Changed Meanings

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 ofto 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 manner they changed the significance ofpond, as I have pointed out. So, too, withcreek. 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 oflotto designate aparcelof 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,[Pg052]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 thatlotorparcelof land."[28]Other examples of the application of old words to new purposes are afforded byfreshet,barnandteam. Afreshet, in eighteenth century English, meant any stream of fresh water; the colonists made it signify an inundation. Abarnwas a house or shed for storing crops; in the colonies the word came to mean a place for keeping cattle also. Ateam, in English, was a pair of draft horses; in the colonies it came to mean both horses and vehicle.

The process is even more clearly shown in the history of such words ascornandshoe.Corn, in orthodox English, means grain for human consumption, and especially wheat,e. g., theCornLaws. The earliest settlers, following this usage, gave the name ofIndian cornto what the Spaniards, following the Indians themselves, had calledmaíz. But gradually the adjective fell off, and by the middle of the eighteenth centurymaizewas called simplycorn, and grains in general were calledbreadstuffs. Thomas Hutchinson, discoursing to George III in 1774, usedcornin this restricted sense, speaking of "rye andcornmixed." "Whatcorn?" asked George. "Indian corn," explained Hutchinson, "or, as it is called in authors,maize."[29]So withshoe. In English it meant (and still means) a topless article of foot-wear, but the colonists extended its meaning to varieties covering the ankle, thus displacing the Englishboot, which they reserved for foot coverings reaching at least to the knee. To designate the Englishshoethey began to use the wordslipper. This distinction between English and American usage still prevails, despite the affectation which has lately sought to reviveboot, and with it its derivatives,boot-shopandbootmaker.

Store,shop,lumber,pie,dry-goods,cracker,rockandpartridgeamong nouns andto haul,to jew,to notifyandto heftamong verbs offer further examples of changed meanings. Down to the[Pg053]middle of the eighteenth centuryshopcontinued to designate a retail establishment in America, as it does in England to this day.Storewas 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 theMassachusetts Spyfor "aplaceas aclerkin astore" (three Americanisms in a row!). Soon afterwardshopbegan to acquire its special American meaning as a factory,e. g.,machine-shop. Meanwhilestorecompletely displacedshopin the English sense, and it remained for a late flowering of Anglomania, as in the case ofbootandshoe, to restore, in a measure, thestatus quo ante.Lumber, in eighteenth century English, meant disused furniture, and this is its common meaning in England today. But the colonists early employed it to designate timber, and that use of it is now universal in America. Its familiar derivatives,e. g.,lumber-yard,lumberman,lumberjack, greatly reinforce this usage.Pie, in English, means a meat-pie; in American it means a fruit-pie. The English call a fruit-pie atart; the Americans call a meat-pie apot-pie.Dry-goods, in England, means "non-liquid goods, as corn" (i. e., wheat); in the United States the term means "textile fabrics or wares."[30]The difference had appeared before 1725.Rock, in English, always means a large mass; in America it may mean a small stone, as inrock-pileandto throw a rock. The Puritans were puttingrocksinto the foundations of their meeting-houses so early as 1712.[31]Crackerbegan to be used forbiscuitbefore the Revolution.Taverndisplacedinnat the same time. As forpartridge, it is cited by a late authority[32]as a salient example of changed meaning, along withcornandstore. 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[Pg054]other tetraonoid birds. This confusion goes back to colonial times. So withrabbit. Properly speaking, there are no native rabbits in the United States; they are all hares. But the early colonists, for some unknown reason, dropped the wordhareout 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.

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 devisedto jew downto indicate an effort to work a reduction in price.To heft, in English, means to lift; 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 ofMissorMis'forMrs.. It was so widespread by 1790 that on November 17 of that year Webster solemnly denounced it in theAmerican Mercury.

§ 5

Archaic English Words—Most of the colonists who lived along the American seaboard in 1750 were the descendants of immigrants who had come in fully a century before; after the first settlements there had been much less fresh immigration than many latter-day writers have assumed. According to Prescott F. Hall, "the population of New England ... at the date of the Revolutionary War ... was produced out of an immigration of about 20,000 personswho arrived before 1640,"[33]and we have Franklin's authority for the statement that the total population of the colonies in 1751, then about 1,000,000, had been[Pg055]produced from an original immigration of less than 80,000.[34]Even at that early day, indeed, the colonists had begun to feel that they were distinctly separated, in culture and customs, from the mother-country,[35]and there were signs of the rise of a new native aristocracy, entirely distinct from the older aristocracy of the royal governors' courts.[36]The enormous difficulties of communication with England helped to foster this sense of separation. The round trip across the ocean occupied the better part of a year, and was hazardous and expensive; a colonist who had made it was a marked man,—as Hawthorne said, "thepetit-maîtreof the colonies." Nor was there any very extensive exchange of ideas, for though most of the books read in the colonies came from England, the great majority of the colonists, down to the middle of the century, seem to have read little save the Bible and biblical commentaries, and in the native literature of the time one seldom comes upon any reference to the English authors who were glorifying the period of the Restoration and the reign of Anne. Moreover, after 1760 the colonial eyes were upon France rather than upon England, and Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire and the Encyclopedists began to be familiar names to thousands who were scarcely aware of Addison and Steele, or even of the great Elizabethans.[37]

The result of this isolation, on the one hand, was that proliferation of the colonial speech which I have briefly reviewed, and on the other hand, the preservation of many words and phrases that gradually became obsolete in England. The Pilgrims of 1620 brought over with them the English of James I and the Revised[Pg056]Version, and their descendants of a century later, inheriting it, allowed its fundamentals to be little changed by the academic overhauling that the mother tongue was put to during the early part of the eighteenth century. In part they were ignorant of this overhauling, and in part they were indifferent to it. Whenever the new usage differed from that of the Bible they were inclined to remain faithful to the Bible, not only because of its pious authority but also because of the superior pull of its imminent and constant presence. Thus when an artificial prudery in English ordered the abandonment of the Anglo-Saxonsickfor the Gothicill, the colonies refused to follow, forsickwas in both the Old Testament and the New;[38]and that refusal remains in force to this day.

A very large number of words and phrases, many of them now exclusively American, are similar survivals from the English of the seventeenth century, long since obsolete or merely provincial in England. Among nouns Thornton notesfox-fire,flap-jack,jeans,molasses,beef(to designate the live animal),chinch,cord-wood,homespun,ice-cream,julepandswingle-tree; Halliwell[39]addsandiron,bay-window,cesspool,clodhopper,cross-purposes,greenhorn,loophole,ragamuffin,riff-raff,rigmaroleandtrash; and other authorities citestock(for cattle),fall(for autumn),offal,din,underpinningandadze.Bub, used in addressing a boy, is very old English, but survives only in American.Flap-jackgoes back to Piers Plowman, but has been obsolete in England for two centuries.Muss, in the sense of a row, is also obsolete over there, but it is to be found in "Anthony and Cleopatra."Char, as a noun, disappeared from English a long time ago, but it survives in American aschore. Among the adjectives similarly preserved areto whittle,to wiltandto approbate.To guess, in the American sense ofto suppose, is to be found in "Henry VI":[Pg057]

Not all together; better far, Iguess,That we do make our entrance several ways.

In "Measure for Measure" Escalus says "Iguessnot" to Angelo. The New English Dictionary offers examples much older—from Chaucer, Wyclif and Gower.To interviewis in Dekker.To loan, in the American sense of to lend, is in 34 and 35 Henry VIII, but it dropped out of use in England early in the eighteenth century, and all the leading dictionaries, both English and American, now call it an Americanism.[40]To fellowship, once in good American use but now reduced to a provincialism, is in Chaucer. Evento hustle, it appears, is ancient. Among adjectives,homely, which means only homelike or unadorned in England, was used in its American sense of plain-featured by both Shakespeare and Milton. Other such survivors areburly,catty-cornered,likely,deft,copious,scantandornate. Perhapscleveralso belongs to this category, that is, in the American sense of amiable.

"Our ancestors," said James Russell Lowell, "unhappily could bring over no English better than Shakespeare's." Shakespeare died in 1616; the Pilgrims landed four years later; Jamestown was founded in 1607. As we have seen, the colonists, saving a few superior leaders, were men of small sensitiveness to the refinements of life and speech: soldiers of fortune, amateur theologians, younger sons, neighborhood "advanced thinkers," bankrupts, jobless workmen, decayed gentry, and other such fugitives from culture—in brief, Philistines of the sort who join tin-pot fraternal orders today, and march in parades, and whoop for the latest mountebanks in politics. There was thus a touch of rhetoric in Lowell's saying that they spoke the English of Shakespeare; as well argue that the London grocers of 1885 spoke the English of Pater. But in a larger sense he said truly, for these men at least brought with them the vocabulary of Shakespeare—or a part of it,—even if the uses he made of it were beyond their comprehension, and they also brought with[Pg058]them that sense of ease in the language, that fine disdain for formality, that bold experimentalizing in words, which was so peculiarly Elizabethan. There were no grammarians in that day; there were no purists that anyone listened to; it was a case of saying your say in the easiest and most satisfying way. In remote parts of the United States there are still direct and almost pure-blooded descendants of those seventeenth century colonists. Go among them, and you will hear more words from the Shakespearean vocabulary, still alive and in common service, than anywhere else in the world, and more of the loose and brilliant syntax of that time, and more of its gipsy phrases.[41]

§ 6

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 philologists, or, perhaps more accurately, our lack of philologists. What Sweet did to clear up the history of English pronunciation,[42]and what Wilhelm Corssen did for Latin, no American professor 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.

One of these errors, chiefly prevalent in New England, is that the so-called Boston pronunciation, with its broada's (makinglast,pathandauntalmost assonant withbar) comes down unbrokenly from the day of the first settlements, and that it is in consequence superior in authority to the pronunciation of the[Pg059]rest of the country, with its flata's (making the same words assonant withban). A glance through Webster's "Dissertations" is sufficient to show that the flatawas in use in New England in 1789, for the pronunciation of such words aswrath,bathandpath, as given by him, makes them rhyme withhath.[43]Moreover, he givesauntthe samea-sound. From other sources come indications that theawas likewise flattened in such words asplant,basket,branch,dance,blast,commandandcastle, and even inbalmandcalm. Changes in the sound of the letter have been going on in English ever since the Middle English period,[44]and according to Lounsbury[45]they have moved toward the disappearance of the Continentala, "the fundamental vowel-tone of the human voice." Grandgent, another authority,[46]says that it became flattened "by the sixteenth century" and that "until 1780 or thereabouts the standard language had no broada." Even in such words asfather,carandaskthe flatawas universally used. Sheridan, in the dictionary he published in 1780,[47]actually gave noah-sound in his list of vowels. This habit of flatting theahad been brought over, of course, by the early colonists, and was as general in America, in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, as in England. Benjamin Franklin, when he wrote his "Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling," in 1768, apparently had no suspicion that any otherawas possible. But between 1780 and 1790, according to Grandgent, a sudden fashion for the broada(not theaw-sound, as infall, but the Continental sound as infar) arose in England,[48]and this fashion soon found servile imitation in Boston. But it was as much an affectation in those[Pg060]days as it is today, and Webster indicated the fact pretty plainly in his "Dissertations." How, despite his opposition, the broadaprevailed East of the Connecticut river, and how, in the end, he himself yielded to it, and even tried to force it upon the whole nation—this will be rehearsed in the next chapter.

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 longe-sound inheard. Webster says that the custom of rhymingheardwithbirdinstead of withfearedcame 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 rhymingdeafwithleaf, and protests against inserting ay-sound before theuin such words asnature. Franklin's authority stands behindgitforget. This pronunciation, according to Menner,[49]was correct in seventeenth century England, and perhaps down to the middle of the next century. So was the use of the Continentali-sound inoblige, making itobleege. 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 longi-sound in such words asmotive, nor for the corruption ofmercytomarcy. Webster denounced both of these barbarisms. The second he ascribed somewhat lamely to the fact that the letterris calledar, and proposed to dispose of it by changing theartoer.

As for the consonants, the colonists seem to have resisted valiantly that tendency to slide over them which arose in England after the Restoration. Franklin, in 1768, still retained the sound oflin such words aswouldandshould, a usage not met with in England after the year 1700. In the same way, according to Menner, thewinswordwas sounded in America "for[Pg061]some time after Englishmen had abandoned it." The sensitive ear of Henry James detected an unpleasantr-sound in the speech of Americans, long ago got rid of by the English, so late as 1905; he even charged that it was inserted gratuitously in innocent words.[50]The obvious slurring of the consonants by Southerners is explained by a recent investigator[51]on the ground that it began in England during the reign of Charles II, and that most of the Southern colonists came to the New World at that time. The court of Charles, it is argued, was under French influence, due to the king's long residence in France and his marriage to Henrietta Marie. Charles "objected to the inharmonious contractionswill'nt(orwolln't) andwasn'tandweren't... and set the fashion of using the softly euphoniouswon'tandwan't, which are used in speaking to this day by the best class of Southerners." A more direct French influence upon Southern pronunciation is also pointed out. "With full knowledge of hisg'sand hisr's, ... [the Southerner] sees fit to glide over them, ... and he carries over the consonant ending one word to the vowel beginning the next, just as the Frenchman does." The political importance of the South, in the years between the Mecklenburg Declaration and the adoption of the Constitution, tended to force its provincialisms upon the common language. Many of the acknowledged leaders of the nascent nation were Southerners, and their pronunciation, as well as their phrases, must have become familiar everywhere. Pickering gives us a hint, indeed, at the process whereby their usage influenced that of the rest of the people.[52]

The Americans early dropped theh-sound in such words aswhenandwhere, but so far as I can determine they never elided it at the beginning of words, save in the case ofherb, and a few others. This elision is commonly spoken of as a cockney vulgarism, but it has extended to the orthodox English speech. Inostlerthe initialhis openly left off; inhotelandhospitalit is[Pg062]seldom sounded, even by the most careful Englishmen. Certain English words inh, in which thehis now sounded, betray its former silence by the fact that notabutanis still put before them. It is still good English usage to writean hotelandan historical; it is the American usage to writea hotelanda historical.

The great authority of Webster was sufficient to establish the American pronunciation ofschedule. In England theschis always given the soft sound, but Webster decided for the hard sound, as inscheme. The variance persists to this day. The name of the last letter of the alphabet, which is alwayszedin English, is usually madezeein the United States. Thornton shows that this Americanism arose in the eighteenth century.

FOOTNOTES:[1]Bristed was a grandson of John Jacob Astor and was educated at Cambridge. He contributed an extremely sagacious essay on The English Language in America to a volume of Cambridge Essays published by a group of young Cambridge men; London, 1855.[2]Vol. i, p. vi.[3]Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling; Philadelphia, 1768.[4]Dec. 26, 1789. The Works of B. Franklin, ed. by A. F. Smyth; New York, 1905, vol. i, p. 40.[5]The Druid, No. 5; reprinted in Witherspoon's Collected Works, edited by Ashbel Green, vol. iv; New York, 1800-1.[6]Vide, in addition to the citations in the text, theBritish Critic, Nov. 1793; Feb. 1810; theCritical Review, July 1807; Sept. 1809; theMonthly Review, May 1808; theEclectic Review, Aug. 1813.[7]1815, pp. 307-14; reprinted in his Remarks on National Literature, Boston, 1823.[8]American English,North American Review, April, 1883.[9]A number of such Indian words are preserved in the nomenclature of Tammany Hall and in that of the Improved Order of Red Men, an organization with more than 500,000 members. The Red Men, borrowing from the Indians, thus name the months, in order:Cold Moon,Snow,Worm,Plant,Flower,Hot,Buck,Sturgeon,Corn,Travelers',BeaverandHunting. They call their officersincohonee,sachem,wampum-keeper, etc. But such terms, of course, are not in general use.[10]A long list of such obsolete Americanisms is given by Clapin in his Dictionary.[11]An Account of the History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations....; Phila., 1818.[12]Cf.Hans Brinker, by Mary Maples Dodge; New York, 1891.[13](a) A chest of drawers, (b) a government office. In both senses the word is rare in English, though its use by the French is familiar. In the United States its use in (b) has been extended,e. g., inemployment-bureau.[14]FromSint-Klaas—Saint Nicholas.Santa Claushas also become familiar to the English, but the Oxford Dictionary still calls the name an Americanism.[15]The spelling is variouslysauerkraut,saurkraut,sourkrautandsourkrout.[16]Cf.The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. i, pp. 14 and 22.[17]The American origin of this last word has been disputed, but the weight of evidence seems to show that it was borrowed from therapidesof the French Canadians. It is familiar in the United States and Canada, but seldom met with in England.[18]Log-cabincame in later. Thornton's first quotation is dated 1818. TheLog-Cabincampaign was in 1840.[19]Theo. Roosevelt: Gouverneur Morris; Boston, 1888, p. 104.[20]William Brown Meloney: The Heritage of Tyre; New York, 1916, p. 15.[21]Videhis preface to Every-Day English, pp. xxi and xv, respectively.[22]VideLyell's Travels in North America; London, 1845.[23]Pref. to the Biglow Papers, 2nd series, 1866.[24]Reprinted in Helpful Hints in Writing and Reading, comp. by Grenville Kleiser; New York, 1911, pp. 15-17.[25]A. Cleveland Coxe: Americanisms in England,Forum, Oct., 1886.[26]Edwin S. Gould: Good English, or, Popular Errors in Language: New York, 1867; pp. 25-27.[27]Cf.Ch. I, § 5, and Ch. V, § 1.[28]Lottappears in the Connecticut Code of 1650.Videthe edition of Andrus; Hartford, 1822. On page 35 is "their landes,lottsand accommodations." On page 46 is "meadow and homelotts."[29]VideHutchinson's Diary, vol. i, p. 171; London, 1883-6.[30]The definitions are from the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (1914) and the Standard Dictionary (1906), respectively.[31]S. Sewall: Diary, April 14, 1712: "I lay'd aRockin the North-east corner of the Foundation of the Meeting-house."[32]The Americana, ...art.Americanisms: New York, 1903-6.[33]Immigration, 2nd ed.; New York, 1913, p. 4. Sir J. R. Seeley says, in The Expansion of England (2nd ed.; London, 1895, p. 84) that the emigration from England to New England, after the meeting of the Long Parliament (1640), was so slight for a full century that it barely balanced "the counter-movement of colonists quitting the colony." Richard Hildreth, in his History of the United States, vol. i, p. 267, says that the departures actually exceeded the arrivals.[34]Works, ed. by Sparks: vol. ii, p. 319.[35]Cf.Pehr Kalm: Travels into N. America, tr. by J. R. Forster, 3 vols.; London, 1770-71.[36]Sydney George Fisher: The True Story of the American Revolution; Phila. and London, 1902, p. 27. See also John T. Morse's Life of Thomas Jefferson in the American Statesmen series (Boston and New York, 1898), p. 2. Morse points out that Washington, Jefferson and Madison belonged to this new aristocracy, not to the old one.[37]Cf.the Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. i, p. 119. Francis Jeffrey, writing on Franklin in theEdinburgh Reviewfor July, 1806, hailed him as a prodigy who had arisen "in a society where there was no relish and no encouragement for literature."[38]Examples of its use in the American sense, considered vulgar and even indecent in England, are to be found in Gen. xlviii, 1; II Kings viii, 7; John xi, 1, and Acts ix, 37.[39]J. O. Halliwell (Phillips): A Dictionary of Archaisms and Provincialisms, Containing Words now Obsolete in England All of Which are Familiar and in Common Use in America, 2nd ed.; London, 1850.[40]An interesting discussion of this verb appeared in theNew York Sun, Nov. 27, 1914.[41]Cf.J. H. Combs: Old, Early and Elizabethan English in the Southern Mountains,Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. iv, pp. 283-97.[42]Henry Sweet: A History of English Sounds; London, 1876; Oxford, 1888.[43]P. 124.[44]Cf.Art.Changes in the Language Since Shakespeare's Time, by W. Murison, in The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xiv, p. 485.[45]English Spelling and Spelling Reform; New York, 1909.[46]C. H. Grandgent: Fashion and the BroadA,Nation, Jan. 7, 1915.[47]Thomas Sheridan: A Complete Dictionary of the English Language; London, 1780.[48]It first appeared in Robert Nares' Elements of Orthography; London, 1784. In 1791 it received full approbation in John Walker's Critical Pronouncing Dictionary.[49]Robert J. Menner; The Pronunciation of English in America,Atlantic Monthly, March, 1915.[50]The Question of Our Speech; Boston and New York, 1906, pp. 27-29.[51]Elizabeth H. Hancock: Southern Speech,Neale's Monthly, Nov., 1913, pp. 606-7.[52]Videhis remarks onbalancein his Vocabulary. See also Marsh, p. 671.

[1]Bristed was a grandson of John Jacob Astor and was educated at Cambridge. He contributed an extremely sagacious essay on The English Language in America to a volume of Cambridge Essays published by a group of young Cambridge men; London, 1855.

[2]Vol. i, p. vi.

[3]Scheme for a New Alphabet and a Reformed Mode of Spelling; Philadelphia, 1768.

[4]Dec. 26, 1789. The Works of B. Franklin, ed. by A. F. Smyth; New York, 1905, vol. i, p. 40.

[5]The Druid, No. 5; reprinted in Witherspoon's Collected Works, edited by Ashbel Green, vol. iv; New York, 1800-1.

[6]Vide, in addition to the citations in the text, theBritish Critic, Nov. 1793; Feb. 1810; theCritical Review, July 1807; Sept. 1809; theMonthly Review, May 1808; theEclectic Review, Aug. 1813.

[7]1815, pp. 307-14; reprinted in his Remarks on National Literature, Boston, 1823.

[8]American English,North American Review, April, 1883.

[9]A number of such Indian words are preserved in the nomenclature of Tammany Hall and in that of the Improved Order of Red Men, an organization with more than 500,000 members. The Red Men, borrowing from the Indians, thus name the months, in order:Cold Moon,Snow,Worm,Plant,Flower,Hot,Buck,Sturgeon,Corn,Travelers',BeaverandHunting. They call their officersincohonee,sachem,wampum-keeper, etc. But such terms, of course, are not in general use.

[10]A long list of such obsolete Americanisms is given by Clapin in his Dictionary.

[11]An Account of the History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations....; Phila., 1818.

[12]Cf.Hans Brinker, by Mary Maples Dodge; New York, 1891.

[13](a) A chest of drawers, (b) a government office. In both senses the word is rare in English, though its use by the French is familiar. In the United States its use in (b) has been extended,e. g., inemployment-bureau.

[14]FromSint-Klaas—Saint Nicholas.Santa Claushas also become familiar to the English, but the Oxford Dictionary still calls the name an Americanism.

[15]The spelling is variouslysauerkraut,saurkraut,sourkrautandsourkrout.

[16]Cf.The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. i, pp. 14 and 22.

[17]The American origin of this last word has been disputed, but the weight of evidence seems to show that it was borrowed from therapidesof the French Canadians. It is familiar in the United States and Canada, but seldom met with in England.

[18]Log-cabincame in later. Thornton's first quotation is dated 1818. TheLog-Cabincampaign was in 1840.

[19]Theo. Roosevelt: Gouverneur Morris; Boston, 1888, p. 104.

[20]William Brown Meloney: The Heritage of Tyre; New York, 1916, p. 15.

[21]Videhis preface to Every-Day English, pp. xxi and xv, respectively.

[22]VideLyell's Travels in North America; London, 1845.

[23]Pref. to the Biglow Papers, 2nd series, 1866.

[24]Reprinted in Helpful Hints in Writing and Reading, comp. by Grenville Kleiser; New York, 1911, pp. 15-17.

[25]A. Cleveland Coxe: Americanisms in England,Forum, Oct., 1886.

[26]Edwin S. Gould: Good English, or, Popular Errors in Language: New York, 1867; pp. 25-27.

[27]Cf.Ch. I, § 5, and Ch. V, § 1.

[28]Lottappears in the Connecticut Code of 1650.Videthe edition of Andrus; Hartford, 1822. On page 35 is "their landes,lottsand accommodations." On page 46 is "meadow and homelotts."

[29]VideHutchinson's Diary, vol. i, p. 171; London, 1883-6.

[30]The definitions are from the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (1914) and the Standard Dictionary (1906), respectively.

[31]S. Sewall: Diary, April 14, 1712: "I lay'd aRockin the North-east corner of the Foundation of the Meeting-house."

[32]The Americana, ...art.Americanisms: New York, 1903-6.

[33]Immigration, 2nd ed.; New York, 1913, p. 4. Sir J. R. Seeley says, in The Expansion of England (2nd ed.; London, 1895, p. 84) that the emigration from England to New England, after the meeting of the Long Parliament (1640), was so slight for a full century that it barely balanced "the counter-movement of colonists quitting the colony." Richard Hildreth, in his History of the United States, vol. i, p. 267, says that the departures actually exceeded the arrivals.

[34]Works, ed. by Sparks: vol. ii, p. 319.

[35]Cf.Pehr Kalm: Travels into N. America, tr. by J. R. Forster, 3 vols.; London, 1770-71.

[36]Sydney George Fisher: The True Story of the American Revolution; Phila. and London, 1902, p. 27. See also John T. Morse's Life of Thomas Jefferson in the American Statesmen series (Boston and New York, 1898), p. 2. Morse points out that Washington, Jefferson and Madison belonged to this new aristocracy, not to the old one.

[37]Cf.the Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. i, p. 119. Francis Jeffrey, writing on Franklin in theEdinburgh Reviewfor July, 1806, hailed him as a prodigy who had arisen "in a society where there was no relish and no encouragement for literature."

[38]Examples of its use in the American sense, considered vulgar and even indecent in England, are to be found in Gen. xlviii, 1; II Kings viii, 7; John xi, 1, and Acts ix, 37.

[39]J. O. Halliwell (Phillips): A Dictionary of Archaisms and Provincialisms, Containing Words now Obsolete in England All of Which are Familiar and in Common Use in America, 2nd ed.; London, 1850.

[40]An interesting discussion of this verb appeared in theNew York Sun, Nov. 27, 1914.

[41]Cf.J. H. Combs: Old, Early and Elizabethan English in the Southern Mountains,Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. iv, pp. 283-97.

[42]Henry Sweet: A History of English Sounds; London, 1876; Oxford, 1888.

[43]P. 124.

[44]Cf.Art.Changes in the Language Since Shakespeare's Time, by W. Murison, in The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xiv, p. 485.

[45]English Spelling and Spelling Reform; New York, 1909.

[46]C. H. Grandgent: Fashion and the BroadA,Nation, Jan. 7, 1915.

[47]Thomas Sheridan: A Complete Dictionary of the English Language; London, 1780.

[48]It first appeared in Robert Nares' Elements of Orthography; London, 1784. In 1791 it received full approbation in John Walker's Critical Pronouncing Dictionary.

[49]Robert J. Menner; The Pronunciation of English in America,Atlantic Monthly, March, 1915.

[50]The Question of Our Speech; Boston and New York, 1906, pp. 27-29.

[51]Elizabeth H. Hancock: Southern Speech,Neale's Monthly, Nov., 1913, pp. 606-7.

[52]Videhis remarks onbalancein his Vocabulary. See also Marsh, p. 671.

[Pg063]toc

§ 1

The New Nation—The American language thus began to be recognizably differentiated from English in both vocabulary and 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 pretentions 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 still 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 Farewell 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[Pg064]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 ofSturm und Drangwhose gigantic 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, even today) exhibited an undisguised Anglomania, and looked forward confidently to arapprochementwith the mother country.[3]This Anglomania showed itself, not only in ceaseless political agitation, but also in an elaborate imitation of English manners. We have already seen, on Noah Webster's authority, how it even extended to the pronunciation of the language.

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[Pg065]old 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. 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,[4]and have never ratified it, in fact, to this day. Democracy was still experimental, doubtful, full of gunpowder. 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.

It was reserved for Andrew Jackson, a man genuinely of the people, to lead and visualize the rise of the lower orders. Jackson, in his way, was the archetype of the new American—ignorant, pushful, impatient of restraint and precedent, an iconoclast, a Philistine, an Anglophobe in every fibre. He came from the extreme backwoods and his youth was passed amid surroundings but little removed from downright savagery.[5][Pg066]Thousands of other young Americans like him were growing up at the same time—youngsters filled with a vast impatience of all precedent and authority, revilers of all that had come down from an elder day, incorrigible libertarians. They swarmed across the mountains and down the great rivers, wrestling with the naked wilderness and setting up a casual, impromptu sort of civilization where the Indian still menaced. Schools were few and rudimentary; there was not the remotest approach to a cultivated society; any effort to mimic the amenities of the East, or of the mother country, in manner or even in speech, met with instant derision. It was in these surroundings and at this time that the thorough-going American of tradition was born: blatant, illogical, elate, "greeting the embarrassed gods" uproariously and matching "with Destiny for beers." Jackson was unmistakably of that company in his every instinct and idea, and it was his fate to give a new and unshakable confidence to its aspiration at the Battle of New Orleans. Thereafter all doubts began to die out; the new republic was turning out a success. And with success came a vast increase in the national egoism. The hordes of pioneers rolled down the western valleys and on to the great plains.[6]America began to stand for something quite new in the world—in government, in law, in public and private morals, in customs and habits of mind, in the minutia of social intercourse. And simultaneously the voice of America began to take on its characteristic twang, and the speech of America began to differentiate itself boldly and unmistakably from the speech of England. The average Philadelphian or Bostonian of 1790 had not the slightest difficulty in making himself understood by a visiting Englishman. But the average Ohio boatman of 1810 or plainsman of 1815 was already speaking a dialect that the Englishman would have shrunk from as barbarous and unintelligible, and before long it began to leave[Pg067]its mark upon and to get direction and support from a distinctively national literature.

That literature, however, was very slow in coming to a dignified, confident and autonomous estate. Down to Jefferson's day it was almost wholly polemical, and hence lacking in the finer values; he himself, an insatiable propagandist and controversialist, was one of its chief ornaments. "The novelists and the historians, the essayists and the poets, whose names come to mind when American literature is mentioned," says a recent literary historian, "have all flourished since 1800."[7]Pickering, so late as 1816, said that "in this country we can hardly be said to have any authors by profession." It was a true saying, though the new day was about to dawn; Bryant had already written "Thanatopsis" and was destined to publish it the year following. Difficulties of communication hampered the circulation of the few native books that were written; it was easier for a man in the South to get books from London than to get them from Boston or New York, and the lack of a copyright treaty with England flooded the country with cheap English editions. "It is much to be regretted," wrote Dr. David Ramsay, of Charleston, S. C., to Noah Webster in 1806, "that there is so little intercourse in a literary way between the states. As soon as a book of general utility comes out in any state it should be for sale in all of them." Ramsay asked for little; the most he could imagine was a sale of 2,000 copies for an American work in America. But even that was far beyond the possibilities of the time.

An external influence of great potency helped to keep the national literature scant and timorous during those early and perilous days. It was the extraordinary animosity of the English critics, then at the zenith of their pontifical authority, to all books of American origin or flavor. This animosity, culminating in Sydney Smith's famous sneer,[8]was but part of a[Pg068]larger hostility to all things American, from political theories to table manners. The American, after the war of 1812, 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 theQuarterly Review, theEdinburgh, theForeign Quarterly, theBritish RevieworBlackwood's, for a generation following 1814, in which he was not stupendously assaulted. Gifford, Sydney Smith and the poet Southey became specialists in this business; it took on the character of a holy war; even such mild men as Wordsworth were recruited for 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. TheForeign Quarterly, summing up in January, 1844, pronounced them "horn-handed and pig-headed, hard, persevering, unscrupulous, carnivorous, with a genius for lying." Various Americans went to the defense of their 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 an Englishman, 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 avalanche of denunciation kept up, and even down to a few years ago it was very uncommon for an Englishman to write of American politics, or manners, or literature without betraying his dislike. Not, indeed, until the Prussian began monopolizing the whole British talent for horror and invective did the Yankee escape the lash.[9]

This gigantic pummelling, in the long run, was destined to encourage an independent spirit in the national literature, if[Pg069]only by a process of mingled resentment and despair, but for some time its chief effect was to make American writers of a more delicate aspiration extremely self-conscious and diffident. The educated classes, even against their will, were influenced 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 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 theQuarterly Review, made by Gifford in 1828, on the ground that "theReviewhas 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[Pg070]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 terror or had much influence. 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?"

In brief, the national feeling, long delayed at birth, finally leaped into being in amazing vigor. "One can get an idea of the strength of that feeling," says R. O. Williams, "by glancing at almost any book taken at random from the American publications of the period. Belief in the grand future of the United States is the key-note of everything said and done. All things American are to be grand—our territory, population, products, wealth, science, art—but especially our political institutions and literature. The unbounded confidence in the material development of the country which now characterizes the extreme northwest of the United States prevailed as strongly throughout the eastern part of the Union during the first thirty years of the century; and over and above a belief in, and concern for, materialistic progress, there were enthusiastic anticipations of achievements in all the moral and intellectual fields of national[Pg071]greatness."[10]Nor was that vast optimism wholly without warrant. An American literature was actually coming into being, and with a wall of hatred and contempt shutting in England, the new American writers were beginning to turn to the Continent for inspiration and encouragement. Irving had already drunk at Spanish springs; Emerson and Bayard Taylor were to receive powerful impulses from Germany, following Ticknor, Bancroft and Everett before them; Bryant was destined to go back to the classics. Moreover, Cooper and John P. Kennedy had shown the way to native sources of literary material, and Longfellow was making ready to follow them; novels in imitation of English models were no longer heard of; the ground was preparing for "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Finally, Webster himself, as Williams demonstrated, worked better than he knew. His American Dictionary was not only thoroughly American: it was superior to any of the current dictionaries of the English, so much so that for a good many years it remained "a sort of mine for British lexicography to exploit."

Thus all hesitations disappeared, and there arose a national consciousness so soaring and so blatant that it began to dismiss all British usage and opinion as puerile and idiotic. William L. Marcy, when Secretary of State under Pierce (1853-57), issued a circular to all American diplomatic and consular officers, loftily bidding them employ only "the American language" in communicating with him. The Legislature of Indiana, in an act approved February 15, 1838, establishing the state university at Bloomington,[11]provided that it should instruct the youth of the new commonwealth (it had been admitted to the Union in 1816) "in the American, learned and foreign languages ... and literature." Such grandiose pronunciamentos[Pg072]well indicate and explain the temper of the era.[12]It was a time of expansion and braggadocia. The new republic would not only produce a civilization and a literature of its own; it would show the way for all other civilizations and literatures. Rufus Wilmot Griswold, the enemy of Poe, rose from his decorous Baptist pew to protest that so much patriotism amounted to insularity and absurdity, but there seems to have been no one to second the motion. It took, indeed, the vast shock of the Civil War to unhorse the optimists. While the Jackson influence survived, it was the almost unanimous national conviction that "he who dallies is a dastard, and he who doubts is damned."

§ 2

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