Page:The American Language.djvu/97

Rh 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 overwhelmingly 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, cut–off, 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), carnival (in such phrases as carnival of crime), scrape (for fight or difficulty), 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, hunkydory, scalawag, guyascutis, spondulix, slumgullion, rambunctious, scrumptious,