Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 01.djvu/537

AMERICANISMS. . White prepared a long list of words and phrases supposed to be indigenous, and proved their British origin by citing early dates at which they appear in literature, or the names of authors in whose works they occur. Selecting from this list, and indicating by the letter "a." words known to be ancient, by "m." such as are still used in provincial speech, and by "Bible," King James' version, we submit the following: To admire, in the sense of to wish eagerly (Chapman's Homer, 1655); to advocate (Milton); apart, aside (Bulwer); baggage, luggage (Fielding, T. Hughes); blizzard (m.); blow, boastful talk (a. m.); to bolt, to rush or escape (Dryden); bosom, applied to a man (Shakespeare); bull-doze (W. Scott); bureau, for chest of drawers (Fielding, Hare); by the skin of one's teeth (Bible); catamount (a.); chaw (1530, m.); chore, light work (Ben Jonson); clean gone (Bible); clever, good-natured (Elizabethan writers); conclude, resolve (Tyndale, Froude); crevasse (Chaucer); deck of cards (Shakespeare); divine, clergyman (W. Scott, G. Eliot); elect, for conclude or determine (Lord Thurlow, Ruskin); to enjoy poor health (m.); fall, for autumn (Cairne, 1552; Froude); feel to, as in the expression, &ldquo;I feel to rejoice&rdquo; (m.); to fellowship (Chaucer); fix, to put in place or order (Farquhar, Sterne); fleshy, stout (Chaucer, Prof. Owen); folks, people (Byron, Bulwer Lytton); gent (Pope); a good time (Swift); grain, any cereal (Wielif); guess, think or suppose (Wielif, Milton, A. Trollope); gumption (a. m.); heft (Sackville, T. Hughes); help, servant (T. Hughes); human, person (Chapman's Homer); hung, hanged (Shakespeare, C. Reade); to hustle (a.); illy (a. m.); influential (W. Thompson, c. 1760); improvement, of an occasion, etc. (Defoe, Gibbon); institution in the sense of an establishment or foundation (Beatty, 1784; Trollope); interview, to meet for conversation (Dekker); to let on, to divulge (m.); to let slide (Gower); limb, leg (Fielding); love, like (Cowper); lucrative (Bacon); mad, angry (Bible, Middleton); magnetic as an adjective (Donne); to make a visit (m.); metropolis, the chief city of the State (Milton, De Quincey, Macaulay); million, melon (Pepys); musicianer (Byron); nice, pleasing or agreeable (a. m.); notify, to give notice (m.); notions, for small wares (Young); overly, excessively (m.); parlor, for drawing-room (G. Eliot, Helps); peruse, scan or read (W. Scott); professor of religion (Milton); pumpion (pumpkin) pie (1655); quit, leave off (Ben Jonson); railroad, railway (J. H. Newman, Mrs. Trollope); rare, underdone (Dryden); reliable (Richard Montagu, 1624, Gladstone); reckon, suppose or conclude (Bible, W. Scott); rock, stone (a.); run, a small stream (a.); sick, ill (Bible, Evelyn); skeddadle (m.); slick (a.); span new (Chaucer); spell, a period of time (a.); spruce, for neat (Evelyn); spunky (Burns); swop (B. Jonson, Dryden); to take on, to wail or grieve (a.); tend, attend (Shakespeare); town as a geographical division (Wielif); well, prefacing a sentence (Disraeli); whittling (Walpole); and the writer would add the following which are sometimes ridiculed as outlandish products of the New World: A howling wilderness (Bible); Mr. &mdash;&mdash;&mdash; and lady (Thackeray); and to set store by, in the sense of to prize or appreciate (Mrs. Oliphant). Gilbert M. Tucker says that the 460 Words in Elwyn's Glossary of Supposed Americanisms are all of British origin; that in Pickering's work (1816) not more than 70 words out of the 500 are really American; and that out of the 5000 or more entries in Bartlett's Dictionary, only about 500 are genuine and distinct Americanisms now in decent use. Most New Englanders, said James Russell Lowell, speaking of colloquialisms still heard in Massachusetts, stand less in need of a glossary to Shakespeare than many a native of the old country. It may be added that many words formerly termed Americanisms are as commonly used in England as here, though not in polite speech or literature: e.g., bamboozle, chockful, duds, and sight for number, while, on the other hand, such old forms as axe for ask, and housen for houses, are frequently heard in England and rarely here.

Richard Grant White and T. R. Lounsbury limit the term &ldquo;Americanisms&rdquo; narrowly. According to the former, they must not have been transplanted, but must be perversions or modifications of English words or phrases, and must be used in the current speech or literature of the United States at the present day, &ldquo;Words which are the names of things peculiar to this country are not Americanisms, except under certain conditions (maize, squaw, wigwam). They are merely names which are necessarily used by writers and speakers of all languages. If, however, any such word is adopted here as the name of a thing which already had an English name (wigwam, for hut; squaw, for wife), it then becomes properly an Americanism. Indian, and names compounded of Indian, were given by Europeans. Indian pudding is an American thing, but its name is not an Americanism.&rdquo; As he rejects Indian summer, paleface, succotash, tomahawk, and the rest, White asks, &ldquo;What have we to do with the Indian?&rdquo; and proceeding, crosses from the list of cherished &ldquo;Americanisms,&rdquo; bronco, lacrosse, stampede, and their kin; abolitionist, border-ruffian, gerrymander, reservation, etc., as well as groundhog, long-moss, pine barrens, and saltlick, to go further, besides refusing to discuss such words as intervale and water-gap, because they are &ldquo;legitimate English.&rdquo; Lounsbury, like White, objects to the expression, &ldquo;the American language,&rdquo; and remarks of the so-called &ldquo;Yankee dialect&rdquo; that it is never &ldquo;the characteristic tongue of any one man, or of any one class, or of any one district.&rdquo; He doubts whether the term &ldquo;Americanisms&rdquo; can be regularly applied to cent, congress, mileage, nullification, and so on, and prefers to call tliem &ldquo;American contributions to the common language.&rdquo;

American newspapers are largely to blame for the mongrel and high-sounding words heard in the United States, especially those derived from the Latin or the Greek. The oratory of political campaigns gives rise to not a few astonishing Americanisms, and our humorists have coined many more that are beloved by the public. Persons of fair education, who, as we learn from their talk, engage in avocations, reside in a mansion, wear pants, donate to charities, ride to the metropolis in a smoker, retire to bed, and have proclivities, must be expected to use also enthuse, funeralize, saleslady, and shootist, when they find them in their favorite journals; but criticism under this head comes with little grace from the English, whose leaderette is as absurd as our editorial paragraph, and agricultural laborer, a clumsy name for him whom we term a farmhand. Our colleges, Yale in particular, are