The American Language

An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States

H.L. Mencken

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 This classic was written to clarify the discrepancies between British and American English and to define
the distinguishing characteristics of American English. Mencken’s groundbreaking study was undoubtedly
the most scientific linguistic work on the American language to date and continues to serve as a definitive
resource in the field.

NEW YORK: BARTLEBY.COM, 2000

Preface to the First Edition

Preface to the Second Edition

I. Introductory ……………………………………………………………………………….. 6
1. The Diverging Streams of English ………………………………………………………6
2. Foreign Observers ………………………………………………………………………..7
3. The General Character of American English ……………………………………………8
4. The Materials of the Inquiry …………………………………………………………….10
II. The Beginnings of American ………………………………………………………………..13
1. The First Differntiation ……………………………………………………………………13
2. Sources of Early Americanisms ……………………………………………………………14
3. New Words of English Material …………………………………………………………..15
4. Changed Meaning ………………………………………………………………………….18
III. The Period of Growth ………………………………………………………………………….20
1. Character of the New Nation ……………………………………………………………….20
2. The Language in the Making ………………………………………………………………..22
3. The Expanding Vocabulary ………………………………………………………………….23
4. Loan-Words and Non-English Influences ………………………………………………….26
IV. American and English Today ………………………………………………………………….29
1. The Two Vocabularies ……………………………………………………………………….29.
2. Differences in Usage ………………………………………………………………………….33.
3. Honorifics ……………………………………………………………………………………..38
4. Euphemisms ………………………………………………………………………………….38
5. Expletives and Forbidden Words …………………………………………………………….40
V. International Exchanges …………………………………………………………………………41
1. Americanisms in England ……………………………………………………………………..41
2. Briticisms in the United States ………………………………………………………………..43
VI. Tendencies in American …………………………………………………………………………43
1. General Characters ………………………………………………………………………………45
2. Lost Distinctions …………………………………………………………………………………45
3. Processes of Word-Formation …………………………………………………………………..46
4. Foreign Influences Today ……………………………………………………………………….50

VII. The Standard American Pronunciation ……………………………………………………….. ..51

1. General Characters ……………………………………………………………………………..51
2. The Vowels ……………………………………………………………………………………52
VIII. American Spelling ………………………………………………………………………………53
1. The Two Orthographies ………………………………………………………………………..53
2. The Influence of Webster ………………………………………………………………………57

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 3. The Advance of American Spelling …………………………………………………………….59
4. British Spelling in the United States …………………………………………………………60
5. Simplified Spelling ……………………………………………………………………………..61
6. The Treatment of Loan-Words ………………………………………………………………..63
7. Minor Differences ……………………………………………………………………………….65
IX. The Common Speech ……………………………………………………………………………..65
1. Grammarians and Their Ways …………………………………………………………………..65
2. Spoken American As It Is ……………………………………………………………………….67
3. The Verb …………………………………………………………………………………………67
4. The Pronoun …………………………………………………………………………………….75
5. The Adverb ………………………………………………………………………………………80
6. The Noun …………………………………………………………………………………………81.
7. The Adjective ……………………………………………………………………………………..81
8. The Double Negative ……………………………………………………………………………...82
9. Other Syntactical Peculiarities ……………………………………………………………………82
10. Vulgar Pronunciation ……………………………………………………………………………83
X. Proper Names in America ……………………………………………………………………………83.
1. Surnames …………………………………………………………………………………………….83
2. Given Names ……………………………………………………………………………………….85
3. Geographical Names ……………………………………………………………………………….87
4. Street Names ……………………………………………………………………………………….92
XI. American Slang ……………………………………………………………………………………….93
1. Its Origin and Nature ………………………………………………………………………………93
2. War Slang …………………………………………………………………………………………...96
II. Non-English Dialects in America ………………………………………………………………………97
1. German 2. French 3. Spanish 4. Yiddish 5. Italian 6. Dano-Norwegian 7. Swedish 8. Dutch
9. Icelandic 10. Greek 11. The Slavic Languages …97-107
III. Proverb and Platitude …………………………………………………………………………………107.
Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………………………….109

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Preface to the First Edition

The aim of this book is best exhibited by describing its origin. I am, and have been since early manhood, an
editor of newspapers and books, and a critic of the last named. These occupations have forced me into a
pretty wide familiarity with current literature, both periodical and within covers, and in particular into
familiarity with the current literature of England and America. It was part of my daily work, for a number of
years, to read the principal English newspapers and reviews; it has been part of my work, all the time, to read
the more important English novels, essays, poetry and criticism. An American born and bred, I early noted,
as everyone else in like case must note, certain salient differences between the English of England and the
English of America as practically spoken and written---differences in vocabulary, in syntax, in the shade and
habits of idiom, and even, coming to the common speech, in grammar. And I noted too, of course, partly
during visits to England but more largely by a somewhat wide and intimate intercourse with English people
in the United States, the obvious differences between English and American pronunciation and intonation.
Greatly interested in these differences---some of them so great that they led me to seek exchanges of light
with Englishmen---I looked for some work that would describe and account for them with a show of
completeness, and perhaps depict the process of their origin. I soon found that no such work existed, in
either England or America---that the whole literature of the subject was astonishingly meagre and
unsatisfactory. There were several dictionaries of Americanisms, true enough, but only one of them made
any pretension to scientific method, and even that one was incomplete. The solitary general treatise on the
American dialect, the work of a man foreign to both England and America in race and education, was more
than 40 years old, and full of palpable errors. For the rest, there was only a fugitive and inconsequential
literature---an almost useless mass of notes and essays, chiefly by the minor sort of pedagogues, seldom
illuminating, save in small details, and often incredibly ignorant and inaccurate. On the large and important
subject of American pronunciation, for example, I could find nothing save a few casual essays. On American
spelling, with its wide and constantly visible divergences from English usages, there was little more. On
American grammar there was nothing whatsoever. Worse, an important part of the poor literature that I
unearthed was devoted to absurd efforts to prove that no such thing as an American variety of English
existed---that the differences I constantly encountered in English and that my English friends encountered in
American were chiefly imaginary, and to be explained away by denying them.
Still interested in the subject, and despairing of getting any illumination from such theoretical masters of it,
I began a collection of materials for my own information and amusement, and gradually it took on a rather
formidable bulk. My employment being made known by various articles in the newspapers and magazines, I
began also to receive contributions from other persons of the same taste, both English and American, and
gradually my collection fell into a certain order, and I saw the workings of general laws in what, at first, had
appeared to be mere chaos. The present book then began to take form---its preparation a sort of recreation
from other and far different labor. It is anything but an exhaustive treatise upon the subject; it is not even an
exhaustive examination of the materials. All it pretends to do is to articulate some of those materials---to get
some approach to order and coherence into them, and so pave the way for a better work by some more
competent man. That work calls for the equipment of a first-rate philologist, which I am surely not. All I
have done here is to stake out the field, sometimes borrowing suggestions from other inquirers and
sometimes, as in the case of popular American grammar, attempting to run the lines myself.
That it should be regarded as an anti-social act to examine and exhibit the constantly growing differences
between English and American, as certain American pedants argue sharply---this doctrine is quite beyond
my understanding. All it indicates, stripped of sophistry, is a somewhat childish effort to gain the approval of
Englishmen---a belated efflorescence of the colonial spirit, often commingled with fashionable aspiration.
The plain fact is that the English themselves are not deceived, nor do they grant the approval so ardently
sought for. On the contrary, they are keenly aware of the differences between the two dialects, and often
discuss them, as the following pages show. Perhaps one dialect, in the long run, will defeat and absorb the

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other; if the two nations continue to be partners in great adventures it may very well happen. But even in
that case, something may be accomplished by examining the differences which exist today. In some ways, as
in intonation, English usage is plainly better than American. In others, as in spelling, American usage is as
plainly better than English. But in order to develop usages that the people of both nations will accept it is
necessary to study the differences now visible. This study thus shows a certain utility. But its chief excuse is
its human interest, for it prods deeply into national idiosyncrasies and ways of mind, and that sort of
prodding is always entertaining.
I am thus neither teacher, nor prophet, nor reformer, but merely inquirer. The exigencies of my vocation
make me almost completely bilingual; moreover, I have a hand for a compromise dialect which embodies the
common materials of both languages, and is thus free from offense on both sides of the water---as befits the
editor of a magazine published in both countries. But that compromise dialect is the living speech of neither.
What I have tried to do here is to make a first sketch of the living speech of these States. The work is
confessedly incomplete, and in places very painfully so, but in such enterprises a man must put an arbitrary
term to his labors, lest some mischance, after years of diligence, take him from them too suddenly for them to
be closed, and his laborious accumulations, as Ernest Weekly says in his book on English surnames, be
“doomed to the waste-basket by harassed executors.’’
If the opportunity offers in future I shall undoubtedly return to the subject. For one thing, I am eager to
attempt a more scientific examination of the grammar of the American vulgar speech, here discussed briefly
in Chapter VI. 1 For another thing, I hope to make further inquiries into the subject of American surnames of
non-English origin. Various other fields invite. No historical study of American pronunciation exists; the
influence of German, Irish-English, Yiddish and other such immigrant dialects upon American has never
been fully investigated; there is no adequate treatise on American geographical names. Contributions of
materials and suggestions for a possible revised edition of the present book will reach me if addressed to me
in care of the publisher at 220 West Forty-second Street, New York. I shall also be very grateful for the
correction of errors, some perhaps typographical, but others due to faulty information or mistaken judgment.

In conclusion, I borrow a plea in confession and avoidance from Ben Jonson’s pioneer grammar of English,
published in incomplete form after his death. “We have set down,’’ he said, “that that in our judgment
agreeth best with reason and good order. Which notwithstanding, if it seem to any to be too rough hewed,
let him plane it out more smoothly, and I shall not only not envy it, but in the behalf of my country most
heartily thank him for so great a benefit; hoping that I shall be thought sufficiently to have done my part if in
tolling this bell I may draw others to a deeper consideration of the matter; for, touching myself, I must needs
confess that after much painful churning this only would come which here we have devised.’’

Baltimore, January 1, 1919.

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I. Introductory

1. The Diverging Streams of English

Thomas Jefferson, with his usual prevision, saw clearly more than a century ago that the American people, as
they increased in numbers and in the diversity of their national interests and racial strains, would make
changes in their mother tongue, as they had already made changes in the political institutions of their
inheritance. “The new circumstances under which we are placed,” he wrote to John Waldo from Monticello
on August 16, 1813, “call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects. An
American dialect will therefore be formed.”
Nearly a quarter of a century before this, another great American, and one with an expertness in the matter
that the too versatile Jefferson could not muster, had ventured upon a prophecy even more bold and specific.
He was Noah Webster, then at the beginning of his stormy career as a lexicographer. In his little volume of
“Dissertations on the English Language,” printed in 1789 and dedicated to “His Excellency, Benjamin
Franklin, Esq., LL.D., F.R.S., late President of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” Webster argued that the
time for regarding English usage and submitting to English authority had already passed, and that “a future
separation of the American tongue from the English” was “necessary and unavoidable.” “Numerous local
causes,” he continued, “such as a new country, new associations of people, new combinations of ideas in arts
and sciences, and some intercourse with tribes wholly unknown in Europe, will introduce new words into
the American tongue. These causes will produce, in a course of time, a language in North America as
different from the future language of England as the modern Dutch, Danish and Swedish are from the
German, or from one another.”
Neither Jefferson nor Webster put a term upon his prophecy. They may have been thinking, one or both, of
a remote era, not yet come to dawn, or they may have been thinking, with the facile imagination of those
days, of a period even earlier than our own. In the latter case they allowed far too little (and particularly
Webster) for factors that have worked powerfully against the influences they saw so clearly in operation
about them. One of these factors, obviously, has been the vast improvement in communications across the
ocean, a change scarcely in vision a century ago. It has brought New York relatively nearer to London today
than it was to Boston, or even to Philadelphia, during Jefferson’s presidency, and that greater proximity has
produced a steady interchange of ideas, opinions, news and mere gossip. We latter-day Americans know a
great deal more about the everyday affairs of England than the early Americans did, for we read more
English books, and find more about the English in our newspapers, and meet more Englishmen, and go to
England much oftener. The effects of this ceaseless traffic in ideas and impressions, so plainly visible in
politics, in ethics and æsthetics, and even in the minutiæ of social intercourse, are also to be seen in the
language. On the one hand there is a swift exchange of new inventions on both sides, so that many of our
American neologisms quickly pass to London and the latest English fashions in pronunciation are almost
instantaneously imitated, at least by a minority, in New York; and, on the other hand, the English, by so
constantly having the floor, force upon us, out of their firmer resolution and certitude, and no less out of the
authority that goes with their mere cultural seniority, a somewhat sneaking respect for their own greater
conservatism of speech, so that our professors of the language, in the overwhelming main, combat all signs of
differentiation with the utmost diligence, and safeguard the doctrine that the standards of English are the
only reputable standards of American.
This doctrine, of course, is not supported by the known laws of language, nor has it prevented the large
divergences that we shall presently examine, but all the same it has worked steadily toward a highly artificial
formalism, and as steadily against the investigation of the actual national speech. Such grammar, so-called, as
is taught in our schools and colleges, is a grammar standing four-legged upon the theorizings and false
inferences of English Latinists of a past generation, 2 eager only to break the wild tongue of Shakespeare to a

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rule; and its frank aim is to create in us a high respect for a book language which few of us ever actually speak
and not many of us even learn to write. That language, elaborately artificial though it may be, undoubtedly
has merits. It shows a sonority and a stateliness that you must go to the Latin of the Golden Age to match; its
“highly charged and heavy-shotted” periods, in Matthew Arnold’s phrase, serve admirably the obscurantist
purposes of American pedagogy and of English parliamentary oratory and leader-writing; it is something for
the literary artists of both countries to prove their skill upon by flouting it. But to the average American, bent
upon expressing his ideas, not stupendously but merely clearly, it must always remain something vague and
remote, like Greek history or the properties of the parabola, for he never speaks it or hears it spoken, and
seldom encounters it in his everyday reading. If he learns to write it, which is not often, it is with a rather
depressing sense of its artificiality. He may master it as a Korean, bred in the colloquial Onmun, may master
the literary Korean-Chinese, but he never thinks in it or quite feels it.
This fact, I daresay, is largely responsible for the notorious failure of our schools and colleges to turn out
pupils who can put their ideas into words with simplicity and intelligibility. What their professors try to
teach is not their mother-tongue at all, but a dialect that stands quite outside their common experience, and
into which they have to translate their thoughts, consciously and painfully. Bad writing consists in making
the attempt, and failing through lack of practise. Good writing consists, as in the case of Howells, in
deliberately throwing overboard the principles so elaborately inculcated, or, as in the case of Lincoln, in
standing unaware of them. Thus the study of the language he is supposed to use, to the average American,
takes on a sort of bilingual character. On the one hand, he is grounded abominably in a grammar and syntax
that have always been largely artificial, even in the country where they are supposed to prevail, and on the
other hand he has to pick up the essentials of his actual speech as best he may. “Literary English,” says Van
Wyck Brooks, 3 “with us is a tradition, just as Anglo-Saxon law with us is a tradition. They persist, not as the
normal expressions of a race,… but through prestige and precedent and the will and habit of a dominating
class largely out of touch with a national fabric unconsciously taking form out of school.” What thus goes on
out of school does not interest most of the guardians of our linguistic morals. Now and then a Charters takes a
somewhat alarmed peep into the materials of the vulgar speech, and now and then a Krapp investigates the
pronunciation of actual Americans, but in the main there is little save a tedious repetition of nonsense. In no
department are American universities weaker than in the department of English. The æsthetic opinion that
they disseminate is flabby and childish, and their philological work in the national language is
extraordinarily lacking in enterprise. No attempt to deduce the principles of vulgar American grammar from
the everyday speech of the people has ever been made by an American philologist. There is no scientific
study, general and comprehensive in scope, of the American vocabulary, or of the influences lying at the root
of American word-formation. No professor, so far as I know, has ever deigned to give the same sober
attention to the sermo plebeius of his country that his colleagues habitually give to the pronunciation of
Latin, or to the irregular verbs in French.

2 Foreign Observers

What English and American laymen have thus observed has not escaped the notice of Continental
philologists. The first edition of Bartlett, published in 1848, brought forth a long and critical review in the
Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen by Prof. Felix Flügel, and in the successive
volumes of the Archiv there have been many valuable essays upon Americanisms, by such men as Herrig,
Koehler and Kartzke. Various Dutch philologists, among them Barentz, Keijzer and Van der Voort, have also
discussed the subject, and a study in French has been published by G. A. Barringer. That, even to the lay
Continental, American and English now differ considerably, is demonstrated by the fact that many of the
popular German Sprachführer appear in separate editions, Amerikanisch and Englisch. This is true, for
example, of the “Metoula-Sprachführer” 46 and of the “Polyglott Kuntze” books. 47 The American edition of
the latter starts off with the doctrine that “Jeder, der nach Nord-Amerika oder Australien will, muss Englisch
können,” but a great many of the words and phrases that appear in its examples would be unintelligible to
most Englishmen—e. g., free-lunch, real-estate agent, buckwheat, corn (for maize), conductor and popcorn—
and a number of others would suggest false meanings or otherwise puzzle—e. g., saloon, wash-stand, water-
pitcher and apple-pie. In the “Neokosmos Sprachführer durch England-Amerika” there are many notes

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calling attention to differences between American and English usage, e. g., baggage-luggage, car-carriage,
conductor-guard. The authors are also forced to enter into explanations of the functions of the boots in an
English hotel and of the clerk in an American hotel, and they devote a whole section, now mainly archaic, to
a discourse upon the nature and uses of such American beverages as Whiskey-sours, Martini-cocktails, silver-
fizzes, John-Collinses, and ice-cream sodas. In other Continental works of the same sort there is a like
differentiation between English and American. Baedeker follows suit. In his guide-book to the United States,
prepared for Englishmen, he is at pains to explain the meaning of various American words and phrases.
Asiatics are equally observant of the fast-growing differences. In the first number of the Moslem Sunrise, a
quarterly edited by Dr. Mufti Muhammad Sadig, there is an explanatory note, apparently for the guidance of
East Indian Mohammedan missionaries in the United States, upon certain peculiarities of the American
vocabulary.
All the Continental Europeans who discuss the matter seem to take it for granted that American and English
are now definitely separated. When I was in Germany as a correspondent, in 1917, I met many German
officers who spoke English fluently. Some had learned it in England and some in America, and I noted that
they were fully conscious of the difference between the two dialects, and often referred to it. M.
Clemenceau, who acquired a very fluent and idiomatic English during his early days in New York, is always
at pains to inform those who compliment him upon it that it is not English at all, but American. The new
interest in American literature in France, growing out of the establishment of a chair of American Literature
and Civilization at the Sorbonne, with Charles Cestre as incumbent, has brought forth several articles upon
the peculiarities of American in the French reviews. Early in May, 1920, in discussing “La Poésie américaine
d’aujourd’hui” in Les Marges, Eugène Montfort argued that American showed every sign of being more
vigorous than English, and would eventually take on complete autonomy. A philologist of Scandinavian
extraction, Elias Molee, has gone so far as to argue that the acquisition of correct English, to a people grown
so mongrel in blood as the Americans, has already become a useless burden. In place of it he proposes a
mixed tongue, based on English, but admitting various elements from the other Germanic languages. His
grammar, however, is so much more complex than that of English that most Americans would probably find
his artificial “American” very difficult of acquirement. At all events it has made no progress.

3 The General Character of American English

The characters chiefly noted in American speech by all who have discussed it, are, first, its general
uniformity throughout the country, so that dialects, properly speaking, are confined to recent immigrants, to
the native whites of a few isolated areas and to the negroes of the South; and, secondly, its impatient
disregard of rule and precedent, and hence its large capacity (distinctly greater than that of the English of
England) for taking in new words and phrases and for manufacturing new locutions out of its own materials.
The first of these characters has struck every observer, native and foreign. In place of the local dialects of
other countries we have a general Volkssprache for the whole nation, and if it is conditioned at all it is only
by minor differences in pronunciation and by the linguistic struggles of various groups of newcomers. “The
speech of the United States,” says Gilbert M. Tucker, “is quite unlike that of Great Britain in the important
particular that here we have no dialects.” “We all,” said Mr. Taft during his presidency, “speak the same
language and have the same ideas.” “Manners, morals and political views,” said the New York World,
commenting upon this dictum, “have all undergone a standardization which is one of the remarkable aspects
of American evolution. Perhaps it is in the uniformity of language that this development has been most note-
worthy. Outside of the Tennessee mountains and the back country of New England there is no true dialect.”
“While we have or have had single counties as large as Great Britain,” says another American observer, “and
in some of our states England could be lost, there is practically no difference between the American spoken
in our 4,039,000 square miles of territory, except as spoken by foreigners. We, assembled here, would be
perfectly understood by delegates from Texas, Maine, Minnesota, Louisiana, or Alaska, from whatever walk
of life they might come. We can go to any of the 75,000 postoffices in this country and be entirely sure we
will be understood, whether we want to buy a stamp or borrow a match.” “From Portland, Maine, to
Portland, Oregon,” agrees an English critic, “no trace of a distinct dialect is to be found. The man from

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Maine, even though he may be of inferior education and limited capacity, can completely understand the
man from Oregon.”
Of the intrinsic differences that separate American from English the chief have their roots in the obvious
disparity between the environment and traditions of the American people since the seventeenth century and
those of the English. The latter have lived under a relatively stable social order, and it has impressed upon
their souls their characteristic respect for what is customary and of good report. Until the Great War brought
chaos to most of their institutions, their whole lives were regulated, perhaps more than those of any other
people save the Spaniards, by a regard for precedent. The Americans, though partly of the same blood, have
felt no such restraint, and acquired no such habit of conformity. On the contrary, they have plunged to the
other extreme, for the conditions of life in their new country have put a high value upon the precisely
opposite qualities of curiosity and daring, and so they have acquired that character of restlessness, that
impatience of forms, that disdain of the dead hand, which now broadly marks them. From the first, says a
recent literary historian, they have been “less phlegmatic, less conservative than the English. There were
climatic influences, it may be; there was surely a spirit of intensity everywhere that made for short effort.”
Thus, in the arts, and thus in business, in politics, in daily intercourse, in habits of mind and speech. The
American is not, in truth, lacking in a capacity for discipline; he has it highly developed; he submits to
leadership readily, and even to tyranny. But, by a curious twist, it is not the leadership that is old and
decorous that fetches him, but the leadership that is new and extravagant. He will resist dictation out of the
past, but he will follow a new messiah with almost Russian willingness, and into the wildest vagaries of
economics, religion, morals and speech. A new fallacy in politics spreads faster in the United States than
anywhere else on earth, and so does a new fashion in hats, or a new revelation of God, or a new means of
killing time, or a new shibboleth, or metaphor, or piece of slang. 3
Thus the American, on his linguistic side, likes to make his language as he goes along, and not all the hard
work of his grammar teachers can hold the business back. A novelty loses nothing by the fact that it is a
novelty; it rather gains something, and particularly if it meets the national fancy for the terse, the vivid, and,
above all, the bold and imaginative. The characteristic American habit of reducing complex concepts to the
starkest abbreviations was already noticeable in colonial times, and such highly typical Americanisms as O.
K., N. G., and P. D. Q., have been traced back to the first days of the republic. Nor are the influences that
shaped these early tendencies invisible today, for the country is still in process of growth, and no settled
social order has yet descended upon it. Institution-making is yet going on, and so is language-making. In so
modest an operation as that which has evolved bunco from buncombe and bunk from bunco there is
evidence of a phenomenon which the philologist recognizes as belonging to the most youthful and lusty
stages of speech. The American vulgate is not only constantly making new words, it is also deducing roots
from them, and so giving proof, as Prof. Sayce says, that “the creative powers of language are even now not
extinct.”
All of these processes, of course, are also to be observed in the English of England; in the days of its great
Elizabethan growth they were in the lustiest possible being. They are, indeed, common to all languages; they
keep language alive. But if you will put the English of today beside the American of today you will see at
once how much more forcibly they are in operation in the latter than in the former. The standard southern
dialect of English has been arrested in its growth by its purists and grammarians. It shows no living change in
structure and syntax since the days of Anne, and very little modification in either pronunciation or
vocabulary. Its tendency is to conserve that which is established; to say the new thing, as nearly as possible,
in the old way; to combat all that expansive gusto which made for its pliancy and resilience in the days of
Shakespeare. In place of the old loose-footedness there is set up a preciosity which, in one direction, takes the
form of unyielding affectations in the spoken language, and in another form shows itself in the heavy
Johnsonese of current English writing—the Jargon denounced by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his Cambridge
lectures. This “infirmity of speech” Quiller-Couch finds “in parliamentary debates and in the newspapers”;…
“it has become the medium through which Boards of Government, County Councils, Syndicates,
Committees, Commercial Firms, express the processes as well as the conclusions of their thought, and so
voice the reason of their being.” Distinct from journalese, the two yet overlap, “and have a knack of
assimilating each other’s vices.”

9
 The purist performs a useful office in enforcing a certain logical regularity upon the process, and in our own
case the omnipresent example of the greater conservatism of the English corrects our native tendency to go
too fast, but the process itself is as inexorable in its workings as the precession of the equinoxes, and if we
yield to it more eagerly than the English, it is only a proof, perhaps, that the future of what was once the
Anglo-Saxon tongue lies on this side of the water. “The story of English grammar,” says Murison, “is a story
of simplification, of dispensing with grammatical forms.” And of the most copious and persistent
enlargement of vocabulary and mutation of idiom ever recorded, perhaps, by descriptive philology. English
now has the brakes on, but American continues to leap in the dark, and the prodigality of its movement is all
the indication that is needed of its intrinsic health, its capacity to meet the ever-changing needs of a restless
and emotional people, constantly fluent in racial composition, and disdainful of tradition. “Language,” says
Sayce, “is no artificial product, contained in books and dictionaries and governed by the strict rules of
impersonal grammarians. It is the living expression of the mind and spirit of a people, ever changing and
shifting, whose sole standard of correctness is custom and the common usage of the community.… The first
lesson to be learned is that there is no intrinsic right or wrong in the use of language, no fixed rules such as
are the delight of the teacher of Latin prose. What is right now will be wrong hereafter, what language
rejected yesterday she accepts today.”

4 The Materials of the Inquiry

One familiar with the habits of pedagogues need not be told that, in their grudging discussions of American,
they have spent most of their energies upon vain attempts to classify its materials. White and Lounsbury, as I
have shown, carried the business to the limits of the preposterous; when they had finished identifying and
cataloguing Americanisms there were no more Americanisms left to study. But among investigators of less
learning there is a more spacious view of the problem, and the labored categories of White and Lounsbury
are much extended. Pickering, the first to attempt a list of Americanisms, rehearsed their origin under the
following headings:
We have formed some new words.”
To some old ones, that are still in use in England, we have affixed new significations.”
Others, which have been long obsolete in England, are still retained in common use among us.”
Bartlett, in the second edition of his dictionary, dated 1859, increased these classes to nine:
Archaisms, i.e., old English words, obsolete, or nearly so, in England, but retained in use in this country.
English words used in a different sense from what they are in England. “These include many names of
natural objects differently applied.”
Words which have retained their original meaning in the United States, though not in England.
English provincialisms adopted into general use in America.
Newly coined words, which owe their origin to the productions or to the circumstances of the country.
Words borrowed from European languages, especially the French, Spanish, Dutch and German.
Indian words.

Negroisms.
Peculiarities of pronunciation.

Some time before this, but after the publication of Bartlett’s first edition in 1848, William C. Fowler,
professor of rhetoric at Amherst, devoted a brief chapter to “American Dialects” in his well-known work on
English and in it one finds the following formidable classification of Americanisms:
Words borrowed from other language.
Indian, as Kennebec, Ohio, Tombigbee; sagamore, quahaug, succotash.
Dutch, as boss, kruller, stoop.
German, as spuke(?), sauerkraut.
French, as bayou, cache, chute, crevasse, levee.
Spanish, as calaboose, chapparal, hacienda, rancho, ranchero.
Negro, as buckra.

10
Words “introduced from the necessity of our situation, in order to express new ideas.”
Words “connected with and flowing from our political institutions,” as selectman, presidential, congressional,
caucus, mass-meeting, lynch-law, help (for servants).
Words “connected with our ecclesiastical institutions,” as associational, consociational, to fellowship, to
missionate.
Words “connected with a new country,” as lot, diggings, betterments, squatter.
Miscellaneous Americanisms.
Words and phrases become obsolete in England, as talented, offset (for set-off), back and forth (for backward
and forward).
Old words and phrases “which are now merely provincial in England,” as hub, whap (?), to wilt.
Nouns formed from verbs by adding the French suffix -ment, as publishment, releasement, requirement.
Forms of words “which fill the gap or vacancy between two words which are approved,” as obligate (between
oblige and obligation) and variate (between vary and variation).
“Certain compound terms for which the English have different compounds,” as bank-bill (bank-note), book-
store (bookseller’s shop), bottom-land (interval-land), clapboard (pale), sea-board (sea-shore), side-hill (hill-
side).
“Certain colloquial phrases, apparently idiomatic, and very expressive,” as to cave in, to flare up, to flunk out,
to fork over, to hold on, to let on, to stave off, to take on.
Intensives, “often a matter of mere temporary fashion,” as dreadful, might, plaguy, powerful.
“Certain verbs expressing one’s state of mind, but partially or timidly,” as to allot upon (for to count upon), to
calculate, to expect (to think or believe), to guess, to reckon.
“Certain adjectives, expressing not only quality, but one’s subjective feelings in regard to it,” as clever, grand,
green, likely, smart, ugly.
Abridgments, as stage (for stage-coach), turnpike (for turnpike-road), spry (for sprightly), to conduct (for to
conduct one’s self).
“Quaint or burlesque terms,” as to tote, to yank; humbug, loafer, muss, plunder (for baggage), rock (for stone).
“Low expressions, mostly political,” as slangwhanger, loco foco, hunker; to get the hang of.
“Ungrammatical expressions, disapproved by all,” as do don’t, used to could, can’t come it, Universal preacher
(for Universalist), there’s no two ways about it.
Elwyn, in 1859, attempted no classification. 75 He confined his glossary to archaic English words surviving
in America, and sought only to prove that they had come down “from our remotest ancestry” and were thus
undeserving of the reviling lavished upon them by English critics. Schele de Vere, in 1872, followed Bartlett,
and devoted himself largely to words borrowed from the Indian dialects, and from the French, Spanish and
Dutch. But Farmer, in 1889, 76 ventured upon a new classification, prefacing it with the following definition:
An Americanism may be defined as a word or phrase, old or new, employed by general or respectable usage
in America in a way not sanctioned by the best standards of the English language. As a matter of fact,
however, the term has come to possess a wider meaning, and it is now applied not only to words and phrases
which can be so described, but also to the new and legitimately born words adapted to the general needs and
usages, to the survivals of an older form of English than that now current in the mother country, and to the
racy, pungent vernacular of Western life.
Words and phrases of purely American derivation, embracing words originating in:
Indian and aboriginal life.
Pioneer and frontier life.
The church.
Politics.
Trades of all kinds.
Travel, afloat and ashore.
Words brought by colonists, including:
The German element.
The French.
The Spanish.
The Dutch.

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The negro.
The Chinese.
Names of American things, embracing:
Natural products.
Manufactured articles.
Perverted English words.
Obsolete English words still in good use in America.
English words, American by inflection and modification.
Odd and ignorant popular phrases, proverbs, vulgarisms, and colloquialisms, cant and slang.
Individualisms.
Doubtful and miscellaneous.
Clapin, in 1902, reduced these categories to four:
Genuine English words, obsolete or provincial in England, and universally used in the United States.
English words conveying, in the United States, a different meaning from that attached to them in England.
Words introduced from other languages than the English:—French, Dutch, Spanish, German, Indian, etc.
Americanisms proper, i.e., words coined in the country, either representing some new idea or peculiar
product.
Thornton, in 1912, substituted the following:
Forms of speech now obsolete or provincial in England, which survive in the United States, such as allow,
bureau, fall, gotten, guess, likely, professor, shoat.
Words and phrases of distinctly American origin, such as belittle, lengthy, lightning-rod, to darken one’s
doors, to bark up the wrong tree, to come out at the little end of the horn, blind tiger, cold snap, gay Quaker,
gone coon, long sauce, pay dirt, small potatoes, some pumpkins.
Nouns which indicate quadrupeds, birds, trees, articles of food, etc., that are distinctively American, such as
ground-hog, hang-bird, hominy, live-oak, locust, opossum, persimmon, pone, succotash, wampum, wigwam.
Names of persons and classes of persons, and of places, such as Buckeye, Cracker, Greaser, Hoosier, Old
Bullion, Old Hickory, the Little Giant, Dixie, Gotham, the Bay State, the Monumental City.
Words which have assumed a new meaning, such as card, clever, fork, help, penny, plunder, raise, rock, sack,
ticket, windfall.
In addition, Thornton added a provisional class of “words and phrases of which I have found earlier
examples in American than in English writers;… with the caveat that further research may reverse the
claim”—a class offering specimens in alarmist, capitalize, eruptiveness, horse of another colour (sic!), the jig’s
up, nameable, omnibus bill, propaganda and whitewash.
Tucker, in 1921, 78 attempted to reduce all Americanisms to two grand divisions, as follows:
Words and phrases that originated in America and express something that the British have always expressed
differently if they have mentioned it at all.
Words and phrases that would convey to a British ear a different meaning from that which they bear in this
country.
To which he added seven categories of locutions not to be regarded as Americanisms, despite their inclusion
in various previous lists, as follows:
Words and phrases stated by the previous compiler himself to be of foreign [i.e., chiefly of English] origin,
like Farmer’s hand-me-downs.
Names of things exclusively American, but known abroad under the same name, such as moccasin.
Names of things invented in the United States, like drawing-room car.
Words used in this country in a sense hardly distinguishable from that they bear in England, like force for a
gang of laborers.
Nonce words, like Mark Twain’s cavalieress.
Perfectly regular and self-explanatory compounds, like office-holder, planing-machine, ink-slinger and fly-
time.
Purely technical terms, such as those employed in baseball.
No more than a glance at these discordant classifications is needed to show that they hamper the inquiry by
limiting its scope—not so much, to be sure, as the extravagant limitations of White and Lounsbury, but still

12
very seriously. They leave out of account some of the most salient characters of a living language. Only
Bartlett and Farmer establish a separate category of Americanisms produced by umlaut, by shading of
consonants and by other phonological changes, though even Thornton, of course, is obliged to take notice of
such forms as bust and bile, and even Tucker lists buster. None of them, however, goes into the matter at any
length, nor even into the matter of etymology. Bartlett’s etymologies are scanty and often inaccurate; Schele
de Vere’s are sometimes quite fanciful; Thornton, Tucker and the rest scarcely offer any at all. It must be
obvious that many of the words and phrases excluded by Tucker’s index expurgatorius are quite genuine
Americanisms. Why should he bar out such a word as moccasin on the ground that it is also used in England?
So is caucus, and yet he includes it. He is also far too hostile to such characteristic American compounds as
office-holder, fly-time and parlor-car. 79 True enough, their materials are good English, and they involve no
change in the meaning of their component parts, but it must be plain that they were put together in the
United States and that an Englishman always sees a certain strangeness in them. Pay-dirt, panel-house,
passage-way, patrolman, night-rider, low-down, know-nothing, hoe-cake and hog-wallow are equally
compounded of pure English metal, and yet he lists all of them. Again, he is too ready, it seems to me, to bar
out archaisms, which constitute one of the most interesting and authentic of all the classes of Americanisms.
It is idle to prove that Chaucer used to guess. The important thing is that the English abandoned it centuries
ago, and that when they happen to use it today they are always conscious that it is an Americanism. Baggage
is in Shakespeare, but it is not in the London Times. The Times, save when it wants to be American, uses
luggage, as do the fashionable shop-keepers along Fifth avenue. Here Mr. Tucker allows his historical
principles to run away with his judgment. His book represents the labor of nearly forty years and is full of
shrewd observations and persuasive contentions, but it is sometimes excessively dogmatic.
These grammatical and syntactical tendencies are beyond the scope of Thornton’s investigation, 81 but it is
plain that they must be prime concerns of any future student who essays to get at the inner spirit of the
language. Its difference from standard English is not merely a difference in vocabulary, to be disposed of in
an alphabetical list; it is, above all, a difference in pronunciation, in intonation, in conjugation and
declension, in metaphor and idiom, in the whole fashion of using words. A page from one of Ring W.
Lardner’s baseball stories contains few words that are not in the English vocabulary, and yet the thoroughly
American color of it cannot escape anyone who actually listens to the tongue spoken around him. Some of
the elements which enter into that color will be considered in the following pages. The American
vocabulary, of course, must be given first attention, for in it the earliest American divergences are embalmed
and it tends to grow richer and freer year after year, but attention will also be paid to materials and ways of
speech that are less obvious, and in particular to certain tendencies of the grammar of spoken American,
hitherto not investigated.

II. The Beginnings of American

1. The First Differentiation

William Gifford, the first editor of the Quarterly Review, is authority for the tale that a plan was set on foot
during the Revolution for the abandonment of English as the national language of America, and the
substitution of Hebrew in its place. An American chronicler, Charles Astor Bristed, makes the proposed
tongue Greek, and reports that the change was rejected on the ground that “it would be more convenient for
us to keep the language as it is, and make the English speak Greek.” 1 The story, though it has the support of
the editors of the Cambridge History of American Literature, 2 has an apocryphal smack; one suspects that
the savagely anti-American Gifford invented it. But, true or false, it well indicates the temper of those times.
The passion for complete political independence of England bred a general hostility to all English authority,
whatever its character, and that hostility, in the direction of present concern to us, culminated in the
revolutionary attitude of Noah Webster’s “Dissertations on the English Language,” printed in 1789. Webster
harbored no fantastic notion of abandoning English altogether, but he was eager to set up American as a
distinct and independent dialect. “Let us,” he said, “seize the present moment, and establish a national
language as well as a national government. … As an independent nation our honor requires us to have a
system of our own, in language as well as government.”

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 Long before this the challenge had been flung. Scarcely two years after the Declaration of Independence
Franklin was instructed by Congress, on his appointment as minister to France, to employ “the language of
the United States,” not simply English, in all his “replies or answers” to the communications of the ministry
of Louis XVI. And eight years before the Declaration Franklin himself had invented a new American
alphabet and drawn up a characteristically American scheme of spelling reform, and had offered plenty of
proof in it, perhaps unconsciously, that the standards of spelling and pronunciation in the New World had
already diverged noticeably from those accepted on the other side of the ocean. 3 In acknowledging the
dedication of Webster’s “Dissertations” Franklin endorsed both his revolt against English domination and his
forecast of widening differences in future, though protesting at the same time against certain Americanisms
that have since come into good usage, and even migrated to England. Nor was this all. “A Scotchman of the
name of Thornton,” having settled in the new republic and embraced its Kultur with horrible fervor,
proposed a new alphabet even more radical than Franklin’s and, according to Gifford, was doubly honored by
the American Philosophical Society for his project, first by being given its gold medal and secondly by having
his paper printed in its Transactions. This new alphabet included e’s turned upside down and i’s with their
dots underneath. “Di Amerike languids,” he argued, “uil des bi az distint az de gevernment, fri from aul foliz
or enfilosofikel fasen.”
Franklin’s protest to Webster was marked by his habitual mildness, but in other quarters dissent was voiced
with far less urbanity. The growing independence of the colonial dialect, not only in its spoken form, but also
in its most dignified written form, had begun, indeed, to attract the attention of purists in both England and
America, and they sought to dispose of it in its infancy by force majeure. One of the first and most vigorous
of the attacks upon it at home was delivered by John Witherspoon, a Scotch clergyman who came out in
1769 to be president of Princeton in partibus infidelium. This Witherspoon brought a Scotch hatred of the
English with him, and at once became a leader of the party of independence; he signed the Declaration to the
tune of much rhetoric, and was the only clergyman to sit in the Continental Congress. But in matters of
learning he was orthodox to the point of immovability, and the strange locutions that he encountered on all
sides aroused his pedagogic ire. “I have heard in this country,” he wrote in 1781, “in the senate, at the bar,
and from the pulpit, and see daily in dissertations from the press, errors in grammar, improprieties and
vulgarisms which hardly any person of the same class in point of rank and literature would have fallen into
in Great Britian.” 5 It was Witherspoon who coined the word Americanism—and at once the English
guardians of the sacred vessels began employing it as a general synonym for vulgarism and barbarism.
Another learned immigrant, the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, soon joined him. This Boucher was a friend of
Washington, but was driven back to England by his Loyalist sentiments. He took revenge by printing various
charges against the Americans, among them that of “making all the haste they can to rid themselves of the
[English] language.” He was vigorously supported by many Englishmen, including Samuel Johnson, whose
detestation of all things American is familiar to every reader of Boswell. Johnson’s recognition of and
aversion to Americanisms, in fact, long antedated the Revolution. When, in 1756, one Lewis Evans published
a volume of “Geographical, Historical, Philosophical, and Mechanical Essays,” with a map, the sage wrote of
it: “The map is engraved with sufficient beauty, and the treatise written with such elegance as the subject
admits, though not without some mixture of the American dialect; a trace of corruption to which every
language widely diffused must always be exposed.”

2. Sources of Early Americanisms

The first genuine Americanisms were undoubtedly words borrowed bodily from the Indian dialects—words,
in the main, indicating natural objects that had no counterparts in England. We find opossum, for example,
in the form of opasum, in Captain John Smith’s “Map of Virginia” (1612), and, in the form of apossoun, in a
Virginia document two years older. Moose is almost as old. The word is borrowed from the Algonquin musa,
and must have become familiar to the Pilgrim Fathers soon after their landing in 1620, for the woods of
Massachusetts then swarmed with the huge animals and there was no English name to designate them.
Again, there are skunk (from the Abenaki Indian seganku), hickory, squash, caribou, pecan, scuppernong,
paw-paw, raccoon, chinkapin, porgy, chipmunk, terrapin, menhaden, catalpa, persimmon and cougar. 10 Of
these, hickory and terrapin are to be found in Robert Beverley’s “History and Present State of Virginia”

14
(1705), and squash, chinkapin and persimmon are in documents of the preceding century. Many of these
words, of course, were shortened 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. Its
variations show a familiar effort to bring a new and strange word into harmony with the language—an effort
arising from what philologists call the law of Hobson-Jobson. This name was given to it by Col. Henry Yule
and A. C. Burnell, compilers of a standard dictionary of Anglo-Indian terms. They found that the British
soldiers in India, hearing strange words from the lips of the natives, often converted them into English words
of similar sound, though of widely different meaning. Thus the words Hassan and Hosein, frequently used by
the Mohammedans of the country in their devotions, were turned into Hobson-Jobson. The same process is
constantly in operation elsewhere. 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. No
doubt squash originated in the same way. That woodchuck did so is practically certain. 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.
1
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
last division belong hominy, pone, toboggan, canoe, pemmican, mackinaw, tapioca, moccasin, paw-paw,
papoose, sachem, sagamore, tomahawk, wigwam, succotash and squaw, all of which were in common
circulation by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Finally, new words were made during the period by
translating Indian terms, for example, war-path, war-paint, pale-face, big-chief, medicine-man, pipe-of-peace
and fire-water. The total number of such borrowings, direct and indirect, was a good deal larger than now
appears, for with the disappearance of the red man the use of loan-words from his dialects has decreased. In
our own time such words as papoose, sachem, tepee, wigwam and wampum have begun to drop out of
everyday use; 11 at an earlier period the language sloughed off ocelot, manitee, calumet, supawn, samp and
quahaug, or began to degrade them to the estate of provincialisms. 12 A curious phenomenon is presented by
the case of maize, which came into the colonial speech from some West Indian dialect, went over into
orthodox English, and from English into French, German and other Continental languages, and was then
abandoned by the colonists. We shall see other examples of that process later on.
From the very earliest days of English colonization the language of the colonists also received accretions
from the languages of the other colonizing nations. The French word portage, for example, was already in
common use before the end of the seventeenth century, and soon after came chowder, cache, caribou,
voyageur, and various words that, like the last-named, have since become localisms or disappeared
altogether. Before 1750 bureau, 15 gopher, batteau, bogus, and prairie were added, and caboose, a word of
Dutch origin, seems to have come in through the French. Carry-all is also French in origin, despite its
English quality. It comes, by the law of Hobson-Jobson, from the French carriole. The contributions of the
Dutch during the half century of their conflicts with the English included cruller, cold-slaw, dominie (for
parson), cookey, stoop, span (of horses), pit (as in peach-pit), waffle, hook (a point of land), scow, boss,
smearcase and Santa Claus. Schele 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 and bush-town. Barrère and Leland also
credit the Dutch with dander, which is commonly assumed to be an American corruption of dandruff. They
say that it is from the Dutch word donder (=thunder). Op donderen, in Dutch, means to burst into a sudden
rage. The chief Spanish contributions to American were to come after the War of 1812, with the opening of
the West, but creole, calaboose, palmetto, peewee, key (a small island), quadroon, octoroon, barbecue,
pickaninny and stampede had already entered the language in colonial days. Jerked beef came from the
Spanish charqui by the law of Hobson-Jobson. The Germans who arrived in Pennysylvania in 1682 also
undoubtedly gave a few words to the language, though it is often difficult to distinguish their contributions
from those of the Dutch. It seems very likely, however, that sauerkraut and noodle are to be credited to
them. Finally, the negro slaves brought in gumbo, goober, juba and voodoo (usually corrupted to hoodoo),
and probably helped to corrupt a number of other loan-words, for example banjo and breakdown. Banjo

15
seems to be derived from bandore or bandurria, modern French and Spanish forms of tambour, respectively.
It may, however, be an actual negro word; there is a term of like meaning, bania, in Senegambian. Ware says
that breakdown, designating a riotous negro dance, is a corruption of the French rigadon, but offers no
evidence. The word, used in the American sense, is not in the English dictionaries. Bartlett listed it as an
Americanism, but Thornton rejected it, apparently because, in the sense of a collapse, it has come into
colloquial use in England. Its etymology is not given in the American dictionaries. It may be a compound
regularly formed of English materials, like its brother, hoedown.

3. New Words of English Material

But of far more importance than these borrowings was the great stock of new words that the colonists coined
in English metal—words primarily demanded by the “new circumstances under which they were placed,”
but also indicative, in more than one case, of a delight in the business for its own sake. The American, even
in the early eighteenth century, already showed many of the characteristics that were to set him off from the
Englishman later on—his bold and some-what grotesque imagination, his contempt for dignified authority,
his lack of æsthetic sensitiveness, his extravagant humor. Among the first colonists there were many men of
education, culture and gentle birth, but they were soon swamped by hordes of the ignorant and illiterate, and
the latter, cut off from the corrective influence of books, soon laid their hands upon the language. It is
impossible to imagine the austere Puritan divines of Massachusetts inventing such verbs as to cowhide and to
logroll, or such adjectives as no-account and stumped, or such adverbs as no-how and lickety-split, or such
substantives as bull-frog, hog-wallow and hoe-cake; but under their eyes there arose a contumacious
proletariat which was quite capable of the business, and very eager for it. In Boston, so early as 1628, there
was a definite class of blackguard roisterers, chiefly made up of sailors and artisans; in Virginia, nearly a
decade earlier, John Pory, secretary to Governor Yeardley, lamented that “in these five months of my
continuance here there have come at one time or another eleven sails of ships into this river, but fraighted
more with ignorance than with any other marchansize.” In particular, the generation born in the New World
was uncouth and iconoclastic; 18 the only world it knew was a rough world, and the virtues that
environment engendered were not those of niceness, but those of enterprise and resourcefulness.
Upon men of this sort fell the task of bringing the wilderness to the ax and the plow, and with it went the
task of inventing a vocabulary for the special needs of the great adventure. Out of their loutish ingenuity
came a great number of picturesque names for natural objects, chiefly boldly descriptive compounds: bull-
frog, canvas-back, mud-hen, cat-bird, razor-back, garter-snake, ground-hog and so on. And out of an
inventiveness somewhat more urbane came such coinages as live-oak, potato-bug, turkey-gobbler, sweet-
potato, poke-weed, copper-head, eel-grass, reed-bird, egg-plant, blue-grass, pea-nut, pitch-pine, cling-stone
(peach), moccasin-snake, June-bug, lightning-bug, and butter-nut. Live-oak appears in a document of 1610;
bull-frog was familiar to Beverley in 1705; so was James-town weed (later reduced to Jimson weed, as the
English hurtleberry or whortleberry was reduced to huckleberry). These early Americans were not botanists.
They were often ignorant of the names of the plants that they encountered, even when those plants already
had English names, and so they exercised their fancy upon new ones. So arose Johnny-jump-up for the Viola
tricolor, and basswood for the common European linden or lime-tree (Tilia), and locust for the Robinia
pseudacacia and its allies. The Jimson weed itself was anything but a novelty, but the pioneers apparently did
not recognize it as the Datura stramonium, and so we find Beverley reporting that “some Soldiers, eating it in
a Salad, turn’d natural Fools upon it for several Days.” The grosser features of the landscape got a lavish
renaming, partly to distinguish new forms and partly out of an obvious desire to attain a more literal
descriptiveness. I have mentioned key and hook, the one borrowed from the Spanish and the other from the
Dutch. With them came run, branch, fork, bluff (noun), neck, barrens, bottoms, watershed, foot-hill, water-
gap, under-brush, bottom-land, clearing, notch, divide, knob, riffle, rolling-country and rapids, 19 and the
extension of pond from artificial pools to small natural lakes, and of creek from small arms of the sea to
shallow feeders of rivers. Such common English topographical terms as downs, weald, wold, fen, bog, fell,
chase, combe, dell, tarn, common, heath and moor disappeared from the colonial tongue, save as fossilized in
a few localisms and proper names. 20 So did bracken.

16
 With the new landscape came an entirely new mode of life—new foods, new forms of habitation, new
methods of agriculture, new kinds of hunting. A great swarm of neologisms thus arose, and, as in the
previous case, they were chiefly compounds. Back-country, back-woods, back-woodsman, back-settlers,
back-settlements: all these were in common use early in the eighteenth century. Back-log was used by
Increase Mather in 1684. Log-house appears in the Mary-land Archives for 1669. 21 Hoe-cake, Johnny-cake,
pan-fish, corn-dodger, roasting-ear, corn-crib, corn-cob and pop-corn were all familiar before the
Revolution. So were pine-knot, snow-plow, cold-snap, land-slide, ash-can, bob-sled, apple-butter, salt-lick,
prickly-heat, shell-road and cane-brake. Shingle was a novelty in 1705, but one S. Symonds wrote to John
Winthrop, of Ipswich, about a clap-boarded house in 1637. Frame-house seems to have come in with shingle.
Trail, half-breed, Indian-summer, Indian-giver, and Indian-file, were obviously suggested by the Red Men.
Statehouse was borrowed, perhaps, from the Dutch. Selectman is first heard of in 1685, displacing the English
alderman. Mush had displaced porridge by 1671. Soon afterwards hay-stack took the place of the English
hay-cock, and such common English terms as byre, mews, wier and wain began to disappear. Hired-man is to
be found in the Plymouth town records of 1737, and hired-girl followed soon after.
Various nautical terms peculiar to America, or taken into English from American sources, came in during
the eighteenth century, among them, schooner, cat-boat and pungy, not to recall batteau and canoe.
According to a recent historian of the American merchant marine, 24 the first schooner ever seen was
launched at Gloucester, Mass., in 1713. The word, it appears, was originally spelled scooner. To scoon was a
verb borrowed by the New Englanders from some Scotch dialect, and meant to skim or skip across the water
like a flat stone. As the first schooner left the ways and glided out into Gloucester harbor, an enraptured
spectator shouted: “Oh, see how she scoons!” “A scooner let her be!” replied Captain Andrew Robinson, her
builder—and all boats of her peculiar and novel fore-and-aft rig took the name thereafter. The Dutch
mariners borrowed the term and changed the spelling, and this change was soon accepted in America. The
Scotch root came from the Norse skunna, to hasten, and there are analogues in Icelandic, Anglo-Saxon and
Old High German. The origin of cat-boat and pungy I have been unable to determine. Perhaps the latter is
related in some way to pung, a one-horse sled or wagon. Pung was once widely used in the United States, but
of late it has sunk to the estate of a New England provincialism. Longfellow used it, and in 1857 a writer in
the Knickerbocker Magazine reported that pungs filled Broadway, in New York, after a snow-storm.
Most of these new words, of course, produced derivatives, for example, to shingle, to shuck (i. e., corn), to
trail and to caucus. Backwoods immediately begat backwoodsman and was itself turned into a common
adjective. The colonists, indeed, showed a beautiful disregard for linguistic nicety. At an early date they
shortened the English law-phrase, to convey by deed, to the simple verb, to deed. Pickering protested against
this as a barbarism, and argued that no self-respecting law-writer would employ it, but all the same it was
firmly entrenched in the common speech and it has remained there to this day. To table, for to lay on the
table, came in at the same time, and so did various forms represented by bindery, for book-binder’s shop. To
tomahawk appeared before 1650, and to scalp must have followed soon after. Within the next century and a
half they were reinforced by many other such new verbs, and by such adjectives made of nouns as no-
account and one-horse, and such nouns made of verbs as carry-all and goner, and such adverbs as no-how. In
particular, the manufacture of new verbs went on at a rapid pace. In his letter to Webster in 1789 Franklin
denounced to advocate, to progress, and to oppose—a vain enterprise, for all of them are now in perfectly
good usage. To advocate, indeed, was used by Thomas Nashe in 1589, and by John Milton half a century later,
but it seems to have been reinvented in America. In 1822 and again in 1838 Robert Southey, then poet
laureate, led two belated attacks upon it, as a barbarous Americanism, but its obvious usefulness preserved it,
and it remains in good usage on both sides of the Atlantic today—one of the earliest of the English
borrowings from America. In the end, indeed, even so ardent a purist as Richard Grant White adopted it, as
he did to placate.
Webster, though he agreed with Franklin in opposing to advocate, gave his imprimatur to to appreciate (i.
e., to rise in value, and is credited by Sir Charles Lyell 27 with having himself invented to demoralize. He
also approved to obligate. To antagonize seems to have been given currency by John Quincy Adams, to
immigrate by John Marshall, to eventuate by Gouverneur Morris, and to derange by George Washington.
Jefferson, always hospitable to new words, used to belittle in his “Notes on Virginia,” and Thornton thinks
that he coined it. Many new verbs were made by the simple process of prefixing the preposition to common

17
nouns, e. g., to clerk, to dicker, to dump, to negative, to blow (i. e., to bluster or boast), to cord (i. e., wood),
to stump, to room and to shin. Others were produced by phonological changes in verbs of the orthodox
vocabulary, e. g., to cavort from to curvet, and to snoop from to snook. Others arose as metaphors, e. g., to
whitewash (figuratively) and to squat (on unoccupied land). Others were made by hitching suffixes to nouns,
or by groping for roots, e. g., to deputize, to locate, to legislate, to infract, to compromit and to happify. Yet
others seem to have been produced by onomatopœia, e. g., to fizzle, or to have arisen by some other such
spontaneous process, so far unintelligible, e. g., to tote. With them came an endless series of verb-phrases, e.
g., to draw a bead, to face the music, to darken one’s doors, to take to the woods, to fly off the handle, to go
on the war-path and to saw wood—all obvious products of pioneer life. Many coinages of the pre-
Revolutionary era later disappeared. Jefferson used to ambition, but it dropped out nevertheless. So did
conflagrative, though a president of Yale gave it his imprimatur. So did to compromit (i. e., to compromise),
to homologize and to happify. Fierce battles raged ’round some of these words, and they were all violently
derided in England. Even so useful a verb as to locate, now in quite respectable usage, was denounced in the
third volume of the North American Review, and other purists of the times tried to put down to legislate.
The history of many of these Americanisms shows how vain is the effort of grammarians to combat the
normal processes of language development. I have mentioned the early opposition to dutiable, influential,
presidential, lengthy, to locate, to oppose, to advocate, to legislate, and to progress. Bogus, reliable and
standpoint were attacked with the same academic ferocity. All of them are to be found in Bryant’s Index
Expurgatorius 30 (circa 1870), and reliable was denounced by Bishop Coxe as “that abominable barbarism” so
late as 1886. 31 Edward S. Gould, another uncompromising purist, said of standpoint that it was “the bright
particular star … of solemn philological blundering” and “the very counterpart of Dogberry’s non-com.”
Gould also protested against to jeopardize, leniency and to demean, and Richard Grant White joined him in
an onslaught upon to donate. But all of these words are in good use in the United States today, and some of
them have gone over into English.

4. Changed Meanings

A number of the foregoing contributions to the American vocabulary, of course, were simply common
English words with changed meanings. To squat, in the sense of to crouch, had been sound English for
centuries; what the colonists did was to attach a figurative meaning to it, and then bring that figurative
meaning into wider usage than the literal meaning. In a somewhat similar maner they changed the
significance of pond, as I have pointed out. So, too, with creek. In English it designated (and still designates) a
small inlet or arm of a large river or of the sea; in American, so early as 1674, it designated any small stream.
Many other such changed meanings crept into American in the early days. A typical one was the use of lot to
designate a parcel of land. Thornton says, perhaps inaccurately, that it originated in the fact that the land in
New England was distributed by lot. Whatever the truth, lot, to this day, is in almost universal use in the
United States, though rare in England. Our conveyancers, in describing real property, always speak of “all
that lot or parcel of land.” 34 Other examples of the application of old words to new purposes are afforded by
freshet, barn and team. A freshet, in eighteenth century English, meant any stream of fresh water; the
colonists made it signify an inundation. A barn was a house or shed for storing crops; in the colonies the
word came to mean a place for keeping cattle also. A team, in English, was a pair of draft horses; in the
colonies it came to mean both horses and vehicle. 1
The process is even more clearly shown in the history of such words as corn and shoe. Corn, in orthodox
English, means grain for human consumption, and especially wheat, e. g., the Corn Laws. The earliest
settlers, following this usage, gave the name of Indian corn to what the Spaniards, following the Indians
themselves, had called maíz. The term appears in Bradford’s “History of Plimouth Plantation” (1647) and in
Mourt’s “Relation” (1622). But gradually the adjective fell off, and by the middle of the eighteenth century
maize was called simply corn and grains in general were called breadstuffs. Thomas Hutchinson, discoursing
to George III in 1774, used corn in this restricted sense, speaking of “rye and corn mixed.” “What corn?”
asked George. “Indian corn,” explained Hutchinson, “or, as it is called in authors, maize.” So with shoe. In
English it meant (and still means) a topless article of footwear, but the colonists extended its meaning to
varieties covering the ankle, thus displacing the English boot, which they reserved for foot coverings

18
reaching at least to the knee. To designate the English shoe they reaching to use the word slipper. This
distinction between English and American usage still prevails, despite the fashion which has lately sought to
revive boot in the United States, and with it its derivatives, boot-shop and boot-maker.
Store, shop, lumber, pie, dry-goods, cracker, rock and partridge among nouns and to haul, to jew, to notify
and to heft 36 among verbs offer further examples of changed meanings. Down to the middle of the
eighteenth century shop continued to designate a retail establishment in America, as it does in England to
this day. Store was applied only to a large establishment—one showing, in some measure, the character of a
warehouse. But in 1774 a Boston young man was advertising in the Massachusetts Spy for “a place as a clerk
in a store” (three Americanisms in a row!). Soon afterward shop began to acquire its special American
meaning of a factory, e. g., machine-shop. Meanwhile store completely displaced shop in the English sense,
and it remained for a late flowering of Anglomania, as in the case of boot and shoe, to restore, in a measure,
the status quo ante. Lumber, in eighteenth century English, meant disused furniture, and this is its common
meaning in England today, as is shown by lumber-room. But the colonists early employed it to designate cut
timber, and that use of it is now universal in America. Its familiar derivatives, e. g., lumber-yard, lumberman,
lumberjack, greatly reinforce this usage. Dry-goods, in England, means, “nonliquid goods, as corn” (i. e.,
wheat); in the United States the term means “textile fabrics or wares.” 37 The difference had appeared before
1725. Rock, in English, always means a large mass; in America it may mean a small stone, as in rock-pile and
to throw a rock. The Puritans were putting rocks into the foundations of their meeting-houses so early as
1712. Cracker began to be used for biscuit before the Revolution. Tavern displaced inn at the same time. As
for partridge, it is cited by a late authority 39 as a salient example of changed meaning, along with corn and
store. In England the term is applied only to the true partridge (Perdix perdix) and its nearly related varieties,
but in the United States it is also used to designate the ruffed grouse (Bonasa umbellus), the common quail
(Colinus virginianus) and various other tetraonoid birds. This confusion goes back to Colonial times. So with
rabbit. Zoologically speaking, there are no native rabbits in the United States; they are all hares. But the early
colonists, for some unknown reason, dropped the word hare out of their vocabulary, and it is rarely heard in
American speech to this day. When it appears it is almost always applied to the so-called Belgian hare,
which, curiously enough, is not a hare at all, but a true rabbit. Bay and bayberry have also acquired special
American meanings. In England bay is used to designate the bay-tree (Laurus nobilis); in America it
designates a shrub, the wax myrtle (Myrica cerifera). Both the tree and the shrub have berries. Those of the
latter are used to make the well-known bayberry candles.
To haul, in English, means to move by force or violence; in the colonies it came to mean to transport in a
vehicle, and this meaning survives in sound American. To jew, in English, means to cheat; the colonists made
it mean to haggle, and devised to jew down to indicate an effort to work a reduction in price. To heft, in
English, means to lift up; the early Americans made it mean to weigh by lifting, and kept the idea of
weighing in its derivatives, e. g., hefty. Finally, there is the familiar American misuse of Miss or Mis’ (pro
miz) for Mrs. It was so widespread by 1790 that on November 17 of that year Webster solemnly denounced it
in the American Mercury.

5. Colonial Pronunciation

The debate that long raged over the pronunciation of classical Latin exhibits the difficulty of determining
with exactness the shades of sound in the speech of a people long departed from earth. The American
colonists, of course, are much nearer to us than the Romans, and so we should have relatively little difficulty
in determining just how they pronounced this or that word, but against the fact of their nearness stands the
neglect of our phonologists. What Sweet did to clear up the history of English pronunciation, 50 and what
Wilhelm Crossen did for Latin, no American philologian has yet thought to attempt for American. The
literature is almost if not quite a blank. But here and there we may get a hint of the facts, and though the sum
of them is not large, they at least serve to set at rest a number of popular errors.
The colonists remained faithful much longer than the English to various other vowel-sounds that were
facing change in the eighteenth century, for example, the long e-sound in heard. Webster says that the
custom of rhyming heard with bird instead of with feared came in at the beginning of the Revolution. “To
most people in this country,” he adds, “the English pronunciation appears like affectation.” He also argues for

19
rhyming deaf with leaf, and protests against inserting a y-sound before the u in such words as nature.
Franklin’s authority stands behind git for get. This pronunciation, according to Menner, was correct in
seventeenth century England, and perhaps down to the middle of the next century. So was the use of the
Continental i-sound in oblige, making it obleege. It is probable that the colonists clung to these disappearing
usages much longer than the English. The latter, according to Webster, were unduly responsive to illogical
fashions set by the exquisites of the court and by popular actors. He blames Garrick, in particular, for many
extravagant innovations, most of them not followed in the colonies. But Garrick was surely not responsible
for the use of a long i-sound in such words as motive, nor for the corruption of mercy to marcy. Webster
denounced both of these pronunciations. The second he ascribed somewhat lamely to the fact that the letter r
is called ar, and proposed to dispose of it by changing the ar to er.
The majority of Americans early dropped the initial h-sound in such words as when and where, but so far
as I can determine they never elided it at the beginning of other words, save in the case of herb and humble.
This elision is commonly spoken of as a cockney vulgarism, but it has extended to the orthodox English
speech. In ostler the initial h is openly left off; in hotel and hospital it is sometimes not clearly sounded, even
by careful Englishmen. Certain English words in h, in which the h is now sounded, betray its former silence
by the fact that not a but an is still put before them. It is still good English usage to write an hotel and an
historical.
The great authority of Webster was sufficient to establish the American pronunciation of schedule. In
England the sch is always given the soft sound, but Webster decided for the hard sound, as in scheme. The
variance persists to this day. The name of the last letter of the alphabet, which is always zed in English, is
usually made zee in the United States. Thornton shows that this Americanism arose in the eighteenth
century.

III. The Period of Growth

1. Character of the New Nation

The English of the United States thus began to be recognizably differentiated from the English of England,
both in vocabulary and in pronunciation, by the opening of the nineteenth century, but as yet its growth was
hampered by two factors, the first being the lack of a national literature of any expanse and dignity and the
second being an internal political disharmony which greatly conditioned and enfeebled the national
consciousness. During the actual Revolution common aims and common dangers forced the Americans to
show a united front, but once they had achieved political independence they developed conflicting interests,
and out of those conflicting interests came suspicions and hatreds which came near wrecking the new
confederation more than once. Politically, their worst weakness, perhaps, was an inability to detach
themselves wholly from the struggle for domination then going on in Europe. The surviving Loyalists of the
revolutionary era—estimated by some authorities to have constituted fully a third of the total population in
1776—were ardently in favor of England, and such patriots as Jefferson were as ardently in favor of France.
This engrossment in the quarrels of foreign nations was what Washington warned against in his Fare-well
Address. It was at the bottom of such bitter animosities as that between Jefferson and Hamilton. It inspired
and perhaps excused the pessimism of such men as Burr. Its net effect was to make it difficult for the people
of the new nation to think of themselves, politically, as Americans. Their state of mind, vacillating,
uncertain, alternately timorous and pugnacious, has been well described by Henry Cabot Lodge in his essay
on “Colonialism in America.” 1 Soon after the Treaty of Paris was signed, someone referred to the late
struggle, in Franklin’s hearing, as the War for Independence. “Say, rather, the War of the Revolution,” said
Franklin. “The War for Independence is yet to be fought.”
“That struggle,” adds Lossing, “occurred, and that independence was won, by the Americans in the War of
1812.” 2 In the interval the new republic had passed through a period of Sturm und Drang whose gigantic

20
perils and passions we have begun to forget—a period in which disaster ever menaced, and the foes within
were no less bold and pertinacious than the foes without. Jefferson, perhaps, carried his fear of “monocrats”
to the point of monomania, but under it there was undoubtedly a body of sound fact. The poor debtor class
(including probably a majority of the veterans of the Revolution) had been fired by the facile doctrines of the
French Revolution to demands which threatened the country with bankruptcy and anarchy, and the class of
property-owners, in reaction, went far to the other extreme. On all sides, indeed, there flourished a strong
British party, and particularly in New England, where the so-called codfish aristocracy (by no means extinct
today) exhibited an undisguised Anglomania, and looked forward confidently to a rapprochement with the
mother country. This Anglomania showed itself, not only in ceaseless political agitation, but also in an
elaborate imitation of English manners. We have already seen how it even extended to the pronunciation of
the language.
In our own time, with the renewal of the centuries-old struggle for power in Europe, there has been a
revival of the old itch to take a hand, with results almost as menacing to the unity and security of the
Republic as those visible when Washington voiced his warning. But in his day he seems to have been heard
and heeded, and so colonialism gradually died out. The first sign of the dawn of a new national order came
with the election of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency in 1800. The issue in the campaign was a highly
complex one, but under it lay a plain conflict between democratic independence and the European doctrine
of dependence and authority; and with the Alien and Sedition Laws about his neck, so vividly reminiscent of
the issues of the Revolution itself, Adams went down to defeat. Jefferson was violently anti-British and pro-
French; he saw all the schemes of his political opponents, indeed, as English plots; he was the man who
introduced the bugaboo into American politics. His first acts after his inauguration were to abolish all
ceremonial at the court of the republic, and to abandon spoken discourses to Congress for written messages.
That ceremonial, which grew up under Washington, was an imitation, he believed, of the formality of the
abhorrent Court of St. James; as for the speeches to Congress, they were palpably modelled upon the speeches
from the throne of the English kings. 4 Both reforms met with wide approval; the exactions of the English,
particularly on the high seas, were beginning to break up the British party. But confidence in the solidarity
and security of the new nation was still anything but universal. The surviving doubts, indeed, were strong
enough to delay the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, providing for more direct
elections of President and Vice-President, until the end of 1804, and even then three of the five New
England states rejected it, 5 and have never ratified it, in fact, to this day. Democracy was still experimental,
doubtful, full of gun-powder. In so far as it had actually come into being, it had come as a boon conferred
from above. Jefferson, its protagonist, was the hero of the populace, but he was not of the populace himself,
nor did he ever quite trust it.
All things American, indeed, were under the ban in England after the War of 1812, and Sydney Smith’s
famous sneer—“In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play?
or looks at an American picture or statue?”—was echoed and re-echoed in other planes. The Yankee, flushed
with victory, became the pet abomination of the English, and the chief butt of the incomparable English
talent for moral indignation. There was scarcely an issue of the Quarterly Review, the Edinburgh, the
Foreign Quarterly, the British Review or Blackwood’s, for a generation following 1812, in which he was not
stupendously assaulted. Gifford, Sydney Smith and the poet Southey became specialists in this business; it
almost took on the character of a holy war; even such mild men as Wordsworth had a hand in it. It was
argued that the Americans were rogues and swindlers, that they lived in filth and squalor, that they were
boors in social intercourse, that they were poltroons and savages in war, that they were depraved and
criminal, that they were wholly devoid of the remotest notion of decency or honor. “See what it is,” said
Southey in 1812, “to have a nation to take its place among civilized states before it has either gentlemen or
scholars! They [the Americans] have in the course of twenty years acquired a distinct national character for
low and lying knavery; and so well do they deserve it that no man ever had any dealings with them without
having proofs of its truth.” The Quarterly, summing up in January, 1814, accused them of a multitude of
strange and hair-raising offenses: employing naked colored women to wait upon their tables; kidnapping
Scotchmen, Irishmen, Welshmen and Hollanders and selling them into slavery; fighting one another
incessantly under rules which made it “allowable to peel the skull, tear out the eyes, and smooth away the
nose”; and so on, and so on. Various Americans, after a decade of this snorting, went to the defense of their

21
countrymen, among them Irving, Cooper, Timothy Dwight, J. K. Paulding, John Neal, Edward Everett and
Robert Walsh. Paulding, in “John Bull in America, or, the New Munchausen,” published in 1825, attempted
satire. Even a Briton, James Sterling, warned his fellow-Britons that, if they continued their intolerant abuse,
they would “turn into bitterness the last drops of good-will toward England that exist in the United States.”
But the denunciation kept up year after year, and there was, indeed, no genuine relief until 1914, when the
sudden prospect of disaster caused the English to change their tune, and even to find all their own great
virtues in the degraded and disgusting Yankee, now so useful as a rescuer. This new enthusiasm for him was
tried very severely by his slowness to come into the war, but in the main there was politeness for him so long
as the emergency lasted, and all the British talent for horror and invective was concentrated, down to 1919 or
thereabout, upon the Prussian.
The word does is split into two syllables, and pronounced do-es. Where, for some incomprehensible reason,
is converted into whare, there into thare; and I remember, on mentioning to an acquaintance that I had
called on a gentleman of taste in the arts, he asked “whether he shew (showed) me his pictures.” Such words
as oratory and dilatory are pronounced with the penult syllable long and accented; missionary becomes
missionairy, angel, ângel, danger, dânger, etc.
But this is not all. The Americans have chosen arbitrarily to change the meaning of certain old and
established English words, for reasons they cannot explain, and which I doubt much whether any European
philologist could understand. The word clever affords a case in point. It has here no connexion with talent,
and simply means pleasant and (or) amiable. Thus a good-natured blockhead in the American vernacular is a
clever man, and having had this drilled into me, I foolishly imagined that all trouble with regard to this
word, at least, was at an end. It was not long, however, before I heard of a gentleman having moved into a
clever house, another succeeding to a clever sum of money, of a third embarking in a clever ship, and making
a clever voyage, with a clever cargo; and of the sense attached to the word in these various combinations, I
could gain nothing like a satisfactory explanation.
The privilege of barbarizing the King’s English is assumed by all ranks and conditions of men. Such words as
slick, kedge and boss, it is true, are rarely used by the better orders; but they assume unlimited liberty in the
use of expect, reckon, guess and calculate, and perpetrate other conversational anomalies with remorseless
impunity.
This Briton, as usual, was as full of moral horror as of grammatical disgust, and put his denunciation upon
the loftiest of grounds. “I will not go on with this unpleasant subject,” he concluded, “nor should I have
alluded to it, but I feel it something of a duty to express the natural feeling of an Englishman at finding the
language of Shakespeare and Milton thus gratuitously degraded. Unless the present progress of change be
arrested, by an increase of taste and judgment in the more educated classes, there can be no doubt that, in
another century, the dialect of the Americans will become utterly unintelligible to an Englishman, and that
the nation will be cut off from the advantages arising from their participation in British literature. If they
contemplate such an event with complacency, let them go on and prosper; they have only to progress in their
present course, and their grandchildren bid fair to speak a jargon as novel and peculiar as the most patriotic
American linguist can desire.”
Such extravagant denunciations, in the long run, were bound to make Americans defiant, but while they
were at their worst they produced a contrary effect. That is to say, they made all the American writers of a
more delicate aspiration extremely self-conscious and diffident. The educated classes, even against their will,
were daunted by the torrent of abuse; they could not help finding in it an occasional reasonableness, an
accidental true hit. The result, despite the efforts of Channing, Knapp and other such valiant defenders of the
native author, was uncertainty and skepticism in native criticism. “The first step of an American entering
upon a literary career,” says Lodge, writing of the first quarter of the century, “was to pretend to be an
Englishman in order that he might win the approval, not of Englishmen, but of his own countrymen.”
Cooper, in his first novel, “Precaution,” chose an English scene, imitated English models, and obviously
hoped to placate the critics thereby. Irving, too, in his earliest work, showed a considerable discretion, and
his “History of New York,” as everyone knows, was first published anonymously. But this puerile spirit did
not last long. The English onslaughts were altogether too vicious to be received lying down; their very fury
demanded that they be met with a united and courageous front. Cooper, in his second novel, “The Spy,”
boldly chose an American setting and American characters, and though the influence of his wife, who came

22
of a Loyalist family, caused him to avoid any direct attack upon the English, he attacked them indirectly, and
with great effect, by opposing an immediate and honorable success to their derisions. “The Spy” ran through
three editions in four months; it was followed by his long line of thoroughly American novels; in 1834 he
formally apologized to his countrymen for his early truancy in “Precaution.” Irving, too, soon adopted a
bolder tone, and despite his English predilections, he refused an offer of a hundred guineas for an article for
the Quarterly Review, made by Gifford in 1828, on the ground that “the Review has been so persistently
hostile to our country that I cannot draw a pen in its service.”
The same year saw the publication of the first edition of Webster’s American Dictionary of the English
Language, and a year later followed Samuel L. Knapp’s “Lectures on American Literature,” the first history of
the national letters ever attempted. Knapp, in his preface, thought it necessary to prove, first of all, that an
American literature actually existed, and Webster, in his introduction, was properly apologetic, but there was
no real need for timorousness in either case, for the American attitude toward the attack of the English was
now definitely changing from uneasiness to defiance. The English critics, in fact, had overdone the thing, and
though their clatter was to keep up for many years more, they no longer spread their old terror or had as
much influence as of yore. Of a sudden, as if in answer to them, doubts turned to confidence, and then into
the wildest sort of optimism, not only in politics and business, but also in what passed for the arts. Knapp
boldly defied the English to produce a “tuneful sister” surpassing Mrs. Sigourney; more, he argued that the
New World, if only by reason of its superior scenic grandeur, would eventually hatch a poetry surpassing
even that of Greece and Rome. “What are the Tibers and Scamanders,” he demanded, “measured by the
Missouri and the Amazon? Or what the loveliness of Illysus or Avon by the Connecticut or the Potomack?”

2. The Language in the Making

All this jingoistic bombast, however, was directed toward defending, not so much the national vernacular as
the national belles lettres. True enough, an English attack upon a definite American locution always brought
out certain critical minute-men, but in the main they were anything but hospitable to the racy neologisms
that kept crowding up from below, and most of them were eager to be accepted as masters of orthodox
English and very sensitive to the charge that their writing was bestrewn with Americanisms. A glance
through the native criticism of the time will show how ardently even the most uncompromising patriots
imitated the Johnsonian jargon then fashionable in England. Fowler and Griswold followed pantingly in the
footsteps of Macaulay; their prose is extraordinarily self-conscious, and one searches it in vain for any
concession to colloquialism. Poe, the master of them all, achieved a style so ornate that many an English
leader-writer must have studied it with envy. A few bolder spirits, as we have seen, spoke out for national
freedom in language as well as in letters—among them, Channing—but in the main the Brahmins of the time
were conservatives in this department and it is difficult to imagine Emerson or Irving or Bryant sanctioning
the innovations later adopted so easily by Howells. Lowell and Walt Whitman, in fact, were the first men of
letters, properly so called, to give specific assent to the great changes that were firmly fixed in the national
speech during the half century between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. Lowell did so in his preface to
the second series of “The Biglow Papers.” Whitman made his declaration in “An American Primer.” In
discussing “Leaves of Grass,” he said: “I sometimes think that the entire book is only a language experiment—
that it is an attempt to give the spirit, the body and the man, new words, new potentialities of speech—an
American, a cosmopolitan (for the best of America is the best cosmopolitanism) range of self-expression.”
And then: “The Americans are going to be the most fluent and melodious-voiced people in the world—and
the most perfect users of words. The new world, the new times, the new people, the new vistas need a new
tongue according—yes, what is more, they will have such a new tongue—will not be satisfied until it is
evolved.” 15 According to Louis Untermeyer, a diligent and enthusiastic Whitmanista, old Walt deserves to
be called “the father of the American language.” 16 He goes on:
This, in spite of its grandiloquent sound, is what he truly was. When the rest of literary America was still
indulging in the polite language of pulpits and the lifeless rhetoric of its libraries, Whitman not only sensed
the richness and vigor of the casual word, the colloquial phrase—he championed the vitality of slang, the
freshness of our quickly assimilated jargons, the indigenous beauty of vulgarisms. He even predicted that no
future native literature could exist that neglected this racy speech, that the vernacular of people as opposed to

23
the language of literati would form the living accents of the best poets to come. One has only to observe the
contemporary works of Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, James Oppenheim, Edgar Lee Masters, John Hall
Wheelock, Vachel Lindsay and a dozen others to see how Whitman’s prophecy has been fulfilled.
Words, especially the neglected words regarded as too crude and literal for literature, fascinated Whitman.
The idea of an enriched language was scarcely ever out of his mind.… This interest … grew to great
proportions; it became almost an obsession.
Whitman himself spoke of “An American Primer” as “an attempt to describe the growth of an American
English enjoying a distinct identity.” He proposed an American dictionary containing the actual everyday
vocabulary of the people. To quote him again:
The Real Dictionary will give all words that exist in use, the bad words as well as any. The Real Grammar
will be that which declares itself a nucleus of the spirit of the laws, with liberty to all to carry out the spirit of
the laws; even by violating them, if necessary.
Many of the slang words are our best; slang words among fighting men, gamblers, thieves, are powerful
words.… Much of America is shown in these and in newspaper names, and in names of characteristic
amusements and games.…
Our tongue is full of strong words, native or adopted, to express the blood-born passion of the race for
rudeness and resistance, as against mere polish.… These words are alive and sinewy—they walk, look, step
with an air of command.…
Ten thousand native idiomatic words are growing, or are already grown, out of which vast numbers could be
used by American writers, with meaning and effect—words that would give that taste of identity and locality
which is so dear in literature—words that would be welcomed by the nation, being of the national blood.

3. The Expanding Vocabulary

A glance at some of the characteristic coinages of the time, as they are revealed in the Congressional Globe,
in contemporary newspapers and political tracts, and in that grotesque small literature of humor which began
with Judge Thomas C. Haliburton’s “Sam Slick” in 1835, is almost enough to make one sympathize with Dean
Alford. Bartlett quotes to doxologize from the Christian Disciple, a quite reputable religious paper of the 40’s.
To citizenize was used and explained by Senator Young, of Illinois, in the Senate on February 1, 1841, and he
gave Noah Webster as authority for it. To funeralize and to missionate, along with consociational, were
contributions of the backwoods pulpit; perhaps it also produced hell-roaring and hellion, the latter of which
was a favorite of the Mormons and even got into a sermon by Henry Ward Beecher. To deacon, a verb of
decent mien in colonial days, signifying to read a hymn line by line, responded to the rough humor of the
time, and began to mean to swindle or adulterate, e. g., to put the largest berries at the top of the box, to
extend one’s fences sub rosa, or to mix sand with sugar. A great rage for extending the vocabulary by the use
of suffixes seized upon the corn-fed etymologists, and they produced a formidable new vocabulary in -ize, -
ate, -ify, -acy, -ous and -ment. Such inventions as to obligate, to concertize, to questionize, retiracy,
savagerous, coatee (a sort of diminutive for coat) and citified appeared in the popular vocabulary and even got
into more or less good usage. Fowler, in 1850, cited publishment and releasement with no apparent thought
that they were uncouth. And at the same time many verbs were made by the simple process of back
formation, as, to resurrect, to excurt, to resolute, to burgle 18 and to enthuse.
Some of these inventions, after flourishing for a generation or more, were retired with blushes during the
period of æsthetic consciousness following the Civil War, but a large number have survived to our own day,
and are in good usage. Not even the most bilious purist would think of objecting to to affiliate, to endorse, to
collide, to jeopardize, to predicate, to progress, to itemize, to resurrect or to Americanize today, and yet all of
them gave grief to the judicious when they first appeared in the debates of Congress, brought there by
statesmen from the backwoods. Nor to such simpler verbs of the period as to corner (i. e., the market), to boss
and to lynch. Nor perhaps to to boom, to boost, to kick (in the sense of to protest), to coast (on a sled), to
engineer, to chink (i. e., logs), to feaze, to splurge, to bulldoze, to aggravate (in the sense of to anger), to yank
and to crawfish. These verbs have entered into the very fibre of the American vulgate, and so have many
nouns derived from them, e. g., boomer, boom-town, bouncer, kicker, kick, splurge, roller-coaster. A few of

24
them, e. g., to collide and to feaze, were archaic English terms brought to new birth; a few others, e. g., to
holler 21 and to muss, were obviously mere corruptions. But a good many others, e. g., to bulldoze, to
hornswoggle and to scoot, were genuine inventions, and redolent of the soil.
It was not, however, among the verbs and adjectives that the American word-coiners of the first half of the
century achieved their gaudiest innovations, but among the substantives. Here they had temptation and
excuse in plenty, for innumerable new objects and relations demanded names, and here they exercised their
fancy without restraint. Setting aside loan words, which will be considered later, three main varieties of new
nouns were thus produced. The first consisted of English words rescued from obsolescence or changed in
meaning, the second of compounds manufactured of the common materials of the mother-tongue, and the
third of entirely new inventions. Of the first class, good specimens are deck (of cards), gulch, gully and
billion, the first three old English words restored to usage in America and the last a sound English word
changed in meaning. Of the second class, examples are offered by gum-shoe, mortgage-shark, carpet-bagger,
cut-off, mass-meeting, dead-beat, dug-out, shot-gun, stag-party, wheat-pit, horse-sense, chipped-beef, oyster-
supper, buzz-saw, chain-gang and hell-box. And of the third there are instances in buncombe, greaser,
conniption, bloomer, campus, galoot, maverick, roustabout, bugaboo and blizzard.
Of these coinages perhaps those of the second class are most numerous and characteristic. In them
American exhibits one of its most marked tendencies: a habit of achieving short cuts in speech by a process of
agglutination. Why explain laboriously, as an Englishman might, that the notes of a new bank (in a day of
innumerable new banks) are insufficiently secure? Call them wild-cat notes and have done! Why describe a
gigantic rain storm with the lame adjectives of everyday? Call it a cloud-burst and immediately a vivid
picture of it is conjured up. Rough-neck is a capital word; it is more apposite and savory than the English
navvy, and it is over-whelmingly more American. Square-meal is another. Fire-eater is yet another. And the
same instinct for the terse, the eloquent and the picturesque is in boiled-shirt, blow-out, big-bug, claim-
jumper, spread-eagle, come-down, back-number, claw-hammer (coat), bottom-dollar, poppy-cock, cold-snap,
back-talk, back-taxes, calamity-howler, fire-bug, grab-bag, grip-sack, grub-stake, pay-dirt, tender-foot,
stocking-feet, ticket-scalper, store-clothes, small-potatoes, cake-walk, prairie-schooner, round-up, snake-
fence, flat-boat, under-the-weather, on-the-hoof, and jumping-off-place. These compounds (there must be
thousands of them) have been largely responsible for giving the language its characteristic tang and color.
Such specimens as bell-hop, semi-occasional, chair-warmer and down-and-out are as distinctively American
as baseball or the quick-lunch.
The spirit of the language appears scarcely less clearly in some of the coinages of the other classes. There
are, for example, the English words that have been extended or restricted in meaning, e. g., docket (for court
calendar), betterment (for improvement to property), collateral (for security), crank (for fanatic), jumper (for
tunic), tickler (for memorandum or reminder), 23 Carnival (in such phrases as carnival of crime), scrape (for
fight or difficulty), 24 Flurry (of snow, or in the market), suspenders, diggings (for habitation) and range.
Again, there are the new assemblings of English materials, e. g., doggery, rowdy, teetotaler, goatee, tony and
cussedness. Yet again, there are the purely artificial words, e. g., sockdolager, hunky-dory, scalawag,
guyascutis, spondulix, slumgullion, rambunctious, scrumptious, to skedaddle, to absquatulate and to
exfluncticate. 25 In the use of the last-named coinages fashions change. In the 40’s to absquatulate was in
good usage, but it has since disappeared. Most of the other inventions of the time, however, have to some
extent survived, and it would be difficult to find an American of today whom did not know the meaning of
scalawag and rambunctious and who did not occasionally use them. A whole series of artificial American
words groups itself around the prefix ker, for example, ker-flop, ker-splash, ker-thump, ker-bang, ker-plunk,
ker-slam and ker-flummux. This prefix and its onomatopœic daughters have been borrowed by the English,
but Thornton and Ware agree that it is American. Several of my correspondents suggest that it may have
been suggested by the German prefix ge- —that it may represent a humorous attempt to make German words
by analogy, e. g., geflop, gesplash, etc. I pass on this guess for what it is worth. Certainly such American-
German words must have been manufactured frequently by the earliest “Dutch” comedians, and it is quite
possible that some of them got into the language, and that the ge- was subsequently changed to ker-.
In the first chapter I mentioned the superior imaginativeness revealed by Americans in meeting linguistic
emergencies, whereby, for example, in seeking names for new objects introduced by the building of railroads,
they surpassed the English plough and crossing-plate with cow-catcher and frog. That was in the 30’s.

25
Already at that day the two languages were so differentiated that they produced wholly distinct railroad
nomenclatures. Such commonplace American terms as box-car, caboose and air-line are unknown in
England. So are freight-car, flagman, towerman, switch, switching-engine, switch-yard, switchman, track-
walker, engineer, baggage-room, baggage-check, baggage-smasher, accommodation-train, baggage-master,
conductor, express-car, flat-car, hand-car, way-bill, expressman, express-office, fast-freight, wrecking-crew,
jerk-water, commutation-ticket, commuter, round-trip, mileage-book, ticket-scalper, depot, limited, hot-box,
iron-horse, stop-over, tie, rail, fish-plate, run, train-boy, chair-car, club-car, diner, sleeper, bumpers, mail-
clerk, passenger-coach, day-coach, railroad-man, ticket-office, truck and right-of-way, not to mention the
verbs, to flag, to express, to dead-head, to side-swipe, to stop-over, to fire (i. e., a locomotive), to switch, to
side-track, to railroad, to commute, to telescope and to clear the track. These terms are in constant use in
America; their meaning is familiar to all Americans; many of them have given the language everyday figures
of speech. 26 But the majority of them would puzzle an Englishman, just as the English luggage-van,
permanent-way, goods-waggon, guard, carrier, booking-office, railway-rug, R. S. O. (railway sub-office),
tripper, line, points, shunt, metals and bogie would puzzle the average untraveled American.
In two other familiar fields very considerable differences between English and American are visible; in both
fields they go back to the era before the Civil War. They are politics and that department of social
intercourse which has to do with drinking. Many characteristic American political terms originated in
revolutionary days and have passed over into English. Of such sort are caucus and mileage. But the majority
of those in common use today were coined during the extraordinarily exciting campaigns following the
defeat of Adams by Jefferson. Charles Ledyard Norton has devoted a whole book to their etymology and
meaning; 27 the number is far too large for a list of them to be attempted here. But a few characteristic
specimens may be recalled, for example, the simple agglutinates: omnibus-bill, banner-state, favorite-son,
anxious-bench, gag-rule, executive-session, mass-meeting, office-seeker and straight-ticket; the humorous
metaphors: pork-barrel, pie-counter, wire-puller, land-slide, carpet-bagger, lame-duck and on the fence; the
old words put to new uses: plank, pull, platform, machine, precinct, slate, primary, floater, repeater, bolter,
stalwart, filibuster, regular and fences; the new coinages: gerrymander, heeler, buncombe, roorback,
mugwump and to bulldoze; the new derivatives: abolitionist, candidacy, boss-rule, per-diem, to lobby and
boodler; and the almost innumerable verbs and verb-phrases: to knife, to split a ticket, to go up Salt River, to
bolt, to eat crow, to boodle, to divvy, to grab and to run. An English candidate never runs; he stands. To run,
according to Thornton, was already used in America in 1789; it was universal by 1820. Platform came in at
the same time. Machine was first applied to a political organization by Aaron Burr. The use of mugwump is
commonly thought to have originated in the Blaine campaign of 1884, but it really goes back to the 30’s.
Anxious-bench (or anxious-seat) at first designated only the place occupied by the penitent at revivals, but
was used in its present political sense in Congress so early as 1842. Banner-state appears in Niles’ Register for
December 5, 1840. Favorite-son appears in an ode addressed to Washington on his visit to Ports-mouth, N.
H., in 1789, but it did not acquire its present ironical sense until it was applied to Martin Van Buren.
Thornton has traced bolter to 1812, filibuster to 1863, roorback to 1844, and split-ticket to 1842. Regularity
was an issue in Tammany Hall in 1822. 28 There were primaries in New York city in 1827, and hundreds of
repeaters voted. In 1829 there were lobby-agents at Albany, and they soon became lobbyists; in 1832
lobbying had already extended to Washington. All of these terms are now as firmly imbedded in the
American Vocabulary as election or congressman.
In the department of conviviality the imaginativeness of Americans was shown both in the invention and in
the naming of new and often highly complex beverages. So vast was the production of novelties in the days
before Prohibition, in fact, that England borrowed many of them and their names with them. And not only
England: one buys cocktails and gin-fizzes to this day in “American bars” that stretch from Paris to
Yokohama. Cocktail, stone-fence and sherry-cobbler were mentioned by Irving in 1809; by Thackeray’s
time they were already well-known in England. Thornton traces the sling to 1788, and the stinkibus and
anti-fogmatic, both now extinct, to the same year. The origin of the rickey, fizz, sour, cooler, skin, shrub and
smash, and of such curious American drinks as the horse’s neck, Mamie Taylor, Tom-and-Jerry, Tom-Collins,
John-Collins, bishop, stone-wall, gin-fix, brandy-champarelle, golden-slipper, hari-kari, locomotive,
whiskey-daisy, blue-blazer, black-stripe, white-plush and brandy-crusta remains to be established; the
historians of alcoholism, like the philologists, have neglected them. 30 But the essentially American character

26
of most of them is obvious, despite the fact that a number have gone over into English. The English, in
naming their drinks, commonly display a far more limited imagination. Seeking a name, for example, for a
mixture of whiskey and soda-water, the best they could achieve was whiskey-and-soda. The Americans,
introduced to the same drink, at once gave it the far more original name of high-ball. So with ginger-ale and
ginger-pop. 31 So with minerals and soft-drinks. Other characteristic Americanisms (a few of them borrowed
by the English) are red-eye, corn-juice, eye-opener, forty-rod, squirrel-whiskey, phlegm-cutter, moon-shine,
hard-cider, apple-jack and corpse-reviver, and the auxiliary drinking terms, speak-easy, boot-legger, sample-
room, blind-pig, barrel-house, bouncer, bung-starter, dive, doggery, schooner, moonshine, shell, stick, duck,
straight, hooch, saloon, finger and chaser. Thornton shows that jag, bust, bat and to crook the elbow are also
Americanisms. So are bar-tender and saloon-keeper. To them might be added a long list of common
American synonyms for drunk, for example, piffled, pifflicated, awry-eyed, tanked, snooted, stewed, ossified,
slopped, fiddled, edged, loaded, het-up, frazzled, jugged, soused, jiggered, corned, jagged and bunned. Farmer
and Henley list corned and jagged among English synonyms, but the former is probably an Americanism
derived from corn-whiskey or corn-juice, and Thornton says that the latter originated on this side of the
Atlantic also.

4. Loan-Words and Non-English Influences

The Indians of the new West, it would seem, had little to add to the contributions already made to the
American vocabulary by the Algonquins of the Northwest. The American people, by the beginning of the
second quarter of the nineteenth century, knew almost all they were destined to know of the aborigines, and
they had names for all the new objects thus brought to their notice and for most of the red man’s peculiar
ceremonials. A few translated Indian terms, e. g., squaw-man, Great White Father, Father of Waters, and
happy-hunting ground, represent the meagre fresh stock that the western pioneers got from him. Of more
importance was the suggestive and indirect effect of his polysynthetic dialects, and particularly of his vivid
proper names, e. g., Rain-in-the-Face, Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Wife and Voice-Like-Thunder. These
names, and other word-phrases like them, made an instant appeal to American humor, and were extensively
imitated in popular slang. One of the surviving coinages of that era is Old-Stick-in-the-Mud, which Farmer
and Henley note as having reached England by 1823.
Contact with the French in Louisiana and along the Canadian border, and with the Spanish in Texas and
further West, brought many more new words. From the Canadian French, as we have already seen, prairie,
batteau, portage and rapids had been borrowed during colonial days. To these French contributions bayou,
picayune, levee, chute, butte, crevasse and lagniappe were now added, and probably also shanty and canuck.
The use of brave to designate an Indian warrior, almost universal until the close of the Indian wars, was also
of French origin. From the Spanish, once the Mississippi was crossed, and particularly after the Mexican war,
there came a swarm of novelties, many of which have remained firmly imbedded in the language. Among
them were numerous names of strange objects: lariat, lasso, ranch, loco (weed), mustang, sombrero, canyon,
desperado, poncho, chapparal, corral, broncho, plaza, peon, cayuse, burro, mesa, tornado, presidio, sierra and
adobe. To them, as soon as gold was discovered, were added bonanza, eldorado, placer and vigilante. Cinch
was borrowed from the Spanish cincha in the early Texas days, though its figurative use did not come in until
much later. Ante, the poker term, though the etymologists point out its obvious origin in the Latin, probably
came into American from the Spanish. Thornton’s first example of its use in its current sense is dated 1857,
but Bartlett reported it in the form of anti in 1848. Coyote came from the Mexican dialect of Spanish; its first
parent was the Aztec coyotl. Tamale had a similar origin, and so did frijole and tomato. None of these is good
Spanish. As usual, derivatives quickly followed the new-comers, among them peonage, broncho-buster, hot-
tamale, ranchman and ranch-house, and such verbs as to ranch, to lasso, to corral, to ante up and to cinch. To
vamose (from the Spanish vamos, let us go), came in at the same time. So did sabe. So did gazabo in the
American sense.
This was also the period of the first great immigrations, and the American people now came into contact, on
a large scale, with peoples of divergent race, particularly Germans, Irish Catholics from the South of Ireland
(the Irish of colonial days “were descendants of Cromwell’s army, and came from the North of Ireland”),
and, on the Pacific Coast, Chinese. So early as the 20’s the immigration to the United States reached 25,000 in

27
a year; in 1824 the Legislature of New York, in alarm, passed a restrictive act. 34 The Know-Nothing
movement of the 50’s need not concern us here. Suffice it to recall that the immigration of 1845 passed the
100,000 mark, and that that of 1854 came within sight of 500,000. These new Americans, most of them
Germans and Irish, did not all remain in the East; a great many spread through the West and Southwest with
the other pioneers. Their effect upon the language was a great deal more profound than most of us think. The
Irish, speaking the English of Cromwell’s time, greatly reinforced its usages in the United States, where it was
beginning to yield to the schoolmasters, who were inclined to follow contemporary English precept and
practice. “The influence of Irish-English,” writes an English correspondent, “is still plainly visible all over the
United States. About nine years ago, before I had seen America, a relative of mine came home after twelve
years’ farming in North Dakota, and I was struck by the resemblance between his speech and that of the Irish
drovers who brought cattle to Norwich market.” 35 We shall see various indications of the Irish influence
later on, not only on the vocabulary, but also upon pronunciation and idiom. The Germans also left indelible
marks upon American, and particularly upon the spoken American of the common people. The everyday
vocabulary is full of German words. Sauerkraut and noodle, as we have seen, came in during the colonial
period, apparently through the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch, i. e., a mixture, much debased, of the German
dialects of Switzerland, Suabia and the Palatinate. The later immigrants contributed pretzel, pumpernickel,
hausfrau, lager-beer, pinocle, wienerwurst (often reduced to wiener or wienie), frankfurter, bock-beer,
schnitzel, leberwurst (sometimes half translated as liverwurst), blutwurst, rathskeller, schweizer (cheese),
delicatessen, hamburger (i. e., steak), kindergarten and katzenjammer. 36 From them, in all probability, there
also came two very familiar Americanisms, loafer and bum. The former, according to the Standard
Dictionary, is derived from the German laufen; another authority says that it originated in a German
mispronunciation of lover, i. e., as lofer. 37 Thornton shows that the word was already in common use in
1835. Bum was originally bummer, and apparently derives from the German bummler. Both words have
produced derivatives: loaf (noun), to loaf, cornerloafer, common-loafer, to bum, bum (adj.) and bummery,
not to mention on the bum. Loafer has migrated to England, but bum is still unknown there in the American
sense. In England, indeed, bum is used to designate an unmentionable part of the body and is thus not
employed in polite discourse.
Another example of debased German is offered by the American Kriss Kringle. It is from Christkindlein, or
Christkind’l, and properly designates, of course, not the patron saint of Christmas, but the child in the
manager. A German friend tells me that the form Kriss Kringle, which is that given in the Standard
Dictionary, and the form Krisking’l, which is that most commonly used in the United States, are both quite
unknown in Germany. Here, obviously, we have an example of a loan-word in decay. Whole phrases have
gone through the same process, for example, nix come erous (from nichts kommt heraus) and ’rous mit ’im
(from heraus mit ihm). These phrases, like wie geht’s and ganz gut, are familiar to practically all Americans,
no matter how complete their ignorance of correct German. So are such slang phrases, obviously suggested
by German, as ach Louie and on the Fritz. So is the use of dumb for stupid, a borrowing from the German
dumm. Most of them know, too, the meaning of gesundheit, k¨mmel, seidel, wanderlust, stein, speck,
männerchor, schützenfest, sängerfest, turn-verein, hoch, yodel, zwie-back and zwei (as in zwei bier). I have
found snitz (=schnitz) in Town Topics. Prosit is in all American dictionaries. 40 Bower, as used in cards, is
an Americanism derived from the German bauer, meaning the jack. The exclamation, ouch! is classed as an
Americanism by Thornton, and he gives an example dated 1837. The New English Dictionary refers it to the
German autsch, and Thornton says that “it may have come across with the Dunkers or the Mennonites.”
Ouch is not heard in English, save in the sense of a clasp or buckle set with precious stones (=OF nouche),
and even in that sense it is archaic. Shyster is very probably German also; Thornton has traced it back to the
50’s. 41 Rum-dumb is grounded upon the meaning of dumb borrowed from the German; it is not listed in the
English slang dictionaries. 42 Bristed says that the American meaning of wagon, which indicates almost any
four-wheeled, horse-drawn vehicle in this country but only the very heaviest in England, was probably
influenced by the German wagen. He also says that the American use of hold on for stop was suggested by
the German halt an, and White says that the substitution of standpoint for point of view, long opposed by all
purists, was first made by an American professor who sought “an Anglicized form” of the German
standpunkt. The same German influence may be behind the general facility with which American forms
compound nouns. In most other languages, for example, Latin and French, the process is rare, and even

28
English lags far behind American. But in German it is almost unrestricted. “It is,” says L. P. Smith, “a great
step in advance toward that ideal language in which meaning is expressed, not by terminations, but by the
simple method of word position.”
The immigrants from the South of Ireland, during the period under review, exerted an influence upon the
language that was vastly greater than that of the Germans, both directly and indirectly, but their
contributions to the actual vocabulary were probably less. They gave American, indeed, relatively few new
words; perhaps shillelah, colleen, spalpeen, smithereens and poteen exhaust the unmistakably Gaelic list.
Lallapalooza is also probably an Irish loan-word, though it is not Gaelic. It apparently comes from allay-
foozee, a Mayo provincialism, signifying a sturdy fellow. Allay-foozee, in its turn, comes from the French
allez-fusil, meaning “Forward the muskets!”—a memory, according to P. W. Joyce, of the French landing at
Killala in 1798. Such phrases as Erin go bragh and such expletives as begob and egorry may perhaps be added:
they have got into American, though they are surely not distinctive Americanisms. But of far more
importance, in the days of the great immigrations, than these few contributions to the vocabulary were
certain speech habits that the Irish brought with them—habits of pronunciation, of syntax and even of
grammar. These habits were, in part, the fruit of efforts to translate the idioms of Gaelic into English, and in
part, as we have seen, survivals from the English of the age of James I. The latter, preserved by Irish
conservatism in speech 44 came into contact in America with habits surviving, with more or less change,
from the same time, and so gave those American habits an unmistakable reinforcement. The Yankees had
lived down such Jacobean pronunciations as tay for tea and desave for deceive, and these forms, on Irish lips,
struck them as uncouth and absurd, but they still cling, in their common speech, to such forms as h’ist for
hoist, bile for boil, chaw for chew, jine for join, 45 sass for sauce, heighth for height, rench for rinse and lep
for leaped, and the employment of precisely the same forms by the thousands of Irish immigrants who spread
through the country undoubtedly gave them support, and so protected them, in a measure, from the assault
of the purists. And the same support was given to drownded for drowned, oncet for once, ketch for catch,
ag’in for against and onery for ordinary. Grandgent shows that the so-called Irish oi-sound in jine and bile
was still regarded as correct in the United States so late as 1822, though certain New England grammarians,
eager to establish the more recent English usage, had protested against it before the end of the eighteenth
century. 46 The Irish who came in in the 30’s joined the populace in the war upon the reform, and to this day
some of the old forms survive. Certainly it would sound strange to hear an American farmer command his
mare to hoist her hoof; he would invariably use hist, just as he would use rench for rinse.
Certain usages of Gaelic, carried over into the English of Ireland, fell upon fertile soil in America. One was
the employment of the definite article before nouns, as in French and German. An Irishman does not say “I
am good at Latin,” but “I am good at the Latin.” In the same way an American does not say “I had measles,”
but “I had the measles.” There is, again, the use of the prefix a before various adjectives and gerunds, as in a-
going and a-riding. This usage, of course, is native to English, as aboard and afoot demonstrate, but it is much
more common in the Irish dialect, on account of the influence of the parallel Gaelic form, as in a-n-aice=a-
near, and it is also much more common in American. There is, yet again, a use of intensifying suffixes, often
set down as characteristically American, which was probably borrowed from the Irish. Examples are no-siree
and yes-indeedy, and the later kiddo and skiddoo. As Joyce shows, such suffixes, in Irish-English, tend to
become whole phrases. The Irishman is almost incapable of saying plain yes or no; he must always add some
extra and gratuitous asseveration. The American is in like case. His speech bristles with intensives; bet your
life, not on your life, well I guess, and no mistake, and so on. The Irish extravagance of speech struck a
responsive chord in the American heart. The American borrowed, not only occasional words, but whole
phrases, and some of them have become thoroughly naturalized. Joyce, indeed, shows the Irish origin of
scores of locutions that are now often mistaken for native Americanisms, for example, great shakes, dead (as
an intensive), thank you kindly, to split one’s sides (i. e., laughing), and the tune the old cow died of, mot to
mention many familiar similes and proverbs. Certain Irish pronunciations, Gaelic rather than archaic
English, got into American during the nineteenth century. Among them, one recalls bhoy, which entered
our political slang in the middle 40’s and survived into our own time. Again, there is the very characteristic
American word ballyhoo, signifying the harangue of a ballyhoo-man, or spieler 48 (that is, barker) before a
cheap show, or, by metaphor, any noisy speech. It is from Ballyhooly, the name of a village in Cork, once

29
notorious for its brawls. Finally, there is shebang. Schele de Vere derives it from the French cabane, but it
seems rather more likely that it is from the Irish shebeen.

IV. American and English Today

1. The Two Vocabularies

By way of preliminary to an examination of the American of today, here is a list of terms in everyday use that
differ in American and English:
American English
ash-can dust-bin
ash-cart dust-cart
ashman dustman
backyard garden
baggage luggage
baggage-car luggage-van
ballast (railroad) metal
barbershop barber’s-shop
bath-robe dressing-gown
bath-tub bath
beet beet-root
bid (noun) tender
bill-board hoarding
boarder paying-guest
boardwalk (seaside) promenade
boot high-boot
brakeman brakesman
bumper (car) buffer
bureau chest of drawers
calendar (court) cause-list
campaign (political) canvass
can (noun) tin
candy sweets
cane stick
canned-goods tinned-goods
car (railroad) carriage, van or waggon
checkers (game) draughts
chicken-yard fowl-run
chief-clerk head-clerk
chief-of-police chief-constable
city-editor chief-reporter
city-ordinance by-law
clipping (newspaper) cutting
closed-season close-season
coal coals
coal-oil paraffin
collar-button stud
commission-merchant factor, or commission-agent
commutation-ticket season-ticket
conductor (of a train) guard
corn maize, or Indian corn
corner (of a street) crossing

30
corn-meal Indian meal
counterfeiter coiner
cow-catcher plough
cracker biscuit
crazy-bone funny-bone
cross-tie sleeper
crystal (watch) watch-glass
department-store stores
derby (hat) bowler
dime-novel penny-dreadful
district (political) division
druggist chemist
drug-store chemist’s shop
drummer bagman
dry-goods-store draper’s-shop
editorial (noun) leader, or leading-article
elevator lift
elevator-boy lift-man
enlisted-man private-soldier
excursionist tripper
ferns bracken
filing-cabinet nest-of-drawers
fire-department fire-brigade
fish-dealer fishmonger
floor-walker shop-walker
fraternal-order friendly-society
freight goods
freight-agent goods-manager
freight-car goods-waggon
freight-elevator hoist
frog (railway) crossing-plate
garters (men’s) sock-suspenders
gasoline petrol
grade (railroad) gradient
grain corn
grain-broker corn-factor
groceries stores
hardware-dealer ironmonger
headliner topliner
hod-carrier hodman
hog-pen piggery
hood (automobile) bonnet
hospital (private) nursing-home
huckster coster (monger)
hunting shooting
Indian Red Indian
Indian Summer St. Martin’s Summer
instalment-business credit-trade
instalment-plan hire-purchase plan
internal-revenue inland-revenue
janitor caretaker, or porter
laborer navvy

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legal-holiday bank-holiday
letter-box pillar-box
letter-carrier postman
locomotive engineer engine-driver
long-distance-call trunk-call
lumber deals
lumber-yard timber-yard
mad angry
mantelpiece chimney-piece
Methodist Wesleyan
molasses treacle
monkey-wrench spanner
moving-picture-theatre cinema, or picture-palace
necktie tie
news-dealer news-agent
newspaper-man pressman, or journalist
notions small-wares
oatmeal porridge
officeholder public-servant
orchestra (seats in a theatre) stalls
outbuildings (farm) offices
overcoat great-coat
package parcel
parlor drawing-room
parlor-car saloon-carriage
patrolman (police) constable
pay-day wage-day
peanut monkey-nut
pen-point nib
period (punctuation) full-stop
pitcher jug
plant (industrial) works
poorhouse workhouse
post-paid post-free
potpie pie
prepaid carriage-paid
press (printing) machine
program (of a meeting) agenda
public-school board-school
quotation-marks inverted-commas
railroad railway
railroad-man railway-servant
rails line
rare (of meat) underdone
receipts (in business) takings
Rhine-wine Hock
road-bed (railroad) permanent-way
road-repairer road-mender
roast joint
roll (of films) spool
roll-call division
rooster cock

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round-trip-ticket return-ticket
saleswoman shop-assistant
saloon public-house
scarf-pin tie-pin
scow lighter
sewerage drains
shirtwaist blouse
shoe boot
shoemaker bootmaker
shoe-shine boot-polish
shoestring bootlace
shoe-tree boot-tree
sick ill
sidewalk footpath, or pavement
silver (collectively) plate
sled sledge
sleigh sledge
soft-drinks minerals
smoking-room smoke-room
spigot (or faucet) tap
sponge (surgical) tap
stem-winder keyless-watch
stockholder shareholder
stocks shares
store-fixtures shop-fittings
street-cleaner crossing-sweeper
street-railway tramway
subway tube, or underground
suspenders (men’s) braces
sweater jersey
switch (noun, railway) points
switch (verb, railway) shunt
taxes (municipal) rates
taxpayer (local) ratepayer
tenderloin (of beef) under-cut, or fillet
ten-pins nine-pins
terminal (railroad) terminus
thumb-tack drawing-office
ticket-office booking-office
tinner tinker
tin-roof leads
track (railroad) line
trained-nurse hospital-nurse
transom (of door) fanlight
trolley-car tramcar
truck (vehicle) lorry
truck (of a railroad car) bogie
typewriter (operator) typist
typhoid-fever enteric
undershirt vest
vaudeville-theatre music-hall
vest waistcoat

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warden (of a prison) governor
warehouse stores
wash-rag face-cloth
wash-stand wash-hand-stand
waste-basket waste-paper-basket
whippletree splinter-bar
witness-stand witness-box

2. Differences in Usage

The differences here listed, most of them between words in everyday employment, are but examples of a
divergence in usage which extends to every department of daily life. In his business, in his journeys from his
home to his office, in his dealings with his family and servants, in his sports and amusements, in his politics
and even in his religion the American uses, not only words and phrases, but whole syntactical constructions,
that are unintelligible to the Englishman, or intelligible only after laborious consideration. A familiar
anecdote offers an example in miniature. It concerns a young American woman living in a region of prolific
orchards who is asked by a visiting Englishman what the residents do with so much frut. Her reply is a pun:
“We eat all we can, and what we can’t we can.” This answer would mystify most Englishmen, for in the first
place it involves the use of the flat American a in can’t and in the second place it applies an unfamiliar name
to the vessel that the Englishman knows as a tin, and then adds to the confusion by deriving a verb from the
substantive. There are no such tings as canned-goods in England; over there they are tinned. The can that
holds them is a tin; to can them is to tin them.… And they are counted, not as groceries, but as stores, and
advertised, not on bill-boards but on hoardings. And the cook who prepares them for the table is not Nora or
Maggie, but Cook, and if she does other work in addition she is not a girl for general housework, but a cook-
general, and not help, but a servant. And the boarder who eats them is often not a boarder at all, but a
paying-guest. And the grave of the tin, once it is emptied, is not the ash-can, but the dust-bin, and the man
who carries it away is not the garbage-man or the ash-man or the white-wings, but the dustman.
An Englishman, entering his home, does not walk in upon the first floor, but upon the ground floor. What
he calls the first floor (or, more commonly, first storey, not forgetting the penultimate e!) is what we call the
second floor, and so on up to the roof—which is covered not with tin, but with slate, tiles or leads. He does
not take a paper; he takes in a paper. He does not ask his servant, “Is there any mail for me?” but “Are there
any letters for me?” for mail, in the American sense, is a word that he seldom uses, save in such compounds as
mail-van, mail-train and mail-order. He alwaus speaks of it as the post. The man who brings it is not a letter-
carrier but a postman. It is posted, not mailed, at a pillar-box, not at a mail-box. It never includes postal-
orders but only post-cards, never money-orders, but only postal-orders or postoffice-orders. 2 The
Englishman dictates his answers, not to a typewriter, but to a typist; a typewriter is merely the machine. If he
desires the recipient to call him by telephone he doesn’t say, “ ’phone me at a quarter of eight,” but “ring me
up at a quarter to eight.” And when the call comes he says “are you there?” When he gets home, he doesn’t
find his wife waiting for him in the parlor or living-room, 3 but in the drawing-room or in her sitting-room,
and the tale of domestic disaster that she has to tell does not concern the hired-girl but the scullery-maid. He
doesn’t bring her a box of candy, but a box of sweets. He doesn’t leave a derby hat in the hall, but a bowler.
His wife doesn’t wear shirtwaists, but blouses. When she buys one she doesn’t say “charge it,” but “put it
down.” When she orders a tailor-made suit, she calls it a costume or a coat-and-skirt. When she wants a
spool of thread she asks for a reel of cotton. 4 Such things are bought, not in the department-stores, but at the
stores, which are substantially the same thing. In these stores calico means a plain cotton cloth; in the United
States it means a printed cotton cloth. Things bought on the instalment plan in England are said to be bought
on the hire-purchase plan or system; the instalment business itself is the credit-trade. Goods ordered by post
(not mail) on which the dealer pays the cost of transportation are said to be sent, not postpaid or prepaid, but
postfree or carriage-paid.
An Englishman does not wear suspenders, but braces. Suspenders are his wife’s garters; his own are sock-
suspenders. The family does not seek sustenance in a rare tenderloin but in an underdone undercut or fillet.
It does not eat beets, but beet-roots. The wine on the table, if white and German, is not Rhine wine, but

34
Hock. Yellow turnips, in England, are called Swedes, and are regarded as fit food for cattle only; when rations
were short there, in 1916, the Saturday Review made a solemn effort to convince its readers that they were
good enough to go upon the table. The English, of late, have learned to eat another vegetable formerly
resigned to the lower fauna, to wit, American sweet corn. But they are still having some difficulty about its
name, for plain corn in England, as we have seen, means all the grains used by man. Some time ago, in the
Sketch, one C. J. Clive, a gentleman farmer of Worcestershire, was advertising sweet corn-cobs as the “most
delicious of all vegetables,” and offering to sell them at 6s. 6d. a dozen, carriage-paid. Chicory is something
else that the English are unfamiliar with; they always call it endive. By chicken they mean any fowl,
however ancient. Broilers and friers are never heard of over there. Neither are crawfish, which are always
crayfish. 5 The classes which, in America, eat breakfast, dinner and supper, have breakfast, dinner and tea in
England; supper always means a meal eaten late in the evening. No Englishman ever wears a frock-coat or
Prince-Albert, or lives in a bungalow; he wears a morning-coat and lives in a villa or cottage. His wife’s maid,
if she has one, is not Ethel, or Maggie but Robinson, and the nurse-maid who looks after his children is not
Lizzie but Nurse. So, by the way, is a trained nurse in a hospital, whose full style is not Miss Jones, but
Nurse Jones or Sister. And the hospital itself, if private, is not a hospital at all, but a nursing-home, and its
trained nurses are plain nurses, or hospital nurses, or maybe nursing sisters. And the white-clad young
gentlemen who make love to them are not studying medicine but walking the hospitals. Similarly, an English
law student does not study law, but reads the law.
In England a corporation is a public company or limited liability company. The term corporation, over
there, is commonly applied only to the mayor, aldermen and sheriffs of a city, as in the London corporation.
An Englishman writes Ltd. after the name of a limited liability (what we would call incorporated) bank or
trading company, as we write Inc. He calls its president its chairman or managing director. Its stockholders
are its shareholders, and hold shares instead of stock in it. The place wherein such companies are floated and
looted—the Wall Street of London—is called the City, with a capital C. Bankers, stock-jobbers, promoters,
directors and other such leaders of its business are called City men. The financial editor of a newspaper is its
City editor. Government bonds are consols, or stocks, or the funds. 9 To have money in the stocks is to own
such bonds. As Englishman hasn’t a bank-account, but a banking-account. He draws cheques (not checks),
not on his bank but on the bankers. 10 In England there is a rigid distinction between a broker and a stock-
broker. A broker means, not a dealer in securities, as in our Wall Street broker, but a dealer in second-hand
furniture. To have the brokers 11 in the house means to be bankrupt, with one’s very household goods in the
hands of one’s creditors. For a City man to swindle a competitor in England is not to do him up or to do him,
but to do him in. When any English business man retires he does not actually retire; he declines business.
In the United States a pressman is a man who runs a printing press; in England he is a newspaper reporter,
or, as the English usually say, a journalist. 14 This journalist works, not at space rates, but at lineage rates. A
printing press is a machine. An editorial in a newspaper is a leading article or leader. An editorial paragraph
is a leaderette, or par. A newspaper clipping is a cutting. A pass to the theatre is an order. The room-clerk of a
hotel is the secretary. A real-estate agent or dealer is an estate-agent. The English keep up most of the old
distinctions between physicians and surgeons, barristers and solicitors. A barrister is greatly superior to a
solicitor. He alone can address the higher courts and the parliamentary committees; a solicitor must keep to
office work and the inferior courts. A man with a grievance goes first to his solicitor, who then instructs or
briefs a barrister for him. If that barrister, in the course of the trial, wants certain evidence removed from the
record, he moves that it be struck out, not stricken out, as an American lawyer would say. Only barristers
may become judges. An English barrister, like his American brother, takes a retainer when he is engaged. But
the rest of his fee does not wait upon the termination of the case: he expects and receives a refresher from
time to time. A barrister is never admitted to the bar, but is always called. If he becomes a King’s Counsel, or
K. C. (a purely honorary appointment), he is said to have taken silk. In the United States a lawyer tries a case
and the judge hears it; in England the judge tries it. In the United States the court hands down a decision; in
England the court hands it out. In the United States a lawyer probates a will; in England he proves it, or has it
admitted to probate.
The common objects and phenomena of nature are often differently named in England and America. As we
saw in a previous chapter, such Americanisms as creek and run, for small streams, are practically unknown in
England, and the English moor and downs early disappeared from American. The Englishman knows the

35
meaning of sound (e. g., Long Island Sound), but he nearly always uses channel in place of it. In the same
way the American knows the meaning of the English bog, but rejects the English distinction between it and
swamp, and almost always uses swamp or marsh (often elided to ma’sh). The Englishman seldom, if ever,
describes a severe storm as a hurricane, a cyclone, a tornado, or a blizzard. He never uses cold-snap,
cloudburst or under the weather. He does not say that the temperature is 29 degrees (Fahrenheit) or that the
thermometer or the mercury is at 29 degrees, but that there are three degrees of frost. He calls ice water iced-
water. He knows nothing of blue-grass country or of the pennyr’yal. What we call the mining regions he
knows as the black country. He never, of course, uses down-East or up-State. Many of our names for
common fauna and flora are unknown to him save as strange Americanisms, e. g., terrapin, moose, June-bug,
persimmon, gumbo, egg-plant, alfalfa, catnip, sweet-potato and yam. Until lately he called the grapefruit a
shaddock. He still calls the rutabaga a mangelwurzel. He is familiar with many fish that we seldom see, e. g.,
the turbot. He also knows the hare, which is seldom heard of in America. But he knows nothing of devilled-
crabs, crab-cocktails, seafood-dinners, clam-chowder or oyster-stews, and he never goes to oyster-suppers,
clam-bakes or burgoo-picnics. He doesn’t buy peanuts when he goes to the circus. He calls them
monkeynuts, and to eat them publicly is infra dig. The common American use of peanut as an adjective of
disparagement, as in peanut politics, is incomprehensible to him.
The Englishman is naturally unfamiliar with baseball, and in consequence his language is bare of the
countless phrases and metaphors that it has supplied to American. Many of these phrases and metaphors are
in daily use among us, for example, fan, rooter, bleachers, batting-average, double-header, grand-stand-play,
Charley-horse, pennant-winner, gate-money, busher, minor-leaguer, glass-arm, to strike out, to foul, to be
shut out, to play ball, on the bench, on to his curves and three strikes and out. The national game of draw-
poker has also greatly enriched American with terms that are either quite unknown to the Englishman, or
known to him only as somewhat dubious Americanisms, among them, cold-deck, kitty, full-house, jack-pot,
four-flusher, ace-high, pot, penny-ante, divvy, a card up his sleeve, three-of-a-kind, to ante up, to stand pat,
to call (a bluff), to pony up, to hold out, to cash in, to go it one better, to chip in and for keeps. But the
Englishman uses many more racing terms and metaphors than we do and he has got a good many phrases
from other games, particularly cricket. The word cricket itself has a definite figurative meaning. It indicates,
in general, good sports-manship. To take unfair advantage of an opponent is not cricket. The sport of boating,
so popular on the Thames, has also given colloquial English some familiar terms, almost unknown in the
United States, e. g., punt and weir. Contrariwise, pungy, batteau and scow are unheard of in England, and
canoe is not long emerged from the estate of an Americanism. 19 The game known as ten-pins in America is
called nine-pins in England, and once had that name over here. The Puritans forbade it, and its devotees
changed its name in order to evade the prohibition. 20 Finally, there is soccer, a form of football that is still
relatively little known in the United States. What we call simply football is Rugby or Rugger to the
Englishman. The word soccer is derived from association; the rules of the game were established by the
London Football Association. Soccer is one of the relatively few English experiments in portmanteau words.
Another is to be found in Bakerloo, the name of one of the London underground lines, from Baker-street and
Waterloo, its termini.
But though the English talk of racing, football, cricket and golf a great deal, they have developed nothing
comparable to the sporting argot used by all American sporting reporters. When, during the war, various
American soldier nines played baseball in England, some of the English newspapers employed visiting
American reporters to report the games, and the resultant emission of wild and woolly technicalities
interested English readers much more than the games themselves. An English correspondent, greatly excited,
sent me the following report from the Times of May 26, 1919:
In American chapel simply means a small church, usually the branch of some larger one; in English it has
acquired the special sense of a place of worship unconnected with the Establishment. Though three-fourths
of the people of Ireland are Catholics (in Munster and Connaught, more than nine-tenths), and the
Protestant Church of Ireland has been disestablished since 1871, a Catholic place of worship in that country
is still a chapel and not a church. 22 So is a Methodist wailing-place in England, however large it may be,
though now and then tabernacle is substituted. Chapel, of course, is also used to designate a small church of
the Establishment, as St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. A Methodist, in Great Britain, is not ordinarily a
Methodist, but a Wesleyan. Contrariwise, what the English call simply a churchman is an Episcopalian in the

36
United States, what they call the Church (always capitalized!) is the Protestant Episcopal Church, 23 what
they call a Roman Catholic is simply a Catholic, and what they call a Jew is usually softened (if he happens to
be an advertiser) to a Hebrew. The English Jews have no such idiotic fear of the plain name as that which
afflicts the more pushing and obnoxious of the race in America. 24 “News of Jewry” is a common headline in
the London Daily Telegraph, which is owned by Lord Burnham, a Jew, and has had many Jews on its staff,
including Judah P. Benjamin, the American. The American language, of course, knowns nothing of
dissenters. Nor of such gladiators of dissent as the Plymouth Brethren, nor of the nonconformist conscience,
though the United States suffers from it even more damnably than England. The English, to make it even, get
on without circuit-riders, holy-rollers, Dunkards, hard-shell Baptists, United Brethren, Seventh Day
Adventists and other such American ferœ naturœ and are born, live, die and go to heaven without the aid of
either the uplift or the chautauqua.
In music the English cling to an archaic and unintelligible nomenclature, long since abandoned in America.
Thus they call a double whole note a breve, a whole note a semibreve, a half note a minim, a quarter note a
crotchet, an eighth note a quaver, a sixteenth note a semi-quaver, a thirty-second note a demisemiquaver,
and a sixty-fourth note a hemidemisemiquaver, or semidemisemiquaver. If, by any chance, an English
musician should write a one-hundred-and-twenty-eighth note he probably wouldn’t know what to call it.
This clumsy terminology goes back to the days of plain chant, with its longa, brevis, semi-brevis, minima and
semiminima. The French and Italians cling to a system almost as confusing, but the Germans use ganze,
halbe, viertel, achtel, etc. I have been unable to discover the beginning of the American system, but it would
seem to be borrowed from the German. Since the earliest times a great many of the music teachers in the
United States have been Germans, and some of the rest have had German training.
In the same way the English hold fast (though with a gradual slacking of the grip of late) to a clumsy and
inaccurate method of designating the sizes of printers’ types. In America the simple point system makes the
business easy; a line of 14-point type occupies exactly the vertical space of two lines of 7-point. But the
English still indicate differences in size by such arbitrary and confusing names as brilliant, diamond, small
pearl, pearl, ruby, ruby-nonpareil, nonpareil, minion-nonpareil, emerald, minion, brevier, bourgeois, long
primer, small pica, pica, English, great primer and double pica. They also cling to a fossil system of numerals
in stating ages. Thus, an Englishman will say that he is seven-and-forty, not that he is forty-seven. This is
probably a direct survival, preserved by more than a thousand years of English conservatism, of the Anglo-
Saxon seofan-and-feowertig. He will also say that he weighs eleven stone instead of 154 pounds. A stone is 14
pounds, and it is always used in stating the heft of a man. He employs such designations of time as fortnight
and twelve-month a great deal more than we do, and has certain special terms of which we know nothing,
for example, quarter-day, bank-holiday, long-vacation, Lady Day and Michaelmas. Per contra, he knows
nothing whatever of our Thanksgiving, Arbor, Labor and Decoration Days or of legal holidays, or of Yom
Kippur. Finally, he always says “a quarter to nine,” not “a quarter of nine.” If it is 8.35 he usually says that it is
five-and-twenty minutes to nine. But he never inverts any other number; it is twenty-three minutes to and
twenty-seven minutes past. He rarely says fifteen minutes to; nearly always he uses quarter to. He never says
a quarter hour or a half hour; he says a quarter of an hour and half an hour.
In English usage, to proceed, the word directly is always used to signify immediately; in American a
contingency gets into it, and it may mean no more than soon. In England quite means “completely, wholly,
entirely, altogether, to the utmost extent, nothing short of, in the fullest sense, positively, absolutely”; in
America it is conditional, and means only nearly, approximately, substantially, as in “he sings quite well.” An
Englishman does not say “I will pay you up” for an injury, but “I will pay you back.” He doesn’t look up a
definition in a dictionary; he looks it out. He doesn’t say, being ill, “I am getting on well,” but “I am going on
well.” He doesn’t use the American “different from” or “different than”; he uses “different to.” He never adds
the pronoun in such locutions as “it hurts me,” but says simply, “it hurts.” He never “catches up with you” on
the street; he “catches you up.” He never says “are you through?” but “have you finished?” He never uses to
notify as a transitive verb; an official act may be notified, but not a person. He never uses gotten as the
perfect participle of get; he always uses plain got. 25 An English servant never washes the dishes; she always
washes the dinner or tea things. She doesn’t live out, but goes into service. Her beau is not her fellow, but her
young man. She does not keep company with him but walks out with him. She is never hired, but always

37
engaged; only inanimate things, such as a hall or cab, are hired. When her wages are increased she does not
get a raise, but a rise. When her young man goes into the army he does not join it; he joins up.
That an Englishman always calls out “I say!” and not simply “say!” when he desires to attract a friend’s
attention or register a protestation of incredulity—this perhaps is too familiar to need notice. His hear, hear!
and oh, oh! are also well known. He is much less prodigal with good-bye than the American; he uses good-
day and good-afternoon far more often. A shop-assistant would never say good-bye to a customer. To an
Englishman it would have a subtly offensive smack; good-afternoon would be more respectful. Various very
common American phrases are quite unknown to him, for example, over his signature, on time and planted
to corn. The first-named he never uses, and he has no equivalent for it; an Englishman who issues a signed
statement simply makes it in writing. He knows nothing of our common terms of disparagement, such as
kike, wop, yap and rube. His pet-name for a tiller of the soil is not Rube or Cy, but Hodge. When he goes
gunning he does not call it hunting, but shooting; hunting is reserved for the chase of the fox. When he goes
to a dentist he does not have his teeth filled, but stopped. He knows nothing of European plan hotels, or of
day-coaches, or of baggage-checks.
An intelligent Englishwoman, coming to America to live, told me that the two things which most impeded
her first communications with untraveled Americans, even above the gross differences between English and
American pronunciation and intonation, were the complete absence of the general utility adjective jolly from
the American vocabulary, and the puzzling omnipresence and versatility of the verb to fix. In English
colloquial usage jolly means almost anything; it intensifies all other adjectives, even including miserable and
homesick. An Englishman is jolly bored, jolly hungry or jolly well tired; his wife is jolly sensible; his dog is
jolly keen; the prices he pays for things are jolly dear (never steep or stiff or high: all Americanisms). But he
has no noun to match the American proposition, meaning proposal, business, affair, case, consideration, plan,
theory, solution and what not: only the German zug can be ranged beside it. 26 And he has no verb in such
wide practise as to fix. In his speech it means only to make fast or to determine. In American it may mean to
repair, as in “the plumber fixed the pipe”; to dress, as in “Mary fixed her hair”; to prepare, as in “the cook is
fixing the gravy”; to bribe, as in “the judge was fixed”; to settle, as in “the quarrel was fixed up”; to heal, as in
“the doctor fixed his boil”; to finish, as in “Murphy fixed Sweeney in the third round”; to be well-to-do, as in
“John is well-fixed”; to arrange, as in “I fixed up the quarrel”; to be drunk, as in “the whiskey fixed him”; to
punish, as in “I’ll fix him”; and to correct, as in “he fixed my bad Latin.” Moreover, it is used in all its English
senses. An Englishman never goes to a dentist to have his teeth fixed. He does not fix the fire; he makes it up,
or mends it. He is never well-fixed, either in money or by liquor. The American use of to run is also
unfamiliar to Englishmen. They never run can hotel, or a railroad; they always keep it or manage it.
The English use quite a great deal more than we do, and, as we have seen, in a different sense. Quite rich, in
American, means tolerably rich, richer than most; quite so, in English, is identical in meaning with exactly
so. In American just is almost equivalent to the English quite, as in just lovely. Thornton shows that this use
of just goes back to 1794. The word is also used in place of exactly in other ways, as in just in time, just how
many and just what do you mean? Two other adverbs, right and good, are used in American in senses strange
to an Englishman. Thornton shows that the excessive use of right, as in right away, right good and right now,
was already widespread in the United States early in the last century; his first example is dated 1818. He
believes that the locution was “possibly imported from the southwest of Ireland.” Whatever its origin, it
quickly attracted the attention of English visitors. Dickens noted right away as an almost universal
Americanism during his first American tour, in 1842, and poked fun at it in the second chapter of “American
Notes.” Right is used as a synonym for directly, as in right away, right off, right now and right on time; for
moderately, as in right well, right smart, right good and right often, and in place of precisely, as in right
there. Some time ago, in an article on Americanisms, an English critic called it “that most distinctively
American word,” and concocted the following dialogue to instruct the English in its use:
How do I get to —?
Go right along, and take the first turning (sic) on the right, and you are right there.
Right?
Right.
Right!

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 But this Englishman failed in his attempt to write correct American, despite his fine pedagogical passion. No
American would ever say “take the first turning”; he would say “turn at the first corner.” As for right away,
R. O. Williams argues that “so far as analogy can make good English, it is as good as one could choose.”
Nevertheless, the Concise Oxford Dictionary admits it only as an Americanism, and avoids all mention of the
other American uses of right. Good is almost as protean. It is not only used as a general synonym for all
adjectives and adverbs connoting satisfaction, as in to feel good, to be treated good, to sleep good, but also as a
reinforcement to other adjectives and adverbs as in “I hit him good and hard” and “I am good and tired.” Of
late some has come into wide use as an adjective-adverb of all work, indicating special excellence or high
degree, as in some girl, some sick, going some, etc. It is still below the salt, but threatens to reach a more
respectable position. One encounters it in the newspapers constantly and in the Congressional Record, and
not long ago a writer in the Atlantic Monthly 29 hymned it ecstatically as “some word—a true super-word,
in fact” and argued that it could be used “in a sense for which there is absolutely no synonym in the
dictionary.” It was used by the prim Emily Dickinson forty or more years ago. 30 It will concern us again in
Chapter IX.

3. Honorifics

Among the honorifics in everyday use in England and the United States one finds many notable divergences
between the two languages. On the one hand the English are almost as diligent as the Germans in bestowing
titles of honor upon their men of mark, and on the other hand they are very careful to withhold such titles
from men who do not legally bear them. In America every practitioner of any branch of the healing art, even
a chiropodist or an osteopath, is a doctor ipso facto, but in England a good many surgeons lack the title and it
is not common in the lesser ranks. Even physicians may not have it, but here there is a yielding of a usual
meticulous exactness, and it is customary to address a physician in the second person as Doctor, though his
card may show that he is only Medicinœ Baccalaureus, a degree quite unknown in America. Thus an
Englishman, when he is ill, always sends for the doctor, as we do. But a surgeon is usually plain Mr., 31 and
prefers to be so called, even when he is an M. D. An English veterinarian or dentist or druggist or masseur is
never Dr.
But perhaps the greatest difference between English and American usage is presented by the Honorable. In
the United States the title is applied loosely to all public officials of apparent respectability, from senators and
ambassadors to the mayors of fifth-rate cities and the members of state legislatures, and with some show of
official sanction to many of them, especially congressmen.

4. Euphemisms

But such euphemisms as lady-clerk are, after all, much rarer in English than in American usage. The
Englishman seldom tries to gloss menial occupations with sonorous names; on the contrary, he seems to
delight in keeping their menial character plain. He says servants, not help. Even his railways and banks have
servants; the chief trades-union of the English railroad men is the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants.
He uses employé in place of clerk, workman or laborer much less often than we do. True enough he often
calls a boarder a paying-guest, but that is probably because even a lady may occasionally take one in. Just as
he avoids calling a fast train the limited, the flier or the cannon-ball, so he never calls an undertaker a funeral
director or mortician, or a dentist a dental surgeon or odontologist, or a real estate agent a realtor, or a press-
agent a publicist, or a barber shop (he always makes it barber’s shop) a tonsorial parlor, or a common public-
house a café, a restaurant, an exchange, a buffet or a hotel, or a tradesman a storekeeper or merchant, or a
fresh-water college a university. A university, in England, always means a collection of colleges. He avoids
displacing terms of a disparaging or disagreeable significance with others less brutal, or thought to be less
brutal, e.g., ready-to-wear, ready-tailored, or ready-to-put-on for ready-made, used or slightly-used for
second-hand, popular priced for cheap, mahoganized for imitation mahogany, aisle manager for floor-
walker (he makes it shop-walker), loan-office for pawn-shop. 42 Also he is careful not to use such words as

39
rector, deacon and baccalaureate in merely rhetorical senses. 43 Nor does he call mutton lamb, or milk
cream. Nor does he use cuspidor for spittoon, or B. V. D.’s as a euphemism for underwear, or butterine for
oleomargarine.
“Business titles,” says W. L. George, “are given in America more readily than in England. Men are
distinguished by being called president of a corporation. I know one president whose staff consists of two
typists. Many firms have four vice-presidents. Or there is a press-representative, or a purchasing-agent. In
the magazines you seldom find merely an editor; the others need their share of honor, so they are associate
(not assistant) editors. A dentist is called a doctor. The hotel valet is a tailor. Magistrates of police-courts are
judges instead of merely Mr. I wandered into a university, knowing nobody, and casually asked for the dean.
I was asked, ‘Which dean?’ In that building there were enough deans to stock all the English cathedrals. The
master of a secret society is royal supreme knight commander. Perhaps I reached the extreme at a theatre in
Boston, when I wanted something, I forget what, and was told that I must apply to the chief of the ushers. He
was a mild little man, who had something to do with people getting into their seats, rather a come-down
from the pomp and circumstance of his title. Growing interested, I examined my program, with the following
result: It is not a large theatre, but it has a press-representative, a treasurer (box-office clerk), an assistant
treasurer (box-office junior clerk), an advertising-agent, our old friend the chief of the ushers, a stage-
manager, a head-electrician, a master of properties (in England called props), a leader of the orchestra (pity
this—why not president?), and a matron (occupation unknown).” George might have unearthed some even
stranger magnificoes in other play-houses. I once knew an ancient bill-sticker, attached permanently to a
Baltimore theatre, who boasted the sonorous title of chief lithographer.
I have already spoken of the freer use of Jew in England. In American newspapers it seems likely to be
displaced by Hebrew, largely through the influence of Jewish advertisers who, for some strange reason or
other, look upon Bebrew as more flattering. The Jews in England—that is, those of enough public importance
to make themselves heard—are in the main of considerable education, and so they are above any silly
shrinking from the name of Jew. But in the United States there is a class of well-to-do commercial Jews of a
peculiarly ignorant and obnoxious type—chiefly department-store owners, professional Jewish
philanthropists, and their attendant rabbis, lawyers, doctors, and so on—and the great majority of
newspapers are disposed to truckle to their every whim. Along about the year 1900 they began to protest
against the use of the word Jew to differentiate Jewish law-breakers from the baptized, and, soon thereafter,
to be on the safe side, the newspapers began to employ Hebrew whenever it was necessary to designate an
institution or individual of the Chosen. Thus, one often encounters such absurdities as Hebrew congregation,
Hebrew rabbi and Hebrew holidays. A few years ago a number of more cultured American Jews, alarmed by
the imbecility into which the campaign was falling, issued a “Note on the Word Jew” for the guidance of
newspapers. From this document I extract the following:
The words Jew and Jewish can never be objectionable when applied to the whole body of Israel, or to whole
classes within that body, as for instance, Jewish young men.
There can be no objection to the use of the words Jew and Jewish when contrast is being made with other
religions: “Jews observe Passover and Christians Easter.”
The application of the word Jew or Jewish to any individual is to be avoided unless from the context it is
necessary to call attention to his religion; in other words, unless the facts have some relation to his being a
Jew or to his Jewishness.… Thus, if a Jew is convicted of a crime he should not be called a Jewish criminal;
and on the other hand, if a Jew makes a great scientific discovery he should not be called an eminent Jewish
scientist.
The word Jew is a noun, and should never be used as an adjective or verb. To speak of Jew girls or Jew stores
is both objectionable and vulgar. Jewish is the adjective. The use of Jew as a verb, in to Jew down, is a slang
survival of the medieval term of opprobrium, and should be avoided altogether.
The word Hebrew should not be used instead of Jew. As a noun it connotes rather the Jewish people of the
distant past, as the ancient Hebrews. As an adjective it has an historical rather than a religious connotation;
one cannot say the Hebrew religion, but the Jewish religion.
Unfortunately this temperate and intelligent pronunciamento seems to have had but little effect. Potash and
Perlmutter still insist that the papers they support refer to them as Hebrews, and the thing is docilely done.
In the vaudeville journal, Variety, which is owned and edited by a Jew, Hebrew is invariably used. I have

40
often observed references to Hebrew comedians, Hebrew tragedians, the Hebrew drama, the Hebrew
holidays and even the Hebrew church. For an American newspaper to refer to Jewry would be almost as
hazardous as for it to refer to the ghetto. When the New York papers desire to discuss the doings of the
Jewish Socialists on the East Side, they are forced to retire behind East side agitators or soap-boxers. Years
ago, being city editor of a newspaper in a large city, I employed a reporter to cover the picturesque and often
strikingly dramatic life of the Russian and Polish Jews in its slums. He staggered along for two or three
months, trying in vain to invent terms to designate them that would not offend the large Jewish advertisers.
Finally, the business office bombarded me with so many complaints that I instructed him to abandon the
Jews, and devote himself to the Italians and Bohemians, who were all poor and without influential
compatriots uptown.

5. Expletives and Forbidden Words

When we come to words that, either intrinsically or by usage, are improper, a great many curious differences
between English and American reveal themselves. The Englishman, on the whole, is more plain-spoken than
the American, and such terms as bitch, mare and on foal do not commonly daunt him, largely, perhaps,
because of his greater familiarity with country life; but he has a formidable index of his own, and it includes
such essentially harmless words as sick, stomach, bum and bug. The English use of ill for sick I have already
noticed, and the reasons for the English avoidance of bum. Sick, over there, means nauseated, and when an
Englishman says that he was sick he means that he vomited, or, as an American would say, was sick at the
stomach. The older (and still American) usage, however, survives in various compounds. Sick-list, for
example, is official in the navy, 46 and sick-leave is known in the army, though it is more common to say of a
soldier that he is invalided home. Sick-room and sick-bed are also in common use, and sick-flag is used in
place of the American quarantine-flag. But an Englishman hesitates to mention his stomach in the presence
of ladies, though he discourses freely about his liver. To avoid the necessity he employs such euphemisms as
Little Mary. As for bug, he restricts its use very rigidly to the Cimex lectularius, or common bed-bug, and
hence the word has highly impolite connotations. All other crawling things he calls insects. An American of
my acquaintance once greatly offended an English friend by using bug for insect. The two were playing
billiards one summer evening in the Englishman’s house, and various flying things came through the window
and alighted on the cloth. The American, essaying a shot, remarked that he had killed a bug with his cue. To
the Englishman this seemed a slanderous reflection upon the cleanliness of his house.
But the most curious disparity between the profane vocabulary of the two tongues is presented by bloody.
This word is entirely without improper significance in America, but in England it is regarded as the vilest of
indecencies. The sensation produced in London when George Bernard Shaw put it into the mouth of a
woman character in his play, “Pygmalion,” will be remembered. “The interest in the first English
performance,” said the New York Times, “centered in the heroine’s utterance of this banned word. It was
waited for with trembling, heard shudderingly, and presumably, when the shock subsided, interest
dwindled.” But in New York, of course, it failed to cause any stir. Just why it is regarded as profane and
indecent by the English is one of the mysteries of the language. It came in during the latter half of the
seventeenth century, and remained innocuous for 200 years. Then it suddenly acquired its present abhorrent
significance. Two etymologies have been proposed for it. By the one it is held to be synonymous with “in the
manner of a blood,” i. e., of a rich young roisterer; this would make bloody drunk equivalent to as drunk as a
lord. The other derives it from by our Lady. But both theories obviously fail to account for its present
disrepute. As drunk as a lord would certainly not offend English susceptibilites, and neither would by our
Lady. An Englishwoman once told me that it grated upon her ears because it somehow suggested catamenia;
perhaps this affords a clue to the current aversion to it among the polite. It is used incessantly by the English
lower classes; they have even invented an intensive, bleeding. So familiar has it become, in fact, that it is a
mere counter-word, without intelligible significance. A familiar story illustrates this. Two Yorkshire miners
are talking. “What do they mean,” asks one, “by one man, one bloody vote.”

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V. International Exchanges

1. Americanisms in England

More than once, during the preceding chapters, we encountered Americanisms that had gone over into
English, and English locutions that had begun to get a foothold in the United States. Such exchanges are
made frequently and often very quickly, and though the guardians of English, as we saw in Chapter I, Section
3, still attack every new Americanism vigorously, even when, as in the case of scientist, it is obviously sound,
or, as in the case of joy-ride, it is irresistibly picturesque, they are often routed by public pressure, and have
to submit in the end with the best grace possible.
For example, consider caucus. It originated in Boston at some indeterminate time before 1750, and remained
so peculiarly American for more than a century following that most of the English visitors before the Civil
War remarked its use. But, according to J. Redding Ware, 1 it began to creep into English political slang
about 1870, and in the 80’s it was lifted to good usage by the late Joseph Chamberlain. Ware, writing in the
first years of the present century, said that the word had become “very important” in England, but was “not
admitted into dictionaries.” But in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, dated 1914, and in Cassell’s New English
Dictionary, published five years later, it is given as a sound English word, though its American origin is
noted. The English, however, use it in a sense that has become archaic in America, thus preserving an
abandoned American meaning in the same way that many abandoned British meanings have been preserved
on this side. In the United States the word means, and has meant for years, a meeting of some division, large
or small, of a political or legislative body for the purpose of agreeing upon a united course of action in the
main assembly. In England it means the managing committee of a party or fraction—something
corresponding to our national committee, or state central committee, or steering committee, or to the half-
forgotten congressional caucuses of the 20’s. It has a disparaging significance over there, almost equal to that
of our words organization and machine. Moreover, it has given birth to two derivatives of like quality, both
unknown in America—caucusdom, meaning machine control, and caucuser, meaning a machine politician.
A good many other such Americanisms have got into good usage in England, and new ones are being
exported constantly. Farmer describes the process of their introduction and assimilation. American books,
newspapers and magazines, especially the last, circulate in England in large number, and some of their
characteristic locutions strike the English fancy and are repeated in conversation. Then they get into print,
and begin to take on respectability. “The phrase, ‘as the Americans say,’ ” he continues, “might in some cases
be ordered from the type foundry as a logotype, so frequently does it do introduction duty.” are shows
another means of ingress: the argot of sailors. Many of the Americanisms he notes as having become
naturalized in England, e. g., boodle, boost and walk-out, are credited to Liverpool as a sort of half-way
station. Travel brings in still more: England swarms with Americans, and Englishmen themselves, visiting
America, are struck by the new and racy phrases that they hear, and afterward take them home and try them
on their friends. The English authors who burden every west-bound ship, coming here to lecture, have
especially sharp ears for such neologisms, and always use them when they get home—often, as we shall see,
inaccurately. Dickens was the first of these visitors to carry back that sort of cargo; according to Bishop Coxe
4 he gave currency in England, in his “American Notes,” to reliable, influential, talented and lengthy. Bristed,
writing in 1855, said that talented was already firmly fixed in the English vocabulary by that time. All four
words are in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and only lengthy is noted as “originally an Americanism.”
But though there are many such protests, the majority of Englishmen make borrowings from the tempting
and ever-widening American vocabulary, and many of these loan-words take root, and are presently
accepted as sound English, even by the most squeamish. The two Fowlers, in “The King’s English,” separate
Americanisms from other current vulgarisms, but many of the latter on their list, in the sense indicated, are
actually American in origin, though they do not seem to know it—for example, to demean and to transpire.
More remarkable still, the Cambridge History of English Literature lists backwoodsman, know-nothing and

42
yellow-back as English compounds, apparently in forgetfulness of their American origin, and adds skunk,
squaw and toboggan as direct importations from the Indian tongues, without noting that they came through
American, and remained definite Americanisms for a long while. It even adds musquash, a popular name for
the Fiber zibethicus, borrowed from the Algonquin muskwessu but long since degenerated to muskrat in
America. Musquash has been in disuse in this country, indeed, since the middle of the last century, save as a
stray localism, but the English have preserved it, and it appears in the Oxford Dictionary.
A few weeks in London or a month’s study of the London newspapers will show a great many other
American pollutions of the well of English. The argot of politics is full of them. Many beside caucus were
introduced by Joseph Chamberlain, a politician skilled in American campaign methods and with an
American wife to prompt him. He gave the English their first taste of to belittle, one of the inventions of
Thomas Jefferson. Graft and to graft crossed the ocean in their nonage. To bluff has been well understood in
English for 30 years. It is in Cassell’s and the Oxford Dictionaries, and has been used by no less a magnifico
than Sir Almroth Wright. 9 To stump, in the form of stump-oratory, is in Carlyle’s “Latter-Day Pamphlets,”
published in 1850, and caucus appears in his “Frederick the Great,” 10 though, as we have seen on the
authority of Ware, it did not come into general use in England until ten years later. Buncombe (usually
spelled bunkum) is in all the later English dictionaries. Gerrymander is in H. G. Wells’ “Outline of History.”
In the London stock market and among English railroad men various characteristic Americanisms have got a
foothold. The meaning of bucket-shop and to water, for example, is familiar to every London broker’s clerk.
English trains are now telescoped and carry dead-heads, and in 1913 a rival to the Amalgamated Order of
Railway Servants was organized under the name of the National Union of Railway Men. The beginnings of a
movement against the use of servant are visible in other directions, and the American help threatens to be
substituted; at all events, Help Wanted advertisements are now occasionally encountered in English
newspapers. But it is American verbs that seem to find the way into English least difficult, particularly those
compounded with prepositions and adverbs, such as to pan out and to swear off. Most of them, true enough,
are still used as conscious Americanisms, but used they are, and with increasing frequency. The highly
typical American verb to loaf is now naturalized, and Ware says that The Loaferies is one the common
nicknames of the Whitechapel workhouse. Both the Concise Oxford and Cassell list to loaf without
mentioning its American origin. The former says that its etymology is “dubious” and the latter that it is
“doubtful.”
It is curious, reading the fulminations of American purists of the last generation, to note how many of the
Americanisms they denounced have not only got into perfectly good usage at home but even broken down
all guards across the ocean. To placate and to antagonize are examples. The Concise Oxford and Cassell
distinguish between the English and American meanings of the latter: in England a man may antagonize only
another man, in America he may antagonize a mere idea or thing. But, as the brothers Fowler show, even the
English meaning is of American origin, and no doubt a few more years will see the verb completely
naturalized in Britain. To placate, attacked vigorously by all native grammarians down to (but excepting)
White, now has the authority of the Spectator, and is accepted by Cassell. To donate is still under the ban,
but to transpire has been used by the London Times. Other old bugaboos that have been embraced are
gubernatorial, presidential and standpoint. White labored long and valiantly to convince Americans that the
adjective derived from president should be without the i before its last syllable, following the example of
incidental, regimental, monumental, governmental, oriental, experimental and so on; but in vain, for
presidential is now perfectly good English. To demean is still questioned by purists, but Cassell accepts it.
English authors of the first rank have used it, and it will probably lose its dubious character very soon. To
engineer, to collide, to corner, to aggravate, to obligate, and to obligate, and to lynch are in Cassell with no
hint of their American origin, and so are home-spun, out-house, cross-purposes, green-horn, blizzard,
excursionist, wash-stand and wash-basin, though wash-hand-stand and wash-hand-basin are also given. To
boom, to boost and to boss are listed as Americanisms; so are highfalutin, skeedaddle and flat-footed. But to
donate and to feature are not there at all, and neither are non-committal, bay-window, semi-occasional,
square-meal, back-number, spondulix, back-yard, stag-party, derby (hat) and trained-nurse. Drug-store is
slowly making its way in England; the firm known as Botts Cash Chemists uses the term to designate its
branches. But it is not yet listed by either Cassell or the Concise Oxford, though both give druggist. L.
Pearsall Smith adds platform (political), interview, faith-healing, co-education and cake-walk. Cassell says

43
that letter-carrier is obsolete in England and that pay-day is used only on the Stock Exchange there.
Tenderfoot is creeping in, though the English commonly mistake it for an Australianism; it is used by the
English Boy Scouts just as our own Boy Scouts use it. Scalawag, characteristically, has got into English with
an extra l, making it scallawag. Rambunctious is not in any of the new English dictionaries, but in Cassell I
find rumbustious, probably its father.
I doubt that the war gave much new currency to Americanisms among the English. The fact is that the
American and British troops were seldom on the best of terms, and so fraternized very little. Cassell’s New
English Dictionary, published in 1919, lists a number of words borrowed by the British from the Americans,
among them cold-feet, delicatessen, guy (noun), high-brow, hobo, jitney, hot-stuff, jazz, joy-ride, milk-
shake, movies, pronto, tangle-foot, to make good, to hike, and to frazzle, but not many of them were in
general use. Cassell lists chautauquan but not chautauqua, and converts the American dub into dud. A
correspondent who was an officer in the American army writes:
I was with an American division brigaded with the British. The chief result seemed to be the adoption of a
common unit of swearing, but probably even this had been arrived at independently. The passage of all the
American troops that went through Liverpool, which was near-American before the war, didn’t make much
difference. I had to get some shoes while I was on furlough there after the armistice, and although I was in
my American uniform, a fact that should have made the nature of the shoes demanded doubly sure, they
brought out a pair of low shoes.

2. Briticisms in the United States

Nor did the American troops pick up many Briticisms during their year and a half in France, save
temporarily. In an exhaustive and valuable vocabulary of soldiers’ slang compiled by E. A. Hecker and
Edmund Wilson, Jr., I can find few words or phrases that seem to be certainly English in origin. To carry on
retains in American its old American meaning of to raise a pother, despite its widespread use among the
English in the sense of to be (in American) on the job. Even to wangle, perhaps the most popular of all the
new verbs brought out of the war by the English, has never got a foothold in the United States, and would be
unintelligible to nine Americans out of ten.
It is on far higher and less earthly planes that Briticisms make their entry into American, and are esteemed
and cultivated. Because the United States has failed to develop a native aristocracy of settled position and
authority, there is still an almost universal tendency here, among folk of social pretensions, to defer to
English usage and opinion. The English court, in fact, still remains the only fount of honor that such persons
know, and its valuations of both men and customs take precedence of all native valuations. I can’t imagine
any fashionable American who would not be glad to accept even so curious an English aristocrat as Lord
Reading or Lord Birkenhead at his face value, and to put him at table above a United States Senator. This
emulation is visible in all the minutiæ of social intercourse in America—in the hours chosen for meals, in the
style of personal correspondence, in wedding customs, in the ceremonials incidental to entertaining, and in
countless other directions. It even extends to the use of the language. We have seen how, even so early as
Webster’s time, the intransigent Loyalists of what Schele de Vere calls “Boston and the Boston dependencies”
imitated the latest English fashions in pronunciation, and how this imitation continues to our own day. New
York is but little behind, and with the affectation of what is regarded as English pronunciation there goes a
constant borrowing of new English words and phrases, particularly of the sort currently heard in the West
End of London. The small stores in the vicinity of Fifth avenue, for some years past, have all been turning
themselves into shops. Shoes for the persons who shop in that region are no longer shoes, but boots, and they
are sold by bootmakers in bootshops. One encounters, too, in Fifth avenue and the streets adjacent, a
multitude of gift-shops, tea-shops, haberdashery-shops, book-shops, luggage-shops, hat-shops and print-
shops. Every apartment-house in New York has a trades-men’s entrance. To Let signs have become almost as
common, at least in the East, as For Rent signs. Railway has begun to displace railroad. 20 Charwoman has
been adopted all over the country, and we have begun to forget our native modification of char, to wit,
chore. Long ago drawing-room was borrowed by the haut ton to take the place of parlor, and hired girls
began to be maids. Whip for driver, stick for cane, top-hat for high-hat, and to tub for to bathe came in long
ago, and guard has been making a struggle against conductor in New York for years. In August, 1917, signs

44
appeared in the New York surface cars in which the conductors were referred to as guards; all of them are
guards on the elevated lines and in the subways save the forward men, who remain conductors officially. In
Charles street in Baltimore, some time ago, the proprietor of a fashionable stationery store directed me, not to
the elevator but to the lift. During the war even the government seemed inclined to substitute the English
hoarding for the American billboard. In the Federal Reserve Act it actually borrowed the English governor
to designate the head of a bank.
The influence of the stage is largely responsible for the introduction and propagation of such Briticisms. Of
plays dealing with fashionable life, most of those seen in the United States are of English origin, and many of
them are played by English companies. Thus the social aspirants of the towns become familiar with the
standard English pronunciation of the moment and with the current English phrases. It was by this route, I
suppose, that old top and its analogues got in. The American actors, having no court to imitate, content
themselves by imitating their English colleagues. Thus an American of fashionable pretensions, say in
Altoona, Pa., or Athens, Ga., shakes hands, eats soup, greets his friends, enters a drawing-room and
pronounces the words path, secretary, melancholy and necessarily in a manner that is an imitation of some
American actor’s imitation of an English actor’s imitation of what is done in Mayfair—in brief, an imitation
in the fourth degree. No wonder it is sometimes rather crude. This crudity is especially visible in speech
habits. The American actor does his best to imitate the pronunciation and intonation of the English, but
inasmuch as his name, before he became Gerald Cecil, was probably Rudolph Goetz or Terence Googan, he
frequently runs aground upon laryngeal impossibilities. Here we have an explanation of the awful fist that
society folk in Des Moines and Little Rock make of pronouncing the test words in the authentic English
manner. All such words are filtered through Gaelic or Teutonic or Semitic gullets before they reach the
ultimate consumer.
I incline to think that both the grand dialects of English would be the better for a somewhat freer
interchange, and fully endorse the doctrine laid down by Prof. Gordon Hall Gerould, of Princeton, who
argues that it would be a sensible thing for Americans to adopt the English lift and tram in place of the more
cumbersome elevator and trolley-car, and that the English, in their turn, would find the communication of
ideas easier if they borrowed some of our American neologisms. “Logophobia,” he says, “has usually been a
sign, in men of our race, of a certain thinness of blood. The man of imagination and the man with something
to say have never been afraid of words, even words that have rung strangely on the ear. It has been the
finicking person, not very sure of himself, who has trod delicately between alternatives, and used the
accepted and time-worn word in preference to the newer coinage, out of his abhorrence born of fear …. I do
not wish to urge … the wiping out of those peculiarities of vocabulary by which one region of the English-
speaking world is made to seem slightly exotic to the visitor from another. Without such differences of
idiom, the common speech of the race would be the poorer, as the waters from many rivulets are needed to
feed the river. Let him who says naturally a pail of water say so still, and him to whom a bucket is more
familiar rejoice in his locution. Let my English friend call for his jug, while I demand my pitcher; for he
will—if he be not afflicted with logophobia—enjoy what seems to him the fine archaic flavor of my word.
What I would commend is a generous reciprocity in vocabulary, as between section and section,
commonwealth and commonwealth, country and country. If it should become convenient for us Americans
to use a word now peculiar to Great Britain, I hope we should not be so silly as to stop it at the tongue’s end
out of national pride or chauvinistic delicacy. It is evident that any ‘American’ language which might be
evolved by the sedulous fostering on our part of native idioms would still retain a good deal of the original
English language. Why, then, should we shut ourselves off from the good things in words that have been
invented or popularized in Great Britain since the Pilgrims sailed? And why, on the other hand, should the
Englishman disdain the ingenious locutions that have come to light on this side the Atlantic?” 6
A correspondent makes the suggestion that such exchanges, if they were more numerous, would greatly
enrich each language’s stock of fine distinctions. A loan-word, he says, does not usually completely displace
the corresponding native word, but simply puts a new distinction beside it. Unquestionably, this often
happens. Consider, for example, the case of shop. As it is now used in the American cities it affords a
convenient means of distinguishing between a large store offering various lines of merchandise and a small
establishment specializing in one line. The old-fashioned country store remains a store and so does the
department-store. To call either a shop would seem absurd. Shop is applied exclusively to smaller

45
establishments, and almost always in combination with some word designating the sort of stock they carry.
Shop, indeed, has always been good American, though its current application is borrowed from England. We
have used shop-worn, shoplifter, shopping, pawn-shop, shopper, shop-girl and to shop for years. In the same
way the word penny continues to flourish among us, despite the fact that there has been no American coin of
that name for more than 125 years. We have nickel-in-the-slot machines, but when they take a cent we call
them penny-in-the-slot machines. We have penny-arcades and penny-whistles. We do not play cent-ante,
but penny-ante. We still “turn an honest penny” and say “a penny for your thoughts.” The pound and the
shilling became extinct legally a century ago, 25 but the penny still binds us to the mother-tongue. But an
American knows nothing of pence. To him two pennies are always pennies.

VI. Tendencies in American

1. General Characters

The elements that enter into the special character of American have been rehearsed in the first chapter: a
general impatience of rule and restraint, a democratic enmity to all authority, an extravagant and often
grotesque humor, an extraordinary capacity for metaphor 1—in brief, all the natural marks of what Van
Wyck Brooks calls “a popular life which bubbles with energy and spreads and grows and slips away ever
more and more from the control of tested ideas, a popular life with the lid off.” 2 This is the spirit of America,
and from it the American language is nourished. “The wish to see things afresh and for himself,” says Dr.
Harry Morgan Ayres, 3 “is so characteristic of the American that neither in his speech nor his most
considered writing does he need any urging to seek out ways of his own. He refuses to carry on his verbal
traffic with the well-worn counters; he will always be new-writing them. He is on the lookout for words that
say something; he has a sort of remorseless and scientific efficiency in the choice of epithets! … The
American … has an Elizabethan love of exuberant language.” Brooks, perhaps, generalizes a bit too lavishly;
Ayres calls attention to the fact that below the surface there is also a curious conservatism, even a sort of
timorousness. In a land of manumitted peasants the primary trait of the peasant is bound to show itself now
and then; as Wendell Phillips once said, “more than any other people, we Americans are afraid of one
another”— that is, afraid of isolation, of derision, of all the consequences of singularity. But in the field of
language, as in that of politics, this suspicion of the new is often transformed into a suspicion of the merely
unfamiliar, and so its natural tendency toward conservatism is overcome. It is of the essence of democracy
that it remain a government by amateurs, and under a government by amateurs it is precisely the expert who
is most questioned—and it is the expert who commonly stresses the experience of the past. And in a
democratic society it is not the iconoclast who seems most revolutionary, but the purist. The derisive
designation of high-brow is thoroughly American in more ways than one. It is a word put together in an
unmistakably American fashion, it reflects an habitual American attitude of mind, and its potency in debate
is peculiarly national too.
I daresay it is largely a fear of the weapon in it—and there are many others of like effect in the arsenal—
which accounts for the far greater prevalence of idioms from below in the formal speech of America than in
the formal speech of England. There is surely no English novelist of equal rank whose prose shows so much
of colloquial looseness and ease as one finds in the prose of Howells: to find a match for it one must go to the
prose of the neo-Celts, professedly modelled upon the speech of peasants, and almost proudly defiant of
English grammar and syntax, and to the prose of the English themselves before the Restoration. Nor is it
imaginable that an Englishman of comparable education and position would ever employ such locutions as
those I have hitherto quoted from the public addresses of Dr. Wilson—that is, innocently, seriously, as a
matter of course. The Englishman, when he makes use of coinages of that sort, does so in conscious
relaxation, and usually with a somewhat heavy sense of doggishness. They are proper to the paddock or even
to the dinner table, but scarcely to serious scenes and occasions. But in the Unitel States their use is the rule
rather than the exception; it is not the man who uses them, but the man who doesn’t use them, who is
marked off. Their employment, if high example counts for anything, is a standard habit of the language, as
their diligent avoidance is a standard habit of English.

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2. Lost Distinctions

This general iconoclasm reveals itself especially in a disdain for most of the niceties of modern English. The
American, like the Elizabethan Englishman, is usually quite unconscious of them and even when they have
been instilled into him by the hard labor of pedagogues he commonly pays little heed to them in his ordinary
discourse. The distinction between each other and one another offers a salient case in point; all the old effort
to confine the first to two persons or objects and the latter to more than two seems to be breaking down. 26
So with the very important English distinction between will and shall. This last, it may be said at once, is far
more a confection of the grammarians than a product of the natural forces shaping the language. It has,
indeed, little etymological basis, and is but imperfectly justified logically. One finds it disregarded in the
Authorized Version of the Bible, in all the plays of Shakespeare, in the essays of the reign of Anne, and in
some of the best examples of modern English literature. The theory behind it is so inordinately abstruse that
the Fowlers, in “The King’s English,” 27 require 20 pages to explain it, and even then they come to the
resigned conclusion that the task is hopeless. “The idiomatic use [of the two auxiliaries],” they say, “is so
complicated that those who are not to the manner born can hardly acquire it.” 28 Well, even those who are
to the manner born seem to find it difficult, for at once the learned authors cite blunders in the writings of
Richardson, Stevenson, Gladstone, Jowett, Oscar Wilde, and even Henry Sweet, author of the best existing
grammar of the English language. In American the distinction is almost lost. No ordinary American, save
after the most laborious reflection, would detect anything wrong in this sentence from the London Times,
denounced as corrupt by the Fowlers: “We must reconcile what we would like to do with what we can do.”
Nor in this by W. B. Yeats: “The character who delights us may commit murder like Macbeth … and yet we
will rejoice in every happiness that comes to him.” Half a century ago, impatient of the effort to fasten the
English distinction upon American, George P. Marsh attacked it as of “no logical value or significance
whatever,” and predicted that “at no very distant day this verbal quibble will disappear, and one of the
auxiliaries will be employed, with all persons of the nominative, exclusively as the sign of the future, and the
other only as an expression of purpose or authority.” This prophecy has been substantially verified. Will is
sound American “with all persons of the nominative,” and shall is almost invariably an “expression of purpose
or authority.”

3. Processes of Word-Formation

Some of the tendencies visible in American—e. g., toward the facile manufacture of new compounds, toward
the transfer of words from one part of speech to another, and toward the free use of suffixes and prefixes and
the easy isolation of roots and pseudoroots—go back to the period of the first growth of a distinct American
dialect and are heritages from the English of the time. They are the products of a movement which, reaching
its height in the English of Elizabeth, was dammed up at home, so to speak, by the rise of linguistic self-
consciousness toward the end of the reign of Anne, but continued almost unobstructed in the colonies.
For example, there is what philologists call the habit of clipping or back-formation—a sort of instinctive
search, etymologically un-sound, 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 new sect of purists, 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 such words in standard English, e. g., patter from paternoster, van from caravan, wig from periwig, cab
from cabriolet, brandy from brandy-wine (=brandewyn), pun from pundigrion, grog from grogram, curio
from curiosity, canter from Canterbury, brig from brigantine, bus from omnibus, bant from Banting and fad
from fadaise. In the colonies there was no such opposition to them as came from the purists of the English
universities; save for a few feeble protests from Witherspoon and Boucher they went unchallenged. As a
result they multiplied enormously. Rattler for rattle-snake, pike for turnpike, draw for drawbridge, coon for
raccoon, possum for opossum, cuss for customer, cute for acute, squash for askutasquash—these American
back-formations are already antique; Sabbaday for Sabbath-day has actually reached the dignity of an
archaism, as has the far later chromo for chromolithograph. To this day they are formed in great numbers;

47
scarcely a new substantive of more than two syllables comes in without bringing one in its wake. We have
thus witnessed, within the past few years, the genesis of scores now in wide use and fast taking on
respectability: phone for telephone, gas for gasoline, co-ed for co-educational, pop for populist, frat for
fraternity, gym for gymnasium, movie for moving picture, plane for air-plane, prep-school for preparatory-
school, auto for automobile, aero for aeroplane and aeronautical. Some linger on the edge of vulgarity: pep
for pepper, flu for influenza, plute for plutocrat, vamp for vampire, pen for penitentiary, con for confidence
(as in con-man, con-game and to con), convict and consumption, defi for defiance, beaut for beauty, rep for
reputation, stenog for stenographer, ambish for ambition, vag for vagrant, champ for champion, pard for
partner, coke for cocaine, simp for simpleton, diff for difference, grass for asparagus, mum for
chrysanthemum, mutt for muttonhead, 44 wiz for wizard, rube for Reuben, hon for honey, barkeep for
barkeeper, divvy for dividend or division, jit for jitney. Others are already in good usage: smoker for
smoking-car, diner for dining-car, sleeper for sleeping-car, oleo for oleomar-garine, hypo for hyposulphite of
soda, Yank for Yankee, confab for confabulation, memo for memorandum, pop-concert for popular-concert,
gator for alligator, foots for footlights, ham for hamfatter (actor), sub for substitute, knicker for
knickerbocker. Many back-formations originate in college slang, e. g., prof for professor, prom for
promenade, soph for sophomore, grad for graduate (noun), lab for laboratory, dorm for dormitory, plebe for
plebeian. 45 Ad for advertisement is struggling hard for general recognition; some of its compounds, e. g., ad-
writer, want-ad, display-ad, ad-card, ad-rate, column-ad and ad-man, are already accepted in technical
terminology. 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 hoak for hoakum, two altogether fit successors to bum
for bummer. Try for trial, as in “He made a try at it,” is also making progress but perhaps try-out, a
characteristically American combination of verb and preposition, will eventually displace it. This production
of new words by clipping, back-formation and folk-etymology is quite as active among the verbs as among
the nouns. I have already described the appearance of such forms as to locate in the earliest days of
differentiation and the popularity of such forms as to enthuse and to phone today. Many more verbs of the
same sort have attained to respectability, e. g., to jell, to auto, to commute, to typewrite, to tiptoe (for to walk
tiptoe). Others are still on probation, e. g., to reminisce, to insurge, to vamp, to peeve, to jubilate, to taxi, to
orate, to bach (i. e., to live in bachelor quarters), to emote. Yet others are still unmistakably vulgar or merely
waggish, e. g., to plumb (from plumber), to barb (from barber), to chauf (from chauffeur), to ready (from to
make ready), to elocute, to burgle, to ush, to sculp, to butch, to con (from confidence-man), to buttle, to
barkeep, to dressmake, to housekeep, to boheme, to photo, to divvy. Such forms seem to make an irresistible
appeal to the American; he is constantly experimenting with new ones. “There is a much greater percentage
of humorous shortenings among verbs,” says Miss Wittmann, “than among other parts of speech. Especially is
this true of verbs shortened from nouns and adjectives by subtracting what looks like a derivative suffix, e. g.,
-er, -or, -ing, -ent from nouns, or -y from adjectives. Many clipped verbs have noun parallels, while some are
simply clipped nouns used as verbs.” 46 Miss Wittmann calls attention to the curious fact that very few
adjectives are clipped in American; there are actually more of them in British English. Sesech (from
secessionist, really a noun, but often used as an adjective) is one of the few familiar examples. Adjectives are
made copiously in American, but most of them are made by other processes.
Another popular sort of neologism is the blend- or portmanteau- word. Many such words are in standard
English, e. g., Lewis Carroll’s chortle (from chuckle and snort), dumbfound (from dumb and confound),
luncheon (lunch+nuncheon), blurt (blare+spurt). American contributed gerrymander (Gerry+salamander) so
long ago as 1812, and in more recent years has produced many blends that have gone over into standard
English, e. g., cablegram (cable+telegram), electrocute (electricity+execute), electrolier
(electricity+chandelier, Amerind (American+Indian), doggery (dog+groggery), riffle (in a stream) (probably
from ripple and ruffle). Perhaps travelogue (travel+monologue), Luther Burbank’s pomato (potato+tomato),
slanguage (slang+language), and thon (that+one) 47 will one day follow. Boost (boom+hoist) is a typical
American blend. I have a notion that blurb is a blend also. So, perhaps, is flunk; Dr. Louise Pound says that it
may be from fail and funk. 48 Aframerican, which is now very commonly used in the Negro press, is not
American, but was devised by Sir Harry Johnston. Allied with the portmanteau words are many blends of a
somewhat different sort, in which long compounds are displaced by forms devised by analogy with existing
words. Printery (for printing-office) appeared very early, and in late years it has been reinforced by many

48
analogues, e. g., beanery, bootery, boozery, toggery. Condensery is used in the West to indicate a place where
milk is condensed. I have encountered breadery in Baltimore; Dr. Pound reports hashery and drillery. 50
Somewhat similar are the words suggested by cafeteria, once a California localism. Among other strange
forms I have encountered haberteria (for haberdashery) and groceriteria (for grocery-store). The wide use of
the suffix -ette in such terms as farmerette, conductorette, kitchenette, cellarette, featurette, leatherette,
flannelette, crispette, usherette and huskerette, is due to the same effort to make one word do the work of
two. In Baltimore, in 1918, the street railways company appealed to the public to drop conductorette and go
back to woman conductor, but the new word survived. I suspect that the popularity of near- as a prefix has
much the same psychological basis. Near-beer is surely simpler than imitation beer or non-alcoholic beer,
and near-silk is better than the long phrase that would have to be used to describe it accurately. So with the
familiar and numerous terms in -ee, -ite, -ster, -ist, -er, -dom, -itis, -ism, -ize, etc., e. g., draftee, Kreislerite,
dopester, chalkologist, soap-boxer, picturedom, golfitis, Palmerism, to hooverize, and so on. They all
represent efforts to condense the meaning of whole phrases into simple and instantly-understandable words.
“The great majority of shortened forms,” says Miss Wittmann, “are clearly made for convenience; their
speakers employ them to save time and trouble.” Here, incidentally, the influence of newspaper head-lines is
not to be overlooked. The American head-line writer faces peculiar difficulties; he must get clearly
explanatory phrases into very small space, and almost always he is handicapped by arbitrary regulations as to
typographical arrangement—regulations which do not oppress his English colleague. As a result he is an
ardent propagandish gandish for short words, e. g., probe (for investigation), grab, steal, haul, wed (for
wedded), hello-girl (for telephone-girl), soul-mate, love-nest, love-pirate, and so on. He constantly uses up in
the something’s up sense, e. g., “Dry QuestionUp in Legislature.” The popularity of Hun, during the War, was
no doubt largely due to the exigencies of his calling. He never uses a long word when a short one will
answer, and he never uses articles when they can be avoided. Possibly the omission of the article in such
American phrases as up street, all year and all Sunday (the Englishman would probably say all day on
Sunday) is largely due to his influence. Certainly, he is an eager merchant of all such neologisms as sub-deb,
stand-pat, try-out, co-ed, gym, auto, defi and phone.
For the student interested in the biology of language, as opposed to its paleontology, there is endless
material in the racy neologisms of American, and particularly in its new compounds and novel verbs.
Nothing could exceed the brilliancy of such inventions as joy-ride, high-brow, road-louse, sob-sister, frame-
up, loan-shark, nature-faker, stand-patter, lounge-lizard, hash-foundry, buzz-wagon, has-been, end-seat-hog,
shoot-the-chutes and grape-juice diplomacy. They are bold; they are vivid; they have humor; they meet
genuine needs. Joy-ride is already going over into English, and no wonder. There is absolutely no synonym
for it; to convey its idea in orthodox English would take a whole sentence. And so, too, with certain single
words of metaphorical origin: barrel for large and illicit wealth, pork for unnecessary and dishonest
appropriations of public money, joint for illegal liquor-house, tenderloin for gay and dubious neighborhood.
Many of these, and of the new compounds with them, belong to the vocabulary of disparagement, e. g.,
bone-head, skunk, bug, jay, lobster, boob, mutt, gas (empty talk), geezer, piker, baggage-smasher, hash-
slinger, clock-watcher, four-flusher, coffin-nail, chin-music, batty and one-horse. Here an essential character
of the American shows itself: his tendency to combat the disagreeable with irony, to heap ridicule upon what
he is suspicious of or doesn’t understand.
This last example, however, violates one tendency almost as clearly as it shows another. In general, the
English habit of hitching a preposition to a verb is carried to even greater lengths in America than it is in
England. The colloquial language is very rich in such compounds, and some of them have come to have
special meanings. Compare, for example, to give and to give out, to go back and to go back on, to beat and to
beat it, to light and to light out, to butt and to butt in, to turn and to turn down, to show and to show up, to
put and to put over, to wind and to wind up. Sometimes, however, the addition seems to be merely
rhetorical, as in to start off, to finish up, to open up, to beat up (or out), to try out, to stop over (or off), and to
hurry up. To hurry up is so commonplace in America that everyone uses it and no one notices it, but it
remains rare in England. Up seems to be essential to many of these latter-day verbs, e. g., to pony up, to doll
up, to ball up; without it they are without significance. Sometimes unmistakable adverbs are substituted for
prepositions, as in to stay put and to call down. “Brush your hat off” would seem absurd to an Englishman; so
would “The Committee reported out the bill.” Nearly all of these reinforced verbs are supported by

49
corresponding adjectives and nouns, e. g., cut-up, show-down, kick-in, come-down, hand-out, start-off,
wind-up, run-in, balled-up, dolled-up, bang-up, turn-down, frame-up, stop-over, jump-off, call-down,
buttinski.
The rapidity with which words move through the parts of speech must be observed by every student of
American. The case of bum I have already cited: it is noun, adjective, verb and adverb. The adjective
lonesome, in “all by her lonesome,” becomes a sort of pronoun. The verb to think, in “he had another think
coming,” becomes a noun. Jitney is an old American noun lately revived; a month after its revival it was also
an adjective, and before long it will be a verb. To lift up was turned tail first and made a substantive, and is
now also an adjective and a verb. Joy-ride became a verb the day after it was born as a noun. So did auto and
phone. So did the adjective, a. w. o. l. Immediately the Workmen’s Compensation Act began to appear on the
statute-books of the States, the adjective compensable was born. Other adjectives are made by the simple
process of adding -y to nouns, e. g., classy, tasty, tony. And what of livest? An astounding inflection,
indeed—but with quite sound American usage behind it. The Metropolitan Magazine, of which Col.
Roosevelt was an editor, announces on its letter paper that it is “the livest magazine in America,” and Poetry,
the organ of the new poetry movement, used to print at the head of its contents page the following
encomium from the New York Tribune: “the livest art in America today is poetry, and the livest expression
of that art is in this little Chicago monthly.”
We have seen how readily new prefixes and affixes are adopted in America. Often a whole word is thus put
to service, and such amalgamations produce many new words. Thus smith threatens to breed a long series of
new agent nouns, e. g., ad-smith, joke-smith; and fiend (a characteristic American hyperbole) has already
produced a great many, e. g., movie-fiend, drug-fiend, bridge-fiend, golf-fiend, coke-fiend, kissing-fiend.
Moreover, there is no impediment to their almost infinite multiplication. If some enterprising shoe-repairer
began calling himself a shoe-smith tomorrow no one would think to protest against the neologism, and if
some new game were introduced from abroad, say the German Skat, the corresponding fiend would come
with it. Always the effort is to dispose of a long explanatory phrase by substituting a succinct and concrete
term. This effort is responsible for many whole classes of compounds, e. g., the hospital series: doll-hospital,
china-hospital, camera-hospital, pipe-hospital, etc. It is responsible, too, for many somewhat startling
derivatives, e. g., mixologist and tuberculogian. 69 And it lies behind the invention of many words that are
not compounds, but boldly put forth new roots, many of them etymologically unintelligible, e. g., jazz, jinx,
hobo, 70 woozy, goo-goo (eyes), hoakum, sundae. A large number of characteristic Americanisms are
deliberate inventions, devised to designate new objects or to clothe old objects with a special character. The
American advertiser is an extraordinarily diligent manufacturer of such terms, and many of his coinages, e.
g., kodak, vaseline, listerine, postum, carborundum, klaxon, jap-a-lac, pianola, victrola, dictagraph and
uneeda are quite as familiar to all Americans as tractor or soda-mint, and have come into general acceptance
as common nouns. The Eastman Kodak Company, indeed, has sometimes had to call attention to the fact that
kodak is its legal property, and in the same way the Chesebrough Manufacturing Company has had to protect
vaseline. Dr. Louise Pound has made an interesting study of these artificial trade-names. They fall, she
finds, into a number of well defined classes. There are the terms that are simple derivatives from proper
names, e. g., listerine, postum, klaxon; the shortenings, e. g., jell-o, jap-a-lac; the extensions with common
suffixes, e. g., alabastine, protectograph, dictograph, orangeade, crispette, pearline, electrolier; the extensions
with new or fanciful suffixes, e. g., resinol, thermos, grafanola, shinola, sapolio, lysol, neolin, crisco; the
diminutives, e. g., cascaret, wheatlet, chiclet; the simple compounds, e. g., palmolive, spearmint, peptomint,
auto-car; the blends, e. g., cuticura, damaskeene, locomobile, mobiloil; 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 substitution, e. g., triscut; and the arbitrary formations, e. g., kodak, tiz, clysmic,
vivil. Dr. Brander Matthews once published an Horatian ode, of unknown authorship, made up of such
inventions. 73 I transcribe it for the joy of connoisseurs:
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,

50
Crisco balopticon lysol, jello bellans, carborundum!
Ampico clysmic swoboda, pantasote necco britannica
Encyclopædia?
One of the words here used is not American, but Italian, i. e., fiat, a blend made of the initials of Fabbrica
Italiano Automobili Torino; most of the others are quite familiar to all Americans. “But only a few of them,”
says Dr. Matthews, “would evoke recognition from an Englishman; and what a Frenchman or a German
would make out of the eight lines it is beyond human power even to guess. Corresponding words have been
devised in France and in Germany, but only infrequently; and apparently the invention of trade-mark names
is not a customary procedure on the part of foreign advertisers. The British, although less affluent in this
respect than we are, seem to be a little more inclined to employ the device than their competitors on the
continent. Every American, traveling on the railways which converge upon London, must have experienced
a difficulty in discovering whether the station at which his train has paused is Stoke Pogis or Bovril,
Chipping Norton or Mazzawattee. None the less it is safe to say that the concoction of a similar ode by the aid
of the trade-mark words invented in the British Isles would be a task of great difficulty on account of the
paucity of terms sufficiently artificial to bestow the exotic remoteness which is accountable for the aroma of
the American ‘ode’.”
Of analogous character are artificial words of the scalawag and rambunctious class, the formation of which
constantly goes on. Some of them are telescope forms: grandificent (from grand and magnificent), sodalicious
(from soda and delicious) and warphan (age) (from war and orphan [age]). Others are made up of common
roots and grotesque affixes: swelldoodle, splendiferous and peacharino. Yet others are stretch forms or mere
extravagant inventions: scallywampus, supergobsloptious and floozy. Many of these are devised by
advertisement writers or college students and belong properly to slang, but there is a steady movement of
selected specimens into the common vocabulary. The words in -doodle hint at German influences, and those
in -ino owe something to Italian or maybe to Spanish.

4. Foreign Influences Today

The English, in this matter, display their greater conservatism very plainly. Even when a loan-word enters
both English and American simultaneously a sense of foreignness lingers about it on the other side of the
Atlantic much longer than on this side, and it is used with far more self-consciousness. The word matinée
offers a convenient example. To this day the English commonly print it in italics, give it its French accent,
and pronounce it with some attempt at the French manner. But in America it is entirely naturalized, and the
most ignorant man uses it without any feeling that it is strange. Often a loan-word loses all signs of its
original foreignness. For example, there is shimmy, a corruption of both chemise and chemin (de fer), the
name of a card game: it has lost both its original forms and, in one sense, its original meaning. 85 The same
lack of any sense of linguistic integrity is to be noticed in many other directions—for example, in the
freedom with which the Latin per is used with native nouns. One constantly sees per day, per dozen, per
hundred, per mile, etc., in American newspapers, even the most careful, but in England the more seemly a is
almost always used, or the noun itself is made Latin, as in per diem. Per, in fact, is fast becoming an everyday
American word. Such phrases as “as per your letter (or order) of the 15th inst.” are met with incessantly in
business correspondence. The same greater hospitality is shown by the readiness with which various un-
English prefixes and affixes come into fashion, for example, super- and -itis. The English accept them
gingerly; the Americans take them in with enthusiasm, and naturalize them instanter.
The pressure of loan-words, of course, is greatest in those areas in which the foreign population is largest. In
some of these areas it has given rise to what are almost distinct dialects. Everyone who has ever visited lower
Pennsylvania must have observed the wide use of German terms by the natives, and the German intonations
in their speech, even when they are most careful with their English. 87 In the same way, the English of
everyday life in New Orleans is full of French terms, e.g., praline, brioche, lagniappe, armoir, kruxingiol (=
croquignole), pooldoo (= poule d’eau), and the common speech of the Southwest is heavy with debased
Spanish, e.g., alamo, arroyo, chaparral, caballero, comino, jornada, frijole, presidio, serape, hombre, quien
sabe, vamose. 89 As in the early days of settlement, there is a constant movement of favored loan-words into
the general speech of the country. Hooch, from the Chinook, was for long a localism in the Northwest;

51
suddenly it appeared everywhere. So with certain Chinese and Japanese words that have, within late years,
entered the general speech from the speech of California. New York has been the port of entry for most of
the new Yiddish and Italian loan-words, as it was the port of entry for Irishisms seventy years ago. In
Michigan the natives begin to borrow from the Dutch settlers and may later on pass on their borrowings to
the rest of the country; in the prairie states many loan-words from the Scandinavian languages are already in
use; in Kansas there are even traces of Russian influence.
In the Philippines and in Hawaii American naturally shows even greater hospitality to loan-words; in both
places distinct dialects have been developed, quite unintelligible to the newcomer from home. Maurice P.
Dunlap 91 offers the following specimen of a conversation between two Americans long resident in Manila:
Hola, amigo.
Komusta kayo.
Porque were you hablaing with ese senorita?
She wanted a job as lavandera.
Cuanto?
Ten cents, conant, a piece, so I told her no kerry.
Have you had chow? Well, spera, till I sign this chit and I’ll take a paseo with you.
Here we have an example of Philippine American that shows all the tendencies of American Yiddish. It
retains the general forms of American, but in the short conversation, embracing but 41 different words, there
are eight loan-words from the Spanish (hola, amigo, porque, ese, senorita, lavandera, cuanto and paseo), two
Spanish locutions in a debased form (spera for espera and no kerry for no quiero), two loan-words from the
Tagalog (komusta and kayo), two from Pidgin English (chow andchit), one Philippine-American localism
(conant), and a Spanish verb with an English inflection (hablaing).
The American dialect developed in Hawaii is thus described by a writer in the Christian Science Monitor:
93
Honolulu, despite the score or more of races which intermingle in absolute harmony, is a strictly American
community. English is the language which predominates; and yet there are perhaps a hundred or more
Hawaiian words which are used by everyone, almost exclusively, in preference to those English words of
similar meaning.
Are you pau?” asks the American housekeeper of her Japanese yard man.
“All pau,” he responds.
The housekeeper has asked if the yard man is through. He has replied that he is. She would not think of
asking, “Are you through?” Pau—pronounced pow—as used in Honolulu conveys just as much meaning to
the Honolulan as the English 94 word through. It is one of the commonest of the Hawaiian words used today.
In Honolulu one does not say “the northwest corner of Fort and Hotel Streets.” One says “the makai-ewa
corner.” Makai means toward the sea. Ewa means toward the north or in the direction of the big Ewa
plantation which lies toward the north of Honolulu. Thus the makai-ewa corner means that corner which is
on the seaward side and toward Ewa. Instead of saying east or the direction in which the sun rises,
Honolulans say mauka, which means toward the mountains. To designate south, they say waikiki, which
means toward Diamond Head or Waikiki Beach.
One often hears a little boy say he has a puka in his stocking. The housekeeper directs the yard man to put
the rubbish in the puka. It is a simple Hawaiian word meaning hole. Another common word is lanai. In
English it means porch or veranda. One never says, “Come out on the porch,” but “Come out on the lanai.”
The two words pahea oe are used as a term of greeting. In the States they say, “How do you do?” “How are
you?” or “Good day.” In Honolulu, “Pahea oe?” conveys the same meaning. The response is Maikai no, or
“Very good,” or “All right.”
On the mainland the word aloha is not new. It is used as a word of greeting or as a word of farewell. “Aloha
oe” may mean “Farewell to you,” “How are you?” or “Good day.” The word is not as common among the
Americans as some of the others, but is used to a more exclusive extent by the Hawaiians.
A large number of Americans have an entirely wrong interpretation of the word kanaka. In its truest and
only sense it means man. It can be interpreted in no other way. In Hawaiian a man is a kanaka, a woman a
wahine.

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VII. The Standard American Pronunciation

1. General Characters

“Language,” said Sayce, in 1879, “does not consist of letters, but of sounds, and until this fact has been
brought home to us our study of it will be little better than an exercise of memory.” 1 The theory, at that
time, was somewhat strange to English grammarians and etymologists, despite the investigations of A. J. Ellis
and the massive lesson of Grimm’s law; their labors were largely wasted upon deductions from the written
word. But since then, chiefly under the influence of German philologists, they have turned from
orthographical futilities to the actual sounds of the tongue, and the latest and best grammar, that of Sweet, is
frankly based upon, the spoken English of educated Englishmen—not, remember, of conscious purists, but of
the general body of cultivated folk. Unluckily, this new method also has its disadvantages. The men of a
given race and time usually write a good deal alike, or, at all events, attempt to write alike, but in their oral
speech there are wide variations. “No two persons,” says a leading contemporary authority upon English
phonetics, “pronounce exactly alike.” Moreover, “even the best speaker commonly uses more than one
style.” The result is that it is extremely difficult to determine the prevailing pronunciation of a given
combination of letters at any time and place. The persons whose speech is studied pronounce it with minute
shades of difference, and admit other differences according as they are conversing naturally or endeavoring
to exhibit their pronunciation. Worse, it is impossible to represent a great many of these shades in print.
Sweet, trying to do it, found himself, in the end, with a preposterous alphabet of 125 letters. Prince L.-L.
Bonaparte more than doubled this number, and Ellis brought it to 390. Other phonologists, English and
Continental, have gone floundering into the same bog. The dictionary-makers, forced to a far greater
economy of means, are brought into obscurity. The difficulties of the enterprise, in fact, are probably
unsurmountable. It is, as White says, “almost impossible for one person to express to another by signs the
sound of any word.” “Only the voice,” he goes on, “is capable of that; for the moment a sign is used the
question arises, What is the value of that sign? The sounds of words are the most delicate, fleeting and
inapprehensible things in nature. …. Moreover, the question arises as to the capability to apprehend and
distinguish sounds on the part of the person whose evidence is given.” Certain German orthoëpists,
despairing of the printed page, have turned to the phonograph, and there is a Deutsche Grammophon-
Gesellschaft in Berlin which offers records of specimen speeches in a great many languages and dialects,
including English. The phonograph has also been put to successful use in language teaching by various
American correspondence schools.
In view of all this it would be hopeless to attempt to exhibit in print the numerous small differences
between English and American pronunciation, for many of them are extremely delicate and subtle, and only
their aggregation makes them plain. According to a recent and very careful observer 6 the most important of
them do not lie in pronunciation at all, properly so called, but in intonation. In this direction, he says, one
must look for the true characters of “the English accent.”
But here, of course, we come upon the tendency to depress all vowels to the level of a neutral e—a tendency
quite as visible in English as in American, though there are differences in detail. The two languages,
however, seem to proceed toward phonetic decay on paths that tend to diverge more and more, and the
divergences already in effect, though they may seem slight separately, are already of enough importance in
the aggregate to put serious impediments between mutual comprehension. Let an Englishman and an
American (not of New England) speak a quite ordinary sentence, “My aunt can’t answer for my dancing the
lancers even passably,” and at once the gap separating the two pronunciations will be manifest. Add a dozen
everyday words—military, schedule, trait, hostile, been, lieutenant, patent, laboratory, nephew, secretary,
advertisement, and so on—and the strangeness of one to the other is augmented. “Every Englishman visiting
the States for the first time,” said an English dramatist some time ago, “has a difficulty in making himself
understood. stood. He often has to repeat a remark or a request two or three times to make his meaning clear,
especially on railroads, in hotels and at bars. The American visiting England for the first time has the same
trouble.” Despite the fact that American actors always imitate English pronunciation to the best of their
skill, this visiting Englishman asserted that the average American audience is incapable of understanding a
genuinely English company, at least “when the speeches are rattled off in conversational style.”

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2. The Vowels

In Chapters II and III, I have already discussed historically the pronunciation of a in the United States—not, I
fear, to much effect, but at all events as illuminatingly as the meagre materials so far amassed permit. The
best study of the pronunciation of the letter today is to be found in George Philip Krapp’s excellent book,
“The Pronunciation of Standard English in America,” from which I have, already quoted several times. This
work is the first adequate treatise upon American phonology to be published, and shows very careful
observation and much good sense. Unluckily, Krapp finds it extremely difficult, like all other phonologists, to
represent the sounds that he deals with by symbols. He uses, for example, exactly the same symbol to
indicate the a-sound in cab and the a-sound in bad, though the fact that they differ very greatly must be
obvious to everyone. In the same way he grows a bit vague when he tries to represent the compromise a-
sound which lies somewhere between the a of father and the a of bad. “It is heard … chiefly,” he says, “in
somewhat conscious and academic speech,” as a compromise between the former, “which is rejected as being
too broad,” and the latter, “which is rejected as being too narrow or flat.” This compromise a, he says, “is
cultivated in words with a, sometimes au, before a voiceless continuant, or before a nasal followed by a
voiceless stop or continuant, as in grass, half, laugh, path (also before a voiced continuant, as in paths, calves,
halves, baths, when the voiced form is a variant, usually the plural, of a head form with a voiceless sound),
aunt, branch, can’t, dance, fancy, France, shan’t, etc.” Later on he says that this compromise a-sound is the
same that occurs in heart, star, large and Clarke, but this, it seems to me, is not quite accurate; there is a
perceptible difference. The usual sound of a in heart is far nearer to that of a in father.

VIII. American Spelling

1. The Two Orthographies

The chief changes made in the standard English spelling in the United States may be classified as follows:
1. The omission of the penultimate u in words ending in -our:
American English
arbor arbour
armor armour
behavior behaviour
candor candour
clamor clamour
clangor clangour
color colour
demeanor demeanour
endeavor endeavour
favor favour
fervor fervour
flavor flavour
glamour glamour
harbor harbour
honor honour
humor humour
labor labour
neighbor neighbour
odor odour
parlor parlour
rancor rancour
rigor rigour
rumor rumour
savor savour

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splendor splendour
succor succour
tumor tumour
valor valour
vapor vapour
vigor vigour
2. The reduction of duplicate consonants to single consonants:
American English
councilor councillor
counselor counsellor
fagot faggot
jewelry jewellery
net (adj.) nett
traveler traveller
wagon waggon
woolen woollen
2. The omission of a redundant e:
annex (noun) annexe
asphalt asphalte
ax axe
form (printer’s) forme
good-by goodbye
intern (noun) interne
peas (plu. of pea) pease
story (of a house) storey
4. The change of terminal -re into -er:
caliber calibre
center centre
fiber fibre
liter litre
meter metre
saltpeter saltpetre
theater theatre
5. The omission of unaccented foreign terminations:
catalog catalogue
envelop envelope
epaulet epaulette
gram gramme
program programme
prolog prologue
toilet toilette
veranda verandah
6. The omission of u when combined with a or o:
balk (verb) baulk
font (printer’s) fount
gantlet (to run the—) gauntlet
mold mould
molt moult
mustache moustache
stanch staunch
7. The conversion of decayed diphthongs into simple vowels:
American English

55
anemia anæmia
anesthetic anæsthetic
encyclopedia encyclopædia
diarrhea diarrhœa
ecology œcology
ecumenical œcumenical
edema œdema
eon æon
esophagus œsophagus
esthetic æsthetic
estival æstival
etiology ætiology
hemorrhage hæmorrhage
medieval mediæval
septicemia septicæmia
8. The change of compound consonants into simple consonants:
bark (ship) barque
burden (ship’s) burthen
check (bank) cheque
draft (ship’s) draught
picket (military) piquet
plow plough
vial phial

9. The change of o into a:

naught nought
pudgy podgy
slug (verb) slog
slush slosh
taffy toffy (or toffee)
10. The change of e into i:
inclose enclose
indorse endorse
inquire enquire
jimmy (burglar’s) jemmy
scimitar scimetar
11. The change of y into a, ia or i:
ataxia ataxy
baritone barytone
cachexia cachexy
cider cyder
pajamas pyjamas
siphon syphon
siren syren
tire (noun) tyre
12. The change of c into s: American English
defense defence
offense offence
pretense pretence
vise (a tool) vice
13. The substitution of s for z:
advertisement advertizement

56
fuse fuze
14. The substitution of k for c:
mollusk mollusc
skeptic sceptic
15. The insertion of a supernumerary e:
forego forgo
foregather forgather
16. The substitution of ct for x:
Connection connexion
inflection inflexion
17. The substitution of y for i:
dryly drily
gayety gaiety
gypsy gipsy
pygmy pigmy
18. Miscellaneous differences:
alarm (signal) alarum
behoove behove
brier briar
buncombe bunkum
catsup ketchup
cloture closure
cozy cosy
cutlas cutlass
czar tsar
gasoline gasolene
gray grey
hostler ostler
jail gaol
maneuver manœuvre
pedler pedlar
show (verb) shew
snicker snigger
stenosis stegnosis

This list might be very much extended by including compounds and derivatives, e. g., coloured, colourist,
colourless, colour-blind, colour-line, colour-sergeant, colourable, colourably, neighbourhood, neighbourly,
neighbourliness, favourite, favourable, slogger, kilogramme, kilometre, amphitheatre, centremost, baulky,
anæsthesia, plough-boy, dreadnought, enclosure, endorsement, and by including forms that are going out of
use in England, e. g., fluxation for fluctuation, surprize for surprise, and forms that are still but half
established in the United States, e. g., chlorid, brusk, cigaret, lacrimal, rime, gage, quartet, eolian, dialog,
lodgment, niter, sulfite, phenix. According to a recent writer upon the subject, “there are 812 words in which
the prevailing American spelling differs from the English.” But enough examples are given here to reveal a
number of definite tendencies. American, in general, moves toward simplified forms of spelling more rapidly
than English, and has got much further along the road. Redundant and unnecessary letters have been
dropped from whole groups of words, simple vowels have been substituted for degenerated diphthongs,
simple consonants have displaced compound ones, and vowels have been changed to bring words into
harmony with their analogues, as in tire, cider and baritone (cf. wire, rider, merriment). Clarity and
simplicity are served by substituting ct for x in such words as connection and inflection, and s for c in words
of the defense group. The superiority of jail to gaol is made manifest by the common mispronunciation of the
latter by Americans who find it in print, making it rhyme with coal. The substitution of i for e in such words
as indorse, inclose and jimmy is of less patent utility, but even here there is probably a slight gain in

57
euphony. Of more obscure origin is what seems to be a tendency to avoid the o-sound, so that the English
slog becomes slug, podgy becomes pudgy, slosh becomes slush, toffee becomes taffy, and so on. Other
changes carry their own justification. Hostler is obviously better American than ostler, though it may be
worse English. Show is more logical than shew. Cozy is more nearly phonetic than cosy. Curb has analogues
in curtain, curdle, curfew, curl, currant, curry, curve, curtsey, curse, currency, cursory, curtain, cur, curt and
many other common words: kerb has very few, and of them only kerchief and kernel are in general use.
Moreover, the English themselves use curb as a verb and in all noun senses save that shown in kerbstone.
Such forms as monolog and dialog still offend the fastidious, but their merit is not to be gainsaid. Nor would
it be easy to argue logically against gram, toilet, mustache, anesthetic, draft and tire.
The u in all these words is therefore either useless or positively misleading. And finally in the case of colour,
clamour, fervour, humour, rancour, valour and vigour, it is to be remarked that the exact American
orthography actually occurs in old French! “Finally,” I said, but that is not quite the end of British absurdity
with these -our -or words. Insistent as our transatlantic cousins are on writing arbour, armour, clamour,
clangour, colour, dolour, flavour, honour, humour, labour, odour, rancour, rigour, savour, valour, vapour and
vigour, and “most unpleasant” as they find the omission of the excrescent u in any of these words, they
nevertheless make no scruple of writing the derivatives in the American way—arboreal, armory, clamorous,
clangorous, colorific, dolorous, flavorous, honorary, humorous, laborious, odorous, rancorous, rigorous,
savory, valorous, vaporize and vigorous—not inserting the u in the second syllable of any one of these words.
The British practice is, in short and to speak plainly, a jumble of confusion, without rhyme or reason, logic or
consistency; and if anybody finds the American simplification of the whole matter “unpleasant,” it can be
only because he is a victim of unreasoning prejudice against which no argument can avail.

2. The Influence of Webster

At the time of the first settlement of America the rules of English orthography were beautifully vague, and so
we find the early documents full of spellings that seem quite fantastic today. Aetaernall (for eternal) is in the
Acts of the Massachusetts General Court for 1646. But now and then a curious foreshadowing of later
American usage is encountered. On July 4, 1631, for example, John Winthrop wrote in his journal that “the
governour built a bark at Mistick which was launched this day.” During the eighteenth century, however,
and especially after the publication of Johnson’s dictionary, there was a general movement in England toward
a more inflexible orthography, and many hard and fast rules, still surviving, were then laid down. It was
Johnson himself who established the position of the u in the -our words. Bailey, Dyche and other
lexicographers before him were divided and uncertain; Johnson declared for the u, and though his reasons
were very shaky 8 and he often neglected his own precept, his authority was sufficient to set up a usage
which still defies attack in England. Even in America this usage was not often brought into question until the
last quarter of the eighteenth century. True enough, honor appears in the Declaration of Independence, but it
seems to have got there rather by accident than by design. In Jefferson’s original draft it is spelled honour. So
early as 1768 Benjamin Franklin had published his “Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of
Spelling, with Remarks and Examples Concerning the Same, and an Enquiry into its Uses” and induced a
Philadelphia typefounder to cut type for it, but this scheme was too extravagant to be adopted anywhere, or
to have any appreciable influence upon spelling.
It was Noah Webster who finally achieved the divorce between English example and American practise. He
struck the first blow in his “Grammatical Institute of the English Language,” published at Hartford in 1783.
Attached to this work was an appendix bearing the formidable title of “An Essay on the Necessity,
Advantages and Practicability of Reforming the Mode of Spelling, and of Rendering the Orthography of
Words Correspondent to the Pronunciation,” and during the same year, at Boston, he set forth his ideas a
second time in the first edition of his “American Spelling Book.” The influence of this spelling-book was
immediate and profound. It took the place in the schools of Dilworth’s “Aby-sel-pha,” the favorite of the
generation preceding, and maintained its authority for fully a century. Until Lyman Cobb entered the lists
with his “New Spelling Book,” in 1842, its innumerable editions scarcely had any rivalry, and even then it
held its own. I have a New York edition, dated 1848, which contains an advertisement stating that the annual
sale at that time was more than a million copies, and that more than 30,000,000 copies had been sold since

58
1783. In the late 40’s the publishers, George F. Cooledge & Bro., devoted the whole capacity of the fastest
steam press in the United States to the printing of it. This press turned out 525 copies an hour, or 5,250 a day.
It was “constructed expressly for printing Webster’s Elementary Spelling Book [the name had been changed
in 1829] at an expense of $5,000.” Down to 1889, 62,000,000 copies of the book had been sold.
The appearance of Webster’s first dictionary, in 1806, greatly strengthened his influence. The best
dictionary available to Americans before this was Johnson’s in its various incarnations, but against Johnson’s
stood a good deal of animosity to its compiler, whose implacable hatred of all things American was well
known to the citizens of the new republic. John Walker’s dictionary, issued in London in 1791, was also in
use, but not extensively. A home-made school dictionary, issued at New Haven in 1798 or 1799 by one
Samuel Johnson, Jr.—apparently no relative of the great Sam—and a larger work published a year later by
Johnson and the Rev. John Elliott, pastor in East Guilford, Conn., seem to have made no impression, despite
the fact that the latter was commended by Simeon Baldwin, Chauncey Goodrich and other magnificoes of
the time and place, and even by Webster himself. The field was thus open to the laborious and truculent
Noah. He was already the acknowledged magister of lexicography in America, and there was an active public
demand for a dictionary that should be wholly American. The appearance of his first duodecimo, according
to Williams, 10 thereby took on something of the character of a national event. It was received, not critically,
but patriotically, and its imperfections were swallowed as eagerly as its merits. Later on Webster had to meet
formidable critics, at home as well as abroad, but for nearly a quarter of a century he reigned almost
unchallenged. Edition after edition of his dictionary was published, each new one showing additions and
improvements. Finally, in 1828, he printed his great “American Dictionary of the English Language,” in two
large octavo volumes. It held the field for half a century, not only against Worcester and the other American
lexicographers who followed him, but also against the best dictionaries produced in England. Until the
appearance of the Concise Oxford in 1914, indeed, America remained far ahead of England in practical
dictionary making.
A good many of these new spellings, of course, were not actually Webster’s inventions. For example, the
change from -our to -or in words of the honor class was a mere echo of an earlier English uncertainty. In the
first three folios of Shakespeare, 1623, 1632 and 1663-6, honor and honour were used indiscriminately and in
almost equal proportions; English spelling was still fluid, and the -our-form was not consistently adopted
until the fourth folio of 1685. Moreover, John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, is authority for the
statement that the -or-form was “a fashionable impropriety” in England in 1791. But the great authority of
Johnson stood against it, and Webster was surely not one to imitate fashionable improprieties. He deleted the
u for purely etymological reasons, going back to the Latin honor, favor and odor without taking account of
the intermediate French honneur, faveur and odeur. And where no etymological reasons presented
themselves, he made his changes by analogy and for the sake of uniformity, or for euphony or simplicity, or
because it pleased him, one guesses, to stir up the academic animals. Webster, in fact, delighted in
controversy, and was anything but free from the national yearning to make a sensation.
A great many of his innovations, of course, failed to take root, and in the course of time he abandoned some
of them himself. In his early “Essay on the Necessity, Advantage and Practicability of Reforming the Mode of
Spelling” he advocated reforms which were already discarded by the time he published the first edition of his
dictionary. Among them were the dropping of the silent letter in such words as head, give, built and realm,
making them hed, giv, bilt, and relm; the substitution of doubled vowels for decayed diphthongs in such
words as mean, zeal and near, making them meen, zeel and neer; and the substitution of sh for ch in such
French loan-words as machine and chevalier, making them masheen and shevaleer. He also declared for stile
in place of style, and for many other such changes, and then quietly abandoned them. The successive editions
of his dictionary show still further concessions. Croud, fether, groop, gillotin, iland, instead, leperd, soe, sut,
steddy, thret, thred, thum and wimmen appear only in the 1806 edition. In 1828 he went back to crowd,
feather, group, island, instead, leopard, sew, soot, steady, thread, threat, thumb and women, and changed
gillotin to guillotin. In addition, he restored the final e in determine, discipline, requisite, imagine, etc. In
1838, revising his dictionary, he abandoned a good many spellings that had appeared in either the 1806 or the
1828 edition, notably maiz for maize, suveran 11 for sovereign and guillotin for guillotine. But he stuck
manfully to a number that were quite as revolutionary—for example, aker for acre, cag for keg, grotesk for
grotesque, hainous for heinous, porpess for porpoise and tung for tongue—and they did not begin to

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disappear until the edition of 1854, issued by other hands and eleven years after his death. Three of his
favorites, chimist for chemist, neger for negro and zeber for zebra, are incidentally interesting as showing
changes in American pronunciation. He abandoned zeber in 1828, but remained faithful to chimist and neger
to the last.
Webster’s reforms, it goes without saying, have not passed unchallenged by the guardians of tradition. A
glance at the literature of the first years of the nineteenth century shows that most of the serious authors of
the time ignored his new spellings, though they were quickly adopted by the newspapers. Bancroft’s “Life of
Washington” contains -our endings in all such words as honor, ardor and favor. Washington Irving also
threw his influence against the -or ending, and so did Bryant and most of the other literary big-wigs of that
day. After the appearance of “An American Dictionary of the English Language,” in 1828, a formal battle was
joined, with Lyman Cobb and Joseph E. Worcester as the chief opponents of the reformer. Cobb and
Worcester, in the end, accepted the -or ending and so surrendered on the main issue, but various other
champions arose to carry on the war. Edward S. Gould, in a once famous essay, denounced the whole
Websterian orthography with the utmost fury, and Bryant, reprinting this philippic in the Evening Post, said
that on account of Webster “the English language has been undergoing a process of corruption for the last
quarter of a century,” and offered to contribute to a fund to have Gould’s denunciation “read twice a year in
every school-house in the United States, until every trace of Websterian spelling disappears from the land.”
But Bryant was forced to admit that, even in 1856, the chief novelties of the Connecticut schoolmaster “who
taught millions to read but not one to sin” were “adopted and propagated by the largest publishing house,
through the columns of the most widely circulated monthly magazine, and through one of the ablest and
most widely circulated newspapers in the United States”—which is to say, the Tribune under Greeley. The
last academic attack was delivered by Bishop Coxe in 1886, and he contented himself with the resigned
statement that “Webster has corrupted our spelling sadly.” Lounsbury, with his active interest in spelling
reform, ranged himself on the side of Webster, and effectively disposed of the controversy by showing that
the great majority of his spellings were supported by precedents quite as respectable as those behind the
fashionable English spellings. In Lounsbury’s opinion, a good deal of the opposition to them was no more
than a symptom of antipathy to all things American among certain Englishmen and of subservience to all
things English among certain Americans.
Webster’s inconsistencies gave his opponents a formidable weapon for use against him—until it began to be
noticed that the orthodox English spelling was quite as inconsistent. He sought to change acre to aker, but
left lucre unchanged. He removed the final f from bailiff, mastiff, plaintiff and pontiff, but left it in distaff. He
changed c to s in words of the offense class, but left the c in fence. He changed the ck in frolick, physick, etc.,
into a simple c, but restored it in such derivatives as frolicksome. He deleted the silent u in mould, but left it
in court. These slips were made the most of by Cobb in a furious pamphlet in excessively fine print, printed
in 1831. He also detected Webster in the frequent faux pas of using spellings in his definitions and
explanations that conflicted with the spellings he advocated. Various other purists joined in the attack, and it
was renewed with great fury after the appearance of Worcester’s dictionary, in 1846. Worcester, who had
begun his lexicographical labors by editing Johnson’s dictionary, was a good deal more conservative than
Webster, and so the partisans of conformity rallied around him, and for a while the controversy took on all
the rancor of a personal quarrel. Even the editions of Webster printed after his death, though they gave way
on many points, were violently arraigned. Gould, in 1867, belabored the editions of 1854 and 1866 and
complained that “for the past twenty-five years the Websterian replies have uniformly been bitter in tone,
and very free in the imputation of personal motives, or interested or improper motives, on the part of
opposing critics.” At this time Webster himself had been dead for twenty-two years. Schele de Vere, during
the same year, denounced the publishers of the Webster dictionaries for applying “immense capital and a
large stock of energy and perseverance” to the propagation of his “new and arbitrarily imposed orthography.”

3. The Advance of American Spelling

The logical superiority of American spelling is well exhibited by its persistent advance in the face of all this
hostility at home and abroad. The English objection to our simplifications, as Brander Matthews once pointed
out, is not wholly or even chiefly etymological; its roots lie, to borrow James Russell Lowell’s phrase, in an

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esthetic hatred burning “with as fierce a flame as ever did theological hatred.” There is something
inordinately offensive to English purists in the very thought of taking lessons from this side of the water,
particularly in the mother-tongue. The opposition, transcending the academic, takes on the character of the
patriotic. “Any American,” said Matthews in 1892, “who chances to note the force and the fervor and the
frequency of the objurgations against American spelling in the columns of the Saturday Review, for example,
and of the Athenœum, may find himself wondering as to the date of the papal bull which declared the
infallibility of contemporary British orthography, and as to the place where the council of the Church was
held at which it was made an article of faith.” 19 But that, as I say, was in 1892. Since then there has been an
enormous change, and though the editors of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, so recently as 1914, pointedly
refrained from listing forms that would “strike every reader as Americanisms,” they surrendered in a
wholesale manner to forms quite as thoroughly American in origin, among them, ax, alarm, tire, asphalt,
program, toilet, balk, wagon, vial, inquire, advertisement, pygmy and czar. The monumental New English
Dictionary upon which the Concise Oxford is chiefly based shows many silent concessions, and quite as
many open yieldings—for example, in the case of ax, which is admitted to be “better than axe on every
ground.” Moreover, practical English lexicographers tend to march ahead of it, outstripping the liberalism of
its editor, Sir James A. H. Murray. In 1914, for example, Sir James was still protesting against dropping the
first e from judgement, a characteristic Americanism, but during the same year the Concise Oxford put
judgment ahead of judgement, and two years earlier the Authors’ and Printers’ Dictionary, edited by Horace
Hart, 20 had dropped judgement altogether. Hart is Controller of the Oxford University Press, and the
Authors’ and Printers’ Dictionary is an authority accepted by nearly all of the great English book publishers
and newspapers. Its last edition shows a great many American spellings. For example, it recommends the use
of jail and jailer in place of the English gaol and gaoler, says that ax is better than axe, drops the final e from
asphalte and forme, changes the y to i in cyder, cypher and syren and advocates the same change in tyre,
drops the redundant t from nett, changes burthen to burden, spells wagon with one g, prefers fuse to fuze,
and takes the e out of storey. “Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press, Oxford,” also edited
by Hart (with the advice of Sir James Murray and Dr. Henry Bradley), is another very influential English
authority. It gives its imprimatur to bark (a ship), cipher, siren, jail, story, tire and wagon, and even
advocates kilogram and omelet. Cassell’s New English Dictionary goes quite as far. Like Hart and the Oxford
it clings to the -our and -re endings and to the diphthongs in such words as œsthete and anœsthesia, but it
prefers jail to gaol, net to nett, story to storey, asphalt to asphalte, tire to tyre, wagon to waggon, inquiry to
enquiry, vial to phial, advertise to advertize, baritone to barytone, and pygmy to pigmy.

4. British Spelling in the United States

American imitation of English orthography has two impulses behind it. First, there is the colonial spirit, the
desire to pass as English—in brief, mere affectation. Secondly, there is the wish among printers, chiefly of
books, to reach a compromise spelling acceptable in both countries, thus avoiding expensive revisions in case
sheets are printed for publication in England. 28 The first influence need not detain us. It is chiefly visible
among folk of fashionable pretensions, and is not widespread. At Bar Harbor, in Maine, some of the summer
residents are at great pains to put harbour instead of harbor on their stationery, but the local post-master still
continues to stamp all mail Bar Harbor, the legal name of the place. In the same way American haberdashers
sometimes advertise pyjamas instead of pajamas, just as they advertise braces instead of suspenders and boots
instead of shoes. But this benign folly does not go very far. Beyond occasionally clinging to the -re ending in
words of the theatre group, all American newspapers and magazines employ the native orthography, and it
would be quite as startling to encounter honour or traveller in one of them as it would be to encounter gaol
or waggon. Even the most fashionable jewelers in Fifth avenue still deal in jewelry, not in jewellery.
The second influence is of more effect and importance. In the days before the copyright treaty between
England and the United States, one of the standing arguments against it among the English was based upon
the fear that it would flood England with books set up in America, and so work a corruption of English
spelling. This fear, as we have seen, had a certain plausibility; there is not the slightest doubt that American
books and American magazines have done valiant missionary service for American orthography. But English
conservatism still holds out stoutly enough to force American printers to certain compromises. When a book

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is designed for circulation in both countries it is common for the publisher to instruct the printer to employ
“English spelling.” This English spelling, at the Riverside Press, 30 embraces all the -our endings and the
following further forms: cheque grey
chequered inflexion
connexion jewellery
dreamt leapt
faggot premiss (in logic)
forgather waggon
forgo
It will be noted that gaol, tyre, storey, kerb, asphalte, annexe, ostler, mollusc and pyjamas are not listed, nor
are the words ending in -re. These and their like constitute the English contribution to the compromise. Two
other great American book presses, that of the Macmillan Company and that of the J. S. Cushing Company,
add gaol and storey to the list, and also behove, briar, drily, enquire, gaiety, gipsy, instal, judgement, lacquey,
moustache, nought, pygmy, postillion, reflexion, shily, slily, staunch and verandah. Here they go too far, for,
as we have seen, the English themselves have begun to abandon enquire and judgement, and lacquey is also
going out over there. The Riverside Press, even in books intended only for America, prefers certain English
forms, among them, anæmia, axe, mediæval, mould, plough, programme and quartette, but in compensation
it stands by such typical Americanisms as caliber, calk, center, cozy, defense, foregather, gray, hemorrhage,
luster, maneuver, mustache, theater and woolen. The Government Printing Office at Washington follows
Webster’s New International Dictionary, which supports many of the innovations of Webster himself. This
dictionary is the authority in perhaps a majority of American printing offices, with the Standard and the
Century supporting it. The latter two also follow Webster, notably in his -er endings and in his substitution
of s for c in words of the defense class. The Worcester Dictionary is the sole exponent of English spelling in
general circulation in the United States. It remains faithful to most of the -re endings, and to manæuvre,
gramme, plough, sceptic, woollen, axe and many other English forms. But even Worcester favors such
characteristic American spellings as behoove, brier, caliber, checkered, dryly, jail and wagon. The Atlantic
Monthly, which is inclined to be stiff and British, follows Webster, but with certain reservations. Thus it uses
the -re ending in words of the center class, retains the u in mould, moult and moustache, retains the
redundant terminal letters in such words as gramme, programme and quartette, retains the final e in axe and
adze, and clings to the double vowels in such words as mediæval, anæsthesia, homœopathy, and diarrhæa. In
addition, it uses the English plough, whiskey, clue and gruesome, differentiates between the noun practice
and the verb to practise, and makes separate words of to ensure, to make certain, and to insure, to protect or
indemnify. It also prefers entrust to intrust. It follows the somewhat arbitrary rule laid down by Webster for
the doubling of consonants in derivatives bearing such suffixes as -ed, -ing, -er, and -ous. This rule is that
words ending in l, p, r and t, when this last letter is preceded by a vowel, double the consonant before such
suffixes, but only if the words are monosyllables or polysyllables accented on the last syllable. Thus dispelled
has two l’s but traveled has one, equipped has two p’s but worshiper one, occurred has two r’s but altered
one, and petted has two t’s but trumpeter one.

5. Simplified Spelling

The current movement toward a general reform of English-American spelling is of American origin, and its
chief supporters are Americans today. Its actual father was Webster, for it was the long controversy over his
simplified spellings that brought the dons of the American Philological Association to a serious investigation
of the subject. In 1875 they appointed a committee to inquire into the possibility of reform, and in 1876 this
committe reported favorably. During the same year there was an International Convention for the
Amendment of English Orthography at Philadelphia, with several delegates from England present, and out of
it grew the Spelling Reform Association. In 1878 a committee of American philologists began preparing a
list of proposed new spellings, and two years later the Philological Society of England joined in the work. In
1883 a joint manifesto was issued, recommending various general simplifications. Among those enlisted in

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the movement were Charles Darwin, Lord Tennyson, Sir John Lubbock and Sir J. A. H. Murray. In 1886 the
American Philological Association issued independently a list of recommendations affecting about 3,500
words, and falling under ten headings. Practically all of the changes proposed had been put forward 80 years
before by Webster, and some of them had entered into unquestioned American usage in the meantime, e. g.,
the deletion of the u from the -our words, the substitution of er for re at the end of words, and the reduction
of traveller to traveler.
The trouble with the others was that they were either too uncouth to be adopted without a long struggle or
likely to cause errors in pronunciation. To the first class belonged tung for tounge, ruf for rough, batl for
battleand abuv for above, and to the second such forms as cach for catch and troble for trouble. The result
was that the whole reform received a set-back: the public dismissed the reformers as a pack of dreamers.
Twelve years later the National Education Association received the movement with a proposal that a
beginning be made with a very short list of reformed spellings, and nominated the following by way of
experiment: tho, altho, thru, through, thoro, thoroly, thorofare, program, prolog, catalog, pedagog and
decalog. This scheme of gradual changes was sound in principle, and in a short time at least two of the
recommended spellings,program and catalog, were in general use. Then, in 1906, came the organization of
the Simplified Spelling Board, with an endowment of $15,000 a year from Andrew Carnegie, and a
formidable list of members and collaborators, including Henry Bradley, F. I. Furnivall, C. H> Grandgent, W.
W. Skeat, T. R. Lounsbury and F. A. March. The board at once issued a list of 300 revised spellings, new and
old, and in August, 1906, President Rooselvet ordered their adoption by the Government Printing Office. But
this unwise effort to hasten matters, combained with the buffoonery characteristically thrown about the
matter by Roosevelt, served only to raise up enemies, and then, though it has prudently gone back to more
discret endeavors and now lays main stress upon the original 12 words of the National Education Association,
the board has not made a great deal of progress. 36 From time to time it issues impressive lists of newspapers
and periodicals that have made them optional, but an inspection of these lists shows that very few
publications of any importance have been converted and that most of the great universities still hesitate. It
has, however, greatly reinforced the authority behind many of Webster’s spellings, and aided by the
Chemical> Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the editors of the
Journal of the American Medical Association, it has done much to reform scientific orthography. Such forms
as gram, cocain, chlorid, anemia and anilin are the products of its influence. Its latest list recommends the
following changes:
When a word begins with œ or œ substitute e: esthetic, medieval, subpena. But retain the diphthong at the
end of a word: alumnœ.
When bt is pronounced t, drop the silent b: det, dettor, dout.
When ceed is final spell it cede: excede, procede, succede.
When ch is pronounced like hard c, drop the silent h except before e, i and y: caracter, clorid, corus, cronic,
eco, epoc, mecanic, monarc, scolar, school, stomac, technical. But retain architect, chemist, monarchy.
When a double consonant appears before a final silent e drop the last two letters: bizar, cigaret, creton, gavot,
gazet, giraf, gram, program, quartet, vaudevil.
When a word ends with a double consonant substitute a single consonant: ad, bii, bluf, buz, clas, dol, dul, eg,
glas, les, los, mes, mis, pas, pres, shal, tel, wil. But retain ll after a long vowel: all, roll. And retain ss when the
word has more than one syllable: needless.
Drop the final silent e after a consonant preceded by a short stressed vowel: giv, hav, liv.
Drop the final silent e in the common words are, gone and were: ar, gon, wer.
Drop the final silent e in the unstressed final short syllables ide, ile, ine, ise, ite and ive: activ, bromid, definit,
determin, practis, hostil.
Drop the silent e after lv and rv: involv, twelv, carv, deserv.
Drop the silent e after v or z when preceded by a digraph representing a long vowel or a diphthong: achiev,
freez, gauz, sneez.
Drop the e in final oe when it is pronounced o: fo, ho, ro, to, wo. But retain it in inflections: foes, hoed.
When one of the letters in ea is silent drop it: bred, brekfast, hed, hart, harth.
When final ed is pronounced d drop the e: cald, carrid, employd, marrid, robd, sneezd, struggld, wrongd. But
not when a wrong pronunciation will be suggested: bribd, cand, fild (for filed), etc.

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When final ed is pronounced t substitute t: addrest, shipt, helpt, indorst. But not when a wrong
pronunciation will be suggested: bakt, fact (for faced), etc.
When ei is pronounced like ie in brief substitute ie: conciet, deciev, wierd.
When a final ey is pronounced y drop the e: barly, chimny, donky, mony, vally.
When final gh is pronounced f substitute f and drop the silent letter of the preceding digraph: enuf, laf, ruf,
tuf.
When gh is pronounced g drop the silent h: agast, gastly, gost, goul.
When gm is final drop the silent g: apothem, diagram, flem.
When gue is final after a consonant, a short vowel or a digraph representing a long vowel or a diphthong
drop the silent ue: tung, catalog, harang, leag, sinagog. But not when a wrong pronunciation would be
suggested: rog (for rogue), vag (for vague), etc.
When a final ise is pronounced ize substitute ize: advertize, advize, franchize, rize, wize.
When mb is final after a short vowel drop b: bom, crum, dum, lam, lim, thum. But not when a wrong
pronunciation would be suggested: com (for comb), tom (for tomb), etc.
When ou before l is pronounced o drop u: mold, sholder. But not sol (for soul).
When ough is final spell o, u, ock or up, according to the pronunciation: altho, boro, donut, furlo, tho, thoro,
thru, hock, hiccup.
When our is final and ou is pronounced as a short vowel drop u: color, honor, labor.
When ph is pronounced f substitute f: alfabet, emfasis, fantom, fonograf, fotograf, sulfur, telefone, telegraf.
When re is final after any consonant save c substitute er: center, fiber, meter, theater. But not lucer,
mediocer.
When rh is initial and the h is silent drop it: retoric, reumatism, rime, rubarb, rithm.
When sc is initial and the c is silent drop it: senery, sented, septer, sience, sissors.
When u is silent before a vowel drop it: bild, condit, garantee, gard, ges, gide, gild.
When y is between consonants substitute i: analisis, fisic, gipsy, paralize, rime, silvan, tipe.
Obviously this list is far ahead of the public inclination. Moreover, it is so long and contains so many
exceptions (observe rules 1, 4, 6, 12, 14, 15, 21, 23, 24 and 28) that there is little hope that any considerable
number of Americans will adopt it, at least during the lifetime of its proponents. Its extravagance, indeed, has
had the effect of alienating the support of the National Education Association, and at the convention held in
Des Moines in the Summer of 1921 the Association formally withdrew from the campaign. 39 But even so
long a list is not enough for the extremists. To it they add various miscellaneous new spellings: aker, anser,
burlesk, buro, campain, catar, counterfit, delite, foren, forfit, frend, grotesk, iland, maskerade, morgage,
picturesk, siv, sorgum, sovren, spritely, tuch, yu and yung. The reader will recognize some of these as
surviving inventions of Webster. But though all such bizarre forms languish, the twelve spellings adopted by
the National Education Association in 1898 are plainly making progress, especially tho and thru. I read many
manuscripts by American authors, and find in them an increasing use of both forms, with the occasional
addition of altho, thoro and thoroly. The spirit of American spelling is on their side. They promise to come in
as honor, bark, check, wagon and story came in many years ago, as tire, 40 esophagus and theater came in
later on, and as program, catalog and cyclopedia came in only yesterday. The advertisement writers seem to
be even more hospitable than the authors. Such forms as vodvil, burlesk, foto, fonograf, kandy, kar, holsum,
kumfort, sulfur, arkade, kafeteria and segar are not infrequent in their writings. At least one American
professor of English predicts that these forms will eventually prevail. Even fosfate and fotograf, he says, “are
bound to be the spellings of the future.” 41 Meanwhile the advertisement writers and authors combine in an
attempt to naturalize alright, a compound of all and right, made by analogy with already and almost. I find it
in American manuscripts every day, and it not seldom gets into print. 42 So far no dictionary supports it, but
it has already migrated to England and has the imprimatur of a noble lord. 43 Another vigorous newcomer is
sox for socks. The White Sox are known to all Americans; the White Socks would seem strange. The new
plural has got into the Congressional Record.
Note 35. Accounts of earlier proposals of reform in English spelling are to be found in Sayce’s Introduction
to the Science of Language, vol. i, p. 330 et seq., and White’s Everyday English, p. 152 et seq. The best general
treatment of the subject is in Lounsbury’s English Spelling and Spelling Reform; New York, 1909. A radical
innovation, involving the complete abandonment of the present alphabet and the substitution of a series of

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symbols with vowel points, is proposed in Peetickay, by Wilfrid Perrett; Cambridge (England), 1920. Mr.
Perrett’s book is written in a lively style, and includes much curious matter. He criticises the current schemes
of spelling reform very acutely. Nearly all of them, he says, suffer from the defect of seeking to represent all
the sounds of English by the present alphabet. This he calls“one more reshuffle of a prehistoric pack, one
more attempt to deal out 26 cards to some 40 players.”

6. The Treatment of Loan-Words

In the treatment of loan-words English spelling is very much more conservative than American. This
conservatism, in fact, is so marked that it is frequently denounced by English critics of the national speech
usages, and it stood first among the “tendencies of modern taste” attacked by the Society for Pure English in
its original prospectus in 1913—a prospectus prepared by Henry Bradley, Dr. Robert Bridges, Sir Walter
Raleigh and L. Pearsall Smith, and signed by many important men of letters, including Thomas Hardy, A. J.
Balfour, Edmund Gosse, Austin Dobson, Maurice Hewlett, Gilbert Murray, George Saintsbury and the
professors of English literature at Oxford and London, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and W. P. Ker. I quote from
this caveat:
Literary taste at the present time, with regard to foreign words recently borrowed from abroad, is on wrong
lines, the notions which govern it being scientifically incorrect, tending to impair the national character of
our standard speech, and to adapt it to the habits of classical scholars. On account of these alien associations
our borrowed terms are now spelt and pronounced, not as English, but as foreign words, instead of being
assimilated, as they were in the past, and brought into conformity with the main structure of our speech.
And as we more and more rarely assimilate our borrowings, so even words that were once naturalized are
being now one by one made un-English, and driven out of the language back into their foreign forms;
whence it comes that a paragraph of serious English prose may be sometimes seen as freely sprinkled with
italicized French words as a passage of Cicero is often interlarded with Greek. The mere printing of such
words in italics is an active force toward degeneration. The Society hopes to discredit this tendency, and it
will endeavour to restore to English its old recreative energy; when a choice is possible we should wish to
give an English pronunciation and spelling to useful foreign words, and we would attempt to restore to a
good many words the old English forms which they once had, but which are now supplanted by the original
foreign forms.
A glance through any English weekly or review, or, indeed, any English newspaper of the slightest
intellectual pretension will show how far this tendency has gone. All the foreign words that English must
perforce employ for want of native terms of precisely the same import are carefully italicized and accented, e.
g., matinèe, cafè, crêpe, dèbut, portiére, èclat, naïvetè, règime, rôle, soirèe, prècis, protègè, èlite,
gemütlichkeit, mêlèe, tête-á-tête, porte-cochére, divorcèe, fiancèe, weltpolitik, weltschmerz, muzhik, ukase,
dènouement. Even good old English words have been displaced by foreign analogues thought to be more
elegant, e. g., repertory by rèpertoire, sheik by shaikh, czar by tsar, levee by levèe, moslem by muslim,
khalifate by khilifat, said by seyd, crape by crêpe, supper by souper, Legion of Honor by Lègion d’honneur,
gormand by gourmand, grip by la grippe, crown by krone. Proper names also yield to this new pedantry, and
the London Times frequently delights the aluminados by suddenly making such substitutions as that of Serbia
for Servia and that of Rumania for Roumania; in the course of time, if the warnings of the S. P. E. do not
prevail, the English may be writing München, Kobenhavn, Napoli, Wien, Warszava, Bruxelles and
s’Gravenhage; even today they commonly use Hannover, Habana and Leipzig. Nearly all the English papers
are careful about the diacritical marks in proper names, e. g., Sévres, Zürich, Bülow, François, Frèdèric,
Hèloise, Bogotà, Orlèans, Besançon, Rhône, Côted’Or, Württemberg. The English dictionaries seldom omit
the accents from recent foreign words. Cassell’s leaves them off règime and dèbut, but preserves them on
practically all the other terms listed above; the Concise Oxford always uses them.
In the United States, as everyone knows, there is no such preciosity visible. Dèpôt became depot
immediately it entered the language, and the same rapid naturalization has overtaken employè, matinèe,
dèbutante, negligèe, tête-á-tête, exposè, rèsumè, hofbräu, and scores of other loan-words. Cafè is seldom seen
with its accent, nor is senor or divorcèe or attachè. In fact, says a recent critic, “the omission of the diacritic
is universal. Even the English press of French New Orleans ignores it.” This critic lists some rather amazing

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barbarisms, among them standchen for ständchen in Littell’s Living Age, outre for outrè in Judge, and
Poincaire, Poincare and Poinciarre for Poincarè in an unnamed newspaper. He gives an amusing account of
the struggles of American newspapers with thè dansant. He says:
Put this through the hopper of the typesetting machine, and it comes forth, “the the dansant”—which even
Oshkosh finds intolerable. The thing was, however, often attempted when thes dansants came into fashion,
and with various results. Generally the proof-reader eliminates one of the the’s, making dansant a quasi-
noun, and to this day one reads of people giving or attending dansants. Latterly the public taste seems to
favor dansante, which doubtless has a Frenchier appearance, provided you are sufficiently ignorant of the
Gallic tongue. Two other solutions of the difficulty may be noted:
Among those present at the “the dansant”;
Among those present at the the-dansant;
that is, either a hyphen or quotation marks set off the exotic phrase.
Even when American newspapers essay to use accents, they commonly use them incorrectly. The same
critic reports Piérre for Pierre, má for ma, and buffèt, buffêt and even buffet for buffet. But they seldom
attempt to use them, and in this iconoclasm they are supported by at least one professor, Brander Matthews.
In speaking of naïve and naïvetè, which he welcomes because “we have no exact equivalent for either word,”
he says: “but they will need to shed their accents and to adapt themselves somehow to the traditions of our
orthography.” 47 He goes on: “After we have decided that the foreign word we find knocking at the doors of
English [he really means American, as the context shows] is likely to be useful, we must fit it for
naturalization by insisting that it shall shed its accents, if it has any; that it shall change its spelling, if this is
necessary; that it shall modify its pronunciation, if this is not easy for us to compass; and that it shall conform
to all our speech-habits, especially in the formation of the plural.” This counsel is heeded by the great
majority of American printers. I have found bozart (for beaux arts) on the first page of a leading American
newspaper, and a large textile corporation widely advertises Bozart rugs. Exposè long since lost its accent and
is now commonly pronounced to rhyme with propose. In the common speech the French word beau has
been naturalized as bo, and is often so spelled. Schmierkäse has become smearkase. The sauer, in sauer-kraut
and sauer-braten, is often spelled sour. Cole-slaw, has become cold-slaw. Canon is canyon. I have even seen
jonteel, in a trade name, for the French gentil.
American newspapers seldom distinguish between the masculine and feminine forms of common loan-
words. Blond and blonde are used indiscriminately. The majority of papers, apparently mistaking blond for a
simplified form of blonde, use it to designate both sexes. So with employèe, divorcèe, dèbutante, etc. Here
the feminine form is preferred; no doubt it has been helped into use in the case of the -ee words by the
analogy of devotee. In all cases, of course, the accents are omitted. In the formation of the plural American
adopts native forms much more quickly than English. All the English authorities that I have consulted
advocate retaining the foreign plurals of most of the loan-words in daily use, e. g., sanatoria, appendices,
indices, virtuosi, formulœ, libretti, media, thèsdansants, monsignori. But American usage favors plurals of
native design, and sometimes they take quite fantastic forms. I have observed delicatessens, monsignors,
virtuosos, rathskellers, kindergartens, nucleuses and appendixes. Even the Journal of the American Medical
Association, a highly scientific authority, goes so far as to approve curriculums and septums. Banditti, in place
of bandits, would seem an affectation to an American, and so would soprani for sopranos and soli for solos,
but the last two, at least, are common in England. Both English and American labor under the lack of native
plurals for the two everyday titles, Mister and Missus. In the written speech, and in the more exact forms of
the spoken speech, the French plurals, Messieurs and Mesdames, are used, but in the ordinary spoken speech,
at least in America, they are avoided by circumlocution. When Messieurs has to be spoken it is almost
invariably pronounced messers, and in the same way Mesdames becomes mez-dames, with the first syllable
rhyming with sez and the second, which bears the accent, with games. In place of Mesdames a more natural
form, Madames, seems to be gaining ground in America. Thus, I have found Dames du Sacrè Cœur translated
as Madames of the Sacred Heart in a Catholic paper of wide circulation, and the form is apparently used by
American members of the community.

7. Minor Differences

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In capitalization the English are a good deal more conservative than we are. They invariably capitalize such
terms as Government, Prime Minister and Society, when used as proper nouns; they capitalize Press, Pulpit,
Bar, etc., almost as often. In America a movement against this use of capitals appeared during the latter part
of the eighteenth century. In Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence nature and creator,
and even god are in lower case. During the 20’s and 30’s of the succeeding century, probably as a result of
French influence, the movement against the capitals went so far that the days of the week were often spelled
with small initial letters, and even Mr. became mr. Curiously enough, the most striking exhibition of this
tendency of late years is offered by an English work of the highest scholarship, the Cambridge History of
English Literature. It uses the lower case for all titles, even baron and colonel before proper names, and also
avoids capitals in such words as presbyterian, catholic and christian, and in the second parts of such terms as
Westminster abbey and Atlantic ocean.

IX The Common Speech

1. Grammarians and Their Ways

So far, in the main, the language examined has been of a relatively pretentious and self-conscious variety—
the speech, if not always of formal discourse, then at least of literate men. Most of the examples of its
vocabulary and idiom, in fact, have been drawn from written documents or from written reports of more or
less careful utterances, for example, the speeches of members of Congress and of other public men. The
whole of Thornton’s excellent material is of this character. In his dictionary there is scarcely a locution that
is not supported by printed examples.
It must be obvious that such materials, however lavishly set forth, cannot exhibit the methods and
tendencies of a living speech with anything approaching completeness, nor even with accuracy. What men
put into writing and what they say when they take sober thought are very far from what they utter in
everyday conversation. All of us, no matter how careful our speech habits, loosen the belt a bit, so to speak,
when we talk familiarly to our fellows, and pay a good deal less heed to precedents and proprieties, perhaps,
than we ought to. It was a sure instinct that made Ibsen put “bad grammar” into the mouth of Nora Helmar
in “A Doll’s House.” She is a general’s daughter and the wife of a professor, but even professors’ wives are not
above occasional bogglings of the cases of pronouns and the conjugations of verbs. The professors themselves,
in truth, must have the same habit, for sometimes they show plain signs of it in print. More than once,
plowing through profound and interminable treatises of grammar and syntax during the writing and revision
of the present work, I have encountered the cheering spectacle of one grammarian exposing, with contagious
joy, the grammatical lapses of some other grammarian. And nine times out of ten, a few pages further on, I
have found the enchanted purist erring himself. 1 The most funereal of the sciences is saved from utter
horror by such displays of human malice and fallibility. Speech itself, indeed, would become almost
impossible if the grammarians could follow their own rules unfailingly, and were always right.
Where these tendencies run strongest, of course, is on the plane of the vulgar spoken language. Among all
classes the everyday speech departs very far from orthodox English, and even very far from any recognized
spoken English, but among the lower classes that make up the great body of the people it gets so far from
orthodox English that it gives promise, soon or late, of throwing off its old bonds altogether, or, at any rate,
all save the loosest of them. Behind it is the gigantic impulse that I have described in earlier chapters: the
impulse of an egoistic and iconoclastic people, facing a new order of life in highly self-conscious freedom, to
break a relatively stable language, long since emerged from its period of growth, to their novel and
multitudinous needs, and, above all, to their experimental and impatient spirit. This impulse, it must be plain,
would war fiercely upon any attempt at formal regulation, however prudent and elastic; it is often rebellious
for the mere sake of rebellion. But what it comes into conflict with, in America, is nothing so politic, and
hence nothing so likely to keep the brakes upon it. What it actually encounters here is a formalism that is
artificial, illogical and almost unintelligible—a formalism borrowed from English grammarians, and by them
brought into English, against all fact and reason, from the Latin. “In most of our grammars, perhaps in all of
those issued earlier than the opening of the twentieth century,” says Matthews, “we find linguistic laws laid
down which are in blank contradiction with the genius of the language.” 3 In brief, the American school-

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boy, hauled before a pedagogue to be instructed in the structure and organization of the tongue he speaks, is
actually instructed in the structure and organization of a tongue that he never hears at all, and seldom reads,
and that, in more than one of the characters thus set before him, does not even exist.
The folly of this system, of course, has not failed to attract the attention of the more intelligent teachers, nor
have they failed to observe the causes of its failure. “Much of the fruitlessness of the study of English
grammar,” says Wilcox, 5 “and many of the obstacles encountered in its study are due to ‘the difficulties
created by the grammarians.’# These difficulties arise chiefly from three sources—excessive classification,
multiplication of terms for a single conception, and the attempt to treat the English language as if it were
highly inflected.” Dr. Otto Jespersen puts them a bit differently. “Ordinary grammars,” he says, “in laying
down their rules, are too apt to forget that the English language is one thing, common-sense or logic another
thing, and Latin grammar a third, and that these three things have really, in many cases, very little to do with
one another. Schoolmasters generally have an astonishing talent for not observing real linguistic facts, and an
equally astonishing inclination to stamp everything as faulty that does not agree with their narrow rules.” So
long ago as the 60’s Richard Grant White began an onslaught upon all such punditic stupidities. He saw
clearly that “the attempt to treat English as if it were highly inflected” was making its intelligent study almost
impossible, and proposed boldly that all English grammar-books be burned. 7 Of late his ideas have begun to
gain a certain acceptance, and as the literature of denunciation has grown 8 the grammarians have been
constrained to overhaul their texts. When I was a school-boy, during the penultimate decade of the last
century, the chief American grammar was “A Practical Grammar of the English Language,” by Thomas W.
Harvey. 9 This formidable work was almost purely synthetical: it began with a long series of definitions,
wholly unintelligible to a child, and proceeded into a maddening maze of pedagogical distinctions, puzzling
even to an adult. The latter-day grammars, at least those for the elementary schools, are far more analytical
and logical. For example, there is “Longman’s Briefer Grammar,” by George J. Smith, 10 a text now in very
wide use. This book starts off, not with page after page of abstractions, but with a well-devised examination
of the complete sentence, and the characters and relations of the parts of speech are very simply and clearly
developed. But before the end the author begins to succumb to precedent, and on page 114 I find paragraph
after paragraph of such dull, flyblown pedantry as this:
Some Intransitive Verbs are used to link the Subject and some Adjective or Noun. These Verbs are called
Copulative Verbs, and the Adjective or Noun is called the Attribute.
The Attribute always describes or denotes the person or thing denoted by the Subject.
Verbals are words that are derived from Verbs and express action or being without asserting it. Infinitives
and Participles are Verbals.

2. Spoken American As It Is

But here I wander afield. The art of prose has little to do with the stiff and pedantic English taught in
grammar-schools and a great deal less to do with the loose and lively English spoken by the average
American in his daily traffic. The thing of importance is that the two differ from each other even more than
they differ from the English of a Huxley or a Stevenson. The school-marm, directed by grammarians, labors
heroically, but all her effort goes for naught. The young American, like the youngster of any other race,
inclines irresistibly toward the dialect that he hears at home, and that dialect, with its piquant neologisms, its
high disdain of precedent, its complete lack of self-consciousness, is almost the antithesis of the hard and stiff
speech that is expounded out of books. It derives its principles, not from the subtle logic of learned and stupid
men, but from the rough-and-ready logic of every day. It has a vocabulary of its own, a syntax of its own,
even a grammar of its own. Its verbs are conjugated in a way that defies all the injunctions of the grammar
books; it has its contumacious rules of tense, number and case; it has boldly re-established the double
negative, once sound in English; it admits double comparatives, confusions in person, clipped infinitives; it
lays hands on the vowels, changing them to fit its obscure but powerful spirit; it repudiates all the finer
distinctions between the parts of speech.

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 This highly virile and defiant dialect, and not the fossilized English of the school-marm and her books, is
the speech of the Middle American of Joseph Jacobs’ composite picture—the mill-hand in a small city of
Indiana, with his five years of common schooling behind him, his diligent reading of newspapers, and his
proud membership in the Order of Foresters and the Knights of the Maccabees. Go into any part of the
country, North, East, South or West, and you will find multitudes of his brothers, car conductors in
Philadelphia, immigrants of the second generation in the East Side of New York, iron-workers in the
Pittsburgh region, corner grocers in St. Louis, holders of petty political jobs in Atlanta and New Orleans,
small farmers in Kansas or Kentucky, house carpenters in Ohio, tinners and plumbers in Chicago—genuine
Americans all, bawling patriots, hot for the home team, marchers in parades, readers of the yellow
newspapers, fathers of families, sheep on election day, undistinguished norms of the Homo Americanus. Such
typical Americans, after a fashion, know English. They read it—all save the “hard” words, i. e., all save about
90 per cent of the words of Greek and Latin origin. 16 They can understand perhaps two-thirds of it as it
comes from the lips of a political orator or clerygman. They have a feeling that it is, in some recondite sense,
superior to the common speech of their kind. They recognize a fluent command of it as the salient mark of a
“smart” and “educated” man, one with “the gift of gab.” But they themselves never speak it or try to speak it,
nor do they look with approbation on efforts in that direction by their fellows.
The ages thus covered ran from nine or ten to fourteen or fifteen, and perhaps five-sixths of the material
studied came from children above twelve. Its examination threw a brilliant light upon the speech actually
employed by children near the end of their schooling in a typical American city, and per corollary, upon the
speech employed by their parents and other older associates. If anything, the grammatical and syntactical
habits revealed were a bit less loose than those of the authentic Volkssprache, for practically all of the
written evidence was gathered under conditions which naturally caused the writers to try to write what they
conceived to be correct English, and even the oral evidence was conditioned by the admonitory presence of
the teacher. Moreover, it must be obvious that a child of the lower classes, during the period of its actual
study of grammar, probably speaks better English than at any time before or afterward, for it is only then that
any positive pressure is exerted upon it to that end. But even so, the departures from standard usage that
were unearthed were numerous and striking, and their tendency to accumulate in definite groups showed
plainly the working of general laws.

3. The Verb

A study of the materials amassed by Charters and Lardner, if it be reinforced by observation of what is heard
on the streets every day, will show that the chief grammatical peculiarities of spoken American lie among the
verbs and pronouns. The nouns in common use, in the overwhelming main, are quite sound in form. Very
often, of course, they do not belong to the vocabulary of English, but they at least belong to the vocabulary of
American: the proletariat, setting aside transient slang, calls things by their proper names, and pronounces
those names more or less correctly. The adjectives, too, are treated rather politely, and the adverbs, though
commonly transformed into adjectives, are not further mutilated. But the verbs and pronouns undergo
changes which set off the common speech very sharply from both correct English and correct American.
Their grammatical relationships are thoroughly overhauled and sometimes they are radically modified in
form. 1
This process is natural and inevitable, for it is among the verbs and pronouns, as we have seen, that the only
remaining grammatical inflections in English, at least of any force or consequence, are to be found, and so
they must bear the chief pressure of the influences that have been warring upon all inflections since the
earliest days. The primitive Indo-European language, it is probable, had eight cases of the noun; the oldest
known Teutonic dialect reduced them to six; in Anglo-Saxon they fell to four, with a weak and moribund
instrumental hanging in the air; in Middle English the dative and accusative began to decay; in Modern
English they have disappeared altogether, save as ghosts to haunt grammarians. But we still have two plainly
defined conjugations of the verb, and we still inflect it for number, and, in part, at least, for person. And we
yet retain an objective case of the pronoun, and inflect it for person, number and gender.

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 Some of the more familiar conjugations of verbs in the American common speech, as recorded by Charters
or Lardner or derived from my own collectanea, are here set down:
Present Preterite Perfect Participle
Am was bin (or ben)
Attack attackted attackted
(Be) was bin (or ben)
Beat beaten beat
Become becomebecame
Begin begun began
Bend bent bent
Bet bet bet
Bind bound bound
Bite bitten bit
Bleed bled bled
Blow blowed (or blew) blowed (or blew)
Break broken broke
Bring brought (or brung, or brang) brung
Broke (passive) broke broke
Build built built
Burn burnt burnt
Burst
Bust busted busted
Buy bought (or boughten) bought (or boughten)
Can could could
Catch caught caught
Choose chose choose
Climb clum clum
Cling (to hold fast) clung clung
Cling (to ring) clang clang
Come come came
Creep crep (or crope) crep
Crow crowed (or crew) crowed
Cut cut cut
Dare dared (or dast) dared
Deal dole dealt
Dig dug dug
Dive dove dived
Do done done (or did)
Drag drug dragged
Draw drawed drawed (or drew)
Dream drempt drempt
Drink drank (or drunk) drank
Drive drove drove
Drown drownded drownded
Eat et (or eat) ate (or et)
Fall fell (or fallen) fell
Feed fed fed
Feel felt felt
Fetch fetched fetch
Fight fought fought
Find found found
Fine found found

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Fling flang flung
Flow flew flowed
Fly flew flew
Forget forgot (or forgotten) forgotten
Forsake forsaken forsook
Freeze frozen (or froze) frozen
Get got (or gotten) gotten
Give give give
Glide glode glode
Go went went
Grow growedgrowed
Hang hung hung
Have had had (or hadden)
Hear heerd heerd (or heern)
Heat het het
Heave hove hove
Hide hidden hid
H’ist 41 h’isted h’isted
Hit hit hit
Hold helt held (or helt)
Holler hollered hollered
Hurt hurt hurt
Keep kep kep
Kneel knelt knelt
Know knowed knew
Lay laid (or lain) laid
Lead led led
Lean lent lent
Leap lep lep
Learn learnt learnt
Lend loaned loaned
Lie (to falsify) lied lied
Lie (to recline) laid (or lain) laid
Light lit lit
Loose
Lose lost lost
Make made made
May might’a
Mean meant meant
Meet met met
Mow mown mowed
Pay paid paid
Plead pled pled
Prove proved (or proven) proven
Put put put
Quit quit quit
Raise raised raised
Read read read
Rench renched renched
Rid rid rid
Ride ridden rode
Rile riled riled

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Ring rung rang
Rise riz (or rose) riz
Run run ran
Say sez said
See seen saw
Sell sold sold
Send sent sent
Set set sat
Shake shaken (or shuck) shook
Shave shaved shaved
Shed shed shed
Shine (to polish) shined shined
Shoe shoed shoed
Shoot shot shot
Show shown showed
Sing sung sang
Sink sunk sank
Sit
Skin skun skun
Sleep slep slep
Slide slid slid
Sling slang slung
Slit slitted slitted
Smell smelt smelt
Sneak snuck snuck
Speed speeded speeded
Spell spelt spelt
Spill spilt spilt
Spin span span
Spit spit spit
Spoil spoilt spoilt
Spring sprung sprang
Steal stole stole
Sting stang stang
Stink stank stunk
Strike struck struck
Swear swore swore
Sweep swep swep
Swell swole (or swelled) swollen
Swim swum swam
Swing swang swung
Take taken took
Teach taught taught
Tear tore torn
Tell tole tole
Thin
Think thought thought
Thrive throve throve
Throw throwed threw
Tread tread tread
Unloosen unloosened unloosened
Wake woke woken

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Wear wore wore
Weep wep wep
Wet wet wet
Win won (or wan) won (or wan)
Wind wound wound
Wish (wisht) wisht wisht
Wring wrung wrang
Write written wrote
A glance at these conjugations is sufficient to show several general tendencies, some of them going back, in
their essence, to the earliest days of the English language. The most obvious is that leading to the transfer of
verbs from the so-called strong conjugation to the weak—a change already in operation before the Norman
Conquest, and very marked during the Middle English period. Chaucer used growed for grew in the prologue
to “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” and rised for rose and smited for smote are in John Purvey’s edition of the Bible,
circa 1385. Many of these transformations were afterward abandoned, but a large number survived, for
example, climbed for clomb as a preterite of to climb, and melted for molt as the preterite of to melt. Others
showed themselves during the early part of the Modern English period. Comed as the perfect participle of to
come and digged as the preterite of to dig are both in Shakespeare, and the latter is also in Milton and in the
Authorized Version of the Bible. This tendency went furthest, of course, in the vulgar speech, and it has been
embalmed in the English dialects. I seen and I knowed, for example, are common to many of them. But
during the seventeenth century it seems to have been arrested, and even to have given way to a contrary
tendency—that is, toward strong conjugations. The English of Ireland, which preserves many seventeenth
century forms, shows this plainly. Ped for paid, gother for gathered, and ruz for raised are still in use there,
and Joyce says flatly that the Irish, “retaining the old English custom (i. e., the custom of the period of
Cromwell’s invasion, circa 1650), have a leaning toward the strong inflection.” 50 Certain verb forms of the
American colonial period, now reduced to the estate of localisms, are also probably survivors of the
seventeenth century.
“The three great causes of change in language,” says Sayce, “may be briefly described as (1) imitation or
analogy, (2) a wish to be clear and emphatic, and (3) laziness. Indeed, if we choose to go deep enough we
might reduce all three causes to the general one of laziness, since it is easier to imitate than to say something
new.” This tendency to take well-worn paths, paradoxically enough, is responsible both for the transfer of
verbs from the strong to the weak declension, and for the transfer of certain others from the weak to the
strong. A verb in everyday use tends almost inevitably to pull less familiar verbs with it, whether it be strong
or weak. Thus fed as the preterite of to feed and led as the preterite of to lead paved the way for pled as the
preterite of to plead, and rode as plainly performed the same office for glode, and rung for brung, and drove
for dove and hove, and stole for dole, and won for skun. Moreover, a familiar verb, itself acquiring a faulty
inflection, may fasten a similar inflection upon another verb of like sound. Thus het, as the preterite of to
heat, no doubt owes its existence to the example of et, the vulgar preterite of to eat. 52 So far the irregular
verbs. The same combination of laziness and imitativeness works toward the regularization of certain verbs
that are historically irregular. In addition, of course, there is the fact that regularization is itself intrinsically
simplification—that it makes the language easier. One sees the antagonistic pull of the two influences in the
case of verbs ending in -ow. The analogy of knew suggests snew as the preterite of to snow, and it is
sometimes encountered in the American vulgate. But the analogy of snowed also suggests knowed, and the
superior regularity of the form is enough to overcome the greater influence of knew as a more familiar word
than snowed. Thus snew grows rare and is in decay, but knowed shows vigor, and so do growed and
throwed. The substitution of heerd for heard also presents a case of logic and convenience supporting
analogy. The form is suggested by steered, feared and cheered, but its main advantage lies in the fact that it
gets rid of a vowel change, always an impediment to easy speech. Here, as in the contrary direction, one
barbarism breeds another. Thus taken, as the preterite of to take, has undoubtedly helped to make preterites
of two other perfects, shaken and forsaken.
But in the presence of two exactly contrary tendencies, the one in accordance with the general movement
of the language since the Norman Conquest and the other opposed to it, it is unsafe, of course, to attempt any
very positive generalizations. All one may exhibit with safety is a general habit of treating the verb

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conveniently. Now and then, disregarding grammatical tendencies, it is possible to discern what appear to be
logical causes for verb phenomena. That lit is preferred to lighted and hung to hanged is probably the result
of an aversion to fine distinctions, and perhaps, more fundamentally, to the passive. Again, the use of found
as the preterite of to fine is obviously due to an ignorant confusion of fine and find, due to the wearing off of
-d in find, and that of lit as the preterite of to alight to a confusion of alight and light. Yet again, the use of
tread as its own preterite in place of trod is probably the consequence of a vague feeling that a verb ending
with d is already of preterite form. Shed exhibits the same process. Both are given a logical standing by such
preterites as bled, fed, led, read, dead and spread. But here, once more, it is hazardous to lay down laws, for
shredded, headed, dreaded, threaded and breaded at once come to mind. In other cases it is still more difficult
to account for preterites in common use. In my first edition I called attention to the cases of drug, clum and
friz. On this point, a correspondent has since sent me the following interesting observations:
True enough, these forms may not adhere closely to the rules of umlaut; but are they not born of the spirit of
umlaut which pervades the English verb? Thus: the most obvious form of strong verb is

ring rang rung

stink stank stunk
begin began begun
sing sang sung
spin span spun
speak spake spoke
spit spat spot

(I feel in my bones that spot is a derivative of spit. Spot is the name of the mark made by spitting, which is
obviously one of the most primary of human acts.)
swim swam swum
spring sprang sprun
I imagine that more irregular verbs conform to this one succession than to any one of the others. But all of
them, including this one, have been interrupted and obscured by the collision of such independent words as
think and thank, i.e.,
think (thank) (thunk)
Thank is forced out to avoid collision with
thank thanked thanked
Now, if freeze had been regularly irregular, it would have been
friz fraz frozen
but the present being freeze instead of friz, the procession would normally be
freeze frez frozen
I don’t know whether I have made my idea plain: it is not based on visible law so much as on innate feeling.
Its validity depends on whether, when I state it to you, you too feel instinctively that amid the clash of strong
tenses your own mind would select these forms, in obedience to an overmastering impulse of euphony. The
proper jury to render the verdict would be one of poets. I do not suppose anyone will deny that a man reacts
to the genius of his mother tongue, without knowing why. There are, and must have been, even deeper
depths of reaction than these strong verbs, to account for the choice of vowel sounds in different words,
which process in early ages was entirely unconscious.
This, of course, is only to intimate that there must have been “method in the madness” of friz. As for clum, it
seems to me that it is visibly clomb descended to the next lower level, and then denuded of its final b,
probably by analogy with thumb. Indeed, it is difficult to pronounce that b unless one says clommmb,
thummmb! And will you not agree with me that these are inevitable:
(drig) drag drog (descended to drug)
drag (drog) drug
(dreeg) (dreg) (droge)
(drogg) (drug) (droog)

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i.e., it scarcely matters what vowel marked the present tense of dr-g, for with any vowel this combination of
consonants demands, in any English-speaking mind which is functioning naturally, and not biased by
conscious thought, that its past participle be something very close to drug.
Some of the verbs of the vulgate show the end and products of language movements that go back to the
Anglo-Saxon period, and even beyond. There is, for example, the disappearance of the final t in such words
as crep, slep, lep, swep and wep. Most of these, in Anglo-Saxon, were strong verbs. The preterite of to sleep
(sloepan), for example, was slep, and of to weep was weop. But in the course of time both to sleep and to
weep acquired weak preterite endings, the first becoming sloepte and the second wepte. This weak
conjugation was itself degenerated. Originally, the inflectional suffix had been -de or -ede and in some cases -
ode, and the vowels were always pronounced. The wearing down process that set in in the twelfth century
disposed of the final e, but in certain words the other vowel survived for a good while, and we still observe it
in such archaisms as learned and beloved. Finally, however, it became silent in other preterites, and loved,
for example, began to be pronounced (and often written) as a word of one syllable: lov’d. This final d-sound
now fell upon difficulties of its own. After certain consonants it was hard to pronounce clearly, and so the
sonant was changed into the easier surd, and such words as pushed and clipped became, in ordinary
conversation, pusht and clipt. In other verbs, the t-sound had come in long before, with the degenerated
weak ending, and when the final e was dropped their stem vowels tended to change. Thus arose such forms
as slept. In vulgar American another step is taken, and the suffix is dropped altogether. Thus, by a circuitous
route, verbs originally strong, and for many centuries hovering between the two conjugations, have
eventually become strong again.

The most common inflections of the verb for mode and voice are shown in the following paradigm of to
bite:
ACTIVE VOICE
Indicative Mode
Present I bite Past Perfect I had of bit
Present Perfect I have bit Future I will bite
Past I bitten Future Perfect (wanting)
Subjunctive Mode
Present If I bite Past Perfect If I had of bit
Past If I bitten
Potential Mode
Present I can bite Past I could bite
Present Perfect (wanting) Past Perfect I could of bit
Imperative (or Optative) Mode
Future I shall (or will)
bite
Infinitive Mode
(wanting)
PASSIVE VOICE
Indicative Mode
Present I am bit Past Perfect I had been bit
Present Perfect I been bit Future I will be bit
Past I was bit Future Perfect (wanting)
Subjunctive Mode
Present If I am bit Past Perfect If I had of been
Past If I was bit bit
Potential Mode
Present I can be bit Past I could be bit
Present Perfect (wanting) Past Perfect I could of been bit
Imperative Mode
(wanting)

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Infinitive Mode
(wanting)

A study of this paradigm reveals several plain tendencies. One has just been discussed: the addition of a
degenerated form of have to the preterite of the auxiliary, and its use in place of the auxiliary itself. Another
is the use of will instead of shall in the first person future. Shall is confined to a sort of optative, indicating
much more than mere intention, and even here it is yielding to will. Yet another is the consistent use of the
transferred preterite in the passive. Here the rule in correct English is followed faithfully, though the perfect
participle employed is not the English participle. “I am broke” is a good example. Finally, there is the
substitution of was for were and of am for be in the past and present of the subjunctive. In this last case
American is in accord with the general movement of English, though somewhat more advanced. Be, in the
Shakespearean form of “where be thy brothers?” was expelled from the present indicative two hundred years
ago, and survives today only in dialect. And as it thus yielded to are in the indicative, it now seems destined
to yield to am and is in the subjunctive. It remains, of course, in the future indicative: “I will be.” In
American its conjugation coalesces with that of am in the following manner:
Present I am Past Perfect I had of ben
Present Perfect I bin (or ben) Future I will be
Past I was Future Perfect (wanting)
And in the subjunctive:
Present If I am Past Perfect If I had of ben
Past If I was
All signs of the subjunctive, indeed, seem to be disappearing from vulgar American. One never hears “if I
were you,” but always “if I was you”; “was you going to the dance?” is a very common form. In the third
person the -s is not dropped from the verb. One hears, not “if she go,” but always “if she goes.” “If he be the
man” is never heard; it is always “if he is.” Such a sentence as “Had I wished her, I had had her” would be
unintelligible to most Americans; even “I had rather” is fast disappearing. This war upon the forms of the
subjunctive, of course, extends to the most formal English. “In Old English,” says Bradley, 68 “the subjunctive
played as important a part as in modern German, and was used in much the same way. Its inflection differed
in several respects from that of the indicative. But the only formal trace of the old subjunctive still remaining,
except the use of be and were, is the omission of the final s in the third person singular. And even this is
rapidly dropping out of use…. Perhaps in another generation the subjunctive forms will have ceased to exist
except in the single instance of were, which serves a useful function, although we manage to dispense with a
corresponding form in other verbs.” Here, as elsewhere, unlettered American usage simply proceeds in
advance of the general movement. Be and the omitted s are already dispensed with, and even were has been
discarded.
In the same way the distinction between will and shall, preserved in correct English but already breaking
down in the most correct American, has been lost entirely in the American common speech. Will has
displaced shall completely, save in the imperative. This preference extends to the inflections of both. Sha’n’t
is very seldom heard; almost always won’t is used instead. As for should, it is displaced by ought to
(degenerated to oughter or ought’a), and in its negative form by hadn’t ought’a, as in “he hadn’t oughter said
that,” reported by Charters. Lardner gives various redundant combinations of should and ought, as in “I don’t
feel as if I should ought to leave” and “they should not ought to of had.” I have encountered the same form,
but I don’t think it is as common as the simple ought’a forms. In the main, should is avoided, sometimes at
considerable pains. Often its place is taken by the more positive don’t. Thus “I don’t” mind” is used instead of
“I shouldn’t mind.” Don’t has also completely displaced doesn’t, which is very seldom heard. “He don’t” and
“they don’t” are practically universal. In the same way ain’t has displaced is not, am not, isn’t and aren’t, and
even have not and haven’t. One recalls a famous speech in a naval melodrama of twenty years ago: “We ain’t
got no manners, but we can fight like hell.” Such forms as “he ain’t here,” “I ain’t the man,” “ain’t it the
truth?”, “you been there, ain’t you?”, “you ain’t drank much,” “them ain’t what I want” and “I ain’t heerd of
it” are common.
This extensive use of ain’t, of course, is merely a single symptom of a general disregard of number, obvious
throughout the verbs, and also among the pronouns, as we shall see. Charters gives many examples, among

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them, “how is Uncle Wallace and Aunt Clara?”, “you was,” “there is six” and the incomparable “it ain’t right
to say, ‘He ain’t here today.’#” In Lardner there are many more, for instance, “them Giants is not such rotten
hitters, isthey?”, “the people has all wanted to shake hands with Matthewson and I” and “some of the men
has brung their wife along.” Sez (=says), used as the preterite of to say shows the same confusion. One
observes it again in such forms as “then I goes up to him.” Here the decay of number helps in what threatens
to become a decay of tense. A gambler of the humbler sort seldom says “I won $2,” or even “I wan
$2,” but almost always “I win $2.” And in the same way he says “I see him come in,” not “I saw
him come in” or “seen him.” Lardner, as we have seen, believes that win is displacing both won,winned and
wan. Charters’ materials offer other specimens, among them “we help distributed the fruit,” “she recognize,
hug, and kiss him” and “her father ask her if she intended doing what he ask.” Perhaps the occasional use of
eat as the preterite of to eat, as in “I eat breakfast as soon as I got up,” is an example of the same flattening out
of distinctions. Lardner has many specimens, among them “if Weaver and them had not of begin kicking”
and “they would of knock down the fence.” I notice that used, in used to be, is almost always reduced to
simple use, as in “it use to be the rule,” with the s very much like that of hiss. One seldom, if ever, hears a
clear d at the end. Here, of course, the elision of the d is due primarily to assimilation with the t of to—a
second example of one form of decay aiding another form. But the tenses apparently tend to crumble without
help. I frequently hear whole narratives in a sort of debased historical present: “I says to him…. Then he ups
and says…. I land him one on the ear…. He goes down and out,…” and so on. 70 Still under the spell of our
disintegrating inflections, we are prone to regard the tense inflections of the verb as absolutely essential, but
there are plenty of languages that get on without them, and even in our own language children and
foreigners often reduce them to a few simple forms. Some time ago an Italian contractor said to me, “I have
go there often.” Here one of our few surviving inflections was displaced by an analytical device, and yet the
man’s meaning was quite clear, and it would be absurd to say that his sentence violated the inner spirit of
English. That inner spirit, in fact, has inclined steadily toward “I have go” for a thousand years.

4. The Pronoun

The following paradigm shows the inflections of the personal pronoun in the American common speech:
FIRST PERSON
Common Gender
SingularPlural
Nominative I we
Possessive Conjoint
Absolute my
mine our
ourn
Objective me us
SECOND PERSON
Common Gender
Nominative you yous
Possessive Conjoint
Absolute your
yourn your
yourn
Objective you yous
THIRD PERSON
Masculine Gender
Nominative he they
Possessive Conjoint
Absolute his
hisn their
theirn

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Objective him them
Feminine Gender
Nominative she they
Possessive Conjoint
Absolute her
hern their
theirn
Objective her them
Neuter Gender
Nominative it they
Possessive Conjoint
Absolute its
its their
theirn
Objective it them
These inflections, as we shall see, are often disregarded in use, but nevertheless it is profitable to glance at
them as they stand. The only variations that they show from standard English are the substitution of n for s
as the distinguishing mark of the absolute form of the possessive, and the attempt to differentiate between
the logical and the merely polite plurals in the second person by adding the usual sign of the plural to the
former. The use of n in place of s is not an American innovation. It is found in many of the dialects of
English, and is, in fact, historically quite as sound as the use of s. In John Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible
(circa 1380) the first sentence of the Sermon on the Mount (Mark v, 3) is made: “Blessed be the pore in spirit,
for the kyngdam in hevenes is heren.” And in his version of Luke xxiv, 24, is this: “And some of ourenwentin
to the grave.” Here heren (or herun) represents, of course, not the modern hers, but theirs. In Anglo-Saxon
the word was heora, and down to Chaucer’s day a modified form of it, here, was still used in the possessive
plural in place of the modern their, though they had already displaced hie in the nominative. 71 But in John
Purvey’s revision of the Wycliffe Bible, made a few years later, hern actually occurs in II Kings vii, 6, thus:
“Restore thou to hir alle things that ben hern.” In Anglo-Saxon there had been no distinction between the
conjoint and absolute forms of the possessive pronoun; the simple genitive sufficed for both uses. But with
the decay of that language the surviving remnants of its grammar began to be put to service somewhat
recklessly, and so there arose a genitive inflection of this genitive—a true double inflection. In the Northern
dialects of English that inflection was made by simply adding s, the sign of the possessive. In the Southern
dialects the old n-declension was applied, and so there arose such forms as minum and eowrum (=mine and
yours), from min and eower (=my and your). Meanwhile, the original simple genitive, now become youre,
also survived, and so the literature of the fourteenth century shows the three forms flourishing side by side:
youre, youres and youren. All of them are in Chaucer.
The relative pronouns, so far as I have been able to make out, are declined as follows:
Nominative who which what that
Possessive whose
whosen whose
whosen
Objective who which what that
Two things will be noted in this paradigm. First there is the disappearance of whom as the objective form of
who, and secondly there is the appearance of an inflected form of whose in the absolute, by analogy with
mine, hisn and thesen. Whom, as we have seen, is fast disappearing from standard spoken American; 78 in
the vulgar language it is already virtually extinct. Not only is who used in such constructions as “who did you
find there?” where even standard spoken English would tolerate it, but also in such constructions as “the man
who I saw,” “them who I trust in” and “to who?” Krapp explains this use of who on the ground that there is a
“general feeling,” due to the normal word-order in English, that “the word which precedes the verb is the
subject word, or at least the subject form.” 79 But this explanation is probably fanciful. Among the plain
people no such “general feeling” for case exists. Their only “general feeling” is a prejudice against case

78
inflections in any form whatsoever. They use who in place of whom simply because they can discern no
logical difference between the significance of the one and the significance of the other.
Whosen, which is still relatively rare, is obviously the offspring of the other absolutes in n. In the conjoint
relation plain whose is always used, as in “whose hat is that?” and “the man whose dog bit me.” But in the
absolute whosen is sometimes substituted, as in “if it ain’t hisn, then whosen is it?” The imitation is obvious.
There is an analogous form of which, to wit, whichn, resting heavily on which one. Thus, “whichn do you
like?” and “I didn’t say whichn” are plainly variations of “which one do you like?” and “I didn’t say which
one.” That, as we have seen, has a like form, thatn, but never, of course, in the relative situation. “I like
thatn” is familiar, but “the one thatn I like” is never heard. If that, as a relative, could be used absolutely, I
have no doubt that it would change to thatn, as it does as a demonstrative. So with what. As things stand, it is
sometimes substituted for that, as in “them’s the kind what I like.” Joined to but it can also take the place of
that in other situations, as in “I don’t know but what.”
The substitution of who for whom in the objective case, just noticed, is typical of a general movement
toward breaking down all case distinctions among the pronouns, where they make their last stand in English
and its dialects. This movement, of course, is not peculiar to vulgar American; nor is it of recent beginning.
So long ago as the fifteenth century the old clear distinction between ye, nominative, and you, objective,
disappeared, and today the latter is used in both cases. Sweet says that the phonetic similarity between ye and
thee, the objective form of the true second singular, was responsible for this confusion. In modern spoken
English, indeed, you in the objective often has a sound far more like that of ye than like that of you, as, for
example, in “how do y’ do?” and in American its vowel takes the neutral form of the e in the definite article,
and the word becomes a sort of shortened yuh. But whenever emphasis is laid upon it, you becomes quite
distinct, even in American. In “I mean you,” for example, there is never any chance of mistaking it for ye. In
Shakespeare’s time the other personal pronouns of the objective case threatened to follow you into the
nominative, and there was a compensatory movement of the nominative pronouns toward the objective.
Lounsbury has collected many examples. 81 Marlowe used “is it him you seek?”, “’tis her I esteem” and “nor
thee nor them shall want”; Fletcher used “’tis her I admire”; Shakespeare himself used “that’s me.”
Contrariwise, Webster used “what difference is between the duke and I?” and Green used “nor earth nor
heaven shall part my love and I.” Krapp has unearthed many similar examples from the Restoration
dramatists. 82 Etheredge used “’tis them,” “it may be him,” “let you and I” and “nor is it me”; Matthew Prior,
in a famous couplet, achieved this:
For thou art a girl as much brighter than her
As he was a poet sublimer than me.
The free exchange continued, in fact, until the eighteenth century was well advanced; there are examples of
it in Addison. Moreover, it survived, at least in part, even the attack that was then made upon it by the
professors of the new-born science of English grammar, and to this day “it is me” is still in more or less good
colloquial use. Sweet thinks that it is supported in such use, though not, of course, grammatically, by the
analogy of the correct “it is he” and “it is she.” Lounsbury, following Dean Alford, says it came into English in
imitation of the French c’est moi, and defends it as at least as good as “it is I.” The contrary form, “between
you and I,” has no defenders, and is apparently going out. But in the shape of “between my wife and I” it is
seldom challenged, at least in spoken English.
All these liberties with the personal pronouns, however, fade to insignificance when put beside the
thoroughgoing confusion of the case forms in vulgar American. “Us fellas” is so far established in the
language that “we fellas” from the mouth of a car conductor would seem almost an affectation. So, too, is “me
and her are friends.” So, again, are “her and I set down together,” “him and his wife,” and “I knowed it was
her.” Here are some other characteristic examples of the use of the objective forms in the nominative from
Characters, Lardner and other writers:
Me and her was both late.
His brother is taller than him.
That little boy was me.
Us girls went home.
They were John and him.
Her and little Al is to stay here.

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She says she thinks us and the Allens.
If Weaver and them had not of begin kicking.
Us two’ll walk, me and him.
But not me.
Him and I are friends.
Me and them are friends.
Less numerous, but still varied and plentiful, are the substitutions of nominative forms for objective
forms:
She gave it to mother and I.
She took all of we children.
I want you to meet he and I at 29th street.
It is going to cost me $6 a week for a room for she and the baby.
Anything she has is O.K. for I and Florrie.
Here are some grotesque confusions, indeed. Perhaps the best way to get at the principles underlying them
is to examine first, not the cases of their occurrence, but the cases of their non-occurrence. Let us begin with
the transfer of the objective form to the nominative in the subject relation. “Me and her was both late” is
obviously sound American; one hears it, or something like it, on the streets every day. But one never hears
“me was late” or “her was late” or “us was late” or “him was late” or “them was late.” Again, one hears “us
girls was there” but never “us was there.” Yet again, one hears “her and John was married,” but never “her
was married.” The distinction here set up should be immediately plain. It exactly parallels that between her
and hern, our and ourn, their and theirn: the tendency, as Sweet says, is “to merge the distinction of
nominative and objective in that of conjoint and absolute.” The nominative, in the subject relation, takes the
usual nominative form only when it is in immediate contact with its verb. If it be separated from its verb by a
conjunction or any other part of speech, even including another pronoun, it takes the objective form. Thus
“me went home” would strike even the most ignorant shopgirl as “bad grammar,” but she would use “me and
my friend went,” or “me and him,” or “he and her,” or “me and them” without the slightest hesitation. What
is more, if the separation be effected by a conjunction and another pronoun, the other pronoun also changes
to the objective form, even though its contact with the verb may be immediate. Thus one hears “me and her
was there,” not “me and she”; “her and him kissed,” not “her and he.” Still more, this second pronoun
commonly undergoes the same inflection even when the first member of the group is not another pronoun,
but a noun. Thus one hears “John and her was married,” not “John and she.” To this rule there is but one
exception, and that is in the case of the first person pronoun, especially in the singular. “Him and me are
friends” is heard often, but “him and I are friends” is also heard. I seems to suggest the subject very
powerfully; it is actually the subject of perhaps a majority of the sentences uttered by an ignorant man. At all
events, it resists the rule, at least partially, and may even do so when actually separated from the verb by
another pronoun, itself in the objective form, as, for example, in “I and him were there.”
In the predicate relation the pronouns respond to a more complex regulation. When they follow any form
of the simple verb of being they take the objective form, as in “it’s me,” “it ain’t him,” and “I am him,”
probably because the transitiveness of this verb exerts a greater pull than its function as a mere copula, and
perhaps, too, because the passive naturally tends to put the speaker in the place of the object. “I seen he” or
“he kissed she” or “he struck I” would seem as ridiculous to an ignorant American as to the Archbishop of
Canterbury, and his instinct for simplicity and regularity naturally tends to make him reduce all similar
expressions, or what seem to him to be similar expressions, to coincidence with the more seemly “I seen
him.” After all, the verb of being is fundamentally transitive, and, in some ways, the most transitive of all
verbs, and so it is not illogical to bring its powers over the pronoun into accord with the powers exerted by
the others. I incline to think that it is some such subconscious logic, and not the analogy of “it is he,” as Sweet
argues, that has brought “it is me” to conversational respectability, even among rather careful speakers of
English.
But against this use of the objective form in the nominative position after the verb of being there also occurs
in American a use of the nominative form in the objective position, as in “she gave it to mother and I” and
“she took all of we children.” What lies at the bottom of it seems to be a feeling somewhat resembling that
which causes the use of the objective form before the verb, but exactly contrary in its effects. That is to say,

80
the nominative form is used when the pronoun is separated from its governing verb, whether by a noun, a
noun-phrase or another pronoun, as in “she gave it to mother and I,” “she took all of we children” and “he
paid her and I,” respectively. But here usage is far from fixed, and one observes variations in both
directions—that is, toward using the correct objective when the pronoun is detached from the verb, and
toward using the nominative even when it directly follows the verb. “She gave it to mother and me,” “she
took all of us children” and “he paid her and me” would probably sound quite as correct, to a Knight of
Pythias, as the forms just given. And at the other end Charters and Lardner report such forms as “I want you
to meet he and I” and “it is going to cost me $6 a week for a room for she and the baby.” I have
noticed, however, that the use of the nominative is chiefly confined to the pronoun of the first person, and
particularly to its singular. Here again we have an example of the powerful way in which I asserts itself. And
superimposed upon that influence is a cause mentioned by Sweet in discussing “between you and I.” 87 It is a
sort of by-product of the pedagogical war upon “it is me.” “As such expressions,” he says, “are still denounced
by the grammars, many people try to avoid them in speech as well as in writing. The result of this reaction is
that the me in such constructions as ‘between John and me’# and ‘he saw John and me’# sounds vulgar and
ungrammatical, and is consequently corrected into I.” Here the pedagogues, seeking to impose an inelastic
and illogical grammar upon a living speech, succeed only in corrupting it still more.
Following than and as the American uses the objective form of the pronoun, as in “he is taller than me” and
“such as her.” He also uses it following like, but not when, as often happens, he uses the word in place of as
or as if. Thus he says “do it like him,” but “do it like he does” and “she looks like she was sick.” What appears
here is an instinctive feeling that these words, followed by a pronoun only, are not adverbs, but prepositions,
and that they should have the same power to put the pronoun into an oblique case that other prepositions
have. Just as “the taller of we” would sound absurd to all of us, so “taller than he,” to the unschooled
American, sounds absurd. This feeling has a good deal of respectable support. “As her” was used by Swift,
“than me” by Burke, and “than whom” by Milton. The brothers Fowler show that, in some cases, “than him”
is grammatically correct and logically necessary. 88 For example, compare “I love you more than him” and “I
love you more than he.” The first means “I love you more than (I love) him”; the second, “I love you more
than he (loves you).” In the first him does not refer to I, which is nominative, but to you, which is objective,
and so it is properly objective also. But the American, of course, uses him even when the preceding noun is in
the nominative, save only when another verb follows the pronoun. Thus, he says, “I love you better than
him,” but “I love you better than he does.”
In the matter of the reflexive pronouns the American vulgate exhibits forms which plainly show that it is
the spirit of the language to regard self, not as an adjective, which it is historically, but as a noun. This
confusion goes back to Anglo-Saxon days; it originated at a time when both the adjectives and the nouns
were losing their old inflections. Such forms as Petrussylf (=Peter’s self), Cristsylf (=Christ’s self) and Icsylf
(=I, self) then came into use, and along with them came combinations of self and the genitive, still surviving
in hisself and theirselves (or theirself). Down to the sixteenth century these forms remained in perfectly good
usage. “Each for hisself,” for example, was written by Sir Philip Sidney, and is to be found in the dramatists of
the time, though modern editors always change it to himself. How the dative pronoun got itself fastened
upon self in the third person masculine and neuter is one of the mysteries of language, but there it is, and so,
against all logic, history and grammatical regularity, himself, themselves and itself (not its-self) are in favor
today. But the American, as usual, inclines against these illogical exceptions to the rule set by myself. I
constantly hear hisself and theirselves, as in “he done it hisself” and “they know theirselves.” Also, the
emphatic own is often inserted between the pronoun and the noun, as in “let every man save his own self.”
In general the American vulgate makes very extensive use of the reflexive. It is constantly thrown in for good
measure, as in “I overeat myself” and it is as constantly used singly, as in “self and wife.”
The American pronoun does not necessarily agree with its noun in number. I find “I can tell each one what
they make,” “each fellow put their foot on the line,” “nobody can do what they like” and “she was one of
these kind 89 of people” in Charters, and “I am not the kind of man that is always thinking about their
record,” “if he was to hit a man in the head… they would think their nose tickled” in Lardner. At the bottom
of this error there is a real difficulty: the lack of a pronoun of the true common gender in English,
corresponding to the French soi and son. 90 His, after a noun or pronoun connoting both sexes, often sounds
inept, and his-or-her is intolerably clumsy. Thus the inaccurate plural is often substituted. The brothers

81
Fowler have discovered “anybody else who have only themselves in view” in Richardson and “everybody is
discontented with their lot” in Disraeli, and Ruskin once wrote “if a customer wishes you to injure their
foot.” In spoken American, even the most careful, they and their often appear; I turn to the Congressional
Record at random and in two minutes find “if anyone will look at the bank statements they will see.” In the
lower reaches of the language the plural seems to get into every sentence of any complexity, even when the
preceding noun or pronoun is plainly singular. Such forms as “every man knows their way,” and “nobody
oughter never take what ain’t theirn” are quite common.
In demotic American the pedantry which preserves such forms as someone’s else is always disregarded;
someone else’s is invariably used. I have heard “who else’s wife was there?” and “if it ain’t his’n, it ain’t
nobody here else’s.” Finally, I note that he’s seems to be assimilating with his. In such sentences as “I hear
he’s coming here to work,” the sound of he’s is precisely that of his.

5. The Adverb

All the adverbial endings in English, save -ly, have gradually fallen into decay; it is the only one that is ever
used to form new adverbs. At earlier stages of the language various other endings were used, and some of
them survive in a few old words, though they are no longer employed in making new words. The Anglo-
Saxon endings were -e and -lice. The latter was, at first, merely an -e-ending to adjectives in -lic, but after a
time it attained to independence and was attached to adjectives not ending in -lic. In early Middle English
this -lice changed to -like, and later on to -li and -ly. Meanwhile, the -e-ending, following the -e-endings of
the nouns, adjectives and verbs, ceased to be pronounced, and so it gradually fell away. Thus a good many
adverbs came to be indistinguishable from their ancestral adjectives, for example, hard in to pull hard, loud in
to speak loud, and deep in to bury deep (=Anglo-Saxon, deop-e). Worse, not a few adverbs actually became
adjectives, for example, wide, which was originally the Anglo-Saxon adjective wid (=wide) with the adverbial
-e-ending, and late, which was originally the Anglo-Saxon adjective loet (=slow) with the same ending.
Charters gives a number of characteristic examples of its use: “wounded very bad,” “I sure was stiff,” “drank
out of a cup easy,” “he looked up quick.” Many more are in Lardner: “a chance to see me work regular,” “I am
glad I was lucky enough to marry happy,” “I beat them easy,” and so on. And others fall upon the ear every
day: “he done it proper,” “he done himself proud,” “she was dressed neat,” “she was awful ugly,” “the horse
ran O.K.,” “it near finished him,” “it sells quick,” “I like it fine,” “he et hoggish,” “she acted mean,” “he loved
her something fierce,” “they keep company steady.” The bob-tailed adverb, indeed, enters into a large
number of the commonest coins of vulgar speech. Near-silk, I daresay, is properly nearly-silk. The
grammarians protest that “run slow” should be “run slowly.” But near-silk and “run slow” remain, and so do
“to be in bad,” “it sure will help,” “to play it up strong” and their brothers. What we have here is simply an
incapacity to distinguish any ponderable difference between adverb and adjective, and beneath it, perhaps, is
the incapacity, already noticed in dealing with “it is me,” to distinguish between the common verb of being
and any other verb. If “it is bad” is correct, then why should “it leaks bad” be incorrect? It is just this disdain
of purely grammatical reasons that is at the bottom of most of the phenomena visible in vulgar American,
and the same impulse is observable in all other languages during periods of inflectional decay. During the
highly inflected stage of a language the parts of speech are sharply distinct but when inflections fall off they
tend to disappear. The adverb, being at best the step-child of grammar—as the old Latin grammarians used to
say, “Omnis pars orationis migrat in adverbium”—is one of the chief victims of this anarchy. John Horne
Tooke, despairing of bringing it to any order, even in the most careful English, called it, in his “Diversions of
Purley,” “the common sink and repository of all heterogeneous and unknown corruptions.”
Where an obvious logical or lexical distinction has grown up between an adverb and its primary adjective
the unschooled American is very careful to give it its terminal -ly. For example, he seldom confuses hard and
hardly, scarce and scarcely, real and really. These words convey different ideas. Hard means unyielding;
hardly means barely. Scarce means present only in small numbers; scarcely is substantially synonymous with
hardly. Real means genuine; really is an assurance of veracity. So, again, with late and lately. Thus, and
American says “I don’t know, scarcely,” not “I don’t know, scarce”; “he died lately,” not “he died late.” But
in nearly all such cases syntax is the preservative, not grammar. These adverbs seem to keep their tails largely
because they are commonly put before and not after verbs, as in, for example, “I hardly (or scarcely) know,”

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and “I really mean it.” Many other adverbs that take that position habitually are saved as well, for example,
generally, usually, surely, certainly. But when they follow verbs they often succumb, as in “I’ll do it sure” and
“I seen him recent.” And when they modify adjectives they sometimes succumb, too, as in “it was sure hot.”
Practically all the adverbs made of adjectives in -y lose the terminal -ly and thus become identical with their
adjectives. I have never heard mightily used; it is always mighty, as in “he hit him mighty hard.” So with
filthy, dirty, nasty, lowly, naughty and their cognates. One hears “he acted dirty,” “he spoke nasty,” “the
child behaved naughty,” and so on. Here even standard English has had to make concessions to euphony.
Cleanlily is seldom used; cleanly nearly always takes its place. And the use of illy and thusly is confined to
ignoramuses.

6. The Noun

The only inflections of the noun remaining in English are those for number and for the genitive, and so it is
in these two regions that the few variations to be noted in vulgar American occur. The rule that, in forming
the plurals of compound nouns or noun-phrases, the -s shall be attached to the principal noun is commonly
disregarded, and it goes at the end. Thus, “I have two sons-in-law” is never heard among the plain people;
one always hears “I have two son-in-laws.” So with the genitive. I once overheard this: “that umbrella is the
young lady I go with’s.” Often a false singular is formed from a singular ending in s, the latter being mistaken
for a plural. Chinee, Portugee and Japanee are familiar; I have also noted trapee, specie, 93 tactic and summon
(from trapeze, species, tactics and summons). Paradoxically, the word incidence is commonly misused for
incident, as in “he told an incidence.” Here incidence (or incident) seems to be regarded as a synonym, not
for happening, but for story. I have never heard “he told of an incidence.” The of is always omitted. The
general disregard of number often shows itself when the noun is used as object. I have already quoted
Lardner’s “some of the men has brung their wife along”; in a popular magazine I lately encountered “those
book ethnologists… can’t see what is before their nose.” Many similar examples might be brought forward.

7. The Adjective

The adjectives in English are inflected only for comparison, and the American commonly uses them
correctly, with now and then a double comparative or superlative to ease his soul. More better is the
commonest of these. It has a good deal of support in logic. A sick man is reported today to be better.
Tomorrow he is further improved. Is he to be reported better again, or best? The standard language gets
around the difficulty by using still better. The American vulgate boldly employs more better. In the case of
worse, worser is used, as Charters shows. He also reports baddest, more queerer and beautifullest. Littler,
which he notes, is still outlawed from standard English, but it has, with littlest, a respectable place in
American. The late Richard Harding Davis wrote a play called “The Littlest Girl.” The American freely
compares adjectives that are incapable of the inflection logically. Charters reports most principal, and I
myself have heard uniquer and even more uniquer, as in “I have never saw nothing more uniquer.” I have
also heard more ultra, more worse, idealer, liver (that is, more alive), and wellest, as in “he was the wellest
man you ever seen.” In general, the -er and -est terminations are used instead of the more and most prefixes,
as in beautiful, beautifuller, beautifullest. The fact that the comparative relates to two and the superlative to
more than two is almost always forgotten. I have never heard “the better of the two,” in the popular speech,
but always “the best of the two.” Charters also reports “the hardest of the two” and “my brother and I
measured and he was the tallest.” I have frequently heard “it ain’t so worse,” but here a humorous effect
seems to have been intended.
Adjectives are made much less rapidly in American than either substantives or verbs. The only suffix that
seems to be in general use for that purpose is -y, as in tony, classy, daffy, nutty, dinky, leery, etc. The use of
the adjectival prefix super- is confined to the more sophisticated classes; the plain people seem to be unaware
of it. This relative paucity of adjectives appears to be common to the more primitive varieties of speech. E. J.
Hills, in his elaborate study of the vocabulary of a child of two, found that it contained but descriptive
adjectives, of which six were the names of colors, as against verbs and 173 common nouns. Moreover, most

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of the minus six were adjectives of all work, such as nasty, funny and nice. Colloquial American uses the
same rubber-stamps of speech. Funny connotes the whole range of the unusual; hard indicates every shade of
difficulty; nice is everything satisfactory; wonderful is a superlative of almost limitless scope.

8. The Double Negative

Syntactically, perhaps the chief characteristic of vulgar American is its sturdy fidelity to the double negative.
So freely is it used, indeed, that the simple negative appears to be almost abandoned. Such phrases as “I see
nobody,” “I could hardly walk,” “I know nothing about it” are heard so seldom among the masses of the
people that they appear to be affectations when encountered; the well-nigh universal forms are “I don’t see
nobody,” “I couldn’t hardly walk,” and “I don’t know nothing about it.” Charters lists some very typical
examples, among them, “he ain’t never coming back no more,” “you don’t care for nobody but yourself,”
“couldn’t be no more happier” and “I can’t see nothing.” In Lardner there are innumerable examples: “they
was not no team,” “I have not never thought of that,” “I can’t write no more,” “no chance to get no money
from nowhere,” “we can’t have nothing to do,” and so on. Some of his specimens show a considerable
complexity, for example, “Matthewson was not only going as far as the coast,” meaning, as the context shows,
that he was going as far as the coast and no further. Only gets into many other examples, e. g., “he hadn’t
only the one pass,” “I can’t stay only a minute,” and “I don’t work nights no more, only except Sunday
nights.” This last I got from a car conductor. Many other curious specimens are in my collectanea, among
them: “one swaller don’t make no summer,” “I never seen nothing I would of rather saw,” and “once a child
gets burnt once it won’t never stick its hand in no fire no more,” and so on. The last embodies a triple
negative. In “You don’t know nobody what don’t want nobody to do nothing for ’em, do you?” there is a
quadruplet. And in “the more faster you go, the sooner you don’t get there,” there is a muddling that almost
defies analysis.
Like most other examples of “bad grammar” encountered in American the compound negative is of great
antiquity and was once quite respectable. The student of Anglo-Saxon encounters it constantly. In that
language the negative of the verb was formed by prefixing a particle, ne. Thus, singan (=to sing) became ne
singan (=not to sing). In case the verb began with a vowel the ne dropped its e and was combined with the
verb, as in noefre (never), from ne-oefre (=not ever). In case the verb began with an h or a w followed by a
vowel, the h or w of the verb and the e of ne were both dropped, as in noefth (=has not), from ne-hoefth
(=not has), and nolde (=would not), from ne-wolde. Finally, in case the vowel following a w was an i, it
changed to y, as in nyste (=knew not), from ne-wiste. But inasmuch as Anglo-Saxon was a fully inflected
language the inflections for the negative did not stop with the verbs; the indefinite article, the indefinite
pronoun and even some of the nouns were also inflected, and survivors of those forms appear to this day in
such words as none and nothing.

9. Other Syntactical Peculiarities

“Language begins,” says Sayce, “with sentences, not with single words.” In a speech in process of rapid
development, unrestrained by critical analysis, the tendency to sacrifice the integrity of words to the needs of
the complete sentence is especially marked. One finds it clearly in American. Already we have examined
various assimilation and composition forms: that’n, use’to, would’a, them’ere and so on. Many others are
observable. Off’n is a good example; it comes from off of and shows a preposition decaying to the form of a
mere inflectional particle. One constantly hears “I bought it off’n John.” Sort’a, kind’a and their like follow in
the footsteps of would’a. Usen’t follows the analogy of don’t and wouldn’t, as in “I didn’t usen’t to be.”
Would’ve and should’ve are widely used; Lardner commonly hears them as would of and should of. The
neutral a-particle also appears in other situations, especially before way, as in that-a way and this-a way. It is
found again in a tall, a liaison form of at all.
Various minor syntactical peculiarities may be noticed; an exhaustive study of them would afford materials
for a whole volume. The use of all the further, as in, “it was all the further I could go,” seems to be American.
It has bred many analogues, e. g., “is that all the later it is?” Another curious formation employs there with

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various negatives in an unusual way; it is illustrated in “there can’t anyone break me.” Again, there is the use
of in in such constructions as “he caught in back of the plate,” apparently suggested by in front. Yet again,
there is the use of too and so as intensives, as in “You are, too” and “You are, so.” Yet again, there is the
growing tendency to omit the verb of action in phrases indicating desire or intent, as in, “he wants out” for
“he wants to go out.” This last, I believe, originated as a Pennsylvania localism, and probably owes its genesis
to Pennsylvania German, but of late it has begun to travel, and I have received specimens from all parts of
the country. In the form of “Belgium wants in this protective arrangement” it has even got into a leading
editorial in the Chicago Tribune, “the world’s greatest newspaper.”

10. Vulgar Pronunciation

Before anything approaching a thorough and profitable study of the sounds of the American common speech
is possible, there must be a careful assembling of the materials, and this, unfortunately, still awaits a
phonologist of sufficient enterprise and equipment. Dr. William A. Read, of the State University of Louisiana,
has made some excellent examinations of vowel and consonant sounds in the South, Dr. Louise Pound has
done capital work of the same sort in the Middle West, and there have been other regional studies of merit.
But most of these become misleading by reason of their lack of scope; forms practically universal in the
nation are discussed as dialectical variations. This is a central defect in the work of the American Dialect
Society, otherwise very industrious and meritorious. It is essaying to study localisms before having first
platted the characteristics of the general speech. The dictionaries of Americanisms deal with pronunciation
only casually, and often very inaccurately; the remaining literature is meagre and unsatisfactory. Until the
matter is gone into at length it will be impossible to discuss any phase of it with exactness. No single
investigator can examine the speech of the whole country; for that business a pooling of forces is necessary.
But meanwhile it may be of interest to set forth a few provisional ideas.
At the start two streams of influence upon vulgar American pronunciation may be noted, the one an
inheritance from the English of the colonists, and the other arising spontaneously within the country, and
apparently much colored by immigration. The first influence, it goes without saying, is gradually dying out.
Consider, for example, the pronunciation of the diphthong oi. In Middle English it was as in boy, but during
the early Modern English period it was assimilated with that of the i in wine, and this usage prevailed at the
time of the settlement of America. The colonists thus brought it with them, and at the same time it lodged in
Ireland, where it still prevails. But in England, during the pedantic eighteenth century, this i-sound was
displaced by the original oi-sound, not by historical research but by mere deduction from the spelling, and
the new pronunciation soon extended to the polite speech of America. In the common speech, however, the
i-sound persisted, and down to the time of the Civil War it was constantly heard in such words as boil, hoist,
oil, join, poison and roil, which thus became bile, hist, ile, jine, pisen and rile. Since then the school-marm
has combated it with such vigor that it has begun to disappear, and such forms as pisen, jine, bile and ile are
now very seldom heard, save as dialectic variations. But in certain other words, perhaps supported by Irish
influence, the i-sound still persists. Chief among them are hoist and roil. An unlearned American, wishing
to say that he was enraged, never says that he was roiled, but always that he was riled. Desiring to examine
the hoof of his horse, he never orders the animal to hoist but always to hist. In the form of booze-hister the
latter is almost in good usage. I have seen booze-hister thus spelled and obviously to be thus pronounced, in
an editorial article in the American Issue, organ of the Anti-Saloon League of America.

X. Proper Names in America

1. Surnames

On October 20, 1919, Mr. Mondell, of Wyoming, the majority leader, arose in the House of Representatives
and called the attention of the House to the presence in the gallery of a detachment of 27 soldiers, “popularly
known by the appropriate title and designation of ‘Americans all.’ ” A few moments later Mr. Wilson, of
Connecticut, had the names of these soldiers spread upon the record for the day. Here they are: Pedro Araez
Frank Kristopoulos

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Sylvester Balchunas Johannes Lenferink
Arezio Aurechio Fidel Martin
Jules Boutin Attilio Marzi
Oasge Christiansen Gurt Mistrioty
Kusti Franti Michael Myatowych
Odilian Gosselin Francisco Pungi
Walter Hucko Joseph Rossignol
Argele Intili Ichae Semos
Henry Jurk Joe Shestak
David King George Strong
John Klok Hendrix Svennigsen
Norman Kerman Fritz Wold
Eugene Kristiansen
This was no unusual group of Americans, though it was deliberately assembled to convince Congress of the
existence of a “melting pot that really melts.” I turn to the list of promotions in the army sent in to the Senate
on the first day of the Harding administration, and find Lanza, Huguet, Shaffer, Brambila, Straat,
Knabenshue, De Armond, Meyer, Wiezorek and Stahl among the new colonels and lieutenant-colonels, and
Ver, Lorch, von Deesten, Violland and Armat among the new majors. I proceed to the roll of the Sixty-sixth
Congress and find Babka, Bacharach, Baer, Chindblom, Crago, Dupré, Esch, Focht, Goldfogel, Goodykoontz,
Hernandez, Hoch, Juul, Kahn, Keller, Kiess, Kleczka, Knutson, Kraus, Larsen, Lazaro, Lehlbach, Rodenberg,
Romjue, Siegel, Steenerson, Volk, Volstead, Voigt and Zihlman in the House. I go on to the list of members
of the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1919) and find Cortissoz, deKay, Gummere, Lefevre, Schelling,
van Dyke and Wister among the writers, and Ballin, Betts, Brunner, Carlsen, De Camp, Dielman, Du Mond,
Guerin, Henri, Jaegers, La Farge, Niehaus, Ochtman, Roth, Volk and Weinman among the painters and
sculptors. I conclude with a glance through “Who’s Who in America.” There are Aasgaard, Abbé, Abt,
Ackerman, Adler, Agassiz, Agee, Allaire, Alsberg, Alschuler, Althoff, Althouse, Ament, Amstutz, Amweg,
Andrus, Angellotti, Anshutz, Anspacher, Anstadt, App, Arndt, Auer, Auerbach, Ault and Auman, to go no
further than the A’s—all “notable living men and women of the United States” and all nativeborn.
Turn to the letter z in the New York telephone directory and you will find a truly astonishing array of
foreign names, some of them in process of anglicization, but many of them still arrestingly outlandish. The
only Anglo-Saxon surname beginning with z is Zacharias 5 and even that was originally borrowed from the
Greek. To this the Norman invasion seems to have added only Zouchy. But in Manhattan and the Bronx,
even among the necessarily limited class of telephone subscribers, there are nearly 1500 persons whose
names begin with the letter, and among them one finds fully 150 different surnames. The German
Zimmermann, with either one n or two, is naturally the most numerous single name, and following close
upon it are its relatives, Zimmer and Zimmern. With them are many more German names, Zahn,
Zechendorf, Zeffert, Zeitler, Zeller, Zellner, Zeltmacher, Zepp, Ziegfeld, Zabel, Zucker, Zuckermann,
Ziegler, Zillman, Zinser and so on. They are all represented heavily, but they indicate neither the earliest nor
the most formidable accretion, for underlying them are many Dutch names, e. g., Zeeman, and over them are
a large number of Slavic, Italian and Jewish names. Among the first I note Zabludosky, Zachczynski,
Zapinkow, Zaretsky, Zechnowitz, Zenzalsky and Zywachevsky; among the second, Zaccardi, Zaccarini,
Zaccaro, Zapparano, Zanelli, Zicarelli and Zucca; among the third, Zukor, Zipkin and Ziskind. There are, too,
various Spanish names: Zalaya, Zingaro, etc. And Greek: Zapeion, Zarvakos and Zouvelekis. And Armenian:
Zaloom, Zaron and Zatmajian. And Hungarian: Zadek, Zagor and Zichy. And Swedish: Zetterholm and
Zetterlund. And a number that defy placing: Zrike, Zvan, 6 Zwipf, Zula, Zur and Zeve.
In the New York city directory the fourth most common name is now Murphy, an Irish name, and the fifth
most common is Meyer, which is German and often Jewish. The Meyers are the Smiths of Austria, and of
most of Germany. They outnumber all other clans. After them come the Schultzes and Krauses, just as the
Joneses and Williamses follow the Smiths in Great Britain. Schultze and Kraus do not seem to be very
common names in New York, but Schmidt, Muller, Schneider and Klein appear among the fifty commonest.
7 Cohen and Levy rank eighth and ninth, and are both ahead of Jones, which is second in England, and
Williams, which is third. Taylor, a highly typical British name, ranking fourth in England and Wales, is

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twenty-third in New York. Ahead of it, beside Murphy, Meyer, Cohen and Levy, are Schmidt, Ryan,
O’Brien, Kelly and Sullivan. Robinson, which is twelfth in England, is thirty-ninth in New York; even
Schneider and Muller are ahead of it. In Chicago Olson, Schmidt, Meyer, Hansen and Larsen are ahead of
Taylor, and Hoffman and Becker are ahead of Ward; in Boston Sullivan and Murphy are ahead of any English
name save Smith; in Philadelphia Myers is just below Robinson. Nor, as I have said, is this great proliferation
of foreign surnames confined to the large cities. There are whole regions in the Southwest in which López
and Gonzales are far commoner names than Smith, Brown or Jones, and whole regions in the Middle West
wherein Olson is commoner than either Taylor or Williams, and places both North and South where Duval is
at least as common as Brown.
Moreover, the true proportions of this admixture of foreign blood are partly concealed by a wholesale
anglicization of surnames, sometimes deliberate and sometimes the fruit of mere confusion. That Smith,
Brown and Miller remain in first, second and third places among the surnames of New York is surely no
sound evidence of Anglo-Saxon survival. The German and Scandinavian Schmidt has undoubtedly
contributed many a Smith, and Braun many a Brown, and Müller many a Miller. In the same way Johnson,
which holds first place among Chicago surnames, and Anderson, which holds third, are plainly reinforced
from Scandinavian sources, and the former may also owe something to the Russian Ivanof. Miller is a
relatively rare name in England; it is not among the fifty most common. But it stands thirtieth in Boston,
third in New York, fourth in Baltimore, and second in Philadelphia. 8 In the lastnamed city the influence of
Müller, probably borrowed from the Pennsylvania German, is plainly indicated, and in Chicago it is likely
that there are also contributions from the Scandinavian Möller, the Polish Jannszewski and the Bohemian
Mlinár. Myers, as we have seen, is a common surname in Philadelphia. So are Fox and Snyder. In some part,
at least, they have been reinforced by the Pennsylvania German Myer, Fuchs and Schneider. Sometimes
Müller changes to Miller, sometimes to Muller, and sometimes it remains unchanged, but with the spelling
made Mueller. Muller and Mueller do not appear among the commoner names in Philadelphia; nearly all the
Müllers seem to have become Millers, thus putting Miller in second place. But in Chicago, with Miller in
fourth place, there is also Mueller in thirty-first place, and in New York, with Miller in third place, there is
also Muller in twenty-fourth place.

2. Given Names

The non-Anglo-Saxon American’s willingness to anglicize his patronymic is far exceeded by his eagerness to
give “American” baptismal names to his children. The favorite given names of the old country almost
disappear in the first native-born generation. The Irish immigrants quickly dropped such names as Terence,
Dennis and Patrick, and adopted in their places the less conspicuous John, George and William. The
Germans, in the same way, abandoned Otto, August, Hermann, Ludwig, Heinrich, Wolfgang, Albrecht,
Wilhelm, Kurt, Hans, Rudolf, Gottlieb, Johann and Franz. For some of these they substituted the English
equivalents: Charles, Lewis, Henry, William, John, Frank, and so on. In the room of others they began
afflicting their offspring with more fanciful native names: Milton and Raymond were their chief favorites
thirty or forty years ago. 40 The Jews carry the thing to great lengths. At present they seem to take most
delight in Sidney, Irving, Milton, Roy, Stanley and Monroe, but they also call their sons John, Charles,
Henry, Harold, William, Richard, James, Albert, Edward, Alfred, Frederick, Thomas, and even Mark, Luke,
and Matthew, 41 and their daughters Mary, Gertrude, Estelle, Pauline, Alice and Edith. As a boy I went to
school with many Jewish boys. The commonest given names among them were Isidore, Samuel, Jonas, Isaac
and Israel. These are seldom bestowed by the rabbis of today. In the same school were a good many German
pupils, boy and girl. Some of the girls bore such fine old German given names as Katharina, Wilhelmina, Elsa,
Lotta, Ermentrude and Franziska. All these have begun to disappear. The Jews have lately shown a great
liking for Lee, a Southern given name. It has almost displaced Leon and Leopold, just as it has been
substituted for Li among the Chinese.
The newer immigrants, indeed, do not wait for the birth of children to demonstrate their naturalization;
they change their own given names immediately they land. I am told by Abraham Cahan that this is done
almost universally on the East Side of New York. “Even the most old-fashioned Jews immigrating to this
country,” he says, “change Yosel to Joseph, Yankel to Jacob, Liebel to Louis, Feivel to Philip, Itzik to Isaac,

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Ruven to Robert, and Moise or Motel to Morris.” Moreover, the spelling of Morris, as the position of its
bearer improves, commonly changes to Maurice, though the pronunciation may remain Mawruss, as in the
case of Mr. Perlmutter. The immigrants of other stocks follow the same habit. The Italian Giuseppe quickly
becomes Joseph and his brother Francesco is as quickly transformed into Frank. The Greek Athanasios is
changed to Nathan or Tom, Panagiotis to Peter, Constantine to Gus, Demetrios to James, Chasalambos to
Charles and Vasilios (Basil) to Bill. The Dutch Dirk becomes Dick, Klaas becomes Clarence or Claude, Gerrit
becomes Garrett or Garritt, Mina becomes Minnie, Neeltje becomes Nellie, Barend becomes Barney, Maarten
becomes Martin, Arie becomes Arthur, and Douwe becomes Dewey. 42 The Polish Stanislav is changed to
Stanley, Czeslan to Chester, and Kazimierz to Casey. 43 Every Bohemian Jaroslav becomes Jerry, every
Bronislav a Barney, every Stanislav a Stanley and every Vaclav or Vojtech a William. The Hungarians and
the Balkan peoples run to Frank, John and Joe; the Russians quickly drop their national system of
nomenclature and give their children names according to the American plan. Even the Chinese laundrymen
of the big cities become John, George, Charlie and Frank; I once encountered one boasting the name of Emil.

The Puritan influence, in names as in ideas, has remained a good deal more potent in America than in
England. The given name of the celebrated Praise-God Barebone marked a fashion which died out in
England very quickly, but one still finds traces of it in America, e. g., in such women’s names as Faith, Hope,
Prudence, Charity and Mercy, and in such men’s names as Peregrine. 45 The religious obsession of the New
England colonists is also kept in mind by the persistence of Biblical names: Ezra, Hiram, Ezekiel, Zechariah,
Elijah, Elihu, and so on. These names excite the derision of the English; an American comic character, in an
English play or novel, always bears one of them. Again, the fashion of using surnames as given names is far
more widespread in America than in England. In this country, indeed, it takes on the character of a national
habit; fully three out of four eldest sons, in families of any consideration, bear their mothers’ surnames as
middle names. This fashion arose in England during the seventeenth century, and one of its fruits was the
adoption of such well-known surnames as Stanley, Cecil, Howard, Douglas and Duncan as common given
names. It died out over there during the eighteenth century, and today the great majority of Englishmen
bear such simple given names as John, Charles and William—often four or five of them— but in America it
has persisted. A glance at a roster of the presidents of the United States will show how firmly it has taken
root. Of the eleven that have had middle names at all, six have had middle names that were family surnames,
and two of the six have dropped their other given names and used these surnames. This custom, perhaps, has
paved the way for another: that of making given names of any proper nouns that happen to strike the fancy.
Thus General Sherman was named after an Indian chief, Tecumseh, and a Chicago judge was baptized
Kenesaw Mountain 47 in memory of the battle that General Sherman fought there. A late candidate for
governor of New York had the curious given name of D-Cady, and a late American ethnologist, McGee,
always insisted that his first name was simply W J, and that these letters were not initials and should not be
followed by periods. 48 Various familiar American given names, originally surnames, are almost unknown in
England, among them, Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Columbus and Lee. Chauncey forms a
curious addition to the list. It was the surname of the second president of Harvard College, and was bestowed
upon their offspring by numbers of his graduates. It then got into general use and acquired a typically
American pronunciation, with the a of the first syllable flat. It is never encountered in England.
Americans, in general, manifest a much freer spirit in the invention of new given names than the English,
who remain faithful, in the main, to the biblical and historical names. Dr. Louise Pound, that most alert
observer of American speech-habits, lists some very curious coinages, 49 among them the blends, Olouise
(from Olive and Louise), Marjette (Marjorie+Henrietta), Maybeth (May+Elizabeth), Lunette (Luna+Nettie),
Leilabeth (Leila+Elizabeth), Rosella (Rose+Bella), Adrielle (Adrienne+Belle), Birdene (Birdie+Pauline),
Bethene (Elizabeth+Christine), Olabelle (Ola+Isabel), and Armina (Ardelia+Wilhelmina). Even surnames and
men’s given names are employed in these feminine blends, as in Romiette (Romeo+Juliette), Adnelle
(Addison+Nellie), Adelloyd (Addie+Lloyd), and Charline (Charles+Pauline). A woman professor in the
Middle West has the given name of Eldarema, coined from those of her grandparents, Elkanah, Daniel,
Rebecca and Mary. In some parts of the United States, particularly south of the Potomac, men’s given names
are quite as fantastic. Hoke, Ollie and Champ are familiar to students of latter-day political history In the
mountains of Tennessee one encounters such prodigies as Lute, Bink, Ott and Gin. The negroes, like the

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white immigrants, have a great liking for fancy given names. The old-time Janes, ’Lizas and Jinnies have
almost disappeared. Among the ladies of color who have passed through my kitchen in Baltimore during the
past twenty years have been Geneva, Nicholine, Leah, Celeste, Evelyn, Olivia, Blanche, Isabelle, Dellott,
Irene and Violet.

3. Geographical Names

“There is no part of the world,’’ said Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘‘where nomenclature is so rich, poetical,
humorous and picturesque as in the United States of America.’’ A glance at the latest United States Official
Postal Guide or report of the United States Geographic Board 53 quite bears out this opinion. The map of
the country is besprinkled with place names from at least half a hundred languages, living and dead, and
among them one finds examples of the most daring and elaborate fancy. There are Spanish, French and
Indian names as melodious and charming as running water; there are names out of the histories and
mythologies of all the great races of man; there are names grotesque and names almost sublime. ‘‘Mississippi!’’
rhapsodized Walt Whitman; ‘‘the word winds with chutes—it rolls a stream three thousand miles long….
Monongahela! it rolls with venison richness upon the palate.’’ No other country can match our geographical
names for interest and variety. When there arises among us a philologist who will study them as thoroughly
and intelligently as the Swiss, Johann Jakob Egli, studied the place names of Central Europe, his work will be
an invaluable contribution to the history of the nation, and no less to an understanding of the psychology of
its people.
The original English settlers, it would appear, displayed little imagination in naming the new settlements
and natural features of the land that they came to. Their almost invariable tendency, at the start, was to make
use of names familiar at home, or to invent banal compounds. Plymouth Rock at the North and Jamestown at
the South are examples of their poverty of fancy; they filled the narrow tract along the coast with new
Bostons, Cambridges, Bristols and Londons, and often used the adjective as a prefix. But this was only in the
days of beginning. Once they had begun to move back from the coast and to come into contact with the
aborigines and with the widely dispersed settlers of other races, they encountered rivers, mountains, lakes
and even towns that bore far more engaging names, and these, after some resistance, they perforce adopted.
The native names of such rivers as the James, the York and the Charles succumbed, but those of the Potomac,
the Patapsco, the Merrimac and the Penobscot survived, and they were gradually reinforced as the country
was penetrated. Most of these Indian names, in getting upon the early maps, suffered somewhat severe
simplifications. Potowanmeac was reduced to Potomack and then to Potomac; Unéaukara became Niagara;
Reckawackes, by the law of Hobson-Jobson, was turned into Rockaway, and Pentapang into Port Tobacco.
But, despite such elisions and transformations, the charm of thousands of them remained, and today they are
responsible for much of the characteristic color of American geographical nomenclature. Such names as
Tallahassee, Susquehanna, Mississippi, Allegheny, Chicago, Kennebec, Patuxent and Kalamazoo give a
barbaric brilliancy to the American map. Only the map of Australia can match it.
The settlement of the American continent, once the eastern coast ranges were crossed, proceeded with
unparalleled speed, and so the naming of the new rivers, lakes, peaks and valleys, and of the new towns and
districts no less, strained the inventiveness of the pioneers. The result is the vast duplication of names that
shows itself in the Postal Guide. No less than eighteen imitative Bostons and New Bostons still appear, and
there are nineteen Bristols, twenty-eight Newports, and twenty-two Londons and New Londons. Argonauts
starting out from an older settlement on the coast would take its name with them, and so we find
Philadelphias in Illinois, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee, Richmonds in Iowa, Kansas and nine other
western states, and Princetons in fifteen. Even when a new name was hit upon it seems to have been hit
upon simultaneously by scores of scattered bands of settlers; thus we find the whole land bespattered with
Washingtons, Lafayettes, Jeffersons and Jacksons, and with names suggested by common and obvious natural
objects, e. g., Bear Creek, Bald Knob and Buffalo. The Geographic Board, in its fourth report, made a belated

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protest against this excessive duplication. ‘‘The names Elk, Beaver, Cottonwood and Bald,’’ it said, ‘‘are
altogether too numerous.’’ Of postoffices alone there are fully a hundred embodying Elk; counting in rivers,
lakes, creeks, mountains and valleys, the map of the United States probably shows at least twice as many such
names.
A study of American geographical and place names reveals eight general classes, as follows: (a) those
embodying personal names, chiefly the surnames of pioneers or of national heroes; (b) those transferred from
other and older places, either in the eastern states or in Europe; (c) Indian names; (d) Dutch, Spanish, French,
German and Scandinavian names; (e) Biblical and mythological names; (f) names descriptive of localities; (g)
names suggested by the local flora, fauna or geology; (h) purely fanciful names. The names of the first class
are perhaps the most numerous. Some consist of surnames standing alone, as Washington, Cleveland,
Bismarck, Lafayette, Taylor and Randolph; others consist of surnames in combination with various old and
new Grundwörter, as Pittsburgh, Knoxville, Bailey’s Switch, Hagerstown, Franklinton, Dodge City, Fort
Riley, Wayne Junction and McKeesport; and yet others are contrived of given names, either alone or in
combination, as Louisville, St. Paul, Elizabeth, Johnstown, Charlotte, Williamsburg and Marysville. All our
great cities are surrounded by grotesque Bensonhursts, Bryn Joneses, Smithvales and Krauswoods. The
number of towns in the United States bearing women’s given names is enormous. I find, for example, eleven
postoffices called Charlotte, ten called Ada and no less than nineteen called Alma. Most of these places are
small, but there is an Elizabeth with 75,000 population, an Elmira with 40,000, and an Augusta with nearly
45,000.
The names of the second class we have already briefly observed. They are betrayed in many cases by the
prefix New; more than 600 such postoffices are recorded, ranging from New Albany to New Windsor. Others
bear such prefixes as West, North and South, or various distinguishing affixes, e. g., Bostonia, Pittsburgh
Landing, Yorktown and Hartford City. One often finds eastern county names applied to western towns and
eastern town names applied to western rivers and mountains. Thus, Cambria, which is the name of a county
but not of a postoffice in Pennsylvania, is a town in seven western states; Baltimore is the name of a glacier in
Alaska, and Princeton is the name of a peak in Colorado. In the same way the names of the more easterly
states often reappear in the west, e. g., in Mount Ohio, Colo., Delaware, Okla., and Virginia City, Nev. The
tendency to name small American towns after the great capitals of antiquity has excited the derision of the
English since the earliest days; there is scarcely an English book upon the states without some fling at it. Of
late it has fallen into abeyance, though sixteen Athenses still remain, and there are yet many Carthages,
Uticas, Syracuses, Romes, Alexandrias, Ninevehs and Troys. The third city of the nation, Philadelphia, got its
name from the ancient stronghold of Philadelphus of Pergamon. To make up for the falling off of this old and
flamboyant custom, the more recent immigrants have brought with them the names of the capitals and other
great cities of their fatherlands. Thus the American map bristles with Berlins, Bremens, Hamburgs, Warsaws
and Leipzigs, and is beginning to show Stockholms, Venices, Belgrades and Christianias.
The influence of Indian names upon American nomenclature is quickly shown by a glance at the map. No
fewer than 26 of the states have names borrowed from the aborigines, and the same thing is true of most of
our rivers and mountains, and of large numbers of our towns and counties. There was an effort, at one time,
to get rid of these Indian names. Thus the early Virginians changed the name of the Powhatan to the James,
and the first settlers in New York changed the name of Horicon to Lake George. In the same way the present
name of the White Mountains displaced Agiochook, and New Amsterdam, and later New York, displaced
Manhattan, which has been recently revived. The law of Hobson-Jobson made changes in other Indian
names, sometimes complete and sometimes only partial. Thus, Mauwauwaming became Wyoming,
Maucwachoong became Mauch Chunk, Ouabache became Wabash, Asingsing became Sing-Sing, and
Machihiganing became Michigan. But this vandalism did not go far enough to take away the brilliant color of
the aboriginal nomenclature. The second city of the United States bears an Indian name, and so do the
largest American river, and the greatest American water-fall, and four of the five Great Lakes, and the scene
of the most important military decision ever reached on American soil.
The Dutch place-names of the United States are chiefly confined to the vicinity of New York, and a good
many of them have become greatly corrupted. Brooklyn, Wallabout and Gramercy offer examples. The first-
named was originally Breuckelen, the second was Waale Bobht, and the third was De Kromme Zee. Hell-
Gate is a crude translation of the Dutch Helle-Gat. During the early part of the last century the more delicate

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New Yorkers transformed the term into Hurlgate, but the change was vigorously opposed by Washington
Irving, and so Hell-Gate was revived. The law of Hobson-Jobson early converted the Dutch hoek into hook,
and it survives in various place-names, e. g., Kinderhook and Sandy Hook. The Dutch kill is a Grundwort in
many other names, e. g., Catskill, Schuylkill, Peekskill, Fishkill and Kill van Kull; it is the equivalent of the
American creek. Many other Dutch place-names will come familiarly to mind: Harlem, Staten, Flushing,
Cortlandt, Calver, Plaat, Nassau, Coenties, Spuyten Duyvel, Yonkers, Barnegat, Bowery (from Bouvery).
Block Island was originally Blok, and Cape May, according to Schele de Vere, was Mey, both Dutch. A large
number of New York street and neighborhood names come down from Knickerbocker days, often greatly
changed in pronunciation. Desbrosses offers an example. The Dutch called it de Broose, but in New York
today it is commonly spoken of as Des-bros-sez.
French place-names have suffered almost as severely. Few persons would recognize Smackover, the name of
a small town in Arkansas, as French, and yet in its original form it was Chemin Couvert. 61 Schele de Vere,
in 1871, recorded the degeneration of the name to Smack Cover; the Postoffice, always eager to shorten and
simplify names, has since made one word of it and got rid of the redundant c. In the same way Bob Ruly, a
Missouri name, descends from Bois Brulé; Glazypool, the name of an Arkansas mountain, from Glaise á Paul;
Low Freight, the name of an Arkansas river, from L’Eau Froid, and Barboo from Baribault. ‘‘The American
tongue,’’ says W. W. Crane, ‘‘seems to lend itself reluctantly to the words of alien languages.’’ A large
number of French place-names, e. g., Lac Supérieur, were translated into English at an early day, and most of
those that remain are now pronounced as if they were English. Thus Des Moines is dee-moyns, Terre Haute
is terry-hut, Beaufort is byu-fort in South Carolina (but bo-fort in North Carolina!). New Orleans is or-leens,
Bonne Terre, an old town near St. Louis, is bonnie tar, Lafayette has a flat a, Havre de Grace has another, and
Versailles is ver-sales. The pronunciation of sault, as in Sault Ste. Marie, is commonly more or less correct;
the Minneapolis, St. Paul and Sault Ste. Marie Railroad is popularly called the Soo. This may be due to
Canadian example, or to some confusion between Sault and Sioux. The French Louis, in Louisville, is usually
pronounced correctly, but in St. Louis it is almost always converted into Lewis. The rouge in Baton Rouge is
correctly pronuonced, though the baton is commonly boggled. The local pronunciation of Illinois is Illinoy,
an attempt to improve upon the vulgar Illin-i.
For a number of years the Geographic Board has been seeking vainly to reëstablish the correct
pronunciation of the name of the Purgatoire river in Colorado. Originally named the Rio de las Animas by
the Spaniards, it was renamed the Riviére du Purgatoire by their French successors. The American pioneers
changed this to Picketwire, and that remains the local name of the stream to this day, despite the effort of the
Geographic Board to compromise on Purgatoire river. Many other French names are being anglicized with its
aid and consent. Already half a dozen Bellevues have been changed to Belleviews and Bellviews, and the
spelling of nearly all the Belvédéres has been changed to Belvidere. Belair, La., represents the end-product of
a process of decay which began with Belle Aire, and then proceeded to Bellaire and Bellair. All these forms
are still to be found, together with Bel Air. The Geographic Board’s antipathy to accented letters and to
names of more than one word has converted Isle Ste. Thérése, in the St. Lawrence river, to Isle Ste. Therese,
a truly abominable barbarism, and La Cygne, in Kansas, to Lacygne, which is even worse. 64 Lamoine,
Labelle, Lagrange and Lamonte are among its other improvements; Lafayette, for La Fayette, long antedates
the beginning of its labors.
The Spanish names of the Southwest are undergoing a like process of corruption, though without official
aid. San Antonio has changed to San Antone in popular pronunciation and seems likely to go to San Tone; El
Paso has acquired a flat American a and a z-sound in place of the Spanish s; Los Angeles presents such
difficulties that no two of its inhabitants agree upon the proper pronunciation, and many compromise on
simple Los, as the folks of Jacksonville commonly monly call their town Jax. Some of the most mellifluous of
American place-names are in the areas once held by the Spaniards. It would be hard to match the beauty of
Santa Margarita, San Anselmo, Alamogordo, Terra Amarilla, Sabinoso, Las Palomas, Ensenada, Nogales, San
Patricio and Bernalillo. But they are under a severe and double assault. Not only do the present lords of the
soil debase them in speaking them; in many cases they are formally displaced by native names of the utmost
harshness and banality. Thus, one finds in New Mexico such absurdly-named towns as Sugarite, Shoemaker,
Newhope, Lordsburg, Eastview and Central; in Arizona such places as Old Glory, Springville, Wickenburg

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and Congress Junction, and even in California such abominations as Oakhurst, Ben Hur, Drytown, Skidoo,
Susanville, Uno and Ono.
The early Spaniards were prodigal with place-names testifying to their piety, but these names, in the
overwhelming main, were those of saints. Add Salvador, Trinidad and Concepcion, and their repertoire is
almost exhausted. If they ever named a town Jesus the name has been obliterated by Anglo-Saxon prudery;
even their use of the name as a personal appellation violates American notions of the fitting. The names of
the Jewish patriarchs and those of the holy places in Palestine do not appear among their place-names; their
Christianity seems to have been exclusively of the New Testament. But the Americans who displaced them
were intimately familiar with both books of the Bible, and one finds copious proofs of it on the map of the
United States. There are no less than eleven Beulahs, nine Canaans, eleven Jordans and twenty-one Sharons.
Adam is sponsor for a town in West Virginia and an island in the Chesapeake, and Eve for a village in
Kentucky. There are five postoffices named Aaron, two named Abraham, two named Job, and a town and a
lake names Moses. Most of the St. Pauls and St. Josephs of the country were inherited from the French, but
the two St. Patricks show a later influence. Eight Wesleys and Wesleyvilles, eight Asburys and twelve names
embodying Luther indicate the general theological trend of the plain people. There is a village in Maryland,
too small to have a postoffice, named Gott, and I find Gotts Island in Maine (in the French days, Petite
Plaisance) and Gottville in California, but no doubt these were named after German settlers of that awful
name, and not after the Lord God directly. There are four Trinities, to say nothing of the inherited Trinidads.

Names wholly or partly descriptive of localities are very numerous throughout the country, and among the
Grundwörter embodied in them are terms highly characteristic of American and almost unknown to the
English vocabulary. Bald Knob would puzzle an Englishman, but the name is so common in the United States
that the Geographic Board has had to take measures against it. Others of that sort are Council Bluffs, Patapsco
Neck, Delaware Water Gap, Curtis Creek, Walden Pond, Sandy Hook, Key West, Bull Run, Portage, French
Lick, Jones Gulch, Watkins Gully, Cedar Bayou, Keams Canyon, Parker Notch, Sucker Branch, Fraziers
Bottom and Eagle Pass. Butte Creek, in Montana, is a name made up of two Americanisms. There are thirty-
five postoffices whose names embody the word prairie, several of them, e. g., Prairie du Chien, Wis.,
inherited from the French. There are seven Divides, eight Buttes, eight town-names embodying the word
burnt, innumerable names embodying grove, barren, plain, fork, center, cross-roads, courthouse, cove and
ferry, and a great swarm of Cold Springs, Coldwaters, Summits, Middletowns and Highlands. The flora and
fauna of the land are enormously represented. There are twenty-two Buffalos beside the city in New York,
and scores of Buffalo Creeks, Ridges, Springs and Wallows. The Elks, in various forms, are still more
numerous, and there are dozens of towns, mountains, lakes, creeks and country districts named after the
beaver, martin, coyote, moose and otter, and as many more named after such characteristic flora as the paw-
paw, the sycamore, the cottonwood, the locust and the sunflower. There is an Alligator in Mississippi, a
Crawfish in Kentucky and a Rat Lake on the Canadian border of Minnesota. The endless search for mineral
wealth has besprinkled the map with such names as Bromide, Oil City, Anthracite, Chrome, Chloride, Coal
Run, Goldfield, Telluride, Leadville and Cement.
There was a time, particularly during the gold rush to California, when the rough humor of the country
showed itself in the invention of extravagant and often highly felicitous place-names, but with the growth of
population and the rise of civic spirit they have tended to be replaced by more seemly coinages. Catfish
creek, in Wisconsin, is now the Yakara river; the Bulldog mountains, in Arizona, have become the
Harosomas; the Picketwire river, as we have seen, has resumed its old French name of Purgatoire. As with
natural features of the landscape, so with towns. Nearly all the old Boozevilles, Jackass Flats, Three Fingers,
Hell-For-Sartains, Undershirt Hills, Razzle-Dazzles, Cow-Tails, Yellow Dogs, Jim-Jamses, Jump-Offs, Poker
Citys and Skunktowns have yielded to the growth of delicacy, but Tombstone still stands in Arizona, Goose
Bill remains a postoffice in Montana, and the Geographic Board gives its imprimatur to the Horsethief trail in
Colorado, to Burning Bear in the same state, and to Pig Eye lake in Minnesota. Various other survivors of a
more lively and innocent day linger on the map: Blue Ball, Pa., Cowhide, W. Va., Dollarville, Mich., Oven
Fork, Ky., Social Circle, Ga., Sleepy Eye, Minn., Bubble, Ark., Shy Beaver, Pa., Shin Pond, Me., Rough-and-
Ready, Calif., Non Intervention, Va., Noodle, Tex., Number Four, N. Y., Oblong, Ill., Stock Yards. Neb.,
Stout, Iowa, and so on. West Virginia, the wildest of the eastern states, is full of such place-names. Among

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them I find Affinity, Annamoriah (Anna Maria?), Bee, Bias, Big Chimney, Billie, Blue Jay, Bulltown, Caress,
Cinderella, Cyclone, Czar, Cornstalk, Duck, Halcyon, Jingo, Left Hand, Ravens Eye, Six, Skull Run, Three
Churches, Uneeda, Wide Mouth, War Eagle and Stumptown. The Postal Guide shows two Ben Hurs, five St.
Elmos and ten Ivanhoes, but only one Middle-march. There are seventeen Roosevelts, six Codys and six
Barnums, but no Shakespeare. Washington, of course, is the most popular of American place-names. But
among names of postoffices it is hard pushed by Clinton, Centerville, Liberty, Canton, Marion and Madison,
and even by Springfield, Warren and Bismarck.
Many American place-names are purely arbitrary coinages. Towns on the border between two states, or
near the border, are often given names made of parts of the names of the two states, e. g., Pen-Mar
(Pennsylvania+Maryland), Mar-Del (Maryland+Delaware), Texarkana (Texas+Arkansas), Kanorado
(Kansas+Colorado), Tex-homa (Texas+Oklahoma), Dakoming (Dakota+Wyoming), Texico (Texas+New
Mexico), Calexico (California+Mexico). Norlina is a telescope form of North Carolina. Ohiowa (Neb.) was
named by settlers who came partly from Ohio and partly from Iowa. Penn Yan (N. Y.) was named by
Pennsylvanians and New Englanders, i. e., Yankees. Colwich (Kansas) is a telescope form of the name of the
Colorado and Wichita Railroad. There are two Delmars in the United States. The name of one is a blend of
Delaware and Maryland; the name of the other (in Iowa) was ‘‘made by using the names (i. e., the initials of
the names) of six women who accompanied an excursion that opened the railroad from Clinton, Iowa.’’ 65 In
the same state Le Mars got its name in exactly the same way. Benld (Ill.) is a collision form of Benjamin L.
Dorsey, the name of a local magnifico; Cadams (Neb.) is a collision form of C. Adams; Wascott (Wis.) derives
from W. A. Scott; Eleroy (Ill.) from E. Leroy; Bucoda (Wash.) is a blend of Buckley, Collier and Davis; Gilsum
(N. H.) is a blend of Gilbert and Sumner; Paragould (Ark.) is a blend of W. J. Paramore and Jay Gould;
Marenisco (Mich.) is named after Mary Relief Niles Scott; Miloma (Minn.) derives its name from the first
syllable of Milwaukee, in the name of the Milwaukee, Chicago, Minneapolis & St. Paul Railroad, and the first
two syllables of Omaha, in the name of the Chicago, Minneapolis & Omaha Railroad; Gerled (Iowa) is a
blend of Germanic and Ledyard, the names of two nearby townships; Rolyat (Ore.) is simply Taylor spelled
backward; Biltmore (N. C.) is the last syllable of Vanderbilt plus the Gaelic Grundwort, more.
The Geographic Board, in its laudable effort to simplify American nomenclature, has played ducks and
drakes with some of the most picturesque names on the national map. Now and then, as in the case of
Purgatoire, it has temporarily departed from this policy, but in the main its influence has been thrown
against the fine old French and Spanish names, and against the more piquant native names no less. Thus, I
find it deciding against Portage des Flacons and in favor of the hideous Bottle portage, against Cañada del
Burro and in favor of Burro canyon, against Cañonsy Ylas de la Cruz and in favor of the barbarous Cruz
island. 66 In Boug re landing and Cañon City it has deleted the accents. The name of the De Grasse river it
has changed to Grass. De Laux it has changed to the intolerable Dlo. And, as we have seen, it has steadily
amalgamated French and Spanish articles with their nouns, thus achieving such barbarous forms as
Duchesne, Eldorado, Deleon and Laharpe. But here its policy is fortunately inconsistent, and so a number of
fine old names have escaped. Thus, it has decided in favor of Bon Secours and against Bonsecours, and in
favor of De Soto, La Crosse and La Moure, and against Desoto, Lacrosse and Lamoure. Here its decisions are
confused and often unintelligible. Why Laporte, Pa., and La Porte, Iowa? Why Lagrange, Ind., and La
Grange, Ky.? Here it would seem to be yielding a great deal too much to local u
The Board proceeds to the shortening and simplification of native names by various devices. It deletes such
suffixes as town, city and courthouse; it removes the apostrophe and often the genitive s from such names as
St. Mary’s; it shortens burgh to burg and borough to boro; and it combines separate and often highly discreet
words. The last habit often produces grotesque forms, e. g., Newberlin, Boxelder, Sabbathday lake,
Fallentimber, Bluemountain, Westtown, Three-pines and Missionhill. It apparently cherishes a hope of
eventually regularizing the spelling of Allegany. This is now Allegany for the Maryland county, the
Pennsylvania township and the New York and Oregon towns, Alleghany for the mountains, the Colorado
town and the Virginia town and springs, and Allegheny for the Pittsburgh borough and the Pennsylvania
county, college and river. The Board inclines to Allegheny for all. Other Indian names give it constant
concern. Its struggles to set up Chemquasabamticook as the name of a Maine lake in place of
Chemquasabamtic and Chemquassabamticook, and Chatahospee as the name of an Alabama creek in place of

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Chattahospee, Hoolethlocco, Hoolethloces, Hoolethloco and Hootethlocco are worthy of its learning and
authority.
The American tendency to pronounce all the syllables of a word more distinctly than the English shows
itself in geographical names. White, in 1880, recorded the increasing habit of giving full value to the
syllables of such borrowed English names as Worcester and Warwick. I have frequently noted the same
thing. In Worcester county, Maryland, the name is usually pronounced Wooster, but on the Western Shore
of the state one hears Worcest-’r. Norwich is another such name; one hears Nor-wich quite as often as
Norrich. Another is Delhi; one often hears Del-high. Another is Warwick. Yet another is Birmingham; it is
pronounced as spelled in the United States, and never in the English manner. White said that in his youth
the name of the Shawangunk mountains, in New York, was pronounced Shongo, but that the custom of
pronouncing it as spelled had arisen during his manhood. 69 So with Winnipiseogee, the name of a lake; once
Winipisaukie, it gradually came to be pronounced as spelled. There is frequently a considerable difference
between the pronunciation of a name by natives of a place and its pronunciation by those who are familiar
with it only in print. Baltimore offers an example. The natives always drop the medial i and so reduce the
name to two syllables; in addition, they substitute a neutral vowel, very short, for the o. Anne Arundel, the
name of a county in Maryland, is usually pronounced Ann’ran’l by its people. Arkansas, as everyone knows,
is pronounced Arkansaw by the Arkansans. The local pronunciation of Illinois is Illinoy. Iowa, at home, is
Ioway. 71 Many American geographical names offer great difficulty to Englishmen. One of my English
acquaintances tells me that he was taught at school to accent Massachusetts on the second syllable, to rhyme
the second syllable of Ohio with tea, and to sound the second c in Connecticut. In Maryland the name of
Calvert county is given a broad a, whereas the name of Calvert street, in Baltimore, has a flat a. This curious
distinction is almost always kept up. A Scotchman, coming to America, would give the ch in such names as
Loch Raven and Lochvale the guttural Scotch (and German) sound, but locally it is always pronounced as if it
were k.
Finally, there is a curious difference between English and American usage in the use of the word river. The
English invariably put it before the proper name, whereas we almost as invariably put it after. The Thames
River would seem quite as strange to an Englishman as the river Chicago would seem to us. This difference
arose more than a century ago and was noticed by Pickering. But in his day the American usage was still
somewhat uncertain, and such forms as the river Mississippi were yet in use. Today river almost always goes
after the proper name.

4. Street Names

‘‘Such a locality as ‘the corner of Avenue H and Twenty-third street,’ ’’ says W. W. Crane, ‘‘is about as
distinctly American as Algonquin and Iroquois names like Mississippi and Saratoga.’’ Kipling, in his
‘‘American Notes,’’ 73 gives testimony to the strangeness with which the number-names, the phrase ‘‘the
corner of,’’ and the custom of omitting street fall upon the ear of a Britisher. He quotes with amazement
certain directions given to him on his arrival in San Francisco from India: ‘‘Go six blocks north to [the]
corner of Geary and Markey [Market?]; then walk around till you strike [the] corner of Sutter and
Sixteenth.’’ The English always add the word street (or road or place or avenue) when speaking of a
thoroughfare; such a phrase as ‘‘Oxford and New Bond’’ would strike them as incongruous. The American
custom of numbering and lettering streets is almost always ascribed by English writers who discuss it, not to
a desire to make finding them easy, but to sheer poverty of invention. The English apparently have an
inexhaustible fund of names for streets; they often give one street more than one name. Thus, Oxford street,
London, becomes the Bayswater road, High street, Holland Park avenue, Goldhawke road and finally the
Oxford road to the westward, and High Holborn, Holborn viaduct, Newgate street, Cheapside, the Poultry,
Cornhill and Leadenhall street to the eastward. The Strand, in the same way, becomes Fleet street, Ludgate
hill and Cannon street. Nevertheless, there is a First avenue in Queen’s Park, London, and parallel to it are
Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth avenues—all small streets leading northward from the Harrow road,
just east of Kensal Green cemetery. I have observed that few Londoners have ever heard of them. There is
also a First street in Chelsea—a very modest thoroughfare near Lennox Gardens and not far from the
Brompton Oratory.

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 Next to the numbering and lettering of streets, a fashion apparently set up by Major Pierre-Charles
L’Enfant’s plans for Washington, the most noticeable feature of American street nomenclature, as opposed to
that of England, is the extensive use of such designations as avenue, boulevard, drive and speedway. Avenue
is used in England, but only rather sparingly; it is seldom applied to a mean street, or to one in a warehouse
district. In America the word is scarcely distinguished in meaning from street. Boulevard, drive and speed-
way are almost unknown to the English, but they use road for urban thoroughfares, which is very seldom
done in America, and they also make free use of place, walk, passage, lane and circus, all of which are
obsolescent on this side of the ocean. Some of the older American cities, such as Boston and Baltimore, have
surviving certain ancient English designations of streets, e. g., Cheapside and Cornhill; these are unknown in
the newer American towns. Broadway, which is also English, is more common. Many American towns now
have plazas, which are unknown in England. Nearly all have City Hall parks, squares or places; City Hall is
also unknown over there. The principal street of a small town, in America, is almost always Main street; in
England it is as invariably High street, usually with the definite article before High.

XI. American Slang

1. Its Origin and Nature

There is but one work, so far as I can discover, formally devoted to American slang, 1 and that work is
extremely superficial. Moreover, it has been long out of date, and hence is of little save historical value.
There are at least a dozen careful treatises on French slang, half as many on English slang and a good many
on German slang, but American slang, which is probably quite as rich as that of France and a good deal richer
than that of any other country, is yet to be studied at length. Nor is there much discussion of it, of any
interest or value, in the general philological literature. Fowler and all the other early native students of the
language dismissed it with lofty gestures; down to the time of Whitney it was scarcely regarded as a seemly
subject for the notice of a man of learning. Lounsbury, less pedantic, viewed its phenomena more hospitably,
and even defined it as “the source from which the decaying energies of speech are constantly refreshed,” and
Brander Matthews, following him, has described its function as that of providing “substitutes for the good
words and true which are worn out by hard service.” But that is about as far as the investigation has got.
Krapp has some judicious paragraphs upon the matter in his “Modern English,” there are a few scattered
essays upon the underlying psychology and various superficial magazine articles, but that is all. The
practising authors of the country, like its philologians, have always shown a gingery and suspicious attitude.
“The use of slang,” said Oliver Wendell Holmes, “is at once a sign and a cause of mental atrophy.” “Slang,”
said Ambrose Bierce fifty years later, “is the speech of him who robs the literary garbage cans on their way to
the dumps.” Literature in America, as we have seen, remains aloof from the vulgate. Despite the contrary
examples of Mark Twain and Howells, all of the more pretentious American authors try to write chastely and
elegantly; the typical literary product of the country is still a refined essay in the Atlantic Monthly manner,
perhaps gently jocose but never rough—by Emerson, so to speak, out of Charles Lamb—the sort of thing one
might look to be done by a somewhat advanced English curate. George Ade, undoubtedly one of the most
adept anatomists of the American character and painters of the American scene that the national literature
has yet developed, is neglected because his work is grounded firmly upon the national speech—not that he
reports it literally, like Lardner and the hacks trailing after Lardner, but that he gets at and exhibits its very
essence. It would stagger a candidate for a doctorate in philology, I daresay, to be told off by his professor to

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investigate the slang of Ade in the way that Bosson, 6 the Swede, has investigated that of Jerome K. Jerome,
and yet, until something of the sort is undertaken, American philology will remain out of contact with the
American language.
Most of the existing discussions of slang spend themselves upon efforts to define it, and, in particular, upon
efforts to differentiate it from idiomatic neologisms of a more legitimate type. This effort is largely in vain;
the border-line is too vague and wavering to be accurately mapped; words and phrases are constantly
crossing it, and in both directions. There was a time, perhaps, when the familiar American counter-word,
proposition, was slang; its use seems to have originated in the world of business, and it was soon afterward
adopted by the sporting fraternity. But today it is employed without much feeling that it needs apology, and
surely without any feeling that it is low. Nice, as an adjective of all work, was once in slang use only; today
no one would question “a nice day,” or “a nice time,” or “a nice hotel.” Awful seems to be going the same
route. “Awful sweet” and “awfully dear” still seem slangy and school-girlish, but “awful children” and “awful
job” have entirely sound support, and no one save a pedant would hesitate to use them. Such insidious
purifications and conscrations of slang are going on under our noses all the time. The use of some as a general
adjective-adverb seems likely to make its way in the same manner, and so does the use of kick as verb and
noun. It is constantly forgotten by purists of defective philological equipment that a great many of our
respectable words and phrases originated in the plainest sort of slang. Thus, quandary, despite a fanciful
etymology which would identify it with wandreth (=evil), is probably simply a composition form of the
French phrase, qu’en dirai-je? Again, to turn to French itself, there is tête, a sound name for the human head
for many centuries, though its origin was in the Latin testa (=pot), a favorite slang word of the soldiers of the
decaying empire, analogous to our own block, nut and conch. The word slacker, recently come into good
usage in the United States as a designation for a successful shirker of conscription, is a substantive derived
from the English verb to slack, which was born as university slang and remains so to this day. Brander
Matthews, so recently as 1901, though to hold up slang; it is now perfectly good American.
The contrary movement of words from the legitimate vocabulary into slang is constantly witnessed. Some
one devises a new and arresting trope or makes use of an old one under circumstances arresting the public
attention, and at once it is adopted into slang, given a host of remote significances, and ding-donged ad
nauseam. The Rooseveltian phrases, muck-raker, Ananias Club, short and ugly word, nature-faker and big-
stick, offer examples. Not one of them was new and not one of them was of much pungency, but Roosevelt’s
vast talent for delighting the yokelry threw about them a charming air, and so they entered into current
slang and were mouthed idiotically for months. Another example is to be found in steam-roller. It was first
heard of in American politics in June, 1908, when it was applied by Oswald F. Schuette, of the Chicago Inter-
Ocean, to the methods employed by the Roosevelt-Taft majority in the Republican National Committee in
over-riding the protests against seating Taft delegates from Alabama and Arkansas. At once it struck the
popular fancy and was soon in general use. All the usual derivatives appeared, to steam-roller, steam-rollered,
and so on. Since then the term has gradually forced its way back into good usage, and even gone over to
England. In the early days of the World War it actually appeared in the most solemn English reviews, and
once or twice, I believe, in state papers.
Much of the discussion of slang by popular etymologists is devoted to proofs that this or that locution is not
really slang at all—that it is to be found in Shakespeare, in Milton, or in the Authorized Version. These
scientists, of course, overlook the plain fact that slang, like the folk-song, is not the creation of people in the
mass, but of definite individuals, and that its character as slang depends entirely upon its adoption by the
ignorant, who use its novelties too assiduously and with too little imagination, and so debase them to the
estate of worn-out coins, smooth and valueless. It is this error, often shared by philologists of sounder
information, that lies under the doctrine that the plays of Shakespeare are full of slang, and that the Bard
showed but a feeble taste in language. Nothing could be more absurd. The business of writing English, in his
day, was unharassed by the proscriptions of purists, and so the vocabulary could be enriched more facilely
than today, but though Shakespeare and his fellow-dramatists quickly adopted such neologisms as to bustle,
to huddle, bump, hubbub and pat, it goes without saying that they exercised a sound discretion and that the
slang of the Bankside was full of words and phrases which they were never tempted to use. In our own day
the same discrimination is exercised by all writers of sound taste. On the one hand they disregard the
senseless prohibitions of schoolmasters, and on the other hand they draw the line with more or less

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watchfulness, according as they are of conservative or liberal habit. I find the best of the bunch and joke-
smith in Saintsbury; 8 one could scarcely imagine either in Walter Pater. But by the same token one could
not imagine chicken (for young girl), 9 aber nit, to come across or to camouflage in Saintsbury.
What slang actually consists of doesn’t depend, in truth, upon intrinsic qualities, but upon the surrounding
circumstances. It is the user that determines the matter, and particularly the user’s habitual way of thinking.
If he chooses words carefully, with a full understanding of their meaning and savor, then no word that he
uses seriously will belong to slang, but if his speech is made up chiefly of terms poll-parroted, and he has no
sense of their shades and limitations, then slang will bulk largely in his vocabulary. In its origin it is nearly
always respectable; it is devised, not by the stupid populace, but by individuals of wit and ingenuity; as
Whitney says, it is a product of an “exuberance of mental activity, and the natural delight of language-
making.” But when its inventions happen to strike the popular fancy and are adopted by the mob, they are
soon worn thread-bare and so lose all piquancy and significance, and, in Whitney’s words, become “incapable
of expressing anything that is real.” 10 This is the history of such slang phrases, often interrogative, as
“How’d you like to be the ice-man?” “How’s your poor feet?” “Merci pour la langouste,” “Have a heart,” “This
is the life,” “Where did you get that hat?” “Would you for fifty cents?” “Let her go, Gallagher,” “Shoo-fly,
don’t bother me,” “Don’t wake him up” and “Let George do it.” The last well exhibits the process. It
originated in France, as “Laissez faire à Georges,” during the fifteenth century, and at the start had satirical
reference to the multiform activities of Cardinal Georges d’Amboise, prime minister to Louis XII. 11 It later
became common slang, was translated into English, had a revival during the early days of David Lloyd
George’s career, was adopted into American without any comprehension of either its first or its latest
significance, and enjoyed the brief popularity of a year.
Krapp attempts to distinguish between slang and sound idiom by setting up the doctrine that the former is
“more expressive than the situation demands.” “It is,” he says, “a kind of hyperesthesia in the use of language.
To laugh in your sleeve is idiom because it arises out of a natural situation; it is a metaphor derived from the
picture of one raising his sleeve to his face to hide a smile, a metaphor which arose naturally enough in early
periods when sleeves were long and flowing; but to talk through your hat is slang, not only because it is new,
but also because it is a grotesque exaggeration of the truth.” 12 The theory, unluckily, is combated by many
plain facts. To hand it to him, to get away with it and even to hand him a lemon are certainly not metaphors
that transcend the practicable and probable, and yet all are undoubtedly slang. On the other hand, there is
palpable exaggeration in such phrases as “he is not worth the powder it would take to kill him,” in such
adjectives as break-bone (fever), and in such compounds as fire-eater, and yet it would be absurd to dismiss
them as slang. Between block-head and bone-head there is little to choose, but the former is sound English,
whereas the latter is American slang. So with many familiar similes, e. g., like greased lightning, as scarce as
hen’s teeth; they are grotesque hyperboles, but surely not slang.
The true distinction between slang and more seemly idiom, in so far as any distinction exists at all, is that
indicated by Whitney. Slang originates in an effort, always by ingenious individuals, to make the language
more vivid and expressive. When in the form of single words it may appear as new metaphors, e. g., bird and
peach; as back formations, e. g., beaut and flu; as composition-forms, e. g., whatdyecallem and attaboy; as
picturesque compounds, e. g., booze-foundry; as onomatopes, e. g., biff and zowie; or in any other of the
shapes that new terms take. If, by the chances that condition language-making, it acquires a special and
limited meaning, not served by any existing locution, it enters into sound idiom and is presently wholly
legitimatized; if, on the contrary, it is adopted by the populace as a counter-word and employed with such
banal imitativeness that it soon loses any definite significance whatever, then it remains slang and is avoided
by the finical. An example of the former process is afforded by tommy-rot. It first appeared as English school-
boy slang, but its obvious utility soon brought it into good usage. In one of Jerome K. Jerome’s books, “Paul
Kelver,” there is the following dialogue:
“The wonderful songs that nobody ever sings, the wonderful pictures that nobody ever paints, and all the rest
of it. It’s tommy-rot!”
“I wish you wouldn’t use slang.”
“Well, you know what I mean. What is the proper word? Give it to me.”
“I suppose you mean cant.”
“No, I don’t. Cant is something that you don’t believe in yourself. It’s tommy-rot; there isn’t any other wor

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 Nor was there any other word for hubbub and to dwindle in Shakespeare’s time; he adopted and dignified
them because they met genuine needs. Nor was there any other satisfactory word for graft when it came in,
nor for rowdy, nor for boom, nor for joy-ride, nor for omnibus-bill, nor for slacker, nor for trust-buster. Such
words often retain a humorous quality; they are used satirically and hence appear but seldom in wholly
serious discourse. But they have standing in the language nevertheless, and only a prig would hesitate to use
them as Saintsbury used the best of the bunch and joke-smith.
On the other hand, many an apt and ingenious neologism, by falling too quickly into the gaping maw of the
proletariat, is spoiled forthwith. Once it becomes, in Oliver Wendell Holmes’ phrase, “a cheap generic term,
a substitute for differentiated specific expressions,” it quickly acquires such flatness that the fastidious flee it
as a plague. One recalls many capital verb-phrases, thus ruined by unintelligent appreciation, e. g., to hand
him a lemon, to freeze on to, to have the goods, to cut no ice, to give him the glad hand, to fall for it, and to
get by. One recalls, too, some excellent substantives, e. g., dope and dub, and compounds, e. g., come-on and
easy-mark, and verbs, e. g., to vamp. These are all quite as sound in structure as the great majority of our
most familiar words and phrases to cut no ice, for example, is certainly as good as to butter no parsnips—but
their adoption by the ignorant and their endless use and misuse in all sorts of situations have left them
tattered and obnoxious, and they will probably go the way, as Matthews says, of all the other “temporary
phrases which spring up, one scarcely knows how, and flourish unaccountably for a few months, and then
disappear forever, leaving no sign.” Matthews is wrong in two particulars here. They do not arise by any
mysterious parthenogenesis, but come from sources which, in many cases, may be determined. And they last,
alas, a good deal more than a month. Shoo-fly afflicted the American people for at least two years, and “I
don’t think” and aber nit quite as long. Even “good-night” lasted a whole year.

2. War Slang

“During the war,” says a writer in the New York Tribune, “our army was slow in manufacturing words ….
The English army invented not only more war slang than the American, but much more expressive slang. In
fact, we took over a number of their words, such as dud, cootie and bus (for aeroplane) …. During the first
year of [American participation in] the war the Americans had no slang word for German. Hun was used
sparingly, but only by officers. Fritzie was rare. Boche was tried, but proved to be ill adapted to Americans.
They seemed afraid of it, and, indeed, it was often pronounced botch. Finally, after a year all these foreign
substitutes were abandoned by the enlisted men, and the German became Jerry. Curiously enough, the word
was almost invariably used in the singular. We heard a soldier telling about a patrol encounter in which he
and twenty companions had driven a slightly larger German force out of an abandoned farmhouse, and he
said: ‘When we came over the top of the hill we found Jerry.’ He stuck to that usage all through the story. In
the last year of the war the American army began to find names for various things, but the slang list of the
first year was short. The French army was the most prolific of all in language, and several large dictionaries of
French trench slang have already been published.”
The chief cause of this American backwardness is not far to seek. During the first year of American
participation in the war few Americans got to France, and those who did found an enormous army of
Britishers already in the field. These Britishers, in their three years of service, had developed a vast
vocabulary of slang, and it stood ready for use. Naturally enough, some of it was borrowed forthwith, though
not much. When the main American army followed in 1918 there was little need to make extensive
additions to it. Frog, for Frenchman, was entirely satisfactory; why substitute anything else? So was cootie. So
was bus. So was Holy Joe, for chaplain. So were blimp, Jack Johnson, whizz-bang, to strafe and pill-box.
Whatever was needed further was adapted from the everyday slang of the United States. Thus, handshaker
came to mean a soldier sycophantic to officers, to bust got the new meaning of to demote, and the cowboy
outfit was borrowed for general military use. Most of the remaining slang that developed among the troops
was derisory, e. g., Sears-Roebuck for a new lieutenant, loot for lieutenant, Jewish cavalry for the

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Quartermaster’s force, belly-robber for the mess-sergeant, punk for bread, canned-monkey for the French
canned beef, gold-fish for canned salmon. Much that remained was obscene, and had its origin in the simple
application of obscene verbs and adjectives, long familiar, to special military uses. In the “Vocabulary of the
A. E. F.” compiled by E. A. Hecker and Edmund Wilson, Jr., 16 fully 25 per cent. of the terms listed show
more or less indecency; the everyday speech of the troops was extraordinarily dirty. But in this department,
as I say, there were very few new coinages. In all departments, in truth, the favorite phrases were not
invented in the field but brought from home, e. g., corp for corporal, sarge for sergeant, to salvage for to steal,
chow for food. Even gob, doughboy and leatherneck were not new. Gob and leatherneck had been in use in
the navy for a long while, though the common civilian designation for a sailor had been jackie. The origin of
the terms is much disputed. Gob is variously explained as a derivative from the Chinese (?) word gobshite,
and as the old word gob, signifying a large, irregular mass, applied to a new use. The original meaning of
gobshite I don’t know. One correspondent suggests that gob was first used to designate sailors because of
their somewhat voracious and noisy habits of feeding. He tells a story of an old master-at-arms who
happened into a land aëro-station and found a party of sailors solemnly at table. “My Gawd,” he exclaimed,
“lookit the gobs, usin’ forks an’ all!” Doughboy was originally applied to the infantry only. It originated in the
fact that infantrymen, on practise marches, were served rations of flour, and that they made crude biscuits of
this flour when they halted. Leatherneck needs no explanation. It obviously refers to the sunburn suffered by
marines in the tropics. Hard-boiled seems to have originated among the Americans in France. It is one of the
few specimens of army slang that shows any sign of surviving in the general speech. The only others that I
can think of are cootie, gob, leatherneck, doughboy, frog, and buck-private. Hand-shaker, since the war
ended, has resumed its old meaning of an excessively affable man. Top-sergeant, during the war, suffered an
interesting philological change, like that already noticed in buncombe. First it degenerated to top-sarge and
then to plain top. To a. w. o. l. is already almost forgotten. So is bevo officer. So are such charming inventions
as submarine for bed-pan. The favorite affirmations of the army, “I’ll say so,” “I’ll tell the world,” “You said
it,” etc., are also passing out. From the French, save for a few grotesque mispronunciations of common
French phrases, e. g., boocoop, the doughboys seem to have borrowed nothing whatsoever. To camouflage
was already in use in the United States long before the country entered the war, and such aviation terms as
ace, chandelle, vrille and glissade were seldom heard outside the air-force.
The war-slang of the English, the French and the Germans was enormously richer, and a great deal more of
it has survived. One need but glance at the vocabulary in the last edition of Cassell’s Dictionary 17 or at such
works as Gaston Esnault’s “Le Poilu Tel Qu’il se Parle” 18 or Karl Bergmann’s “Wie der Feldgraue Spricht” 19
to note the great difference. The only work which pretends to cover the subject of American war-slang is
“New Words Self-Defined,” by Prof. C. Alphonso Smith, of the Naval Academy. It is pieced out with much
English slang, and not a little French slang.

II. Non-English Dialects in America

1. German

The German dialect spoken by the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch of lower Pennsylvania is the oldest
immigrant language to remain in daily use in the United States, and so it shows very extensive English
influences. The fact that it survives at all is due to the extreme clannishness of the people using it—a
clannishness chiefly based upon religious separatism. The first Germans came to Pennsylvania toward the
end of the seventeenth century and settled in the lower tier of counties, running from Philadelphia westward
to the mountains; a few continued into Maryland and then down the Valley of Virginia. They came, in the
main, from the Palatinate; the minority hailed from Württemberg, Bavaria, the lower Rhine, Alsace, Saxony
and German Switzerland. The language they brought with them was thus High German; it came to be called
Dutch by the American colonists of the time because the immigrants themselves called it Deitsch (=Deutsch),
and because Dutch was then (and has remained, to some extent, ever since) a generic American term to
designate all the Germanic peoples and languages. This misuse of Dutch is frequently ascribed to the fact that
the colonists were very familiar with the true Dutch in New York, but as a matter of fact Dutch was
commonly used in place of German by the English of the seventeenth century and the colonists simply

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brought the term with them and preserved it as they preserved many other English archaisms. The
Pennsylvania Germans themselves often used Pennsylvania Dutch in place of Pennsylvania German.
Their dialect has produced an extensive literature and has been studied and described at length by
competent philologians; in consequence there is no need to deal with it here at any length. Excellent
specimens of it are to be found in “Harbaugh’s Harfe: Gedichte in Pennsylvanisch-Deutscher Mundart.” 6
That part of it which remains genuinely German shows a change of a to o, as in jor for jahr; of the diphthong
ö to a long e, as in bees for böse, and of the diphthongs ei and äu to the neutral e, as in bem for bäume. Most
of the German compound consonants are changed to simple consonants, and there is a general decay of
inflections. But the chief mark of the dialect is its very extensive adoption of English loan words. Harbaugh,
in his vocabulary, lists some characteristic examples, e. g., affis from office, altfäschen from old-fashioned,
beseid from beside, boghie from buggy, bortsch from porch, diehlings from dealings, Dschäck from Jack,
dscheneral-’leckschen from general-election, dschent’lleit (=gentle leut) from gentlemen, Dschim from Jim,
dschuryman from juryman, ebaut from about, ennihau from anyhow, gehm from game, kunschtabler from
constable, lofletters from love-letters, tornpeik from turnpike and ’xäktly from exactly. Many English words
have been taken in and inflected in the German manner, e.g., gedscheest (=ge±chased), gedschumpt
(ge±jumped) and gepliescht (=ge±pleased). The vulgar American pronunciation often shows itself, as in heist
for hoist and krick for creek. An illuminating brief specimen of the language is to be found in the sub-title of
E. H. Rauch’s “Pennsylvania Dutch Handbook”: 7 “En booch for inschtructa.” Here we see the German
indefinite article decayed to en, the spelling of buch made to conform to English usage, für abandoned for
for, and a purely English word, instruction, boldly adopted and naturalized. Some astounding examples of
Pennsylvania German are to be found in the copious humorous literature of the dialect; e.g., “Mein stallion
hat über die fenz geschumpt and dem nachbar sein whiet abscheulich gedämätscht.” (My stallion jumped
over the fence, and horribly damaged my neighbor’s wheat.) Such phrases as “Es giebt gar kein use” and “Ich
kann es nicht ständen” are very common on Pennsylvania German lips. Of late, with the improvement in
communications, the dialect shows signs of disappearing. The younger Pennsylvania Germans learn English
in school, read English newspapers, and soon forget their native patois. But so recently as the eighties of the
last century, two hundred years after the coming of the first German settlers, there were thousands of their
descendants in Pennsylvania who could scarcely speak English at all.
An interesting variant dialect is to be found in the Valley of Virginia, though it is fast dying out. It is an
offshoot of Pennsylvania German, and shows even greater philological decay. The genitive ending has been
dropped and possession is expressed by various syntactical devices, e.g., der mann sei buch, dem mann sei
buch or am mann sei buch. The cases of the nouns do not vary in form, adjectives are seldom inflected, and
only two tenses of the verbs remain, the present and the perfect, e.g., ich geh and ich bin gange. The
indefinite article, en in Pennsylvania German, has been worn away to a simp&pgr;’n. The definite article has
been preserved, but das has changed to des. It is declined as follows:
Nom. der die des-’s die
Dat. dem-’m der dem-’m dene
Acc. den-der die des-’s die
3 In brief, this Valley German is a language in the last stages of decay. The only persons speaking it are a few
remote country-folk and they have reduced it to its elements: even the use of polite pronouns, preserved in
Pennsylvania German and so important in true German, has been abandoned. It has been competently
investigated and described by H. M. Hays, 8 from whom I borrow the following specimen of it:
’S war wimol ei Mätel, wu ihr Liebling fat in der Grieg is, un’ is dot gmacht wure. Sie hut sich so ang
gedrauert un’ hut ksat: “O wann ich ihn just noch eimol sehne könnt!” Ei Ovet is sie an ’n Partie gange, aver
es war ken Freud dat für sie. Sie hut gwtünscht, ihre Lieve war dat au. Wie freundlich sie sei hätt könne! Sie
is ’naus in den Garde gange, un’ war allei im Monlicht khockt. Kschwind hut sie ’n Reiter höre komme. ’S
war ihre Lieve ufm weisse Gaul. Er hut ken Wat ksat, æver hut sie uf den Gaul hinner sich gnomme, un’ is
fatgritte….
The German spoken elsewhere in the United States is much less decayed. The hard effort of German
schoolmasters and the extensive literature that it has produced 9 tend to keep it relatively pure, even from
English influences. But a great many loan-words have nevertheless got into it, and it shows some phenomena
that instantly arrest the attention of a German arriving from Germany, for example, the use of gleiche for to

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like, by false analogy from gleich (=like, similar). The German encountered in German newspapers printed in
the United States is often very bad, but this is simply due to the that much of it is written by uneducated
men. Nothing approaching a general decay is visible in it; in intent, at least, it is always good High German.

2. French

The French spoken in Canada has been so extensively studied and literature is so accessible that it is scarcely
necessary to describe it at any length. A very extensive investigation of it was undertaken by the late Dr. A.
M. Elliott, of the Johns Hopkins University; his conclusions may be found in the American Journal of
Philology. 10 Since then researches into its history, phonology and morphology have been made by James
Geddes, Jr., 11 A. F. Chamberlain 12 and other competent philologists, and there has grown up an extensive
literature by native, French-speaking Canadians. 13 Dr. Elliott says that alarmed purists predicted so long ago
as 1817 that the French of Canada would be completely obliterated by English, and this fear still shows itself
in all discussions of the subject by French-Canadians But the language continues as the daily speech of
perhaps 1,500,000 persons, and still has an official status, and is often heard in the Dominion Parliament.
“The effect of English on the French,” says Elliott, “has been immeasurably greater than that of French on the
English…. The French has made use of all the productive means—suffixes, prefixes—at its disposal to
incorporate the English vocables in its word-supply,… and to adapt them by a skilful use of its inflectional
apparatus to all the requirements of a rigid grammatical system.” On one page of N. E. Dionne’s lexicon I find
the following loan-words from English: barkeeper, bargaine (used in place of marché), bar-room, bull’s-eye,
buckwheat, buggy, buck-board, bugle, bully, bum, business, bus. As will be observed, a large proportion of
them are not really English at all, but American. Many other Americanisms have got into the language, e. g.,
gang (in the political sense), greenback, ice-cream, elevateur, knickerbockers, trolley-car, sweater, swell (as
an adjective of all work), caucus, lofeur (=loafer, a loan-word originally German) and lager, another. “Comme
tu es swell ce matin, vas-tu aux noces?” —this is now excellent Canadian French. So is gologne (=go’long).
Louvigny de Montigny, in “La Langue Française au Canada,” complains bitterly that American words and
phrases are relentlessly driving out French words and phrases, even when the latter are quite as clear and
convenient. Thus, un patron, throughout French Canada, is now un boss, pétrole is I’huile de charbon (=coal-
oil), une bonne ÿ; tout faire is une servante générale, and un article d’occasion is un article de seconde main!
The French dialect spoken by the Creoles and their colored retainers in Louisiana has been extensively
studied, as has the dialect of the French West Indies. Its principal characters must be familiar to every
reader of the stories of Lafcadio Hearn, George W. Cable, Kate Chopin and Grace Elizabeth King. It produced
a large oralliterature, chiefly in the form of songs, during the days of actual French rule in Louisiana, and
some of this literature is still preserved, though the French-speaking population of the state is rapidly
diminishing, and New Orleans is now a thoroughly American city. But the written literature of the Creoles
was almost wholly in standard French. Curiously enough, nearly the whole of it was produced, not during
the days of French rule, but after the American occupation in 1803. “It was not until after the War of 1812,”
says a recent historian of it, “that letters really flourished in French Louisiana. The contentment and
prosperity that filled the forty years between 1820 and 1860 encouraged the growth of a vigorous and in
some respects a native literature, comprising plays, novels, and poems.” The chief dramatists of the period
were Placide Canonge, A. Lussan, Oscar Dugué, Le Blanc de Villeneufve, P. Pérennes and Charles Testut;
today all their works are dead, and they themselves are but names. Testut was also a poet and novelist; other
novelists were Canonge, Alfred Mercier, Alexandre Barde, Adrien Rouquette, Jacques de Roquigny and
Charles Lamaître. The principal poets were Dominique Rouquette, Tullius Saint-Céran, Constant Lepouzé,
Felix de Courmont, Alexandre Latil, A. Lussan, and Armand Lanusse. But the most competent of all the
Creole authors was Charles E. A. Gayerré (1805-95), who was at once historian, dramatist and novelist.
Today the Creole literature is practically extinct. A few poets and essayists are still at work, but they are of no
importance.

3. Spanish

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The mutations of Spanish in Spanish-America have been very extensively studied by Spanish-American
philologists, and there are separate monographs on Cubanisms, Mexicanisms, Porto Ricanisms,
Venezuelanisms, Argentinisms, Peruanisms, Chileanisms, Costa Ricanisms and Honduranisms, and even
extensive discussions of the dialects of single cities, notably Buenos Ayres and the City of Mexico. 16 The
influence of the Indian language has been especially studied. 17 But the only extensive treatise upon the
Spanish spoken in the United States is a series of four papers by Dr. Aurelio M. Espinosa, of Leland Stanford,
Jr., University, in the Revue de Dialectologie Romane under the general title of “Studies in New Mexican
Spanish.” 18 These papers, however, are of such excellence that they almost exhaust the subject. The first two
deal with the phonology of the dialect and the last two with its morphology. Dr. Espinosa, who was a
professor in the University of New Mexico for eight years, reports that the Spanish of the Southwest in its
general characters, shows a curious parallel with American English. There is the same decay of grammatical
niceties —the conjugations of the verb, for example, are reduced to two—the same great hospitality to loan-
words, the same leaning toward a picturesque vividness, and the same preservation of words and phrases that
have become archaic in the standard language. “It is a source of delight to the student of Spanish philology,”
he says, “to hear daily from the mouths of New Mexicans such words as agora, ansi, naidien, trujo, escrebir,
adrede”—all archaic Castilian forms, and corresponding exactly to the fox-fire, homespun, andiron,
ragamuffin, fall (for autumn), flapjack and cesspool that are preserved in American. They are survivors, in the
main, of the Castilian Spanish of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, though some of them come from other
Spanish dialects. Castilian has changed very much since that time, as standard English has changed; it is
probable, indeed, that a Castilian of the year 1525, coming back to life today, would understand a New
Mexican far more readily than he would understand a Spaniard, just as an Englishman of 1630 would
understand a Kentucky mountaineer more readily than he would understand a Londoner.
New Mexico has been in the possession of the United States since 1846, and so it is natural to find its
Spanish corrupted by American influences, especially in the vocabulary. Of the 1,400 words that Dr.
Espinosa chooses for remark, 300 are English, are Nahuatl, come from the Indian languages of the
Southwest, and are of doubtful or unknown origin; the rest are pure Spanish, chiefly archaic. As in the case
of the Pennsylvania Germans, the French Canadians and the Scandinavians of the Northwest, the
Spanishspeaking people of New Mexico have borrowed the American names of all objects of peculiarly
American character, e. g., besbol (=baseball), grimbaque (=greenback), aiscrim (=ice-cream), quiande
(=candy), fayaman (=fireman), otemil (=oatmeal), piquenic (=picnic), lonchi (=lunch). Most of them have
been modified to bring them into accord with Spanish speech-habits. For example, all explosive endings are
toned down by suffixes, e. g., lonchi for lunch. So with many r-endings, e.g., blofero for bluffer. And sibilants
at the beginning of words are shaded by prefixes, e. g., esteque for steak and espechi for speech. Not only
words have been taken in, but also many phrases, though most of the latter are converted into simple words,
e. g., olraite (=all right), jaitun (=hightoned), jamachi (=how much), sarape (=shut up), enejau (=anyhow). Dr.
Espinosa’s study is a model of what such an inquiry should be. I cordially commend it to all students of
dialect.
English has also greatly influenced the Spanish spoken in Spanish America proper, especially in Mexico,
Cuba, Porto Rico and in the seaports of South America. Sandwich and club, though they are not used by the
Spaniards, are quite good Mexican. Bluffer is quite as familiar in Cuban Spanish as it is in New Mexican
Spanish, though in Cuba it has become blofista instead of blofero. I take the following from El Mundo, one of
the Havana newspapers, of June 28, 1920:
New York, junio 27.—Por un sensacional batting rally, en el octavo inning en el que los Yankees dieron seis
hits incluyendo un triple de Ruth y tubeyes de Ward y Meusel, gano el New York el match de esta tarde,
pues hizo cinco carreras en ese episodio, venciendo 7 a 5. Mays el pitcher de los locales autuó bien, con
excepcion del cuarto round, cuando Vitt le dió un home run con dos en bases.
Nor are such words any longer exotic; the Cubans have adopted the terminology with the game, and begin
to use it figuratively as the Americans use it. Along the east coast of South America the everyday speech of
the people is full of Americanisms, and they enter very largely into the fashionable slang of the upper classes.
Cocktail, dinner-dance, one-step, fox-trot, sweater, kimono, high-ball, ginger-ale and sundae are in constant
use, and most of them are pronounced correctly, though sundae is transformed into soondÿ;e. Bombo
(=boom) is used by all the politicians, and so are plataforma (=platform), mitin (=meeting), alarmista, big-

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stick, damphool and various forms of to bluff. The American auto has been naturalized, and so has ice-cream,
but in the form of milkcream, pronounced milclee by the lower orders. The boss of a train down there is the
conductor del tren; a commuter is a commutador; switch is used both in its American railroad sense and to
indicate the electrical device; slip, dock and wharf (the last pronounced guÿ;fay) are in daily use; so is socket
(electrical), though it is pronounced sokÿ;ytay; so are poker and many of the terms appertaining to the game.
The South Americans use just in the American way, as in justamente a (or en) tiempo (=just in time). They
are very fond of good-bye and go to hell. They have translated the verb phrase, to water stocks, into aguar las
acciones. The American white elephant has become el elefanto blanco. In Cuba the watermelon—patilla or
sandía, in Spanish—is the mélon-de-agua. Just as FrenchCanadian has borrowed Americanisms that are loan-
words from other immigrant tongues, e. g., bum and loafer from the German, so some of the South American
dialects have borrowed rapidas (=rapids), and kimono, the first brought into American from the French and
the second from the Japanese.

4. Yiddish

Yiddish, even more than American, is a lady of easy virtue among the languages. Basically, a medieval High
German, it has become so overladen with Hebrew, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian and even Hungarian words
that it is unintelligible to Germans. 20 Transported to the United States, it has taken in so many English
words and phrases, and particularly so many Americanisms, that it is now nearly unintelligible, as spoken in
the big cities of the East, to recent arrivals from Russia and Poland. Such typical Americanisms as sky-
scraper, loan-shark, graft, bluffer, faker, boodler, gangster, crook, guy, kike, piker, squealer, bum, cadet,
boom, bunch, pants, vest, loafer, jumper, stoop, saleslady, ice-box, and raise are quite as good Yiddish as they
are American. For all the objects and acts of everyday life the East Side Jews commonly use English terms, e.
g., boy, chair, window, carpet, floor, dress, hat, watch, ceiling, consumption, property, trouble, bother,
match, change, party, birthday, picture, paper (only in the sense of newspaper), gambler, show, hall, kitchen,
store, bedroom, key, mantelpiece, closet, lounge, broom, table-cloth, paint, landlord, fellow, tenant, bargain,
sale, haircut, razor, basket, school, scholar, teacher, baby, mustache, butcher, grocery, dinner, street and
walk. In the factories there is the same universal use of shop, wages, foreman, boss, sleeve, collar, cuff,
button, cotton, thimble, needle, machine, pocket, remnant, sample, etc., even by the most recent immigrants.
Many of these words have quite crowded out the corresponding Yiddish terms, so that the latter are seldom
heard. For example, ingle, meaning boy (=Ger. jüngling), has been wholly obliterated by the English word. A
Jewish immigrant almost invariably refers to his son as his boy, though strangely enough he calls his
daughter his meidel. “Die boys mitdie meidlach haben a good time” is excellent American Yiddish. In the
same way fenster has been completely displaced by window, though tür (=door) has been left intact. Tisch
(=table) also remains, but chair is always used, probably because few of the Jews had chairs in the old
country. There the beinkel, a bench without a back, was in use; chairs were only for the well-to-do. Floor
has apparently prevailed because no invariable corresponding word was employed at home: in various parts
of Russia and Poland a floor is a dill, a podlogé, or a bricke. So with ceiling. There were six different words
for it.
Yiddish inflections have been fastened upon most of these loanwords. Thus, “er hat ihm abgefaked” is “he
cheated him,” zubumt is the American gone to the bad, fix’n is to fix, usen is to use, and so on. The feminine
and diminutive suffix -ké is often added to nouns. Thus bluffer gives rise to blufferké (=hypocrite), and one
also notes dresské, hatké, watchké and bummerké. “Oi! is sie a blufferké!” is good American Yiddish for “isn’t
she a hypocrite!” The suffix -nick, signifying agency, is also freely applied. Allrightnick means an upstart, an
offensive boaster, one of whom his fellows would say “He is all right” with a sneer. Similarly,
consumptionick means a victim of tuberculosis. Other suffixes are -chick and -ige, the first exemplified in
boychick, a diminutive of boy, and the second in next-doorige, meaning the woman next-door, an important
person in ghetto social life. Some of the loan-words, of course, undergo changes on Yiddish-speaking lips.
Thus landlord becomes lendler, certificate (a pretty case of Hobson-Jobson!) becomes stiff-ticket, lounge
becomes lunch, tenant becomes tenner, and whiskers loses its final s. “Wie gefällt dir sein whisker?” (=how
do you like his beard?) is good Yiddish, ironically intended. Fellow, of course, changes to the American fella
or feller, as in “Rosie hat schon a fella” (=Rosie has got a fella, i. e., a sweetheart). Show, in the sense of

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chance, is used constantly, as in “git imh a Show, (=give him a chance). Bod boy is adopted bodily, as in “er is
a bad boy.” To shut up is inflected as one word, as in “er hat nit gewolt shutup’n” (=he wouldn’t shut up). To
catch is used in the sense of to obtain, as in “catch’n a gmilath chesed” (=to raise a loan). Here, by the way,
gmilath chesed is excellent Biblical Hebrew. To bluff, unchanged in form, takes on the new meaning of to lie:
a bluffer is a liar. Scores of American phrases are in constant use, among them, all right, never mind, I bet
you, no sir and I’ll fix you. It is curious to note that sure Mike, borrowed by the American vulgate from Irish
English, has gone over into American Yiddish. Finally, to make an end, here are two complete American
Yiddish sentences: “Sie wet clean’n die rooms, scrub’n dem floor, wash’n die windows, dress’n dem boy und
gehn in butcher-store und in grocery. Dernoch vet sie machen dinner und gehn in street für a walk.”
For some time past there has been an active movement among the New York Jews for the purification of
Yiddish. This movement is an offshoot of Zionism, and has resulted in the establishment of a number of
Yiddish schools. Its adherents do not propose, of course, that English be abandoned, but simply that the two
languages be kept separate, and that Jewish children be taught Yiddish as well as English. The Yiddishists
insist that it is more dignified to say a gooten tog than good-bye, and billet instead of ticket. But the
movement makes very poor progress. “The Americanisms absorbed by the Yiddish of this country,” says
Abraham Cahan, “have come to stay. To hear one say ‘Ich hob a billet für heitige vorschtellung’ would be as
jarring to the average East Side woman, no matter how illiterate and ignorant she might be, as the intrusion
of a bit of Chinese in her daily speech.”
Yiddish, as everyone knows, has produced a very extensive literature during the past two generations; it is,
indeed, so large and so important that I can do no more than refer to it here. Much of it has come from
Jewish authors living in New York. In their work, and particularly their work for the stage, there is extensive
and brilliant evidence of the extent to which American English has influenced the language.

5. Italian

Rémy de Gourmont, the French critic, was the first to call attention to the picturesqueness of the
Americanized Italian spoken by Italians in the United States; unluckily his appreciation of its qualities has
not been shared by American Romance scholars. The literature dealing with it, in fact, is confined to one
capital study by Dr. Arthur Livingston, 24 formerly of Columbia University, who says that other “American
philologists have curiously disdained it.” Meanwhile, it has begun to produce, like Yiddish, an extensive
literature, ranging in character and quality from such eloquent pieces as Giovanni Pascoli’s “Italy” to the
Rabelaisian trifles of Carlo Ferrazzano. Ferrazzano shines in the composition of macchiette coloniali for the
cheap Italian theatres in New York. The macchietta coloniale is an Americanized variety of the Neapolitan
macchietta, which Dr. Livingston describes as “a character-sketch—etymologically, a character-‘daub’—most
often constructed on rigorous canons of ‘ingenuity’: there must be a literal meaning, accompanied by a
double sense, which in the nature of the tradition, inclines to be pornographic.” The macchietta was brought
to New York by Edoardo Migliacci (Farfariello), purged of its purely Neapolitan materials, and so adapted to
the comprehension of Italians from other parts of Italy. Farfariello wrote fully five hundred macchiette and
Ferrazzano has probably written as many more; many of the latter have been printed. They are commonly in
verse, with now and then a descent to prose. I take from Dr. Livingston’s study a specimen of the latter:
Ne sera dentro na barra americana dove il patrone era americano, lo visco era americano, la birra era
americana, ce steva na ghenga de loffari tutti americani: solo io non ero americano; quanno a tutto nu
mumento me mettono mmezzo e me dicettono: Alò spaghetti; iu mericano men? No! no! mi Italy men! Iu
blacco enze. No, no! Iu laico chistu contri. No, no! Mi laico mio contry! Mi laico Italy! A questa punto me
chiavaieno lo primo fait! “Dice: Orré for America!” Io tuosto: Orré for Italy! Un ato fait. “Dice: Orré for
America!” Orré for Italy! N’ato fait e n ato fait, fino a che me facetteno addurmentare; ma però, orré for
America nun o dicette!
Quanno me scietaie, me trovaie ncoppa lu marciepiedi cu nu pulizio vicino che diceva; Ghiroppe bomma! Io
ancora stunato alluccaie: America nun gudde! Orré for Italy! Sapete li pulizio che facette? Mi arrestò!
Quanno fu la mattina, lu giorge mi dicette: Wazzo maro laste naite? Io risponette: No tocche nglese! “No?
Tenne dollari.” E quello porco dello giorge nun scherzava, perché le diece pezze se le pigliaie!…

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 Most of the Americanisms are obvious: barra for bar, visco for whisky, blacco enze for black-hand, laico for
like, chistu for this, contri for country, fait for fight (it is also used for punch, as in chiaver nu fair, give a
punch, and nato fait, another punch), loffari for loafers, ghiroppe for get up, bomma for bum, pulizio for
police, nun gudde for no good, orré for hurray, giorge for judge, wazzo maro for what’s the matter, laste for
last, naite for night, toccho for talk, tenne for ten, dollari for dollars. All of the macchiette coloniali are gaudy
with the same sort of loan-words; one of the best of them, says Dr. Livingston, is Farfariello’s “A lingua
’nglese,” which is devoted almost wholly to humorous attempts to represent English words as ignorant
Italians hear and use them.
As in the case of Yiddish, there is a movement among Italian intellectuals in America, and especially in New
York, for the restoration of a purer Italian. These purists are careful to use the sotterraneo to take them nell
bassa città. But the great majority prefer il subway or the tonno (=tunnel) to take them tantane (=downtown).
All the common objects of life tend similarly to acquire names borrowed from American English, sometimes
bodily and sometimes by translation. In the main, these loan-words are given Italianized forms and inflected
in a more or less correct Italian manner. Dr. Livingston presents a number of interesting examples from the
advertising columns of an Italian newspaper in New York. Pressers are pressatori, operators are operatori,
machines are mascine, carpenters are carpentieri, presser’s halpers are sottopressatori, a store is a storo, board
is bordo, boarders are abbordato, bushelmen are buscellatori, customs-coats are cotti da costume, men’s coats
are cotti da uomo. “Originally,” he says, “the policy of this paper was to translate, in correct form, the Italian
copy. The practice had to be abandoned because poorer results were obtained from advertisements restored
to the literary tongue.” In other words, the average Italian in New York now understands American-Italian
better than he understands the standard language of his country.
The newly arrived Italian quickly picks up the Americanized vocabulary. Almost at once he calls the man in
charge of his ghenga (=gang) his bosso, and talks of his work in the indiccio (=ditch) and with the sciabola
(=shovel), picco (=pick) and stim-sciabola (=steam-shovel). He buys sechenze (=second-hand) clothes, works
on the tracca (=track), buys food at the grosseria (=grocery) or marchetto (=market,) eats pinozze (=peanuts,)
rides on the livetta (=elevated,) rushes a grollo (=growler) for near-beer, gets on good terms with the
barritenne (=bartender,) and speaks of the auschieppe (=housekeeper) of his boarding-house, denounces
idlers as loffari (=loafers,) joins a globbo (=club,) gets himself a ghella (=girl,) and is her falò (=fellow.) Some
of the new words he acquires are extremely curious, e. g.,canabuldogga (=bulldog), pipe del gasso (=gas-pipe),
coppetane (=’ncuop+town=uptown), fruttistenne (=fruit-stand), sanemagogna (=son-of-agun), mezzo-barrista
(=half-time bartender.) Several quite new words, unknown to Americans, have been made of American
materials and added to the vocabulary. An example is afforded by temeniollo, signifying a very large glass of
beer. Dr. Livingston says that it comes from Tammany Hall! Another Italian-American invention is flabussce,
used as an interjection to indicate the extreme of pessimism. It comes from Flatbush, where the principal
Italian cemetery is situated. 4
The large emigration of Italians during the past half dozen years has transported a number of Americanisms
to Italy. Bomma (=bum) is now a familiar word in Naples: a strange wandering, indeed, for the original bum
was German. So is schidù (=skiddoo.) So is briccoliere (=bricklayer.)

6. Dano-Norwegian

Here are some characteristic specimens of the Dano-Norwegian spoken by Norwegian settlers in Minnesota,
as given by Dr. Nils Flaten, of Northfield, Minn.:
Mrs. Olsen va aafel bisi idag; hun maatte béke kék. (Mrs. Olsen was awfully busy today; she had to bake
cake.)
Den spattute stiren braekka sig ut av pastre aa rőnna langt ind i fila aa je va ikke aebel te aa
kaetsche’n; men saa sigga je doggen min paa’n. (The spotted steer broke out of the pasture and ran far into the
field before I was able to catch him; but then I sicked my dog at him.)
Reileaaden ha muva schappa sine. (The railroad has moved its shops.)
Je kunde ikke faa resa saa mye kaes at je fik betalt morgesen i farmen min. (I couldn’t raise enough cash to
pay the mortgage on my farm.)
Det meka ingen difrens. (That makes no difference.)

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Det kőtta ingen figger. (That cuts no figure.)
Hos’n fila du? puddi gud. (How do you feel? Pretty good.)
The words in italics would be unintelligible to a recent arrival from Norway; they are all American loan-
words. “Such words,” says Dr. Flaten, “are often mutilated beyond recognition by an American…. In the case
of many words the younger generation cannot tell whether they are English or Norse. I was ten years old
before I found that such words as paatikkel (=particular), staebel (=stable), fens (=fence) were not Norse, but
mutilated English. I had often wondered that poleit, trubbel, sőpperéter were so much like the
English words polite, trouble, separator. So common is this practise of borrowing that no English word is
refused admittance into this vocabulary provided it can stand the treatment it is apt to get. Some words,
indeed, are used without any appreciable difference in pronunciation, but more generally the root, or stem, is
taken and Norse inflections are added as required by the rules of the language.” Sometimes the English loan-
word and a corresponding Norwegian word exist side by side, but in such cases, according to Dr. George T.
Flom, “there is a prevalent and growing tendency” to drop the latter, save in the event that it acquires a
special meaning. “Very often in such cases,” continues Dr. Flom, “the English word is shorter and easier to
pronounce or the Norse equivalent is a purely literary word—that is, does not actually exist in the dialect of
the settlers…. In the considerable number of cases where the loan-word has an exact equivalent in the Norse
dialect it is often very difficult to determine the reason for the loan, though it would be safe to say that it is
frequently due simply to a desire on the part of the speaker to use English words, a thing that becomes very
pronounced in the jargon that is sometimes heard.”
Dr. Flaten exhibits the following declension of a typical loanword, swindler. In Dano-Norwegian there is no
letter w, and the suffix of agency is not -er but -ar; so the word becomes svindlar. It is regarded as masculine
and declined thus: Singular Indefinite Definite
Nom. ein svindlar svindlarn
Gen. aat svindlar aat svindlaré
Dat. (te) ein svindlar (te) svindlaré
Acc. ein svindlar svindlarn
Plural
Nom. noko svindlara svindlaradn
Gen. aat noko svindlara aat svindlaro
Dat. (te) noko svindlara (te) svindlaro
Acc. noko svindlara svindlaradn
The vocabularies of Drs. Flaten and Flom show a large number of such substitutions of English (including
some thoroughly American) words. The Dano-Norwegian φl is abandoned for the English beer, which
becomes bir. Tonde succumbs to baerel, barel or baril (=barrel), frokost to brekkfaest (=breakfast), forsikring
to inschurings (=insurance,) stald to staebel (=stable), skat to taex (=tax,) and so on. The verbs yield in the
same way: vaeljuéte (=valuate), titsche (teach), Katte (cut), Klém (claim), savére (survey), refjuse (refuse.)
And the adjectives: plén (plain), jelős (jealous), kjokfuldt (chock-full), Krésé (crazy), aebel (able), Klir
(clear), pjur (pure), pur (poor). And the adverbs and adverbial phrases: isé (easy), reit evé (right away), aept to
(apt to), allreit (all right). Dr. Flaten lists some extremely grotesque compound words, e. g., nekk-tői
(necktie), Kjaens-bogg (chinch-bug), hospaar (horse-power), gitte long (get along), hardvaer-staar (hardware-
store), staets-praessen (state’s-prison), traevling-maen (traveling-man), uxe-jogg (yoke of oxen), stim-baat
(steamboat). Pure Americanisms are not infrequent, e. g., bősta (busted), bés-baal (baseball), boggé
(buggy), dipo (depot), fraimhus (frame-house), jukre (to euchre), kaemp-mid’n (camp-meeting), kjors
(chores), magis (moccasin), malasi (molasses), munke-rins (monkey-wrench), raad-bas (road-boss), sjante
(shanty), sőrpreisparti (surprise-party), strit-kar (street-car), tru trin (through train). The decayed
American adverb is boldly absorbed, as in han file baed (=he feels bad). “That this lingo,” says Dr. Flaten,
“will ever become a dialect of like importance with the Pennsylvania Dutch is hardly possible…. The
Norwegians are among those of our foreign-born citizens most willing to part with their mother tongue.” But
meanwhile it is spoken by probably half a million of them, and it will linger in isolated farming regions for
years.

7. Swedish

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A useful study of American-Swedish is to be found in “Vårt Språk,” by Vilhelm Berger, 29 editor of the
Swedish semi-weekly, Nordstjernan, published in New York. In his preface to his little book Mr. Berger
mentions two previous essays upon the same subject: “Det Svenske Språket in Amerika,” by Rector Gustav
Andreen, of Rock Island, Ill., and “Engelskans Inflytande på Svenska Språket in Amerika,” by Dr. E. A.
Zetterstrand, but I have been unable to gain access to either. Mr. Berger says that the Swedes who comes to
America quickly purge their speech of the Swedish terms indicating the ordinary political, social and business
relations and adopt the American terms bodily. Thus, borgmästere is displaced by mayor, länsman by sheriff,
häradsskrifvare by countyclerk, centraluppvärmning med ånga by steam-heat, and ananas by pineapple, the
Swedish measurements give way to mile, inch, pound, acre, etc., and there is an immediate adoption of such
characteristic Americanisms as graft, trust, ring, janitor, surprise-party, bay-window, bluff, commencement
(college), homestead, buggy and pull. Loan-words taken into American from other immigrant languages go
with the purely English terms, e. g., luffa (=to loaf, from the German) and vigilans (=vigilantes, from the
Spanish). Many of these borrowings are adapted to Swedish spelling, and so sidewalk becomes sajdoak, street
becomes strit, fight becomes fajt, business becomes bissness, and housecleaning becomes husklining. But even
more important is the influence that American English has upon the vocabulary that remains genuinely
Swedish; when words are not borrowed bodily they often change the form of familiar Swedish words. Thus
sängkammare (=bedroom) is abandoned for bäddrum, husållsgöromål (=housework) gives way to husarbete,
kabeltelegram to kabelgram, brandsoldat (=fireman) to brandman, regnby (=rainstorm) to regnstorm, brekfort
(=postcard) to postkort, and beställa (=order) to ordra. The Swedish-American no longer speaks of frihet;
instead he uses fridom, an obvious offspring of freedom. His wife abandons the hattnål for the hattpinne. He
acquires a hemadress (=home address) in place of his former bostadsadress. Instead of kyrkogård
(=churchyard) he uses grafgård (=graveyard). For godståg (=goods-train) he substitutes frakttåg (=freight-
train). In place of words with roots that are Teutonic he devises words with roots that have been taken into
English from the Latin, the Greek or the French, e.g., investigera, krusad, minoritetsrapport, officerare,
audiens, affår, exkursion, evangelist, hospital, liga (=league), residens, sympati.

8. Dutch

The Dutch language exists in two forms in the United States, both differentiated from the original Dutch of
Holland by the influence of American-English. The first is the so-called Jersey, or Bergen County Dutch,
which is spoken by the descendants of seventeenth century Dutch settlers in Bergen and Passaic counties,
New Jersey. In New York, as everyone knows, Dutch completely disappeared many years ago, but in these
Jersey counties it still survives, though apparently obsolescent, and is spoken by many persons who are not of
Dutch blood, including a few negroes. The second variety of Americanized Dutch is spoken by more recent
immigrants, chiefly in Michigan. There is little if any communication between the two dialects.
An excellent short study of Jersey Dutch was published by Dr. J. Dyneley Prince in 1910; 30 it remains the
only one in print. The dialect, says Dr. Prince, “was originally the South Holland or Flemish language, which,
in the course of centuries (ca. 1630-1880), became mixed with and partially influenced by English, having
bor rowed also from the Mindi (Lenâpe-Delaware) Indian language a few animal and plant names. This
Dutch has suffered little or nothing from modern Holland or Flemish immigration, although Paterson (the
county seat of Passaic County) has at present a large Netherlands population. The old county people hold
themselves strictly aloof from these foreigners, and say, when they are questioned as to the difference
between the idioms: ‘Onze tal äz lex däuts en hoelliz äs Holläns; kwait dääfrent’ (our language is low Dutch
and theirs is Holland Dutch; quite different). An intelligent Fleming or South Hollander with a knowledge of
English can make shift at following a conversation in this Americanized Dutch, but the converse is not true.”

As usual, contact with English has worn off the original inflections, and the definite and indefinite articles,
de and en, are uniform for all genders. The case-endings have nearly all disappeared, in the comparison of
adjectives the superlative affix has decayed from -st to -s, the person-endings in the conjugation of verbs have
fallen off, and the pronouns have been much simplified. The vocabulary shows many signs of English
influence. A large number of words in daily use have been borrowed bodily, e. g., bottle, town, railroad,

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cider, smoke, potato, match, good-bye. Others have been borrowed with changes, e.g., säns (since), määm
(ma’m), belange (belong), boddere (bother), bääznäs (business), orek (earache). In still other cases the drag of
English is apparent, as in blaubääse, a literal translation of blueberry (the standard Dutch word is heidebes),
in mep’lbom (=mapletree; Dutch, ahoornboom), and in njeuspampir (=newspaper; Dutch, nieuwsblad). A few
English archaisms are preserved in the dialect; for example, the use of gentry as a plural for gentleman.
The Dutch spoken by the colonists from Holland in Michigan has been very extensively modified by
American influences, both in vocabulary and in grammar. As in Jersey Dutch and in South African Dutch
there has been a decay of inflections, and the neuter article het has been absorbed by the masculine-feminine
article de. Says Prof. Henry J. G. Van Andel, of the chair of Dutch history, literature and art in Calvin College
at Grand Rapids: “Almost all the American names of common objects, e. g., stove, mail, carpet, bookcase,
kitchen, store, post-office, hose, dress, pantry, porch, buggy, picture, newspaper, ad, road, headline,
particularly when they differ considerably from the Dutch terms, have been taken into the everyday
vocabulary. This is also true of a great many verbs and adjectives, e. g., to move (moeven), to dig (diggen), to
shop (shoppen), to drive (dryven: a meaning different from the standard Dutch one), slow, fast, easy, pink,
etc. The religious language has remained pure, but even here purity has only a relative meaning, for the
constructions employed are often English.” This corrupted vulgate is called Yankee-Dutch by the Hollanders
of Michigan, and, like Pennsylvania German, it has begun to produce a literature, chiefly humorous in
character. A little book of sketches by Dirk Nieland, called “Yankee-Dutch,” 31 contains some amusing
specimens, e. g., piezelmietje (=pleased to meet you), and ‘You want’n ander kop koffie.” From an anonymous
piece kindly supplied by Dr. John J. Hiemenga, president of Calvin College, I extract the following:
’t Had tamelijk ferm gesneeuwd de laatste twee dagen, zoodat de farmers toch nog een sleeride konden
krijgen in het bijna vervlogen jaar. Vooral de young folks hunkerden naar een cutter-ride. Bijna allerwege in
den omtrek van de Star Corners waren de cutters dan ook voor den dag gehaald en nagezien, want alles
moest natuurlijk in running-order zijn. De dust moest er afgeveegd, hier en daar een bur wat aangetight, de
kussens een weinig opgefixt, en de bells vooral nauwkeurig onderzocht.
Dit was hedenmiddag ook Frits zijn job geweest, met het doel hedenavond zijn eerste ride in de mooie cutter
can Klaas Ekkel, biji wien hij als winterknecht diende, te nemen. Hij begon dan ook al vroeg met de chores,
molk in a hurry en was daarmee dus tijdig klaar. ’t Supper werd even vlug verorberd, zoodat Frits om half-
zeven al in de barn was, om Florie op te hichen.
Trotsch op haar nieuw harness en schallende bellen, draaft Florie gezwind enfier daarheen. Hier en daar
waar een oude railfence de sneeuw opving, zoodat de road bijna geheel opgeblokt is, gaat of rakelings langs
de andere fence of over de fields. Wel zijn er van daag een paar teams langs gegaan, doch de sneeuw en de
wind hebben hun tracks geheel opgecoverd, zoodat Frits zijn eigen pad maar moet maken.
Dat’t vinnig koud is voelt hij niet, dank zij zijn dikke furcoat. Voelt hij de koude echter niet, hooren deed hij
haar wel. War knarst en giert die sneeuw onder de runners! Ook de milliarden fonkelende sneeuwkelkjes, die
met evenveel kleuren het licht der halve maan weerkaatsen, getuigen van de koude. Frits geniet dit schoone
kleurenspel en verzinkt weldra in diep gepeins. Plotseling schrikt hij op.
“Hello, Frits, going to the store?”
“Ja, Henry, als je er in jumpen wilt, kan je zoover meerijden, maar ’t is haast te veel troebel voor ’t geld.”
Henry wil ook kunnen zeggen, dat hij van een cutter-ride gehad heeft en stapt dus in. Nog enkele rods en ze
zijn bij de stables achter de kerk, waar ze ’t paard stallen en nu naar de store. Zoo ’n country-store is de
lievelingsplek van de meeste jongens uit den omtrek, als ’s avonds het werk aan kant is. Enkele loafers maken
zoo’n store hun home. Heel gezelling is men’s avonds soms bij elkaar. Is her een onnoozele bloed aanwezig,
dan heeft men wat fun met hem. Stories hoort men er bij de wholesale. Twijfelt Jan er aan of Piet wel een
barrel met salt kan tillen, dan noopt een “I’ll bet you the cigars” hem om te zwijgen of te wedden. Voor
cigars, peanuts en candy wordt er dan ook heel wat geld gespend…
This curious dialect promises to be short of life. On the one hand the leaders among the colonists strive to
make them use a pure Dutch and on the other hand the younger members, particularly those born in
America, abandon both good and bad Dutch for English. I am informed by various observers in Grand Rapids
and its vicinity that there seems to be but small prospect that Yankee-Dutch will survive as long as
Pennsylvania German.

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9. Icelandic

The only study that I have been able to find of the changes undergone by Icelandic in America is a brief but
informative note on the inflection of loan-nouns by Vilhjÿ;lmer Stefÿ;nsson, 33 the well-known arctic
explorer, who was born of Icelandic parents in Canada. There are relatively few Icelanders in the United
States and most of them are concentrated in a few North Dakota and Minnesota counties. There are many
more in Manitoba. Their language, philologically, is one of the most ancient of Europe, for the remote
situation and poor communications of Iceland have served to preserve many early Teutonic characters that
have long since vanished from the related languages. It is, of course, highly inflected, and the most
interesting thing about its relations with American English in the United States is the sturdy way in which it
fastens inflections upon loan-words from the latter. “No word,” says Mr. Stefÿ;nsson, “can be used in
Icelandic without being assigned a gender-form distinguished by the post-positive article.” This law produces
some curious effects when English nouns are taken in. The very American baseball, buggy, candy, cyclone
and corn-starch are all neuter, but beer, boss, cowboy, cowcatcher, nickel and populist are masculine, and tie
(railroad), prohibition and siding are feminine. In the case of many words usage varies. Thus caucus has no
fixed gender; different speakers make it masculine, feminine or neuter. Crackers and automobile are other
such words. Banjo may be either feminine or neuter, bicycle may be either masculine or neuter, and broncho
may be either masculine or feminine. The gender of such loan-words tends to be logical, but it is not always
so. Farmer is always masculine and so is engineer, and nurse is always feminine, but dressmaker is given the
masculine post-positive article, becoming dressmakerinn. However, when the pronoun is substituted, hún,
which is feminine, is commonly used. Words ending in -l or -ll are usually considered neuter, e. g., baseball,
corral, hotel, hall. “A striking example,” says Mr. Stefÿ;nsson, “is the term constable. The natural gender is
evidently masculine and the Icelandic equivalent, lögreglumathur, is masculine; yet constable is usually
employed as a neuter, though occasionally as a masculine.” Words in -er fall under the influence of the
Icelandic masculine nouns in -ari, denoting agency, and so usually become masculine, e. g., director, ginger,
mower, parlor, peddler, reaper, separator. Republican and socialist are masculine, but democrat is neuter.
Why cashbook, chique, contract, election and grape should be feminine it is hard to understand. Of the 467
loan-nouns listed by Mr. Stefÿ;nsson, 176 are neuters and 137 are masculines. There are but 44 clear
feminines, though 80 others are sometimes feminine.
On the syntax of American-Icelandic I can find nothing. The literature of the dialect is not extensive, and it
has produced very few writers of any ability. Nearly all the Icelandic periodicals of the New World are
published in Canada, chiefly at Winnipeg. 34 They are conducted, in the main, by natives of Iceland, and
hence endeavor to preserve the purity of the language. But the Icelander born in America prefers to speak
English, and even when he essays Icelandic he fills it with English words and phrases.

10. Greek

I am informed by Mr. S. S. Lontos, editor of Atlantis, the Greek newspaper published in New York, that
Greek journalists and other writers working in the United States try to avoid the use of Americanisms in
their writing, and that the same care is observed by educated Greeks in conversation. But the masses of Greek
immigrants imitate the newcomers of all other races by adopting Americanisms wholesale. In most cases the
loan-words, as in Italian, undergo changes. Thus, bill-of-fare becomes biloferi, pie changes to pay, sign and
shine to saina (there is no sh-sound in Greek), cream to creamy, fruit-store to fruitaria, clams to clammess,
steak to stecky, polish to policy, hotel to otelli, stand to stanza, lease to lista, depot to depos, car to carron
(=Modern Greek, karron, a cart), picture to pitsa, elevator and elevated to elevata, and so on. The Greeks
suffer linguistic confusion immediately they attempt English, for in Modern Greek nay (spelled nai) means

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yes, P. M. indicates the hours before noon, and the letter N stands for South. To make things even worse, the
Greek papoose means grandfather and mammie means grandmother.
So far as I know, no philological study of American Greek has been made. Undoubtedly all the processes of
decay that have been going on in Greece itself for centuries will be hastened in this country. Whenever
English begins to influence another language it plays havoc with the inflections.

11. The Slavic Languages

So far as I have been able to discover there is no literature in English upon the philological results of
transplanting the Slavic languages, Polish, Czech, Serbian and Bulgarian, to America. Dr. C. H. Wachtel,
editor of the Dziennik Chicagoski, the Polish daily newspaper published in Chicago, informs me that the
Polish spoken in the United States has “taken over a great multitude of English words and phrases,” and says
that the Rev. B. E. Goral, a priest of Milwaukee, has written several articles in Polish upon the subject and
collected a vocabulary. But I have been unable to get into communication with Father Goral. I am likewise
informed by the editor of the Svornost, the Bohemian daily of Chicago, that a study of the changes
undergone by Czech in the United States has been published by Dr. J. Salaba Vojan, of Chicago, but my
inquiries of Dr. Vojan are unanswered. Regarding Serbian and Bulgarian I have been unable to obtain any
information whatever. Of late years several chairs of Slavic languages and literatures have been set up in
American universities. It is to be hoped that among the students they attract there will be some who will
devote themselves to the transplanted living tongues as the scholars of the Middle West have devoted
themselves to Dano-Norwegian.

III. Proverb and Platitude

No people, save perhaps the Spaniards, have a richer store of proverbial wisdom than the Americans, and
surely none other makes more diligent and deliberate efforts to augment its riches. The American literature
of “inspirational” platitude is enormous and almost unique. There are half a dozen authors, e. g., Dr. Orison
Swett Marden and Dr. Frank Crane, who devote themselves almost exclusively, and to vast profit, to the
composition of arresting and uplifting apothegms, and the fruits of their fancy are not only sold in books but
also displayed upon an infinite variety of calendars, banners and wall-cards. It is rarely that one enters the
office of an American business man without encountering at least one of these wall-cards. It may, on the one
hand, show nothing save a succinct caution that time is money, say, “Do It Now,” or “This Is My Busy Day”;
on the other hand, it may embody a long and complex sentiment, ornately set forth. The taste for such
canned sagacity seems to have arisen in America at a very early day. Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s
Almanac,” begun in 1732, remained a great success for twenty-five years, and the annual sales reached
10,000. It had many imitators, and founded an aphoristic style of writing which culminated in the essays of
Emerson, often mere strings of sonorous certainties, defectively articulated. The “Proverbial Philosophy”of
Martin Farquhar Tupper, dawning upon the American public in the early 40’s, was welcomed with
enthusiasm; as Saintsbury says, success on this side of the Atlantic even exceeded its success on the other.
But that was the last and perhaps the only importation of the sage and mellifluous in bulk. In late years the
American production of such merchandise has grown so large that the balance of trade now flows in the
other direction. Every traveling American must have observed the translations of the chief works of Dr.
Marden that are on sale in all the countries of Europe, and with them the masterpieces of such other apostles
of the New Thought as Ralph Waldo Trine and Elizabeth Towne. No other American books are half so well
displayed.
The note of all such literature, and of the maxims that precipitate themselves from it, is optimism. They
“inspire” by voicing and revoicing the New Thought doctrine that all things are possible to the man who
thinks the right sort of thoughts—in the national phrase, to the right-thinker. This right-thinker is
indistinguishable from the forward-looker, whose belief in the continuity and benignity of the evolutionary
process takes on the virulence of a religious faith. Out of his confidence come the innumberable saws, axioms
and geflügelte Wrote in the national arsenal, ranging from the “It won’t hurt none to try” of the great masses

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of the plain people to such exhilarating confections of the wall-card virtuosi as “The elevator to success is not
running; take the stairs.” Naturally enough, a grotesque humor plays about this literature of hope; the folk,
though it moves them, prefer it with a dash of salt. “Smile, damn you, smile!” is a typical specimen of this
seasoned optimism. Many examples of it go back to the early part of the last century, for instance, “Don’t
monkey with the buzz-saw,” “The silent hog eats the swill,” and “It will never get well if you pick it.” Others
are patently modern, e. g., “The Lord is my shepherd; I should worry” and “Roll over; you’re on your back.”
The national talent for extravagant and pungent humor is well displayed in many of these maxims. It would
be difficult to match, in any other folk-literature, such examples as “I’d rather have them say ‘There he goes’
than ‘Here he lies,”’ or “Don’t spit: remember the Johnstown flood,” or “Shoot it in the leg; your arm’s full,”
or “Foolishness is next to happiness,” or “Work is the curse of the drinking classes,” or “It’s better to be a has-
been than a never-was,” or “Cheer up; there ain’t no hell,” or “If you want to cure homesickness, go back
home.” Many very popular phrases and proverbs are borrowings from above. “Few die and none resign”
originated with Thomas Jefferson; Bret Harte, I believe, was the author of “No check-ee, no shirt-ee,”
General W. T. Sherman is commonly credited with “War is hell,” and Mark Twain with “Life is one damn
thing after another.” An elaborate and highly characteristic proverb of the uplifting variety—“So live that
you can look any man in the eye and tell him to go to hell”—was first given currency by one of the engineers
of the Panama Canal, a gentleman later retired, it would seem, for attempting to execute his own counsel.
From humor the transition to cynicism is easy, and so many of the current sayings are at war with the
optimism of the majority.“Kick him again; he’s down” is a depressing example. “What’s the use?” is another.
The same spirit is visible in “Tell your troubles to a policeman,” “How’d you like to be the ice-man?” “Some
she do and some say she don’t," “Nobody loves a fat man,” “Ain’t it hell to be poor!", “Have a heart!”, “I love
my wife, but O you kid,” and “Would you for fifty cents?” The last originated in the ingenious mind of an
advertisement writer and was immediately adopted. In the course of time it acquired a naughty significance,
and helped to give a start to the amazing button craze of the first years of the century—a saturnalia of
proverb and phrase making which finally aroused the guardians of the public morals and was put down by
the Polizei.
The war, as we have seen in the chapter on Slang, produced very little new slang, but the doughboys
showed all the national talent for manufacturing proverbs and proverbial expressions, chiefly derisive. “Our
American visitors,” said an English writer at the end of the war, “are startling London with vivid phrases.
Some of them are well known by now. ‘Hurry up and get born’ is one of them. Others are coming on, such as
‘Put crape on your nose; your brains are dead,’ and ‘Snow again, kid, I’ve lost your drift.”’ 36 Perhaps the
favorite in the army was “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken,” though “They say the first hundred years are
the hardest” offered it active rivalry. No study of these military witticisms has been made. The whole subject
of American proverbs, in fact, has been grossly neglected; there is not even a collection of them. The English
publisher, Frank Palmer, prints an excellent series of little volumes presenting the favorite proverbs of all
civilized races, including the Chinese and Japanese, but there is no American volume among them. Nor is
there one in the similar series issued by the Appeal to Reason. Even such exhaustive collections as that of
Robert Christy 37 contain no American specimens—not even “Don’t monkey with the buzzsaw” or “Root,
hog, or die.”

1. General

A. F. L.: English As She Is Spoke, Baltimore Evening Sun, Nov. 18, 1920.
Aldington, Richard: English and American, Poetry, May, 1920.
Alford, Henry: A Plea for the Queen’s English; London, 1863.
Allen, Grant: Americanisms (in Chambers’ Encyclopaedia, new ed.; Phila., 1906, vol. i).

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Anon.: American English (in America From a French Point of View; London, 1897).
Archer, William: America and the English Language, Pall Mall Magazine, Oct., 1898.
——: The American Language (in America To-day; New York, 1899).
Ayres, Harry Morgan: The English Language in America (in The Cambridge History of American Literature;
New York, 1921, vol. iv).
Bache, Richard Meade: Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech, 2nd ed.; Phila., 1869.
Baker, Franklin T.: The Vernacular (in Munro’s Principles of Secondary Education; New York, 1915, ch. ix).
Barentz, A. E.: Woordenboek der Engelsche Spreektaal… and Americanisms… Amsterdam, 1894.
Barringer, G. A.: Étude sur I’Anglais parlé aux États Unis (la Langue Améri-caine), Actes de la Société
Philologique de Paris, March, 1874.
Bendelari, George: Curiosities of American Speech, New York Sun, Nov., 1895.
Benet, W. C.: Americanisms: English as Spoken and Written in the United States; Abbeville (S. C.), 1880.
Bicknall, Frank N.: The Yankee in British Fiction, Outlook, vol. xcvi, 1910.
Bowen, Edwin W.: Briticisms vs. Americanisms, Popular Science Monthly, vol. 1xix, p. 324.
——: Questions at Issue in Our English Speech; New York, 1914.
Bradley, W. A.: In Shakespeare’s America, Harper’s Magazine, Aug., 1915.
Bristed, Charles A.: The English Language in America (in Cambridge Essays; London, 1855).
Bryant, William Cullen: Index Expurgatorius (reprinted in Helpful Hints in Writing and Reading, by
Grenville Kleiser; New York, 1911, p. 15).
Burton, Richard: American English (in Literary Likings; Boston, 1899).
Carter, Alice P.: American English, Critic, vol. xii, p. 97.
Channing, William Ellery: The American Language and Literature, North American Review, Sept., 1815.
Charters, W. W. (and Edith Miller): A Course of Study in Grammar Based Upon the Grammatical Errors of
School Children of Kansas City, Mo., University of Missouri Bulletin, vol. xvi, No. 2, Jan., 1915.
Crane, W. W.: The American Language, Putnam’s Monthly, vol. xvi, p. 519.
Crosland, T. W.: The Abounding American; London, 1907.
Darling, Gertrude: Standards in English, Education, vol. xvii, p. 331.
Dilnot, Frank: The Written and Spoken Word (in The New America; New York, 1919).
Eggleston, Edward: Wild Flowers of English Speech in America, Century Magazine, April, 1894.
Field, Eugene: London letter in Chicago News, March 10, 1890.
Fowler, H. W. (and F. G. Fowler): The King’s English, 2nd ed.; Oxford, 1908. Fowler, Wm. C.: The English
Language,… 2nd ed.; New York, 1855.
Freeman, Edward A.: Some Points in American Speech and Customs, Longmans’ Magazine, Nov., 1882.
Gerek, William (and others): Is There Really Such a Thing as the American Language? New York Sun, March
10, 1918.
Gould, Edward S.: Good English… New York, 1867.
Grandgent, C. H.: English in America, Die Neueren Sprachen, vol. ii, p. 243 and p. 520.
Hartt, Irene Widdemar: Americanisms, Education, vol. xiii, p. 367.
Hastings, Basil MacDonald: More Americanisms (interview), New York Tribune, Jan. 19, 1913.
Healy, J. F.: The American Language; Pittsburgh, 1910.
Hempl, George: The Study of American English, Chautauquan, vol. xxii, p. 436.
Herrig, Ludwig: Die Englische Sprache und Literatur in Nord-Amerika, Archiv fūr das Studium der
Hill, Adams Sherman: Our English; New York, 1889.
Hughes, Rupert: Our Statish Language, Harper’s Magazine, May, 1920.
Hurd, Seth T.: A Grammatical Corrector or Vocabulary of the Common Errors of Speech… Phila., 1847.
J. D. J.: American Conversation, English Journal, April, 1913.
James, Henry: Tĥe Question of Our Speech; Boston, 1905.
Kartzke, Georg: Die Amerikanische Sprache, Archiv fūr das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und
Literaturen, 1921, p. 181.
Knortz, Karl: Amerikanische Redensarten und Volksgebräuche, Leipzig, 1907.
Krapp, George Philip: Modern English; New York, 1910.
Lang, Andrew: Americanisms, London Academy, March 2, 1895.

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Lienemann, Oskar: Eigentūmlichkeiten des Engl. d. Vereinigten Staaten Nebst Wenig Bekannten
Amerikanismen; Zittau, 1886.
Lloyd, R. J.: Northern English; Leipzig, 1908.
Low, Sidney: Ought American to be Taught in Our Schools? Westminster Gazette, July 18, 1913.
Lowell, James Russell: prefaces to The Biglow Papers, 1st and 2nd series; Cambridge, 1848-66.
Mackay, Charles: The Ascertainment of English, Nineteenth Century, Jan., 1890.
Mackintosh, Duncan: Essai Raisonné sur la Grammaire et la Prononciation Anglaise… Boston, 1797.
Marshall, Archibald: American English and the English Language, North American Review, Nov., 1921.
Matthews, Brander: Americanisms and Briticisms… New York, 1892.
Newcomen, George: Americanisms and Archaisms, Academy, vol. x1vii, p. 317.
Phipson, Evacustes A.: British vs. American English, Dialect Notes, vol. i, pt. i, 1889.
Rambeau, A.: Amerikanisches, Die Neueren Sprachen, vol. ii, p. 53.
Russell, T. Baron: Current Americanisms; London, 1893.
Shipman, Carolyn: The American Language, Critic, new series, vol. xxxvi, p. 81.
Smith, Chas. Forster: Americanisms, Southern Methodist Quarterly, Jan., 1891.
Spies, Heinrich: Die Englische Sprache und das Neue England; Langensalza, 1921.
Sykes, Fred H.: American Speech and Standard English, Our Language, vol. ii, p. 52.
Tuttle, R. M.: Americanisms, Athenæum, vol. i, p. 209.
Untermeyer, Louis: Whitman and the American Language, New York Evening Post, May 31, 1919.
Van der Voort, J. H.: Hedendaagsche Amerikanismen; Gouda (Holland), 1894.
Wardlaw, Patterson: Simpler English, Bulletin of the University of South Carolina, no. 38, pt. iii, July, 1914.
Warren, Arthur: Real Americanisms, Boston Herald, Nov. 20, 1892.
Watts, Harvey M.: Prof. Lounsbury and His Rout of the Dons on Americanisms, Philadelphia Public Ledger,
April 16, 1915.
Wetherill, George N.: The American Language, Anglo-Continental, Jan., 1894.
Wheeler, Benjamin Ide: Americanisms (in Johnson’s Cyclopedia, new ed.; New York, 1893).
Williams, Ralph O.: Some Peculiarities, Real and Supposed, in American English (in Our Dictionaries and
Other English Language Topics; New York, 1890).
Witherspoon, John: various notes on Americanisms in vol. iv of his Works; Phila., 1801.

16. Bibliographies of American English

Anon.: Bibliography of Books and Articles on American English (supplementary to the bibliography
published by Gilbert M. Tucker, q. v., in Tr. Albany Institute, 1883), Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 13.
Babbitt, E. H. (and others): Bibliography of Books and Articles on American English, Dialect Notes, vol. i, p.
344.
Chamberlain, A. F.: List of Articles on “Canadian English,” Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 53.
Mencken, H. L.: Bibliography of American English (in The American Language, 1st ed.; New York, 1919).
Northrup, Clark S.: A Bibliography of the English and French Languages in America From 1894 to 1900,
Dialect Notes, vol. ii, p. 151.
Sheldon, Edward S. (and others): Bibliography of American English, Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 254.
Tucker, Gilbert M.: Bibliography of American English, Tr. Albany Institute for 1883, p. 358.

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