplement I, p. 309–11.
XI
AMERICAN SLANG
1. THE NATURE OF SLANG
The boundaries separating true slang from cant and argot are wavering and not easily defined. The latter two are differentiated from slang by the fact that they belong to the speech of relatively small and cohesive groups, and cant is separated from both argot and slang by the fact that one of its purposes is to deceive or mystify the outsider, but there is a constant movement of words and phrases from one category to another. When, in 1785, Captain Francis Grose published the first edition of his “Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue,” the word slang itself seems to have been confined mainly to the argot of criminals and vagabonds, but by the beginning of the Nineteenth Century it had begun to be used generally as a new and piquant synonym for jargon, and today it appears unchallenged in all dictionaries, though no one, as yet, has worked out its etymology.1 The movement of novelties is in both directions: sometimes from above to below, e.g., bones for dice, which Chaucer used quite seriously, c. 1386, and sometimes from below to above, e.g., to stump in the political sense, which was a Western slang phrase when it came in more than a century ago,2 but is now almost as respectable as to caucus. As everyone knows, most slang terms have relatively short lives, and nothing seems more stale than one that has passed out, e.g., skiddoo, snake’s hips, nerts, attaboy and I don’t think, but now and then one survives for years and even for centuries, without either going into eclipse on the one hand or being elevated to standard speech on the other. To bamboozle is still below the salt and would hardly be used by a bishop in warning against Satan, but it is more than two hundred years old and was listed as slang by Richard Steele in the Tatler in 1710. Gas (talk) has been traced to 1847, kibosh to 1836, lip (impudence) to 1821, sap to 1815, cheese it to 1811, to chisel to 1808, racket to 1785, hush-money to 1709, to knock off (to quit) to 1662, tick (credit) to 1661, grub to 1659, to cotton to to 1605, bat (a loose woman) to 1612, to plant (to hide) to 1610, brass (impudence) to 1594, duds (clothes) to 1567 and to blow (to boast) to c. 1400: all remain in use today and all continue to be slang.1
It would be hard to figure out precisely what makes one slang term survive for years and another perish quickly and miserably, but some of the elements which may shape the process are discernible. One of them is the degree to which a neologism fills a genuine need. It may do so by providing a pungent name, nearly always metaphorical, for an object or concept that is new to the generality of people, e.g., ghost-writer and caterpillar (running gear), or it may do so by supplying a more succinct or more picturesque designation for something already familiar in terms more commonplace, e.g., bellhop, sorehead, rubberneck and killjoy. Many of the best slang-terms are simple compounds, as the examples I have just given show; others are bold tropes, e.g., bull (a policeman), to squeal, masher, cold feet, yellow (cowardly), baloney, apple-sauce, cat’s pajamas (something very rare) and hitched (married); yet others are the products of a delirious delight in language-making which throws phonemes together helter-skelter, e.g., fantods, heebie-jeebies, nifty, whoopee, hubba-hubba, to burp and oomph. When a novelty is obvious it seldom lasts very long, e.g., shellacked for drunk, skirt for a woman, peach for a beautiful girl, trigger-man and to put on the spot, and when its humor is strained it dies as quickly, e.g., movie-cathedral, lounge-lizard, third-termite, and the frequent inventions of the Broadway school. Moreover, its longevity seems to run in obverse proportion to its first success, so that over-night crazes like skiddoo and goo-goo eyes2 are soon done for, whereas novelties of slower growth, e.g., booze, to goose and gimcrack last a long, long while. The same autointoxication seems to cut short the silly phrases of negation that come and go, e.g., aber nit, sez you, oh yeah, I don’t think and over the left, and the numerous catch-phrases that have little if any precise meaning but simply delight the moron by letting him show that he knows the latest, e.g., “How’d you like to be the ice-man?,” “Wouldn’t that jar you?,” “O you kid,” “Tell it to Sweeney,” “Yes, we have no bananas,” “Ish kabibble” (and its twin, “I should worry”), and “Shoo fly, don’t bother me.”1
Slang tends to multiply terms for the same concept: its chief aim seems to be to say something new, not necessarily something good. Thus there is a constant succession of novel synonyms for girl, head, money, drunk, yes, good, bad and other such words of everyday. Between 1860 and 1900 the American vocabulary swarmed with picturesque terms for beard in general and for the various varieties, but in this age of almost universal shaving they retain only a historical interest, e.g., galways, burnsides, and chinners. Slang terms relating to the head always have a derogatory significance, and many of them hint at idiocy. In 1928 Mamie Meredith listed some of th
ose then current, e.g., bean, coco and nut, along with the fashionable derivatives, e.g., bonehead, pinhead and mutt (from muttonhead), but all of these are now obsolete. The vast vogue of sheik (pronounced sheek, not shike) for a predatory male will be recalled by the middle-aged: it is now as extinct as masher.2 The late George Ade, in 1935, attempted a list of substitutes for such words as girl, married, idiot, begone and drunk, arranging them in categories of “old,” “later” and “latest.”1 Most of the terms he entered under the last heading are now almost forgotten, e.g., cutie, babe, eyeful, pip and wow for a pretty girl, loud noise and main stem for a “chief executive or person of importance,” and dumbbell, goof and total loss for “an unsophisticated person.” William Feather, searching “The American Thesaurus of Slang,” by Lester V. Berrey and Melvin Van den Bark,2 found that it listed 52 synonyms for wife, and that there was “not an affectionate reference in the lot.”3 I have mentioned the fact that the same thing is true of neologisms for head. Indeed, it is characteristic of all slang, which commonly represents no more than the effort of some smartie to voice his derision, not infrequently for some person, object or idea obviously above his own lowly thought and station. The folk, as such, invent nothing, but their spokesmen share their inferiority complex, and many of the most successful contrivances of those spokesmen are but little removed from pejorative. The wit of Broadway, now the chief source of American slang, is thus essentially opprobrious, and many of its brighter words and sayings may be readily reduced to “Oh, you son-of-a-bitch.”
Nevertheless, it is from this quarter that most American slang comes, a large part of it invented by gag-writers, newspaper columnists and press-agents, and the rest borrowed from the vocabularies of criminals, prostitutes and the lower orders of showfolk. There was a time when it was chiefly propagated by vaudeville performers, but now that vaudeville is in eclipse the torch has been taken over by the harlequins of movie and radio. A good deal of this slang comes close to being obscene, e.g., the hot mamma of a few years ago, the jerk of yesterday, and the Yiddish loans that come and go,4 but their literal meanings are soon lost, and they are presently on the tongues of multitudes of college students and even school-children.1 It would certainly be absurd, however, to argue that slang is wholly, or even predominantly vulgar and debased, or to dismiss its inventions, like the English prig, Allen Monkhouse,2 as no more than “the ghosts of old facetiousness.” It is, in fact, the most powerful of all the stimulants that keep language alive and growing, and some of the most pungent and valuable words and phrases in English, and especially in American English, have arisen out of its bilge. J. Y. P. Greig, the Scots professor just quoted, was quite right when he described rubberneck as “one of the best words ever coined.”3 It may be homely, but it is nevertheless superb, and whoever invented it, if he could be discovered, would be worthy not only of a Harvard LL.D., but also of the thanks of both Rotary and Congress, half a bushel of medals, and thirty days as the husband of Miss America. Blah is another masterpiece, and, like rubberneck, seems destined to live much longer than the normal term.4 Stooge is yet another,5 though it has many competitors, and yes-man is a fourth. Others are fan, piker,6 stag-party,7 stunt,8 to debunk, to hike,1 O.K.,2 racketeer,3 nut,4 boom,5 boost,6 phony,7 highbrow,8 tight-wad, strong-arm, loan-shark, hard-boiled, he-man, soap-boxer, get-away, square-shooter, fifty-fifty, double-cross, kicker and the almost innumerable verb-phrases, e.g., to get together, to stop over, to eat crow, to saw wood, to bawl out and to play possum.9
American Language Supplement 2 Page 93
