by Melvyn Bragg
Lewis and Clark had opened up the west. It was an immense effort and yet they are probably less well remembered for it today than for the journals they had to scribble every night, descriptions and words which have gained for them a sort of immortality. It was the great rivers that became the superhighways, and a place like St. Louis, the gateway to the west, would be the site of scores of paddle-steamers carrying, as well as everything else, cargoes of words.
The old French presence came into its own along the Mississippi. It’s in the place names, New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Lafayette in the south and up north in St. Louis, Cape Girardeau and French “villes” everywhere — Belleville, Abbeville, Centreville, Pineville, Jacksonville. “Shanty,” “sashay,” “chute,” all come in from the French, as does one of the great meeting places in the west, the “hotel.”
In France, a hotel was a grand private house or a municipal building. In America it became — at its best — a palace for the people, meant to be a cut above the taverns and inns of old England, meant to offer style and a secure lodging place in a shifting, growing, booming busty world, offering the best to anyone who could rake up the modest charges. The word can be found in Smollett in 1765, but “hotel” is a good example of a word that not only changed its meaning but was to take off, first in America and then elsewhere, into a host of other meanings, nuanced, varied, rich, bare: the hotels of Raymond Chandler in downtown Los Angeles, the hotels of Scott Fitzgerald in the 1920s, the rich glitz of Truman Capote in the mid century, places open to all who could pay, an oasis, and in some cases a shot at paradise. In the early days there were some who did indeed refer to hotels as “People’s Palaces.”
Many of the clients at these hotels were businessmen. In eighteenth-century England merchants had been described as businessmen, but once again, in going across to America, the word took on new meanings, from the princes of finance who set up Wall Street and brunched in the Plaza Hotel to the small businessmen whose salesmen came to epitomise the longing to catch the American dream. Later, the progeny of businessmen was to include “executive,” “well heeled,” “fat cat,” “gogetter,” “yes-man,” “assembly line” and “closed shop.”
“Rednecks” got the name because of the way their necks were burned in the sun as they bent to work in the fields. The poor travelled on rafts which they steered with oars called “riffs” — the “riff-raff ” (although a similar phrase, “rif et raf,” had been recorded in France in 1470, meaning “nothing whatever”). On board the bigger boats the richer travellers were called “highfalutin” because of the high fluted smokestacks that carried the soot and cinders well away from the passengers. And they gambled.
Paddle-steamers, river boats, the Mississippi and other swathes of slow-moving water shifting traffic around territories brand new to the immigrants: what better stage for gambling? It became the favourite activity among river-boat passengers. Some travelled only to gamble. Some never got off. English was on the cards.
“Pass the buck” and “the buck stops here” both come from card games. The “buck” was originally a buckhorn-handled knife passed round to show who was dealing. Gamblers put many fine phrases into the word-kitty. “Deal” itself became the power behind phrases such as “new deal,” “square deal,” “fair deal,” “raw deal,” “big deal”; “you bet!,” “put up or shut up!,” “I’ll call your bluff,” which were first heard around the American card table, perhaps on a river boat gliding down to New Orleans. Thanks to these dedicated gambling men you can today have “an ace up your sleeve” so you put “up the ante” and when someone “throws in his hand” you keep a “poker face.” Even when the “chips are down” and “the cards are stacked against you” you can play a “wild card” and “scoop the jackpot.”
They drank while they played. Drink has been good to the English vocabulary. “Bar-room” and “saloon” entered the language in the first half of the nineteenth century, soon followed by “bar-tender” and “set ’em up!” A “snifter,” a “jigger” and a “finger” — all these measures came from America. So did “cocktail.” Not from the 1920s but from 1806, on the frontier, when it was a mixture of spirits, sugar, water and bitters. “Bootlegging,” which became an industry, a crime, a social disaster, began when men hid a flat bottle of whisky in the leg of a boot, whisky which would be sold illegally to the natives.
They were good on words for a drunk. Even before the Revolution, Benjamin Franklin listed two hundred twenty-nine! Here are a few of them, set out, as a tribute to those who have been intoxicated (American English), as if they were verse:
He’s casting up his accounts
He’s pissed in the brook
His head is full of bees
He sees the bears
He’s cherry merry
He’s wamble crop’d
He’s half way to Concord
He’s kill’d his dog
He’s eat a toad and a half for breakfast
He’s spoke with his friend
He’s groatable
He’s as dizzy as a goose
He’s globular
He’s loose in the hilts
He’s going to Jerusalem
He clips the King’s English
He sees two moons
He’s eat the cocoa nut
He’s oil’d
He’s been among the Philistines
He’s wasted his paunch
He’s religious
He’s been too free with Sir Richard
He’s like a rat in trouble
He’s double tongu’d
He’s tramel’d
He’s got the Indian vapours
He’s out of the way.
And many more then, and many more since. For such bounty, English could only say “Cheers!”
“On the wagon” is only first recorded in the twentieth century. Perhaps “on the wagon” meant that when you were driving the wagon, being drunk was not a good idea.
The wagon routes like the Oregon and the Santa Fe trails were bringing the invader and the indigenous people into conflict. “Scalp” has already been noted: a harmless English noun become a verb fit to make your hair stand on end. In came “war-path,” “war-whoop,” “wardance” — the white man identifying the practices of his enemy. There are some grey areas here. Phrases once thought of as translations from Indian languages — “How?” for “hello,” “heap” as in “heap big,” “pale-face,” “happy hunting ground” and others — may have emerged from the frontier pidgin Indians developed or they may have been made up by writers such as Fenimore Cooper, who certainly used them. Phrases like “no can do” and “long time no see” seem to be translated from the Indian but they are classic pidgin — they emerge on the Mexican border, too. “Brave,” as in an Indian brave, is French. But whoever introduced “white man speaks with forked tongue” was describing life on the frontier as it was. Americans made declarations of fair play to themselves before God and sometimes strove to keep them: their promises to the indigenous population, the Native Americans, were worthless. The word “reservation” adopted a new and miserable meaning.
Meanwhile Americans met landscapes on a scale and of a magnificence they had never before encountered, could scarcely have imagined, and were yet undaunted in letting their English loose on them. The frontier rang with the sound of words striking out as loudly as the axe hitting the tree. Frontier English came in like a hungry mountain lion, like a crazed grizzly, like a wildcat full of spit and vengeance — and if you think that a trifle exaggerated, hear the words attributed to that Scots-Irishman, Davy Crockett:
There is times that come upon us like a whirlwind and an airthquake; they are come like a catamount on the full jump! We are called upon to show our grit like a chain lightning agin a pine log, to exterminate, mollify and calumniate the foe . . . Pierce the heart of the enemy as you would a feller that spit in yer face, knocked down your wife, burnt up your horses and called your dog a skunk! Cram his pesky carcase full of thu
nder and lightning like a stuffed sessidge and turtle him off with a old hot poker so that there won’t be a piece of him left big enough to give a crow a breakfast and bit his nose off into the bargain . . . !
And while the Stars of Uncle Sam and the Stripes of his country wave triumphantly in the breeze, whar, whar, whar is the craven, low-lived, chicken-bred, toad-hoppin’, red-mounted, bristle-headed mother’s son of ye who will not raise the beacon light of triumph, storm the citadel of the aggressor and squeeze ahead for Liberty and Glory!
Davy Crockett. Born, as the song says, on a mountain top in Tennessee. His father was a veteran of the Revolution. He became “the King of the wild frontier,” the hero of a series of paperbound books telling stories about him. He read about himself as a legend of the west. He became a famously plain-speaking Congressman and died defending the Alamo in Texas in 1836. He was the first great exponent of a style of speech that seemed to want to be as big as the country. It was called Tall Talk.
The east coast’s mission for Americans to become the guardians of a perfected classical English was a long way away. Ornate words were prized. “Shebang,” “shindy” and “slumgullion”; “kerbang,” “kerflop” and “kerthump.” American English meant that an American need not simply leave hurriedly, he could “absquatulate” or “skedaddle”; he didn’t just use something up, he “exfluncticated” it. The language was “hunky-dory,” “rambunctious” and “splendiferous.” The comparison with Cambridge in the sixteenth century and all those Latinate Inkhorn words, many of them loved and invented by Shakespeare, is irresistible. But there were not only new words of the ravines and rapids, the forests and the high mountains, there were new words you met on the streets, as in:
It’s not my funeral if you fly off the handle because you have a chip on your shoulder and an axe to grind. I won’t sit on the fence or dodge the issue. I won’t fizzle out. I won’t crack up. No two ways about it, I’ll knuckle down and make the fur fly, I’ll go the whole hog and knock the spots off you and you’ll be a goner. You’ll kick the bucket. So face the music. You’re barking up the wrong tree. You won’t get the drop on me. I’m in cahoots with some people with the know-how. So keep a stiff upper lip and have the horse sense to pull up stakes. OK?
All American.
The derivation of OK, okay, allegedly the most used word in the world, is a casebook study in the origin of a word. The theories are so many and so various, so many groups wish to claim it. At one point I thought that it depended entirely on who you were, as different ethnic, political and academic groups fight for the ownership of the number one word.
Here are just a few of the more respectable theories, brought together by Mike Todd. There are hundreds more . . .
The Choctaw Indians had the word “Okeh,” which means “it is so.” There is a report that Andrew Jackson, during the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, learned this Choctaw word, liked it and used it. Woodrow Wilson also used it when he approved official papers.
Liberia has “Oke,” Burmese has “hoakeh,” and these might have flitted over to America before 1840, by which time it was in familiar use.
Then there are the young bucks in Boston who enjoyed playing with or tormenting the language. “ISBD” was used to mean “It shall be done,” for instance; SP meant small potatoes. In the Boston Morning Post, March 1839, OK was claimed as short for “all correct,” which the young bucks spelled as “orl korrekt.” Which brings it out of Native American hands and back to the descendants of the English.
In 1840, Martin van Buren was standing as the Democratic presidential candidate and he acquired the nickname “Old Kinderhook” (he was born in Kinderhook). In March 1840 the Democrats opened the OK Club in New York based on his nickname.
The Times (London) in 1939 claimed it was of Cockney origin — Orl Korrec. The French claimed it came from their sailors who made appointments with American girls “aux quais” (at the quayside). The Finns have “oikea,” which means correct. The Times proposed another theory, that bills going through the House of Lords had to be approved by Lords Onslow and Kilbracken and each initialled them — O.K. Latinists pointed out that for generations schoolmasters would mark examination papers “Omnis Korecta,” sometimes abbreviated. Shipbuilders marked timber for the outer keel as “OK Number 1,” meaning Outer Keel Number 1. The Scots draw our attention to “Och aye,” of which OK may be an adaptation. The Prussians propose that one of their generals fighting for the American colonies in the War of Independence would sign his orders O.K. — his initials. The Greeks come up with a magical incantation from the past, “Omega, Khi.” When repeated twice it drives away fleas. The American army suggests that in the Civil War the U.S. War Department bought supplies of crackers from a company called Orrins-Kendall: OK appeared on these boxes and came to stand for good quality . . . etc.
It can get exhausting. Wise linguists now speak of “coincidental coinage,” which covers all eventualities. OK by me.
Two generations after the opening up of Louisiana, American English had been kicked and hurled into another dimension. This was the democratic language that Adams had foreseen although it is debatable whether he would have altogether enjoyed everyone’s “two cents’ worth.” Decorum and polite taste were not at the table for this feast.
The gold rush brought even more people west and yet again the language was up for it. “Prospector” was a new word: he “staked a claim,” he could “pan out” gold dust from the river bed, he might “strike it lucky,” even “strike it rich” and get a “bonanza” (which came from the Spanish word for fair weather). A good investment anywhere from now on became “a gold mine.”
And there was Mr. Levi Strauss, who made his fortune providing hard-wearing clothes for the miners. He used a cloth called geane fustian, a three-hundred-year-old English name derived from its original manufacture in Genoa. “Levis” and “jeans” were born and show no signs of age or ageing as they stride into their third century.
But Mr. Strauss’s products were distinguished by the modesty of their name. It was the time of Tall Talk and talking up, as if words could conjure reality into being. This became the particular fever of the “booster,” whose job was to talk up property, talk up prospects, talk up gold, talk up the west to whip on to fever the tens of thousands tumbling out of the settled cities of the east, headed for El Dorado. A single-room school might be called a college, a flea-pit could be called a hotel, and, in the spirit not of exaggeration but anticipation, a one-street town could be called a city. And what cities! Out in the west there is Rome, Cairo, Paris and Paradise City. Superior ghost towns in Kansas include Alexandria, Athens, Berlin, Calcutta, London, Moscow, Oxford and Sparta. Mining camps could get names like Bonanza, Wealthy City, Gold Hill or Rich Bar. The spirit of Davy Crockett would not be denied, and we have Dead Mule Canyon, Jackson’s Gulch, Hardscrabble, Poverty Hill, Hell-for-Noon City, Slumgullion, One Eye and Quack Hill. The vigour comes from speech, the speech of men on a high and in a hurry, loving to land a KO with words.
Newspapers spoke for this gold-rushing people and language and beat a persistent drum. In 1859, in the Rocky Mountain News: “To our Esteemed Readers. It is now being settled beyond dispute that rich deposits of gold exist throughout a great extent of the country . . . Persons desirous of trying their fortunes in the new Eldorado can now safely begin to make their calculations how to act.”
History in the American west in the mid nineteenth century was on the fast track. Not so much change as transformation every decade. Yet another hurricane of activity came when the railroad opened up the country and created an industry that gave the west its most characteristic vocabulary.
Joseph McCoy had the big idea. He would drive his cattle often hundreds of miles to a railhead where they could be carried to the big city markets in the east. Previously they had only been butchered for local use. McCoy became rich. So rich that some of his innumerable imitators tried to pretend they were the great man himself. McCoy developed the habit of in
troducing himself to strangers as “the real McCoy.”
So we come to the cowboy. If any one word describes the quintessential ideal of the American male (and subsequent males in many other countries), if any word has influenced the style of the American male manner and manners, has been copied by Presidents and slid helplessly between truth and fantasy in its power to evoke a certain kind of courage, endurance, probity, determination, clean-living, woman-respecting, lawabiding, but always willing and able to take the law into his own hands when that was required, slow to anger but swift in pursuit of justice, it is the cowboy. The word came from eighteenth-century English, where it referred to an illiterate young lad watching over a few docile beasts. In America it became and it remains multi-dimensional, iconic, heroic, a word the country is proud to describe itself by.
Cowboys down on the Mexican border had been picking up Spanish words for years. They took them north and pooled them straight into the deepening reservoir of English. “Ranch” comes from Spanish, as do “mustang” and “bronco” and the “chaps,” “sombrero” and “poncho” they might wear. The “cinch” secured the saddle and they used the “lariat” and the “lasso.” They cried out “Vamoose!” and “Pronto!” and more than anything they feared a “stampede.” “Plumb loco” is a conjunction of the American and the Spanish words. “Vigilantes” took their name from the Spanish, as did the “rodeo” and the “fiesta.”
The American cowboys themselves joined in. “Cow-poke,” “cowhand,” “cow-puncher,” “wrangler,” “range-rider,” “bronco-buster,” “hot under the collar” and “bite the dust” all came from the men on horses themselves. “Rustler” was an American word from the imitative verb “rustle”: the cowboys pinched it for “cattle-thief.” Samuel Maverick was unique in his refusal to brand his cattle because he thought it was cruel. (His detractors thought it was because he could thereby claim all unbranded cattle as his own.) The “maverick” is his legacy.
