Page:The American Language.djvu/62

46 novelty, but the pioneers apparently did not recognize it, and so we find them ascribing all sorts of absurd medicinal powers to it, and even Beverley solemnly 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, underbrush, bottom–land, clearing, notch, divide, knob, riffle, gap, rolling–country and rapids, 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 geographical terms as downs, weald, wold, fen, bog, fell, chase, combe, dell, heath and moordisappeared from the colonial tongue, save as fossilized in a few proper names. So did bracken.

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 Maryland Archives for 1669. 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, 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 clapboarded house in 1637. Frame–house seems to have come in with shingle. Trail, half–breed, Indian–summer and