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AMERICANISMS;

THE ENGLISH OF THE NEW WORLD.

By
M. SCHELE DE VERE, LLD.,

PROFESSOR OF MODERN LANGUAGES IN THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA,
AUTHOR OF “STUDIES IN ENGLISH,” Frc.

NEW YORK:
CHARLES SCRIBNER & COMPANY.
1872.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by
CHARLES SCRIBNER & CO.,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

Seer

JOSEPI J. LITTLE,
Stereotyper, Electrotyper, and Printer,
108 to 114 Wooster St., N. Y.
PREFACE.

Mr. Marcy, when Secretary of State, issued a circular to the diplo-
matic and consular agents of the United Statesin foreign countries,
requiring them to make all communications to his department in
the American Language. The order excited much comment
abroad and at home, and the American Language, thus for the
first time introduced into official documents, was everywhere
gravely discussed. Did the Americans really have an idiom of
their own ? or did the order refer to the Choctaw or Cherokee,
the Sioux or Comanche tongue? A few years later the same term
reappeared in a diplomatic circular of gravest import. The late
Emperor Alexander of Russia, smarting under the defeat he had
suffered in the Crimea at the combined hands of the French and
the English, decreed that certain documents should be translated
from the Russian into the American tongue. The Czar was, as
R. W. Emerson would say, wiser than he knew, and unconsciously
uttered a half-truth.

But a half-truth only, for as yet there is no American Language.
We are far too practical a people, not to appreciate fully all the
admirable qualities of the speech of our fathers, and are really far
too busy with the task allotted us by Providence of creating a
New World, to find time for studying grammar and making
words. It is only now and then, when the old tools cannot do the
new work required of them, that we cast them aside and invent a
better one ; or perhaps in the rich virgin soil of the great West an
old root sends up new suckers, full of vigor and new meaning,
but still bearing the image of the parent stock in all their fea-
4 PREFACE.

tures. As English itself is omnivorous, and this great continent
has opened its doors wide to many millions of men of other races,
we have, besides, freely admitted the useful foreign word with the
foreign immigrant and granted to both full citizenship after a
short trial.

Hence we still speak English, but we talk American. The
native of the New World may, in dress and appearance, in culture
and refinement, pass unnoticed in European society, but no soon-
er does he open his lips, than his intonation, choice of words, and
structure of sentence, betray his foreign birth. The difference is,
in reality, very slight, but it is characteristic, and as there is no
better key to the habits and temper of a people, than the study of
its watchwords and nicknames, its likes and dislikes of terms and
pbrases, we have endeavored to collect enongh of these peculiari-
ties to furnish an idea of the way we talk.

The whole literature of Americanisms is so far limited to three
works, the Vocabulary of the late John Pickering, the Dictionary
of John Russell Bartlett,and the Glossary of supposed Americanisms
by Alfred L. Elwyn. Mr. Bartlett’s admirable and exhausting work
has naturally supplied many words and a few illustrations (marked
B.) even to this compilation, nor would it have appeared desirable to
attempt a new collection, if the time between its publication and
the present, had not been unusually productive in changes and
great events. In the interval many millions of immigrants have
been added to our population, and new Territories and new.
States to our Union; a civil war of gigantic proportions has
shaken the political edifice to its foundations and altered every
feature of the aspect of society, and the mind of the whole nation
has received anew impulse. Language, always a faithful mirror of
the life of a people, has been proportionately enriched and modified.
The war alone has added a large number of new words to our
idiom; every branch of industry, every new way of thinking,
every change in politics, is fully represented by a new word or a.
PREFACE. 5

peculiar phrase. Many of these will, no doubt, pass away again,
while others will become parts of our speech; but in either case
it seemed to be desirable to record them before they are set aside
once more, or, if preserved, before their origin is forgotten.

The author has been most kindly and courteously aided by
friends and strangers. He owes especial thanks to the Hon. John
Hammond Trumbull, of Hartford, Connecticut, for a master’s
guidance in Indian matters; to Professor 8. S. Haldeman, of
Chickis, Pennsylvania, for like aid in scientific terms, and to Mr.
Hugh Blair Grigsby, of Edge Hill, Charlotte County, Virginia,
for valuable hints as to old English terms preserved in the South.
The names mentioned in the chapter on Natural History are
taken from the various publications of the Smithsonian Institu-
tion, courteously supplied by its distinguished officers.

On the othér hand, it must be stated that the task of collecting
so-called Americanisms is necessarily one of overwhelming diffi-
culty. The license of the press, the independent freedom of daily
speech, the very small number of strictly American works, and
the utter indifference of the people to the minutiez of speech, are
so many obstacles. A collection like the present must, therefore,
be unavoidably imperfect and incomplete, and the author will
feel himself amply rewarded, if his good intentions shall awaken
a deeper interest in so important a feature of our national life,
and lead to more satisfactory results hereafter.

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA,
August, 1871.
CONTENTS:

PAGE
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VI.
TRADE OF ATG IOINDSbinsicauaagin eb eesawiw ead (Fea e dad seme nea egias 295
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8 CONTENTS.

PACE
Xx.
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES ....... ccc cee eect eee e ee eeeeees 427
XI.
CANT AND SUANG yaw eck Yous a ius nee whe 4 me Mee nee nou eke 7 573
XII.
NEW WorDS AND NICKNAMES ......0.. ce ece cece eect ee ec eee een eees 653
INDER: ene x cha dud meses See Mee aeweln dele ed x Vee Seacs ane Gat 667
i.

THE INDIAN.
THE INDIAN.

“Lo, the poor Indian!”
Pope.

PROVIDENCE seems to have ordained that by an act of poetical
justice many races that have been conquered and even extermi-
nated by foreign invaders, should nevertheless survive in the
names of the great landmarks of their native land. Thus the
ancient Briton still speaks to us in the mountains and rivers of
- England, and the Indian in the geography and natural history
of the United States. The prairie and the backwoods, once the
home of the Red man, are full of his memory, and objects abound
there, known to us by names which are indigenous and peculiar
among so much that is of foreign origin or common to many
countries. The North American savages play no unimportant part
in our literature; they have their war-whoops and yells, their
paint and their feathers, in prose as well as in poetry, in Hiawatha
and in Cooper’s novels. These names and these things—though,
perhaps, not legitimately included in a very strict definition of the
term Americanisms—-are almost the only really old things which
we have, the only relics left to remind us that human beings
roamed over our hills and floated on our waters before the Pilgrims
Janded at Plymouth and brave Captain Smith sailed in his frail
boat up the Potomac.

It is much to be regretted, that the proportion of these really
ancient names is not larger, especially in our geography ; for we
could well have submitted to it, that the unfortunate race, after
becoming the victims of Anglo-Saxon enterprise, should have
taken their conquerors captive and imposed upon them their own
favorite words. Their names are so musical and full of meaning,
and ours so harsh and commonplace, that we should have been the
12 AMERICANISMS.

gainers by the exchange. There is music even in the roughest
of Indian names; and some like Susquehanna, Towa, Hochelaga,
Minnehaha, Dahlonega, and Taloolah, are smooth and melodious
almost to perfection. ‘They were at one time much more numer-
ous in the land, although, as J. K. Paulding already wrote: “the
first settlers of an Indian country not only took away from the
copper-colored villains their lands and rivers, but gave them new
names, like the gypsies, who first steal children, and then, to dis-
guise the theft, christen them anew.” (Letters from the South,
IL p. 1%.) After the successful struggle for independence, an evil
taste for modernizing set in, and, as a British writer says com-
placently, “esthetic loyalists in the mother country must have felt
avenged for their defeat in the substitution of names like Adams-
town and Gainesville for such ‘melodious syllables as heretofore
graced the village.” Even Pawcatuck (the river which divides
Connecticut and Rhode Island), and Wut-a-qut-o, properly Wica-
taquoc, are less grating upon the civilized ear than Ovid and

Palmyra, to say nothing of Sodom and Babylon, which the old ° °

Puritans inflicted, they alone knew why, upon some places in
their new dominion. There is a slight compensation for this
injury to be found in the fact that this double nomenclature at
times proves the history of certain localities. Thus we find that
in Pennsylvania the older counties bear English names, since the
English colonists used their own names by preference in those
parts of the State with which they came in contact. Northamp-
ton, Lancaster, York, Somerset, and Chester (for Cheshire), coun-
ties in the eastern and southern part of that State, show clearly
that they were the first to be colonized and named. TLehigh and
Delaware, Susquehannah and Alleghany, Juniata and Erie, on the
contrary, prove by their Indian names the change in public opin-
ion produced by the War of Independence. Later still came the
Germans, and not by conquest but by superior industry and great
thrift, became the owners of large tracts of land on which they
built their towns of Womelsdorf, Mannheim, and Hannover. Even
the religious body of Moravians, large numbers of whom settled
in this State and built here their missions and their convents, left
their mark behind them in Bethlehem and Litiz (perhaps from
laetitia?), in Shiloh and Canaan, Salem and Ephrata.

In another instance, that of Virginia, the history of the State
THE INDIAN. 13

may be read in bright letters in its local names. The first settlers,
headed by that paragon of romantic adventurers, John Smith,

“Of name
Most homely, yet unmatched in fame
By those of Arthur’s Table Round ;”

when they found themselves amid the fairest scenes of nature in
her prime, with coast, river, and woodland expanding around in
all her magnificence of novelty and extent, remembered that they
were still patriots, and their loyalty prevailed over their poetical
taste. Hence they replaced the stately and sonorous name of
Powhatan (Father of Waters) by that of the reigning monarch,
and their first permanent settlement was “Old Jamestown, on
the river James.” This inauspicious opening was followed up
through all the succeeding years, while Spenser dedicated his
wondrous allegory to “The most high, mighty, and magnificent
Empresse, renowned for pietie, virtue, and all gracious government,
Elizabeth, by the grace of God Queen of England, France, and Vir-
ginia”’—while the colony-faithfully adhered to the Stuarts and
was honored with the title of the Old Dominion—and while she
remained an ill-treated colonial dependence. There are no less
than sixteen princes and princesses inscribed on her broad lands
in as many counties, called after these royal personages, begin-
ning with Henrico, the first of the eight original shires. By
their side stand names of historic note, still sounding grand
in their ancient renown: York and Lancaster, Warwick and
Northumberland, all redolent of Shakespeare and Rapin. Then
come the governors, each one commemorated by a county, and
Patrick Henry honored by two. “Happily most of the rivers
have been allowed to retain their original appellation, and the
majestic Potomac, the Opecquon, the Rappahannock, the fourfold
Ma-Ta-Po-Ni, its banks famous as our bloodiest battle-ground
on this Continent, the Pamunkey and the Appomattox, immortal
as the closing scene of a woful struggle, and the Roanoke, all
rejoice in the beauty and dignity of their aboriginal names,
hereafter to afford full scope to the acumen of the historian and
the philologist.” (Hugh Blair Grigsby.)

For it is not only the euphony but also the historical interest
and the moral weight of these Indian names, which should have
14 AMERICANISMS.

made them sacred to our forefathers. It is the duty of the brave
man to honor the enemy whom he has conquered, and rarely has
such a conquest called forth greater virtues and more heroic cour-
age than the long and fearful struggle between the Red man and
the Saxon. What sad memories are not associated in the minds
of all Americans with the dark and bloody ground, as the present
State of Kentucky, and part of upper Ohio, were called for
many a generation! First, the ill-fated locality was shunned by
the Indians with superstitious dread, because their ancient
traditions spoke of a frightful carnage which had taken place cen-
turies before the arrival of the Europeans, on the beautiful banks
of theriver. Then immigrants settled here and there in the blood-
stained region, had suddenly been assailed and overwhelmed by
the treacherous Indians, and once more the lo¢ality became the
scene of a long, relentless struggle between two hostile races.
But not only here—everywhere in the great West—the sonorous
names of rivers and mountains are full of bright memories of
matchless heroism and resistless perseverance, and these beautiful
words ought to be treasured up and held as precious as an inher-
itance of gold. The giant Himalaya would lose half its dread
majesty, if it were rechristened Wellington, and Chimborazo would
be reduced from its grandeur under the name of Pizarro. How
much more, however, was lost when Horicon was dubbed by flat-
tering loyalists Lake George, when the silvery Winooski received
the odorous and incongrtious name of Onion River, and the hills, of
which the poet sings:
“Then did the crimson streams that flowed,
Seem like the waters of the brook
That brightly shine, that loudly dash
Far down the cliffs of Agéochook,’
Lovewel?s Flight.

began to bear the common name of White Mountains !

It is true, that occasionally efforts have been made to secure the
Indian nomenclature of well-known points, and even to imitate
the process in forming new names. Mr. Schoolcraft, himself a
master of the Ojibway dialect of the Algonquin, acted both sys-
tematically and judiciously in this matter, when his position as
Commissioner of Indian Affairs enabled him to assume authority.
Me tells us in one of his admirable and most interesting reports,
THE INDIAN. 15

that whenever a piace in the Northwest was to be named, its ex-
act situation, and the particular tribe of aborigines that inhab-
ited the neighborhood, were first carefully ascertained. Then the
most striking features of the landscape and local peculiarities were
considered, and some expression describing them was chosen and
translated into the dialect of the original occupants. Thus the
name of the lake which forms the source of the Mississippi, was
successfully formed. Mr. Schoolcraft had established the fact that
all the fanciful derivations of the name of the river were far more
poetical than true, and that Misi-sepe, as it was originally written,
meant simply Vast River, just the title which such a magnificent
river ought to have. The Mfisi, he taught us, was the same in
Missouri, in Michili Mackinac—which Father Hennepin actually
wrote Missili Mackinac—and in Michigan. How mugh more
imposing and suggestive this Indian name than the Riviere Col-
bert of Hennepin’s Louisiana, the Rividre Saint Louis of La Salle,
and the Hidden River of the Spanish discoverers! To this noble
term, a worthy companion was to be found in naming its first
fountain. Mr. Schoolcraft had discovered the latter himself when
ascending the river with his party, but too modest to give it, after
the example of other discoverers, his own name, he took the Al-
gonquin word totosh, a woman’s breast, and adding to it the usu-
al local termination of Indian words, he fused the parts into the
beautiful and appropriate word Itasca, typifying the support and
sustenance which the lake affords to the great river at its very
birth. How different was this systematic and suggestive method
of the enthusiastic philologist and philanthropic explorer, to the
popular way of bestowing names! States are created by Congress,
and encumbered with the name of the martyr president; new coun-
ties are formed within the older States, and have to bear the name
of the lucky. member of the local legislature who proposed the
measure, and towns built up by the energy and enterprise of suc-
cessful men become known as Titusville, or Bungtown. The ab-
surdity of such nomenclature was once unconsciously exhibited,
when a great. poet, unfortunately not yet known to the world at
large, incorporated in perfectly good faith, the following local
names in his National Poem:

“ Hard Scrabble, Fair Play, Nip and Tuck, and Patch,
With Catholic, Whig and Democrat to match,
16 AMERICANISMS.

Blue River, Strawberry and Hoof-Noggle steep,

And Trespass, and Slake Bag, Clay Hole deep,

Bee Town, Hard Times, and Old Rattlesnake,

Black Leg, Shingle Ridge, Babel and Stake,

Satan's Light House, Pin Hook and Dry Bone,

And Swindler’s Ridge, with hazels overgrown,

Buzzard’s Roost Injunction, and The Two Brothers,

Snake Hollow Diggings, Black Jack, Horse and others,

And Lower Coon, Stump Grove, and Red Dog bleak,

Menomenee, Rattail Ridge, may measure out this sonnet,

With Bull Branch, Upper Coon,—pour no curses on it!”
Black Hawk by Elbert H. Smith. p. 191.

Even such atrocities are, however, occasionally surpassed by will-
ful absurdities, as when a beautiful sheet of water in the State of
Vermont was wantonly deprived of its fair and legitimate Indian
name, to be called Llama water (written now Lama water) in
honor of General Wool!

The Indian names, on the other hand, which were anew given
by discoverers and persons in authority, were generally taken
from the dialects of the Algonquin languages, which Mr. School-
eraft first proposed to call by the generic name of Algic, and
which were spoken by all the tribes of New England, the Middle
States, Virginia, and part of North Carolina; a few only from the
Ojibway (Chippewa) family, and other Western tribes. Thus,
Niagara and Saratoga are Iroquois, like their kindred, full and
sonorous even in their sadly corrupted form of the present day;
Alabama and Tiscaloosa, Talladega and Pensacola, not less
musical, have been traced to a kindred form spoken by the Mus-
cogees (Creeks) and Seminoles, while Wenona and Minnehaha,
immortalized by Longfellow’s poem, belong to the great family of
Daheotah Indians. If such names have not more frequently
retained their hold on the places they once designated and the
memory of early settlers, there is some excuse for the latter found
in the extreme length of most Indian words.. This difficulty was
already complained of by the great Eliot during his pious labors
in writing his noble work, the Indian Bible; and he adduces
words like—*« Nummatchekodtantamoonganunnonash” (thirty-
two letters) meaning “our lusts;” “Noowomantammoonkanu-
nonnaso,” meaning “our loves;” and “ Kummogkodonattootum-
mooetiteaonganunnonash” (forty-three letters), meaning “our
THE INDIAN. 1%

question.” (Magnalia, Bk. III., p. 193.) In the Book of Common
Prayer, translated into the language of the Six Nations, there are
also many long words, such as—“ Tsinihoianerenseratokentitser-
oten.” (Daniel, ix. 9.) No wonder, therefore, that so many of these
words, especially those belonging to the Dahcotah branch, which
is rough and full of nasal sounds, have either been entirely lost or
at least transformed till they can no longer be recognized.

In some instances it is a special matter of regret that the Indian
names of places and States no longer suggest their original mean-
ing. This was occasionally simple enough, as in Connecticut—
originally written Quonaughticot—which meant in the Mohegan
dialect “long river ;” and in Massachusetts—in the Natic dialect
Masasuset—signifying “the place of great hills,” with reference
to the Blue Hills, eleven miles to the southwest of Boston, the
highest point of land in the eastern part of that State. Of cities~
thus designated, Milwaukie, recalls its original name, meaning
“rich lands,” and Sing Sing, the Algonquin word Asingsing, “a
place of stones,” with all the greater force as it is now, “the
residence of gentlemen,” in Artemus Ward’s language, “who
spend their days in poundin’ stun.” Other names, however, have
more or less picturesqueness in their meaning, and are not so
easily improved by recent changes. Thus Chicago represents in
its French pronunciation very fairly the actual sounds heard by
the first French explorers, when the Potawatomies, who dwelt
there, called it Shecaugo, “playful waters.”(?) Dahlonega is the
softened form of the Talawneca of the Cherokees, which meant
“yellow metal,” for the Indians were well aware of the gold found
in the neighborhood, which made the city in later years the seat
of a government mint, because of its happy position in the very
centre of the gold-mine district of Northern Georgia. Lake rie
is almost the only remainder now of the once powerful tribe
of Eries, who lived where the State of Ohio now is; the latter
name, as given to the river, owes its origin to the Iroquois, who
called it the Oheo, “beautiful water,” by the same instinctive
admiration which prompted the French to name it, La Belle
Riviére. It had a lucky escape from Father Marquette’s baptism,
who christened it Quaboukigon—a name which subsequently
shrunk into Ouabache, and has finally as Wabash been given to
the last tributary of the Ohio. It is curious that a kind of stigma
18 AMERICANISMS.

seems to adhere to the name, for even now the good people of In-
diana and the West generally, are fond of saying of a man who has
been cheated, that “he has been Wabashed.”. At one time, when the
“dark and bloody ground” of Kentucky and Ohio became famous
among the whites, the Indians also felt clined to call their beau-
tiful river rather the Blood River, so fearful had been the scenes
of carnage and cruelty enacted on its fair banks. One of the
youngest states, Idaho, well deserves its poetical name, I-da-hoe,
the “gem of the mountains,” and the name of the river Mononga-
hela flows a8 smoothly from the lips with its liquid notes as the
far-famed rye whisky distilled on its banks, which is known all
over the Union by the same term, in contradistinction from Scotch
and Irish rivals. On the other hand, the much-discussed name
of the greatest waterfall on our continent has been stripped of all
the poetical meanings given it by writers whose imagination ex-
ceeded their knowledge. Neagara, the original word, taken from
the Seneca-Iroquois dialect, has no connection with cataracts, but
means prosaically, “across the neck,” alluding to the course of the
river across the neck or strip of land that lies between Lakes Erie
and Ontario. A similar idea underlies the word Mitchikan in
the Ottawa dialect, which was originally given to Mackinac,
and meant “fences,” as if the island were lying fence-like before
the Upper Lake. At least so says the Rey. Mr. Pierz, a mis-
sionary among the Ottawas; but Allouez, his French predeces-
sor, calls it, afew years before, Machihiganing ; the present word
Michigan is evidently an improvement upon both the former
names.

The word Lsquimaux, though not denoting any tribe inhabit-
ing the United States, is still so frequently regarded as belonging
to our speech that it may not be amiss to correct the common
error, by which it is considered a French term, probably only be-
cause of its French-looking termination. A learned linguist of
France went so far in his patriotic zeal to reclaim it as his own,
that he insisted upon its being a contraction of cewa qui miaulent !
The word obtained its French appearance from the Canadian
voyageurs, who introduced it, after having in vain tried to imitate
‘in any better way the sounds by which the Znnwits, as they call
themselves, were designated by the Kenisteno Indians in their
language. This was Ashkimat or “eaters of raw meat,” which
i

THE INDIAN. 19

practice appeared to them strange enough to give its name to the
whole race, and hence the present name of Esquimauc.

Since the acquisition of Alaska, for which a new term, Walrus-
sia, was proposed, but deservedly failed to obtain currency, a few
words have become familiar to the American ear, which belong to
the Indians of that district. This is the Chinook Jargon, aconyen- |
tional language like the Lingua Franca of the Mediterranean, and
the Pigeon-English of India, which dates back to the fur-droguers
of the last century. Those mariners, whose enterprise before
1800 explored the northwest coast of America, picked up at their
general rendezvous, Nootka Sound, various native words useful in
barter, and thence transplanted them, with additions from the
English, to the shores of Oregon. When the great Astor’s expe-
dition arrived at the mouth of the Columbia, the Jargon received
its principal impulse; many more wvords of English were brought
in, and for the first time the French, or rather the Canadian and
Missouri patois of the French, was introduced. The principal
seat of the company being at Astoria, not only a large addition
of Chinook words was made, but a considerable number was taken
from the Chihalis, who immediately bordered that tribe on the
north. The language continued to receive additions, and assumed
a more distinct and settled meaning under the Northwest and
Hudson’s Bay Companies, who succeeded Astor’s party, as well as
the American settlers in Oregon. Its advantage was soon perceived
by the Indians, and the Jargon became to some extent a means
of communication between natives of different speech and between
them and the whites. It was even used between Americans and
Canadians. First in vogue upon the Columbia and Willamette,
it spread to Puget Sound, and with the extension of trade found
its way far up the coast and the rivers, so that there are now
few tribes between the 42d and 57th parallels of latitude, in which
there are not found interpreters through its medium. Notwith-
standing its apparent poverty of words and the absence of gram-
matical forms, it possesses much flexibility and power of expres-
sion, and really serves almost every purpose of ordinary inter-
course.

Mr. George Gibbs, who has furnished the Smithsonian Institu-
tion with an admirable Dictionary of the “Chinook Jargon,”
estimates the total number of words at about five hundred, of
20 AMERICANISMS.

which about one hundred and sixty are French and English,
eighteen of unknown derivation, and all the others belonging to
the Chinook and kindred dialects. Both elements have been
slightly modified in the Jargon: the Indian gutturals are softened
or dropped, and the f andr of the English and French, un-
pronounceable to the Indians, are modified into p and /. Grammat-
ical forms are reduced to their simplest expression, and variations
in mood and tense only conveyed by adverbs or by the context.
The conversational language of the Indians has, of course, left
no traces in our English, mainly because of the great diversity of
dialects, which has deprived even such masterly works as Eliot’s
Indian Bible, of all but historicinterest. Among the rare excep-
tions is the word netop, used by the New England Indians in the
sense of “my friend,” which Mr. Pickering tells us was in his day
still used, colloquially, in some towns in the interior of “ Massa-
chusetts, to signify a friend or (to use a cant word) a crony.”
It is doubtful, however, whether it is now-a-days used in any
intercourse, even with Indians, as the Narragansett word would
hardly be intelligible to other tribes. The term pokeloken, an
Indian term, signifying, “marsh,” has apparently more vitality in
it, for it is still very largely used by lumbermen in Maine, and by
their brethren in the Northwest, mostly their kinsmen and al-
ways their pupils, when they speak of marshy ground extending
inland from a lake or a stream. “I had unawares pushed the
canoe into a pokeloken and was aground, remembering too late
the half-breed’s admonitions, who has specially warned me against
these mysterious pokelokens.” (Hon. C. A. Murray’s Letters, No. 21.)
In North Carolina and further South, similar swamps are called
pocasans. 'They are lands filled with water during winter and
the spring months, and overgrown with cypress and juniper trees,
with a heavy undergrowth of reeds. ‘“ After passing this swamp
or pocasan, on the east side of the Chowan, you come to sandy
lands covered with large pines,a country famous for tar-making.”
(Southern Magaz, Aug. 1871, p. 195.) The lumbermen employ
also the Indian term wangan, “a boat,” very generally for a pecu-
liar kind of boat, in which they carry their tools and provisions.
“Among the dangers (of lumbering in Maine), where life and
property are hazarded, is that of running the wangan, a phrase well
understood on the river.” (Zhe Americans at Home, III. p. 257 B.)
THE INDIAN. : 21

Another Indian term surviving at least as a provincialism, is
the ¢ardoggin of the extreme North and of Canada, the tarbogin
of the Far West, known as ¢travée to the French voyageurs.
This is a kind of light wagon, often drawn by dogs, on which
Indian squaws are in the habit of bringing home their loads of
cotton-wood, etc., consisting simply of a couple of tent-poles with
two cross-bars to support the freight. The Canadians have im-
proved them, mainly for the purpose of using them as sleds in slid-
ing on the snow from great heights, in which case they are often
made to carry a double load, the owner finding it no easy task to
steer the frail vehicle rightly, and to keep his fair charge from:
slipping from his hold. A term which has only lately found its
way into our English, through the increasing number of hunters
who make up parties in search of elk, moose, etc., is whiggiggin,
as it is written from the sound merely. The Indian word is the
Abenaki, awikhigan, meaning “a letter, book, or anything written,”
and is in Maine and Canada, as well as in the Northwest, now gen-
erally used to designate the written permit which has to be
obtained from the local authorities—often an Indian chief—before
non-residents are allowed to hunt there. It is in these same dis-
tricvts, also, that a trap set by hunters, is sometimes called by its
Indian name Killhag. “The first furs were brought into town
yesterday, and already a number of Aillhags have been put up
everywhere.” (Bradford Times, 1864.) If we add, finally, the
term mocuck, which designates in the Abenaki dialect a large,
peculiarly-shaped cake of sugar, we shall have mentioned all the
more familiar terms of this class. “Covered by a blanket, and
pillowed by a mocuck of sugar, each Indian was asleep upon his
rush-mat.” (C. Lanman, Sumer in the Wilderness.)

It is well known that the very word Jndian, as given to the
race found here by the first settlers, rests upon a mistake, as if the
natives also must needs be involved in the evil fortune, which gave
to the whole continent, at the expense of the discoverer, the name
of a man who had no title to such an honor. For whatever
merit recent investigations may have secured to the bold and
persevering navigator, Amerigo Vespucci, his claims are as noth-
ing by the side of those of Columbus, and yet already in 1507,
in the Cosmographie Synopsis, the name of America is entered
as current among men.
22 AMERICANISMS.

In like manner the poor Redskin also, as the early colonists
called him on account of his color, has ever since been known to
the world by the name of distant Ind, which Columbus thought
he had reached, when he discovered Hispaniola. Nor has he
been allowed to retain even that name long, for already Charles
Cotton rhymes the verb “cringes” with “ Indies,” and thus proves
to us that even in his day the poor Indian had to submit to
being called Znjun, which is now his common name with com-
mon people, producing an odd and detestable resemblance in sound
between the Indian, the engine, and the onion of New England.
Along the frontier line he was perhaps as frequently called a
Copperhead, an ancient term of contempt, of which W. Irving
makes frequent use in his quaint History of New York. “These
were the men,” he says, “who vegetated in the mud along the
shores of Pavonia, being of the race of genuine copperheads ;”
and elsewhere: “The Yankees sneeringly spoke of the round-
crowned burghers of the Manhattoes as the Copperheads.’ In
the year 1861, a Mr. Burtt, then Quartermaster in the United
States Army, is said to have first applied the term to a class of
so-called Anti-War Democrats, Northern sympathizers with
the Southern rebellion, though it is not unlikely that in his
patriotic zeal he may have rather compared them to the venomous
and noisome serpent, which is also known under the name of
Copperhead (Trigonocephalus contortrix). Can the Indian be
blamed if he really, as is generally supposed, retorted by fixing
upon the first invader on his soil the equivocal name of Yankee?
The best authorities on the subject now agree upon the deriva-
tion of this term from the imperfect effort made by the Northern
Indians to pronounce the word “ English.” The Rev. Mr. Hecke-
welder, than whom few men have been more thoroughly at home
in Indian speech and Indian character, distinctly states, that
they pronounced it Vengees, and knew how to distinguish them
“by their dress and personal appearance, and that they were con-
sidered as less cruel than the Virginians or Long-knives.”
(Hist. Acc. of the Indian Nations, p. 182.) In like manner
Judge Durfee refers to them in his remarkable poem, “ What
Cheer; or, Roger Williams in Banishment,” thus:

“Hal Yengee,” said the Sachem, “ wouldst thou go

To soothe the hungry panther scenting blood ?”
(Canto IIT. 32.)
THE INDIAN. 23

Nor is it less curious to notice how early the term began to be
used in a disparaging sense by political or personal antagonists
of the bold pioneers and bigoted puritans. The Dutch on the
banks of the Hudson probably first of all applied it contemptu-
ously to their formidable rivals on the Connecticut, and subse-
quently the regular troops took it up, if we may credit the Rev.
Mr. Gordon, as quoted by T. Westcott of Philadelphia, when he
says: “They (the British troops) were roughly handled by the
Yankees, a term of reproach when applied by the regulars.” (Notes
and Queries, 1852, p. 57.) Subsequently the daily-increasing ani-
mosity between the North and the South made the term Yankee
in Southern minds an incarnation of all that was uncongenial
and distasteful, and hence during the war the Yanks became the
universal designation of Federal soldiersin the Confederacy, even
as they were called Rebs—not Rebels—by Northern men. With
a strange confusion of ideas the poor Confederate soldier, who
succumbed morally to the privations and sufferings of Northern
prisons and penitentiaries, and in his dire need took the oathand
enlisted in the United States Army, was contemptuously called a
galvanized Yankee—probably by an indistinct association with
the worthless galvanized imitations of gold and silver, now so pop-
ular with the masses.

The same fatality which made the words America, Yankee,
and Indian genuine misnomers, seems to have followed even the
national songs of the American people. Yankee Doodle, at least,
and the well known tune which bears this name, are anything but
American. Where their birthplace really was, is, however, quite
a mystery yet. New discoveries are constantly made: Kossuth
was reported to have recognized it as one of the national airs of
his own Magyar race, and a learned diplomat of the United States
discovered it among the Basque, in one of their ancient Sword-
Dances. This much only is certain, that the wicked wits of the
court of Charles IJ. whistled the tune in the ears of the Nell
Gwynnes of that time, and it is found jingling in a song ona
famous lady_of easy virtue in those days:

“Lucy Locket lost her pocket,
Kitty Fisher found it ;
Nothing in it, nothing on it,
But the binding round it.”
24 AMERICANISMS.

Those indefatigable students, the Duyckincks, track it still far-
ther back to the old songs of the land of their ancestors, Holland,
and claim that Dutch laborers used to sing:

“Yanker didel, doodel down,
Didel, dudel, lenter ;
Yanker viver, voover vown,
Botermilk and Tanter,’—

which certainly has a suspicious look of originality about it, and
might well shake our faith in the assertion that one Dr. Shack-
burg of the British Army composed the famous song. Its adop-
tion as a national air dates from the day on which a country fifer
happened to play it as a quick-march at the head of a small
detachment of gallant countrymen going to the fight at Bunker
Hill.

The true Yankee of our day is the son of New England, the
descendant and worthy representative of the Pilgrim fathers, the
heir to all their noble qualities, homely virtues, and violent preju-
dices. The type does not find its fullest expression in the accom-
plished Bostonian, though he live at the “Hub of the World,” and
be firmly persuaded that modern culture radiates from his native
town to all parts of the earth; but rather in the thrifty farmer
and hardy mechanic, who can do anything from running a plough
to ruling a State, from selling wooden nutmegs to winning a seat
in the Senate, and now and then in a master-mind like Emerson’s
or Lowell’s. Very different is he, indeed, from the gay, generous
Southron, as the Southerners are apt to be called, whom, at an
early period of our history the Indians distinguished by the name of
Long-knives. The origin of the term is said to have been this: “In
the year 1764, a Colonel Gibson of Fort Pitt came accidentally
upon a party of Mingoes, encamped on Cross Creek, a tributary of
the Ohio. Little Eagle, a distinguished chief, commanded the
party, and upon discovering the whites, gave a fearful whoop
and at the same time discharged his gun at the Colonel. The ball
passed through Gibson’s coat without injuring him. With the
quickness of a tiger he sprang upon his foe, and with one sweep
of his sword, severed the head of Little Eagle from his body. Two
other Indians were killed by the whites, but the others escaped
and reported that the white captain had cut off the head of their
THE INDIAN. 25

chief with his long knife. This was the origin of. the celebrated
and fearfully significant term Long-knives. It was applied
throughout the war to Virginians, and even to this day has not
been forgotten by some of the Western tribes.” (W. De Hass, His-
tory of Indian Wars, p. 216.) Even the mutual aversion of the
white against the red man has by no means become quite extinct,
and it must not be forgotten that this feeling was, on the part of
the former, all the stronger and deeper as the poor Indians were—
thanks to early preachers—for a long time looked upon as wor-
shippers and agents of Satan. Hence the term Indian hating, is
still of frequent use in the Far West, and represents-a passion,
which is even now a mingled ferocity and fanaticism, incon-
ceivable to quiet Christians and perhaps to any other men but
border adventurers.

Of the many words designated as Jndian, we omit here all
names of plants and animals, which will be mentioned elsewhere,
and allude only to those which are characteristic of the language
or the habits of the American. Thus he has learned from the
cautious savage to traverse woods and march to distant points of
attack in a single line, so that every man_steps in the footsteps of
the man before him, and baffles any guess at the number that may
have passed. This is called walking Indian jfile, and applied to
any occasion where people walk one behind the other. Indian
Forts are inclosures, found in large numbers in New York and
Pennsylvania, and less frequently in New England, Canada, and
Virginia, occupying high bluff points or headlands, scarped on
two or more sides and naturally easy of defence. When found
on lower ground, they are generally raised on some dry knoll or
little hill in the midst of a swamp, or where a bend in the river
lends security to the position, but they stand invariably near an
unfailing supply of water. The embankments are seldom over
four feet high, pierced by one or more gateways, and surrounded
by a ditch of some depth. It has been questioned, however,
whether these fortifications belong to the present race of Indians
or the Aztecs that preceded them in the country.

In the State of New York and in Canada there are, besides,
many places found, where the Indians buried their dead, and these
are known as bonepits. The bones are usually deposited in long
trenches or pits, forming very extensive works and accumulations.
26 AMERICANISMS.

The ceremony of thus interring the bones of the departed was
called by the Indians the “second burying,” and took place
among some tribes, like those visited by Charlevoix, every eight
years, but among the Iroquois and the Hurons every ten years.
Early settlers occasionally quote these burials as the festival of the
dead. (H. R. Schoolcraft.)

These Indian Forts are, moreover, carefully to be distinguished
from the Indian Mounds which are found in nearly every State
of the Union, but in all probability have but rarely any connec-
tion with the Aborigines. The habit of the people of ascribing
any unusual form of the surface ground to the agency of the
former owners of the land, has, no doubt, led to the designation
of these mounds as Indian. In many cases they are, of course,
burial-places of the Red man, and when opened, are found to con-
tain bones, tomahawks, and other rude tools and weapons. Such
abound especially in the Middle and Southern States, and, within
the memory of men now living, the Indians of the Far West have
come to visit once more the graves of their forefathers in the Atlan-
tic States, startling the quiet dwellers there by their sudden and un-
couth appearance, and vanishing again like a dream, after having
deposited some simple memorial on one of these mounds. In other
parts of the country every rounded knoll is so called, and thus
in California, especially in times of flood, ‘cattle and sheep are
gathered on Indian Mounds, waiting the fate of their compan-
ions, whose carcasses drift by or swing in eddies with the wrecks
of barns and outhouses.” (F. B. Harte, he Luck of Roaring
Camp, p. 221.) But here also they are strangely mixed up with
the Indians, and thus the same author speaks of the end of one of
his most graphically described heroes: “He was buried in the
Indian Mound, the single spot of strange, perennial greenness,
which the poor aborigines had raised above the dusty plain.” (p. 234)

The State of Florida has a peculiar kind of mounds, which are
familiarly known as Chunk Yards or Chunkee Yards, consisting
of oblong yards adjoining high mounds and “ rotundas,” built by
the Seminoles. In the centre stands a mysterious obelisk, and at
each of the more remote corners a post or strong stake, to which
their captives were bound previous to being tortured and burnt.
The able historian of Florida, Mr. Bartram, says: “The pyramidal
hills or artificial mounts, and highways or avenues, leading from
THE INDIAN. av

them to artificial ponds or lakes, vast tetragon terraces, chunk-
yards, and obelisks or pillars of wood, are the only monuments of
labor, ingenuity, and magnificence that I have seen, worthy of
notice.” Later researches have led to the discovery that Chunkee
was the Indian name of a game played with a flat, round stone
and a pole about eight feet long; the former was rolled forward
and the pole thrown at the same time, by two players, and he
whose pole came nearest to the stone won the game.

As the Indians have been led by their white friends to consider
a present in the light of an exchange only, being always expected
to give much land for little value, this has given rise to the term
Indian Giver, meaning a child, or a man, who desires the return
of his gift. Among the articles which unfortunately still consti-
tute the staple of all such presents, spirits of some kind, or jfire-
water, as the English-speaking Indians often call it, holds, of
course, a prominent rank. It is a sad index to the nature of the
vast majority of such transactions between white and red men,
that the term Indian Liquor is universally known to mean adul-
terated whiskey. Nor is water the only element of adulteration :
tobacco, red pepper, and other condiments are apt to be added in
large quantities by dishonest dealers and agents. ;

Wild orchards of ungrafted apple and peach trees are frequently
called Indian orchards, under an erroneous impression that they
were planted by the red men; but, except in the more prosperous
Indian Reservations or Reserves, tracts of land secured to them
by the government, andin regions where they have long been per-
manently settled, as in the Territory of the Choctaws, the poor
Indian is not apt to plant trees; besides, he is fully aware that
ungrafted peach-trees are apt to be hardier and more productive
than the finer varieties.

Of all the subjects connected with the original race in Ameri-
can life none holds probably a more prominent place in the
mind of the masses than the Indian Summer, a short but sur-
passingly beautiful season in the latter part of autumn. A
similar spell of fine weather, as it is called by another American-
ism, is noticed in other countries also, and frequently compared
to the haleyon period of the Greeks, so that Shakespeare could
pointedly say :
28 AMERICANISMS.

“Expect Saint Martin’s summer, halcyon days,'—(Henry VI, Part 1, B.)
in allusion to what he elsewhere calls:
“Farewell thou latter spring,
Farewell all hallown summer.”—(Henry IV.)

In England the season derived its name of Saint Martin’s or
Martin Mass Summer, from the fact that it commonly begins
there about November 11, St. Martin’s day; on the Continent it is
called Summer Close and “1’été de St. Martin,” with an ungallant
double meaning, which allows the term to be applied to ladies of
advancing years. It may be that there is an association of the
same idea, though less delicately expressed, in the German “ Alte
Weiber Sommer,” while in Chili it is called St. John’s Summer.
In the United States, this season, when “twinkle in the smoky
light the waters of the rill,” generally begins in November, though
the period varies within a month. It is characterized by fair but
not brilliant weather ; the air is smoky and hazy, perfectly still and
moist; and the sun shines dimly, but softly and sweetly, through
an atmosphere that some call copper-colored and others golden,
in accordance with their power of poetical perception. The
name of Jndian Summer is differently explained. The Rey.
James Freeman derives it from the fact that the Indians are par-
ticularly fond of it, regarding it as a special gift of their favorite
god, the god of the Southwest, who sends the soft southwest
winds, and to whom they go after death. Daniel Webster said
that the early settlers gave that name to the season because they
ascribed its peculiar features, the heat and the haze, to the burning
of the prairies by: the Indians at. that time. Mr. Kercheval,
however, gives a more plausible explanation: “It sometimes
happened, that after the apparent onset of winter, the weather
became warm ; the smoky time commenced, and lasted for a con-
siderable number of days. This was the Jndian Summer, be-
cause it afforded the Indians—who during the severe winter
never made any incursions into the settlements—another oppor-
tunity of visiting them with their destructive warfare. The
melting of the snow saddened every countenance, and the genial
warmth of the sun chilled every heart with horror. The appre-
hension of another visit from the Indians and of being driven
back to the detested fort, was painful in the highest degree.”
(Zist. of the Valley of Virginia, p. 190.)
THE INDIAN. 29

Many Indian terms have become so incorporated ipto American _
speech, and have, at times, struck their roots so deep into public
institutions, as to have become almost true Americanisms. Such
are wigwam and wampum. The former ig the Anglicized form
of a phrase in the Natic dialect of the Algonquin family; here
wékouomdadt meant “in his or her house,” and the curtailed word
wékouam was the true ancestor of the modern wigwam in the
sense of an Indian’s hut or cabin. The original hut, generally
made of skins and affording but scanty shelter in protracted bad
weather, stands in strange contrast with the imposing building in
New York, in which the wigwam, t.¢., the headquarters of a Dem-
ocratic organization of great power and influence are now estab-
lished. This political body derives its name of Zammany, and that of
Tammany Hail, from an ancient chief of the Narragansett Indians,
called Miantonomu, who had his seat on Zammany, a hill north
of Newport, where he and Canonicus sold, in 1638, Aquiduct or
the Isle of Peace, now the State of Rhode Island, for twenty-
three broadcloth coats and thirteen hoes, “as also two torkepes.”
Political adversaries will have it that this mode of “selling” has not
yet gone out of practice at the place that now bears the name.

Ordinarily such sales were made, and if not made, confirmed in
wampum, the current coin of the Indians. This consisted of
strings of shells, which were frequently united into a broad belt,
worn as an ornament or a girdle. JVampum, an Algonquin word,
meant originally nothing more than “white” and served to des-
ignate only inferior shells, which were white, and, according to
the accounts of colonial chroniclers, were held equal to silver,
while the peac, or “ black”—whence wampumpeage—were compared
to gold. Sewan was in Algonquin the name of shell-money gen-
erically and Roanoke in Virginia, for which now wampum is used.
The white money was made from the shells of Pyrula caniculata,
a large pear-shaped univalve, sometimes called “periwinkle.”
The part used was the columella or pillar, the whorls being
broken off; they were not eatable, like the English periwinkle,
and attained considerable size. The more costly beads came from
the largest shells of the Quahaug or Cohog, a welk, known in the
Middle and Southern States as the Round Clam, and belonging to
the genus Venus mercenaria, which is so called on account of their
being used as currency. The inner surface of these shells is beau-
30 AMERICANISMS.

'

tifully polished, the centre of the valves pure white, and part of
the outside mantle of arich violet. This border the Narragansett
Indians made into the blue shell-money, which they call Suckan-
hock, by breaking it into small pieces and rubbing them with
stones till they were cylindrical and could be drilled lengthwise.
It scems almost incredible that the Indians should have done
this, and done it so very neatly, without metallic tools, and yet
Roger Williams says, expressly : “ before ever they had awle-blades
from Europe they made shift to bore this, their shell-money, with
stones.” (Key to the Indian Languages, p. 150.) Of the use of
setvan a writer on the “ New Netherlands in 1679,” says, quoting
from ajournal of that year: “We sat down before the fire. ‘There
had been thrown upon it, to be roasted, a pailful of Gowanus
oysters, which are the best in the country. They are large and
full, some of them not less than a foot long. We had for supper
a haunch of venison, which he had bought of the Indians for
three guilders and a half of seewant, that is, fifteen stuivers of
Dutch money, and which weighed thirty pounds.” (Putnam’s
Magazine, April, 1858.)

Like the precious metal, these shells served at the same time for
ornaments and for money, and being strung were worn in brace-
lets and necklaces. The Indians have always been exceedingly
fond.of personal ornaments, and the great chief who now-a-days
delights the crowds in Washington by stalking down the avenue
in all his bravery and finery, had his prototype in the warrior de-
scribed thus a hundred years ago: “One of them was a Delaware
chief; he wore the badges of his office, the wampum belt, three
half-moons, and a silver plate on his breast; bands of silver on
both arms, and his ears cut round and ornamented with silver;
the hair on the top of his head was done up with silver wire.”
(The Johnson Boys’ Account of their Escape in 1788.) When made
up into belts or bands, four inches wide and three to five feet long,
they were exchanged in ratification of treaties, and given and
received as title-deeds. The two colors were at times wrought
together in patterns, and by a methodical arrangement made to
aid the memory. As the female revolutionists of Paris registered,
according to Dickens’s account, the doomed aristocrats in their
knitting, so the Indians wove the story of the past and the promise
of the future into wampum belts. Father Marquette tells us,
“« THE INDIAN. . 31

moreover, that words addressed to the Indians, when not accom-
panied by a wampum belt, were considered not important, and
that the missionary, who first announced the gospel in a village,
always spoke by the “belt of the prayer,” which he held in his
hands, and which remained to witness his words when the sound
had died away. A similar use is made on the Pacific Coast of
-another variety of shells, called Haigua (Dentalium), which the
natives use mainly for ornaments, but in certain localities also
employ after the manner of wampum. “The men did not think
their gala-equipments complete, unless they had ajewel of hatqua,
or wampum, dangling at the nose.” (W. Irving’s Astoria, II. p. 87.)
Another Indian term still prominent in the organization of
great political bodies in America is the name of the presiding
officer of the before-mentioned fraction of the Democratic party,
their Sachem. This term seems to have been peculiar to North-
ern Indians, since Captain John Smith calls the head of the Vir-
ginia Indians’ Avng, and then continues: “ His (Powhatan’s)
inferior kings, whom they call Werowances, are tyed to rule by
custom ; the commander they call Caucorouse, which is captain”
(Hist of Va. I. p. 143), while Beverley says, “acockarouse is one
that has the honor to be of the king or queen’s council, with rela-
tion to the affairs of government.” (Hist. of the Valley of Va.,
III. 117.) The word, which has a suspicious English sound about
it, became, perhaps on that account, a favorite in the South, and
was long used to designate a person of consequence among the
Red men, although already the Swedish-Indian Dictionary of
1696 calls the chief Saccheeman. This term Sachem and the
equally familiar Sagamore, often considered distinct terms, are in
reality one and the same; so far from meaning two different
things, they are simply variations of the original Sakemo, the
name for a chief in all the New England dialects. Captain John
Smith explained the meaning thus: “ For their government: every
Sachem is not a king, but their great Sachems have divers Sachems
under their protection, paying them tribute, and dare make no
warres without his knowledge, but every Sachem cares for the
widowes, orphans, the aged, and maimed.” (Hist. of Va., II. p. 238.)
The modern poet, for his part, describes his appearance in these
words:
32 . AMERICANISMS. *

“ He looks like a Sachem, in red blanket wrapt,
Who ’mid some council of the sad-garbed whites,
Erect and stern, in his own memory wrapt,
With distant eye broods over other sights.”
(J. R. Lowell, An Indian Summer Reverie.)

The rule of the Sachem has long since passed away; a Sachem-
dom, such as the older writers spoke of, when describing the terri-
torial extent of a Sachem’s power, cannot be said to exist in our
day, yet the word still survives and is in constant use. This is
even more strikingly the case with the Indian’s wife, his sqguaw,
a word originating in the Algonquin language, and appearing in
the New England dialects as sguah or esguah, while in Ojibway
itis more simply guah or equah, a form which has led to a com-
parison with the old English cven (queen), a woman. Her child
is strangely disguised under the name of pappoose, which even so
great a scholar as Mr. Schoolcraft fancied to be of Indian origin,
because papots resembled a root meaning “to laugh.” Now, as
Indian children alone ever laugh, such an exhibition of glee and
mirth being regarded as undignified by older people, the designa-
tion appeared to be very appropriate. As such it was used by W.
Irving: “ Marching fearlessly forward, our valiant heroes carried
the village of Communipaw by storm, notwithstanding that it was
vigorously defended by some half a score of squaws and pap-
pooses” (Hist. of New York, p. 321); and J. G. C. Brainard sings
of one:

“ Here his young squaw her cradling tree would choose,
Singing her chant to hush her swart pappoose.”

More careful researches have, however, led to the discovery that
there is no such word in any Algonquin dialect, and that pappoose
is nothing more than an imperfect effort to pronounce the English
word, babies, as Yankee arose from English. It has, therefore, to
take its place by the side of many such words, which owe their
Indian origin to the imagination of the whites and not to the
language of the natives. Such is also the word Pale-face, a great
favorite with Cooper and many poets, which probably never was
seriously used by an Indian in his own tongue, but makes quite a
pretty appearance in such lines as these:
THE INDIAN. 33

“The brave Tecumseh’s words are good:
One league for terror, strife and blood,
Must all our far-spread tribes unite ;
Then shall the pale-face sink to-night.”
(Tecumseh, by Colton, XVIII.)

The word Manitou, which is generally held to mean God, has
been the cause of much angry discussion. This arose from the
fact that the early missionaries, from the zealous Puritan of the
North to the pious Lutheran in Delaware and Virginia, used’
the word as representing the one great God of Christianity. The
truth is, however, that Manitow is a word employed to signify
the same thing by all Indians from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic
regions, and this is simply spirit. Now, the Indians have good
and bad spirits. Hence, it was at a great risk that the New
England apostle, as well as the unknown author of the “ Vocabu-
larium Barbaro-Virgineorum,” printed in Stockholm in 1696,
could dare say: Manctto: “God.” For, the Indians have a Mane-
tou for every cave, waterfall, or other communding object in nature,
and generally make offerings to them at such places. Their bad
Manetow differs in no way from our Devil. Hence, Judge Durfee
was perfectly right, when he wrote:

“Praying for good, we to Cawtantowit bow,
And shunning evil, we to Chepian cry ;
To other Manittoos we offerings owe,

Dwell they in mountain, flood, or open sky.”
(What Cheer, Cant. II. B.)

When Father Marquette came to the Indians who directed his
steps toward the Mississippi, “they answered,” he writes, “ that
they were Ilinois, and in token of peace they presented their
pipes to smoke. These pipes for smoking are called in the
country the Calumets.” It is not improbable that we owe to
these words of the pious and energetic missionary the addition
to our language of this word. And yet it is by no means an
Indian word, as is frequently believed and quite as frequently
stated. Their own word is simply a term meaning pipe.
Calumet, on the other hand, is nothing more than the old form
of the French word “Chalumeau,” from the Latin “Calamus,”
and was the name.given to a pipe by early French settlers, the
colonists of New France. It is, therefore, a much more genuine
84 AMERICANISMS.

Americanism, than most of the Indian words which we have
simply obtained from the Indians in common with all other
nations. The term canoe, on the other hand, has probably a
more legitimate Indian pedigree. Although it has reached us
only through the same French agency in the diminutive form of
canot, there can be little doubt that it is the Carib word canaoa;
at least the natives of San Salvador are said to have called smaller
boats thus, when Columbus first landed there. The Indian’s
canoe in the Northwest, it is well known, is made of the Paper or
Canoe Birch (Betula papyracea), found in Maine and the whole
North, but not in the South. Its thick, glossy, and pliant bark
is used by the Indians for the manufacture of baskets, boxes, and
trinkets of all kinds, which they ornament with beads and col-
ored straws. Itis this bark also which served their ancestors, as it
serves them now, in some districts, for the much more important
structure of canoes, for, taken whole from the tree, it can be spread
open, fashioned into a graceful shape and lined with wooden
ribs. They are still used wherever the Indians have an abiding
place, and hunters are apt to speak of them briefly as birches.
The short oar with a broad blade by which the exceedingly frail
and nicely-balanced canoe is propelled, requires no mean skill and
close attention; hence the slang phrase of paddling one’s own
canoe means fs be skillful and energetic enough to succeed
unaided, as the song says:

“ Voyager upon life’s sea,
To yourself be true ;,
And where’er your lot may be,
Paddle your own canoe.”
(Harper's Mag., May, 1854.)

Among the articles of personal apparel which distinguish the
Indian there are two, which have been and still are so extensively
used by the whites also, that their names have become houschold
words and parts of our language. These are the Mocassin and
the Tomahawk. The former, in the Massachusetts dialect writ-
ten “Mocasson,” in the Kenisteno dialect and some other
offshoots of the Algonquin “ Mockisin,” isa shoe made of soft
leather without a stiff sole, frequently ornamented more or less
richly, These shoes have been largely adopted by Western hunters
THE INDIAN. 3d

and all men who haye hard work to do in winter. Thus we are
told that “the loggers are obliged to take good care of their feet:
one of them often wears three or four pair of socks, with a pair
of mocassins over them—the mocassins, because they give the
foot more freedom and thus render them less liable to freeze, are
generally preferred to coarse leather boots.” (Minnesota Pineries,
Putnam’s Magazine, July, 1857.) They are, however, no pro-

‘ tection against cold or wet; hence 8. Kercheval tells us that “in
winter they were stuffed with deer’s hair or dry leaves to keep the
feet warm, but in wet weather it was usually said, that they were
only a decent way of going barefooted, owing to the natural
spongy nature of the leather of which they were made.” (Hist.
of the Valley of Virginia, p. 221.) A resemblance, more fancied
than real, has given to a poisonous snake (Toxicophis pisci-
vorus), which is brown with black bars faintly marked, like the
black marks of wear and tear on the buff leather, the name of
Mocassin Snake, while in the South a man made drunk by bad
liquor is said to have been “bitten by the snake,” or simply to be
mocassined.

The tomahawk had in like manner become the familiar weapon
of the frontiersman, who handled it with greater skill even than
the Indian. In most Algonquin languages the word appears as
tahmahgan, consisting of otamaha, “to beat,” and egan, a term used
in the construction of all verbal nouns, so that it literally means
“a beating-thing.” The name was given by the natives to every
form of heavy war-club in use among them, though the most
common form was that of a comparatively light axe with a hollow
handle, so that it could serve asa pipe also. Tothe upper part the
scalp of the defeated enemy was frequently attached. A favorite
game of the early settlers is thus described by Kercheval: “The
tomahawk, with its handle of a certain length, will make a given
number of turns at a given distance; at five steps it will strike
with the edge, handle downwards; at seven and a half it will strike
with the edge, handle upwards, etc., a little experience teaches the
eye and the hand, and the sport of throwing the hatchet is great.”
(Hist. of the Valley of Va., p. 243.) As the Indians performed
certain ceremonies with the tomahawk, burying it when they made
peace,.and digging it up again npon the breaking out of a war, the
two customs soon became familiar to the early settlers, and the
36 AMERICANISMS. ‘

phrases, burying the hatchet, and digging up the hatchet, were soon
used in conversation generally for the reopening or amically
arranging of difficulties of every kind. Thus W. Irving says:
“They smoked the pipe of peace together, and the colonel claimed
the credit of having, by his diplomacy, persuaded the sachem to
bury the hatchet,” (Washington, I. p. 361,) and the backwoodsman
gives his advice in the homely words: “now, shet up and don’t
bother talking about digging up the hatchet.” (Life on the Prairies,
p. 314.) The strange process of scalping seems to have been
peculiar to the Indians of this Continent; at least it has not yet
been found among other tribes; the Red man, it is well known,
prepared himself for his fate by allowing his hair to grow ina
long tuft on top of his head, which he called his scalp-lock. The
victor would seize it with his left hand and with a sharp knife, the
scalping-knife, by a single turn of the hand seyer the skin in a
circle on the crown of the head; then with a powerful jerk pull
off hair and skin, and transfer it to his belt or tomahawk. The
custom is still prevalent among several Western tribes, and the
term of scalping so familiar to Americans, that it is not unfrequent-
ly used for “total defeat” or “ utter annihilation in debate.” The
favorite term for the actual operation among Western hunters and
frontiersmen was, however, the graphic phrase lifting hair, and thus
a recent Army Report could still contain the words : “I saw at once
that the Arrapahoes were not after stealing cattle but after lifting
hair, and told the corporal so, but he would not believe me.”
(Congressional Report, August 17, 1868.) Before setting out on
what they call the war-path—a word that has led to the use of
the phrase, he is out on the war-path, fora man who is about to
make a deliberate attack on an adversary or a medsure—a council-
fire is lit in the centre of the village, around which gather the
braves of the tribe, as their fighting men are now-a-days officially
described in the military reports from the Western Plains. The
term itself is, however, of French origin, and was first used by the
admirable missionaries of France, as when Father Hennepin says:
“One of the braves accompanied me down to the river holding
the precious vessel close to his heart.” At this conncil-fire they sit,
often for hours, smoking in silence their Ainui-Kinnichk or Milli-
Aynnick, as it sounds in some dialects, a term originating with the
Dahcotahs or Sioux, and designating a mixture of dried sumac leayes
THE INDIAN. 37

turning red, and red willow bark, which are finely chopped and
grated, and then mixed with a certain proportion of genuine to-
bacco, The true smoker from the East would probably appreciate
the mixture as little as the Englishman relishes the tea of the
Continent, improved (!) by spices or a few spoonfuls of rum, but
Western trappers and hunters soon learn to prefer it to genuine to-
bacco. When the latter is mixed with the bark of the cornel-trec
it is known as Zsquipomgole. Then a pow-wow is held, a corrup-
tion of powan, which in the New England dialects meant a
prophet, conjuror, or medicine-man, called in Ojibway wahend or
jossakeed. The term was adopted by the early settlers for any
great assembly called together by Indians to celebrate feasts, per-
form dances, or hold councils. §. Kerchevalsays: “Towards the
latter part of February we commonly had a fine spell of open,
warm weather, during which the snow melted away. This was
denominated the pow-wowing days, from the supposition that the
Indians were then holding their war-councils for planning their
spring-campaigns into the settlements. Sad experience taught us
that in this supposition we were not often mistaken.” (Hist. of
the Valley of Va., p.190.) The term seems to have been sugges-
tive enough to be fully adopted, and is still very generally used to
designate any public meeting, perhaps with a sly suggestion, that
there was more zeal than sense exhibited there. “ Tammany held
another pow-2wow on the subject, but the meeting broke up in a
row,” said the New York Herald on February 2,1867. The usual
freedom is taken with the noun and it is changed into a verb, so
that Dr Kane, a careful writer, could correctly say of the proph-
et of the Esquimaux: “He prescribes or pow-wows in sickness or
over wounds, directs the policy of the little state, and is really the
power behind the throne.” (Arctic Explorations, II. p. 118.)

The family of the Indian is somewhat oddly called a lodge, from
the French word Joge, for hut, whenever not the braves only, but
women and children are all included. “It was not pleasant to
learn,” says Governor N. 8. Langford, “that twenty-five lodges of
Indians had gone up the valley a few days before our arrival, and
to be told by a trapper that he had been robbed by them, and, in
common parlance, set on foot by having his horse and provisions
stolen.” (The Wonders of the Yellowstone, 1871.)

What most distinguishes the Indian in his external appearance,
38 AMERICANISMS.

is the Totem he wears on his breast—a device of some animal, a
wolf, a heron, or a turtle, which is drawn in paint, or engraven in
the skin of his body. It serves to distinguish from generation to
generation the particular class or subdivision of his tribe to which
he belongs, and often furnishes the name of the whole. The
word is of Algonquin origin, and sometimes derived from dodaim,
a term signifying townmark, but unfortunately, there is no such
word as dodaim to take it from. Longfellow speaks of it elo-
quently, thus:
“ And they painted on the grave-posts,

Of the graves yet unforgotten,

Each his own ancestral totem,

Each the symbol of his household,

Figures of the bear and reindecr,
Of the turtle, crane, and beaver.” (Hiawatha.)

This common custom of all the Indian tribes of the continent
hitherto known, seems not to have reached northward beyond
a certain line, for W. TH. Dale tells us that the “ Totemje system
is not found among the Innuit.” (Alaska and its Resources,
p- 228.)

Besides these words, derived more or less directly from Indian
terms and Indian customs, American English has borrowed from
them a number of names in Natural History and in the kitchen.
It is quite characteristic of this that the first mention ever made
of Americanisms should be contained in the words: “Sed et ab
Americanis nonnulla mutuamur ut mais et canoa.” (Alex. Gill,
cited by J. R. Lowell.) Afaize is, however, rather of West Indian
origin, belonging to the Carib language, and in Hayti called
mahiz or mahis, of which the Spaniards at the time of the first
discovery made maiz, and through the French mais, we have
obtained our term. ‘The first origin of the grain is wrapt in as
much mystery as that of most cereals; like all products of foreign,
unknown countries, it appeared under the general name of Indian
Corn in Spain, and Turkey Corn in Italy, just as the bird of this
continent appears as cog d’Jnde in French, and as a turkey in
English. In America it is universally known as corz, since every -
country calls the staple cereal by this generic name, so that wheat
(or all small grains) in England, rye in Germany, and oats in
Sweden appear as corn in the idioms of these countries.
THE INDIAN. 39

Its fertility and great nutritive power attracted early much
attention, and from the ‘first settlements to our day, it has been
the staple food of man and beast. Beverley already alludes to
some of the many varieties found in this country. “ Flint Corn,”
he says, “looks smooth and as full as the early ripe corn, the
other has a larger grain and looks shrivelled, with a dent on the
back of the grain, as if it had never come to perfection; this they
call she-corn. This is esteemed by the planters as the best for
increase.” (Hist. of Virginta, p. 127.)

Corn is not eaten raw, though there seems to be literally no
stage at which the ear is not fit for food when suitably prepared.
The tucket, as the green ear is called as long as it is soft and
milky, is quite a delicacy to some palates, but generally its con-
sumption is considered too great a waste, and time is given it to
fill up, grow to full size, and harden. The imperfectly-formed
ear, on the contrary, is called a nwdbin, a term said to be of In-
dian origin, though the presumption is not improbable that it is
nothing more than the English word nothing, which the negroes
very uniformly pronounce nuffin, and nubbin. The modes of
preparing the green and the ripe ear for the table are almost
infinitely varied, from the simple ashcake of the Indian, to the
elaborate pudding of the great city. Furnishing, at all times,
a toothsome dish, it is perhaps most appreciated in the simple
shape of roasting-ears, as the latter are called, when, still green,
they are quite soft and pulpy, with just enough consistency to be
roasted Indian fashion, before a fire or in the hot ashes. “Indeed,
this is a very good and pleasing food,” says Beverley, naively
(Hist. of the Valley of Va. p. 117), and P. Cartright, more plaint-
ively: “The Methodist preacher of those days (before 1800), often
slept in dirty cabins, on earthen floors, before the fire, ate roasting-
sars for bread, drank buttermilk for coffee, or sage tea for impe-
rial, and took, with a hearty zest, deer meat, or bear meat, or wild
turkey, for breakfast, dinner, and supper—if he could get it.”
(Autobiography, p. 243.) When ripe, the grains become too hard
‘or eating, and have to be ground into corm meal, which the
aegroes of the South invariably, and very judiciously, prefer to
vheat flour. This meal is made up in various ways, the sim-
slest of which was learned from the Indians. “Tempering this
lower,” says valiant John Smith, “ with water, they make it either
40 AMERICANISMS. 7

in cakes, covering them with ashes till they are baked, and then
washing them in fair water, where they drie presently with their
own heat; or else boyle them in water, eating the broth with the
bread, which they call Ponap.” (Virginia, I., p. 127.) The lat-
ter word was the term apohn in the Powhatan dialect, and hence
comes the modern pone, a name invariably given in the South to
a maize-cake. Hence even F. Olmsted could still write, “We
all clustered around the fire, the landlady alone passing through
our semi-circle, as she prepared the pone and fry and coffee for
our meal.” (Texas, p. 319.) The negro of former days, pre-
paring his simple but savory meal in his cabin, would dab the
roughly-kneaded cake down upon his hoe, and thus bake it be-
fore the fire; the result was a hoe-cake, unsightly to the eye, but
palatable enough. Quaint old Barlow refers to it when he says:
“Some talk of hoe-cake, fair Virginia’s pride.” (Hasty Pud-
ding, 32.) In the New England States another, not less primi-
tive method was pursued; here the dough was spread upon the
stave of a barrel-top and thus baked before the fire; at times
the irresistible pumpkin was mixed with it, and then it appeared
as “Rich Johnny-cake, his mouth has often tryed.” (J. Barlow.)
From thence the precious dish spread westward with the restless
Yankee, and already, in 1840, the Hon. Mr. Duncan could, on
the floor of Congress, speak of life in Ohio as merry enough,
when “ The frolic consisted in dancing, playing, and singing love
and murder songs; cating Johnny-cake and pumpkin pies, and
drinking new whiskey and brown sugar out of a gourd.”

In olden times the johnny-cake seems to have appeared occa-
sionally in an odd disguise, if we recognise him in the following
lines:

“Then times were good; merchants cared not a rush

For other fare than jonakin and mush.”
(New England Crisis, Benjamin Thomson, 1675.)

But while hoe-cake is dear to the South, and johnny-cake at home
alike in the Hast and West, the hasty pudding—Indian meal stir-
red in boiling water into a thick batter, and eaten with milk and
sugar, or molasses—is a favorite dish all over the Union. Joel
Barlow’s popular poem on the subject describes the primitive
mode of preparing it thus:
THE INDIAN. 4l

“She learnt with stones to crack the well dried maize,
Thro’ the rough sieve to shake the golden shower,
In boiling water stir the yellow flour ;

The yellow flour, bestrew’d and stirr’d with haste,
Swells in the flood, and thickens to a paste,

Then puffs and wallops, rises to the brim,

Drinks the dry knobs, that on the surface swim;
The knobs at last the busy ladle breaks,

And the whole mass its true consistence takes.”

The dish was a favorite of the Indians, and in fact their common
food during the greater part of the-year. They called it, to the
ear of the early settlers, supawn, but this was probably merely a
corruption of the Lenape or Delaware name asapahn and is, no
doubt, the same as the samp mentioned by Roger Williams, as “a
kind of meale pottage unparched; from this the English call
their samp, which is Indian corn, beaten and boiled and eaten
hot or cold, with milke or butter, which are mercies beyond the
natives plaine water, and which is a dish exceedingly wholesome
for the English bodies.” (Key to the Ind. Lang., p.13.) Both
words are evidently derived from the Algonquin saphac, meaning
“soft gruel, or anything thinned,” but early settlers fancied it a
Dutch word, and hence honest J. Barlow could write indig-
nantly:
“On Hudson’s bank, while men of Belgic spawn,

Insult and eat thee by the name of suppaum.”
(Hasty Pudding.)

Nor was he less patient with his Southern neighbors, of whom
he speaks with equal scorn:

“Fen in thy native regions, how I blush
To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee mush ;”

and yet, if he had Jived long enough, he would have heard the
name of mush given to the pleasant and extremely nutritious dish
all over the South. It was almost universally known to the In-
dians, as seems to be natural from its great simplicity ; it is proba-
bly the “ sagamity, that is to say, Indian meal boiled in water, and
seasoned with grease,” of Father Marquette. In some parts of
the West, another mush is frequently used, but as it is made of
rye after the manner of a Hasty Pudding, it is called Rye Mush.
Besides the more aristocratic batter-cake, found to perfection in
42 AMERICANISMS.

the South, there is another preparation of corn called hominy, or
homony, an Indian dish, so called from an Indian word written
by Roger Williams in his Key ahwminea, meaning “ parched corn,”
and in the Powhatan dialect wstatahominy, while R. Beverley has
it rockahominy. (Hist. of Va. p.155.) To prepare this dish, which
is likewise eaten all over the Union, but especially appreciated in
South Carolina, the corn is either coarsely ground or hulled, and
boiled with water. 8. Kercheval already calls “ hog and hominy
the standard dish of all early settlers” (p. 48), and to this day, pork
and corn, in this shape, are relished alike by high and low.
“That ar Jake,” says Jim the Cracker, in an account of Georgia,
“ll never make a man, Cap’n; he don’t take kindly to hog and
hominy, no how, but ketches them no ’count birds and eats ’em,
Yes, sir, he does ;” while T. O. Richards, in his “Rice Fields of
the South,” tells us that “to be bidden to a planter’s hog and
hominy, is to be presented with the full, free hospitality of his
house.” From some fancied resemblance to a kernel thus hulled,
a snapping-beetle, or Elater, of Pennsylvania, is called the “Hom-
tmy-beater.” (8.8. Haldeman.) A more direct and more correct
connection exists between the name of the ceFeal and that of the
river which has become so famous during the late Civil War, the
Chickahominy, which was so called from flowing through the
fertile lowlands that bore King Powhatan’s ample harvests, and
thus became the great granary of his dominions. 'The name
itself, Checahaminend, in the original, meant “land of much
grain.” A special variety of corn, with dark, small grains, serves
to furnish a Yankee dainty, very popular in the New England
States, and hardly known elsewhere. The grains are placed on a
heated shovel or held in a wire gauze over a brisk fire, till they pop
open, swelling to great size, and in the act of bursting, expose
the snowy white inside, thus presenting a pleasing appearance in
harmony with their attractive odor. This is called Pop Corn,
and eaten with salt or sugar. ‘The same tendency to pop is pos-
sessed by a variety of cake made of Indian corn, baked very hard,
and called, from its disposition to jump about in the act of baking,
and, as it were, to dodge, Corndodger. “Corndodger and fried
bacon,” says F. Olmsted in his pleasant book on Texas, “seem
to be the universal food of the people,” and a Western tourist
assures us that “Corndodger, baked in the ashes, salt pork broiled
THE INDIAN. 4

on the end of a stick, and a little muddy tea, must, on the prairi
suffice for the hungry stomach.” Corn-juwice is the poetical nan
which Western men are fond of giving to whiskey, because it
frequently made of corn, and thus justifies the quaint quotatic
of J. R. Bartlett :—
“Old Monongahela whiskey,
Whiskey made of Indian corn juice.”
(Pluribushta.)

Nor must we forget to do honor to another combination «
corn with kindred dainties, which we owe to the Jndians, the
mesiccwotash in the Narragansett dialect. In its Anglicised for
it reappears as swecotash or suckatash, and consists of green co}
with beans boiled together, to which experts add, after the examp
of the Indians, a small allowance of venison. The palatable di:
is held specially dear in New England, and hence appeared in di
form at an Indian banquet held in 1836, in Providence, -
honor of the two hundredth anniversary of the settlement
Rhode Island. “An Indian mat being spread out, a large woode
platter well filled with boiled bass graced the centre supporte
on one side by a wooden dish of parched corn, and on the other |
a similar one of swecotash.” (Stone’s Life of Howland, p. 262, £
The word nocake with its ludicrous resemblance to English, bi
quoted in Wood’s New England Prospect, 1634, as a true Indis
word, represented a powder made of Indian corn parched in t]
ashes, and stuffed into a long leathern bag to serve as provend
for long journeys. Although the preparation is of course 1
longer used, the word may still be occasionally heard in the Ne
England States. Mixed with sugar the same powder appea
under the name of Rokage or Yokeage.

Next to succotash the most important article of food with 1]
Indian was probably Pemmican, which has ever since remain:
the main reliance of all explorers, hunters, and voyagers.
name consists of the two Kenisteno words pemis, which meai
fat, and egan, the general substantive inflection, so that the who
simply signifies “fat-substance.” It consists mainly of buffa
meat—though other meat is sometimes used in the same mann
—dried in flakes and then pounded -between two stones. T!
powder is next put into bags made of the hide of the slain an
mal, with the hair outside, into which melted fat is poured till
44 AMERICANISMS.

is quite full. Then, the whole being pressed down, the top of the
bag is closely sewed up, and thus the valuable provender can be
easily carried and long preserved. Fifty pounds of meat and forty
pounds of fat make a bag of pemmican, and will last a careful
traveller several months. In this state it may be eaten raw, but
the voyageurs generally mix it with a little flour and water, and
then boil it, in which form it is known throughout the North-
western territory under the elegant name of robdiboe. Travellers
have always found pemmican good and wholesome food, though it
would perhaps be more palatable without its unprepossessing ap-
pearance and a goodly number of buffalo hairs, which are apt to be
mixed up with it through the carelessness of the hunters. The
pemmican of Arctic explorers and hunters in other continents is
made of any meat that is available, after the same pattern, and
often, for good reasons, without the admixture of fat.

A plant of such universal usefulness and so-familiar to a great
nation could, of course, not fail to furnish in its various parts
also a number of terms and phrases to the idiom. The cod, the
spike or stipe, on which the seed of the plant grows, may have
derived its name from the old English meaning of “head” at-
tached to cob (the German Kopf) ; but Americans carefully distin-
guish between ears of corn, as they are called while the ears are
yet attached to the stipe, and cods of corn, when the latter are re-
moved. They still furnish a certain amount of nutriment, when
mixed with more valuable food; but their best use seems to be
for pipe-heads, for which they are extensively used by the poor
people of the South. There, it must not be overlooked, the cod
or pithy placenta, which remains when the grains have been
shelled off, is as large as the full ear of the Northern corn. Old
smokers say that a Virginia corn-cob pipe surpasses all others in
sweetness, lightness and endurance. The name of this part of
the plant once gave rise to an unexpected witticism on the part
of a negro, who, after the surrender of Lord Cornwallis at York-
town in 1782, remarked to a friend: “He no Cornwallis now; he
Cobwallis; Gineral Washington shell all the corn off him too
slick.” Cornstalk, on the other hand, was the name of a famous
Indian chief, well known ‘in the history of early Northwestern
settlements. The leaves of the beautiful plant, which closely re-
sembles the sugar-cane, and is often chosen in lawns and garden-
THE INDIAN. 4

plots as a graceful centre to tufts of smaller plants, are calle
blades, and when dried and stacked up for use, assume the nan
of fodder, furnishing with the top of the stalk most valuab
food for all cattle. It is these blades, interspersed with the grac
ful tassels, as the flowers are called, and ripening ears, whic
were used for urnaments in the first efforts ever made at a style c
American architecture. A variety of maize is known as broon
corn, since its top and dried seedstalks furnish the immen
majority of brooms used in the Union. A corn cracker is looke
upon as so low a person that he is simply called a cracker; |
inhabits the low, unproductive regions near the sea-shore, ar
besides his generic name derived from the chief article of h
diet, he appears as Conch or Low Downer in North Carolina, ax
as Sandhiller or Poor White Trash in South Carolina and Georgi
Even in Florida he is found occasionally, leading a wretched li
in the woods, and resembling in his habits the worst of the o
Indians. The Crackers of North Carolina, are, perhaps, the poore
of them all. “Their occupation is collecting turpentine, and th«
are said to possess an unnatural craving for a clay-diet. Theya
popularly known as Crackers, but their gaunt aspect and haggar
vacant countenances induce one to suppose that they might wit
greater truth be called cracked.” (Blackwood, Jan. 1860.)

Corn Rights, on the other hand, were in the earliest times c
western settlements, rights to land acquired by cultivation, foi
“In 1776 settlements were made on New River (in Virginia)
the lands taken up in this region being held by what were know
as Corn Rights—whoever planted an acre of corn acquired a tit
to a hundred acres of land.” (Withers, p. 48.)

The outer husk, by which the grain is protected against tk
weather, is generally called shuck, and although a common sayin
has it that a man or a thing is not worth a shuck or not wor
shucks, this shows only the relative merit of the latter in compa:
ison with the more valuable ear. Shucks are very much prized :
the South as fodder for cattle, and the husking or shucking (fro.
Shuck, the husk of a walnut. or shell of a bean.—Grose.) of corn
universally an occasion of merry-making, and one of the gayest ¢
rural frolics known in the country. At the North the thrift
farmer, no longer able to enjoy the Cunticos, as his fathers calle
their frolics from an Indian word, invites his neighbors, far an
46 AMERICANISMS.

near, to help him, as he is expected and ready to help them another
day, and then they set to work, Jads and lasses, with many a
merry custom inherited from their forefathers,

“ For each red car a gen’ral kiss he gains,
With each smut ear, she smuts the luckless swains.”
(Barlow’s Hasty Pudding.)
and thus
“Tn the barn the youths and maidens
Strip the corn of Ausk and tassel,
Warm the dullness of October
With the life of Spring and May ;
While through every chink the lanterns
And sonorous gusts of laughter
Make assault on night and silence
With the counterfeit of day.”

(Helen Lee.)

In the South the negroes used to have high times at corn-shuck-
ing, and gaye especially full play to their quaint, but melodious
songs, with which they lightened the labor and transformed the
task into a frolic. The following portions of two such songs may
serve as specimens of a class of songs which will soon have ceased
to exist and be speedily forgotten :

‘“Oh boys! Come along and shuck the corn ;
Oh boys! Come along to the rattle of the horn!
We'll shuck and sing to the coming of the moon,
And den we'll ford the river.
Oh Bob Ridley O! O! O!
How could you fool the possum so ?”

The other used to be sung by one voice, the response being
given in a chorus, and at each refrain the husked ear would be
thrown on the rapidly-rising pile in the centre:

“Solo. Obadiah. Solo. Pond too deep.
Chorus. Jumped into the fire. Chorus. Jumped in the creek.
Solo. Fire too hot. Solo. Creek too shallow.
Chorus. Jumped in the pot. Chorus. Jumped in the tallow.
Solo. Pot too black. Selo. Tallow too soft.
Chorus. Jumped in the crack. Chorus. Jumped in the loft.
Solo. Crack too high. Solo. Loft too rotten.
Chorus. Jumped in the sky. Chorus. Jumped in the cotton.
Solo. Sky too blue. Solo. Cotton so white.

Chorus. Jumped in the canoe, Chorus. Stayed there all night!”
THE INDIAN. 44

Of late a very brisk trade has sprung up in hackled shucks,
and a Virginia paper said, “ we saw a letter from Charleston, 8. C.
as to whether two hundred tons per month could be supplied,”
(Fredericksburg Herald, Dec. 10, 1870.) During the Civil War,
on the other hand, the original Blue Backs of the Confederacy
(so-called in opposition to the Green Backs of the Union) soon
became known as Shucks, a name sufficiently significant of their
evil repute as a circulating medium. Those were the days, when
it was currently reported that ladies in the capital of the Confed-
eracy could be seen in the streets, followed by a servant who
carried the piles of money for the marketing, which they brought
themselves home in their hands. It ought not to be forgotten,
however, that this was by no means the first time in American
history when paper-money had been reduced to such a low state.
The same thing, precisely, had happened in the days of the
Revolution, when General Washington had already said, (Decem-
ber, 1779,) “a wagon load of money will now scarcely purchase a
wagon load of provisions.”

A Cornstalk Fiddle is a toy familiar to every boy in the land:
an outside fibre of a cornstalk is loosened, and, by placing a bridge
under each end, it becomes a chord capable of producing a few dull
sounds by each vibration. Among the many slang terms derived
from the beautiful and valuable plant, none is probably more
frequently heard than that of acknowledging the corn, with its
more prosy variation of acknowledging the soft impeachment.
The former means a confession of having been mistaken or out-
witted, as the occasion may warrant, and is said to have originated,
like many such phrases, at least twice in very different ways. The
Hon. Andrew Stewart, Member of Congress from Pennsylvania,
claimed in a recent speech to have caused its first appearance in
public. In 1828, he was in Congress discussing the principle of
“Protection,” and said in the course of his remarks, that Ohio, .
Indiana, and Kentucky sent their haystacks, cornfields, and fodder
to New York and Philadelphia for sale. “The Hon. Charles A.
Wickliffe, from Kentucky, jumped up and said, “Why, that is
absurd; Mr. Speaker, I call the gentleman to order. He is stating
an absurdity. We never send haystacks or cornfields to New York
or Philadelpbia.” “Well,” said I, “what do you send?” “ Why,
horses, mules, cattle, hogs.” “ Well, what makes your horses, mules,
48 AMERICANISMS.

cattle, hogs? You feed a hundred dollars’ worth of hay to a horse,
you just animate and get upon the top of your haystack and ride
off to market. How is it with your cattle? You make one of
them carry fifty dollars’ worth of hay and grass to the Hastern
market. Mr. Wickliffe, you send a hog worth ten dollars to an
Eastern market; how much corn does it take at thirty-three
cents per bushel to fatten it?” “ Why, thirty bushels.” “Then you
put that thirty bushels of corn into the shape of a hog, and make
it walk off to the Eastern market.” Mr. Wickliffe jumped up and
said: “Mr. Speaker, 7 acknowledge the corn.”

The other popular account of the origin of the phrase ascribes
it to the misfortunes of a flatboatman who had come down to
New Orleans with two flatboats, laden, the one with corn, the
other with potatoes. He was tempted to enter a gambling-estab-
lishment, and lost his money and his produce. On returning at
night to the wharf, he found his boat with corn had sunk in the
river, and when the winner came next morning to demand the
stake, he received the answer, “Stranger, I acknowledge the corn,
take ’em; but the potatoes you can’t have, by thunder.” (Pitts-
burg Com. Advertiser, B.)

Even the cornfield plays naturally a prominent part in Southern
life, and as schoolhouses were apt to be erected in or near them, so-
called self-made men are to this day fond of beasting that they
neyer received any other education but in an old cornfield
school.

Closely connected with the corn-shucking is the hunt of the
opossum, (Didelphys virginiana,) that strange animal, which still
preserves its ancient Indian appellation, though more frequently it
follows the loyal Irishman’s example, drops the O, and appears as
’Possum simply. Captain John Smith, who may be said to have
discovered it, describes it thus: “An Opasswm hath a head like a
swine, a tail like a rat, and is of the bigness of a cat. Under her
bellye she hath a bagge, wherein she lodgeth, carrieth, and
suckleth her young.” (Virginia, L, p. 124.) Following his exam-
ple, old authors in England and colonial writers spell the name
apassom, till the more modern form superseded the Indian. The
negroes are passionately fond of the very fat meat of the animal,
which comes out only at night, and when hunted always takes
refuge on a tree, hiding in some hollow. Thus it can be caught
THE INDIAN. 49

only by felling the tree, whereupon the cunning creature falls down
apparently dead and often escapes by -his power of simulation,
which is so perfect as to mislead even the instinct of dogs. Hence
the negro’s song,
“A possum on a ’simmon tree,

With one eye winked right down at me,

Fust by his tail the crittur swung:

And this old chorus sweetly sung :

Get along hum, my yeller gals,

For the moon on the grass am shining.”

As the poor animal is not supposed to be over-comfortable in
his lofty position, with numerous enemies looking out for him
below, his situation has given rise to the phrase, ¢o be up a tree,
expressive of being in a difficult situation. Some ten years ago,
the English papers circulated a story taken professedly from an
American paper, “in which this familiar phrase was said to have
been made use of rather ingeniously by a preacher of the Spurgeon
stamp, to attract the more worldly of his congregation. He an-
nounced as the subject of his next sermon: How to rise in the
world—Zaccheus up a tree.” The simulating power, which the
opossum shares with the raccoon, has in like manner originated
the very common expression, ¢o play possum, used when a person
pretends to be asleep; its meaning is, however, extended to cases
of young ladies showing a little affectation of demureness, or of
any one who affects to be unable to do what he ought to do or
what he is presumed to be fully able to do. As the clever animal has,
moreover, a trick of dodging the dogs in the treacherous moon-
light and slyly jumping from one tree to the other, the phrase of
barking up the wrong tree has come to be used when a person
acts under a mistaken impression, very much as the English take
the phrase of “being on the wrong scent” from their favorite, the fox.
It ought perhaps to be added, that good authorities, such as Pro-
fessor 8. S. Haldeman, consider Posswm—and not Opossum—the
proper form of the name. To support this, they refer to two early
quotations. The Penny Cyclopedia, 14,458, quotes: “ Possomes,
this beast hath a bagge under her belly, into which she takes her
young ones, if at any time affrighted, and carries them away.” (Per-
fect Description of Virginia, 1649.) The other, in which the ani-
mal is called Possum and described as above, is from Lawson’s

4
50 AMERICANISMS.

Carolina, 1700, 1709, ete. It was certainly accepted as such by
Gosse in his interesting letters from Alabama, who writes: “ abe
initiated can tell a real dead Posswm from one that is shamming
in the hypocritical state in which I saw it, the coil of the tail- ip
was maintained, whereas in absolute death this would be relaxed
permanently.” (p. 234.)

The favorite tree of the opossum is the Persimmon tree (Dios-
pyros virginiana), which owes its name likewise to the Indians,
who called it puchamon. Captain John Smith has caught the
sound fairly enough, for he tells us “ The other (trees) which they
call Pufchamins, grow as high as a palmeta; the fruit is like a
medler; it is first green, then yellow, and red when it is ripe;
if it be not ripe it Il draw a man’s mouth awry with much tor-
ment; but when it is ripe, it is as delicate as an apricote.” (Vir-
ginia, I, p. 122.) The fact is, that the plum requires to be ex-
posed to severe frost before it is fit to eat; but then it becomes
very sweet and luscious, with a decided vinous taste, which the
opossum fully appreciates. How little even this common tree is
yet known abroad, appears from the manner in which the clever
writer on “Inroads on English,” in Blackwood (Dec. 1870, p. 417),
speaks of its fruit as nzfs. Mr. Jefferson, the President, used to
say, that with cultivation the fruit might be made valuable as a
table-fruit and for preserves, while persimmon beer, as a kind
of beverage made from it is called, might often tempt more
fastidious palates than those of the negroes, who love it dearly.
R. B. Beverley had evidently a good opinion of it, for he writes:
“Of these (persimmons) some vertuosi make an agreeable kind
of beer, to which purpose they dry them in cakes and lay them
up for use.” The familiar fruit has, like other Indian names of
this class, given rise to many familiar expressions and slang
phrases. To rake up the persimmons is a frequent term for
“pocketing the stakes ;” the longest pole gets the most ’simmons
takes the place of the English “ the longest pole knocks down the
nuts,” and the odd-sounding phrase, huckleberry above the per-
simmons, is used mainly in the South to express that something
apparently simple and easy is far above the ability of the person
who made the attempt.

The raccoon (Procyon lotor), an animal which has much in
common with the opossum from its curtailed name of ’coon to its
THE INDIAN. 51

fondness for persimmons, shares with it also the Indian origin of
its name. The Algonquin (Virginian) arougheun or arocoun
(the scratcher), the name of the animal as quoted by Strachey and
Smith, is evidently the ancestor of the modern form, and if there
is any connection with the French raton, as is claimed by some
writers, it is certainly not that of direct descent. In other Al-
gonquin dialects similar names occur, and only among the Ojib-
ways the animal was known as aisebun, “a shell it was,” in
allusion to the tradition prevailing among them, that the curious
marks of the animal’s furs were the traces of its former existence
as a shell before it was transformed. Captain John Smith also
quotes it thus: “There is a beast they call aroughcun, much like
a badger, but uses to live on trees as squirrels doe.” (Virginia, L,
p. 124.) The raccoon is mentioned as such by Beverley, when he
inveighs against animals that are fond of pilfering the settlers’
beehives, and speaks of them as “bears, raccoons, and other
liquorish varmine.” (p. 122.) The shortened form, coon, is of
comparatively modern origin, having been first introduced into
polite language in 1840, when Harrison was elected President, and
the skin of the animal was used as a kind of badge, in conjunc-
tion with cider and log cabins drawn about the country on wheels.
The eccentric Davy Crockett is said to have used the word before,
but it was certainly then first brought from the woods into good
society, and speedily secured a footing. The whigs had no sooner
adopted the emblem than they became known throughout the
Union as Coons, their policy was denounced as “ Coonery, which
must fall with all its corruptions and abominations, never more
to rise.” (Boston Post, &.) The epithet was all the more forcible,
no doubt, because so suggestive of the known character of the
animal, which moves in a somewhat oblique and sidelong manner,
and is up to all sorts of shifts in self-defence. Hence also the Indic-
rous corruption of shecoonery, for chicanery, not uncommon in the
South, and expressive of a kind of mild and feminine whiggery.
A gone coon represents a man in a serious or hopeless difficulty.
This Western phrase is, of course, drawn from the idea of a coon
which has been treed, and—like the one threatened by that famous
shot, Captain Scott—is ready to say, “Don’t trouble yourself to
fire, Captain, ’l1 come down!” having no hope of escape. The
amusing Slang Dictionary, published by J. C, Hotten, London,
52 AMERICANISMS.

1870, has, however, a novel and entertaining explanation. During
the American War, it states, a spy dressed in a raccoon skin had
ensconced himself ina tree. An English rifleman, taking him
for a veritable coon, levelled his piece at him, whereupon the
frightened American exclaimed: “Don’t shoot, Pll come down
of myself, I know Iam a gone coon.” That is the way history is
read on the two sides of the Atlantic. Nevertheless the phrase is
quite current in England, and the flavor of patriotism may have
served to render it more popular. Why a coon should be pre-
sumed to be so long-lived as to make a@ coon’s age a common
expression in the South for any long period of time, is not quite
so evident, but the “ Cracker” who piloted Audubon through the
marshes of Newtown, already exclaimed upon meeting his friend:
“ Wall, Pete, whar have you been? I havw’nt see you this coon’s
age.” (Life, L., p. 178.)

A merry companion of the little bear is the chipmunk of the
Indians, the chitmunk, or chit-squirrel of Canada (Tamias stri-
atus), who loves to show its striped coat on the branches of a
tree or the rails of a fence, and comes uninvited into gardens and
orchards to pick up the pits in cherry-time. It makes a chatter-
ing noise, and hence:

“Was it some chipmunk’s chatter—or weasel
Under the stonewall stealthy and shy ?”
(C. P. Cranch, Summer Pictures.)

It is not impossible, however, that the word is of later origin,
as the term, to chip, from chirp, “to be merry,” a provincialism
m England, is quite common in America, and even the noun
chipper, in the sense of “a lively, cheerful person,” is frequently
heard in New England. In some of the Eastern States the famil-
iar name of the playful little creature, unknown in England, is
Hackee.

A genuine Americanism, in every sense, is the Moose, (Alce
americanus,) a deer of great size, peculiar to America, and so
named by the Indians from his manner of feeding by stripping the
young bark and the twigs from the lower branches. Mooswah
is an Abenaki word, meaning the stripper or smoother, and is
adopted almost without change in its Algonquin form moos. The
animal excited the marvel of the early settlers, so that Lechford
THE INDIAN. 53

wrote of it in 1642, “There are beares, wolves and foxes, and
many other wild beastes, as the moose, a kind of deare, as big as
some oxens and lyons, as I have heard,” (Plaine Dealing,) and
Josselyn indulges in the quaint comparison, “The flesh of their
fawns is an incomparable dish, beyond the flesh of an ass’s foal,
so highly esteemed by the Romans, or that of young spaniel pup-
ies, so much cried up in our days, in France and England.” (New
Englands Rarities, p. 19.) They are now comparatively rare,
being constantly hunted for their, meat, and the sport they afford,
and retire more and more to. the northernmost regions. They
live in families of fifteen to twenty, each one of which confines
itself to a certain part of the woods; this is called a moose yard,
within which they often fall an easy prey to woodmen and hunt-
ers, blocked in as they are by the snow. The leatherwood (Dirca
palustris), a small shrub with a tough, leathern bark, is a favor-
ite food with these gigantic animals, and hence frequently called
Moose wood.

Then there is the Caribou (Rangifer caribou), a small reindeer
found in the northernmost parts of this as well as the older
Continents, and so called by the early French settlers. One vari-
ety is. known as the Barren-Ground, the other as the Wood-
land Caribou, but well-informed travellers tell us that they only
represent the same animal at different seasons. It is curious that
this name, so closely resembling a French word, should be of In-
dian origin, while another term used carelessly for Moose or Rein-
deer alike, should have been discovered to be of Basque origin!
“ Orignal is not Indian,” writes the Hon. J. H. Trumbull, “but a
slightly corrupted form of the Basque word for deer or stag. I
discovered the origin of the name, some years ago, in Lescarbot’s
History of New France—but Littré has been before me in print-
ing it, in his ‘Dictionnaire,’ with a reference to.the very passage
in Lescarbot.” (Feb. 1871.) The poor animals have been ill-
treated from of old: La Hentan, in his North America, calls
them “a kind of wild asses,” and other early French explorers,
mention them as “ vaches sauvages.”

The Wapiti (Cervus canadensis), often confounded with the
moose, is, on the other hand, a stag or perhaps an el in the wider
sense of the word. J. R. Bartlett is inclined to believe that the
name comes from the Iroquois, but these Indian tribes have no
54 AMERICANISMS.

labials in their language, and the same difficulty occurs here as in
the derivation of “alewives” from an Indian “ aloof.’ The Iroquois
have, on the contrary, a proverb which says that the Algonquinsand
the whites “commence talking by shutting their mouths,” as is neces-
sary in order to pronounce the labials. The name is more likely
to belong to the dialects of the Shoshone or Utah, which have a
word wapit, meaning yellow, and as the yellowish or reddish color
of the elk is quite peculiar, thongh dim, it may well have been
called by them “ the yellow deer.” Even the hunters of the North
are apt to call it “the red deer” or “the gray moose,” to distin-
guish it from the common moose, which is black. This presump-
tion is strengthened by the fact that the wap?tt is very common
in the Shoshone country and of great importance to the inhabit-
ants. It is easily domesticated and has been frequently trained
to harness.

Equally original, but very far from being as desirable, is
another American animal, known by itsIndian name. This is the
Skunk (Mephitis mephitica), who was known as segankw or se-
cancu to the Abenakis of Maine, and as seecawk to the Cree Indians,
while the Mexican term conepatl has been changed into a more
familiar-sounding name conepate, in some of the Southern States.

The small fetid animal is, of course, a near cousin to the Eng-
lish polecat, but surpassing it, if not in offensiveness of odor, at
least in its far-reaching and penetrating power. Woe is the house
to which it has, by chance or by the persecution of dogs, found its
way! 1t has to be instantly abandoned by its inmates, and weeks
of thorough purification often do not suffice to remove all traces.
With biting irony the animal is called by the Yankees an essence
pedlar, and as such was introduced to the reading public by no
less an authority than the great poet Lowell. On the other hand,
it has served to giye its name to everything nasty and offensive,
from the skunk-cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus), the first child of
spring in the New England States, but strong-scented and repul-
sive looking, to the skunk in politics or college-life, who earns his
name by disgraceful deceit or dishonest acts, all of which are
called skunking. ‘Two poor birds, utterly innocent of any title to
such a painful denunciation, are still apt to receive it at the hand
of the vulgar: the skunk blackbird, whom the Rev. H. W. Beecher
calls “the polyglot, who describes the way they talked at the
THE INDIAN. 55

winding up of the tower of Babel”—from its colors, black mixed
with white; and the skunkhead, the pied duck of science, thus
called all along the sea-coast. The slang phrase, Let every man
skin his own skunk, which is due to Major Jack Downing, is a
rather forcible version of the French proverb which recommends
us “to wash our soiled linen in the family ;” and however graph-
ically it may paint the folly of meddling with other peopie’s
quarrels, the comparison is odorous almost beyond endurance.
This genuine “varmin”—for no other animal deserves the name
better—has been improved, after the manner of the American
sense of that word, into an original maxim: “ Vice is a skunk that
smells awfully rank, when stirred up by the pole of misfortune.”
(Blackwood, April, 1861.) The phrase contains the very essence
of modern social philosophy, and justifies the description of a
proverb as the wisdom of a nation.

A kinsman in smells, if not in race, is the American Muskrat
(Ondatra zibethicus), whose English name, derived from the strong
musky smell of the beaver’s first cousin, strangely resembles
the more familiar Indian name: Musquash. Captain John
Smith says of it: “The Mussascus is a beast of the form and nature
of our water rats, but many of them smell exceedingly strongly of
muske” (Virginia, I., p. 124), while the poet Lowell refers to its
habitat in the line:

“ Forlorner than a musguash if yowd took an dreened his swamp.”
(Bigiow Papers, II. 10.)

They are hunted for their furs, which are valuable, and become in
sequestered places so bold that “these miniature beavers sit and
eat clams on the steps of the boat-house.” (Harpers’ Monthly,
August, 1847.) They give their name to the musguash root
(Cicuta maculata), a poisonous plant growing in swamps.

Among imported animals at least two breeds of horses peculiar
to America still bear the Indian names by which they were known
from the first. One is the Conestoga horse, the probable result
of a mixture of the Flemish cart-horse with an English breed,
which takes its name from the Conestoga River, in the interior
of Pennsylvania, where fertile lowlands and rich grasses are pecu-
liarly favorable to the raising of stock, and where this breed was
first produced. It is of large size and great power, and still much
56 AMERICANISMS.,

in favor in remote districts, wherever the introduction of railways
has not destroyed the traffic carried on, as of old, by huge wagons,
covered with white canvas and drawn by six of these magnificent
animals. The other breed is known as Narragansett pacers,
ponies said to be found only on the islands in Narragansett Bay,
and very much valucd on account of their powers of endurance
and admirable pacing gait. The breed is, however, reported to
be no longer what it was, which may well be the case, if the Rev.
Dr. MacSparran was not actuated by a little enthusiasm when he
wrote, in 1753: “The produce of this colony is fat cattle, wool,
and tine horses, which are exported to all parts of English Amer-
ica. They are remarkable for their fleetness and swift pacing,
and I have seen some of them pace a mile in little more than two
minutes, a good deal less than three.” (America Dissected, B.)
The increasing fondness of Americans for fast trotting has
naturally led to a comparative neglect of pacing horses, and hence
much less is said now-a-days of the once famous Narragansett
horse.

It is rather remarkable that among the birds so few Indian
names should have become familiar to the whites, and even
Sora, or, as R. B. Beverley writes it in true American style,
Saurer, the name of a well-known luscious rail (Rallus carolinus),
is not unanimously admitted to be of Indian origin. The bird is
said to owe its plump appearance and much-praised flavor to the
wild rice on which it feeds in the great estuaries of the Middle
and Southern States.

Indian names of plants are more numerous. The Cashaw, or
Kershaw, of the West, a pumpkin, may possibly be a corruption
of an Indian name, though the relation to squash lies nearer.
The Oregon grape has not yet had time to make its virtues known.
The Cutawba grape, one of the finest of the Continent, and so
named from the Indians who dwelt in its native haunts, was, for
a time, most relied on by the grape-growers of the Union, though
at present hybrids obtained by crossing it with European varie-
ties are generally preferred. It found early a formidable rival in
the Scuppernong grape, which grows freely from Virginia to
Florida, and covers often half an acre with the spreading branches
ofa single vine. It thrives mainly on the Scuppernong River, in
North Carolina, from which it obtained its name, and is a great
THE INDIAN. 5

favorite with some, though the author of “ American Wines” says:
“The Scuppernong grape produces a wine naturally hard and dry,
with little to recommend it but its peculiar flavor and aroma.”
(p. 615.) The Chickasaw Plum derives its name from an Indian
tribe residing in the portion of Arkansas where the bush (Prunus
chicasa) is found in great abundance along the banks of Red
River. It bears a large and beautiful fruit, red in color, and of
most pleasant taste. “The Cohosh displays its white balls and red
stems,” says A. B. Street, and thus picturesquely introduces one
of the many plants that pass under the name of Snakeroots, from
some fancied virtue as remedies for snake-bites. The Cohosh is
the Actaea racemosa of the botanists, and the Blue, or White, or
Black Cohosh of the common people, who prefer the old Indian
name.

Gumbo is a word, which, Indian or not, is apt to recall most
pleasant recollections in the minds of those who have learnt to
know the excellent use Southern housewives make of the pod of
the Okra (Hibiscus esculentus), in preparing a dish that also bears
the name of Gumbo. Fredrika Bremer wrote in her quiet enthu-
siastic way: “ Gumbo is the crown of all the savory and remark-
able soups in the world, a regular elixir of life of the substantial
kind. He who has once eaten Gwmbo may look down disdainfully
upon the most generous turtle-soup.” The peculiar mucilaginous
qualities of the plant lend new savor to the chicken, rice, tomatoes,
and rich seasonings out of which cooks, especially in New Orleans,
manufacture the popular dish. Far less valuable to the epicurean,
but largely consumed by the masses, are the peanuts or carthnuts
(Arachnis hypogaea), known in North Carolina and the adjoining
States as Goober peas, so that during the late Civil War a con-
script from the so-called “ piney woods” of that State was apt to
be nick-named a Goober.

Among trees bearing Indian names, we meet with the Catalpa
(Bignonia catalpa, Linn.), a most noble and beautiful tree, so
called by the Indians of South Carolina, where it was discovered
in 1726 by Catesby. Its broad, large leaves and brilliant clusters
of white and red flowers have made it a favorite in Europe also;
its wood, however, is brittle, and the trees are short-lived.

Hackmatack is the old Indian name of the Tamarack of our
day (Larix americana), a laurel peculiar to this Continent, and
58 AMERICA NISMS.

one of the most useful trees, which serves alike to build the
houses of new settlers and the ships of our navy, its timber pos-
sessing very valuable properties. The most familiar among the
trees which are called by their Indian names, is, however, the
Pawcohiccora of Captain John Smith, our Hickory (Carya of
several species). ‘Ten years before Nuttall wrote his great work,
it was known as the Hicoria of Rafinesque, and we read already
in 1692 of “The strong Hickory, Locust, and lofty Pine” (Richard
Frame), while W. C. Bryant sings of

“ The hickory’s white nuts,”
y

which in New York are called walnuts. The tree furnishes a
valuable wood, largely exported for carriage building and other
purposes, besides edible nuts. The former, possessing great
toughness, combined with unusual flexibility, is much in demand
for the manufacture of articles requiring these two qualities,
while the name of the plant is constantly transferred to persons
or objects notable for either. A Hickory Catholic, for instance,
is free from bigotry ana asceticism, while a hickory armchatr, if
not actually made of the wood, is a chair of more than usually
yielding material. Occasionally the wood is split into thin layers,
after haying been thoroughly soaked, and then the splits are in-
terwoven so as to make a pleasant, elastic seat for a chair.
Hickory and oak both yield the necessary wood, and chairs of
this kind are known, especially in the South, as split-bottom
chairs, rough in appearance, but astonishingly comfortable for
use. It is from the remarkable toughness and tenacity of hickory
wood that General Jackson became, after the battle of New
Orleans, familiarly known throughout the country as Old Hick-
ory, a term as expressive at least of personal affection, as of a
high appreciation of his character. In like manner a kind of
shirts made of heavy twilled cotton, generally with a narrow blue
stripe, which are much worn by hard-working men, are called
hickory shirts, from their strength. General Brewerton describes
his appearance during a “Ride with Kit Carson” thus: “I was
attired in a check or hichory shirt, as they are called, a pair of
buckskin pants, a fringed hunting-shirt of the same material,
gayly lined with red flannel, and ornamented with brass buttons.”
Hickory trousers owe their name to the same good quality, while
THE INDIAN. 59

the famous nursery song, Hickory-Dickory-Dock, is said to con-
tain a sly allusion to the hickory switch not unfrequently used
instead of the classic rod. Mr. Strachey, i in his “ Historie of
Travaile into Virginia,” written in early colonial times, and
recently published by the Hakluyt Society from a MS. in the
Bodleyan Library at Oxford, states that hickory was also the
name given by the Indians of Virginia to the white liquor made
by them from the kernels of hickory nuts, so that when they
saw the English at Jamestown use milk, they called that also
hickory.

The Shagbark (Carya alba) is a variety of hickory, so called
from the rough and shaggy appearance which its bark assumes in
old age; as the latter peels off easily, the tree is also known as
Shell Bark, and known all the better, since its timber is perhaps the
most valuable, as its nut is certainly the most popular of all the
varieties of hickory. The trees are, on that account, favorite
resorts with all wood-animals, and of one of them Lowell sings:

“The squirrel, on the shingly shagburk’s bow,
Now saws, now lists with downward cye and ear,

Then drops his nut.”
(Indian Summer Reverie.)

A peculiar Indian name for the nut of the hickory is Kiskit-
omas, which is still occasionally heard in the West, where Indians
are near, or in a poem like that which began with the words:

“ Hickory, Shellbark, Aéskitomas nut !”
(Literary World, Nov. 2, 1880, B.)

The Butternut (Juglans cinerea) also belongs to this family,
a beautiful tree with wide, spreading branches, turning in fall
completely yellow, and thus proving its relation to the hickories.
The juice of the fruit, rich in oil, serves as a dye, and hence the
name of Butternut was applied to Confederate troops, dressed in
uniforms of homespun cloth, that owed its color to the nut.
Butternut is sometimes called the Long Walnut, from its shape,
and the White Walnut, from the color of the wood.

There is a story told of Mr. Jefferson by his detractors, that in
his desire to import valuable trees and plants into his native
State, he ordered from abroad, among other shrubs,.a number of
60 AMERICANISMS.

dwarf chestnuts, quoted as Castanea pumila in botanical cata-
logues. They came, they grew, and turned ont to be the Ching-
wapin of Virginia, a native tree, than which few ure more com-
mon in the South. Captain John Smith already reported:
“They have a small fruit growing on little trees, husked like a
chestnut, but the fruit most like a very small acorn. This they
call Chechinquanims, which they esteem a great daintie.” (Vir-
ginia, IL., p. 122.) The same Indian name is given to the shrub
in Strachey’s Vocabulary, the last syllable of which is the generic
termination of words meaning all kinds of fruit, from whence
also mondanim, in the Ojibway, “spirit-grain,” which occurs so
often in Hiawatha.

Under a borrowed name appears all along our Southern water-
courses the papaw, so called from its fancied resemblance to the
genuine papaw-tree of the Tropics. While the latter is a tree
with a leafless trunk, and bearing fruit of the size of a melon,
with a milky, acrid juice, the papaw of our streams (Asimina
triloba), is only a fair-sized shrub, and its fruit, in the shape of
long fleshy pods, is sweet and edible, so that it becomes quite
important as food to the Indians. The twigs also prove useful in
a case of emergency, since, being of a peculiarly supple and tough
nature, they easily take the rine of the willow-withes of the
North.

The Macock, according to R. B. Beverley’s Account of Virginia,
“are a kind of melopepones or lesser sort of pompion or cashaw.
Of these they (the colonists) have a great variety, but the Indian
name is still retained by them.” (p. 124.) The Maracocks, on the
contrary, were, according to the same authority, the fruit of the
passion-flower, which grows wild in Virginia, and bears an escu-
lent seed-vessel, “about the size of a pullet’s egg.” The former
name survives in its Anglicized form of Maycock; the latter is
now believed to be identical with the word murucuya, the Span-
ish name for the same fruit, from which the French made muru-
cuca.

The Oswego tea of the Shakers (Monarda didyma), owes its
name, of course, to the Indian tribe from whom the first settlers
learned its virtue, while the Indian names of Pips/ssewa (Chima-
phila umbellata) and Pi/ahaya (Cereus pitajaya) of New Mexico,
are gradually disappearing to muke way for the more familiar
THE INDIAN. 61

English terms of Prince’s Pride or Winter-green, and Indian Fig,
under which the former is known as a popular domestic remedy,
and the latter as the luscious fruit of a gigantic cactus. The puc-
coon, also, mentioned by Kercheval (p. 258), and long known
under that name to early settlers, is now more generally called
Bloodroot, and continues to be a favorite remedy with all who
deal in simples.

A lowly plant, but one much appreciated in all the States of
the Union, is the squash, presenting another remarkable instance
of those cases of apparent identity, in different languages, which
have so frequently misled amiable philologists. Malvolio says of
Viola: “ Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a
boy, as a sguash is before it isa peascod” (Twelfth Night), and
uses a good old English word, in the sense of “ unripe or immature,”
which has its almost exact counterfeit in the Natic dialect of
Massachusetts, where asqguash means likewise “green or unripe.”
The Indians used to apply this word to all vegetables which were
used while unripe or without cooking. The plants (Cucurbita)
attracted early attention, and their relation to kindred vegetables
seems to have even then been a puzzle to explorers. Beverley
speaks of them in one place as “These cushaws are a kind of
pompion, of a blueish-green color, streaked with white, when
they are fit for use. ‘They are larger than the pompions, and have
a long narrow neck. Perhaps, this may be the above-mentioned
escushaw of 'T. Harriott” (History of Virginia, p. 124), and in
another place, “ Squash or Squanter Squash is their name among
the Northern Indians, and so they are called in New York and
New England.” It is now a favorite vegetable with rich and
poor alike, and considered to possess certain properties peculiarly
favorable for persons in delicate health. A variety is called
Oymblins, which name R. B. Beverley thus explains, “The Cly-
peatae are sometimes called Cymmnels, from the lenten-cake of
that name, which many of them very much resemble.” (p. 113.)
His derivation was correct; for cymnel was really the ancient
name for an oval cake, used primarily in the offices of the Catholic
Church, and was so called from its vague resemblance to a wave
of the sea (yUpa, a wave). Pegge’s Supplement also furnishes:
“« Simnel, a rich cake, the outer crust colored with saffron. Shrops.”
Simnel-bread and wastle-cake graced Prince John’s board at
62 AMERICANISMS.

Ashby when Ivanhoe went to its festivities. The inorganic 4
found its way there, as into “ chimbley ” and all words where it can
creep in between mand J. That the cymdlins of our day were as
much esteemed of old, we may judge from a poem by Benjamin
Thomson, written in 1675, in which he says:

““When Cimnels were accounted noble blood
Among the tribes of common herbage food.”
(New England Crisis.)

Lenten simnels are to this day quite common in many parts of
England, and Simélin is even now the local pronunciation of the
name in Lancashire, which comes nearest to Barclay’s Saxon.

Squaw Root (Conapholis americana), and Squaw Weed (Sene-
cis aureus) hold their place among the medicinal plants of the
country, but owe their names to modern, not to Indian, usage.
The Zipsinah, on the contrary, is a genuine native, and repre-
sents the wild prairie-turnip of the Northwest, which often con-
stitutes an important part of the Indian’s provisions.

Tobacco owes its name to a mistake: the early Spanish discoy-
erors mistook the term by. which the Caribs designated their pipe
or vessel out of which they smoked, for the article itself. There
is an opinion held by many that Tabago was also the name of a
province of Yucatan, where the herb was first found growing; and
still another, that the name is derived from Tobago, one of the
Caribbean Islands. None of these theories, however, are as well
authenticated as the first derivation, which is already quoted in
Gili’s Storia Americana. The weed, as Americans are apt to call
it, with a leaning to slang, is a native of their Continent (Nico-
tiana tabacum), and if not used more largely here than in any
other part of the world, cetainly constitutes at once a fruitful
source of national wealth, and an almost universal cause of enjoy-
ment to the people. There is probably no State of the Union in
which the plant is not raised, and yet so little did the rulers of
the Jand foresee its future importance, that in the instructions to
Governor Wyatt of Virginia, dated July 24, 1621, we find the
following order: “'l'o put prentices to trades, and not let them
forsake their trades for planting tobacco or any such useless com-
modities!” Now Virginia alone pays annually over four millions
of dollars in taxes on this article into the Federal Treasury.
THE INDIAN. 63

Tobacco is smoked in America as elsewhere ; it is chewed perhaps
more generally than abroad, a habit of which the poet Lowell °
says, “Our vile habit of chewing tobacco had the somewhat un-
savory example of Titus Oates, and I know by tradition, from an
eye-witness, that the elegant General Burgoyne partook of the
same vice.” For this purpose it is sweetened with licorice and
mixed with every fair and foul ingredient that can give it color
and flavor, and leads to the most offensive habit that strikes
foreigners in their visits to this country—constant and copious
expectoration. But even more disgusting is the purely American
habit of dipping, which is said to have originated in the use of
snuff for the purpose of cleaning the teeth. It seems that the
acrid taste and narcotic effect of tobacco affects the system through
the gums as well as through the nostrils, and this has led the
women of the South especially, who constantly see all men and
negro-women smoke around them, to use this method of allaying
their craving for stimulants. A writer who had travelled through
Virginia, described the process thus: ‘This neat, orderly, sin-
exterminating woman rubbed snuff. She kept a snuff-box in her
right pocket, filled with the strongest and most pungent Scotch
snuff, and she went about all day, brandishing a dangerous-look-
ing hickory stick with a mop at the end of it, which she was
constantly dipping into this huge, black, horn snuff-box. Then
she would fill her delicate month with load after load. At times
she would invite her few friends to come over and take a dip.”
(Putnan’s Mag., February, 1853.) The dipping-stick is also
called snuff-swad, as if nothing should be wanting to make the
repulsive habit still more unpleasant. Fortunately it is rapidly
going out of fashion, and only lingers still in remote districts
lying far from railways and intercourse with the great world.
Besides Appomattox, from Apomatoz, the Indian for “ 'Tobacco-
plant Country,” and famous in history since the late Civil War,
the plant has given its name indirectly to a fish that enjoys more
different designations than probably any other dweller in Amer-
ican waters—the sunfish, who is often called Tobacco-Box—and to
a plant which has, of late, attracted much attention. This is the
Tobacco Root ( Valeriana officinalis), called Kooyah by the Indians
of Oregon, who bake the root for two days in the ground, to
deprive it of its poisonous qualities, and then make it into a kind
64 AMERICANISMS.

of bread, which they call Supale, and like much better than
their Wapatoo, a dish early mentioned in W. Irving’s Astoria:
“He regaled them, therefore, to the best of his ability, with
abundance of salmon and wappatoo.” (p. 194.) The word, repre-
senting the root of the Sagittaria sagittifolia,” belongs neither to
the Chinook nor the Chihali dialect, but is, as George Gibbs in his
“ Chinook Jargon” asserts, everywhere in common use. (p. 28.)

The term Swims of Tobacco, which is still occasionally met with
in official papers, has its origin in the fact that for many genera-
tions, in old Virginia times, all taxes raised for the support of
government officers, ministers, etc., were assessed in so many
pounds of tobacco. A comparatively recent word connected with
the use of the weed, is Amdia, a euphemism, mainly used in Vir-
ginia and the two Carolinas, for the expectoration which chewing
makes necessary. ‘The presumption is, that the word is a cor-
ruption of Amber, to which it bears a slight resemblance in color,
manifesting certainly a delicacy of expression which borders upon
the poetical.

The Tumatl of the Mexicans, our Tomato (Solanum esculen-
tum), by Bartlett altogether ignored, and by Webster reported as
“of American origin,” is certainly not an exclusively American
fruit, for although long known in Africa, and held there in high
esteem by nations discovered but recently, it has become familiar
to Americans only about two generations since. A competent
critic, who wrote most pleasant and instructive things “ Concern-
ing Salads and French Wines,” says of it: “The tomato is a noble
fruit, as sweet in smell as the odors of Araby, and makes an ex-
cellent—and were I in France, I would say—an illustrious salad.
Its medicinal virtue is as great as its gastronomical goodness. It
is the friend of the well to keep them well, and the friend of the
sick, to bring them back into the lost sheepfolds of Hygeia. The
Englishman’s travelling companion, the blue-pill, would never be
needed, if he would pay proper court to the tomato.” (Blackwood,
October, 1866.) It is a fruit universally used and esteemed in the
Union, eaten raw with salt, as a salad, stewed. and stuffed in
various ways, and canned in immense quantities. Its name is
gradually becoming Anglicised under the shortened form of
Tomat, which is preferable—however objectionable to the eyes of
purists—to the false new form of /o-may-to, “invented to main-
THE INDIAN. 65

tain a fancied analogy with potato, which indeed belongs to the
same natural family—but so does nightshade and henbane.” (8.
8. Haldeman.)

Of more recent date, as far as its general introduction is con-
cerned, is the Yam (Dioscorea alba) of the West Indies, so called
from the Indian word Ihame. The very large and palatable root
or tuber is now quite common in all the Southern States, so that
a recent traveller could say: “To enter the piney woods of Mis-
sissippi is like returning to North Carolina, and to pass through
them without eating roast yams and buttermilk, is like passing
through North Carolina without eating hominy and chine of
bacon.” (Putnam's Mag., June, 1867.) Nor must we forget the
mysterious Tuckahoe of Virginia, in the opinion of many the
only American variety of truffles of which we can boast. The
peculiar plant (Sclerotium giganteum) excited the curiosity of
the first writers on this country, by its growth underground, and
the absence of all leaf or stem to connect it with the sources of
light and heat on the surface. “Others,” says already Captain
John Smith, without explaining the matter, “would gather as
much Zockwogh roots in a day, as would make them bread a
weke.” (Virginia, I, p. 228.) But R. B. Beverley adds more
carefully, that it is “a tuberous root; which, while crude, is of
very hot and virulent quality, but they (the Indians) can manage
it so, as in case of necessity to make bread of it.” (Hist. of Vir-
ginia, p. 153.) Hence it derives its name of Indian Bread, or
Indian Loaf. Like the truffles of Europe, the ¢uchkahoe also are
sought for by dogs and hogs trained for the purpose, though
little attention is paid to them in recent-times. The term is now
more frequently used as a kind of nickname given to the inhab-
itants of the poorer lands of Lower Virginia, whose poverty, it is
implied, drives them to eat tuckahoe. “He is nothing but a
poor Tuckahoe,” was often heard during the late Civil War, when
a peculiarly sad-looking conscript came in from the Lower James,
apparently half-fed only, and shaking with “ chills and fever.”

Another underground product, known to us by its Indian
name, is the Coontie of Florida, which designates the farina ob-
tained from the so-called Arrow-Root (Tamia integrifolia), and
which is said to be fully equal to the famous article from Bermuda.
The root is, in its crude state, poisonous, and the Federal troops

5
66 AMERICANISMS.

lost in the late Civil War a number of: men by the want of pre-
caution in first extracting its deadly properties.

Perhaps the Indian name of a town in Yucatan, Sisai, also,
may be said to have become part of our commercial language, at
least inasmuch as it is used for the prepared fibre of an Agave
(not the Agave americana), very common on the Florida Keys,
and well known in trade as Sisal Hemp.

Among fish the Indians have bequeathed to us but afew names,
and their precise meaning varies so much in different localities,
that it is not always easy to identify the species. Of those that
are well defined we mention the Barracouda (Sphyraena barrocu-
da) of Tampa Bay and other Florida waters, a valuable fish of the
pike-kind, taken with a spear by fishermen, who float with the
tide so as to meet the wary animal with the sun shining directly
in his eyes. More generally known is the Chogse¢ (Ctenolabrus
ceruleus), frequently called Burgall or Blue Fish, and found on
the whole Eastern coast under a variety of designations, and the
Cisco or Ciscovet, from the Indian Siskiwit (Salmo amethystus),
which C. Lanman declares to be “unquestionably of the trout
genus, but much more delicate, and seldom found to weigh more
than a dozen pounds. They are a very beautiful fish and their
habits similar to those of trout.” (4 Summer in the Wilderness, p.
219.) Unfortunately they are so fat, that they become eatable only
after being salted.

The Muskelunge or Muskalownge (Ksox estor), so called in Al-
gonquin, is the largest pike known and peculiar to America. It
abounds in the Northern lakes and rivers, reaching a length of
five feet and a weight of eighty pounds inthe upperlakes. “The
Muskalounge,” says C. Lanman, “in the upper Mississippi, is some-
what of a sluggard, and owing to his size and hyena-like charac-
ter, the very fish of all others for spearing by torchlight, one of the
Esocida, of which Agassiz says America is the fatherland.” (A Sum-
mer in the Wilderness, p. 139.) Perhaps more famous yet is the
Indian name of Menhaden (Alosa menhaden) of the New England
waters and as far south as Chesapeake Bay. Belonging to the her-
ring kind and appearing at times in perfectly incredible numbers
near the shore, they are caught and carted by hundreds of wagon-
loads to the fields to serve as manure. Their popularity is so great
in Massachusetts that a petition was recently (1870) presented to
3 THE INDIAN. 67

the General Court, as the Legislature of that State is called, in behalf
of their friendly relations to the Menhaden! It set forth that the
ancestors of the petitioners, when they landed in this country,
fixed their abode upon the banks of the Neponset River, because
of the abundance of fish therein; that the supply had never failed
but proved an ever-present help “in the war of 1812, the Tariff
struggle, the crises of 1837 and 1857,” but that “when the trou-
bles came on caused by the bombardment of Fort Sumter, the fish
in the water of the Neponset quietly departed, and from that time
we have been deprived of our hereditary luxuries.” The loyal
and fish-loving population, therefore, petition the General Court to
cause the erring Menhaden to return to be eaten as of old! In
the State of New York the same fish appear under the name of
Mossy Back or Mossbunkers, a term much affected by W. Irving,
who writes: “Here an old Dutch burgher related that he saw the
duyvel in the shape of a huge Mossbonker seize the sturdy author
by the leg and draw him beneath the waves. Hence, as to Moss-
bonkers, they are held in such abhorrence, that no true Dutchman
will admit them to his table, who loves good fish and hates—the
devil?” (Knickerbocker History of New York, p.221.) The Mum-
machog is hardly known beyond the waters around Long Island;
the small carp-like fish is more generally called the Barred Avily,
(Fundulus.)

The Porgy (Pagrus argyrops) from the imperfect pronunciation
of r by Americans also frequently called Paugy and Poggy, a fish
of the gilt-head kind and much esteemed for its flavor, has a cu-
rious history connected with its Indian name. In the Narragan-
sett dialects the latter appears as Mishescuppaug, the plural of
Mishescuppe, which meant “large-scaled.”’ Of this word the first
part mishe seems to have been entirely lost, the next syllable seup
has been retained in Rhode Island, while the last, a mere termi-
nation with the p of the word itself, paug has been lengthened into
paugie or altered into pergie, and thus furnished the name by which
the fish is known in New York. It is stated, however, upon J. R.
Bartlett’s authority, that “the entire Indian name is still common
in many parts of New England.” A fish much esteemed in
Northern waters, and especially commended by Mr. Daniel Web-
ster, as “an excellent fish, in its way inferior to none, unless it be
the genuine sheepshead, for which I am told it was mistaken by
68 AMERICANISMS.

Roger Williams,” (Letter to Mr. Seaton, Feb. 14, 1859), is the
Tautog, (Labrus americanus.) The Indian word is the plural of
taut and was really translated in the “ Key to Indian Languages” as
sheepheads, the name of a near cousin also caught in the same waters,
though considered superior when caught in the South. In New
York it is called Black Fish from itscolor. The Tomcod also owes
its odd-sounding name—as if it were not a Tom Cat but a Tom
Cod—to a corruption of the original Indian name, Tahcaud, an
old Mohegan word, meaning “plenty-fish.”. This presumption is
strengthened by the fact that Cuvier still calls it Tacaud, a word
which naturally led by its sound to the conversion into a thor-
oughly English sounding name. The little fish (Morrhua prui-
nosa) appears in vast numbers with the first frost and is hence
quite as well known as Frost Fish ; thus we hear it said: “Here
we met with large schools of Frost Fish, the Tomeod of our books,
with hosts of hungry bluefish in fierce pursuit.” (4 Whaling
Cruise, p. 119.) Nor must we omit mentioning the poor little
Weak Fish, contemptuously so-called by the fishermen of Long
Island Sound because of the feeble resistance it makes when
caught by a hook. Its Indian name Squeteague is not only in use
among the people-of the neighborhood, but has found its way from
the Narragansett dialect, in which it originated, to scientific works,
where the fish appears as Labrus Squeteaque.

Perhaps the most Indicrous corruption of an Indian name into a
good English word is that of the Narragansett term aloof into
alewife. The former is quoted by Winthrop in his essay “On the
Culture of Maize” (Philos. Trans. No. 142, p. 1065), and by
Baddam (Memoirs, II., p. 131), as stated in Webster's Dictionary.
But as the Indian dialects of New England contain neither Znor hs
the original word was more probably ainoop. Whatever may have
‘been the true origin, there was enough resemblance in the term
to tempt the English—for with them we are inclined to think the
change arose—to convert it into their familiar alewife, and thus
the little fish (Clupea serrata), resembling a herring, and used
mainly for manure, appears at home and abroad in the ridiculous
form of alewives.

While the common shellfish found in the sand of tidal rivers
and known as clam, derives its English name very significantly
from its resemblance to a clamp, and was so called for many cen-
THE INDIAN. 69

turies down to Captain John Smith, who writes: “You shall
scarce find any bay or shallow shore or cove of sands where you
may not take many clampses or lobsters, or both at your pleasure”
( Virginia, I., p. 124), it is frequently still called by its Indian name
poquauhock. This word, however, has shared the fate of other
long Narragansett terms, and been made to do duty in parts:
pooquaw being now the name of the Round Clam in Nantucket,
while guahaug represents the same shellfish in New York, New
Jersey, and Pennsylvania. (8.8. Haldeman.) The laws of Rhode
Island use the term guahog in imposing a heavy fine on persons
who take them between May and September from certain beds in
Providence River, where, in common with ‘several other places of
like character, the luscious shellfish are regularly planted after the
manner of oysters. The clam of Boston is the Mya arenaria of
the clam-banks, and when salted for the fisheries it takes the name
of clam-bait., Hen Clam is the name given in New England to
the Mactra gigantea. It has already been mentioned that the
Quahaug (Venus mercenaria) served in olden times to furnish
the Suguahock, as Roger Williams calls it, of which the Indians
made their currency: “After they have eaten the meat there (in
those which are good) they breake out of the shell about halfe an
inch of a blacke part of it, of which they make their Suckauhock,
or black money, which is to them pretious.” (B.) The Soft Clam
is also still known by its Indian name Mananosay, suggestive of
its long flexible snout from which it spirts water, so that on the sea
coast: “even the toothsome AManonosays squirted water up through
the sand what time the tides were out.” (Putnam’s Monthly,
May, 1870.) Even the favorite method of preparing the clam
has been taught us by the Indians, and is to this day known as a
Clam Bake, from the fact that they are baked in an impromptu
stove of stones and weeds. A hole in the ground of the proper
size for the quantity to be prepared is lined with round stones and
thoroughly heated by a continuous fire, then the hard clams are
thrown in and covered with sea-weeds to prevent the escape of steam
and flavor. The result is an unexpectedly savory dish, which is
tempting enough to attract often large parties, and J. R. Bartlett
mentions a political Clam Bake in Rhode Island in 1840, at which
nearly ten thousand persons were present.

It requires probably a greater familiarity with the life of the

~
70 AMERICANISMS.

clam to appreciate the force of the New England proverb: “As

happy as.a clam at high water,” though at that time it certainly

seems to enjoy the generous fluid that covers and feeds it at the same.
time. The vulgar use of the word clamshell is unfortunately more

intelligible, and hence the expression, quite common wherever

slang is heard, “Shut your clamshell, for: Keep your own coun-

sel,” is familiar even to English ears, and the poet Lowell uses

it with great force in the lines:

“You don’t feel much like speakin’

When, ef you let your clamshells gape, a quart of tar will leak in.”
(Biglow Papers, II. 19.)

In addition to these Indian terms derived from the former own-
ers of our Continent, and more or less intimately connected with
our social or domestic life, we have in our English a limited num-
ber of terms that owe their origin to Indians of Central and South
America, or of the West India islands. Some of these are suffi-
ciently familiar and important to deserve a place among Ameri-
can peculiarities of our idiom, although the great majority are
probably as common in England as with ourselves.

Thus the Barbecue, the roasting whole of an animal by splitting
it to the backbone and placing it on a rude gridiron of stakes, is a
term—and a process—obtained from the Indians of Guiana, who
used the word Berbekot for the wooden grills on which they
broiled or smoked dried meats and fish. R. B. Beverley shows
that the word was in use in Virginia before 1700, for he says:
“ By laying the meat upon four sticks, raised upon forks at some
distance above the live coals,” . . . which “ they. and we also from
them call barbecueing.” The word was adopted by the English in
Guiana as early at least as 1665, and thus Pope was led to exclaim
through Oldfield:

“Lend me, gods, a whole hog barbecued.”

There is no necessity, therefore, of resorting to the violent, if
tempting, derivation from barbe-d-quewe, words which in them-
selves bear no association with beardless hogs and oxen, and cer-
tainly would not be apt to be familiar to Virginia Indians. The
convenience of thus preparing ample food for a number of persons
in the simplest way, and the happy result of the process of roast-
ing, have led to the preservation of the ancient custom, and down
TILE INDIAN. V1

to the time of the late Civil War barbecues were frequent in the

South and generally very happy occasions for neighbors and po-

litical friends to assemble in council. The merry scene in the

shelter of a wood, the fragrant steam, the savory meat, and the
lively interchange of wit and jest, all served to make the simple
entertainment a bond of friendship and neighborly kindness
among the assembled people, and spoke well for the simple habits
and cordial feelings of what C. Lanman in his description of such

a meeting calls “the yeomanry of Virginia.” (Adventures, IL, p.

259.) :

The West India term Cacique, borrowed by the Spaniards from
the Cazic of Hayti, has become so familiar to American ears, that
it is often most absurdly applied, now to chiefs of Indian tribes
and now to mayors of New Mexican towns, and any somewhat
pompous and self-sufficient man is apt to be nicknamed the Ca-
cique of his town. Calico is of course as familiar to our ears as to
English, but the East India word, derived from the city of Cali-
cut, does not denote the same material in America; while in
England white cotton goods are still called calicoes, the name is
here confined to prinzs, 2. e. colored cotton cloth, coarser than mus-
lin. The latter material, so called from Mosul in Syria, is,on the
other hand, in New England never applied, as in England, to
thick cotton cloths, which are there called shirting or sheeting.
The difference in various States is so great in this respect, that a

. story is told of a gentleman in Philadelphia, who ordered muslin
shirts in Boston, and although reminded of the unsuitableness of
that material for the climate in which he lived, insisted upon his
order, as he had always worn muslin, meaning cotton-shirting.
When his shirts arrived, they were made of Swiss mull! The
term muslin is, at the North, only used for thin, clear fabrics, and
paper-muslin is known as sarcenet cambric.

The Cassareep of the West Indies, the name of the juice of the
cassawa-root (Jathropha manihot), boiled down to destroy its poi-
sonous properties, and much employed as a condiment, is as such
well known, and has made the name more familiar to American
ears than the Chicha, a fermented liquor made in the West Indies
of Indian corn, and not unknown in the new States that were
once under Spanish authority.

The Mexican word Coyotl, the Aztec name of the prairie-wolt
72 AMERICANISMS.

(Canis latrans. Say.), was adopted by the Spaniards in Mexico
as coyote, and has been bequeathed by them to their successors
in the ownership of California and other provinces of the former
colonies. The word has come into general use now, not only
for the disagreeable barking wolf, but more frequently even for
the diggings which somewhat resemble the burrows in which
the wolf lives. To coyote is a common expression there, meaning
to sink small, shallow shafts. Hence we find an interesting ac-
count of the so-called Colorado Desert, giving us the following de-
scription of the animal: “I slept well, but the rascally coyotes
awakened me at last by their yelping. Leaping up suddenly, I
came Within two or three rods of griping one by the tail. As
they galloped away across the cool, gray gravel, in the dim light
of the daybreak, it looked precisely as if they were skating away
on ice.” (8. Powers. Afoot on Colorado Desert.) Of the mines
it is said: “ All along the gulches coyoteing is going on at a great
rate, and, to tell the truth, there is not always much choice he-
tween the four-legged and the two-legged coyote.” (Overland
Mag., June, 1870.) The word is going Eastward, for a recent
Chicago paper says: “One of the delights of Minnesota sleigh-
ing parties is being chased by coyotes.” (February, 1871.)

Another Mexican name has survived and made its way into
American nomenclature; this is the Ocelot of Mexico, the Oce-
lot of Northern Texas (Felix pardalis), a large cat-like beast of
prey, known also as tiger-cat, and extending Northward as far as
Texas. It became known to us through early French settlers,
who had given the name its present shape.

Guano, a word representing a fair, though not altogether suc-
cessful, effort to pronounce the Peruvian Huano, which means
“dung,” is, of course, now well known all over the Union, and so
largely prepared artificially, that the imminent exhaustion of the :
imported article will probably be viewed with indifference.

The Hommocks of Florida, islands in the everglades or lands
under water, which are supposed by some to have once been
coral islands in the midst of the ocean, before sand and mud
filled up the regions around them so as to convert them into
swamps, are presumed to have their name from a West India
word familiar to the Spaniards. The derivation has, however,
never been satisfactorily established, and it appears quite as likely
THE INDIAN. 73

that the term originated with the Seminoles themselves, who, as
Bartram says, possess “this swampy and hommocky country.”
(Travels in North America.)

Hurricanes, also, more frequent in America than in Europe,
have made their way into the language, and the word, familiar to
English ears, appears already as herecano in Captain John Smith’s
account of Virginia, while no English dictionary mentions it be-
fore 1720, when it was quoted by Phillips. It is derived from
the Carib uracano, fairly represented by the French owragan,
which the patriotic English naturalized, as usual, under the more
familiar form of hurry-cane! The disguise seems to have been
effective enough to lead learned men into temptation: some de-
rived the word from a Quiche term which has never been discov-
ered; others, like the learned Dr. Webster himself in earlier
days, saw in it the root of ‘the Latin fwrio. It is simply the
common term of the dialect of Hispaniola for any high wind,
and especially for the terrible tornado of the Caribbean Sea,
the most sublime and awful display of power which nature
affords.

It is a much mooted question whether the familiar term Jerked
Meat arose from the familiar English word to jerk, or from the
word chargqut, which represents the same preparation in all Span-
ish-American countries except Mexico, where it is called tasayo.
The custom itself, of drying beef and other fresh meats without
salt in the open air, is quite as common now as of old, but the
word was never met with in this sense before its employment
in the “ plantations.” Kercheval says: “ Their large wallets, well
filled with bread, jerk, boiled ham, and cheese, furnished provi-
sions for the drivers.” (p. 224.) Wills De Hass also repeats:
“ As soon as daylight appears the captain started to where they
left some jerk hanging on the evening before” (Mist. of Early
Settlements, p. 389), and this use of jerk would seem to be in
favor of its derivation from the Indian of Central America. A

“yecent work by Mrs. Trail, however, shows the more recent use
of the word: “Instead of cutting the meat into strips and dry-
ing it (or jerking it, as the lumberers term it).” (Zhe Canadian
Crusoes, p. 186.)

Even the Sandwich Islanders have given us some assistance in
their word Kanaka, which with them means simply a man, but

4
V4 AMERICANISMS.

which has, since the intercourse established between their distant
home in the Pacific and California, become quite familiar to our
ears, so that we all know very well what is meant when we read
of “ The day that French Pete and Kanaka Joe shot each other
to death over the bar in the front room.” (The Luck of Roaring
Camp, by F. B. Harte, p. 1.) In the same portions of the Union
the once Mexican word me¢ati, in its Spanish form metate, has
become well known to Americans. It designates the hollowed,
oblong stone, used universally in those countries for grinding
wheat or Indian corn for fortzllas, or cocoa for chocolate. J. RB.
Bartlett himself, perhaps, introduced the word first to the general
public in his excellent work on New Mexico, when he says: “ For
miles around the Casas Grandes the plain is strewed with broken
pottery and metates, or corn-griiders,” and since then every trav-
eller has learnt and taught others to apply the word correctly.
Its days as a living word are, however, numbered, as better
methods of grinding supersede the imperfect, old custom, and
soon, metates will be known only in antiquarian writings. A
longer lease of life may be predicted for jacal, another Mexican
word, originally written xacalli, and meaning a straw-hat. It is
now the name of a rough kind of dwelling, consisting simply of
stakes, the interstices between which have been filled up with
clay, such as are very common in Texas and the new States that
were once Mexican. “To the left was the guard-house, part
jacal, part tent-cloth.” (Overland Monthly, March, 1871.)

The intercourse with British sailors, and the brisk trade carried
on in the East Indies by numerous resident American firms, has
brought the name of the disreputable suburb of Bombay, Dun-
garee, into common use in the United States. It was probably
first the coarse blue cloth manufactured there, and named after
the place, which made the name familiar to American ears, so
that F. B. Harte could say of the motley crowd at the mines,
which he so graphically describes: “‘ Sometimes these appellatives
were derived from some distinctiveness of dress, as in the case of —
Dungaree Jack.” (Luck of Roaring Camp, p. 56.) Ther. the
Anglo-Chinese war, in which American sailors took part, brought
another term home to their mind, and hence we find a recent
writer on Americanisms speak of “ British sailors on the Chinese
coast, who long ago learned to laugh at the clumsy Dungaree
THE INDIAN. 75

forts and Quaker Guns of their Celestial enemies,” both of these
inventions being largely used in the late Civil War. (N. 8.
Dodge.)

Captain Cook, in his “Sea Voyages,” first noticed the word
Taboo, employed by the Indians of Polynesia in a political and
religious sense, for all that was forbidden to speech or touch, and
we have obtained the term thus twice, indirectly from our English
forefathers, and directly from the Pacific itself. The Tamadl, or
Tamauli, of our southernmost States, has, on the other hand,
made its way with the Spaniards into our borders; they learnt to
know the name from the Indians of South America, when they
adopted the dish which it represents: a mixture of polenta and
minced meat, wrapped in cornshucks and baked in the hot ashes.
Mr. Olmsted says: “The mountebanks draw a crowd, and this
attracts a few sellers of whiskey, tortillas, and ¢amaules, making
a ruddy, picturesque group.”

The Tule of Mexico is so widely spread over all the southwest-
ern States, that the name, originally Indian, has become of uni-
versal use in designating the short Cattail (Scirpus lacustris),
which, especially in California, covers plains where the eye finds
no limit. The grass, insignificant in itself, and of no value save
perhaps to cover the huts of shepherds and outlaws, affords refuge
and breeding localities for immense numbers of aquatic birds.
Occasionally, as “around Lake Tulare, it attains a larger size,
growing to the height of eight to sixteen inches, and measuring
three inches and a half near the root.” (Overland Monthly, Jan-
uary, 1870.)
i

IMMIGRANTS FROM ABROAD.

“When a score of nations, each with its own dialect, unite to make up
our population, some effect must be produced on our language ; some pecu-
liar threads will be found after a while interwoven with the national web.”
THE DUTCHMAN.

“The name of Hell Gate, which it continues to bear to the present day.”
W. Irving.

On September 9th, 1609, a bold English mariner in the service
of the Dutch Hast India Company sailed his little shallop Half-
Moon, of eighty tons, into the beautiful bay of New York, and
three days later entered the great river that here flows into the
ocean. The latter took its name from the discoverer, Henry
Hudson, and the land, claimed by Holland, was called New Neth-
erlands. A few years later the island of Manhattan was purchased
of the Indians for the value of twenty-four dollars, and the little
town of New Amsterdam began to flourish, and became the chief
town of a prosperous colony. But the English claimed the whole
as part of Virginia, which belonged to them by right of a prior
discovery by Cabot, and in 1664, already, there was an end of
Dutch supremacy in New Netherlands, which fell into the hands
of their formidable neighbors. New Amsterdam became New
York with a facility which justifies the Fenian prophecy that it
will soon be New Ireland, and the good Dutch burghers in
the town and along the banks of the river up to Albany had to
learn the language of their new masters.

The traces which their own idiom has left on the face of the
country are here, as with the Indians, by far more important and
permanent than the elements which it has contributed to our
every-day language. Hills and mountains, rivers and lakes still
bear their old Dutch names, though often sadly disfigured.

‘There are Staten Island, Harlem River, the towns of Pough-
keepsie, Flushing, Stuyvesant, and Blauvelt; in the city of New
York streets called Cortlandt, Roosevelt, or Nassau; outside of
the city, Coenties Slip and Fort Gansevoort ; and farther eastward
80 AMERICANISMS.

Spuyten Duyvel, Cape May (Mey) and Block (Blok) Island—al-
most all of them unaltered and forcibly recalling to us the days of
the old Dutch dominion. But that crowded thoroughfare of New
York, the Bowery, which for years reproduced all the fierce vio-
lence and reckless crime of ancient Alsatia, has little to remind
us of the pleasant Bouvery, the garden-bower of old Dutch gover-
nors, who here enjoyed their fragrant flowers and luscious fruits
in quiet rural retreats; nor would the ancient village of Breucke-
Jen, seventeen miles from Amsterdam, which in May, 1676, gave
its name to a small settlement within sight of the Bowery, recog-
nize its godchild in the gigantic city of Brooklyn. The noble bay
near by, in which the Navy Yard has long been situated, was
once Waale Boght, a name hardly to be looked for under the thor-
oughly Anglicized Wallabout. The generic term (ill, a small
stream or creek, has on the other hand remained faithful to many
a small and large water of the North, from the lofty Kaatstill
mountains, so-called from a picturesque brook arising in their bo-
som, to the broad Schuylkill (Hidden Creek) in the adjoining
State. The Fishkill does still honor toits name, and the Kill Van ~-
Kull denotes the channel between Staten Island and Bergen,
though it is, for brevity’s sake, more commonly called the Kills
simply. A small fish of the genus Fundulus, found only in these
waters and used as a bait, is appropriately called Avlly Fish.

This term Avi is one of a class of words which serve to mark

the few traces of genuine provincialism existing in the United
States; for the Aull of New York isa dreok in New England, a
run in Virginia, and alas! a crick, or creek, almost everywhere
else.

The term gat also, meaning a hole, a pot, or a passage at sea, has
survived in the names of many maritime localities. Barnes’ Gate,
as the English would have called it, thus continues to be Barne-
gat, but Helle-Gat, concise and rather too suggestive, has been
softened and made proper by being changed into Hurlgate. W.
Irving denounces the alteration thus: “Certain mealy-mouthed
men of squeamish consciences, who are loath to give the Devil his
due, have softened the above characteristic into Hurlgate, for-
sooth! The name of this strait, as given by our author, is sup-
ported by the map in Vander Donck’s history, published in 1656=
by Ogilvie’s History of America, 1671—as also by a journal still
THE DUTCHMAN. Sl

extant, written in the XVIth century and to be found in Hazard’s
State Papers; and an old MS. written in French, speaking of vari-
ous alterations in names about this city, observes: ‘De Helle-gat,
trou @’Enfer, ils ont fait Hell-gate, Porte d’Enfer’”” (Foot-note,
History of New York, ch. iv.)

It was in the same way that the Dutch hoes, a corner, though
generally modified into English-looking hook, is still found as
part of the name of certain corners or angular points in the
Hudson and the East Rivers, such as Sandy Hook, the first land
sighted by the traveller from abroad, and Kinderhook, high up
the river, made famous by the name of its owner, Martin Van
Buren.

To these names may be added the Dutch term overslaan, to skip,
to pretermit, which still survives in a few local names, where sand-
bars suddenly interrupt the free navigation of rivers, as in the Over-
slaugh in the Hudson below Albany, the dread of all skippers.
The same verb, it is well known, has given to English the familiar
term of overslaughing, for the act of rewarding an outsider at the
expense of the person entitled to the preferment by seniority in
office. It is not unlikely that the term came into England
under William and Mary; in America it is almost entirely
limited to political language, and its technical meaning, inherited
from Great Britain, in the army and navy. A prominent candi-
date for the presidency is thus said to have been overslaughed by
his party if a man before unknown is nominated in his place, and
army officers complained bitterly during the late Civil War when
they saw themselves repeatedly overslaughed by civilians serving
among the volunteers. “There is no danger that General Grant
can be oversiaughed,” predicts the New York Tridune (Jan. 19,
1871), speaking of the next presidential election.

The Dutch word Yonker in the sense of the French Cadet and
the German Junker, survives in the name of the town of Yonkers.
The Right Reverend Bishop Kip states, in his charming sketches
of former times, that he remembers visiting, in his early days, the
old manor-house of the Phillipse family, still standing in West-
chester on the Hudson. “ When, before the Revolution, Mr.
Phillipse lived there—lord of all he surveyed—he was always
spoken of by his tenantry as the Yonker, the gentleman by excel-
lence. In fact, he was the only person of social rank in that part

4*
82 AMERICANISMS.

of the country. In this way the town, which subsequently grew
up around the old manor-house, took the name of Yonkers.”

The Knickerbockers have been immortalized by the charming
work of W. Irving, and a grateful posterity honors their many
merits and kindly temper by calling all the descendants of old
Dutch families after their time-honored name. Hospitals and
banks, garments and games, all promise to preserve the old desig-
nation to distant posterity, and genial writers, from the famous
brothers Duyckinck, whose Dictionary of Authors has made them
known abroad as well as at home, to the eloquent divine on the
Pacific Coast, Bishop Kip, unite in recalling the sterling virtues
of their ancestors, while proving that nothing has been lost in
transmitting them to their distant descendants.

It is a misfortune peculiar to patronymics in American hands
that they suffer a sad perversion of meaning. As few journalists
even care to distinguish the Scot from the Englishman, and are
apt to call both alike English, so people throughout the Union
are in the habit of confounding the Dutchman and the German,
and call them all Dutchmen. It must be admitted that there is
a good excuse for this confusion. Archbishop Trench tells us that,
“Till late in the seventeenth century, Dutch meant (in England)
generally German, and a Dutchman a native‘of Germany, while
what we now term a Dutchman would have been named a Hol-
lander.” Quaint old Fuller says accordingly, “ At the same time
began the Teutonic Order, consisting only of Dutchmen, well de-
scended.” (The Holy War, I1,c.16.) It is evident that this arose
not from a tendency to underrate, as when Frenchmen were dubbed
Froggies and the like, but from a courteous effort to call the Ger-
mans by their own name “ Deutsch,” which being somewhat diffi-
cult to pronounce, readily changed into Dutch. Hence the Amer-
ican only follows the example of his forefathers in continuing to
call the Germans who come to this country all Dutchmen and in
speaking of their language as Dutch. He can, moreover, plead in
his excuse that the German immigrants themselves but too readily
acquiesced in the designation and adopted it themselves. Thus,
e.g. the first English almanac ever printed in the German form
was published by John Gruber, a native of Strasburg, under the
title of “ Dutch-English Almanac.”

Tt is far less easy to explain why High Dutch and Dutch Uneles
THE DUTCHMAN. 83

should be used so generally—the latter also in England—to
express ludicrous sounds and undesirable relations. English slang
uses Dutch for any gibberish or unintelligible sounds, and the
Dutch Uncle is frequently introduced into conversation, when the
last person one would wish to see is to be indirectly designated. ©

One would almost imagine that the Dutch of old must have
been greater people than even the Knickerbocker Annals give
them credit for—how else could the phrase: That beats the Dutch,
have obtained such general currency? Mr. Bartlett met with it
in a Revolutionary song of 1775 already, and to this day it is used
whenever a peculiarly astonishing fact is announced.

It is much to the credit of the early Dutch vrows and their
good works, that the majority of Dutch terms, which have been
incorporated. in our language, are attached to names of certain
good things prepared in the kitchen, and a few articles of dress,
in their day, no doubt, religiously made at home. Unfortunately
the good people of New York have kept most of the good dishes
to themselves, so that they and their names are rarely known in
other States. Their cookey, a little cake so called from Moekje,
and still a great favorite at Christmas and New Year, is appar-
ently an exclusively Dutch tit-bit, and yet F. B. Harte makes one
of his reckless California characters say: “Don’t know whar he is!
He lost every hoof and hide, V’ll bet a cookey!” (Luck of Roar-
ing Camp, p. 227.) If this dainty seems to be specially appropri-
ated to great occasions, a crudler may, on the other hand, be found
on many a cake-stand and in countless homes all the year round.
Being made of a strip of sweetened dough, which is boiled in lard
and then curled up at the two ends, it has received its name from
a Dutch term Avruller, meaning a “Curler.” Vegetables were
evidently not much to the taste of the old burghers, for it seems
they called Corn-salad (Valerianetta) with biting irony Vettikost,
something like rich fare, and their descendants, still retaining
the dish, have as contemptuously allowed it to appear half classi-
cally as Fetticus or in ludicrous English disguise as Matticows.
Noodlejees, an humble imitation of maccaroni and used like them
for dumplings and in soup, retain in New York at least their old
Dutch name, but are hardly known elsewhere. Olycoeks, on the
other hand, have become more universally popular. Deriving
their name from the Dutch oly-coek, oil-cake, because they are
84 AMERICANISMS.

“balls of sweetened dough fried in hog’s fat,” as W. Irving describes
them, they have become generally known as doughnuts. The lat-
ter were, of course, not unknown in England, for Halliwell already
quotes them as being called donnuts in Herts, “a pancake made
of dough instead of batter,” but their popularity seems to have
been increased by that of their Dutch cousins, and they have ever
since maintained a strong hold on the New England palate.
“ Doughnuts and pumpkin pies seem to be the delicacies most
held in esteem here,” wrote Mrs. Trollope many years ago, and
the same is true now. The West, however, does not seem to have
appreciated the delicacy yet, if we may trust the account of an
observant traveller who asked the waiter of a Western hotel, if
he had any doughnuts? “ Dornoots,” said Pat, completely at his
wits’ end, “I’m a thinking them noots don’t grow in this coun-
thry.” (Putman’s Mag. December, 1854.) They are frequently
eaten at New York tea-gatherings, and this leads naturally to the
recollection that the pronunciation of pump as pomp is in many cases
due to the sound of the Dutch word. The good people in those days
were very fastidious in the choice of the best water for their tea—
as in fact conscientious tea-drinkers ought always to be—and certain
pumps in the old city were renowned for their excellent qualities.
These were called tea-pomps, and it is said that old inhabitants
still remember some of the most famous, one of which stood in
Franklin-street, where a boy was kept in the afternoon, pumping
tea-water for the neighbors. udlichies, once called rolletjees, little
rolls, are small sausages stuffed with minced meat, cut into slices
and then fried, a dish more palatable than wholesome. Smearcase,
from the Dutch smeer-kaas, a preparation of curds spread on a
flat surface to make into cheese, is the same as the more familiar
cottage-cheese and as familiar to Germany under the name of
Schmier-Kaese as to Holland. It occurs as early as 1842 in the
Philadelphia “ Price-Current.” The same may be said of the fa-
mous Spek en Apeltjces, now commonly called Speck and Applejees,
fat pork and apples cut up together and cooked; for the Germans
and all their near kindred like fat and sweet things combined—
a taste not unfamiliar to the New Englander, who loves his pork
and molasses. Fat pork with haricot-beans, and thickly covered
over with molasses, is a royal dish for seafaring men, and rarely
long absent from the cabin of a whaling captain. The sweet con-
THE DUTCHMAN. 85

diment is evidently added to modify the richness of the fat, on the
same principle which makes us use currant-jelly with mutton or
well-larded venison.

It is somewhat remarkable, that of all these more or less tempt-
ing dishes to which the descendants of the Dutch settlers adhere
with patriotic fervor and good taste, none should have become
popular beyond the limits of New York and parts of New Eng-
land, while the only preparation of theirs which can be said to
have become national is one which can be but faintly praised.
This is their £ool-slaa, literally cabbage-salad, consisting of cab-
bage-leaves cut fine and dressed with vinegar and oil, pepper and
salt, hardly equal to the much-berated Sauerkraut of the Germans.
Persons who desire to be very correct, and are at the same time
happily innocent of any knowledge of foreign languages, have,
itis well known, an intense desire to improve unfamiliar words by
twisting their shape till they assume a more pleasing, because
more familiar, form. To this fate /ool-slaa has nearly succumbed ;
it is now almost invariably written as in the following extract
from a traveller’s account of hotel-fare in Delaware: “A banquet
of half-fried bacon afloat in grease, waxy potatoes, coldslaw appa-
rently cut with a harrow, and coffee as weak as the butter was
strong.” (Lippincott’s Mag., Feb. 1871.)

The few names of articles of wearing apparel which the Dutch
have bequeathed to us, are, like their dishes, almost entirely con-
fined to the State, and often to the city, of New York, and may,
as such, be fairly classed among the genuine provincialisms of
America. There is something of old Holland naiveté in their
barraclades, as napless blankets made at home continue to this day
to be called; the word meant originally baare klederen, bare clothes
(German Kleider), and graphically described the absence of the
usual long staple. It recalls to our mind at once the picture of an
old Dutch dame, so charmingly portrayed in W. Irving’s loving
description of Knickerbocker days, bending over her work in her
clockmutch (klap-muts), a quaint though not unbecoming cap often
seen in Gerard Dow’s paintings, and still worn here and there by
old-fashioned ladies of Dutch descent. No wonder that such a
form, appearing suddenly among fashionable Biddies and brilliant
Phoebes of ebony-color, should be hailed as a Frowchey, a well-
nigh desperate attempt to render the staid old Vrowwtje (German
86 AMERICANISMS.

Frauchen), with which the wives of the good burghers used to be
greeted. We have even heard the term applied to a poor little
woman, looking, in her bright chintz gown and odd cap, her bent
shoulders and deep-wrinkled face, like a picture of an old master,
by boys who were as ignorant of its meaning as of the word hoople,
by which they called their trundling hoops, and which they little
suspected they owed to the hoeple of Dutch ancestors. Nor did
their mothers think probably that they were using another such
term when washing their children’s dirty little hands, and calling
them “too mussy in all conscience ;” the word looks so like the
Old English muss, and recalls so little the Dutch morsiy, from
which it is derived.

Very much in the same manner Americans are still occasionally
heard to speak of a.logy preacher or a logy talker in society, when
they wish gently to insinuate that such persons are not peculiarly
interesting, but approaching the character of “ bores.’ The term
is derived from the Dutch log, which means prosy, slow, or dull,
and being by its very sound suggestive of its meaning, has main-
tained its hold on our language. This attachment to old words
and old customs causes also the word Paas (Paasch) still to be
used for Easter in many families of New York, and children
especially are fond of calling their bright-colored Easter eggs by
their venerable name of Paas-eggs, when merrily cracking them
against each other in Russian fashion, trying to break their neigh-
bor’s and not their own. As, thanks to the resemblance of the
German Blumen, the echo of a similar Dutch word in the form
of Blummie and its diminutive Blummachee still survive among
many people in the great city and along the banks of the Hudson
River, Paas-Blummachee are well known in the flower-markets,
and designate the common yellow Daffodill. The early azalea of
our woods (Azalea nudiflora), is in like manner called Pinzter
Blummachee, for the Dutch were faithful to ancient customs in
celebrating after Easter their Pinter (German Pfingsten), the
Pentecost of our churches, the Whitsuntide of civillife. Nor do
their descendants forget the habit of their fathers of extending
the festival over the next day, and Pinter Monday is a great day
with their families and servants. “ Pinkster fields,” wrote F. Cooper,
and “ spinkster frolics are no novelty to us, for, as they occur at
every season, and T am just old enough not to have missed one of
THE DUTCHMAN. 87

them all for the last twelve years.” (Satanstoe, I., p.90. B.) There
is, of course, no connection between this word and the familiar
name of the little finger, also derived from the Dutch (pink), as
it appears in the nursery rhyme, which accompanies the interlock-
ing of the little fingers of the right hand:

“ Pinky, pinky, bowbell,
Whoever tells a lie
Will sink down to hell,
And never rise up again.”

It is very different with the name of the flower pink, which
was originally derived from the German Pfingsten (the Dutch
Pinkster), and owed its name to the season of its blooming.
A similar confusion between two similar terms exists with re-
gard to the Dutch word pyl, now used in the form of pile by
New York boys to designate an arrow, and the good old English
pileas applied to money. When we call the stone of a cherry or the
hard kernel of any fruit a pit, we use unconsciously an old Dutch
word (pit), by which our idiom hag been enriched, so that the
image of a“ peach-pit put into the ground and rising in due time
to grow into a beautiful tree” is an oft-quoted illustration of our
own resurrection, employed in the pulpit. The potty baker of Mr.
Bartlett, from the Dutch pott-bakker, has, however, entirely ab-
dicated in favor of the shorter native potter himself, and retains
only an antiquarian interest, like the once familiar praadje of
Dutch burghers, which long survived in the painful corruption of
prawchey, to designate a pleasant neighborly gossip. Zo scup
instead of to swing, is still here and there a boy’s term, and feraw-
chey, made after the manner of prawchey from te rage, “ the little
mouse,” a familiar word in English, as well as Dutch nurseries,
for the less poetical creepmouse.

Among the almost local terms of Dutch origin, which barely
survive in districts inhabited by Dutch families, but which every
now and then startle us by their sudden reappearance in poetry or
in local description, are the following: Brogues (brock in Dutch)
have entirely given way to breeches, but Blauser, from the Dutch
blazer, is still the name of the Deaf Adder (Vipera berus), which
blows up its neck and head, and therefore well deserves its graphic
88 AMERICANISMS.

name. There is less poetry in the old term dblickey from the
Dutch dk (Germ. Blech), which is used in some parts of the
States of New York and New Jersey for a tin pail, while boonder,
originally applied to a brush, much in demand and in use by
Dutch ladies, has lately derived a new lease of life from F. B,
Harte’s sketch of his dog Boonder. The word feast, a corruption
of the original vies, and meaning “ fastidious,” can hardly be said
to exist any longer; the Anglicized term fyke from the Dutch furk
is however still in use among fishermen for a large bow net, with
which certain fish, like shad, are caught in New York harbor;
and hay-barrack, a somewhat ludicrous corruption of hootberg
(hay-mountain), is in like manner locally applied to a thatched
roof supported on four posts, under which hay is protected against
the weather. Bockey, also, denoting a vessel made from a gourd,
is derived from the Dutch, but limited in its use to the city of
New York and its immediate vicinity.

There are, however, a few Dutch words in general use through-
out thecountry. Among mariners, for instance, a droger or drog-
her has ever been well known, from the days of the old English
drugger to our own cotton-droger, as a vessel built solely for the
transportation of heavy loads. A scow also, a large, flat-bottomed
boat, called originally schouw, is quite familiar to great cities, where
itis employed as a dredger to clear the harbor or narrow basins, and
to the Northern lakes, where they are often rigged so as to become
fast sailers, a transformation, no doubt, little anticipated by their
first builders. The word school, pronounced like shoal, and only
provincial in England, but universally used in America, belongs to
the Dutch, but of course long before their appearance on this con-
tinent. Hence Captain John Smith already reports, regardless of
all orthography, of the bays of Virginia, “Here are infinite skuls
of divers kindes of fishe more than elsewhere” (Virginia, L., p. 11),
while the poet Saxe plays upon the resemblance to school in the
lines:

“No school to him was worth a fig
Except a school of fish.”
(The Cold- Water Man.)

If the Dutch term portaal is in all probability only a Latin word,
familiar to Holland as well as to England, and deseryes, there-
THE DUTCHMAN. 89

fore, no place among Americanisms, the stoop of our houses is, on
the contrary, a genuine addition which we owe to New Nether-
lands. The good burghers loved to sit on their stoeps (seats) smok-
ing their pipes in peace and “lordly silence,” and having wife and
children on the stoep bancke by their side. The custom was pleas-
ant and well adapted to our climate, and hence soon spread all
over the country; with it the stoop became the common name
for any covered or open porch with seats, in front of a house.
Thus was Governor Peter Stuyvesant “found, according to custom,
smoking his afternoon pipe, on the stoop or bench at the porch of
his house” (Knickerbocker’s New York), and thus in our day the
traveller sees: “ Piles of saw-mill slabs fortifying the wood-pile,
which, paved with chips, the mangled remains of King Log, spread
before the stoop.” (Conn. Georgics, Putnam’s Monthly, April, 1854.) .
In Canada the word is often written sfoup and in the West occa-
sionally stowp, but probably more from inattention than any pur-
pose to naturalize it by a change of form.

The word dush has in like manner retained in America the
original meaning of the Dutch bosch more faithfully than in Eng-
land, where it generally designates a single shrub, while here, as
in most British colonies, it means rather a region abounding in
trees and shrubs. The term is at home in Canada; hence we
read: “The farm-wood is cut off one mile from the river (St.
Lawrence). The rest is dusk, and beyond, the Queen’s bush ; old
as the country is, each landholder bounds on the primitive forest,
and fuel bears no price.” (Putnam’s Monthly, March, 1853.)
During the war men “ took to the dwsh” in the South as readily
as at the North, and to this day Western papers report that the “ In-
dians disappeared in the dush, when they saw the troops approach-
ing.” (Cheyenne Chron. Aug. 17,1870). Itisa curious incident
in the history of words, showing how two meanings of the same
term may gradually become merged in one, that bushwhacking
has thus of late received a new signification. Originally it was a
harmless word, denoting simply the process of propelling a boat
by pulling the bushes on ‘the edges of the stream, or of beating
them down with a scythe or a cudgel in order to open a way
through a thicket. In this sense, which referred to the indi-
vidual bush, W. Irving used it, when he described the Van Bun-
schotens of Nyack as “gallant bushwhackers and hunters of
90 AMERICANISMS.

raccoons by moonlight.” (Knickerbocker’s New York, p. 110.)
Afterwards, however, lawless persons and fugitives from Justice,
taking to the bush, were designated by the convenient name of
bushwhackers, and during the late Civil War the deserting soldier
and the unauthorized raider gave to the term a new and formida-
ble meaning. They would infest public roads, plunder defence-
less houses, and even invade peaceful towns, to return laden with
their booty to safe retreats in the bush. “The general told us
frankly,” writes doughty Colonel von Borcke, “ that we had more
to fear from dushwhackers than from the enemy, but I trusted
in my good old sword and bade my friends dismiss all fear.”
(Blackwood, Sept., 1865.)

The bushwhacker has unfortunately not disappeared in our
days, although the term is probably often applied where another
word would be more appropriate. Thus we read of a raid on
illicit distilleries in Tennessee, that “in Smith County the gov-
ernment officials, with a squad of Federal soldiers, were fired upon
by dushwhackers, but no one was injured. One man was shot in
the thigh by the accidental discharge of his own pistol, and the
remainder of the party is stillin search of contraband distilleries.”
(Nashville Banner, March 7, 1871).

Among the words that may have come to our speech from more
than one source is the word span, which we may owe to a Ger-
man word Gespann, or a Dutch term span, familiar as inspan to
all readers of works on South African explorations, or books like
Gordon Cumming’s Travels. In the United States the word is,
however, generally used of horses only, and implies invariably a
match in color, if not in all respects. “Commodore Vanderbilt
drives a span of bays, which are said to have cost him ten thou-
sand dollars, and Dr. Helmbold four in hand, which span admi-
rably, of still greater value.” (Philadelphia Inquirer, July 28,
1870.) Another such doubtful word is spook, which may be the
Dutch spook, a spirit or a ghost, or the German Spuck, a phantom
ora vision. The manner of writing it speaks for the former pre-
sumption, and so does the fact that the word is not only used in
the British colonies, but even by classic writers like Lord Lytton.
But, on the other hand, spooks prevail most in regions where
Germans abound, as in the great Valley of Virginia and in the
Northwest. A New York correspondent wrote recently of an old
THE DUTCHMAN 91

negro in Santo Domingo that “ once he saw Toussaint L’Ouverture
spooking about with an air of mournful majesty,” (New York Ziri-
bune, Feb. 24, 1871,) and the “ Acorn and Gem,” a half-German half-
English journal, published in Pennsylvania, says: ‘People near
town firmly believe in the spook, and are afraid of going through
that lane after sundown.” (November 30, 1870.) In the Valley
of Virginia there remains to this day a region called Powell’s
Spook, where a fierce mountain-creek breaks the silence of the
night with its roar, and where Old Powell long ago coined money
in defiance of the law. Growing rich in accordance with his
compact with the devil, he barrelled up his treasure and buried
it, but now goes about all night watching it carefully and fright-
ening belated wanderers.

But of all Dutch words familiar to our ear, none has acquired
a wider circulation and a stronger hold on our social system than
the term oss, derived from the Dutch daas. It had, originally,
with us as in its native land, the primitive meaning of “ master,”
overseer, or superior of any kind, and retains it to this day ina
large measure. Even now a doss shoemaker, or a boss bricklayer’
means the head of a gang of workmen, who deals their work out
to them, and pays their wages, as an English master does to his
workmen and apprentices. In this sense it is, even in England,
now the cant term, if nothing more, with all mechanics, and can
boast high antiquity for such a meaning, since as early as 1679,
M. Philipse wrote: “Here they had their first interview with
the female doss or supercargo of the vessel,” (Harly Voyage to
New Netherlands), strangely foreshadowing the “ Advanced Fe-
male” of the New World. For the proud Yankee, from the begin-
ning, disliked calling any man his master, a word which, as long
as slavery existed, he thought none but a slave should employ;
and as the relation between employer and employed required a
word, the use of boss instead of master, was either coined or dis-
covered. Thus the word became early a part of the language in
Northern and Western States, and Lord Carlisle could enjoy the
naive question propounded to him by his stage-driver: “I sup-
pose the Queen is your boss, now ?” In the same sense the slang-
loving New York Herald said, in speaking of the Pope: “ Roths-
child refused to let him have any (money). The fact is, Rothschild
is the real pope and Zoss of all Europe.” It is curious that the
92 AMERICANISMS.

word has actually found its way into French also, although only
as a cant term; for M. Francisque Michel, in his Dictionnaire
@ Argot, has: Beausse, un riche bourgeois, terme des voleurs Flam-
ands. It made its way Southward, in America, but very slowly, and
reached Pennsylvania only about 1852, with the construction of
railways and canals. Since the emancipation of slaves in the
South, the negroes also have become too proud to continue their
old mode of address, and substitute for it the Northern boss, so
that the word may fairly be said to be in universal use all over
the Union. It has even been turned into a verb, and fo boss is
quite a common expression, meaning to direct anything, from
bossing a job, that is, to contract and superintend it, to bossing
the house, which means in the case of the husband or the wife, as
Providence may direct, to rule and manage it. So familiar has
the word become, that we are told of a child not five years old
put into a corner for quarrelling, who wished to charge his sister
with being the aggressor, and said: “I did not boss the jod, it was
sister.” (8.8. Haldeman.) Thus the Dutchman is master in the
‘land after all.

The word is occasionally grievously misunderstood at the
South. There the negro has apparently not been able to catch
the difference of sound in the Dutch boss and the English dass,
and when he indulges in his favorite songs, he is quite sure to
summon some skillful singer to lead, and promises to “boss him
through.” This meant, originally, nothing more than that he
would sing the dass to the other’s lead ; but now it refers to the full
chorus or refrain. This applies especially to the shouting songs,
when the negroes form a ring, in which one half of the assembled
company perform a shuffling dance, with a sort of ducking motion

of the body, while the other half stand by and sing, one voice lead- . .

ing and stringing verse to verse, many of which are made up on
the spot, and refer to the company present. These bystanders
are said to doss the song.

The readers of W. Irving’s delightful work on the History of
New York, in which fact and fiction are so amusingly interwoven
as to have deceived more than one acute critic, are familiar with
his quaint and graphic description of the origin of Moving Day.
He ascribes the curious custom which makes the first of May a day
of horror in that city, on which every one who is not the fortu-
.THE DUTCHMAN. 93

nate owner of a house, vacates his lodgings and seeks new ones
for the coming year, to the first great move made by the Dutch
inhabitants of Communipaw to New Amsterdam “The anni-
versary,” he says, “was piously observed among their sons, by
turning their houses topsy-turvy, and carrying all their furniture
into the streets; and this is the real origin of the universal agita-
tion and moving, by which this most restless of cities is literally
turned out of doors on every May-day.” (Knickerbocker’s His-
tory of New York.) The custom has certainly survived till now,
and as Robert 8. Coffin, the “Boston Bard,” says,

“ Hurry, scurry—grave and gay,
All must trudge the first of May,”
(The First of May.)

but it is older than even the ancient settlement called Communi-
paw. The Dutch settlers evidently brought the custom with
them from their transatlantic home, and to this day, in Bruges
and its neighborhood, in Verviers and many other parts of Bel-
gium and Holland, the first of May continues to be the general
day of moving. It has not only become a characteristic institu-
tion of the City of New York, but the tendency to move, con-
stantly to shift and drift from one place to another, is, by the
home-keeping Scotch and Irish especially, not quite unjustly
looked upon as a sign of instability in the national character.
The marvellous facility of locomotion which this country affords
by its net-work of railways, rivers, and canals, favors the disposi-
tion, to which must be added the temptation held out by count-
less openings for all in the newer States. The roving propensity
subsides, however, in nations as in individuals, and already a
strong tendency is perceptible in the United States to crowd the
great cities at the expense of the open country.

The custom, also, to keep one room in the house as the dest
room, and. to call it so, which still prevails in most of the Northern
States, has been bequeathed to this generation by the first Dutch
settlers of New York. The same name and usage may still be
found in all the old towns of Holland, where these rooms are kept
as dark as here, to preserve the furniture, and only opened on
great occasions, when company is expected. A person entering
a. bed-room, also, in some out of the way New England town,
94 AMERICANISMS.

would not fail to notice the chintz curtains and the puffy feather-

bed with its bolster, not as in England, tucked in under the sheet,

but with its own fair case of white linen; nor could he help being

struck in the kitchen with the cheap but neat tiles on the hearth,

and the delft-ware on the dresser, all features that prove the
‘former presence of stout Dutchmen in these districts.

Nor must we, finally, forget, among the many pleasant things
left us by our Dutch ancestors, the one Dutchman whom all
American children hold dear and in great veneration. This ig
Santa Klaus, as the name is commonly though erroneously
written, in reality Xlaas, the abbreviation of Nickolas, a Dutch
Saint of undisputed nationality, whose name is heard everywhere
when his own day, Christmas, is drawing near.
THE FRENCHMAN.

“Can the leopard change his spots? Can the Frenchman lose his
nationality ?’—H. About.

Our English contains, of course, a large number of French
terms, which we owe, in common with our English cousins, to
the supremacy which France has till ‘recently exercised in war
and in fashions. It might have been expected that large addi-
tions would have been made by the frequent and numerous
streams of immigration, which have come to us from France
itself and from former French dependencies. The French owned
Acadie, and sent their missionaries throughout the whole West;
they owned Louisiana, and thus met at the mouth of the Missis-
sippi their zealous countrymen from the far North. Noble
Huguenots, animated by a fervor and a constancy in no ways
inferior to that of the Puritans, came over in large numbers and
settled in the Southern States, where climate and national char-
acter seemed to be congenial, and the “ charitable exhibition” of
King William also sent in 1700 nearly a thousand more, who
had left their native land on account of their religion. Ata later
period new arrivals came from home and from the colonies; the
French Revolution sent many hundreds, the expulsion of the
French from San Domingo added large numbers, and dissatisfied
Imperialists came to find homes here after the banishment of
their idol to St. Helena. French colonies were attempted in
Michigan and in Florida; Gallipolis bore the name of its founders ;
even in the Great Desert a /renchtown had a brief existence, and
the Falls of the Kanahwa were once owned by a French com-
pany. French names still remain on the map of the United
States as they were first bestowed: Beaufort and Port Royal in
South Carolina, speak of the Huguenot and the scholar, as La
96 AMERICANISMS.

Moille River, Calais, and Mount Desert, in New England, remind
us of the enterprise and zeal of the Jesuits in the very home of
Puritanism.

There is no lack, in fact, of French elements in our population,
and the grateful feeling long cherished throughout the United
States for the efficient help rendered by France during the War

of Independence, might, it seems, have given moral weight to the | ,

influence legitimately wielded by the representatives of a polished
language, a matchless literature, and highest culture. But few
and faint are the marks left by the French on our public life and
our language. Their own character is too light and too fickle to
impress itself forcibly on the sturdy, thoughtful Anglo-Saxon, as
their frequent failures to adapt themselves to Republican institu-
tions stand in striking contrast with the success of the latter
among ourselves. There are, of course, a number of French
words in use among Americans, whose fondness for Gallic words
and things has laid them open to the charge that good Americans
hope to go to Paris hereafter, but these terms are no more Amer-
icanisms than those borrowed by the English can be called Angli-
cisms. We shall content ourselves, therefore, with mentioning
here only such as designate objects or institutions peculiar to
this country, adding a few which have here 4 somewhat different
meaning from that given them abroad.

Even the geography of the land retains but few traces of the
brave French explorers, though Marquette and his brethren are
recorded in many a town and river. All the more pleasing is it
to find occasionally justice done, as in the case of that beautiful
sheet of water now known as Lake Champlain. It was long
called Lake Corlaer, after the great man of a Dutch settlement
on the Mohawk River, who “for long years swayed the civic sword
so potently and with such terror to evil-doers among the Indians,
that they adopted his name in their language to signify a white
governor. This doughty Dutchman, therefore, left his name to
his successors, and the Corlaers went through their decline and
fall with as much dignity, in a small way, as history ascribes to
the Pharaohs and Cxsars. Like the founders of other dynasties,
however, the original Corlaer came to an untimely end, being
drowned, and as the catastrophe occurred in the lake, the Dutch
stubbornly regarded their own hero as haying the best right to
ar ee Hee

THE FRENCHMAN. 9%

it” But suddenly, and with her proverbial fickleness assigning
no reason for the act, Dame Fortune declared for Samuel de
Champlain, the brave servant of Henry IV., the father, as he was
justly called, of La Nouvelle France,and henceforth the lake bore
his name exclusively.

Other geographical names and terms in Natural History also
are often met with, but the whole class of these words are gen-
erally of such exclusively technical meaning, that they can hardly
be said to form part of our speech, except when they really be-
come the common name of a whole class of similar objects. Such
is, for instance, the case with dayou, meaning a stream—like the
Bayou la Fourche in Louisiana or the Atchafalaya, connecting
this bay with Red River—which takes a wide course, often
on the largest scale, such as is, of course, possible only in‘ low,
alluvial regions. ‘The English correlative is Gut, as the Gut of
Canso—the Gut is a local offshoot of the Susquehanna. The
word originally meant literally a gut, or leathern pipe, but in the
Southern States is used to designate the outlet of a lake or river.
That eccentric river, the Mississippi, with its bed higher than the
surrounding country, instead of being sunk in it like other rivers,
also boasts, below the mouth of Red River, of dayous running out
of it, instead of rivers falling into it. It is of these broad chan-
nels that J. R. Lowell’s hero says:

“Thad to cross bayous an’ cricks (wal, it did beat all natur’)
Upon a kin’ of corduroy, fust log, then alligator.”
(Biglow Papers, I1., p. 18.)

Near the mouth of the giant river, its powerful current, at times
of high water, frequently causes the caving in of a bank for long
distances, and then on the opposite side a deposit of sediment ac-
cumulates rapidly to the extent perhaps of several acres of land.
This is called battwre.

The French word butte has in like manner become naturalized
since it was first introduced by General Fremont, the Pathfinder,
as he was then called. He stated in his report of the great expe-
dition to the Rocky Mountains and Oregon, that the word applied
“to detached hills and ridges which rise abruptly and reach too
high to be called hills or ridges, and not high enough to be called
mountains. Knobs is their most descriptive term in English, but

5
98 AMERICANISMS.

no translation or paraphrase would preserve the identity of these
picturesque landmarks.” (p. 145, 8.) The word has since become
more and more familiar in California also, and furnishes the cur-
rent term, fo butte, meaning to chop off with a dull axe, used
in the Northwest in laying out or recognizing an established log-
ging camp. “'T'woof our company, who had lingered behind, came
up with the information that they had seen several Indians making
observations from behind a small dvéte, from which they fled in
great haste upon being discovered.” (N. P. Langford, The Won-
ders of the Yellowstone, 1871.) The word coulee, used in Oregon
for a rocky valley with sloping sides (not precipitous as in a
cation), has not yet made its way beyond the new State.

It is very different with crevasse, from créver, “to burst,” a
breach in a levee or embankment of a river, a word which represents
such a terrible disaster and awakens such intensely painful recol-
lections, that it is familiar to all Americans. Whenever the dam
that holds the Mississippi in its uncertain bed is broken through
by its turbulent flood, the ery of Crevasse! goes forth through
the whole neighborhood, and unless plantations, homesteads, and
cabins for many square miles are to be swept away into absolute
destruction, gigantic efforts have to be made by the united efforts
of one or more parishes to fill up the break and thus to stem the
current. The Zevee has become so fully naturalized when mean-
ing the high embankments on the lower Mississippi, that it is
now generally known as vy. From the first séttlement of Louis-
iana by the French the importance of protecting against inun-
dation the rich alluvial lands on both sides of the river, which
are actually at a lower level than the bed of the latter, has
been felt and shown in vast earth-mounds, called levees by the old
Creole word. The name has subsequently been extended to arti-
ficial embankments, like the famous levee of New Orleans, five
miles long, and presenting an unparalleled picture of commercial
activity and enormous wealth. The late Civil War played, some-
times for a purpose, sometimes by forced neglect, such havoe with
the river-levees, that their restoration exceeds the financial re-
sources of the riparian States, and the Federal Government is
expected to make them a national work.

It would hardly be necessary to mention that the term levee is
_ also used for the periodical receptions held by the President at
THE FRENCHMAN. 99

his official residence, the White House, if it were not for the
fact that the ridiculous word, derived from the lever or rising
of the Grand Monarch, is in this case accented on the last sylla-
ble, whilst the embankment is pronounced like levy. The Presi-
dent’s wife has, according to established usage, her days also on
which she receives the sovereign people, but she is said to hold a
reception.

The French word arpent also, a French acre, is still used in
Louisiana as in the days before it was a State of the Union.
“ All that part of my real and personal estate, near Washington,
in the State of Louisiana .... consisting of upwards of two hun-
dred and eighty arpens or acres of land.” (Will of Stephen Girard,
1832.)

But, perhaps, no French word in use among us is more géner-
ally known abroad than the Prairie of the West, a level or rolling
tract of land, covered with coarse grass, and generally character-
ized by a rich soil of great depth.

“These are the gardens of the desert, these

The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,

For which the speech of Evgland has no name—

The prairies.

(W. CO. Bryant.y
The Level Prairie is, perhaps, the exception, being found but

rarely, and then mostly near, if not in, the valley of the Missis-
sippi, while further west the Rolling Prairte prevails, with its
gently undulating surface, resembling the great waters of the
ocean, when the latter “is just undulating with along ground-
swell,” as Cooper describes it in his Oak-Openings (p. 237). New
Mexico, Texas, and Arizona boast of vast prairies, often fifty miles
square and more, which are covered with a whitish efflorescence
of natron or soda, and these are known respectively as Salt
Prairies and Soda Prairies. Their aspect is one of utter, almost
unbearable desolation, and the thirsty traveller, who has to cross
them, not unfrequently endures most painful sufferings. Even
more terrible, and certainly more dangerous to life, is the Trem-
bling Prairie of the Southwest, which is thus spoken of: “The
land that first attracts the attention of the voyager—if indeed
a few mud-lumps, a few almost floating isles, and a ¢vem-
bling prairie, into which one would sink as into quicksand, can
100 AMERICANISMS.

be called land—is scarcely raised above the surface of the water.”
(Putnan’s Mag., May, 1869.)

It is to be regretted that the fair name of one of the most beau-
tiful scenes of American landscape should have suffered, as most
foreign words seem to be fated to suffer, in the process of naturali-
zation. People living on the prairies themselves, or within sight,
hardly ever speak of them otherwise than as pararas or’ pereras,
and great is the variety of spelling by which authors have endeay-
ored to represent the willful wanderings of the rebellious letter 7 in
the word. “Mrs. Morpher,” says F. B. Harte, “a womanly and
kind-hearted specimen of southwestern efflorescence, known in her
maidenhood as the Per-rairie Rose” (Luck of Roaring Camp,
p. 156), and the clever author of Los Gringos, Lieutenant Wise,
prefers it thus: “Looks lively ‘nuff here Sundays: that are per-
rary ’s fairly peppered with folks.” (Putnam’s Mag., May, 1868.)
The prairillon, or little prairie, is fast disappearing from our
idiom.

The prairies have naturally given their name to many features
in their appearance and to customs connected with the life of which
they are the great stage. Some of these terms are hardly known
beyond their own limits, as the Indian’s free gift, which is profes-
sionally called On the Prairie, a phrase almost identical with the
less diplomatic “nowhere ;” and the Prairie Bitters, a horrible
mixture of water and buffalo-gall, to which great medicinal powers
are ascribed by hunters and border-settlers. The animal life on
the Prairie is, on the contrary, well-known to the world of science,
and to travellers and enthusiastic sportsmen. The Prairie-hen
especially is looked upon as excellent game by the latter, and
as a luxury now found in every market of the large cities on the
seaboard, and a frequent visitor even to Covent Garden. Itis the
pennated grouse (Tetrao cupido) of the Western States, akin to
the Scotch grouse of England and the Eastern cousin, of which
W. C. Bryant sings:

“T listened, and from midst the depth of wood
Heard the low signal of the grouse, that wears
A sable muff around his mottl’d neck ;
Partridge they call him in our Northern States,
And pheasant by the Delaware.”
THE FRENCHMAN. 101

Another dweller on the prairie that bears a false name, is the
Prairie-Dog (Cynomus ludovicianus), a genuine marmot, and
called a dog only in acknowledgment of his short, sharp bark, by
which he warns his companions against an approaching enemy.
As they live in large communities with their burrows in close
proximity, western hunters speak of Dog Villages, and travellers
say that “seen through the misty morning air the little conical
huts and grotesque dark figures by their side looked, from a dis-
tance, not unlike a village crowded with people sitting idle at
their doors.” (The Prairie Rose, C. A. Murray, IL, p.19.) They
number many thousands in each village, but we are tdld by an
ancient traveller that “one arm of Red River is famous for the
stupendous Village of the Dogs of the Prairie. The village is no
less than twenty-five miles in length, and as many in breadth.
It consists of subterranean galleries, sometimes nine feet deep and
from four to five inches wide, and of a superstructure formed of
earth, thrown up by these dog-voiced, but squirrel-resembling
architects.” (L’Abbé Em. Domenech.) In the West they are also
known as Gophers, from the French gaufre, perhaps however
through the English fo goffer, to flute or crimp, because their
countless holes literally honeycomb the soil in which they dig
their villages. W. C. Bryant foretells a time when

“the gopher mines the ground
Where stood their swarming cities,”’

but now-a-days the Western man, as well as the California miner,
is content to gopher the ground wherever rich crops, or a harvest
of gold and silver, may be found. With the usual carelessness of
colonists, and owing in part to the ignorance of settlers of foreign
origin, the term gopher has been applied to various animals, often
entirely dissimilar inform and mode of life. That the little field-
mouse of the West, a pouched, brownish-red rat with mole-like feet
(Geomys bursarius), and a gray burrowing squirrel (Spermophilus
franklinii), known also as the prairie squirrel, should have received
the same name in Missouri and Mississippi, might not appear so far
amiss; Kennicott thinks it has the best right to the name of Gopher.
(U. 8. Agric. Report, 185%, p. 75.) But there is no such excuse for
bestowing the term upon a striped squirrel of Wisconsin (Spermo-
philus tredecimlineatus), which does not burrow, and still less a
102 AMERICANISMS.

land-tortoise (Testudo polyphemus) of Florida. Even a large snake
(Coluber couperi) is so called in Georgia. A ludicrous confusion of
ideas has bestowed the name from a different source upon an en-
tirely different object. Probably with a dim recollection that the
word gopher occurs in Holy Writ, as the name of the wood of which
Noah’s Ark was built by divine command, a wooden coulter suit-
able for light sandy soil is in Florida sometimes called gopher, and
thus an indignant “Cracker” says of a rival still lower in the
social scale: “’ve seen him pulling the gopher himself, harnessed
to it like a d—d jackass, sir.” (Harper's Monthly, Feb. 1859.)

The Prairie Wolf (Canis latrans) is an exclusively American
species, about the size of a setter-dog, and lives like the fox in
burrows, so that W. C. Bryant could say of him correctly:

“ the prairie-wolf
Hunts in their meadows, and his fresh-dug den
Yawns by my path.”

They hunt in packs, and are much less afraid of man than Euro-
pean wolves. Further South they are better known under the
Spanish name of Coyotes, a term borrowed from the Mexicans.
While the majority of prairies are treeless, every now and then
an exception is met with, and of course eagerly sought for by
settlers. “The sons of the forest,” we are told by one of these
emigrants to the Far West, “would seek the shelter of bordering
groves for their dwellings, or else in the shade of those singular,
but beautiful 7slands-—groves in the midst of prairies—dense and
dark within, but bending their graceful boughs over the pure
sward of grass all around, bright with green and gay with flowers.”
(Overland Monthly, Feb. 1870, p. 148.) These islands, as they
are poetically named, in the vast ocean of waving g grass, were called
Mottes by the early French explorers, and in many parts of the
West still retain their old names. Thus Mr. Olmsted mentions
them as striking features in the Southern landscape: “Before us
lay beautiful prairies, with the smooth-grassed surface varied here
and there by herds of cattle and little belts, mottes and groups
of live oak,” (Zevas, p. 13%, B.) while W. G. Simms quotes them
in their corrupt form in the words: “In Western Texas a small
clump of timber is called a mot.” (The Yemassce, II. p. 110.)
We can easily spare the word with its vague unsuggestive mean-
THE FRENCHMAN. 103

ing, especially as the English terms of the prairie, almost all
taken from the sea, are poetical and yet true to their meaning.
Thus, besides tslands, the prairie has also its coves, where small
strips of grass-land run into a wood as if seeking for shelter
against the blazing sun and the drenching rains, and its days or
large openings into a forest on its borders. Most graphically
does the Rev. Mr. Cartwright describe how in the early days
of his itinerancy as a Methodist preacher he had often to travel
fifty and sixty miles a day in ceaseless rains, and how “there
was no guide to be had, no road to follow, but the traveller’s
only resource was to sight a line from one cape to the other,
and thus to cross the days, no other landmarks being visible as
‘far as the eye could reach.”

Nor is travelling by water without its incidents and features,
which still bear the names given them by early French explorers.
There is the sawlt, a low waterfall or rapids, bearing its first
name, eloquent of old age by the presence of the 7, which has since
left it in French, and the resemblance to Ben. Jonson’s salt, em-
ployed by him in the sense of a leap, a jumping. The name,
reduced in pronunciation generally to Soo, adheres firmly to rivers
which, like the St. Lawrence and the St. Mary of Mackinaw,
have been navigated by French missionaries and French boat-
men and the familiar voyageur of our day, whether he paddles his
canoe on Canadian streams or rises to the dignity of a fur-trader
on the Upper Mississippi and in the great Northwest. If the
waters rush hastily over obstructing rocks or just on the verge
of a great waterfall, they form Rapids, first so called by French
explorers on the St. Lawrence. The term was afterward applied
to similar features in great water courses, especially the Niagara
immediately above the Falls. The use of the plural in this sense
is purely American, and the distinction thus made between a
considerable descent in the river and a real cascade a very nice
one. Lady Lyell, at Niagara, thought “the Rapids at times—
especially in moonlight—a finer sight than the Falls themselves.”

When voyageurs for their own purposes, or in the service of
travellers, make their voyages in canoes, they are apt to avoid these
rapids and falls by carrying their light dirches over the interven-
ing space, and where this can be done, the latter is called a por-
tage. The term, now generally accepted as an English word,
104 AMERICANISMS.

applies correctly to the strip of land between two navigable rivers
or their head-waters; in fact to any break in a chain of water
navigation, over which canoes and stores have to be carried on
the men’s backs. In the Eastern States, and especially in the
Adirondack and White Mountains, the French term portage is
exchanged for the more expressive English term carry. A
traveller speaks of it thus: “The boat was taken out of the water,
yokes hewn out with axes, and carried by the rapids. Imagine
the delights of a carry! A path led by the Falls, but across it
were big logs, blown down by some hurricane, and it wound up
the sides of hills and through tangled thickets.” (Harper's
Monthly, February, 1860.) ‘The process is, of course, very irksome
to the voyageurs, and they prefer, therefore, shooting a river, that’
is to say, dashing over the rapids in the swift current. This is
actually done in the St. Lawrence with large steamboats, which
used to be placed under the direction of a: frequently half-tipsy
Indian pilot, and then, in his experienced and skillful hands, al-
lowed to shoot the rapids, one of the most exciting scenes the tray-
eller can witness in America. The bottom of the vessel actually
grates the rocks in the bed of the river, but no lives have ever
yet been lost. The word comes, of course, from the French chute,
a term which is given extensively to places where a river, either
from the nature of its surroundings or by the hand of man, is
forced to contract within a narrow compass, and rushes through
with great fury. The same word, frequently written chute or shute,
is applied to an artificial plankway made on the side of a hill,
down which the timber, cut above, is sent to a river in the valley.
One of the most picturesque expressions of the West, also, is taken
from this vehemence of motion caused by such a contrivance for
wood or water: a man, passionately in love, is said to take a shute
after his lady-love, and a young clerk may thus be heard saying:
“To clap my eyes on her, and take a straight shute after her, was
the work of a moment.” (The Country Merchant, p. 221.)

The voyageur, when grown old, is apt to settle down into a habi-
tant or habitan, as the humbler among the French settlers are
still called in Canada and Louisiana, by a term which has come
down to the former at least from the days of happy but short-
lived Acadie. In the days of the Revolution they were not
without political influence, and in one of General Washington’s
THE FRENCHMAN. 105

despatches they are called the “French Yeomanry.” The term
is, however, fast disappearing from Louisiana, and even in Canada
it is rarely heard outside of the purely French districts on the
St. Lawrence. One of their familiar terms survives yet, however,
throughout the West; any special success they met with they
were apt to call a coup, and in this sense the word is still used.
“He followed closely on the trail of the savages, bided his time,
struck his coup, and recovered a pair of packhorses, which was
all he required.” (Life in the Far West.)

On his travels and hunting expeditions the voyageur generally
carries his most valuable property in curiously constructed
saddle-bags called a parfléche. “The teetsook or parfleche,” says
General T. F. Meagher, “is generally made.of dried buffalo hide,
the hair of which has been beaten off with a stone, which softens
it considerably; it is then put in the shape of an envelope. The
articles stowed in it are kept secure and compact by thongs passed
through holes in the flaps, and with one on each side, looped to the
forks of the packsaddle, and lashed firmly together to keep them
from slapping and pounding his ribs, the mule or the horse trots
along pleasantly.” (Rides through the Rocky Mountains, p.
576.)

The French word caravane, once very familiar to all the sct-
tlers of Western Virginia, Kentucky, ete. is still not unfre-
quently heard in the Southwest, and from the lips of emigrants
who cross the Rocky Mountains. In former days caravans
furnished the only means of communication between the new
settlements and the Eastern cities. “In the fall of the year, after
seeding-time, every family formed an association with some of
their neighbors for starting a little caravan. A master-driver
was selected, who was assisted by two or more young men. The
horses were fitted out with packsaddles; a bell and a collar
ornamented the neck. Every family collected what peltry and
fur they could obtain during the year, to send them East for bar-
ter. They had no other stores of any kind, and needed salt and
iron. The common price of a bushel of salt was a good cow and
calf.” (Wills De Hass, History of Western Virginia.)

The caravan is quite at home in New Mexico and Sonora,
although frequently called there by its Spanish name, conducta,
and the trade which it enables trappers and hunters, as well as
106 AMERICANISMS.

distant settlers, to carry on, is often of considerable importance.
The term itself is one which has, like many others, very nearly
made the circuit of the earth: beginning in Persia as Kdrivdn or
Kirwan, it entered Arabia as Aairawdn, in the sense of “ travelling
through many countries,” became French, as caravane, and is
now on the shores of the Pacific, ready to be wafted back again
to Asia, its native land.

In Western waters rafts were the first means of conveyance,
soon to be followed by the batteaux of French traders; they have
not yet entirely disappeared, and J. K. Paulding, in his Letters
from the South, says: “The beautiful Shenandoah passes not far
from this town, and is navigable for batteaux” (II.p. 71), and by a
recent act of the Legislature of Virginia, a company is chartered
for batteaux navigation on the Rivanna River (Jan. 17, 1871).
The word cache (French cacher), on the contrary, now frequently
disgraced into cash, is receding more and more to the West,
where it still retains its first meaning of a hole dug in the ground
to cache, 2. e., to conceal stores, and to protect them against thieves
of all kinds. If properly made, these holes will preserve provis-
ions for a year and longer, and great skill is manifested by
Indians and Western travellers in effacing every trace of work
that could betray the secret. Mr. Bartlett tells us how, on his
expedition to settle the boundary line with Mexico, the “ contents
of a wagon were cached on the banks of the Gila, and camp-fires
built over the openings, that the Indians might not discover it.”
The term is used in a wider sense, when a timid syortsman ex-
claims: “ Do’ee hear now, boys, thar’s sign about. This hoss feels
like caching.” (Life in the Far West.) The old English word
cahoot, a slang word of the West and South for keeping company
legitimately and illegitimately, is so little used and so far removed
from its original in French (cohorte) that it does not deserve a
place among Americanisms; calwmet, on the contrary, the old,
slightly changed form of the modern chalwmeau, originated with
the early colonists of New France, and has held its own mainly
among the Indians, and in the intercourse between them and the
whites.

It is to the French of Louisiana that the few words belonging
to their language must be traced back which serve to designate
shades of color in the descendants of colored people. Such are
THE FRENCHMAN. 107

the grifin, from the French griffon, still frequently heard when
applied to a mulatto, especially a woman, and the guadroon, from
quarteron, the half-Spanish name of the offspring of a mulatto
woman and a white man, among whom the very highest grade
of beauty is not unfrequently found. The word is also occasion-
ally written cuarteroon, with a leaning to the Spanish original,
which, like the French, alludes to the one quarter negro-blood in
the veins of the owner of the name. The offspring, in the next
generation, of a quadroon and a white person, is called a metif.
In the same State, as in all districts where sugar is raised, the term
bagasse is one of great familiarity and importance. It comes from
the low Latin dagasea, and designates the dry remains of the sugar-
cane after the juice has all been pressed out. It is used as fuel
under the sugar-kettles, and invaluable in those regions where
other fuel is either not to be had at all or likely to be very expen-
sive; occasionally also it serves as manure. Among the barely
surviving words bequeathed to us by former generations are the
banquette, the name of the sidewalk in some of the Southern
cities, and the darraque or barrack,as applied to a roof on four
posts for the sheltering of hay and other produce. In Canada, in
the same manner, a small bedstead is still very frequently called a
dodette, and an old-fashioned kind of gig a calash, from the French
caleche, a name often applied also to that becoming covering for
the head, familiar to English ears as “an ugly,” and by no means
improved under its new appellation. Another kind of carriage,
of more pretension and greater capacity, is the Carryall, a corrup-
tion of the original carriole, so successfully carried out, that few
are disposed to admit the French paternity, and stoutly maintain
that its purpose is to express the capacity of the small one-horse
vehicle to “carry all.” The term originated, perhaps, in Canada,
and thus came first to the Northern States, but while in the
Dominion it now means a sleigh, its common use has extended
throughout the country. “I once crossed Tennessee and Ken-
tucky in a buggy,” writes Professor 8. 8. Haldeman, “ which the
toll-takers were puzzled how to classify, as it had no place in the
Table of Rates. At last it was determined to be a Carryall.” It
is a curious question how the terms caveson, quoted already as caves-
son in Bailey’s Dictionary, and meaning a muzzle for a horse, and
cuttoes, a corruption of couteaua, should have maintained themselves
108 AMERICANISMS.

so long in the New England States, where they are still used, when
they have neither beauty of form or sound, nor pregnancy of mean-
ing, to secure them so longa life-lease. We must assume that words
have, like men, a providence which makes them occasionally long-
lived for reasons incomprehensible to worldly wisdom. We can
better understand how the term vacher connected itself with the
almost innumerable herds of half-wild cattle roaming over South-
ern prairies, and how the extraordinary class of men, who keep the
stock; brand the calves, catch the horses and break them, should
have so long retained their original name. In the West and in
California the term is fast giving way to a new word, herder, which
is thus quoted: “It’s well we’ve a good herder ; they are not com-
mon. The first time I crossed the plains, I was a herder. I hadn’t
learned the trade at all, and a rough time we had of it.” (On the
Plains, Putnam’s Magy., Feb., 1869.) We cannot wish the same
long life to the hideous name of Vawdouz, a French term, desig-
nating a certain form of worship and the object of this worship
alike, introduced from the Island of Santo Domingo. The off-
spring of grossest ignorance and most barbarous impulses, ac-
cused of demanding human sacrifices and certainly accompanied
by ceremonies of the most repulsive nature, the Vawdowx worship
has, nevertheless, continued among the negroes of Louisiana, and
an assembly was found engaged in it as late as the year 1862 in
the State of North Carolina.

By some freak of public taste the word vendue, vulgarly pro-
nounced vandue, in the sense of public sale, has continued to be
used here, while it is but rarely heard in England. “ THis farm is
soon to be sold at vendue, and I think of buying it,” writes the
author of the Letters from the South. (IL, p. 127.)  Vendue-erier
is in constant use in Pennsylvania. Unjustifiable are the silly
imitations of English ignorance in using French terms with
meanings which have no existence in France; and still journalists
wil inform us that a great match is on the tapis, or that at such a
ball Mrs. Grundy chaperoned two charming young ladies, although
the chaperon rouge is the only chaperon known in France!

French words have, of course, not escaped corruption among
us any more than in England, only we proceed perhaps with more
recklessness while our foreign cousins act more from ignorance.
We call the fine pear Virgaliew by the more convenient name of
THE FRENCIIMAN. 109

Burgaloo, but make a great effort to give the Indian Turnip
(Psoralea esculenta) its French name pomme blanche, while the
potcau, a stake firmly set in the ground, to which wild cattle and
horses are fastened, becomes a vulgar putto on the lips of South-
western settlers, and the poule @eau, a small black duck at home
in the Gulf of Mexico, reappears as a pulldoo ; and still even this
is less grievous than the Lave! with which the guide or chief-
hunter rouses his companions from their short slumbers, instead
of saying léve! “How I hated the slow, steady Lave! Lave! of
our old trapper, when his moccasined foot touched my side, and
I had to rouse myself for another day’s tramp through the endless
wilderness!” (Scenes tn the Far. West, p. 9%.) Nor can much be
said in apology of the shamefaced prudery which dares not say
chemise, and tries to conceal it under the disguise of a shimmey:
much more pardonable are the sherryvallies of former days, the
chevalier’s or horseman’s overalls, by which he protected his
trousers against mud and thorny bushes on long journeys on
horseback!

Names of places have not escaped this process of corruption.
Bob Ruly in Missouri bears no resemblance to its French original
Bois Brulé, nor does Smack Cover in Arkansas exactly represent
Chemin Couvert, as it was first called by French settlers. One of
the most striking cases of this class is probably a river in New
Mexico, known as Picketwire, a name which was long a great °
mystery to all who had to use it. At last it was traced back,
step by step, to the days of Spanish rule, when it had been regu-
larly christened as Rio de las Animas, the river of Souls (of the
departed). The French, who appeared next on the scene, translated
this into Riviere du Purgatoire, and this the American conquerors,
after the manner of Norman conquerors in England, changed into
the River Picketwire !

A similar corruption has played havoc with a fair Indian name,
and transformed it into a most absurd term of apparently French
origin, by which not foreigners only, but even natives, have often
been misled. On the Kennebec River, not far from the town of
Norridgewook, the traveller sees a series of small but attractive
falls, which he is told are called the Bombdazine Rips. He is
apt to marvel at the oddity of the name, if he has not seen much
110 AMERICANISMS.

of the country yet, but he is sure to be still more astonished when
he finds in Vermont, near Castleton, a second Bombazine, here
applied to a lake. It has only been quite recently discovered—
thanks to Whittier’s Mog Megone—that the Indian tribe of the
Norridgewocks, which resided in this neighborhood, once had a
famous chief called Bomoseen, after whom they named both the
falls and the lake. A Yankee trader, with more knowledge of
dry-goods than Indian lore, no doubt, heard in Bomoseen noth-
ing but Bombazine, and thus the poor chieftain was cheated
out of his posthumous fame.

Bodewash would remind few hearers of its French derivation
from Bois de Vache, as early voyageurs called the Buffalo Chips
of the Western hunter and trader. On the treeless plains of New
Mexico and Texas, the cow-dung gathered near springs, where
cattle are apt to congregate, is often the only fuel, yet is even pre-
ferred to green brushwood, since it makes hardly any smoke and
gives out a surprising amount of heat. Nor is the use of this
strange fuel confined to the Southwestern States: in many parts
of the Orient the same custom prevails, and even England is quite
familiar with it, for Captain Grose has in his dictionary: “ Cas-
ings or cassons; dried cow-dung used for fuel. Northumber-
land.”

A still stranger disguise is worn by the beautiful shrub known
as the Osage Orange. Its wood being specially well adapted
for the bows used by the Indians, it was called bois dare by
French settlers; the unfamiliar name became in the hands of
English hunters Bowdark, in which form it was long familiar
along the whole Western frontier, and finally it settled down into
the still shorter Bodok, which is now the common designation in
many parts of the Union. “The chief stopped under a beautiful
Bodok-tree, and calling Ouachita to him with an imperious ges-
ture, he bade her kneel at his feet.” (W. G. Simms, Tales, L, p.
89.)

A few French words have entered our idiom either with greater
force or a more special purpose than appears in English, and
may, to that extent, at least, be looked upon as Americanisms.
Thus the verb to demoralize, is, of course, not unknown to Eng-
lish authors, but Sir Charles Lyell tells us of his visit to Dr.
THE FRENCHMAN. 111

Webster, that “when the Doctor was asked how many words he
had coined for his Dictionary, he replied, only one, to demoralize,
and that not for his dictionary, but in a pamphlet published in
the last century.” (B.) Since then the word has become a great
favorite in the United States, and is used on every occasion that
will furnish a pretext for itsemployment. Hence the well-known
anecdote of the Southern soldier in the late Civil War, who was
found at the bottom of a ditch during the battle of Gettysburg,
and when picked up for dead, piteously informed General Lee
that he was not hurt, nor scared, but “terribly demoralized.” The
term depariment has here the special meaning of one of the prin-
cipal branches of government, the Treasury, War, Navy, etc.,
with a Secretary at the head of each, corresponding to the min-
isters of continental monarchies. Here departmental business is
transacted by a number of clerks, who for the sake of greater
efficiency and method are distributed among so many dwreaua, in
each of which again a subdivision of departmental business is
performed. In another connection we find the name of the royal
Bourbons applied, now politically to any old-fashioned party
which acts unmindful of past experience, and now as a trade-term
to a superior kind of whiskey distilled in the county of Bourbon,
in the State of Kentucky, or to successful imitations. Pelage is
still heard in the West, as it was in the days when Bacon used it,
to designate certain furs; thus sea-otters are described as having
a “fur much lighter inside than upon the surface, and extending
over all are scattering, long, glistening hairs, which add much to
the richness and beauty of the pelage.” (Overland Monthly, Jan.
1870, p. 25.) The French rode, on the other hand, is limited to
the skin of a buffalo, while those of other animals are simply
called skins. They are brought in packs of robes, ten being tied
together, to the great fur markets, and thus a “coachman sat on
the high box in splendid livery, with a costly buffalo robe
thrown carelessly over his knees.” (New York Herald, Jan. 9,
1870.)

Other French words, like promenading, instead of simply walk-
ing; prestige for a peculiar influence more felt than enforced ; and
oortemonnate, for a compact mouey-pwrse, dre probably not more
common in America than in England; and when a writer says of
the mouth of the Mississippi: “Here and there, shaded by a
112 AMERICANISMS.

graceful group of bananas, is a latanier hut with adobe walls, and
a roof thatched with the fan-shaped leaf of the palmetto” (Put-
nan’s Mag. May, 1868), he would have been better understood
in both countries by simply saying, “ Bourbon palm,” instead of
latanier.

The abuse of douguet, which is commonly pronounced and often
even printed doqguet, is “a corruption as dissonant to the ear as
were to the eye the plucking a rose from a variegated nosegay,
and leaving only its thorny stem.” (George H. Calvert, Popular
Errors.) Even Boquet River, in Essex County, New York, has
been thus contaminated. The hope that it might derive its name
‘from Colonel Boquet, who encamped on its banks with a British
force in the colonial time, has failed; since it has been ascertained,
from a letter written years before, that the correct name, Bouquet
River, was given it from the flowers on its banks, which to this
day make it one of the most lovely and romantic of American
rivers.

Nor have proper names of persons been able to protect them-
selves against the overwhelming power with which the English
language absorbs all foreign words, as the English character
absorbs other nationalities. Frenchmen and French Canadians
who came to New England, had to pay for such hospitality as
they there received, by the sacrifice of their names. The brave
Bon Ceur, Captain Marryatt tells us in his Diary, became Mr.
Bunker, and gave his name to Bunker's Jill of famous memory;
Pibaudiére was changed into Peabody, Bon Pas into Bumpus ;
and the “most unkindest cut of all,” the haughty de ? Hétel, be-
came a genuine Yankee under the guise of Doolittle.

A curious form under which French still continues in Louis-
iana and some of the riparian counties on the Mississippi, is the
Creole-French, a dialect or patois, consisting in the main of
strangely disguised and disfigured French words, with an admiy-
ture of some English and a few genuine African terms. — Its
grammar has been written, and the learned librarian of Yale
College, Mr. Van Name, has examined it philologically with great
success. As it is rapidly passing away, a stanza of a popular
Coonjai (congé), or Minuet, well known to Louisiana planters,
may not be out of place here:
THE FRENCHMAN. 118

“Mo déja roulé tout la céte,
Pancor (pas encore) ouar (voir) pareil belle Layotte,
Mo roulé tout la céte,
Mo roulé tout la colonie,
Mo pamor ouar grifforme 1a,
Qua mo géut comme la belle Layotte.”
THE SPANIARD.

“He has no Savey.”
Mark Twain.

Tue Spaniards have been so long masters in Mexico and Flor-
ida, that the acquisition of the latter State, and the formation of
California and the territory obtained after the Mexican war into
several new States, have made our people familiar with many
terms belonging to their language. They remember with deep
interest that the oldest town in the United States is St. Augustine,
in Florida, founded in 1565 by the Spaniards, while venerable
Jamestown, in Virginia, dates back only to 1607, and Plymouth,
in Massachusetts, to Governor Winthrop in 1620. Santa Rosa
and Fernandina, in Florida, retain with their ancient names
many a relic and ruin of Spanish days, and California is almost
altogether Spanish, as far as local names and the most familiar
expressions are concerned. Spanish words, especially those re-
lating to horses and mules and to their equipments, have of late
come into general use in Oregon, owing to intercourse with
California.

A number of these Spanish terms bequeathed to us by the
former owners of the soil, are, of course, parts of the great Eng-
lish language, and as well known abroad as with us, but in the
great majority of cases such words have assumed here either a
new form or a special meaning, which makes them more exclu-
sively part of our own speech. Known in England only to the
few, they have become with us the common property of the’ peo-
ple, and are understood not only by the dwellers in formerly
Spanish districts, but quite as well by the general weader.

Thus we owe to Spanish distinctions, made at an early period
of their dominion on this continent, several of the names by
which shades of color are designated in the descendants of white
THE SPANIARD. 115

and black persons who had intermarried. Their term mudlato,
from mado, simply denoting a mixed breed, became our Mulatto,
the name of a person whose parents were black and white. The
name is in the United States given more loosely to any one who
has white blood in him, though, strictly speaking, the offspring
ofa mulatto and a white man is a guadroon, or cuarteroon, as he
is sometimes called by the Spanish term, and an octaroon (with
an rin it which is inorganic, and has slipped in merely from a
fanciful analogy to guadroon, while the proper form would be
“Octoon ”), is the offspring of a quadroon and a white. The
latter is also sometimes called a Mustee, a term obtained from
Cuba, but properly the Spanish mestizo, the child of a Spaniard
and an Indian, which again produces Mustafina, the offspring of
a mustee and a white, having therefore only one sixteenth of
black blood in his veins. These nice distinctions have, since the
emancipation, lost all the importance they had in the days of
slavery, and the only interest that now attaches itself to the
multattoes especially, is the question how far they will show a
superiority over the negroes, such as has been noticed in some of
the West India Islands. So far two facts only have been estab-
lished which bear upon this question. One is, that the mulatto
is invariably a decided improvement on one of his producers, and
not at all incapable of reaching the full stature of mental and
moral manhood. The other is, that while an infusion of white
blood thus beyond all doubt intellectualizes the black, it brutal-
izes the Red-man—a fact proven by the superiority of Brazil over
other Spanish-American countries. In the Empire the mixture
of Caucasian and negro blood has apparently not impeded prog-
ress of every kind—in the latter the fusion of European and
Indian blood has produced utter and universal ruin.

The negro himself bears his first Spanish name, which simply
means a black man, though the term is not often heard. now in
the United States, where a sickly philanthropy prefers speaking
of freedmen and colored men, while contempt stigmatises them as
niggers, and ludicrously as people of the “ Fifteenth Amendment
Persuasion,” alluding to the amendment to the Constitution,
which secured to them their rights of citizenship. The word
nigger is, however, not to be charged to this country. In Wix’s
Newfoundland Missionary Journal we find: “Here we saw the
116 AMERICANISMS.

wreck of the Royal Wigger (qu. Niger ?), a fine vessel which had
run ashore” (p. 79), and beyond all doubt of a possible mistake, in
an article of the London Telegraph, written by W. G. A. Sala:
“There seem to be as many negroes in Africa . . . full-blooded,
black niggers.” (Nov. 2, 1865.) The late Civil War procured for
him a title, by which he was subsequently even officially known
in many an Order of the Day and municipal proclamation. Gen-
eral Butler, when first stationed at Fortress Monroe, in Virginia,
remembered his acuteness, so often shown at the bar, and drew the
line between the negro as property held by a rebel, and the same
man as property useful to the enemy. He saw that the moment had
come when the status of such a person had to be legally defined,
and declared in his official orders, that he should hereafter be
considered as “ Contraband of War.” From that day the former
slave was known as a contraband, a reality soon to be changed
once more into the ghastly phantom of a citizen. General But-
ler’s claim to the honor of having invented or originated this very
happy designation, has subsequently suffered under the misfor-
tune which has so maliciously followed other claims of his algo.
It was discovered that the term contraband, as applied to negro
slaves, yas not unknown in English literature; we certainly read
in Captain Canot’s amusing account of his life: “Scandal declares
that while brokers are selling the blacks at the depot, it is not
unusual for their owner or his agent to be knocking at the door
of the Captain-General’s secretary. It is even said that the Cap-
tain-General himself is sometimes present in the sanctuary, and
after a familiar chat about the happy landing of the contraband,
the requisite rouleaux are insinuated into the official desk under
the intense smoke of a fragrant cigar.” (Twenty Years of an
African Slaver, 1854, p. 108.)

The Negro or nigger has lent his name to various other objects
peculiar to American life. The Negro-minstrel is the artist who
blackens his face, adopts the black man’s manner and instrv- -
ment, and recites his field and plantation songs, interspersed with
laughable parodies of classic music. Miggerheads, again, are in
the far South and Southwest the tussocks or tufts of grass and
sedge standing out of a swamp, and bearing a faint resemblance
to the woolly head of an African; while the same regions are
familiar with the phrase of niggering out land, which marks the
THE SPANIARD. 117

improvident and destructive method of working the same field,
year after year; without manure. Among the cant words pro-
duced by the late Civil War, nigger babies also became very popu-
lar; the term originated with the veterans serving under the
Confederate General Hardee, who gave that name to the enor-
mous projectiles thrown into the city of Charleston by the Swamp
Angel of General Gilmore, as his monster-gun in the swamps was
ironically called.

The real nigger baby is known under the name of pickaninny,
a word frequently derived, after the example of Boucher, in his
Glossary, from the Spanish words pequeto nifio, little child, but
quite as likely of African origin; used in the West Indies to de-
signate any young child, it is applied in the Southern States only
to the offspring of colored parents, as J. R. Lowell says:

‘oTain’t quite hendy to pass off one o’ your six-foot Guineas,
Aw git your halves an’ quarters back in gals and pickaninnies.”
(Biglow Papers, IT., p. 25.)

The word has since made its way across the Atlantic, where it
“is now completely naturalized among the sailors and waterside
people of England.” (Slang Dictionary, p. 200.)

The Guinea so pleasantly introduced by the poet, the small
change for which is represented by the little ones, is the Guinea
Negro of not many years ago, when the designation was quite
common, though generally applied to a full-blooded negro, as if
he had but recently arrived from his African home. The Rev.
Mr. Cartwright says thus, with an energy which is, we hope, not
often required in the pulpit, while speaking of an incident which
occurred while he was preaching in the State of Tennessee: “Just
then my fastidious preacher pulled my coat and whispered: ‘ Gen-
eral Jackson has come in, General Jackson has come in!’ I felt
a flash of indignation run all over me dike an electric shock, and
facing about to my congregation, and purposely speaking out
audibly, I said: ‘Who is General Jackson? If he don’t get his
soul converted God will damn him as quick as he would a Guinea
Negro”” (Autobiography, p. 192.)

The word creole, from the Spanish word criodlo, meant origi-
nally nothing more than a child born of European parents in the
West Indies, or on American soil; but it has long since been
118 AMERICANISMS.

almost universally applied to any one born in the Tropics, with-
out regard to race or color. In the United States, the meaning
of the term is very vague, but a general feeling prevails, that the
’ ereole has some slight admixture of African blood in his veins—
an impression probably imported from the West Indies, where
negroes born on the islands are called creole negroes, in order to
distinguish them from the African negroes, imported directly. In
the Spanish colonies the creole was also often a man of color, as
distinguished from the gapuwchin—an Aztec word—the Spanish
resident. In the South, on the other hand, the term is now most
generally used.for Americans of French descent, and this impres-
sion is strengthened by the existence of a dialect or patois, known
as Creole-French, of which a sample has been given.

The Spanish word Zambo, originally meaning “ bandy-legged,”
was by the Spaniards first applied to the offspring of a negro and
a mulatto, and afterwards, in the South American colonies, to the
child of a negro and an Indian woman. In the West Indies and
the United States, the term has gradually come to be applied to
all colored persons alike, and Sambo, as it is generally written,
denotes simply a negro. It is of him Mrs. H. B. Stowe writes so
enthusiastically: “No race has ever shown such capabilities of
adaptation to varying soil and circumstances as the negro. Alike
to them the snows of Canada, the hard rocky soil of New England,
or the gorgeous profusion of the Southern States; Sambo and
Cuffey expand under them all.”

The word peon, from the Spanish term denoting first a foot-
traveller and then a day-laborer, is of more recent date in our
speech than in English, where it had become known through its
use in India. We found the peon in the Spanish possessions, which
now constitute California and the adjoining States, together with
the system of peonage, as the peculiar relations were called, which
existed in Mexico between’ the land-owner and his humbler ten-
ants, or, worse still, between the creditor and his debtor, who,
unable to discharge his obligations, voluntarily entered into a kind
of serfdom to pay his debt by labor. The peon, in this sense of
the word, is of course unknown to the territory annexed to the
United States, but the term remains in use and is now applied
mainly to humble laborers or small farmers of Spanish blood.
Thus F. B. Harte says: “Leaving our horses in the charge of a
THE SPANIARD. 119

few peons in the court-yard, who were basking lazily in the sun,
we entered a low doorway.” (Luck of Roaring Camp, p. 218.)
Another Spanish term of the kind, the jwez del campo, is now more
generally used in the English form of Judges of the Plain. As
such they appear already in the last code of California Laws, where
they are appointed to attend the rodeos or great gatherings of all
the cattle on a plain, for the purpose of separating, counting, and
branding the stock belonging to each farmer; they have large
powers in deciding all disputes concerning the ownership of every
kind of cattle.

The filibuster, whether his name be derived from the Dutch
Viy-boot, a sort of fast-sailing clipper, or from the German Frei-
beuter, the familiar freebooter of the Low Country wars during
the reign of Queen Elizabeth, obtained his unenviable reputation
among us and with it the naturalization of the word among our
words, during the unfortunate attack of Lopez on Cuba in 1851.
The term, therefore, is an addition we owe directly to the Spanish
word jilibustero, as denoting first a small but swift vessel, and then
a lawless adventurer, a pirate, landing in such vessels on a defence-
Jess coast. Hence the Fenians also, in their unwarrantable inroad
upon Canada, were called land-filibusters. It came prominently
forward in the newspapers of the United States during the year
1852, mainly in connection with the ill-starred expedition against
Cuba, but it must have made its way rapidly to England, as we find
already in 1858 a work of high authority use it Abe “ By connect-
ing the maritime wars of the Etruscans with the piratical expedi-
tions of the Lydians, and lastly by confounding the Torrhebian
pirates with the filibustering Pelasgians, who roamed over every
sea, plundering wherever they came, there has arisen, one of the
most deplorable confusions of historical tradition.” (Mommsen,
Earliest Inhatitants of [taly, p. 59.) Since then the word has
come into general use among us to designate any process wliich
attempts to achieve a rightful end by unfair means, and even in
political slang it plays a prominent part. “The Democrats tried
by every means to prevent the vote being taken; they Jilibustered
for twelve hours, but the majority sat watching them with indiffer-
ence, sure of success as soon as their hour should come.” (Debate
on the Enforcement Bill, Feb. 25, 1871.)

The arriero, the muleteer so well known to all travellers in
120 AMERICANISMS.

Spain, has of late become, in name and in duty alike, familiar to
Americans ; since Mexicans, who are the most expert in managing
horses and mules, are universally employed in all the trains that
cross the Plains. Now he is seen riding on his gayly caparisoned
mule at the head of a picturesque cavallard, as the long strings
of horses and mules, laden with merchandise, are called in the
Southern States, from the Spanish cadallada; and now he carefully
leads a long mulada, “a drove of mules, hiding behind the swell-
ing of the prairie, and watching the outline of the heights to see
if no curious Indian is lying in wait there. If redskins or out-
laws approach, the mzdada is instantly collected in a body, and
the drivers, under the direction of the arriero, stand ready for
service with their pieces cocked.” (Ruxton’s Adventures, p. 65, B.)
“The caballada,” says, on the other hand, a more recent traveller,
in purer Spanish, “contained not only horses and mules, but also
here and there a stray burro (Mexican jackass), destined to pack
wood across the rugged hills of New Mexico.” (A Ride with Kit
Carson, G. D. Brewerton.)

Certain features of the landscape in the South and West also
continue to bear their original Spanish names, which are daily
becoming more familiar as a part of our speech. The alamo
(Populus monilifera) represents in Texas and all the formerly
Spanish states the Cottonwood of the older parts of the Union, a
most useful tree, so called from the cotton-like substance in which
the seeds of this poplar are protected against the cold. Already
in Lewis’ and Clarke’s Hzplorations of the Rocky Mowntains we
find it stated that: “During the cold weather the squaws cut
down the Cottonwood trees as they are wanted, and the horses feed
on the boughs and bark of the tender branches, which are also
brought into the lodges at night.” (L, p. 219.) They are found
almost near all the bottom-lands and along the banks of streams
and ‘lakes growing wild, and carefully planted in the public walks
of Southern and Western towns, which hence derive the name of
Alamedas.-

The calabash of the United States is not the tree generally
known by that name, but, when at all applied to a plant, the Gourd
(Cucurbita lagenaria), and more generally the drinking vessel,
made from its bottle-shaped fruit, which procured for it the
Arabic name, from which the Spanish calabaza was derived. By
THE SPANIARD. 121

far the most frequent use made of the word is, as a cant term, for
a weak and empty head, and thus employed in humorous language,
as in the words: “Mind how you chuck, or you'll break his cala-
bash.” (J.C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches, p. 223.) Far more generally
in use is the Spanish word chaparral, from chaparra, an ever-
green dwarf oak, which in its turn is derived from the Basque.
The meaning of the word was, however, in the colonies extended
to any thicket or succession of thickets, consisting not of oaks
only, but of other plants peculiar to the district. In California,
therefore, and the formerly Mexican states, chaparra with its
collective termination -al, denotes a tract of land covered with
shrubs and bushes, mostly armed with spines, but belonging to
different classes of plants. The chaparral of Palo Alto, for
instance, is described as being “defended by gigantic cactus here,
sharp-pointed yuccas there, and cat-claw briars everywhere”
(New York Spirit of the Times, B.) ; and we are told that a new
town, “ Middletown, on paper, flourishes like a green bay tree ;
on terra firma it is the dry chaparral and the forlorn hillside.”
(Overland Monthly, October, 1870, p. 322.) In other regions the
mesquite, and some other shrubs of the family of the mimosa, are
most common, and still others, like the Creosote plant, and the
Greasewood of the Americans, known locally under its Spanish
name chimisail, predominate in the Northern-parts of the State.
F. B. Harte describes a man, in an inundation, rowing on the vast
expanse of water and saying: “ With my hands dipped listlessly
over the thwarts I detected the tops of chimisal, which showed
the tide to have somewhat fallen.” (Luck of Roaring Camp, p
229.) The origin of Greasewood is doubtful. Some derive it
from the Greaser, the popular name of the Spanish Californian ;
others from the well-known fact that the Grizzly Bear gathers
the leaves of the herb when he is wounded, and, his own surgeon,
stuffs them into the wound tightly.

The Mesquite or Muskeet (Algarobia glandulosa), a bastard-
locust, is frequently derived from an Indian word, simply because
the Spantal term, Mezquite, from which we derive the name, is
not an original word of that language. It represents in the South-
western States not only the tree, which is thought by botanists
to be identical with that which furnishes the Arabic gum of com-
merce, but also a fine, short grass, growing in great abundance,

6
122 AMERICANISMS.

though only interspersed with other grasses, on the Western
prairies. Of the former we read that: “ By the roadside there was
a Texan emigrant wagon, which had turned aside into the almost
impenetrable mezquite brakes,” and of the grass: “Now we come
occasionally under the sweet influence of female angels, whose
hoof-marked valley has no staple productions save jerked beef and
mesquite.” (Overland Monthly, Aug., 1870,.p. 154.) The long,
narrow pods of the tree, a mere shrub in less favorable localities,
are not only a favorite food of all kind of cattle, but are ground
by some of the more provident Indian tribes, and mixed with
wheat-flour, giving their bread a peculiar and most palatable
sweetness. The grass, also, has special virtues, among which the
fact that it preserves its sweetness long after it is dried, is by no
means the least important. Our kidney-beans form on South-
western plains and in many of the old Mexican districts so con-
stant an article of food, that they have become there universally
known by their Spanish name of /frijoles, while the palmetto
(Chamerops palmetto), called palmita or little palm in Spanish,
reaches up as far as the State of South Carolina, to which it has
given its name and its flag, and is extensively used for thatching
cabins, for making piles of wharves, and a number of similar
purposes. A pine-tree, the Spanish pion, has become quite
naturalized also as pinion, since its edible nuts, long since appre-
ciated by the animals of the forest, have become a favorite with
the new settlers in Arkansas and the adjoining States. It is
probably to the same language that we owe the term ratoon, used
to designate the cuttings of sugar-cane of the second and third
years’ growth, which serve for planting new fields. Derived from
the Spanish retofo, a sprout or shoot from a plant cut down pre-
viously, it has come into general use, and is even employed asa
verb, so that planters will say: “the cane ratoons well. this
season, and everything bears a most promising look on the
plantations.” (New Orleans Delta, Feb. 21, 1869.) The prickly
pear cactus, known also as Indian fig (Cactus opuntia) bears a
purplish pear-shaped fruit, which in Southern countries becomes
not only edible, but luscious, and is there generally known under
its Spanish name ¢wna—a term which also serves to designate the
pleasant beverage made from the fruit.

The features of the landscape in our formerly Mexican States
THE SPANIARD. 123

are but rarely left in possession of their Spanish names; they
either recall familiar objects at home, and then receive the same
appellation, or they are new and suggest at once a special name.
Some of the older terms have, however, stoutly maintained their
right, and have thus become incorporated in our speech. Prom-
inent among these is the cafion, often written canyon, to represent
the Spanish pronunciation of the word, which originally meant
nothing more than a hollow tube. It represents now a feature
probably exclusively peculiar to the Southwestern States, gorges
or ravines worn by violent watercourses, of such vast dimensions
as to fill the beholder with feelings akin to awe. At times they
are long, and so overhung by precipitous rocks as to resemble
tunnels; at other times the sides rise to the height of several thou-
sand feet, and the traveller riding along on a high table-land finds
himself suddenly arrested by a rent in the rocks which allows
him barely to discern the tiny watercourse at the bottom of the
gigantic fisstire. Where such narrow channels separate spurs or
buttresses of the mountains, the Redwood generally follows the
moist channel of the cafon, while in California there pour through
these guiches the mountain torrents, the wet diggings of the gold
regions. The word, but recently naturalized, has not escaped the
common fate of being forthwith used as a verb, and hence already
Captain Mayne Reid says: “I soon came to a bend, where the
stream, after running parallel to the ridge, swept round and
cafioned through it.” The word gulch, which is so often found in
connection with California matters, that it is largely believed to
be of Spanish origin likewise, is of course nothing more than the
good old English guich, a “ravine,” which after long neglect has
come to new honor in the new States. They abound in the South-
western States, and are quoted as “Steep gulches, where every-
thing was absolutely and hideously naked” (Afoot in Colorado
Desert), while new ones are formed continually, especially after
earthquakes. “In places one side of the crevice was two feet
higher than the opposite wall, and the long, straight gudch, from
one to three feet deep, and nearly as wide, could be seen for several
miles.” (Overland Monthly, Aug. 1870, p. 161.) The word and
its meaning are, however, well known to other countries also, for
in Wix’s Newfoundland Missionary Journal we find: “I have met
with places in Fortune Bay, two or three miles only from each
124 AMERICANISMS.

other, to visit which, in winter, it might be necessary to make a
circuit of fifteen miles, to get round the deep precipitous chasms
or guishes and ravines.” (p. 19.) As if to make amends for its
homely origin, the word frequently appears in its Spanish form
of arroyo, which is, at least in certain districts, as familiar as the
former, while the darranca, another Spanish-American term for
a ravine, is generally applied only to deep breaks, produced sud-
denly by heavy rains or swollen watercourses, and having steep
and abrupt banks, like perpendicular walls.

The word farailon, meaning an isolated island or promontory,
is at least of local importance, as the islands on the coast of Cali-
fornia are so called, and hence the term is often misunderstood,
and taken to be a proper name. The Lagoons of the South owe ,
their origin quite as often to the French settlers, who certainly
gave the name to the many bays and inlets of Louisiana, as to the
Spaniards in the more southerly States. The Jano, on the con-
trary, is the name of plains and prairies in the districts bordering
on Mexico, unchanged as it was bestowed upon them by the first
conquerors ; the hills and long ridges with flat tops, which fre-
quently border them, are, in like manner, still called lomas, and
when very low, with the diminutive ending, lomitas. A high
plain or table-land, on the contrary, is called a mesa or table, and
hence, in a Report on the Pacific Railroad, it is thus intro-
duced: “The mesa or table-land character is exhibited only along
the line of the river-valleys, as high bluffs, the result of denuding
forces, subsequent to the origin albasin-depositions.” (Vol. I, p.
84, B.) Where they occur on a smaller scale, the diminutive form
mesilla is used. Quite a poetical term survives yet in the lower
plains, where occasionally a tuft of rank grass rises suddenly from
. amidst the arid waste, and cheers the parched and weary traveller
with its promise of a spring. These springs, inexpressibly wel-
come in the vast deserts of those regions, were so heartily greeted
by the first explorers, that. they called them ojos, or eyes, and this
name they still bear. A picacho, or pointed summit, is the term
by which, in New Mexico and Arizona especially, the peaks are
known, which rise abruptly from a level plain and serve as land-
marks far and near.

The Spanish word placer has long since lost the primitive sim-
plicity of its first meaning, whether it be derived, as some say,
THE SPANIARD. 125

from plaza, and denoted nothing more than any particular spot, or
really come from the word placer, a “pleasure,” in allusion to the
delight caused by the finding of gold in the shape of dust in cer-
tain localities. At all events, it was borrowed from the Mexicans
in the latter sense, and for many years used to designate the de-
posits of drift-sand in which gold was found. The term became,
however, soon so familiar to American ears through the astound-
ing reports of gold-findings m California, that it was applied to
the discovery of any good thing which promised, a large reward.
A careful writer in the Atlantic Monthly could, therefore, safely
say: “The Homer of Chapman is so precious a gift, that we are
ready to forgive Mr. Smith’s shortcomings. It is a vast placer,
full of nuggets for the philologist and lover of poetry” (April,
1858), and “Elegant Tom Dillar” in Putnam’s Monthly says:
“ Because it is all Ineed. Ithink I have found a placer ; I shall
make money by it, and after this I shall be rich again.” The
word has even given a flourishing town the barbarous name of
Placerville! The plaza itself, the public square, has become a
familiar term with the acquisition of so many towns in which it
formed a‘prominent feature, while playa, literally the “strand or
seashore,” finds in the Southwest an entirely new purpose to fulfill.
It is there applied to those vast inland plains, known farther North
as salt and water prairies, the surface of which is covered with a
thick incrustation or nitrous efflorescence, known as fesqutte, so as
to give them the appearance of a large motionless lake. Mr. Bart-
lett himself describes them thus: “ Emerging from the pass into
the plain, our eyes were greeted with the sight of a white streak,
which we would have taken for a lake, had it not been called the
playas. This playa seemed to have an extent of twenty-five or
thirty miles. The surface was an indurated clay, so hard that the
wheels of our wagon scarce made an impression. After rain this
basin receives a large amount of water, which seems to evaporate
before vegetation getsa foot-hold.” (Personal Narrative, I., p. 246.)
The presidio, also, the name of a military post in the former prov-
inces of Mexico, has been inherited from the Spaniards; and as
many of these posts are now within the new States of the Union,
the name is retained for the village, which generally occupies
the place of the former fortifications. The same fate has been
that of the casa, a word originally meaning simply a “house,” but

%
126 AMERICANISMS.

being by the Spaniards applied to conntry houses especially, the
Americans have adopted it in that sense, and thus say: “ His
casa’s built too high up the foot-hills. O, thar ain’t any water
thar, you bet.” (F. B. Harte, Luck of Roaring Camp, p. 228.)
The term pueblo, also, in Spanish used to designate the village
inhabited by Indians, under the care of a Spanish priest, and by
him directed in worldly as well as in spiritual matters, still clings
to the place. It has a peculiar interest in the case of the Puwebdlo-
Indians, said to be the legitimate descendants of the ancient Aztecs,
the former rulers of the country, who have given up their roving
life and devote themselves to agriculture and domestic pursuits.
But while they are thus semi-civilized and at least nominally
good Christians, they nevertheless look piously and anxiously for
the return of Montezuma, burning as of old his eternal fires, and
celebrating his festivals in strictest secrecy. Pueblo itself is not
unfrequently heard for a town or village that was formerly Spanish,
and many of these continue to bear their old Castilian name. San
Francisco alone seems to be in danger, at least colloquially, of losing
its identity, as miners and others now very generally shorten it
into Frisco. “They advised me to send him to /risco to the hos-
pital, for he was no good to any one, and would be a baby all his
life” (F. B. Harte, Luck of Roaring Camp, p.51.) Nor must it
be forgotten that the same term, pweblo, is applied also to the
ruins in New Mexico and Arizona, peculiar erections, very nume-
rous in the region between the Rio Grande, Colorado, and Gila
rivers, which owe their origin to a partly-civilized race, differing
from all others. “The Puedlo Pintado is one of the most remark-
able. It is built of small flat slabs of grayish sandstone; between
the stones are layers of small colored pebbles, the edifice at a dis-
tance resembling brilliant mosaic work. It is thirty feet high,
and embraces three stories, the upper portion of each story form-
ing a terrace. The building is one hundred and thirty yards
long, and contains fifty-three rooms on the ground-floor. The
Pueblo Una Vida is about three hundred and thirty yards long,
while that called the Ohettro Kettle, is four hundred and thirty-
three yards long, and each story has one hundred and twenty-four
rooms.” (Charles Morris, Monuments of Ancient America.)
In like manner the Spanish word sitio, a square league of land,
nearly equal to 4428 English acres, is perfectly familiar to all
THE SPANIARD. 127

Americans who either live or own land in the former Spanish
possessions, as all ancient grants and charters mention this meas-
ure; the term occurs constantly also in the courts of law, and
thus is brought to the higher courts in other States, also.

One of the few local terms taken from the Spaniards, which is
used in the older States of the Union, is the word Savannah,
well known as the name of the great seaboard city of the State of
Georgia. The euphonious name has its very modest origin in the
Spanish term sabana, a “linen sheet,” which was applied by the
followers of De Soto already to the prairies of the South. It
became of general use in Florida, and when the State was incor-
porated into the Union, it was adopted into our speech. It was,
of course, well known to English writers, and used by them also,
as in Thomsou’s lines:

“Plains immense,

And vast savannas, where the wand’ring eye,
Unfixt, is in a verdant ocean lost.” (Summer.)

That its form and its meaning was not always quite clear, how-
ever, to English minds, we may presume from the Salwanners,
which the old English innkeeper in Barnaby Rudge believed to
be the name of a ferocious tribe of Indians, whose sole occupation
was digging up tomahawks, and uttering unearthly war-whoops.
When the savanna is a dry desert of considerable extent, it has the
expressive name of Jornada, or the Day’s Journey, and some of
these terrible plains, which look as if they were forsaken by man and
beast, and labored under a curse, are thus familiarly known.
The Jornada del Muerto, the Plain of the Dead Man, as it might
be translated, is ninety miles long, and requires several days to
traverse ; the trail is strewn with bleached bones, and early trav-
ellers, especially, used to look upon this part of the Overland
Route as the most dangerous part of the whole undertaking.
Efforts are, however, made to deprive these deserts of their terror
by sinking Artesian wells, which would soon “change many
dreaded jornadas from waterless deserts into cultivated plains.”
(Wislizenus, New Mexico.)

The Sierra, the suggestive name of a mountain-ridge resem-
bling, with its numerous pointed peaks, the “saw” with its sharp
teeth, seems peculiarly appropriate to the serrated mountain-
chains of the Pacific coast. But Archbishop Trench, who first made
128 AMERICANISMS.

this remark, was immediately taken to task by Alderman Moon,
who destroyed the poetry of the resemblance at a blow, by declar-
ing that sierra came from the two Arabic words sah rah, which
simply means a desolate mountain-tract. Spanish authorities
have, so far, preferred the saw doctrine. Two names of very
special and peculiar localities will conclude this list. Tinaja,
originally nothing more than an earthenware water-jar, is in
the once Spanish districts very generally applied to small holes
in the rocks on mountain-slopes, which, during the rainy season,
are filled with water, and generally preserve a small quantity dur-
ing the year. They furnish, in many regions, the only supply to
travellers and hunters, and are hence most highly prized. The
other term is the name of the State of Texas, literally meaning
tiles, which, on the Mississippi and Western waters generally, is
applied to the upper deck of steamboats. This is now a most
desirable place, a light structure with glazed sides, in the very
centre of the steamer, and immediately around the little glass
house, from which the boat is steered, so as to afford ample room
and a fine view. The cabins below this and above the grand
saloon, where the officers of the boat are accommodated, also
belong to Zexas. Formerly, however, the space was open, with-
out guards at the side or awning above-head, and frequented by the
personal friends of the pilot and their associates, men of great
daring, no doubt, and expert in the use of bowie-knife and pistol,
but as little desirable company as the first settlers in the republic
of Texas, which attracted all the lawless and desperate characters
of the Union. It was then the name was given to this part of
the boats, and the application was probably not altogether inap-
propriate.

The two Spanish terms, hacienda and rancho, have become so
familiar to Americans in the former Mexican provinces, and all
along the Pacific slope, that they have become incorporated in
our speech. Hacienda is generally the name of a large and exten-
sive plantation, with the mansion of the owner, while the ranch,
as it is almost universally called now-a-days, is the small farm or
peasant village, and the owner is called ranchman. The larger
rancho, again, passes sometimes still under its old Spanish name
of estancia, managed by a mayor-domo or upper butler. “The
hacienda of Encarnacion, thirty miles south of Agua Nueva, was
THE SPANIARD. : 129

an estancia or stock-ranch, supplied with a bitterish but drinka-
ble water from two deep wells worked by mules.” (Old and New,
June, 1871.)

The term meant originally nothing more in Northern Mexico
than a hut rudely made up of a few posts and covered with
branches, in which the vagweros or herdsmen would sleep at
night and seek shelter in bad weather. For with the Spaniards
a rancho was a cattle-station or a hunting-lodge in a desert or a
forest, far from the haunts of men; and itis from this meaning
that the common tendency of corrupting words, and the national
ingenuity shown in perverting their legitimate use, have derived
the application of rancho, in Washington, to a place of evil report.
(Slang Dictionary, p. 221.) In California a rancho sometimes
means also the buildings on such a farm, while the lands put in
cultivation for the purpose of raising corn or any other crop, are
called a dabor, pronounced like the Spanish word from which
it is derived. All three names have been adopted, unchanged,
and are in common use on the Pacific coast and in Arizona. The
proper name for the buildings on a rancho used to be rancheria,
but American carelessness dispenses with the word, and uses the
shorter term for all it can mean. ‘The owner or occupant of such
a farm is the ranchero, a word long incorrectly pronounced ran-
kero, if we may judge from J. R. Lowell’s poems, who makes his
hero, Hosea Biglow, say: “'These fellers are very propilly called
Rank Heroes, and the more they kill the ranker and the more
heroick they bekim.” (Biglow Papers, 1, p. 122.) A Milk-ranch
has of late become the familiar Californian term for a dairy.

The vast herds of cattle owned in those States are generally
pastured all the year round; but where a dairy is attempted, the
cows and their calves are every day driven into a Corral, as the
large enclosure of cedar logs (Redwood) is called wherever it is
used. The Spanish word, derived from corro, a circle, is quite as
‘frequently applied to the ring formed by the wagons of an emi-
grant or hunter’s train, into which all the horses and cattle are
driven at night to graze, and to be protected against prowling
Indians. On the outside the tents are pitched, with their flaps
opening outward, and here the camp-fires are lighted. A travel-
ler, therefore, writes: “The wagons were all corralled, t. ¢., run
together in the form of a horseshoe, so that the live stock, after -

6*
130 AMERICANISMS.

feeding, could be driven into it.” (On the Plains, Puinam’s Mag,
Feb., 1869.) “On the 10th inst., sheriffs Morse of Contra Costa,
and Harris of Monterey, corralled a party of Spaniards in the
Pacheco mountains. One of them was of the party that murdered
three Frenchmen in Suscal Valley. A desperate fight ensued,
but the Spaniard was shot dead and his companions were cap-
tured.” (San Francisco paper, January, 1871.) If the corral
is near a house, it serves as stock-yard, and, as mentioned before,
the cows are daily driven into it, to nurse the calves. The
people of the ranch then crowd in with their milking-pails;
the calves are caught by little boys with lassos, and their necks
tied to the hind leg of the mother, who then, under a pleas-
ing delusion, allows herself to be milked. The “cattle,” on
such occasions, often includes the mustangs, as the wild horses
of the prairies are called, from the Spanish word mestefo,
referring to studs and cattle-raising generally. “At sundown,”
G. W. Kendall says, in his lively description, of the animals,
“a drove of mustangs, or wild horses of the prairies, paid us a
visit. When seen on a distant hill, standing with their raised
heads toward a person, and forming a line as is their custom, it is
almost impossible to take them for anything but mounted men.
Having satisfied their curiosity, they wheeled with almost the
regularity of cavalry, and galloped off, their long thick manes
waving in the air and their tails nearly sweeping the ground.
They are beautiful animals, always in excellent condition, and
although smaller than our American horses, are still very compact
and will bear much fatigue.” (Santa Fé Expedition, I, p. 88.)
They are caught with the lasso, the Spanish lazo, a long, slender
rope, often made of rawhide, and having a loop at the end, which
the Indians and the whites of the Plains know how to handle
with amazing skill. Texans twine or rope a horse, instead of
“catching” him, as it is called elsewhere, and then stake him out
with a stake-rope.. This may be either a cabresto, when it is made
of hair, or—as is invariably the case in California—a Jariat, of
rawhide twisted. ‘The word is derived from the Spanish Ja reata,
and the rope is used to tie horses and mules together into a line,
or to fasten them to a peg or stake driven into the ground.
Hence J. R. Lowell makes his hero say, as he passes, on his return
from the Mexican War, through parts of Texas:
THE SPANIARD. 131

“You see a feller peekin’ out, an’, fust you know, a lariat
Is round your throat, an’ you a copse, ’fore you can say: wut air ye at?”
(Biglow Papers, I., p. 22.)

Occasionally the original word asserts its right, and then the
word is more correctly used as riata, without the article. “I’m
a coiling up my riata” (Overland Magazine, March, 1871) means,
very graphically, I am preparing for my death. “There was a
stake driven near its summit, with the initials L. E.8. Tied half-
way down was a curiously worked riata. It was George’s.” (F. B.
Harte, Luck of Roaring Camp, p. 230.)

With this /ariat or a shorter rope also, a horse is hobbled out to
grass, which consists in confining his two forelegs to each other,
so that he cannot step more than six or ten inches at a time.
Cunning mules, however, with their usual perverseness, soon learn
to lift both forefeet at a time and gallop off; hence they are lined,
that is, the forefoot is tied to the hindfoot on the same side, so
that the step is very much shortened and their gait reduced to a
kind of pace. As this rope is of the utmost importance, it is the
invariable accompaniment of every horseman, and generally hangs
from the horn of the saddle, as the pommel is here called from its
horn-like shape. If the saddle should be a pack-saddle, it is known
by its Spanish name of aparejo, and all saddles, for riding as well
as for carrying burdens, are apt to have an apishamore, a saddle-
blanket, made of buffalo-calf skins, under them, so as to protect
the animal’s back from being chafed.

The main purpose of forming a corral is to prevent a stampede,
as a general scamper of the horses and mules of a cadallada (con-
‘tracted in Texas into caballad and pronounced cavayard), and of
the cattle from their pasture-ground, is called in the Southwest
from the Spanish word estampida. The word was first used of
the herds of cattle and mustangs, which were so common in the
North of Mexico, then applied to every drove, and to the horses,
mules, and dronchos, as the packhorses are called (pronouncing
the ch as in chocolate); but it is now employed to denote any
sudden fright, which starts a drove of animals on a wild flight,
or a start given them by thievish Indians and white outlaws, who
wish to possess themselves of the more valuable part of the drove.
The scene is full of terror, and yet not without grandeur: oxen,
horses, and mules, all racing in various directions and at full
132 AMERICANISMS.

speed across the plain, with eyes distended and glowing in wild
fear, with tails on high, and strange sounds filling the air. If this
happens at night, even the experienced hunter is rarely able to
resist the panic, and thus Kit Carson himself, probably the coolest.
and most expert of Western hunters, was once carried away by the
sudden surprise. “Some inexperienced traveller had given the
alarm of Indians during his turn of guard-duty, or, as Western
men express it, stampeded the camp. Kit Carson sprang to his
feet, and, while yet half asleep, seeing some dark object advancing
upon him through the long grass, seized one of his unerring
pistols and shot, not an Indian, but his own particular riding
mule, right through the head.” (A Ride with Kit Carson, p. 237.)
The term has, like many similar words, become so current as to
find ready application to every kind of sudden start or fright.
“The Virginia Legislature, becoming frightened at the approach
of the cholera, have stampeded to the White Sulphur Springs,
there to legislate in the ballroom of the principal hotel,” says the
New York Tribune of June 12, 1849; and in Blackwood we
find it related of the Charleston Hotel, that “a shell had struck a
house close by, and a sort of panic had been the result. Some
had stampeded without waiting to dress, and had been seen with
coats flying in one hand and pantaloons in the other, rushing
frantically in the direction of the railroad-depot.” (Jan., 1865.)
Anather word which has, in like manner, obtained currency
among us, and a meaning far beyond the original signification, is
Fandango, in Spanish the name of a popular dance and the appro-
priate tune. Certain authorities, however, claim for it an older
date, and recognize in it an African word, believing that the
dance and its name were both brought from Guinea to the West
Indies by slaves, and that it had made its way from there back to
Spain, which in its turn sent it to the American colonies. At all
events, a fandango was found to mean in Mexico, where American
soldiers first were initiated into its mysteries, any kind of noctur-
nal gathering, where the main entertainment consisted in dancing.
In this form it is known in California and all the adjoining States.
Miners and hunters delight in getting up an occasional fandango
when they happen to be in town, and the Spanish residents are
quite willing to attend, the men in their expensive scrapes, Mexi-
can blankets with an opening in the centre, woven by hand, and
THE SPANIARD. 133

rich in gaudy colors, and the women with their rebosos drawn
closely over the face, serving for bonnets, which they never wear.
The men, ou the contrary, seem reluctant to part with their
sombreros, as the broad-brimmed hats are appropriately called in
Spanish, from somora, “shade,” so that we read: “The old man
extinguished his black-silk cap beneath the stiff, uncomely som-
brero, which all native Californians affect.” (F. B. Harte, Luck of
Roaring Camp, p. 214.) Such is the fandango in its native land,
but the term is used in the Eastern States also. Here, however,
the idea of more than usual noise seems to be intimately connected
with the term, and any very boisterous assembly, even a row, is
familiarly called a fandango. “You must have had a real fan-
dango last night,” says the sleepless neighbor in a recent novel,
“*T heard your friends making merry till late in the morning, and
not a wink could I sleep.” (New York Home Journal, Dec. 14,
1850.) On such occasions, as well as at the somewhat more for-
mal entertainments called ¢ertulias, the refreshments are of the
simplest, consisting mainly of tortillas, little flat round cakes made
of corn-meal and cooked upon a sheet of iron, and a large supply
of aguardiente or “fire-water,” a kind of brandy distilled from the
red wine of the country. ‘The former constitute the ordinary
bread of Mexico and its provinces. The grains are first soaked in
ley till they are soft, and the outer covering peels off; then they
are thoroughly washed in water and made ready for the mill, a
flat. stone, the upper surface of which is slightly concave, and a
cylindrical crusher of the same material. A woman, by these
simple means, crushes a handful of meal, which becomes soft and
pulpy, and is then turned into a trough, kneaded, and made ready
for the baking. In camp, men soon learn the mysteries of the art-
less process, and easily prepare the wholesome, palatable food,
vastly preferable to the atole, a gruel of corn-meal familiar to all
the regions which are or once were Spanish. The latter resembles
in its simplicity, at least, the equally familiar pinole, parched corn
ground and mixed with sugar and spices, which is much used by
travellers, because of its compact form and extremely nutritious
character.

After the morning’s work every Spaniard and every dweller in
the former Spanish possessions, yielding to the force of established
usage, indulges in his séesta, a Spanish word derived from the
134 AMERICANISMS.

name of the “sixth” hour after the beginning of day, our “noon.”
As the rest then taken is not necessarily confined to that hour,
the term siesta, quite familiar to Europeans also, has become well
known among Americans from two sources at once, and thus
obtained so complete naturalization, that few persons using the
word remember its foreign origin.

They here also learnt a word which seemed to come quite nat-
urally to them, the Spanish ¢izaja, which they promptly declared
to be nothing better than a Mexican ‘effort to naturalize the famil-
iar ¢¢n (tin-bucket) of the Americans. They had an opportunity
of using the word in a complimentary sense, while admiring the
Indian women, who carry these ¢inajas (earthenware vessels) of
water gracefully on their head, when coming back from well or
river, and thus acquire the same graceful, upright carriage, which
is so striking in the women of Egypt and of the Kast Indies.

If the refreshments are simple, there is no lack of entertain-
ment, for while part of the guests amuse themselves with dancing,
others enjoy the favorite game of the Mexicans and American
settlers, known as Monte, and taking its name, very graphically,
from the “mountain” of gold which the banker piles up before
him to attract customers. The very fact that it is a game of
pure chance, and hence continually varying, makes it peculiarly
attractive to gambling Mexicans and adventurous men of all
nations, who stray and drift to California and the new States of
the Southwest.

A few stray terms have, besides, found their way-from the
Spanish into our speech, and acquired there more or less perfect
naturalization. Among these the most undesirable are probably
the two vile companions, which we apparently shrink from nam-
ing in good English, the chinch and the mosquito. The former,
mainly found in southern latitudes, bears its Spanish name of
chinche, not only when it designates the common bed-bug (Cimex
lectularius), but also when applied to an insect of similar offen-
sive odor, which infests the wheat, and often does serious injury
toa whole crop. The mosquito (Culex mosquito) seems to have
been dreaded from of old, for even Bailey has already something
to say of the moschetto, as he calls it after Italian manner. Our
mosquito is, of course, a little fly only, but of most blood-thirsty
nature, and eyen more intolerable in high northern latitudes than
THE SPANIARD. 135

in the south. Mosqwito-nets or burs, curtains of a light, trans-
parent material, which are closely drawn over the bed, are
therefore known and used almost in every part of the United
States, and indispensable for those who would enjoy their rest at
night. Nor does the word garrote, which we owe, of course, quite
as much to England as to our Spanish neighbors, awake pleasant
recollections within us in its various applications to tight collars,
to robberies by means of partial strangulation, and to the Spanish
mode of execution practised in Mexico; it is, however, much more
generally used in America than in England. The word adobe,
the Spanish term for a brick not burnt, but baked in the sun,
has on the other hand become quite naturalized. The material
of which they are mide is abundant in California, and the bricks are
hence, largely used in all the Southwestern States. “Some years
ago,” says a traveller in those regions, “I passed along a by-road
in Alameda County, through one of these adode fields, which had
been sown in oats. ‘The crop was in blossom, and, riding on horse-
back, the top of the grain had an average height somewhat exceed-
ing the level of my eye sight.” This adobe soil is found in parts
of the State outside of the great Central Valley. “In the county
of Santa Cruz it is largely diffused, and there is a rancho, adjoining
a creek, both of which bear the same name, which was given by
the natives with reference to the physical character of the alluvium
Salsapentos, which means, Get out of it, if you can.” (Overland
Monthly, August, 1870, p. 160.) The word has made itself so
much at home with us, that J. R. Lowell says of the Red Robin:

“ Choosing out a handy crotch an’ spouse
He goes to plast’ring his adobe house.”
(Biglow Papers, Il., p. 157.)
The common jail is, in Southern States, very frequently known
as the Calaboose, a term which is probably a corruption of the
Spanish calabozo, partly due to an intermediate French word,
calabouse. It is quoted as sea-slang in the Slang-Dictionary
(p. 93), but in America serves regularly, as, for instance, in the
case of the common jail at New Orleans, which bears that name.
“ More than thirty men were last night confined in the Caladoose,
and with the present imperfect arrangements there, their sufferings
must have been well-nigh intolerable.” (New Orleans Picayune,
June 30, 1869.) Another word, similarly corrupted, but treated
136 AMERICANISMS.

much worse, is the geographical name of Key, as applied to ledges
of rock rising near the surface of the water, and low, flat islands
in the West Indies. The word is derived from the Spanish Cayo,
a name given, among others, to the small islands on the coast of
Florida, which was retained after the acquisition of that State, but
pronounced as it now is written. One of the best known among
them, Key West, has suffered still further ill treatment; it was
originally Cayo Hueso, Bone Island.

Where formerly Spanish coins were current the word pieza, a
piece, may still be occasionally heard in the transactions between
Americans even, when a small silver coin, the Spanish real (de
plata), is meant. In other parts of the Union it is represented by
a term which has come from the West Indies.’ There—especially
in Jamaica—a dit meant the smallest silver coin current, worth
about sevenpence ha’penny; from thence the Southern States
obtained their did, fully known as ji-pvenny-bit, amounting to six
and a quarter cents; a defaced twenty-cent piece being called a
long bit. With the disappearance of the Spanish coins from the
United States, the word has gone nearly out of use. In England,
however, fourpence continues to be called a dit, at least in city
slang. The picayune, on the contrary, originally a Carib word, or
possibly akin to French pécune, has not only held its own but be-
come a popular word in familiar language. It was long used to
designate, in Louisiana, Florida, etc., the Spanish half-real, and
was next transferred to the American sixpence. The coin no
longer exists in currency, but the term remains to designate any-
thing peculiarly small and pitiful. “The whole thing this year
was a miserable picayune affair,” says the New Orleans Delia of
the Beeuf Gras of 1866, an expression exactly corresponding to the
Northern phrase: “a one-horse affair” “A dozen Picayune
Amnesty Bills,” states the New York Tribune, “ will do much to
inflame and diffuse Southern discontent, nothing to allay it.”
(Dec. 12, 1870.) The only serious use made of the term is found
in the name of a very clever daily newspaper, published under the
name of the Picayune, in the city of New Orleans, and sold for
that coin, a fact which strangely recalls the name of the very first
of all newspapers, published in Venice, and called Gazeta, from
the coin of that name, for: “If you will have a stool, it will cost
you a gazet, which is almost a penny.” (Coryat. Cradities, U., p. 15.)
THE SPANIARD. 137

Of ill-treated Spanish words, perhaps none has suffered more
grievously than piragua, a word probably of Indian origin in the
first place, but introduced into the world of letters in this form,
and soon adopted by the French also as pirogue, which is most
familiar to American ears. Meaning, originally, a canoe formed
of a single large tree, or sometimes two such trunks lashed to-
gether, it is in the United States used promiscuously for any small
boat or canoe, and even for a larger vessel carrying two masts and
a leeboard, such as were formerly used as ferryboats in the neigh-
borhood of New York. But the word was soon Americanized in
a variety of ways, and, except in print, its true form is hardly
ever preserved. Itappears in the West as periauger, a form under
which it is used by W. Irving ( Washington, IL., p. 2'72), as pert-
auga in Virginia, and thus quoted from the Western papers (p.13),
and even as pettiauger in the Far West. A mere grammatical
perversion, involving, however, no less violence, is the use of the
Spanish imperative, Vamos, as an English verb, which has of late
become so universal that it is actually often written: to vamose.
The interjection, corresponding very nearly to our: Well! became
familiar to the American troops during the Mexican War in 1847,
and being uncommonly popular among them, it soon spread as a
cant term all over the Union. Now it is a verb: “Before the
speaker’s voice could be heard every democratic member had
vamosed, and since that day no quorum has ever been present,”
was said of the Indiana Legislature. (February 18, 1870.) Mr.
Bartlett quotes from a book, “Southern Sketches,” the phrase
vamosed the ranch, and calls this process of appropriating words:
“breaking Priscian’s head with a vengeance.” (Dict., p. 496.)
Since J. R. Lowell, however, has used to vamose, the word must
probably be considered naturalized.

In a recent poem by John Hay occur the following lines:

“The nigger has got to mosey
From the limits o’ Spunky P’int.”
(Banty Tim.)

This mysterious word mosey is, probably correctly, said to be
nothing more than a mere variety of the Americanized verb
vamose, With the final vowel sounded, and the first syllable lost.
It certainly has the same meaning, of leaving suddenly, and gen-
erally involuntarily. “My friend, let me tell you, if you do not
138 AMERICANISMS.

mosey this instant, and clear out for good, you'll have to pay
pretty dear.’ (Louisville Journal, October 9, 1857.) In this
sense it has crossed the ocean, and reappears in English slang,
especially as a summons: “Now, Mosey/” Its derivation from a
mythical Moses, warmly as it is supported by English writers,
has no foundation in fact, and is “only a new instance of the
tendency to mythologize, which is as strong as ever among. the
uneducated.” (Atlantic Monthly, August, 1860.) The Celtic
proves its usual readiness to supply an ancestor to the quaint
word, and proves its claims by the habit of Cornish miners to
say, Moas, for Go! The verb is, of course, an entirely different
word from that which enters into the composition of Mosey-
sugar, molasses-candy with the meat of nuts mixed up with it. The
latter comes from Mosaic, which the kind of inlaid work produced
by the two colors, white and brown, resembles in some manner.

Few would recognize the proud old Spanish word cavar, which
denoted the haughty, impatient pawing of a spirited horse, in the
half-ludicrous term: to cavort. It is true, its derivation is some-
times sought in the verb: to curvet, from the French courbetter,
but the fact that the term is very frequently not only pronounced
but also written cavault, seems to speak in favor of its Spanish
origin. It is now used, especially in the South, for any very ex-
trayagant manner of speaking or acting, with an intention of
ridiculing the action. Thus Judge Longstreet makes one of his
heroes of “Georgia Scenes” say: “In they came, boys and girls,
old and young, making a prodigious noise, and prancing and
cavorting at a tremendous rate.” A recent traveller in South
Carolina describes a court-scene thus: “In the court, a judge ina
black silk gown, and a jury of nine whites and three blacks, were
trying a black, evil-looking, one-eyed negro, for disturbing a reli-
gious meeting. The witneases were all negroes, and the gist of
their testimony was that Tony, ‘the accused, came to the meeting-
house, and—jes kep cavortin’ round.” (New York Tribune, May
7, 1871.)

Spanish terms may appropriately come to an end with the
word Zombi, a phantom or a ghost, not unfrequently heard in the
Southern States in nurseries and among the servants. The word
is a Creole corruption of the Spanish somdbra, which at times has
the same meaning.
THE GERMAN.

“TI schpeaksch English.”—Hans Breitmann.

Even that more remarkable than creditable propensity of the
German, to assert his cosmopolitan character by abandoning his
nationality, and by repudiating, after a few years’ residence abroad,
all attachment to his own language, his national views, and private
convictions, has not prevented statisticians from finding more
than five millions of Germans in the United States. They are,
moreover, not limited, like the Dutch and the French, to certain
circumscribed localities; they are not scattered and lost in the
great Anglo-Saxon family, like the Irish and the Welsh. Far
from it; they constitute a large proportion of the population of
great cities, and own vast tracts of land in all the agricultural
States; they have their temples to worship Gambrinus in Boston
and in New Orleans, in Norfolk and in San Francisco. Their
press is powerful and high-toned, their potent voice is heard
in State Legislatures and in the national Senate. Their influ-
ence is felt in every State, and their vote is decisive in great
crises.

And yet they have not enriched our language by a dozen im-
portant words! ‘The very fact of their excessive readiness to
adapt themselves to all the exigencies of their new home, their
unwillingness to use their own idiom as soon as they have
acquired sufficient English to converse in it freely, and their
prompt admission of the superiority of American terms as well as
institutions, have well-nigh neutralized the influence they might
nave exercised by their numbers, their intelligence, and their
superior education. They have, no doubt, powerfully affected the
national mind in all that pertains to the realm of thought—
140 AMERICANISMS.

American churches, American letters, and even American man-
ners bear more or less the impress of German teachings; but the
marks are not visible, because the action has been too subtle and
slow, too secret and silent, to leave its traces on the surface.

This is all the more true of our speech, as their own beautiful
and highly improved idiom, so near akin to our tongue, has sadly
suffered by the contact with English. Scholars coming over
from Germany remark with deep regret how rapidly their beloved
language is yielding to the might of American nationality.
They point with ineffable pain to the jargon spoken, written, and
even printed in Pennsylvania—a hopeless departure from the old
standard, and shocking in its barbarous admixture of English
terms, which it mutilates as savagely as its own. The lines:

“My Mary cot one leetle sheeps,
Hees flees so vite mit schnow,
Und efry blace als Mary pin,
Dat tam leetle sheeps will go,”

show the havoc the uneducated German, whose ear cannot dis-
tinguish between 4 and p, or d and ¢, plays with English; and the
following will, in like manner, illustrate the injury done to the
mother-tongue:

“ Mudder, may I a schwimming went ?
Nix, my grosse dotter!
I bet twice more als foofty cent,
Dat you get drowned in de votter.”
(Acorn and Germ, Millwood, Pennsylvania, Sept. 14, 1870.)

Hans Brettmann’s Ballads (by Charles G. Leland), give an
example of the process which, artificial in the poems, goes on
naturally in the regions where uneducated Germans and the des-
cendants of such come in contact with the superior English which
is spoken throughout the United States. On the other hand,
in cities and a few specially favored districts, where a higher
class of Germans are brought in contact with each other, they
still speak their own language, publish their own newspapers,
almanacs, and light literature, and have their own schools and
churches, where instruction is given and services are held in
German.

The result is, that with the exception of one or two German
THE GERMAN. 141

words of greater importance, our speech has been enriched only
by a few terms, relating either to slang or to—eating. The word
standpoint, a literal version of the German Standpunkt, is gen-
erally considered as having originated in America; its use, how-
ever, has met with such prompt and general success in the pages
of English writers, that America would probably find it difficult
to prove the paternity. A Turner, however, has become literally
what Americans call an “ institution.” The word represents our
“Gymnast,” but being applied to members of clubs and societies
who make gymnastics a subject of pleasure as well as of health, it
is now universally admitted into our speech. Turnerfeste, as
their annual festivals are designated, excite the utmost interest,
and their performances the greatest admiration in the large cities,
while their clubs, or Turn Vereine, as they begin to be called
even by many who are ignorant of German, exercise a most salu-
tary influence on the people by inducing them to bestow that
attention upon physical exercise, the want of which has so se-
riously affected the health of Americans.

It is somewhat strange that the word designating the very
opposite to the Turner's character, the Loafer, should, in like
manner, come from the German. He is the vagabond or idle
lounger, who so oddly contradicts the world’s impression of Amer-
ican energy anil irrepressible activity; who meets you at every
corner and in every grogshop of a city; disfigures every village as
he sits on empty boxes and windowsills, lazily whittling a stick,
and spitting his villanous tobacco; who supports bar-rooms and
ruins his prospects, disgraces his family, and destroys his own
life. He is far worse than the lazzarone of Naples in his forced
inactivity under a wretched government, and in a climate where
life is possible without labor; worse than the Mexican lepero,
cursed with an incurable malady, and helpless in all his efforts.
In vain has he been painted in quaint humor by many a clever
artist, in vain has Walt Whitman declared that the forte of his
nation is “confessedly loafing and writing poems.” Although R.
W. Emerson tells us gravely that the poet’s “ Leaves of Grass” are
“the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America
has yet contributed,” we believe better things of his nation.

The term, common as it is, has, like many other common words,
given the learned much trouble. The Philadelphia Vademecum
142 AMERICANISMS.

said: “It is a convenient word, much needed in language, but
without etymology.” Many are the sources, on the other hand,
from which other writers have tried to derive the puzzling word,
and the oddest suggestions have been made in good earnest. One
claims it as a descendant of the Dutch land-looper, a vagrant;
another traces it back to loaf, and sees in it a beggar for bread,
Can it be a contracted form of low-fellow? asks a third, and still
another is sure it owes its origin to Rabelais, who among hig
wonders of word-coinage speaks of a certain good-for-nothing
person, encountered by Gargantua, as lipe-lope. The fact that
loper or loafer was in general use as a cant term in the early part
of last century, when landloper was a vagabond who begged in
the attire of a sailor (hence no doubt land-lwbber, Slang Dic.
tionary, p. 172), would seem to speak in favor of the Dutch deriva-
tion. The true origin of the word ‘must, however, be sought in
German, where Ldufer is a term applied by the steady and
phlegmatic people to men who are irregular and unsettled in life.
Half of Germany pronounces this word with the vulgar sound of
aw as lofer, and from this, in all probability, the German term
Lofer and our loafer are derived. The usual freedom is taken
with the word in forming derivatives: to loaf is quite frequent, as
in J. C. Neal’s Charcoal Sketches: “One night, Mr. Dobbs came
home from his loafing-place, for he loafs of an evening like the
generality of people,” (IIL, p.11,) and the Philadelphia Mercury
actually had a word loaferishly. (Jan. 13, 1867.)

The word suggests almost logically the familiar Zager, as the
famous Lagerbier of Germany is now called, since thousands of
breweries furnish the favorite beverage to thirsty Teutons and
Americans alike. Its popularity was unbounded, and the con-
sumption perfectly amazing, till quite recently a formidable rival
arose in the shape of duckbeer, the renowned Bock of Bavaria.
Whilst Zagerbeer is so weak that judicial proof has been brought
into-a Court of Justice of its inability to intoxicate a man even
when several gallons have been drunk, the Buckbeer, on the
contrary, is one of the strongest made in Germany, and hence
represented by a he-goat, from which it derives its name, and
whose effigy may be seen in countless deer saloons all over the
country. ‘The other extreme, an exceedingly weak and insipid
beverage, Shenkbeer, the Schenkbier of Germany, is so called
THE GERMAN. 143

because it has to be put on draught (schenken) as soon as it is
made, for fear of turning sour if not immediately consumed.
Whatever may be the objections to the immoderate use of beer,
there can be no doubt that it favors temperance by weaning
foreigners especially from the habitual use of Schnaps, as almost
any distilled liquor is called by the Germans, even in America;
and all who know the sad effects produced in habitual tipplers of
this country, or the still greater horrors produced by absynthe,
will readily concede some advantages at least to comparatively
harmless beers.

The German is accused of being unable to enjoy life without a
dish, which is as frequently —and as correctly—-called his national
dish as frogs were considered that of the Frenchman: his sowr-
crout. The Sauerkraut, cabbage cut fine, pressed into casks, and
frequently allowed to ferment, is certainly a favorite with many
Germans here as well as in their native land, but by no means
more frequently to be met with than the coleslaw of the New
Englander and his descendants. Aypple-butter, not unlike the
famous apple-sauce of Yankeedom, and made by stewing apples
for twenty hours or longer in cider, is a dish peculiar to Pennsyl-
vania and the valley of Virginia, where it is produced in enormous
quantities. Here it has been inherited from the first settlers
through several generations ; among recent immigrants it is com-
paratively unknown. The German word IMetzelsuppe (from metzeln,
to kill, to butcher) has, in Pennsylvania and the Western States,
where Germans abound, acquired the naturalized form Metzel-
soup. When the “killing season” arrived, it was—-and probably
still is—a common practice among farmers to send their friends
and near neighbors as much of the puddings and sausages they
made as was necessary for one meal for the family, at least, and
as this was sure to be reciprocated, the practice was usually ac-
companied by no special sacrifice. Still, there were cases in
which no return was expected, as when the savory morsels were
sent to tailors, shoemakers, and other humble persons employed
by the family. This gift was called the Metzel-soup, although the
term originated in a kind of sowp made out of the broth, in which
the puddings were “boiled off.” The pudding itself is, in tho
same districts, and especially in “ Pennsylvania Dutch,” called a
Leverworscht (Leberwurst, 1. ¢. liver-sausage), and thus distin-
144 AMERICANISMS.

guished from Blootworscht, (Blutwurst, 1. e. blood-sausage.) The
real pudding was called pawnhost by the negroes, with whom it
was a great favorite. The German Bretzeln have been adopted,
with only slight modifications, wherever the peculiar twisted kind
of bread is known, but the Schnitzel, slices of dried fruit, are
almost universally called snits. A schoolmaster in a public
school in the interior of Pennsylvania was drilling his class in
arithmetic. He said: “If I cut an apple in two, what will the
parts be?” “Halves!” was the answer. “If I cut the halves in
two, what would you call the parts?” “Quarters!” “If I cut the
quarters in two, what will the parts be?” The answer was
unanimous, “ Snits /”

Noodles, also, derive their name from the German Nudeln, and
differ from the vermicelli of Italy only in the addition of eggs,
With the dish the term of reproach, noodlehead, has come over
from Germany, where NVudeln and Gritze (grits) are apt to be
considered as the favorite food of fools. Hence J. C. Neal says:
“Be sassy, be anything, Mr. Woodlesoup” (Charcoal Sketches, 1,
137), alluding to the German Nudelsuppe. Thus also dummer-
head is not unfrequently heard in Pennsylvania and some of the
Western States, where the German element is prevalent—an imi-
tation of Dummkopf, our “blockhead.” The first part of the
compound, the adjective dumm, is often used as dummy, not only
to represent the absent partner at cards, but also any stupid,
silent person. In this sense it is an inheritance from the Scotch
as well, claiming near kindred to our dumb, as used in Allan
Ramisay’s well known lines:

“ Auld Gabbi Spec wha was sae cunning,
To be a dummie ten years running.”

In the sense of stupid, it is employed by the great Seer, Andrew
Jackson Davis, who says of a medium that “he was the laughing-
stock of his brothers and sisters, who nicknamed him a dummy,
whilst his father averred that he would never earn his salt, for he
had not gumption enough to make a whistle.” (The Great Har-
monia, p. 339.)

Sagnichts is almost the only political term ever employed by
the Germans in America and adopted asa party-cry. They had
been roused to an unwonted degree of indignation by the offen-
THE GERMAN. 145

sive doctrines of Know-Nothings, who claimed all rights and
privileyes in a country peopled entirely by immigrants, for
natives only, to the exclusion of all foreign-born, naturalized citi-
zens. With a fine instinct of political irony the Germans changed
the term into Sagnichts, or Say-Nothings. It is not certainly
known whether a similar political allusion lies at the bottom of a
peculiar feature in the popular game of Zuchre, but if the latter
is really, as many maintain, a German game, the explanation
would be easy. In this game the knave of the trump-suit is
called the Right Bower, and the knave of the suit of the same
color the Left Bower, and these two cards trump king and queen
as well as every other card. Now Bower is evidently the German
Bauer, and here, therefore, as certainly in a very similar German
game, the Bauer or yeoman is given the place and power of the.
king. The term has become so familiar that Right Bower is now
a common though perhaps still a cant term of high praise; hence
an occurrence, in a recent debate in Congress, was thus reported :
“They threatened to filibuster to prevent the bill from being con-
sidered, and as their Right Bower, General Butler, was abseut,
the stratagem would have succeeded, had not help come from an
unexpected quarter.” (Globe, November 17, 1870.)

Among the corruptions of German terms introduced into our
speech may be noticed two ridiculous terms: Aatoose, used in the
New England States for any sudden unpleasant noise, and said to
have been derived from the German G'etdse (?), and Kriss Kingle,
the sadly mutilated form of the beautiful word Christ Kindlein.
The latter is in Germany already quite frequently contracted into
Christ Kindel, the “Child Christ,” on whom German children
rely for their gifts on the Christmas-tree, and this form has the
more readily degenerated, as it was, after the manner of words,
prone to follow the analogy of Criss-Cross,a game played on a
slate by children, and derived from old-fashioned Primers. ‘These
almost uniformly began the alphabet with the sign of the Cross,
which was called Chiist Cross, from the first lesson learned by
children ; for one of the oldest authorities on the subject, “The
Boke of Curtasye,” directs children to give special attention to the
seven initiatory lessons of the Christian child. 1. The Cross Christ.
2. The Lord’s Prayer. 3. The Ave and Creed, etc.

Among the many evidences of the absurdities to which the

7
146 AMERICANISMS.

freedom of phonography, so warmly advocated by many earnest
men, but happily abandoned even in Webster’s last edition of
his great Dictionary, must inevitably lead, few are more striking
than the word fillipeen, bravely quoted in Bartlett’s American-
isms. As the pleasant custom which the term designates, is not
known ever to have been connected with the giving of fillips, this
manner of writing seems to be inexcusable; it certainly recalls
neither of the two favorite derivations of the puzzling word. For-
tunately it concerns Americans very little, whether the term is
derived from the Greek péiAos and zouvn, or from the German
Vielliebchen, since they use it only as they have received it from
their English forefathers; but it ought surely to be -protected
against such utterly lawless spelling. The mzley-saw, a saw
which is not hung in the gate, is almost as bad; few would at
first recognize in the English-looking word, with its squint at a
mule, the German word Mithlen sdge, from which it is in reality
derived. But what shall we say of German phrases which seem
gradually to force their way into English, like the hold on! used
thus: “ When the police-officer saw him quietly walk out of the
door, as if to leave the court-house, he called out to him, hold on,
my good friend, you are wanted!” (Cincinnati Inquirer, July 1%,
1865), or the what for (was fiir) of the New Englander, who had
lived so long in Missouri that he could rise in the House and say:
“Mr. Speaker, I demand to know who dared present such a peti-
tion. What for a boldness is that, to come here and ask us, who
have fought against treason for four years, to honor the very
traitors whom we have crushed?” (St. Louis Democrat, Aug. 21,
1866.) They are simple barbarisms which the genius of our lan-
guage may endure for a time, but which ought not to be encour-
aged and endorsed by careful writers, even in the pages of a news-
paper.

There is much less harm in the introduction of German phrases
drawn from nature or local peculiarities. Thus, while the French
and English draw, their terms of contempt or pity for youthful
inexperience from unfledged birds with green or yellow bills, etc,
the German fancifully notices that newly-born animals are apt to
be licked dry promptly everywhere except behind the ears, and
hence their colloquial phrase: “The youngster is not dry yet

behind his ears”? The expression having become familiar to
THE GERMAN. 147

American ears in Pennsylvania first, has from thence spread to
other States also. “Rustic maidens rejecting the attentions of
youths, whom they consider too young to be of special value as
lovers, are fond of saying: You are not dry yet behind the ears,
you had better wait!” (Professor 8. 8. Haldeman.)
THE NEGRO.

“Dark sayings, darkly uttered.”

THE negro formerly occupied too subordinate a position in the
social scale to influence the speech of his masters. His ignorance,
his carelessness, his inability, with peculiar organs of speech un-
trained for many generations, to repeat certain sounds at all, and
his difficulty in perceiving others by the ear, account amply for
the havoc he played with-the king’s English. These impediments
haye made themselves clearly felt, since zealous and intelligent
teachers of both sexes have devoted themselves in numbers to the
training of freedmen’s children. They have encountered almost
insuperable difficulties, even where mental capacities were appar-
ently fully equal to those of the white race, and the zeal to learn
was almost irrepressible. The most successful among the well-
educated negroes, who have risen to honorable positions at the
bar, or earned distinction in other professions, men of eloquence,
often, and always forcible speakers, retain nevertheless certain
peculiarities of sound, of utterance, and accentuation, which
would mark them, even if they bore no trace of their origin in their
appearance, at least as much ag foreigners are marked who have
mastered a foreign idiom perfectly. Did not even the elder
Dumas in his speech as in his writings betray his descent unmis-
takably ?

The habits of the negro in his pronunciation of English words
must, however, not be judged, as is too frequently done, by so-
called negro minstrelsy. As French and German characters in
comedy have passed into a conventional mispronunciation, as no
American ever spoke like the Yankee on the boards of minor
theatres in London, so haye these so-called minstrels done great
THE NEGRO. 149

injustice to the negro, whom they claim to represent. Foreigners,
especially, believe in the conventional negro, as Englishmen
believe in the long-legged, tobacco-chewing, bowie-knife-carrying
Yankee in Punch. The bulk of American play-goers, we fear,
are as frequently misled.

The error arises often from utter ignorance of the vast
difference that exists between certain classes and varieties of
negroes. The Virginia slave, for generations accustomed to the
nicer functions of a house-servant, in daily contact with gentle-
women, and accustomed to hear at table and during long journeys
on horseback or in private carriages, the conversation of intel-
ligent men, was far above the average of the British laborer, to
say nothing of the French peasant. He spoke fair English, in-
finitely better, at all events, than the Yorkshire yokel, or even
the thorough-bred Cockney. The slave on a sugar or cotton
plantation in the Southwest, on the other hand, was but a step
_removed from the African savage; his speech, largely intermixed
with African terms, was well-nigh unintelligible. But even in
the so-called Border States there was an immense gulf between
the house-servant and the rnder Field-hand. Some of the
former possessed not only knowledge, but even refinement; body-
servants, as they were called, taken abroad by their. masters,
astonished European gentlemen by their politeness of manner
and their inbred courtesy, and the Ex-President of Liberia, long
a slave in Virginia, never once lacked the dignity and self-posses-
sion required by his high office, when presented at foreign courts,
or on the far more trying occasions, when he returned to his
native State and met his former masters. But the jield-hand was,
what Mr. Olmsted says of him: “on an average a very poor and
very bad creature, much worse than I had supposed before I had
seen him, and grown familiar with his stupendous ignorance,
duplicity, and sensuality. He seems to be but an imperfect man,
incapable of taking care of himself in a civilized manner, and his
presence in large numbers must be considered a dangerous cir-
cumstance to a civilized country.” (Journey in the Back Coun-
try, p. 432.)

Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that even the most intelligent
of the race seem to have some difficulty both in their hearing and
in their organs of speech, which prevents their perceiving the
150 AMERICANISMS.

more delicate modifications of sound, which abound and are of
such paramount importance in English, and of reproducing them
accurately. As the German, whose native dialect has from child-
hood up accustomed his ear to an utter disregard of the differ-
ence between d and ¢, and 4 and p, never ceases to confound them
in English also, so the negro finds it often utterly impossible to
hear certain sounds, and can consequently not imitate them.

One of the most striking evidences of this inability is found in
the unique and very interesting manuscript, in Arabic charac-
ters, made by a Mandingo slave, who belonged to a Mr. Maxwell,
of Savannah. His American name was London, and having
become a zealous Christian, he transcribed the Gospel with rare
precision, using even the vowel-points—harakat—of the Arabic
grammar, proving thus his careful training at home in making
copies from the Koran. But in spite of all this training, and
with all his intelligence, he could only write the English words
as their sounds affected his ear, and thus his vocalization was in
this wise: (First Chapter of John) “fas chapta ob Jon. Inde
beginnen wasde wad ; ande wad waswid Gad, ande wad was Gad.”
The manuscript caused a ludicrous mistake, such as had hap-
pened even to Mr. de Sacy, the great Orientalist, who states him-
self that having received an Arabic manuscript from Madrid, he
examined it carefully, and failing to discover a single Arabic word
in it, suggested that the book was probably written in the language
of the Hovas of Madagascar. Subsequently he found that the
MS. was in Spanish, and had been written, according to the ear,
by a converted Moor. In like manner the MS. of the intelligent
Mandingo slave was presented to Mr. W. B. Hodgson, of Savan-
nah, who also looked for Arabic words corresponding to the
Arabic letters, and abandoned the task of deciphering it in des-
pair. A chance remark suggested the turning of the latter into
Roman letters, and he discovered at once by the sound what the
eye had failed to perceive.

Still, the very imperfect manner in which the writer had evi-
dently only been able to catch the English sounds, accounts at
once for. the majority of peculiar forms and sounds, which are
so often exhibited as Americanisms, due to the influence of the
negroes in our midst, while they are in effect nothing more than
unsuccessful efforts to speak correct English. It is a grave mis-
THE NEGRO. 151

take to imagine-that the language adopted by negro minstrels is
that of the negro; the Englishman might as fairly be judged by
the “ Mylord Goddam ” of the French stage; and the use of had
for have, 7ub for love, massa for master, is by no means universal,
nor has it ever been common to all slaves.

Of genuine African words which have become sufficiently well-
known to be considered Americanisms, there are probably but
three in our speech. One is the term Buckra, which, on the
African coast, is universally applied to white men, meaning
originally “a spirit, a powerful being,” and is used in that applica-
tion throughout the Southern States. Hence, Mr. Bartlett quotes
the negro song:

‘ “ Great way off at sea,
When at home I binny,
Buckra man take me
From de coast ob Guinea.”
Its meaning is occasionally transferred to white objects, and
negroes thus speak of duckra yam, with the understanding, how-
ever, that it is not only white, but peculiarly good also. The
word is occasionally enforced by the addition of swanga, an
African term, meaning elegant or bright-colored, so as to strike
and please the eye. A Swanga Buckra serves, therefore, among
negroes, to designate a specially well-dressed white man.

From this African term is, curiously enough, a word derived
which has made its way to New England, and is now quite at
home on the banks of Newfoundland. This is Swankey, the
name given—probably as something very elegant in taste and
effect—to a beverage consisting of molasses, vinegar, and water,
the favorite drink of fishermen. “Roll along here, shouted the
cook. Tumble up an’ git your swankey, boys. It’s as good as
ever you cocked a lip at. And at the word each man, his face
glowing with excitement and exercise, took his turn at the
swankey pail.” (Newfoundland Fisheries, p. 110.)

It is presumed, though not proven, that the Moonack, a myth-
ical animal known to negroes only, is also of African origin. The
beast lives, according to their belief, in caves or hollow trees, and
the poor negro who meets it in his solitary rambles is doomed.
His reason is impaired, till he becomes a madman, or is carried
off by some lingering malady. He dare not speak of it, but old,
182 AMERICANISMS.

experienced negroes say when they look at him: “He gwine to
die; he seed the »oonack.”

Cuffy, which is often claimed as a negro term, is in all proha-
bility nothing more than a corruption of the English slang term,
a cove, and quite as frequently heard abroad as in the United
States. “The fine dash of Virginia upper cuffyism, it is gone,’
gone forever. Sambo has settled down into a simple bourgeois.”
(Putnam’s Magazine, December, 1854.)

Nor is the number of words large which express the rela-
tions of master and slave, and to which ignorant negroes, dull of
bearing, have given anew meaning. Even the familiar appellations
of Uncle and Aunt, by which for many generations every colored
man and woman was called, were not peculiar to America, as
Pegge’s Supplement to Grose distinctly states that the two words
are “in Cornwall applied to all elderly persons.” The house and
stable servant, in like manner, went by the generic term of boy,
irrespective of age.

A word as hideous in sound as of import, connected with the
negro, is the famous Black Code, a collection of laws first made
by Bienville in Louisiana, which was ever after the model for all
legislation on the relations of master and slave. When the colony
was taken possession of by the Crown of Spain in the year 1769,
the provisions of the Black Code were retained with such modifica-
tions as the “Siete Partidas” made on the subject of slavery.
This system of laws has ever since been the Blackstone of Spain
and her colonies, and is still the authority in the parts of America
settled by Spaniards. Its power continued long in Louisiana, and
controlled largely the rights of negroes, even after the colony be-
came a State of the Union.

It is comforting to turn from such a subject to the term of
tenderness, by which the black nurse was, for so many generations,
known to the children of the South. This used to be Mammy,
the same name formerly given in England to grandmothers, and
by some derived from the Gypsy word Mam, which means grand-
mother. Even now many a Mammy is spending her declining
years in the family of-those whom she has nursed and reared,
and thus the name still lingers on in the Southern States. In
South Carolina and some of the Gulf States, the word is sounded
and written Marwmer, and thus it is quoted by a recent writer:
THE NEGRO. 153

“An old Maumer (the general term of Southern children for
their nurses), whose gray hairs are still covered by the bright
turban, which always gave such dignity to the appearance of the
nursery ruler. Where are those mauwmers, whom the children
loved only less than those who bore them, and with whom the
friendship only ceased with life? They, too, belong now to the
past.”

Indirectly, at least, the negro has given us the verb, to maroon,
from maroon, the name applied in the West Indies to runaway
negroes, who lived as outlaws in remote and inaccessible parts of
the country. .The term is used in the Southern States, though
now less frequently than formerly, to designate a pic-nic or
excursion party extending over several days. <A few families agree
thus to go marooning ; they take tents and cooking utensils, and
spend their time away from the haunts of men, and more or less
in Robinson Crusoe style.

America owes the negro no small gratitude for the only national
poetry which it possesses, as distinct from all imitation of old Eng-
lish verses, and all competition with English writers of our day.
We have no ballad and no song that can be called American. The
nearest approach ever made to the creation of a new type was the
dramatic song Jim Crow, brought out about the year 1835 by an
enthusiastic Yankee on the boards of a theatre in New York; it
created a sensation, for it was new in form and conception, and
no doubt rendered still more attractive by the strange guise in
which it was presented. It was quickly followed by several other
songs of the same kind, such as Zip Coon, Longtatled Blue, Ole
Virginny nebber tire, Settin’ on a Rail, etc. Then came, in 1841,
a variation in the form of a descriptive ballad, famous Ole Dan
Tucker, and after that the vein was exhausted. For a time this
African inroad drove nearly every other song from the publisher’s
store and the drawing-room. It is strange that they are almost
all sad, touching, and resigned. Philanthropists have, of course,
ascribed this to the sad fate of the race. Thisis a mistake, for
the negro is by nature, and was even in the days of slavery, em-
phatically a merry creature, full of fun and endowed with an
almost superhuman power of laughing. He has become sad only
since the responsibilities of earning his livelihood and exercising
the duties of a citizen have been so suddenly imposed upon him.

We
154 AMERICANISMS.

Tt may be, that in another generation he will recover the happy
cheerfulness of his race, and with it the love of song and laughter,
but at present he feels instinctively that his race is passing
through a great and perilous crisis.

He is passionately fond, also, of religions music, and the good
ear for music, with a fair endowment of voice, which have been
vouchsafed to his race, enable him to perform creditably and
to enjoy heartily all manner of hymn and psalmody. But he
must be allowed to translate the words into his own familiar
terms and to alter them at will, utterly regardless of their mean-
ing, so they suit the metre and chime in with the cadence. The
following hymn, a genuine native production, and sung in the
churches of Baltimore, which appeared not long ago in that ex-
cellent paper, Appleton’s Journal, will give an idea of their man-
ner of treating religious subjects :

PHARAO.

Didn’t ole Phay get loss?
Get loss, get loss ?
Didn’t ole Phay get loss
In de Red Sea?
Phayo say, I gwine across
In de Red Sea,
So whip up horses an’ gallop across,
In de Red Sea.

Didn’t ole Phay get loss,
Get loss, get loss ?
Didn’t ole Phay get loss
In de Red Sea?
Hebrews say, we get across now
In de Red Sea,
At thy feet we humblie bow,
In de Red Sea.

Didn’t ole Phay get loss ?
Get loss, get loss?

Didn’t ole Phay get loss
In de Red Sea ?

Phayo say, I gwine along home,
In de Red Sea,

Oh, how I wish I hadn’t come
In de Red Seca!
JOHN CHINAMAN.

“The heathen Chinec is peculiar."—/. B. Harte.

Tuer Heathen Chinee, as he will, no doubt, be called for many a
year to come, bearing the baptismal name bestowed upon him in
F. B. Harte’s characteristic poem of Truthful James (a character
invented by John Pheenix), has only so lately appeared on our
shores, that Chinese terms can hardly be said to have found their
way yet into our speech. Johnny, or John Chinaman, for under
both names is he known in California, has for years given rise to
angry debates in legislative halls, and to vehement discussions in
public journals; he has been victimized unmercifully in the mines
and gulches in the up-country, and brutally ill-treated in trade
and in courts in the cities. He has recently even found his way
to Southern plantations and to Northern factories, everywhere
proving useful, faithful, and intelligent. The announcement of
large arrivals of Chinese laborers and servants threatened at a
. time to become a question of national policy, and Labor-Leagues
as well as Congress became deeply agitated on the subject. So
far, however, their number has been too small, and their mode of
life, their manners, and their faith, are too far apart from those of
the United States to admit of their exercising any influence. The
few Chinese terms used in conversation and by good authors, hare
all come to us through the English, and it is only due to our
more frequent and more direct intercourse with China, if these
words are in more general use here than abroad. Thus we say
perhaps more frequently than our English cousins that a thing is
first-chop, using the Canton-jargon of the Anglo-Chinese, which
employs first-chop instead of our American first-rate. Joss-houses
with ample supplies of joss-sticks are now quite common in San
Francisco and other parts of California, where Buddhism and
156 AMERICANISMS.

Chinese paganism are better represented than even the Greek
Church. They consist, however, as yet mostly of small, insig-
nificant buildings, no real temple having yet been erected. It
need not be added that the word Joss is not a Chinese term, but
only a corruption of the Spanish word Dios, which is made to
stand generically for any kind of god.

The word Aootoo, or Kotow, Chinese bowing, is in like manner
very familiar to American ears, and largely used by a certain class
of writers like N. P. Willis, in their fondness for peculiar, odd-
sounding words. It is, moreover, generally misapplied, being
used to convey the idea of flattery rather than of grave courtesy,
which it originally denotes. Thus the New York Tribune says
of the American citizen: “Consequently he has kootooed and
salaamed before every travelling scribbler or story-monger, fear-
ful that he would be dismissed by them to the dunce’s stool for
some solecism in manner or pronunciation.” (February 2, 1871.)

Perhaps the most familiar of Chinese words to all Americans is
the famous Ginseng, a plant so called from the two Chinese
words gen-seng, “ first of plants,” on account of the high apprecia-
tion in which it is held by the citizens of the Flowery Empire for
its medicinal virtues. The herb (Panax quinquefolium) is found
all over the North, and for many years its root formed a most
valuable article of exportation, besides being largely consumed
at home. Its name, being thus continually used, has suffered
the common fate of such popularity, and has been curtailed for
the sake of brevity. Sang became the familiar term for the val-
uable herb, and in Virginia and North Carolina, where the trade
was especially flourishing, men and women would go a sanging,
as they called the process of gathering the plant. Hence the
name of Sang Run, in the State of Maryland, and of the sanging
ground near the villages where ginseng used to be found in
abundance.

The Chinese have given a new meaning to the term Company,
which promises, so far, to become an Americanism. A San Fran-
cisco paper explains the meaning, when it informs its readers that
“There are no Chinese beggars, for nearly all who come over
belong to one of the five great Companies. Each of these has a
building and acts in all respects as a benevolent institution. The
word of their merchants is perfectly reliabl’.” (Badlledin, Jan. 13,
JOHN CHINAMAN. 157

1869.) In like manner the word punk, originally meaning “ rot-
ten wood,” and applied mainly to the pithy substance found in
dead pine-trees, and sought for by boys because it gives out a
phosphorescent light when rubbed, has obtained a new use in
Chinese hands. It represents now the material of which so-called
joss-sticks are made, as well as the sticks themselves. “A Chinese
lady of rank in San Francisco walks attended by three maids of
honor, bearing lighted sticks of punk highly perfumed. Her
face is painted with a reckless disregard of expense and her hair
is saturated with oil, Running through the knot at the back of
her hair isan iron dumb-bell ; on her head, gracefully waving in the
wind, is a flower, which, from the fertilizing effect oil is said to
have, is judged indigenous. Her short highly-colored silk dress
is beautifully embroidered, and her feet are encased in the custom-
ary canoe-shaped sandals.” (Sacramento paper, 1870.)

“From 1852-1870, nine thousand Chinese emigrants arrived
in San Francisco, and there are probably seventy-five thousand in
round numbers in the United States at present. In the South
they have proved as satisfactory as in the North, and it is prob-
able that another year will see their employment in manufactories
and plantations widely extended.” (Frank H. Norton, Our Labor
System, 1871.) :

Of the contemptuous and injudicious manner in which the
poor Chinaman is treated in the Western States, the following
resolutions actually offered—but not passed—in the Legislature
of Oregon, in 1870, may give anexample: “Be it enacted by the
Legislative Assembly of the State of Oregon:—Section 1. No
Chinaman shall be allowed to die in this State, until he has paid $10
for a new pair of boots, with which to kick the bucket.—Section
2. Any Chinaman dying under this act shall be buried six feet .
under ground.-—Section 3. Any Chinaman who attempts to dig
up another Chinaman’s bones, shall first procure a license from
the Secretary of State, for which he shall pay $4.—Section
4, Any dead Chinaman, who attempts to dig up his own bones,
without giving due notice to the Secretary of State, shall be fined
$100.”
ITT.

THE GREAT WHST.
THE GREAT WEST.

“There is pleasure in the sight of a glebe which has never been broken.”
Pp Ss g
Walter Savage Landor.

Tue New England States have a dialect of their own, by far
the most fully developed and the most characteristic of all the
varieties of English spoken in America. It represents alike the
effect which climate has upon the organs of speech in their favor-
ite sounds—the nasal twang and the violent curtailment of words,—
and the direction given to the choice of terms and the arrange-
ment of sentences, by their favorite occupations and their leading
lines of thought. But the Great West has impressed the stamp of
its own life even more forcibly upon the speech of its sons. Every-
thing is on such a gigantic scale there that the vast proportions
with which the mind becomes familiar, beget unconsciously a
love of hyperbole, which in its turn invites irresistibly to humor.
Life is an unceasing fury of activity there, and hence speech
also is racy with life and vigor; all is new there to those who
come from older countries or crowded cities, and hence new
words are continually coined, and old ones receive new meanings;
nature is fresh and young there, and hence the poetic feeling is
excited, and speech assumes unconsciously the rhythm and the
elevation of poetry.

The language of Western men has been called high-flown,
overwrought, grandiloquent—it may be so, but it is so only as a
fair representation of the Western world, which God created on a
large scale, and which in its turn grows faster, works harder,
achieves more than any other land on earth has ever done. Nor
must it be forgotten that the West has no severe critic to correct
abuses, no court and no polite society to taboo equivocal words,
no classic writers to impart good taste and train the ear to a love

11
162 AMERICANISMS.

of gentle words and flowing verse. Speech, there, is free as the
air of heaven, and moves with the impulsive energy of independ-
ent youth, conscious of matchless strength, and_ acknowledging
no master in word or deed. It is an intensified, strangely impul-
sive language, just as the life’s blood of the whole West throbs
with faster pulse, and courses with fuller vigor through all its
yeins. There is no greater difference between the stately style of
Milton and the dashing, reckless lines of Swinburne, than between
the formal, almost pedantic echo of Johnsonian rhythm in Haw-
thorne’s work, and the free and easy verses of Brett Harte.
Hence, New England has wit, and what can be more caustic
than Lowell’s deservedly famous political squibs? But the West
has humor, golden humor, full of poetry, dramatizing dry facts
into flesh and blood, but abounding in charity and good-will to
all men.

So it is with their sounds, that come full and hearty from broad
chests, breathing freely the pure air that sweeps down from Rocky
Mountains unhampered, across broad prairies, over a whole con-
tinent. Words are as abundant as food, and expressions grow in
force and extent alike, till they sound extravagant to the more
economical son of the Hast. Speech is bold, rejecting laws and
rules, making one and the same word answer many purposes, and
utterly scouting the euphemistic shifts of a sickly delicacy. If it
becomes vulgar—and it will become so, as the sweetest milk turns
sour when the thunder rolls on high—the vulgarism is still what.
J. R. Lowell so happily calls “poetry in the egg.” Its slang,
also, is as luxurious as the weeds among the rich grasses, but at
least it is home-made, and smells of the breath of the prairie or
the blood of the Indian, and is not imported from abroad or made
in the bar-room and betting-ring.

Hence the student of English finds in the West a rich harvest
of new words, of old words made to answer new purposes, often
in the most surprising way, and of phrases full of poetical feeling,
such as could only arise amid scenes of great beauty, matchless
energy, and sublime danger.

There is a strange perfume about the very term dackwoods,
which brings up before our mind’s eye at a glance the forest of
primeval trees, those formidable giants which the pioneer has to
encounter at once with his trusty weapon, the axe. For it used
THE GREAT WEST. 1628

to mean—real backwoods no longer exist—the partially cleared
woods on the Western frontiers of the Union, which were con-
sidered the dack of the new country, as the coast of the Atlantic
constituted the front. The Hast having been first settled, and
having furnished, to a large extent, the sinews and brains for the
new States, was naturally looked upon as the representative of
wealth, intelligence, and progress; and the back country became,
from that time onward, synonymous not only with regions lying
back, 7. ¢., to the West of the seaboard States, but also with a state
of civilization somewhat behindhand. The nearest districts became
early known—and are still very generally designated—as the Up
Country, a term, when used as an adjective, peculiar to this conti-
nent. It is employed all along the seaboard from Maine to the
Gulf of Mexico, with varying meaning, but always suggesting a
certain inferiority to the seaboard population, because up the rivers,
toward the headwaters, population becomes scarce, civilization
imperfect, and schools few in number. Of this peculiar belt,
J. R. Lowell says: “I imagined to myself such an up country
man as I had often seen at anti-Slavery meetings, capable of dis-
trict-school English, but always instinctively falling back into the
national stronghold of his homely dialect, when heated to the
point of self-forgetfulness” (Preface to Biglow Papers), and the
result of this imagination was one of the most brilliant creations
of American genius. In Southern States the inhabitant of the
large seaboard city speaks with ineffable contempt of the up coun-
try people, and formerly used to rank them with Crackers and
mean whites, till they made their political influence felt at elec-
tions.

The dack country seems to have receded back from the Hastern
States as civilization advanced Westward, but it still retains the
character of a region, where lands and living are cheap, and peo-
ple simple and unsophisticated. An opulent family, reduced in
circumstances, and compelled to remove to a place where social
claims were unknown and wants few and easily supplied, is thus
alluded to in the Letters from the South: “The family were in
great distress, though we helped them ona little to get to the back
country, where I hear they are doing pretty well again” (p. 127) ;
and even in more recent days a traveller in the West says: “The
hotel was a roomy log-house,-commanding a view of the back
164 AMERICANISMS.

country, 2 prairie stretching off into the western horizon.” (Put-
nan’s Magazine, November, 1868.)

In common language the one is the Hast, the other the West,
The former, now more generally known as the Hastern or the
New England States, still maintains its strong hold on the minds
of men by many afamiliar phrase. Down Hast, in the American’s
mind, is instinctively placed near the low coast of the Atlantic, as
it were down toward the sea, and at the same time toward the
East, 7. ¢, in Yankeedom. The emigrant, who has gone to
the West, still remembers with delight how they spoke and how
they did Down Last, and looks forward, after years of hard labor
and painful longing, to his visit to the Hast, while the Virginian,
to the second and third generation even, speaks only of going
home, and still more frequently of coming tn, when he proposes to
yisit his relatives in the Old Dominion. The Down Easter is well
known by his Janguage, his costume, and his peculiar habits,
smiled at for many an odd trick he has, but respected for his
many solid virtues. With him all that is done in his native land
is right, and hence what he admires, he simply calls’ about Last.
“There was not a Yankee,” says J. R. Lowell, when Horace
Mann regretted we had not the French word “s’orienter” in our
speech, “whose problem has not always been to find out what is
about East.” The enthusiastic (though quaintly exaggerated) love
borne the Hast by its sons is, perhaps, most strikingly illustrated
in Major Jack Downing’s oft-repeated phrase: “Td go ast of
sunrise any day to see sich a place.” (Letters, p. 21.)

The West, on the other hand, is as vast and undefined as the
East is limited in extent, and sharply marked in character. First, -
it meant all the gigantic states, which were the generous gift of
Old Virginia, lying between the Afother of States, as she was hence
called, and the great river. Thus Edward Everett could say in his
great speech: “The enterprising, ingenious and indomitable North,
the substantial and magnificent Central States, the great balance-
wheel of the system; the youthful, rapidly expanding, and almost
boundless Wesé, the ardent, genial, and hospitable South—I have
traversed them all.” (Speech, July 5, 1858.) At that time, the
regions on the other side of the Mississippi were the Far TWest of
America, and beyond it rose the impassable barrier of the Rocky
Mountains. Since the snow-capped range has been traversed by
THE GREAT WEST. 165

a railway, and new, powerful States have arisen on its Western side,
facing the ocean, there is ho longer a West to the Union, the
great Pacific itself bounding it toward the setting sun. Still, the
States west of the Mississippi continue to be called the West, and
what is done Oué }West is as frequently mentioned as what happens
Down East or Down South.

It is to this West that annually thousands and thousands of
brave young men, daring families, and numerous whole companies
carry the banner of civilization and the power of the great repub-
lic. For the American worships the Almighty Dollar, but, with
few exceptions, only in order to gratify his first and greatést of all
desires-—to live in independence on his own land, and to enjoy in
freedom the fruit of his labor under his own vine and his own fig-
tree. The millionaire and the porter, the proud descendant of
the grim Puritan or the rollicking Cavalier and the immigrant
fresh from the Emerald Isle or Imperial Germany, all share this
desire. A Stewart buys half a county in the neighborhood of
New York and lays out a city, a Greeley purchases vast tracts in
the purified South, and almost every capitalist invests a part of his
fortune in real estate, hoping, from the steadily rising value of all
lands in the republic, a large and certain return for his capital.
The poor man drifts almost instinctively to the West to seek a
home, where land can be had for the asking. The skillful
mechanic and the frugal servant, the bankrupt merchant and the
adventurous youth, all press in one unceasing current Westward,
to build wp their own fortunes and with them the power and pros-
perity of new States.

The government of the United States has ever been blameably
lavish in the disposal of the matchless domain which Providence
has placed inits hands. First offering the rich lands of the Conti-
nent, without respect for the rightful owner, to all who would take
it—for cultivation or speculation alike—they now squander them
recklessly in so-called grants to railroad companies and rings of
every kind. This is a continuation of the original process, by
which the British Crown granted lands to all who were willing to
plant colonies in the New World. Hence the latter were called
plantations in the North as well as in the South; in New England
the first settlers were known as planters, and distinguished select
families as Old Planters, while the oldest.and most dignified
166 AMERICANISMS.

member of each family was honored with the title of Landlord,
The same occurred in the South. “The adventurers,” says Cap-
tain John Smith, “which raised the stock to begin and supply the
Plantation, were about seventy gentlemen, some merchants, some
handicraftsmen, some adventuring great summes, some small, as
their estate and affection served. The planters are not servants to
the adventurers here, but have onely counceles of direction from
them, but no injunctions or commands, and all masters of fami-
lies are partners in land and whatsoever, setting their labours
against the stocke, till certain years be expired for division.” (Vir-
ginia, I. p. 251.)

Very early in the history of this country a distinction arose
between these enterprising but more or less speculating planters,
and the actual farmers of the land. “The yeomanry of Massa--
chusetts,” we are told, “hold their heads high to this day, as their
fathers spoke proudly of themselves as farmers. ‘They were the.
men who penetrated the forest in all directions, sat down beside
the streams, and ploughed up such level tracts as they found open
to the sunshine; so that in a few years the Salem Farmers rose
to much prosperity. The Farmers formed an order by them-
selves—not by having peculiar institutions, but through the
dignity ascribed to agriculture.” (Salem Witchcraft, Charles W.
Upham.) On these plantations they had certain officers, whose
power seems to have been very nearly paramount, and whose
name still survives in the sedectmen of our day. They were, and
still are, the chosen magistrates, in whose hand is placed the
management of all communal affairs, and juries are still selected,
and not indiscriminately chosen as elsewhere, according to their
discretion. N. Hawthorne speaks of them as they were in 1635
thus: “Woe to the youth or maiden who did but dream of a
dance! The sedectman nodded to the constable, and there sat the
light reprobate in the stocks, or if he danced, it was round the
whipping-post, which might be termed the Puritan Maypole.”
(May Pole of Merry Mount.)

It was one of these plantations, the Plantation of York, which
in 1641 became, under the name of Georgiana, the first city in
the United States, in the legal sense of that word, a charter being
solemnly granted for thét purpose by Sir Fernando Georges.

At a later period, a broad distinction arose between a Southern
THE GREAT WEST. 167

plantation, on which tobacco, sugar, and rice were planted, and a
Northern farm, where the cereals were raised, a contrast which
was still further heightened by the slave labor engaged in planting,
while free labor was used in farming. That in Newfoundland a
person engaged in fishing should also be designated as a planter,
is probably to be ascribed to the habit of speaking of a sea “harvest,”
and comparing the two branches of industry with each other. A
planter in Western rivers means, on the other hand, nothing
more than a tree or a piece of timber firmly planted in the bed of
the river by the force of its current—one of the most formidable
obstructions to navigation.

From these early settlements on land purchased or taken by
force from the rightful owners, bold explorers and restless adven-
turers set out still farther westward in search of richer lands,
larger domains, or simply ampler space for hunting. At times
these movements were favored by the’ great Proprietaries, as the
- grantees of large districts were often called, such as the famous
.Patroons of New York, and the noble Fairfaxes of Virginia. The

former, retaining down to the present day their Dutch title,
derived their rights from the Dutch government, which wisely
and liberally granted large privileges and the title of Patroons of
New Netherland, to all who should, in a given term, plant colonies
of fifty souls on the banks of some navigable river. Hence W.
Irving, in his inimitable portrait of the days of New Amsterdam,
speaks of a man who “indulged in magnificent dreams of foreign
conquests and great patroonships in the wilderness.” These large
possessions and exclusive privileges proved, however, soon obnox-
ious to the republican tendencies of the Union, and led to much
trouble, as in the case of the famous Manor of Rensselaerwyck,
founded by Kiliaen Van Rensselaer—who never came out himself
to look after his magnificent domain. In the course of a few gen-
erations the number of tenants on this grant had risen to more than
a hundred thousand souls, who chafed under the burden of paying
ground-rent, where everybody else held his land in fee-simple.
Hence resulted refusals to pay dues, combinations among the
aggrieved, and the so-called Anti-Rent Troubles, sometimes settled
by compromises and judicial decisions, and at other times leading
to actual strife, as in the Helderberg War, which could be quelled
only by the presence of a large armed force.
168 AMERICANISMS.

In Virginia similar grants were made by the British Government,
as in the famous Patent issued to Lord Fairfax by King James I.
In those days the colony was known as a land of necks or strips
of land between large rivers, and men naturally.preferred settling
upon the rivers in order to possess themselves of rich bottom
lands for farming purposes and also to be near to a convenience
for market. Of these necks there were four, and one of them,
known as the Northern Neck, and containing all the lands between
the headwaters of the Rappahannock and Potomac to Chesapeake
Bay, was granted to the Lord Fairfax of those days. arly in the °
spring of 1736 an agent came over to lay out the manor and grant
portions in fee-simple to tenants; another Lord Fairfax came
then himself, established his headquarters at Greenway Court, in
the heart of his magnificent domain, living there in princely,
though somewhat barbarous, splendor, and rapidly seé¢ling up, as it
began to be called, his lands, even in the famous Valley of Virginia.
But here, also, the rights of favored monopolists were found in- ,
compatible with the levelling tendencies of growing republicanism,
and the descendants of the proud nobleman now own an empty
title, but not an acre of their former possessions.

With the exception of such special grants and patents, to which
subsequently titles obtained from the Spanish government were
added, all land in the Union was held by the Government in trust
for the people and sold or awarded in fee-simple. The process was
as informal as the peculiar circumstances required. Early settlers
would go out in the wilderness and simply take possession of a
tract of land by chopping a piece out of a tree here and there and
thus marking all within these lines as their own. This was called
to blaze a tree, whether it served to secure ownership or merely to
mark a path through a forest. The term is derived from the
French dlason, which already in Shakespeare's time was shortened
into blazen :

“Thyself thou blazen’st
In these two princely boys,’

and was in like manner applied to the blaze, or white spot, in the
forehead of a horse, as all these marks bore some likeness to the
blason or armorial bearing of the Normans. “ Many settlers did
not content themselves,” as we are told by 8. Kercheval in his
¢ THE GREAT WEST. 169

History of the Valley of Virginia, “with marking the trees at
the usual height with the initials of their name, but climbed up
the large beech-trees and cut the letters in the bark, often forty feet
from the ground. To enable them to identify these trees at a
future period, they made marks on other trees around them as
references.” Thus the new-comer, having selected his future
home, would, in the language of the day, “at once blaze out on the
tree-trunks his pre-emption claim,” and henceforth he was secured
in his property. As soon as he had built a cabin and raised a crop,
however small, the occupant was, by the laws of Virginia—then
stretching from the Atlantic to the Mississippi—entitled to four
hundred acres and a pre-emption right to a thousand more ad-
joining, to be secured by a simple Jand-office warrant. There
was, however, at an early period an inferior kind of land-title,
called tomahawk-right, which was made by deadening a few trees
near the head of a spring and marking the bark of some one or more
with the initials of the improver. The deadening consisted in
cutting with a tomahawk, then as familiar to the white man as to
the Indian, a narrow ring round the trunk of a tree; this scarcely
noticeable injury, nevertheless, goes to the life of the tree, and the
latter dies, not suddenly, but slowly, by the lingering process of
starvation. Such tomahawk-rights did not exist in law, but were,
nevertheless, often-bonght and sold. (8. Kercheval, History of Vir-
ginia, p. 214.)

Rights thus acquired secure at least what is called a claim,
although the squatter also insists upon a like right. In the
poetical language of the West, a man who unceremoniously took
possession of new Jand was said to sgwat down on it; and “hence
is derived,” says W. Irving, “the appellation of syuatters, so odious
to all great land-holders, and which is given to those enterprising
worthies who seize upon land first and take their chance to make
good their title to it afterward.” In the wild frontier portions of
the West the “enlightened citizen” has naturally a very indis-
tinct idea of mewm and tuwm, and when once fairly settled, he
objects very earnestly to being removed. Hence laws and writs
of ejectment avail very little. Nor is the evil apparently diminished
by an increase of population; for in the year 1870 official reports
stated that not less than seven or eight thousand squatters, with
a town of over a thousand inhabitants, had been found on an

8
170 AMERICANISMS. 3

Indian reservation in a central State of the Union, and a requisi-
tion was made for a large military force to restore the lands to the
rightful owners. It was, of course, found inexpedient to employ
troops for such a purpose, and the squatters carried the day. ,
They were not so successful, however, in the days of the so-called
squatter sovereignty, a word coined by General Cass, and repre-
senting the right of the inhabitants of newly-formed territories,
mostly squatters, to determine for themselves what laws and
institutions they would prefer. The question was of great impor-
tance when Slavery still counted among the latter, but Thomas
H. Benton of Missouri already stigmatized the claim as “an insane
demagogical idea, as unreasonable as for a child to be independent
of its father.”

The almost boundless liberty with which Americans use the
words of their language, was recently shown with painful impres-
siveness. In a fearful catastrophe which happened in February,
1871, on the Hudson River railway, all the horrors of the disaster
and all the grief for the numerons victims could not efface the
deep impression made by the useless but noble heroism of the
engine-driver, who refused to escape, stood by his engine, and
plunged with it into the abyss. It appeared afterward that in
discussing with railroadmen the expediency-of jumping from an
engine in time of danger, Doc. Simmons had once said, “I would
squat!” He meant he would sgwat down behind the boiler and
trust to going through with whatever might obstruct the road,
after having pulled the brakes, reversed the engine, and opened
the throttle.

The word claim has of late obtained special importance in the
gold diggings of California and the adjoining States. The former
now means not only the small piece of ground claimed by the
individual discoverer, but quite as often a whole mining locality,
and men speak therefore of “riding out to the claim, and seeing
if part of it was for sale,” while the rough miner will say: “ You
see, stranger, gold is sure to come out ’er that theer claim, but the
old proprietor wasn’t of much account. He was green, and let the
boys about here jump him.” (F. B. Harte, The Luck of Roaring
Camp, p. 134.) The word diggings is one of the fallacious class
that look as new as California—it is as old as Jeremy Taylor!
He says: “Let us not project long designs, crafty plots, and dig-
THE GREAT WEST. 171

gings so deep” (Holy Dying, L., 2, 3), evidently using metaphor-
ically a term familiar in practice to all his readers. Its free use,
howeyer, is unmistakeably American ; for now it denotes, in cant
language at least, any special locality or region, and often even a
dwelling or home. “Were you ever before in these diggings?” is
a phrase very often heard in the West upon first introduction, and
in J. OC. Neal’s Charcoal Sketches we read: “Look here, Ned, I
reckon it’s about time we should go to our diggings ; I am dead
beat, and you don’t look as if you could keep out of bed much
longer.” (IL, 119.) The miner of California and Nevada has
been known, in times of a rush, to speak of a place where he could
stand leaning against a stout post, as his diggings for the night.
Generally, however, he means in good earnest the piece of land on
which he hopes to reach ded-rock, where gold is found in quanti-
ties, and to strike it very rich, as soon as he comes to the pay-
streak, that is, the lode or vein which is to repay him for all his
labors. To ascertain his probable success, he prospects, digging
here a few inches and there several feet into the ground, throw-
ing himself down and examining closely every particle of sand or
soil, or actually sinking a shaft. But the immigrant in search ‘of
land is also said to be prospecting, and the term has, since the
late Civil War, been applied with new force to the numerous
Northerners who have gone to the South in search of cheap farms
and promising plantations. A report of the new Greeley Colony
in Colorado says: “Much cedar was found in the gulches, with
plums and grapes at intervals; an exploring party is soon to
prospect the country from Greeley down to Julesburg.” (New
York Tribune, January 19, 1871.) “ We noticed quite a number
_ of gentlemen yesterday on the Central train; they were substan-
tial farmers from Pennsylvania, come to prospect in our State.
We bid them welcome.” (Richmond Dispatch, May 21, 1866.)
Claim and digging alike are subject to the danger of being
jumped. For there is a kind of poetic justice in the fact, that
' where one bold man was defiant enough to take land without
regard to law or ownership, another equally bold man was apt to
be near at hand, and ready suddenly to seize, or, in the energetic
language of the West, to jump upon the land on which the other
had squatted. If they did not respect the right of the first occu-
pant, they were naturally as little disposed to dread the law, and
172 AMERICANISMS,

to abstain from ousting a lawful owner; hence they became
known as Claim-jumpers. Many a poor settler, unable to meet
the rough brutality of such men, has had to abandon his home-
stead and leave it in the hands of the robber; but many a jumper
has also been tried by a self-constituted jury of neighbors, and
graced a tree on the land he would fain have made his own by
the mere right of the stronger.

All the land not owned by special grant or actual occupancy is
apt to be called Wild Land in Western parlance. This is laid
out by the agents of the Government Land Office into regular
divisions based upon parallels of longitude and latitude, which,
when surveyed by the official land-surveyor, are laid out into
square sections of 640 acres each, which are again subdivided into
quarter-sections. This process, which takes place before the land
is offered for sale, is called by the barbarous term of sectionizing,
and hence the laws of Texas of 1828 say: “So much of the vacant
land of the republic shall be surveyed and sectiontzed, as will be
sufficient to satisfy all claims” (8). It is peculiar to this term,
section, that it is one of the few words which have come back to
the Eastern States from the West; for now political discussion
abounds in references to sectional interests, as well as to party
feelings, and the growing division of the Union into four great
sections, the North and the South, the Central and the Pacific
States, is looked upon with grave apprehensions by all friends of
the Republic. “ Sectionalism,” says Mr. Seward in one of his
ablest state-papers, “has received a final blow,” but the prophet
who predicted the final battle in the late Civil War so often and
so peremptorily, years before it took place, may well be doubted
in this prediction also. Nor is the word section used in political
language only; it has become a common term for any parcel of
land, and of a once wealthy family it is thus said: “In the prog-
ress of a half-century they had sold, bit by bit, their section of
land, which, kept intact, would have proved a fortune.” (Lip-
pincot?’s Mag., March, 1871, p. 289.)

The section as well as the claim, and, in fact, every tract of land
blazed by a claimant, are defined by what the surveyors call the
corners, marks on the tree between which the boundary lines are
run. “ Most of the lands belonging to Washington in the West,”
says a biographer of Colonel Chaaetond, “were located by Colonel
THE GREAT WEST. 173

Crawford. We have frequently heard the old surveyors along the
Ohio say that they often met with his corners.”

The only lands exempted from legitimate occupancy by new set-
tler are the so-called reservations, made for the Indians and cer-
tain purposes of public importance, such as schools, etc. Most
of these are now near or beyond the Mississippi; a few, however,
exist still in the very heart of some of the oldest States; this will
explain the following article, contained in the New York Tribune
of Jan. 23d, 1871: “The resolutions of the New York Legislature,
relative to the Alleghany-Reservation of the Seneca Indians, in
Cattarauga County of that State, were presented in the House
to-day. It appears that white settlers occupy lands in the town
of Salamanca (!), within the reservation, without any title. It is
now asked that a title be given these squatters, and that a new
treaty be made with the Senecas, by which they may be compen-
sated for the lands of which they have been deprived.” In the
New Dominion the corresponding term, is feserves, as, e. g., the
Clergy Reserves.

All other lands can be obtained by entering them, and hence
the Rev. Peter Cartwright, the famous backwoods preacher, says
in his quaint and graphic autobiography: “Money was very
scarce—I saw little of it, at least—and what little there was, was
generally kept to enter lands, when Congress should order a sale.”
(p. 254.) This is done sometimes by the so-called Préemption
Law of 1841, which, however, only regulates a process known now
for more than a hundred years. It was enacted “to appropriate
the proceeds of the public lands and to grant préemption rights,”
and granted 160 acres of land to every head of a family, to a
widow, and to any man over twenty-one, who will file his inten-
tion in a land-office, to enter upon and improve the land, and to
reside thereon long enough to make it his residence. He pays for
it one dollar and a quarter per acre in gold ora land-warrant, and
the fees. The “ man over twenty-one”’—who must, however, swear
that he does not own 320 acres of land elsewhere—includes, by law
of Congress, spinsters, provided they will build a house on their
préemption, and there reside, although, poor lonely things, we fear
there are not many that will accept the offer. In the year 1870,
however, a damsel of twenty-two thus entered a quarter-section,
erected a log-cabin, fenced in two fields, and by her own labor
174: AMERICANISMS.

earned enough to support herself and a younger brother at school,
The process is so familiar to the American mind, that the word
préempt has been created for the purpose, and the Western hunter
says to his visitor, when he invites him to lie down in his tent:
“Well, I guess, if you can find a corner that is not préempted, you
may spread your shavings there” (W.G. Simms, Wigwam), while
Fitzhugh Ludlow writes poetically: “Any man, who has married
a lovely blonde, and sees himself reflected in two blue eyes, has
thereby made himself sure of heaven, having préempted two
quarter-sections of it, and settled on the same.”

The law has its adversaries, and Horace Greeley fiercely says:
“In our judgment the whole Préemption system is a nuisance and
a nursery of fraud, which Congress ought promptly to abolish,
the Homestead Law answering every good purpose, which Pre-
emption was intended to subserve.” (New York Tribune, Febru-
ary 1, 1871.) This Homestead Act of 1862 gives to every citizen,
native or naturalized, a home-farm of 160 acres, which is not
liable for debts contracted prior to the issuing of the patent. The
condition is five years’ residence, before the General Land Office
in Washington will issue the patent, and this is too irksome for
American impatience. Hence we find it stated that “so rapid is the
appreciation in value of land, when once settled on, that it is
found by experience that from forty to fifty per cent. of those
who enter their lands under the provisions of the Homestead Law,
expecting fo receive a gratuitous deed, prefer to pay for the land,
rather than to wait the five years necessary for the consummation
of their titles.” (Our Public Lands, Harper’s Monthly, January,
1871.)

To soldiers who are by Congress rewarded with a grant of land
for their services during the war, and to companies entitled, by
Act of Congress, to alternate sections on the line of a proposed
railway, land warrants are issued, which entitle them to locate or
take up a tract of new or uncultivated land. This word—not
known to English dictionaries before Todd—is so suggestive and
useful that, though long resisted in England, it has forced its way
into the best authors. It has, however, never attained abroad to
the same latitude of meaning which it enjoys here. The first
meaning, no doubt, was simply to define a particular spot, but itis
a genuine Americanism in the sense of selecting, surveying, and
THE GREAT WEST. 1%5

settling the hounds of a tract of land, in which it is now univer-
sally used. The great freedom with which technical terms are
made to serve countless other purposes besides the first, has led to
some very quaint uses of the ugly word. In Gilliam’s Travels in
Mexico, we find that “the mate, having located himself opposite
to me at table, began to expostulate with me,” where it is substi-
tuted for the good English word “seated ;” whilst even W. Irving
half ironically says: “At the tail of these vehicles would stalk a
crew of long-limbed, lank-sided varlets, with axes on their shoul-
ders and packs on their backs, resolutely bent on locating them-
selves, as they term it, and improving the country.” The Annual
Report of the Secretary of the Navy in 1871, contains perhaps
the most daring use made of the word, when it says: “A vessel
has been sent out to locate a harbor on the Pacific.” Perfectly
natural, on the other hand, is the technical use made of ‘the word
by the Methodists, whose ministry is essentially itinerant, while
a small number of ministers are located, 7. ¢., appointed to remain
at a place permanently, whenever old age, infirmity, or special
purposes to be fulfilled make such an arrangement desirable. “I
never asked to be located,” said the venerable Peter Cartwright, “till
Thad served the Lord for half a century in the ministry.” The
Methodist Church speaks, therefore, also of the dovation of certain
ministers, as surveyors and land-jobbers refer to a place as a good
or bad location. The danger of admitting such words is, however,
shown by the fact that quite a number of words have been offered
for public approbation, made after the pattern of locate, since this
has forced its way into public use. Making a speech has been
called to orate; bestowing a grant to donate ; approving of any-
thing to approdate ; and good authors have tried their best to
secure them a footing in American English. An excellent
magazine, the Overland Monthly of San Francisco, speaks of a
“young but inactive half Mexican, who smiled at Caleb’s infre-
quent jokes and listened a good deal when Caleb orated and the
boss of the schooner slept.” (Oct., 1870, p. 335.) A Law enacted
by the General Court of Massachusetts prohibits a certain class
of men “being approbated to keep an inn or public house,” (Nov.
17, 1851), and the religious newspapers of the Union vie with
each other in long lists of men who have donated large sums to
the churches and colleges of each denomination. Even to misston-
1%6 AMERICANISMS.

ate has been attempted, and led to another barbarism, which is
found thus introduced in Putnam’s Magazine for Nov. 1870: “the
Missionary work held Lota by a double claim; it was a birthright
and a vocation—that is, as far as other people can vocate for a
girl.”

When the immigrant looks around for the kind of land he
would choose, he is generally guided by a preference for districts
where neighbors of his own race or faith are found; but if he can-
not indulge in this luxury and must go to what is called New
Lands, he has to be careful in his selection. Fraudulent com-
panies will sell him wader-lots, tempting enough on the map, but
found, upon reaching the place, to be swamp or morass, and half
the year under water, while rascally runners will sell him tickets
to the State of Virginia, which he may reach in twenty-four hours,
instead of the town of Virginia, in Nevada, which he cannot
reach under several days. He will, of course, prefer prairie-land,
if it is to be had, and look out for an sland, a grove in the midst
of the prairie, or at least for a ottom, as the richest land is apt to
be called. Their vicinity is generally marked by those high banks
with precipitous fronts, which, from their resemblance to bold
promontories jutting out into the sea, are in America called Bluffs.
The term was already thus used by Lewis and Clark in their
famous Travels to the Pacific Ocean (1804), and the bold, steep
front is thus referred to by W. Irving: “The mountains were
broken and precipitous, with huge bluffs, projecting from among
the forests.” (Astoria, IL, p. 270.)

The dottoms are sometimes known as Jntervales, when they con-
sist of alluvial land enriched by overflowing rivers, (Belknap,
History of New Hampshire, 1792.) They are generally meadows,
smooth and level, covered with rich grass and interspersed with
clumps of trees, having a creek or a river running through them.
Often they rise in beautiful terraces along the valleys of Western
rivers, and “are locally and perhaps accurately known as river-
bottoms ; they were the favorite site of the Indian mound-builders.”
(HH. R. Schoolcraft.) The word is, of course, as old as Shakes-
peare, who speaks of “a sheepcote down in the neighboring 0ot-
tom,” but the application is peculiar to the West. In his search
after these he will have to cross many a divide, as hunters and set-
tlers are fond of calling the long, low ridge, which acts as a water-
THE GREAT WEST. 177

shed, sending the waters from the slopes in opposite directions.
“ At last we came to the divide,” says Mr. Ruxton in his EHxplora-
tions, “ and here we stood by the side of the waters that flowed on
till they mingled with those of the Pacific” (IL, p. 11), and F.B.
Harte says: “Then up and dusted out of South Hornitos across
the long Divide.” Tere, near the upper part of rivers, the new
settler may meet with flats, which Bailey explains as “ low, flat
grounds, exposed to inundation,” but which in America rather
mean the alluvial lands close to a river, or very large shoals in the
river itself. Here, as well as on larger prairies in the South and
Southwest, he willalso meet with those curious little hills and valleys
which appear on wet prairies, where the heavy annual rains wash
the ground, cracked in all directions by severe drought, into regu-
lar, hexagonal hillocks and valleys a foot or two deep. These are
called hogwallows, from the resemblance they bear to soft places
where hogs have been rooting and wallowing. “These hogwallows
are formations of pitfalls and elevations, hollows and hillocks of
every variety, which succeed each other like cups and saucers
turned topsy-turvy,” says a traveller in Texas. “They relieve
the monotony of an unbroken level.” (Putnam’s Magazine, Feb-
ruary, 1854.) The Alkali Flats are now crossed by the Pacific
Railroad, but had already become familiar to the reading public
as the “old bugbear of the Great American Desert.” They are
still found to be unpleasant to the traveller by their annoying
dust, but appear quite fertile and abounding in agricultural capa-
cities. “The alkali consists of gypsum and the chlorite of potas-
sium and soda—a combination in the highest degree fertilizing,
when not in too great excess in the soil. Wherever irrigation is
practicable, the vegetable productions of this region attain a size
and perfection utterly unknown in the. Eastern States. The
organic elements, moreover, are not capable of being exhausted, as
they ascend by evaporation from the underlying deposits. It is
more than probable that Artesian wells may yet convert a large
part of the arid wastes of Wyoming, Nebraska, and Montana into
fertile fields, and open new resources to the hand of enterprise.”
(Western paper, 1870.)

In other bottoms, again, where-limestone formations prevail,
sinkholes ave a characteristic feature; this is the name here given
to low depressions in the surface, from which powerful springs

8*
178 AMERICANISMS.

suddenly gush forth, often forming large ponds on the spot, or flow-
ing off in the shape of broad rivers, capable of turning mills and
driving machinery. The hammocks of the South, on the con-
trary, are gentle hills of peculiar shape, most common in Florida
and the adjoining States. “The ground which a Southern hunter
best likes is that which is designated by the name of hamunocks,
undulating hills, covered with oak, hickory, and magnolia,
threaded by a good number of ‘roads and cattle-paths.” (P. H.
Gosse, Letters from Alabama, p. 267.)

In former years it was a matter of first importance for the im-
migrant to choose his new home in a /free-soil territory, as the
lands were called which were owned by the United States, and as
yet free from slavery; since the emancipation the term has, of
course, lost all its meaning, and is important only for its historical
associations, which date back to 1848. In the States where the
battle between Freesoilism and Slavery was most fiercely fought,
as on the bloody ground of Kansas, the name still survives with
the passionate recollections of days of terrible and relentless
warfare.

If the settler find no home on an island or in a cove of a prairie,
he prefers, especially if he be a German, a Anod, as from its re-
semblance to a knob (Germ. Knopf), any rising is called in the
West. Originally the term was limited to certain peculiar, round
hills in Kentucky, the result of the material, soft sandstone and
shale, having been worn by wind and rain into a rounded form.
The word, however, soon extended over the whole West, and a
hilly region is very apt to be called a knoddy country in Western
parlance. Should he build his cabin in a forest, he will soon find
his neighborhood designated as a neck of the woods, that being the
name applied to any. settlement made in the well-wooded parts of
the Southwest especially. Should he dread the dusk, he may
choose one of those beautiful forest glades called oak openings
and found in the Northwest. They are undulating plains, cov-
ered with close, rich turf, and dotted all over with groups of fine,
well-grown oaks, looking for all the world like a well-kept Eng-
lish park, though apparently endless. It is they which have given
Mr. Cooper a title for one of his latest, thongh not most interest-
ing novels. They are very different from the Barrens, with
which they are occasionally confounded. The latter are elevated
THE GREAT WEST. 179

plains of poor soil, either having no growth on them at all, or
barely supporting stunted trees unfit for timber. Such waste
lands abounded formerly in some of the Eastern and Central
States even, but were soon brought under subjection to man by
energy and ingenuity. Thus, when Ohio began to be settled,
some seventy years ago, most of its territory outside of the rich
valleys of the two Miamis, the Scioto and Maumee, was in barrens.
No foliage could be discovered for hundreds of miles, save on the
banks of a few streams; fires having consumed, year after year,
the young trees which Nature had tried to bring forth there.
To-day, land in that State, everywhere, has advanced a hundred-
fold, and yet one of the most profitable uses to which it has been
put, and can now be put, is the growth of timber! It is from a
vast stretch of such barren lands in the Northeastern corner of
America, known as the Barren Grounds, that a variety of rein-
deer (Tarandus arcticus), derives its melancholy name of Barren
Ground Reindeer, which it bears also if found in Greenland and
other localities.

Where trees at all succeed in growing on such neglected
lands, the latter are known as Oak-barrens, straggling forests of
poor, stunted ouk-trees, which show by their low growth and
gnarled branches the poverty of the soil on which they have to
subsist. The Southern States have, in like manner, Pine Bar-
rens, which are still more desolate tracts, covered with light, loose

suid, and bearing a wretched growth of pine-trees; the people’

who live here are called sand-hillers, and belong, generally, to the
lowest class of whites. In the Southeastern States a similar kind
of Jand, but of somewhat better quality, is known as the Piny
Woods, the resort of poor people who cannot obtain lands else-
where; while in the North and Northwest the superb tracts of
noble woodland, which furnish the finest timber in the country,
are called Pinertes. Here loggers and lumberers in great num-
bers congregate during the season, and a recent traveller says
admiringly: “No stimulants stronger than tobacco and tea are
allowed in the pinertes ; the woods had not yet received enough
of the influence of civilization to admit a-bar within their hal-
lowed shade.” (Minnesota Pineries.) Thus hill and dale, valley
and prairie, are open to the new-comer, and soon filled; the
mountain alone seems to be shunned, as the rains wash all the

~
180 AMERICANISMS.

rich soil from top and slope into the valleys below, and thus it has
come about that the words, Over the Mountain, are frequently
used with a very sad meaning. “He had a great deal to say of
the palmy days of Virginia,” is said of an old gentleman in J. P,
Kennedy’s delightful book, Swallow Barn, “ and the generation
which in his time had been broken up, or, what in his conception
was equivalent, had gone over the mountain.” Sloughs also are
dreaded, whether they are pronounced like “ploughs” or slews,
since the sudden changes in the American climate, with alternate
fierce droughts and terrific rains, make them dangerous neighbors
to cultivated lands. California boasts of them in proportions which
would elsewhere entitle them to a very different name, for we are
told: “Passing from this summit, on a gently descending grade,
we reached the slough which joins the upper lakes with Tulare.
This slough is about forty miles long and two hundred feet wide.
The stream has a sluggish current to the Northwest, and both of
its banks, for nearly the whole distance, are covered with tules.”
(Overland Monthly, Aug., 1870, p. 155.) Wild Lands are by no
means undesirable, as they are merely so called because not yet
cultivated ; they embrace all the land yet unappropriated, though
generally meaning the forest, by preference. It is different with
the Bad Lands, which border the Missouri for about twenty
miles, and were called, by the first French settlers, Mawvaises
Terres, because, as a recent explorer, General Cuvier Grover, says,
“they present a picture of Nature’s wild deformities, a master-
piece in its way, characterized by a total absence of anything
which could, by any possibility, give pleasure to the eye, or grati-
fication to the mind, by any associations of utility. ... Colonnades
and detached pillars of partially cemented sand, capped by huge
globes of light-brownish sandstone, tower up from the steep sides
of the bluffs to the height of a hundred feet or more.”

Even where the land looks fair and a stream promises comfort
in times of drought, care has to be taken to ascertain if the latter
is not, perhaps, in summer a Dry Creek. This apparent anomaly
is very common in the Southern and Western parts of the Union,
and rivers, which have no other name but that of Dry Creek,
are found in nearly every State from Virginia to California. It is
from these frequent periods of suffering that the two words
drought and dry are so much used in the country. The former
THE GREAT WEST. 181

retains very frequently the sound, and quite as often the manner of
writing, which were once considered orthodox in England; drouth,
aseven the verb to dry, reverts at times to its ancient form to drow.
Sandys says : “As torrents in the drowth of summer fail” (B.),
and Milton uses drowth as he writes highth. “'The greaf but only
drawback to these fertile regions (in Virginia) is the almost cer-
tainty of a drouth during the summer months.” (Richmond
Enquirer, August 7, 1866.) As the drying up of a river makes
more or less efficiently an end to all agricultural operations, the
verb to dry up has become synonymous with to make an end.
“Dry up!” is a familiar slang term for the more considerate
Hush! “Dry up !—no, I won’t dry up. Vl have my rights, if
I die for ’em, and I'll stand here until I get’s ’em, too; so you
had better dry up yourself.” (The Student’s Speaker, P. Reeves, :
p. 79.) In another sense it is used thus: “ As the long dry sum-
mer withered to its roots, the school term of Red Gulch—to use
a local euphuism-—dried up also.” (F.B. Harte, Luck of Roaring
Camp, p. 82.)

Even the larger rivers, the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri, it is
well known, are entirely dependent on these variations in the sup-
ply they receive from their tributaries, which are often very
quaintly called simple drains. W. Irving thus spoke of them:
« About noon, the travellers reached the drains and brooks that
formed the head-waters of the river.” (Astoria, IL. p. 254.) The
consequence is that navigation is often impeded for months, as
far as vessels of some draught are concerned. This leads to a
peculiar phenomenon, called the June Rise of the Missouri, when
suddenly all the head-waters come roaring and rushing down from
the high table-lands, from which the great river springs, and swell
it to its full height. The rise begins generally in June, though it
is sometimes delayed till July, and of course affects the Mississippi
also. It is called “A name of grandeur, of joy, of activity, of
wealth, of harvests to all the dwellers on the stream, from the
Gulf of Mexico to the far-off British line in the Northwest.”
(Putnam’s Magazine, July, 1868.)

The immigrant may be able to reach his new home in the Far
West by railroad, thanks to the vast number of roads that inter-
sect each other in all the States; but he may also have to travel
many a weary day across desert plains and hostile regions. In
182 AMERICANISMS.

that case he learns to camp out, that is, to spend the night in the
open air on the plain or under some sheltering tree; his resting-
place is always called his camp, even wheu he is quite alone; when
several families join, they are apt to have a half-faced camp, which
is on one side open to emit free egress to cattle and horses. It is
the corral of the Southwest. “Here we suddenly came upon a
half-faced camp, filled with women and children; all the men
having gone out hunting, as the ‘whole party had been without
meat for several days, and their store of flour had given out long
ago.” (Scenes in the Far West.)

Occasionally caravans are formed, such as have been in use in
the Western States from the earliest times, placed under the guid-
ance of some experienced frontier’s-man, who regulates all their
movements, waking them up in the morning by his fierce Lave!
Lave! (from the French levez-vows), or roars his stentorian Catch
up! Catch up ! to rouse all and make them ready for an early start.
The same startling cry is heard when a prairie-fire threatens the
camp, and all hands are called upon to fight the fire, which is
generally done by burning a wide circle around the camp to mect
the approach of the flames, unless the actual beating out of the
fire by the men can be attempted with success.

Wherever he may select his future home, what he now wants is
his lot—a word, which in its application to land is unknown to,
England, and universal in the United States. It has its rise in an
old Puritan custom. The first settlers in the sea-board plantations
of New England owned the extensive salt-marshes, which produce
such excellent salt hay, in common, and every man cut and cocked,
saved and salted as much of the latter as he wanted. When,
however, the population increased and the first simplicity and
harmony were no longer maintained, it was agreed to divide out
these commons in equal parts to all the families. This was done
after the biblical precedent in the election of a twelfth apostle, by
lot, and the choice of every man, as his name was drawn and he
became entitled to select his piece of land, was known as his lot.
The firm belief of the Puritans in a special providence watching
over them and their interests made them continually resort to
this manner of distributing lands or other articles of value, held
heretofore in common, and thus the term Jo¢s soon came to designate
any great quantity. Cotton Mather in his Magnutia speaks, hence,
THE GREAT WEST. 183

grimly of the “great lot of evil spirits” that possessed a poor
woman in Beverley, and “stories of lots wpon lots killed by old
hunters in the White Mountains are heard to this day at the fire-
side,” says N. 8. Dodge.

But it was not among the Puritans only that the custom pre-
vailed. The proud cavaliers of Virginia were as familiar with it as
their rivals. In an old deed preserved at Flower de Hundred, once
a magnificent plantation on the banks of James River, we read:
“Two paper dotts were made and framed, in one of which was
written these words, viz.,—the uppermost part, in the other was
written—the lowermost part, and being so made and framed were
put into the croune of a hatt, and be it further remembered that
the said Ro. Lucy and his wife Sarah, and said Phil. Limbney
and Elizabeth his wife, did then and there for themselves and their
heirs mutually agree and consent each to the other, that said lotis
so put into the crouneof a hatt should one after another be drawne
out by a younge child then present, and given by the said child
one loté to said Lucy and his wife, and one lott to said Limbney and
his wife.” In 1768 Colonel Byrd laid off the towns of Shockoe and
Rocky Ridge, the former now the city of Richmond, the capital
of Virginia, the latter the town of Manchester. In the paper of
that day, the Gazette, it is stated that they were sold by lottery,
* the lots numbered, and mills, ferries, and water-powers placed
among the prizes. S

By such means the term do¢ obtained general currency in. the
new country, and every generation added new applications of its
meaning. Not only every kind of lands, from a town-lot in the
city of New York to a water-lot on a prairie in the Far West, was
thus designated, but the banker in Wall-street has his nice Jot of
stocks for sale, and the drover in Missouri his Jot of hogs, and one
man has ots of friends, while another is troubled with lots of debts. .
But the extreme freedom with which such terms are used here is,
perhaps, best shown in the fact that even cemeteries are laid out in
lots, and quite recently a case came up in a New York court of a
man who had mortgaged such a piece of property, in which the
judge held “that though the conveyance of a cemetery-lot was
allowable, it was not within the range of financial or commercial
affairs to suppose that a man designed to transfer the remains of
any member of his family, even conditionally, which must be the
184 AMERICANISMS.

effect of the mortgage of his cemetery-lot.” (New York Herald,
Feb. 2, 1871.)

The same word has given rise to the odd phrase across lots,
which denotes a short cut in sparsely-built-up towns, where men
can save distances by crossing over vacant lots. Brigham Young,
the apostle and chief of the Mormons, is reported to have said that
he “ would send his enemies to h across lots,’ and J. C. Neal
makes one of his heroes sneeringly say to a grumbler : “ You would
cut across the lot like a streak of lightning, if you had a chance.”
(Charcoal Sketches, I., 35.) J. R. Lowell improves upon it by
making it an epithet in the line—

 

“To all the mos’ aoe lot ways of preachin’ an’ convertin’.”
(Biglow Papers, II., p. 100.)

Having secured his dot by one of the various processes men-
tioned before, of squatting, pre-empting or entering, the new-
comer begins by staking out the ground for his cabin and kitchen-
garden. The stake plays, hence, a prominent part in the Western
man’s speech, and serves to characterize his movements. Where
he settles, there he stakes or sticks his stakes. “Indications were
favorable,” says an immigrant in Nevada, “so we staked a body
of ground along the main creek, built cabins, organized a com-
pany, and went towork to open our claim.” (Southern Magazine,
January, 1871, p. 90.) “It is a rugged, arduous task,” we are told
by one who has tried it, “to make a Christian home out of either
dense forest or bleak prairie to this day. He who sticks his stake
far enough from settlements to find homestead-land, must not
expect to see a brickyard, blacksmith’s shop, sawmill, gristmill,
wheelwright, etc. in his neighborhood very soon.” (New York
Tribune, March 1, 1871.) Does he desire to change, he moves his
stakes. Thus the son of a lawless squatter says coolly of his
father: “In fact, he built the shanty for the purpose, lest titles
should fall through and we'd have to get up and move stakes
farther down.” (F. B. Harte, Luck of Roaring Camp, p. 211.)
The more energetic form—and by far the older—is to pull up
stakes, the earliest use of which occurs in a MS. letter (owned by
the Hon. J. Hammond Trumbull, of Connecticut), written by
Thomas Lechford, a London attorney, who lived three or for
years in Boston, and went home to publish “ News from Engla
THE GREAT WEST. 185

in 1642. In 1640 he writes to an English correspondent: “I am
loth to hear of a stay (in New England), but am plucking up
stakes with as much speed asI may.” Since that early day the
expression has held its own in American speech, a vivid reminis-
cence of Western life, and always forcible by its touch of the pic-
turesque.

Next begins his warfare against the trees, which he unfortu-
nately must needs regard as his enemies, since they stand upon the
ground he wants for his home and live upon the soil which he
intends shall support himself and his family. Unconscious of the
day, not so very far off, when he will begin diligently to plant
trees on the very spot from which he now uproots them so pain-
fully, he sets to work with his trusty axe to delt or girdle them.
In either case he cuts a circular incision through the bark and
alburnum of the tree, and leaves it cruelly to die of starvation ;
the following year, or as soon as it is dead and dry, he sets it on
fire, and thus saves himself the trouble of cutting it down. The
process is also often called darkingin the Northwest, while belting
is the Southern favorite. The forest itself is known to the West
only as timber ; people used to “ go to the timber for shelter”
against invading Indians, and even now, “men take to the timber
as soon as the Comanches are seen at a distance.” (Official Army
Report, Jan. 11,1871.) Hence is the term Cross Timbers derived, ,
the name of two remarkable tracts, about twenty miles wide and
_ several hundred miles Jong, which extend in a southern direction
between Red River and Trinity River, and are covered with lofty
trees in so singularly regular lines and cross lines, that they sug-
gest irresistibly the idea of having been planted at some remote
time by the hand of man. It is not without a poetical instinct
that the skeleton of a whale is known as his timbers ; hence a
visitor to Nantucket says: “In several places we passed the ¢im-
bers of a whale, the remains of two that had been harpooned off
Napeague during the previous winter.” (Putnam’s Mag., Sept.
1870.) These same trees, which the new settler looks upon with
such bitterness of feeling, have often to serve him as refuge in
time of need, and early settlers, as well as hunters of our day,
have made us familiar with the term #o tree one’s self, in the sense
of taking refuge behind a tree. Already, in 8. Kercheval’s History
of Virginia, we read of one of the most famous heroes in early
186 AMERICANISMS.

Indian warfare, that “ Wetzel, as before, loaded his gun and stopped
several times during this chase ; when he did so, the Indians always
trecd themselves.” (p. 201.) At other times, ¢o ¢ree means simply to
kill, and the same remarkable frontier’s-man said, when asked on
his return, “ What luck ?” “ Not much,” he replied, “I ¢reed one
Indian, but the other got away.” (p. 202.) When animals take to a
tree, the hunter is said to have treed them, and considers himself
already sure of victory and capture. This has again given rise to
the cant phrase of barking up the wrong tree, which originated, of
course, in the dog’s losing the scent, or the hunter’s mistaking the
tree in which he thinks his game has taken refuge, and thus lead-
ing to vain efforts to dislodge the latter by barking or shooting.
But it has made its way, like many such picturesque expressions,
into the language of daily life, and the man who vainly tries to
accomplish a thing for which he is not qualified, or addresses
himself to the wrong person for assistance, is said to bark up the
wrong tree. “ You didn’t really go to old Bullion,” said a poli-
tician to an office-seeker, “ Why, he has no influence there, I can
tell you. You barked up the wrong tree there, my friend, and
you deserve to fail.” (Richmond Znguirer, September 8, 18365.)
When the tree is at last cut down, there remains the hideous,
obstinate stwmp, yielding neither to axe nor to fire, but only to
, powerful machines, especially adapted to the purpose of uproot-
ing stumps. A hindrance to the settler and a blemish in the
landscape, the stwmp has but one usefulness, and that is, the
moderate elevation which it affords to a public speaker, who can
here take his stand and overlook the crowd which he wishes to
address. Thus the West has endowed our speech with a whole
number of terms derived from this backwoods custom of using
the broad, level top of a stump as a rostrum. The man who
wishes to canyass a district for Congress or any other office
obtained by popular election, is said to take the stump, whether
he virtually ascends it in the woods and addresses settlers and
squatters, or speaks in Fanueil Hall to select audiences of Boston
men. He stwmps it from the time of his nomination till the day
of election, and if he proves able to engage the attention of his
hearers, or, still better, to persuade, coax, or cheat them into sup-
porting his claims against all rivals, he is said to be an excellent
stump-speaker. Such a man was Thomas Corwin, of Ohio, the
THE GREAT WEST. 187

very “prince of campaign orators,” as his friends called him, and
he gave his testimony in favor of the curious fact that the same
speech is repeated over and over again on such occasions. “A
man,” he says, “who should attempt a fresh speech on every
stump, would never have any speech worth listening to.” “The
stwmp-orator,” asserts a foreign expert, “is by no means un-
known in the British islands, and the phrase might perhaps be
adopted, in default of a better, to describe the kind of speech
which tickles the fancy or pleases the judgment of a miscella-
neous crowd. The late Daniel O’Connell, Daniel Whittle Harvey,
and Thomas Wakley, the coroner, were excellent specimens of the
stump-orator, while in our day Mr. John Bright may lay claim to
a similar distinction, though it must be admitted that Mr. Bright
is a true orator, and speaks to the refined as effectively as to the
roughs.” (Blackwood, October, 1867.) The addresses made on
such occasions are, of course, stwmp-speeches, and of these it is
simply said in Dow’s Sermons: “ When you see a politician
extra full of patriotism and stuffed with stump-speeches, you may
take it for granted he wants office, either for himself or for some
particular friend.”

Two expressions are connected with the term stump, which
have no reference to politics. The verb ¢o stwmp is often used in
the sense of “to puzzle,” or to “nonplus;” a disputant says, e. g.,
“ But I will stwnep you yet, doctor ” (Scribner’s Monthly, February,
1871), meaning: I will confound and silence you yet; but this
word has nothing to do with trees; itis the intensified form of:
to stub, as people say, not less frequently, they stumped than they
stubbed their toe. The American, however, at once makes the
term useful in every possible capacity, and speaks of a conclusive
argument, or a difficult problem: “That is a stumper.” Nor is
the slang phrase: “To whip the devil around the stwmp,” to be
traced very clearly to the backwoods. It denotes the indirect
manner in which something is done, as when men will not pay a
militia fine, for conscience’ sake, and leaye its value to be taken
by the officer, a method formerly often resorted to by Quakers in
England, in regard to taxes they considered unjust.

“ T whipped the devil round the stump,
And gave a cut at every jump,”
188 AMERICANISMS.

isa Pennsylvania ditty quoted by Professor 8. 8. Haldeman, who
also states that somany Quakers whipped the devil round the stump
during the late Civil War, by supporting the government morally,
but stoutly refusing to share its perils, that one of their faith
assured him “the war had killed Quakerism in Pennsylvania.”

A short stump of a tree, or any other large and irregular piece
of wood, is called here, as in some of the Southern shires of
England, a chunk, probably a corruption of the Old English
chump. Inthe West people apply it to anything short and thick,
and speak, hence, of “a tolerable chun’ of a pony.” In the South
the word is even used as a verb, and where there are no stones, as
on the alluvial soil which borders on the Mississippi, they say:
“Tl chunk him,” meaning that they will throw a clod of earth or
a stick of wood at some animal. It is not impossible that the
odd expletive kerchunk may be in some vague way associated with
the noise caused by the sudden falling of a chunk. “TI looked
up,” says W. 8. Mayo, “and there I saw a young catamount,
scrambling up the little, old oak; he stretched himself out on the
branch and looked down upon me so kind of impudent, I thought
I'd take a crack at him; I raised my rifle and down he came, ker-
chunk, right on the edge of the precipice.” (aloolah, p. 27.) The
term, however, is a very Proteus, and appears under a great variety
of forms, as in J. R. Lowell’s line—

“They
Would all come down, kerswosh / ez tho’ the dam broke in a river.”
(Biglow Papers, II., p. 104.)

As soon as the trees are cut down or burnt, the settler’s place
obtains the name of clearing, irrespective as yet of cabin or field
being visible or not. Hence J. R. Lowell quotes: “A man speak-
ing to me once of a very rocky clearing, said: Stones got a pretty
heavy mortgage on that.” Then the land has to be broken up—
not simply broken, as in England, perhaps because of the much
greater difficulty in breaking new land—and put into cor.
Speaking of the Scandinavians who flock in large numbers to
Wisconsin, a writer says: “The essential difference between Norsk
and Nomad was quickly seen. The rude huts or excavations in
the sides of the bluffs, which often gave' temporary shelter to the
first Norwegian settlers, were soon exchanged for comfortable
log houses, and wide spaces of breaking showed the tender green.
THE GREAT WEST. 189

of young wheat.” (Putnam’s Magazine, May, 186%.) Besides his
crop of corn or wheat, the new settler is sure to have, as soon
as possible, his truck-patch, which often is made to hold his
cereals also. The word came, of course, from England, but at
first only with the meaning of “small produce, cloth or the like,”
in which sense it is still used mainly in England. Thus R. B.
Beverley says: “In 1654 they sent out two vessels, which made
good profit of Indian ¢ruck, which they bought for things of
much inferior value, and then returned.” (History of Virginia,
p. 2.) Captain John Smith also relates that his men “went to
trade with the Indians of Chickahominie, where making showe of
a great quantitie of ¢rucke they had, which the Salvages perceiv-
ing, partly for revenge of some friends, partly for their ¢rwcke, one
of them with an English peece shot Killingbeck.” (Virginia, IL,
p. 86.) In later days, the small produce of gardens was called
truck in contradistinction to the larger crops raised in open fields,
and then the word truckpatch came into use. 8S. Kercheval
says: “Every family, besides a little garden for a few vegetables
which they cultivated, had another small enclosure containing
from half an acre to one acre, which they called a trauckpatch,
and in which they raised corn for roasting ears, pumpkins, and
squashes, beans, and potatoes.” (History of Virginia, p. 218.)
The term continues to be constantly used, and is now frequently
applied in the Atlantic States to market gardens: “Northern
men, familiar with the best manner of raising early vegetables
and with the wants of Northern markets, have come and estab-
lished truckpatches in our neighborhood, which have given them,
in some instances, a handsome fortune in a few years.” (Norfolk
(Virginia) Argus, August 11, 1870.) In the South the phrase
poor truck is applied to any inferior person or thing, as expressive
of great contempt.

The settler’s next purpose is to build himself a log cabin, a
rough house of unhewn logs, notched together at the corners,
while the interstices are filled up with clay so as to make them
nearly air-tight. If more is attempted, a regular frame is pre-
pared, and the setting up of the timbers is called a raising.
None of these operations are, of course, within the power of the
new-comer unaided, and hence the custom of dees, which pre-
yails throughout the whole country. “You see, sir,” said a
190 AMERICANISMS,

squatter, in explanation of the term, “when you wants to get
anything done right away in a hurry, all at oncet like, whether
it’s flax beatin’ or apple parin’, or corn huskin’, and the neighbors
all around come and help work, that’s a bee—and a bwildin’ bee or
a ratsiw bee is, when they want to set up the frame-or the logs of
a house or barn.”. (Life in the Far West, p. 257.) The duty of
neighbors to help on such occasions is so universally acknowl-
edged that in olden times “a man, who refused assistance, was
called Lawrence, and when it came to his turn to call upon the
neighbors, the idler felt his punishment in théir refusal to
attend his calls.’ (S. Kercheval, History of Virginia, p. 249.)
Another method, characteristic of those early days, and still occur-
ring in many parts of the West, is the hating out. “'The punish-
ment,” says the same author, “for idleness, lying, dishonesty, and
ill-fame generally, was that of hating the offender oud, as they
expressed it. It commonly resulted in the reformation or ban-
ishment of the person against whom it was directed. IZfa man
did not do his share of the public service, he was hated out as a
coward.” <A chopping-bee is thus described: “Once a clearing
was attempted on a large scale. It was for the site of a public
institution. The inhabitants within a radius of ten miles were
invited to a chopping-bee. Each one brought his axe and day’s
provisions. No spirituous liquors were allowed. The work was
ordered by an elected marshal of the day. The front rank of
trees, ten rods in width, were chopped partially through on either
side; then the succeeding ones in like manner, for a space of per-
haps twenty rods. Then the last rank were felled simultaneously
by the united force, when with a crash increasing to a thunder-
ing volume, it bore down on the next, till all lay prostrate. And
thus for three days did this volunteer war against the forest
progress.” (Western Magazine, January, 1868.) “ Ratsing-bees,”
says W. Irving, “were also frequent, when houses sprang up at.
the wagging of the fiddlestick, as the walls of Thebes sprang
up of yore to the sound of the lyre of Amphion.” (Knicker-
bocker, Hist. of New Fork.) A stone-bee, on the other hand, is
arranged to clear a ficld of stones, and a husking-bee to strip the
husks from the ample supply of corn to be stored away for the
winter—scenes of much merriment, and adorned by many a
quaint old custom, as when the finder of a red ear is rewarded,
THE GREAT WEST. 191

with the privilege of a kiss all around, or, if of the fairer sex, is
expected to make her election of some one to be honored. Hence
Longfellow’s allusion to it as an Indian usage, that

““Whene’er some lucky maiden
Found a red ear in the husking,
Found a maize ear, red as blood is,
Mushka! cried they all together,
Mushka! you shall have a sweetheart,
You shall have a handsome husband !”
(Song of Hiawatha, Canto XII.)

In the West, and in the East where old traditions have not yet
come to be sneered at, these dees are the main festive occasions
for young people, where, amid social laugh and gossip, fingers and
tongues work together. Every excuse is, therefore, readily seized
upon, and even gudléing-bees are popular, where the young women
sit around a large frame to make a patchwork quilt, and where
the young backwoodsmen find their way in, on some pretence,
perhaps only on the Irishman’s principle, that

“Tf all the young women was ducks in the water,
It’s thin the young men would jump in and swim ater.”

The good people are willing to come from twenty and thirty miles
around to enjoy the frolic, and when the husking or quilting is
over, when the house is built or the harvest reaped, the woodpile
is raised or the apples are pared, and the nuts gathered in, then
the welcome “ fiddle” is heard, and, in spite of hard work and late
hours, dancing begins and continues till morning. Occasionally,
after the peculiar manner of the pilgrim fathers, religious exercises
are quaintly mixed up with the work and the fun. A corn-husk-
ing is announced, or a raising-bee is arranged, and the neighbors
from far and near assemble, each bringing his provisions in a
basket. From the latter feature these pic-nics dérive their names
of Basket-Meetings. The most determined polemical divine, how-
ever, could hardly venture upon a long harangue there, since the
minds are bent upon hard work and gay frolic, the means of es-
cape are open on all sides, and the tempting baskets at any moment
ready to allure the audience away from every other thought.
The worst harm would be some such mistake as that which befell
a young man from Down East, who related the matter thus:
192 AMERICANISMS.

“There was a corn-husking, and I went along with Sal Stebbins.
There was all the gals and boys sittin’ around, and I got sot down
so near Sal Babit that I'll be darned if I didn’t kiss her afore [
knowed what I was about!” (Traits of American Humor, p. 134)
The idea of these assemblies is not new, only the poetical name
of Bee. They are known in the Old Country under various
names, as, ¢ g. the “Clay Daubin” of Cumberland, where the
neighbors and friends of a newly-married couple assemble, and do
not separate till they have erected them a rough cottage.

The log-house thus erected is, of course, of the utmost simplicity.
The Rev. Mr. Cartwright describes the interior of one, which was
neither better nor worse than the majority of those he found some
fifty years ago in the now flourishing State of Illinois: “ We had
a hewed puncheon for a table, with four holes in it, and four
straight sticks put in for legs; forks were driven down between
the puncheons for bedsteads; cross-poles and side-poles put in
these forks, and clapboards laid crosswise for cords.’ (Auto-
biography, p. 252.) The Hon. Mr. Duncan, of Ohio, described a
better kind of log-cadin, in a speech on the floor of Congress, thus:
“A house made of round logs, one story high, of dimensions
suited to the size or number of the family who were to inhabit
it, and sometimes with reference to an increase, a puncheon floor,
a live back loft, and a clapboard roof. The industry of the
matron and her daughters was displayed by the thick folds of
linsey frocks, pants, and hunting-shirts that behung its walls;
its top was underhung with strings of dried pumpkins.” The
puncheon mentioned in these descriptions is a split log, the upper
side of which has been more or less carefully smoothed with a
broadaxe or a hatchet; raised upon rough logs or sleepers, they
furnish the floor of most backwoods dwellings. The clapboards,
known in England as thin boards prepared to serve for staves,
are here thin, narrow boards, three to four feet long, and thinner
on one edge than on the other, which serve to cover the sides and
roofs of houses, being placed so as to overlap each other. It has
been suggested by a distinguished etymologist, Dr. Elwyn of
Philadelphia, that the term may be originally derived from the
thin, smooth boards called a clapboard, on which in the North
of England a kind of bread is clapped, which, hence, is known
as clapbread. 'The fireplace consists ordinarily of a few stones
THE GREAT WEST. 193

roughly arranged for the purpose, and the chimney of stout sticks
of wood, about two feet long, which are piled up crosswise, and
cemented with clay or mud. They are, hence, called stick-chim-
neys, and, strangely enough, answer their purpose so well, that
they are common all over the West and the South.

In the next place the new settler makes a fence around his lot,
which is to serve as a garden; commonly a few gigantic roots of
trees, dragged near each other, or slim young pine-trees, with
some brushwood between, have to suffice. When leisure admits
it, rails are split, and laid in endless zigzag, which makes the
famous Virginia-fence, or snake-fence, immensely costly in all
districts where wood is not absolutely a cumbrance to the ground,
requiring much land, always out of repair, and harboring in its
corners boundless supplies of weeds and much vermin. The
capital invested in these snake-fences is said to be larger than the
value of all stocks and agricultural implements. Hence the fence
plays a prominent part in the life of the Western man, who
watches it jealously, as a single break and a night’s inroad of his
pigs may cost him a year’s labor, and who loves to sit on it, sur-
veying all that is his own. As a man thus situated can with
equal ease jump down on either side, the phrase to be or to sit
on the fence, has become a common cant phrase for persons—in
politics mainly—who prefer what J. R. Lowell pointedly calls

“ A kind o’ hangin’ round an’ settin’ on the fence,
Till Providence pinted how to jump an’ save the most expense.”
(Biglow Papers, I1., p. 97.)

These are emphatically men who, as he elsewhere states, “believe,
with Deedalus, the primal sttter-on-the-fence, that medium tenere
tutissimum.” (Biglow Papers, II., p.85.) Politicians of this class
are said to be fence-men, being cautious men, who wait to see on
which side victory will declare itself, to jump down and join in
the shouts of the winning party; and while the state of uncertainty
lasts, they are said to be fence-riding. ‘We shall give the mi-
nority no such right to impede legislation,” said the leader of the
Republican Party on the floor of Congress, during an angry debate
on Reconstruction; “ this question is one of clear right and wrong,
and there can be no fence-riding, when the rights of four thillions
of men are at stake.” (Congressional Globe, July 1%, 1868.)
9
194 AMERICANISMS.

Although these fences are, in most cases, made of rails, to ride on
the fence is a very different thing from riding on a ratl. The
latter is a savage punishment inflicted by an excited crowd upon
a person who has exasperated a community by some real or fancied
outrage; he is placed upon the sharp edge of a rail, and thus borne
on the shoulders of his enemies through the village to a pond or
even worse fate. For it is frequently only the beginning of a
punishment often reported as significative of American inventive
barbarity—the Tarring and Feathering of offenders. So far from
being born here, it is an old English custom, brought to us by
the early settlers from their own home. For in the Laws and
Ordinances appointed by King Richard IL, for the use of his navy,
occurs this sentence as quoted in Hakluyt (p. 7): “Item, a thiefe
ora felon that hath stolen, being lawfully convicted, shall have
his head shorne, and boyling pitch powred over his head, and
feathers or downe strawed upon the same, whereby he may be
knowen ; and so at the first landing-place they shall come to,
there to be cast up.” The lesson has been well learnt, the prac-
tice religiously bequeathed from generation to generation, and
employed in Boston, as Grose tells us, on persons suspected or
convicted of loyalty, as it is, in our day, carried ont on the banks
of the Mississippi on criminals whom the law cannot or will not
punish.

His cabin built and his lot fenced in, the new settler provides
for his simple costume, which must be adapted to his driving a
plough or hunting a “painter.” He has, of course, his blanket,
though in his case that term has a very different meaning from
that which it bears when applied to an Indian; in the latter case,
the blanket represents the Redskins’ general costume, which may
be more than a blanket or not, and hence the familiar expression in
the West, used with regard to a half-breed, that “his father or
his mother wore the blanket.’ As the island of Mackinaw was
formerly the chief post at which the Indians received their annual
payments and presents, part of which, it was stipulated, always
consisted of a superior kind of blanket, these became known as
Mackinaw blankets or Machinaws simply. Being very thick and
well made, they served not only for beds but also for overcoats,
which were called Blanket-Coats, and really answered their pur-
pose admirably. A hunting-shirt, made of deerskin, and abun-
THE GREAT WEST. 195

dantly covered with fringes and stitchings, is his only costume for
all seasons and weathers, and so eminently serviceable as to be
adopted by hunters, explorers, and travellers generally. The great
Pathfinder, General Fremont, was hence addressed by the poet
Whittier, when he was the candidate of the Anti-Slavery Party
for President, in these words:

“ Rise up, Fremont ! and go before !
The hour must have its man;
Put on the Aunting-shirt once more,
And lead in Freedom’s van !”

As flannel is his constant wear, the backwoodsman calls the
rarely-used linen which chance may supply to him, and which he
vows is a nuisance beyond all others, the diled shirt, because—
forsooth !—it is occasionally boiled to be washed. The more usual
material is a checkered fabric of cotton, and goes by the simple
name of checks, to which John Hay alludes, when he sings—

“How Jimmy Bludsoe pass’d in his checks
The night of the Prairie Belle.”
(Jim Bludsoe of the Prairie Belle.)

His nether garments are his leygins—but rarely called leggings—
as even W. Irving wrote the word after the Scotch manner:
“ Others had leggins and moccasins of deerskin, and buffalo robes,
which they threw gracefully over their shoulders.” (Astoria, L,
p. 239.) Every other article of dress, worn by men in and near
towns, comes under the general designation of store-clothes, and is
out of the reach of the backwoodsman.

Two articles only he must have of prime quality, for on these
depends his life: his axe and his rifle. Without the former he
cannot cut down trees and plant his corn; without the latter he
would stayve, or soon succumb to his hereditary foe, the Indian.
He hardly knows a greater disappointment than if axe and handle
part company, and thus he has given to our speech the favorite
phrase : to go or to fly off the handle. If a fair lady loses her temper,
or, worst of all, if she breaks the tender promise, she is said to fly
off the handle, and the disappointment is as serious to the unlucky
lover as a lost axe to many_a settler. The meaning is occasion-
ally extended beyond that misfortune even, as when the New
York Home Journal speaks of a poor man haying succeeded to a
196 AMERICANISMS.

large fortune from a distant relative, who “ went off the handle in
England rather unexpectedly.” (July 21, 1867.)

His rifle is, of course, more important still, and hence he loveg
it with almost tender affection, cleans and caresses it, and speaks
of it as a shooting-tron with that loving affection which makes
many a husband speak of the partner of his joys and his sorrows
as the “old woman.” The more recent revolver, now quite com-
mon in the West, is, on the other hand, his five or six shooter,
according to the number of barrels. The rifle, also, has given to
our speech quite a number of terms and phrases full of picturesque
meaning. The ramrod is familiarly called the gunstick, and the
whole represented as lock, stock, and barrel, which has come to
mean the whole of any important matter. “ Take it all in all,”
said Colonel Benton, “it is rotten; lock, stock, and barrel, there
is not an inch of it sound, and the sooner we throw it away the
better it will be for the nation.” (Speech on the National Bank.)
Good sight, and hence also fair judgment in using the sights on
the rifle, are, of course, indispensable in hunting as in warfare;
hence the hind-sight or notch in the hind-sight of a rifle plays a
prominent part in hunters’ language, referring now to the rump
of an.animal, and then to the main argument of an adversary.
Watchful observation is, in like manner, represented by the ¢rig-
ger-eye, and a servant engaged to take care of a well-bred dog,
“promised to keep his trigger-eye on the dog.” (J.C. Neal, Char-
coal Sketches, Il, p. 1%.) The old-fashioned priming, now no
longer known as in the days when breech-loaders, and even per-
cussion locks, were still myths to the backwoodsmen, never was
considered of much importance when compared with powder and
ball, and thus the term came, colloquially, to stand for anything
of small import or value. David Crockett thus said of ferocious
foreign animals, that they “ would be no part of a priming toa
grizzly bear of the Rocky Mountains.” (Adventures, By In tak-
ing slowly and cautiously aim, as is the custom of the Western
inser he gradually raises the front-sight, which resembles a
bead, to a level with the hind-sight, and the moment the two are
in a line he fires; hence, to draw a bead, is with him equivalent
to firing, and from him the expression has made its way into
colloquial speech. The man who attacks another in his speech
is said to have drawn a bead upon him. Two misfortunes may
THE GREAT WEST. 19%

happen to the hunter at this critical moment: if his rifle be of
the old pattern, the powder in the pan may flash and the rifle
refuse to go off, or he may have forgotten to put the latter at full
cock. In the first case the flash in the pan produces a noise,
known as a fizzle, such as wet powder also is apt to cause. From
the hunter’s failure, the word has become a general term for any
ridiculous failure after a great effort. “The speech was as com-
plete a fizzle,” said the National Intelligencer, “ as has ever dis-
graced Congress, and we hope sincerely the honorable member
from Massachusetts will take the lesson to heart.” (Dec. 8, 1851.)
When recently a lottery was attempted in Virginia for a most
laudable purpose, and the unfitness of some managers, and the
dishonesty of others, brought about a complete failure, “ the en-
terprise fizzled out in the most contemptible manner.” (Richmond
Enquirer, Sept. 17, 1866.) Hence failures in College recitations
also are called jizzles. (Hall’s College Words.) The other phrase, to
go off half-cock, is as familiar to English sportsmen as to our hunt-
ers. The term plumd centre, on the contrary, is a peculiar Western
phrase, expressive of a crack shot at a shooting match, though
commonly the word is written plum only. “ Plum in the centre each
barrel shoots.” (Life in the Far West, p.119.) The fact that on such
occasions the improvised target is not unfrequently a rag hung
on a bush, has suggested to Professor 8.8. Haldeman the thought
that the familiar phrase: “That takes the rag off the bush,” may
have likewise originated from the use of the rifle in the hands af
the Western hunter. The latter is not apt to miss; the man who
can bark a squirrel, that is, as Mr. Audubon told us first, strike
with a rifle-ball the bark on the lower side of a branch on which
the little animal sits, with such accuracy that the concussion kills
it without inflicting the slightest injury, that man never wastes
his powder nor attempts the impossible. .

And yet to the inexperienced eye of the Huropean traveller,
he seems to attempt an apparent impossibility, when he offers to
crease a deer or other animal. An expert Western hunter shoots a
deer—and often a horse that is to be captured—so cautiously, that
the ball cuts the skin at a precise spot of the upper part of the
neck; the animal instantly drops down and remains quiet and
stunned, till it is secured,: “ We were so much afraid of shooting
the pet of our kind hostess that we enjoined Frangois to crease
198 AMERICANISMS.

the pretty little deer; for we stood sadly in need of food, the
terrible fire having left not a single trace of a human habitation
for twenty miles all around us.”. (Travels in Canada, 1863.) If
the unlucky deer had been the lady’s pet, the hunter would have
admitted, in his graphic language, that he had fired into the wrong
flock—a phrase which has also crept into every-day language, and
denotes a mistake made in the effort to overcome an adversary.
“When Mr. Saulsbury rose and called the Speaker’s attention to
the alleged blunder in the Secretary’s report, his own friends
jumped up in great excitement and pulled him down; he soon
found out that he had fired into the wrong flock.” (New York
Herald, November 9, 1858.)

Among the favorite amusements of Western men are naturally
trials of skill with their rifles. At one time they will bet on driv-
ing the nail. A stout nail is driven into a post about half-way up
to the head; the riflemen then stand at a great distance and fire at
the nail, the object being to hit the nail so truly on the head with
the ball as to drive it home. At another time it is threading the
needle; an auger-hole is pierced through the centre of an upright
board, just large enough to allow the ball to pass, and the best
marksman is he who drives his ball through without enlarging
the opening !

The new settler who ventures into new lands, soon finds that he
has disagreeable neighbors. The Indians, whether on their own
hpnting-grounds or on their reservations, have not all yet for-
gotten their old enmity against the intruders, and even in 1870
many a scalp was yet lifted from whites. Hence, his language is
full of allusions to Indians and Indian warfare, and as the latter
is nearly as old ag the colonization of the land, many of these
terms have become incorporated in our speech. Caution was,
from the time of the first settlements, so necessary a quality
among frontiersmen, and is still so requisite, however far the
frontier may be removed westward, that it has given us, in cov-
nection with the national character of Northern men, an intensely
American phrase. Yo be a caution, means, to be a warning, a
marvel, a stupendous thing. “The way in which he pitched into
them was a caution, I tell you,” says the reporter of Mr. Wendell
Phillips’ speech, at a recent meeting in Worcester. “Stranger,”
said Tom Nye, in California Sketches, “look a-here, and tell
THE GREAT WEST. 199

me, whar did you ever see such gold? Come, now, ain’t that
a caution, I axe you?” (San Francisco Bulletin, August 5,
1868.) ‘The sign of the Western man is, ordinarily, any evidence,
seen upon the prairies or in the woods, of the appearance, whether
recent or not, of animals or men. If the marks appear recent,
they make what is called a fresh sign, if they are old, an old sign.
“This was the place where some fresh beaver signs had attracted
their notice.” (Life in the Far West, p. 12%.) But of all these
tracks, the often almost imperceptible Indian sign is most anx-
iously looked for, and most carefully studied. ‘To perceive them
the backwoodsman says, in his high-flown language, you must keep
your eyes skinned ; “keep your eyes skinned for sign, and listen
to my horn.” (American Humor, Vol. IL, B.) The regular foot-
path of the Indian, who always goes single so as to leave but one
man’s footsteps as a sign, is his trail; the word is as old as Hak-
luyt, who speaks of “many wayes ¢raled by wilde beastes,” but the
special application is purely American. Hunters next adopted
the term for their own paths through the forests, and for the
track of animals, till finally it became in the West the general
name for any and every kind of road. “In consequence of the
abrupt sides of the cafion, which made out toward the lake, it
becomes necessary to seek, at times, a ¢ratd within the hills.” (Over-
land Monthly, Aug., 1870.) Of a lonely miner’s hut we are told
by F. B. Harte, that “the only outlet was a steep ¢rail over the
summit of a hill that faced the cabin,” (Luck of Roaring Camp,
p- 3,) for, in California the word is now in common use for road
or path.. Woe is the single Indian that is suddenly met, in time
of warfare, by the enraged backwoodsman! He is instantly shot,
which in this case does not, as in ordinary life, simply mean shot
at, but killed. For it is, perhaps, the effect of the American’s
familiarity with shooting-weapons that he loves to say he shot a
man, when he, perhaps, only wounded him slightly. F. B. Harte,
therefore, speaks very carefully of “the day that French Pete and
Kanaka Joe shot each other to death over the bar in the front
room.” (Luck of Roaring Camp, p. 1.) The Western man
rarely uses the word, but he is quite rich in substitutes. Some-
times he prefers an English slang word, said to be derived from
the fashion of rubbing out the names of friends on the slate or
visiting list (Slang Dictionary, p. 216), with a novel and some-
200 AMERICANISMS.

what awful application: “ Rubbed oud at last, they heard him say,
the words gurgling in his blood-filled throat, and opening his
eyes once more, and looking upward to take a last look at the
bright sun, he turned gently on his side and breathed his last.”
(Life in the Far West.) Then again he will borrow a phrase from
tavern-life, where scores of debtors are chalked on doors and
shutters, and wiped out when settled by payment more rarely than
by grim Death. Its primary meaning has not yet disappeared,
and a recent poem, “ Dobbs his Ferry,” said quaintly, in complain-
ing of the change of old Indian names into modern, unmeaning
names:
“ Down there, on old Manhattan,

Where landsharks thrive and fatten,

They’ve wiped out Tubby Hook.

That famous promontory,

* * * * *
Stands, newly christened, Inwood.”
(Putnam's Magazine, January, 1868.)

But from the hunter’s lips it means nothing less than death. “Ifthe
Arrapahoes will not keep the treaty,” says a recent report made
to the Indian Bureau in Washington, “the settlers and traders
unanimously assure us the whole tribe will be wiped out in an-
other season. We look forward with some anxiety to the first
appearance of grass and the renewal-of hostilities.” (January 17,
1871.) In California, the hunter is, perhaps, more likely to be
snuffed out, and thus explains the origin of the phrase, “The
thought that I was fired into by some stranger, who wasn’t
a-takin’ no hand, and came near having my light snuffed out by
some one unbeknown to me, is not a good thought to die on.”
(Overland Monthly, March, 1871, p. 285.) A very odd expression,
confined, however, mainly to the mountaineers in the wilder
parts of the Southwest, is quite expressive; they say they send a
man up Green River, when they have killed him. The phrase
had its origin in a once famous factory on Green River, where a
superior kind of large knife was made, very popular among hunters
and trappers. On the blade the words “ Green River Works” were
engraved, and hence the mountaineers, using the knife to de-
spatch an adversary, literally sent his blood up Green River.

It is a striking illustration of the destructive power of slang
THE GREAT WEST. 201

that the once poetical and pious phrase fo go up has recently been
so completely mixed up with the absurd expression to go up the
spout, as to lose its force and character. Of old, to go up meant to
go to heaven, a meaning ludicrously illustrated by a tombstone in
Dixon, Mlinois, on which, above the name of the deceased, a hand
pointed heavenward, and the words: Gone wp! were added.
This beautiful and expressive epitaph, once no doubt deeply
touching to all who read it, would now only provoke laughter or
be looked upon as blasphemous.

It is quite interesting to notice how another popular Western
phrase for death—to go wnder—evidently represents in the In-
dian’s mind, from whom it is borrowed, the same process of
reasoning as in the German’s mind, who uses the same word
untergehn for perish, whether the figure be taken from the vessel,
that literally goes under, or from the body that is put “under the
grass,” as they are apt to call it in the West, or, finally, from the
Redman’s simple notion of being under the knee of his con-
queror—the fundamental idea remains the same. “ Poor Hawk-
eye felt,” says one of his biographers, “that his time had come,
and knowing that he must go wnder sooner or later, he deter-
mined to sell his life dearly.” (Hawkeye, the Iowa Chief, p. 210.)

If the Western man hunts by water, he is not always able to pro-
vide himself with a canoe ; often he must be content with a simple
dug-out, such as ig even now frequently seen on small creeks of
the South as well ag the West. It is nothing more than a large
log hollowed or dug out; but the skill with which the Western
men and Canadian voyageurs (who call them dug canoes) will man-
age these rude boats, is astonishing. The Rey. Mr. Cartwright
liad, in the Far West, very often to travel by water,and says: ‘If
by chance we got a dug-out or canoe to cross in ourselves and
swim our horses by, it was quite a treat.” (Autobiography, p. 486.)
It is propelled by a paddle, and when well built apt to be as swift
as a canoe.

In his warfare against the Indians, the frontiersman has inher-
ited from his predecessors for many generations a term which at
first looks ridiculously unlike its true meaning. The Red men he
kills, he boasts of haying saved. “I calculate, Mr. Hossifer
(officer),” says an old Western trapper, “that war the most deci-
sivest and the most sanguinariest fight you ever seen in all your

o*
202 AMERICANISMS.

born days. We boys, we up and pitched in thar, ‘and we give thie
yaller bellies the most particular Hail Columby. We chawed um
all up; we laid um out colder nor a wedge; we saved every
mother’s son of um—we did that thar little thing, boss,”
(Col. Marcy’s Army-Life on the Border.) The origin of the
term must be sought in the importance which early hunters and
settlers attached to even a single load of powder and shot, at
times when the former’s subsistence and the latter’s life depended
on his rifle. Every wounded animal that escaped was a shot
wasted, and the Indian, whom he had missed, was still prowling
about to take his revenge. Only what was killed was really safe.
How the phrase has made its way into our speech may be seen
from the boast of a renowned duellist, a Texan judge, who said:
“T have shot three men, and two of them I saved.”

In the Far West the settler is, to this day, asked whether he is
going out to hunt for meat, for skins, or for scalps. Any kind of
animal food is to him meat—commonly pronounced mate—and this
he earns by his rifle alone. Bear-meat and deer-meat alternate
with wild turkey—the term venison is hardly known in the West.
Bear-meat is quite popular with him, and, if he can have his
choice, he is sure to prefer grizzly-meat, as he briefly calls it, to
all others. The Grizzly Bear, peculiar to America, has fortu-
nately a very wide range all about the base of the Rocky Moun-
tains, where his favorite food, the buffalo, is to be found.- Hunt-
ers do not hesitate to attack him single-handed, formidable as he
is, to get his meat, which is so highly esteemed that it can be
found even at the eating-houses of San Francisco. The term
grizzly, commonly misunderstood as denoting a peculiar color, is
nothing more than the old English grisly, meaning ugly, from
grise, which once was a name of swine. Mr. Grose explains it as
meaning also a mixture of black and white or gray, and hence the
very natural error. When young they are easily tamed, and thus
F. B. Harte introduces a young Californian lady who “ opened
the door and disclosed a half-grown grizzly, who instantly raised
himself on his haunches, with his forepaws hanging down in the
popular attitude of mendicants.” (Luck of Roaring Camp, p. 47.)

Sheep-imeat, as mutton is called, is very rare in the Far West, and
deer-meat has a drawback not generally known: “ It is a nutritious
meat when eaten with other viands, butit is a remarkable fact that
THE GREAT WEST. 203

in an exclusive diet of deer-meat it will finally cease to afford any
sustenance, and a person thus living, will present the phenomenon
of actual starvation. Frontiersmen have been found in Texas in
the-last stages of exhaustion, wan, shrivelled, and at the point’ of
death, who had been reduced to this condition while there was
a plentiful provision of venison in the camp.” (R. B. Thorpe.)
8. Kercheval touchingly says of his own childhood: “The lean
venison and the breast of wild turkeys we were taught to call
bread, and the flesh of the bear was called meat. This artifice
did not succeed very well, for after living in this way some time
we became sickly, the stomach seeming to be always empty and
tormented with a sense of hunger. How delicious was the taste
of the first young potatoes! what a jubilee when we were per-
mitted to pull the young corn for roasting-ears! Still more so,
when it had acquired sufficient hardness to be made into juhmny-
cakes by the aid of a tin grater. We then became healthy, vigor-
ous, and contented with our situation, poor as it was.” (Hist. of
the Valley of Virginia, p. 214.) The wild turkey has given rise
to a playful phrase, originating in the tradition of a white and a
Redman, who had gone out hunting together, sitting down to eat
a roast turkey, which they were to share. The Indian waited with
the stoicism of his race, till his turn should come, while the surly
backwoodsman ate and ate, and, as the poor Indian afterward
reported, “never said turkey once.” To this day an unfair divi-
sion and want of hospitality, especially in the South, is character-
ized by the blamed persons “ never saying turkey once.” If he hunts
for skins, he is known as a Trapper, from the traps he sets to
catch animals with valuable furs. The ideal frapper, familiar to
usin the shape of Cooper’s Leatherstocking, never existed in
reality ; he is rare even now, having been driven from the so-
called West to snaring and capturing his game in the Rocky
Mountain region. “The majority of trappers of the present day
are either Canadian-French or half-breeds (French and Indian)
by birth. They now find their quarry in Dakota, Montana, Idaho,
Washington, and Oregon, in the Red River region, British Colum-
bia, and Vancouver Island. They are active, patient under toil,
exposure, and hardship, versed in all the mysteries of woodcraft
and the arts of the trapper, ingenious and full of expedients,
generous and reckless in their expenditures, helpful and kind-
hearted.” (Appleton’s Journal, April 1, 1871.)
204 AMERICANISMS.

In trapping, he uses the usual variety of traps, but also one
he calls the deadfall, because it kills the game. It is commonly
made of a heavy plank with one edge held up by what is techni-
cally called Figure Four trap-sticks—three sticks arranged like a
large figure 4. “I know’d it would be easy to catch one by mak-
ing a deadfall.” (Mrs. Trail, The Canadian Crusoes, p. 85.)
“The most beautiful notions are all lost for want of a trap, an
intellectual Figgery Four.” (J.C. Neal’s Charcoal Sketches, 1, p.
38.) If the hunter is out after scalp, he calls it going to raise
hair. A more innocent sport, which plays a prominent part in
Western life, is the hunting of bees. The bee-hunter, as he is
called, catches a bee in a little box with some honey in it; the
bee, first alarmed, and struggling hard to go out, soon catches the
smell of honey, forgets its captivity, and, like a true Yankee—-for
they all came from New England—determined to make the most
of every mishap, falls to, taking its fill- The box is then placed
upon a stump or rock, the lid gently withdrawn, and the hunter
steps aside to see the bee take its flight, which it does in about one
minute, that is, as soon as it is filled with honey. Rising a few
feet in the air, it circles around two or three times, taking its
bearings, and strikes a dbee-line for home. The pursuit of the bee
to its hive in a distant tree is called lining bees, and considered a
valuable accomplishment throughout the West. Hence G. W.
Kendall describes a man thus: “The Indian he could circum-
vent and outmaneuvre at his own games, and at killing every
kind of animal known in the woods or on the prairies; at
fishing and at lining bees, the oldest and best hunters acknowl-.
edged Tom’s supremacy.” (Santa Fé Expedition, L., p.53). Hence
the familiar term of bee-dine for any direct line from place to place,
such as the bee chooses to return home. “ Now you make tracks,”
says a hunter in Scenes from the Far West, “and strike a bee-line
for home, or if ever I catch you in these digging agin, you won't
git home any more, that’s all.” (p. 234.) “The boy, anointing
his face and hands with a little tar, diluted with sweet oil, made
a bee-line for the upper end of the meadow.” (Putnam's Magazine,
July, 1870.) A rich store of honey is often found in hollow trees,
among which the bee seems to prefer the gum-rees (Liquidambar
styreiflua), which grow to a large size both in swamps ayd in
dry woods. It has its name from the fact that the bark, if
THE GREAT WEST. » 205

wounded in summer, distils a fluid gum or resin in very small
quantity, which has an agreeable fragrance, and is often chewed
at the South. If the tree should be hollow, it is called a bee-tree.
This preference of the bees has led to a curious process of retalia-
tion. The large but short-lived trees, when they once begin to
suffer, soon become hollow, decaying at the heart and leaving a
shell of some few inches in thickness. Then they are cut in con-
venient lengths to make casks, and among other hollow-ware also
beehives; hence the latter are frequently called dee-gums or gums
simply, furnishing the captive bees the same home they chose in
the free woods. The fruit of the dee-hunter’s skill is highly ap-
preciated in his lonely cabin where sweets are not abundant, and
hence honey is a favorite word in the backwoods for real or verbal
sweetness. A lndicrous application of the term was found in an
advertisement in a Tuscaloosa newspaper: “Notice. Persons in-
debted to the Tuscaloosa bookstore are respectfully solicited to
pay their last year’s account forthwith. It is of no use to honey ;
payments must be made at least once a year or I shall run down
at the heels. I have not spare change enough to buy myself a
shirt or a pair of breeches. My wife is now actually engaged in
turning an old pair wrongside-out, and trying to make a new
shirt out of two old ones. Come, come, pay up, my friends!
keep peace.in the family, and enable me to wear my breeches right-
side-out!” (September 21st, 1870.) Butthe worst use of the sweet
word is probably made in the formation of honey-fogile, in the
sense of swindling or cheating. Mr. Bartlett suggests that the
curious word may have its origin in the Lancashire coney-fogling,
mentioned by Halliwell, as meaning to lay plots. It was long
confined to Louisiana and Kentucky, then went to the Great
West, and with the general advance of refinement has found a
resting-place in the lips of Colonel Susan B. Anthony—as West-
ern papers call her in admiration of her courage—who uses
honey-fugling for “kissing,” in her lectures on Women’s Rights.
“What is Honey-Fugling (sic)?” asks a writer in Harper's
Monthly, and receives the answer: “It is cutting it too fat over
the left ;” a suggestive if not very clear explanation. (July, 1858.)

This fondness of sweet things has led to the curious expression
of sowring on an unpleasant task or occupation. As the English
gwain is said to be “ sweet” on his lady-love, so the Texas youth
206 - AMERICANISMS.

sours on the beauty that will not listen to his addresses, and the
man who abandons his plantations to take up some other busi-
ness, is said to have “sowred on planting.”

The backwoodsman finds at home, besides honey, the long and
short sweetening, peculiar to the West; the former representing
molasses, as in the early days of the colonies molasses imported
into New England from the West Indies was known by that
name; the latter meaning store-swgar, or sugar made from the cane.
For the settler has also tree-sugar made from the sugar-maple,
as it is called (Acer saccharinum), and is apt, when his farm is an
old one, to own quite a sugar-orchard, 1. ¢.,a@ collection of maple-
trees, preserved and watched over in the forest, from which he
derives the necessary supply. A mere clump of such trees near
his house he is disposed to call only a sugar-camp. Sugar-parties,
during which the sap collected in large vessels is boiled down in
the still wintry woods, amid much merriment and innocent mirth,
are common from Vermont down to Western Virginia, wherever
the noble tree will grow that gives its sweet blood to man; and
the gatherings of young people in the beautiful groves to eat the
warm sugar are practically but very prosaically called sugar-licks.
Even the verb to sugar off is derived from this custom of eating
the maple-sugar as it is poured off in its hot state on the snow
around, thus making a dainty compound resembling ice-cream;
which at home is often produced by a similar mixture with tree-
molasses. ‘The latter enables his thrifty housewife, who is, how-
ever, always a “lady,” tomake him a plentiful supply of sarves,,
as he invariably calls the preserves, of which all Western men are
said to be peculiarly fond—no doubt from the natural instinct
which makes them choose saccharine substances as an offset to
the large quantities of fat and meat they consume. This sweet
tooth has evidently been carried to the West from the first settlers
of the East, for even there still lingers.a tendency to prefer pies
and preserves to bread and meat, and sugar is a term used, like
honey in other countries, for all that is sweet in taste, affection, or
—wealth. To sugar off is one of those expressions the thorough-
bred Yankee rolls as a sweet morsel under his tongue when speak-
ing of a large fortune or a rich inheritance. Thus we find it in a
recent notice of the humorous author: “Josh Billings, who comes
of a wealthy family—Shaws of Lanesborongh in Massachusetts—
THE GREAT WEST. 207

and it is estimated that his estate would sugar off, as they say in
Vermont, about $200,000. Joshua is now about fifty years old,
tall, round-shouldered, and an oddity, always carryin g about on his
features an expression indescribably ludicrous.” (Harper’s Bazar,
March 13, 1871.)

The backwoodsman’s table is otherwise very modest, and knows
no peculiar dishes save the very simplest. Cold flour, as he calls
it, is a delicacy, though it consists but of parched and pulverized
Indian corn mixed with sugar; a few spoonfuls are stirred in a
tin cup with-water, and make a good meal when other food is not
to be had. On the Texan trail travellers are very apt to provide
themselves with this compound, making it more palatable by the
addition of spices; in this form it appears as pivole in all the
regions where Spanish used to be spoken. His daily fare is
designated as common doings, a term which is transferred from
the log-cabin to the great marts of the West, and then denotes any
ordinary transaction in cqntrast with those that are very large or
peculiarly profitable. “What shall we do?” says a poor frontiers-
man’s wife, when she hears of a Federal officer who is to take up
his quarters at her cabin fora day; “I can’t give him common
doings ? And thar Jim’s gone away and I can’t send him over to
Billy’s wife, or I might get up some chicken-fizings for him.”
(Colonel Marcy, Army-Life on the Border, p.11%7.) If the latter
dish, highly esteemed all over the West and South as a delicacy
for great occasions, or.a turkey, come to the table, they are sure to
be accompanied with piles of stuffening, as the usual stuffing of
herbs and some relish is called in the fullness of Western speech.
A very curious term is connected with the fondness of Western
men for coffee and tea: “I take my tea barfoot, said a backwoods-
man, when asked if he would take cream and sugar,” using as
J. R. Lowell observes, in this very novel signification an old
English term, written in precisely the same manner in the Coven-
try Plays. Lean meat he calls, in the same brief manner, simply
poor-doe, without regard to the animal from which it was obtained.

Good-natured, and even kind-hearted, as the backwoodsman
generally is, his language is full of extreme words and eccentric
phrases, which do not always justice to his real character. His
solitary life, however, begets not only sturdy independence, but
also utter disregard of mere conyentionalities, and the rough life
208 AMERICANISMS.

he must needs lead in constant strife with nature and with rival
claimants of the soil, soon makes its impress upon his speech also,
Many a peculiar term is, of course, taken here, as in every pro-
fession and special pursuit of life, from the objects around him,
with which he is most familiar. He works like a beaver, but in
saying so only follows the usage established long ago, for already
in 1747 there appeared in the Boston Rehearsal the following
advertisement: “ To besold by the printer of this paper, the very
best negro in this town; is as hearty as a horse, as brisk asa bird,
and will work like a beaver.” The phrase has become common
property, and hence we find that “The Radicals worked like
beavers, but they were so far outnumbered, that I should not
wonder if the Democracy got at least half the votes at this point.”
(Savannah Repudlican, Nov. 14, 1870.) On the other hand, the
English use of deaver for a hat has entirely ceased, giving way to
“ cossamer,” or, in modern slang, “ goss,” while the term is still
used in the South and among old-fashioned people. The Beaver-
tree (Magnolia glauca), is so called in the West, while elsewhere it
is more generally known as Castor-tree, in either case from the
fact that the deavers (Castor americanus) use the bark as food and
the wood for their beaver-dams. The great importance which a
crop of grass has for all stock-raisers and the Indians, whose very
life depends on the buffaloes finding food and their horses pasture,
has led to the use of the. peculiar phrase in which the youth, who
is no longer a boy and not yet a man, is picturesquely said to be
between grass and hay. The fire made in the woods consists of
large loge piled one upon another, and hence in the West a fire is
built, and very rarely made as elsewhere. The raccoon furnishes
the suggestive idea of a coon’s age for a long time, and of a gone
coon instead of the English phrase, “a gone goose.” The Hon.
Mr. Giddings said, on the floor of Congress, in 1845, “ Besides the
acquisition of Canada, which is put down on all sides as a gone
coon, other brilliant results are to ensue from the possession of,
Canada.” The mountaineer is apt to modify the phrase to suit
his favorite animal, and speaks of a ruined person as a gone beaver.
The duck suggests to the hunter the idea of being hearty as a
buck, and makes him speak of buck ague, or buck sever, when he
wishes to describe the nervous agitation of the inexperience?
sportsman; so that G. W. Kendall wrote: “There is a very ¢
THE GREAT WEST. 209

mon disease prevalent among young and inexperienced hunters in
Texas, which is known as the buck ague.” (Santa Fé Expedition,
II., p. 321.) he duck fly is the insect which plagues the deer at
certain seasons, so as not unfrequently to drive them from their
favorite feeding-ground ; but whether the duck negro obtains his
name from the animal or from the general meaning of buck as a
slang term for strong or lusty, is not so evident. “Cries of: there
he goes! were heard, as the skirmishers advanced, and a big duck
negro was found in a hollow laying (sic) on his face, playing
possum, and he actually allowed himself to be turned over on the
back and kicked several times before he would acknowledge that
he was alive.” (Nashville Banner, January 8, 1871.)

The raccoon’s favorite resort, the gum-tree, furnishes him with
another figure of speech. This tree, the Sweet Gum, as it is com-
monly called, grows up very tall, and begins to spread its branches
only at a great height from the ground, a feature which makes it
the place of refuge for opossums as well as raccoons, when they
are hotly pursued. Up there in his leafy retreat the animal is
well hid from dog and hunter alike, and frequently defies all their
efforts. This is what the Western man calls coming the gum-
game, aud he applies the phrase with great shrewdness and force
to any case in daily life in which he thinks he sees a desire to
overreach him by concealment. ‘‘ You can’t come that gwm-game
over me any more,” says a Kansas man to a squatter, whose farm
he wished to purchase, when the latter claims to have some ficti-
tious title, “I’ve been to the land-office, and kiow all about the
place.” (Kansas City Advertiser, May 7, 1869.) The word is not
-unknown to the Eastern States, for J. R. Lowell uses it in the
same sense: “ You can’t gum me, I tell ye now, andso you needn’t
try.” (Biglow Papers, I., p. 185.) The old English phrase, as
stupid as a coot, quoted by Halliwell already as an “ old prover-
bial saying,” is quite at home on Western low grounds, and finds a
companion in the local expression, “he is a poor coot.” Of the
same nature is the expression, “ straight as a loon’s leg,” in allusion
to the peculiar leg of the Northern Diver (Holymbus glacialis).

From the cock’s spur, not unfrequently, as in England, supplied
with a steel spur, he derives the use of heeded, in the sense of armed
with deadly weapons, and in California, especially, a man giving
an account of a fight, is apt to be asked: “ Were both men heeled?”
210 AMERICANISMS.

The turkey is to the Western man a goddler, a name most likely
to have been derived from the very peculiar noise made by the
proud bird when, shutting his eyes and beating his wings, he
dances like a madman on his branch, and calls for his mate to
come and admire his out-spread tail and crimson adornments,
There is a negro melody, familiar in Georgia, which in the refrain
attempts to imitate this gobble—the only feasible method, it hag
been said, of talking turkey yet discovered :

“Ole mars William he gone to legislatur’,
Ab! chocaloga, chocaloga, chocalog !
Young mars John, he done come home from college,
Ah! chocaloga, chocaloga, chocalog !”

A hunter in the Far West writes: “I had gone some fifty yards
up the fork, when I saw one of the godblers perched, with his
bearded breast to me, upon a horizontal limb of an oak, within
easy shot.” (Ruxton, Adventures in the West, p. 347.) The war
brought with its large stock of old and cant terms also the use of
gobbling up, instead of “taking from the enemy,” a meaning de-
rived from the voracity which is generally conveyed by gobbling.
A correspondent of the Chicago Hvening Post is credited with the
first experiment; he wrote: “‘ Nearly four hundred prisoners were
gobbled up after the fight, and any quantity of ammunition and
provisions.” (July, 1861.)

Even domestic animals appear in a new light in the Great West,
and this gives rise to new meanings of familiar terms. California,
for instance, forms its vast flocks of sheep into bands, of about
a thousand each, and employs herders to tend its valuable cattle.
The former is hence called sheep-herder, and not shepherd, be-
cause the keeping of sheep is considered wnfit for man, and ‘no one
will own to it! Formerly the work was done by Indians ; then by
such immigrants as were utterly unable by any exertion of their
own to earn a living; and finally the task has come down to the
despised greasers or “ vagrant miners, who gamble off their wages
as soon as they receive them, or runaway sailors from Frisco, who
sell their blankets for a pillow-case of biscuits, and then go two
days without eating anything, or vagabond soldiers, who fall
asleep at their post and let the coyotes pull awaya sheep.” (Over-
land Monthly, February, 1871, p. 142.) The Stool-Pigeon, also, as
THE GREAT WEST. 211

familiar to English ears as to ours, exists here—and even in the
Hastern States—still in both its primary signification and its
figurative extension. In the former it means the pigeon, with its
eyes stitched up, fastened on a stool, which can be moved up and
down by the hidden fowler, an action which causes the bird to
flutter anxiously. This attracts the passing flocks of wild pigeons,
which alight and are caught by a net, which may be sprung over
them. The figurative stool-pigeon is, of course, only the decoy-
duck in another form.

A very peculiar term, full of instruction in showing the origin
of many similar words, is the name of Maverick, used in Texas
to designate an unmarked yearling. It is derived from the Hon.
Samuel Maverick, of San Antonio, who removed to Western
Texas thirty years ago, driving with him some three thousand
head of cattle, then the largest herd in all the country. He
established a ranche, and placed an old negro there in charge of
the cattle, to mark, brand, and see after them. Unfortunately
this man was more given to the bottle than his business, and, as a
natural consequence, many a calf and colt went unmarked.. The
neighbors, having much smaller herds, were very careful to mark
and brand every one of their calves during the early spring and
summer. The spring after the arrival of Mr. Maverick’s large
herd these rancheros noticed a number of unmarked yearlings,
and, well acquainted with the habits of his steward, naturally
concluded that they were the new-comer’s property, and hence
called them mavericks, so that the very absence of a mark and
brand was taken as evidence of his ownership. As the number
of cattle rapidly increased, there were, of course, many unmarked
yearlings running about that belonged to other owners and were
well known as such; nevertheless the name clung to every calf
with long or unmutilated ears, and to’this day every yearling
without a mark is a maverick. Any owner of a large herd con-
siders himself authorized to brand a maverick which he finds on
or near his ranche, and this operation is called to jack a maverick.
With this process of marking or branding young cattle, so as to
show to whom it belongs, another term is closely connected, the
word counterbranding : when marked cattle are sold the mark is
burnt in a second time on the opposite side, thus destroying the
force of the original brand, and this process is called cownter-
branding cattle.
212 AMERICANISMS.

The crooked stick that will not fit into the pile, becomes the
familiar nickname of a cross-grained person who does not suit
society, and has, as such, made its way back again to the East,
where it reappears in J. R. Lowell’s Biglow Papers thus: *

“So as I aint a crooked stich, just like, like old—{I swow,
I don’t know as I know his name)—I’ll go back to my plough.”

Snakes, whom the backwoodsman hates for a good reason and
with intense bitterness, furnish him with several graphic expres-
sions. He has his snake-fences and countless snakeroots, reputed
to cure snake-bites, and mostly inherited from the Indians, from
the Seneca snakeroot (Polyga Seneca) at the North, to the Vir-
ginia snakeroot (Aristolochia serpentaria) in the South, one of
which at least was known to the French settlers as serpent-d-son-
nettes, and is to this day looked upon as an infallible remedy.
The horror with which he discovers a snake—or under a rock
perhaps a whole so-called nest of snakes, containing hundreds
closely interlaced and hissing furiously at the intruder—has sug-
gested to him the picturesque phrase of waking snakes with a
double meaning. In grim allusion to the wriggling, hissing
crowd of hideous creatures, he speaks of a peculiarly noisy, bois-
terous frolic as a waking of snakes, such as J. R. Lowell refers to in
the lines—

“This goin’ where glory awaits ye, hain’t one agreeable featur’,
And if it warn’t for wakin’ snakes, Pd be home agin short metre.”
(Biglow Papers, 1.

The other meaning is derived from the sense of sudden terror
excited. by the discovery, and makes waking snakes equivalent to
“running away quickly,” “a highly probable result in a country
where a traveller about to start in the morning, is pleasantly
informed by the landlord, that there’s a smart sprinkling of rattle-
snakes on Red Run, and a powerful nice day to sun them-
selves.” (Carlton’s The New Purchase, I., p. 85.) Not many years
ago, negroes living near the foot of the Blue Ridge would ask
leave “to be gwin’ wakin’ snakes” for the professors of the Uni-
versity of Virginia, who wanted some specially fine specimens of
rattlesnakes for friends abroad, or for the students, who had them
pitted against each other on the great lawn of the institution, and
heartily enjoyed the terrific combats which the snakes would
THE GREAT WEST. 213

continue sometimes for hours. Western men have a special dis-
like to any indirect, underhand proceedings, and term them snak-
ing, so that even in politics a man is said to snake, if he tries to
obtain an advantage by such influence. On the other hand,
snaking means quite as frequently to catch or to draw swiftly
from any place. W.8. Mayo describes a struggle with an Indian
thus: “ He made a spring at arail-fence, and I believe would have
gone over it at the first jump, but just as he cleared the ground I
wollopped the hoop around him and snaked him back, head over
heels; he gathered himself like a frightened deer and cleared the
fence the next jump, easy.” (Kaloolah, p.17.) Major Downing, in
his Letters, uses it as a political effort, when he says of his great
hero, General Jackson: “ We snaked him out of the scrape as
slick as a whistle.” (p.14.) This phrase, however, comes not
directly from the snake itself; but from the use which is made of
the phrase to snake it out, when applied by settlers to the draw-
ing out of stumps by means of a long chain.

That even railways cannot escape the snake, and had in former
days snake-heads, which constituted one of the most formidable
dangers in railway travelling, has already been mentioned else-
where.

The tendency of all Americans to use high-sounding words of
extensive meaning for comparatively small matters, is nowhere
more fully developed than in the West. Here even small objects
are not brought, but crowded, and thus the Rev. Mr. Cartwright
even says quaintly: “ God Almighty crowded me into the world
bareheaded, and I think no more harm to enter Massachusetts
bareheaded, than for the Lord to bring me into the world-without
a hat.” (Autobiography, p. 473.) What elsewhere is great appears
to him nothing less than crwel, although here also he only follows
the example set him by his early ancestors, since Hakluyt already
thus used the word. Mr. Bartlett tells the pleasant story of a
man who, having been quite seriously ill, was asked by the physi-
cian who had calmed the paroxysm, how he felt, and replied:
“Oh, doctor, I am powerful weak, but crwel easy.” (Dictionary,
p. 170.) On the other hand, the Western man takes the much
debated word cuss, and employs it where he wishes to express
anything but a curse, often even affection. There is a touching
incident mentioned in F. B. Harte’s Luck of Roaring Camp,
214 AMERICANISMS.

where a rough, wicked miner, Kentuck Joe, goes to see a new-
born baby, and finding his finger clutched by the little creature,
breaks forth ecstatically in the words : “ The d——d little cuss / he
rastled with my finger!” holding that finger a little apart from its
fellows and examining it curiously. The question is, whether the
term comes really from a vulgar pronunciation of curse, as most
authorities state, or is an abbreviation of customer, with the
primary idea of what is frequently called a dad or an ugly customer.
The latter theory might be supported by the fact that a cuss is, as
has already been stated, by no means always a curse, and that a
low, miserly person is very apt to be called a mean cuss, which
may be nothing more than a mean customer. This would apply
even to a case like the following, taken from the New Orleans
Picayune: “T had oft heard tell of Yankees, but never knew
what mean cusses they were, until I met a few of them at Wash-
ington.” The noun cussedness, also, is by no means always used
in utter condemnation. “He done it out of pure cussedness,”
means, of course, out of sheer wickedness and malignity, and in
this sense the Coventry Plays already employ cursydnesse. But
quite as frequently cussedness is intended to convey the idea of
resoluteness and obstinate courage, as in John Hay’s popular song
‘of Jim Bludsoe of the Prairie Bell:

“Through the hot-black breath of the burnin’ boat
Jim Bludsoe’s voice was heard,
And they all had trust in his cussedness,
And knowed he would keep his word.”

The term has even been traced back to a French origin, from
the fact that the same term is used in France. St. Simon uses it
and confesses its usefulness. Speaking of the Abbé Dubois, he
says: “Qui était en plein ce qu’en matvais Francais on appelle
un sacre, mais qui ne se peut.guére exprimer autrement.”

A fertile country, like the western part of Illinois, conjures up
pictures of fat kine and at once receives the name of Zyypi, from
the productiveness of the soil, as the natives say, but, in the opin-
ion of outsiders, from the Egyptian darkness prevailing there.
This (mental) darkness is explained by the extreme ignorance of
hard-working, but also hard-drinking, low Germans, who first
settled there, and found as predecessors only a “ground-tier” of
THE GREAT WEST. 215

poor, shiftless, and ignorant outcasts from Kentucky and Tennes-
see. Railroads and immigration have since entirely changed the
state of things, and Hyypt can boast of intelligence now as well
as of fertility. Besides such special terms, the West loves dig
words generally, and calls a week an efernal time, a good officer
an almighty general, and a spell of rain an everlasting deluge,
with a tendency to form gradually a Comic Bible, which is most
seriously to be deprecated. Where other men simply stir, he livens
up, as we are told that “ Lucien’s father hastened to liven up the fire,
and then sat down near the boy, who, gun in hand, was bravely
watching the enemy.” (Harper’s Monthly, December, 1870.) If
he speaks to a friend he hollows, and where a Northern man burns
to do a thing, the Southwestern hunter “freezes for buffalo-
meat and mountain-doin’s.” (Ruxton’s Far West, B.)

This tendency is naturally increased when drink comes to its
aid; the backwoodsman, working hard and having few amuse-
ments, is not disinclined to déquor, as his forefathers long ago taught
him to do, for J. R. Lowell tells us that he read in the Puritan
already: “Call’em in and liguor ’em a little.” To liguor-up is
his own improvement. But of all the rare compounds known to
Eastern bar-rooms, few ever reach his secluded home. Nor would
he appreciate the bewitching softness of “Long Linked Sweet-
ness,” or the ecstacy produced by a “ Kiss me Quick”—he likes to
take it strong and hot. He has not yet forgotten the old custom
of his forefathers, and takes a horn, as they called the stout horn-
cup by their side; and if it is filled to the brim with Old Red-Lye,
he likes it all the better, for whiskey is his favorite drink, and the
red eyes it marks for its own by no means rare on the frontier.
“Salted provisions and red-eye to boot” is the refrain of many a
rude song, and if the latter is fiery and raw it is none the less
welcome. “Formerly rm was the favorite, and largely produced
in the New England States. The word itself, little known in the
early days of the Union beyond Yankeedom, was brought into
the Middle States by Eastern temperance lecturers, who often use
it as a poetic and objurgatory term, instead of the proper word,
whiskey.” (Professor 8.8. Haldeman.) The peculiar and by no
means prepossessing redness of face which it is apt to produce,
first on the nose and gradually extending over the cheeks, is profes-
sionally known as rum-bud ; while the victim, the habitual toper,
216 “AMERICANISMS.

has conferred upon him the name of rwm-sucker. The State of
New York alone, we believe, uses the term rwm-holes for its
smaller grog-shops. Western men, once upon a time, devised a
quaint and by no means inefficient way to avenge themselves on
a well-known zealous temperance lecturer, a Mr. Hawkins. They
took his name and applied it, in bitter derision, to an inferior.
kind of rwm, calling it Hawkins’ Whetstone. The hunter and
trapper is said to haye no other reply to the question: How are
you? than the expressive monosyllable: Dry! The statement ig,
of course, in the highest degree unjust to him, and the term is
not even an Americanism ; it occurs as long ago as the days when
the Middleton Plays came out, and may be found in many an old
English poet, where it is used, just as now, for thirsty.

When the Western man is not dry, he is accused of being apt
to be on a bust, as they call, in California, a great drinking-bout,
accompanied with dancing and gambling, or as the West gener-
ally says in its free and easy way, on a buster. The figure is, of
course, taken from the idea of enjoying a thing to bursting, and
as the latter word is very generally contracted into dusting, the
buster need not be sought for in the word dustard, an old form of
buzzard. It means simply anything so large or unusual as to
“look like bursting.” In this sense it is used in England also,
and the London boys used to call the small new-made loaves, two-
penny dusters, while the papers gravely stated, after Dr. Hassall’s
revelations of all the fearful adulterations of bread, that “a sensi-
tive person would sometimes durst, if he knew what he was eating.”
A New England paper, on the other hand, said of a fashionable
evening dress, that it “dust open at the top and all over the
arms.” The next step, calling any astonishing thing, person,
or event, a duster, is perfectly natural. The familiar use of the
term led to the following amusing scene: Two young midship-
men accompanied once Commodore Morris, of the United States
Navy, to Court at Rio, and seeing two very odd as well as foreign-
looking gentlemen playing écarté, they walked up to them and
placed themselves behind their chairs to watch the game. After
a while one said to the other, “Hal, whom will you bet on?” The
reply was, “ Pll bet on this little monkey-faced fellow.” “ All right,”
says the first, “Pl go this cock-eyed old duster in the red wig.”
The words were hardly uttered, when up jumped the odd-looking
THE GREAT WEST. 21%

couple—a brace of Envoys Plenipotentiary—with fury in their
faces, to the terrified amazement of the youngsters, who had had
no idea they would be understood, a fair inference from the gen-
eral amount of linguistic knowledge possessed by their national
representatives. To the credit of their Excellencies, they soon
joined in the laugh, only cautioning their photographers to look,
for the future, before they leaped. (Lippincott’s Magazine, Feb-
ruary, 1871.) The verb is, of course, quite as popular as the noun,
and a poor fellow, brought up before the Recorder at New Orleans,
made this plea in his defence: “Because I was a good-natured
fellow, [had to go with them, frolicking, teaparting, excursioning,
and busting generally.” (New Orleans Picayune, February 14,
1869.) To duss—also a Western term—is, however, a very dif-
ferent term, and quite as much English as American, in the sense
of to punch. “Tl Juss your head,” is a popular threat in the
West. When he is dry he is very apt to yield to the quite pardona-
ble longing of a lonely man in the backwoods, to hear what is
going on in the world, to see human faces once more, and to get
some liquor. He finds a variety in name, if not in reality, for the
West is as rich in epithets for pure liquor as the Eastern States
are fond of devising daily some new names for cunning mixtures.
Now he is asked to take a Stone Fence, and now a Railroad, but
both are simple whiskey, so called, in the latter case, “because of
the rapidity with which it hurries men to the end of their jour-
ney.” (J.C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches, I.,117.) The worst of lickers,
as the signboards often have it in unconscious irony, is called
Chain-lightning, from its terrible strength and stunning effect.
Even the word rotgut, used as far back as in Heywood’s Eng-
lish Traveller and Addison’s Drummer, for a poor kind of drink,
and in England still often heard in speaking of small-beer, has
here been revived and made to serve as a name for particularly
bad and fiery whiskey. All these he finds at the doggery, the
very expressive name of a mean grogshop in the West and South.
The Rey. Mr. Cartwright alluded to them when he described a
camp-meeting, saying, “There was a crowd from the floating
population of the river and loose-footed, doggery-haunting, dis-
sipated renegades ofthe towns and villages all around.” (Auto-
biography, p. 376.) 2

It i: generally on such occasions, and in such company only,

10 .
218 AMERICANISMS.

that a “free fight” occurs, after the pattern of Irish frolics, and
the old, now obsolete, practice of gouging was indulged in. §,
Kercheval already refers to the “detestable practice of gouging,
by which eyes are sometimes put out, and which rendered the
mode of fighting frightful indeed. It was not, however, so destruc-
tive as the stiletto of an Italian, the knife of a Spaniard, the small-
sword of a Frenchman, or the pistol of the American or English

duellist.” (History of the Valley of Virginia, p. 251.) Mr. Bart-.

lett remarks with patriotic indignation that Grose, in his Dic-
tionary, defines gouging as “a cruel custom, practised by the
Bostonians in America!” The term is taken from the carpenter’s
shops, where it is in constant use, just as Ben Jonson employed it
in the lines:

“ By googing of ’em out
Just to the size of my bottles, and not slicing.”
(Devil is an Ass.)

The practice, consisting of a turning out of the eye from the
socket by the thumb-nail, which was suffered to grow long for the
purpose, is now nearly, if not wholly, extinct, but the word is still
occasionally heard, as flaying alive and skinning are used to express
very hard treatment, which is threatened but never carried out.

The same happy termination unfortunately can not be predicted
of the abuses and villanies transacted under the shelter of so-
called Lynch Law, since recent cases, by no means confined to the
West, but (in 1871) extending even to New Hampshire, prove the
strong hold which the idea of popular justice has on the Amer-
ican mind. Perhaps no term in the whole.list of Americanisms
has been more thoroughly examined than this, and yet no conclu-
sive proof has yet been adduced in favor of any one derivation.
The oldest date assigned to it is the year 1498, when an Irishman,
“James Lynch, Mayor of Galway, hanged his own son out of the
window for defrauding and killing strangers, without martial or
common Jaw, to show a good example to posterity.” (Hxtract
from Council Books of Galway.) Lydford Law, explained by the
doggerel lines—

“First hang and draw,
Then hear the cause by Lydford lato,”

and said to have been practised under Richard IL, claims an even
THE GREAT WEST. 219

earlier date, but lacks the ominous name. Another ancestor is
found in one Lynch, who, in 1687-8, was sent to America to sup-
press piracy. As the laws were not administered with much rigor
or formality in the Colonies, owing to “the difficulty of adhering
to the usual forms of law in the newly-fashioned territories,” it is
presumed that this Judge Lynch was empowered to proceed sum-
marily against the pirates, and thus gave rise to the term. (George
H. Bailey in Notes and Queries.) ‘The opinion which traces the
law to one Lynch, founder of the town of Lynchburg, in Virginia,
is entirely unsupported by any authority, and rests solely upon the
identity of the name. R. W. Emerson describes it thus: “ Wild
liberty develops iron conscience. Want of liberty, by strength-
ening law and decorum, stupefies conscience. Lynch Law pre-
vails only where there is greater hardihood and self-consistency
in the leaders.” (Politics, p. 117.) The absurdly euphemistic
way in which newspaper writers of the day occasionally indulge
in speaking of very grave matters, was recently shown in an ac-
count of Lynch Law justice, thus described: “Mr. Lyon, of
Georgia, who owned several horses belonging to other parties, re-
cently dislocated his cerebral vertebrae while performing trying
feats at a rope’s end, held by said parties, for the amusement of a
large crowd.” (“ Personal” in a Western paper, December, 1870.)
A local application of the same principle is to be found in the
Vigilance Committees of California, whose name, originally in all
probability derived from the familiar Spanish term vigilante,
has since made its way to other States also. The French vigilance
is, of course, the same word, but the connection with the custom
is not so evident. These Vigilance Comnvitiees originated, like
Lynch Law, in the inefficiency of the appointed authorities to
execute the law—when judges were intimidated, juries partial and
guilty of the same crimes as those they were called upon to con-
demn, and.public opinion all on the side of the criminal. Men
of standing and character, who had much at stake, then formed
themselves into a Committee to watch over the safety of their
home and to punish criminals. The first self-constituted body of
this kind was formed in San Francisco; others in New Orleans
have become quite famous, and even in the Northwest their inter-
position has been repeatedly tolerated. In the Eastern States they
have never obtained the support of law-abiding citizens, and on
220 AMERICANISMS.

several occasions have been very promptly suppressed. In the
more remote parts of the Union they continue, however, to exist,
and probably to do some good, in default of a regular and efficient
administration of the laws of the country. A recent instance is
thus described: “The Vigilance Committee in Los Angelos:
(California) has proved itself a reality by its large numbers and
vigorous action. At 10 o’clock on the morning of the 19th,

three hundred men assembled in Stearn’s Hall, elected Mr. Sig-

nouret President, and at once proceeded to try Miguel Lachenai
for the murder of Jacob Bell, and other murders which he is

known to have committed. After a brief session it was unani-

mously decided to hang Lachenai. At 11 o’clock the Vigilantes

were divided into three companies and marched through the

streets to the jail; guards were stationed at different points to

prevent interference with their work, and a party commenced bat-

tering down the door, which consumed quite half an hour.

Entering Lachenai’s cell, a rope was put around his neck and he

was led out into the street. The Vigilantes surrounded him and

conducted him to a corral some two squares away from the jail,

and hung him at 11.40 a.m. In the words he was given time to

speak, he confessed his crime, but expressed no regret. The

sheriff and his men made all the resistance possible, but they

were unable to raise a man to assist them, all believing in the

justness of the Vigilantes’ action.” (San Francisco Bulletin,

December 8, 1870.)

When the man of the Western frontier is not dry, he is very
apt to be slewed. This term has been traced to two or three dif-
ferent sources, among which the word slowgh, in the West pro-
nounced slew, is not the weakest claimant. But as the word is
quite as common in England, where sloughs are scarcely known, it
may there really be a sea-term, derived from the apparent disorder
on board ship at the moment when she tacks; the sails flap and
she heels over, in which condition she is said to slew. It may,
however, also have been suggested by the resemblance which the
slewed or half-tipsy man bears to a sleigh at the moment when it
goes round a corner, and its peculiar sliding motion is conveyed
by the New England term: It slewed round.

Great as the backwoodsman is in terms and phrases concerning
every object around him, he is greatest by far in speaking of him-
THE GREAT WEST. 221°

self or his comrade. The outsider of all classes and colors is
simply the stranger to him, and he sings out to the traveller he
meets on the trail, “ Halloa, stranger, whar’ may you be bound to ?”
He speaks of himself in mock modesty as this child, or more self-
asserting, as this horse, and his friend is affectionately greeted as
“Wal, Ole Hoss, how are ye?” A common challenge, often given
to a whole company, around the camp-fire or at the bar-room, in
an out-lying settlement, is, “Who dare set this hoss?” (Life in
the Far West, p.171.) For the horse plays in many ways a prom-
inent part In the dramatic manner of speaking in the West, and
has thence fonnd its way back to the Kastern States. The old
feeling of rude force connected with the horse, prevailing so
largely in English as to produce numerous words, like horse-laugh,
horse-medicine, and others, has here been strengthened by the
love of metaphor. A horse is the name of a man of energy, and
a Western man says readily, “He wasn’t loony on a bargain, sir,
no indeed; and he had plenty of hard horse-sense, and took good
care of his property.” (Putnam's Magazine, January, 1868.)
Hence, also, the two extremes of lowest and highest esteem are
both conveyed by horse-terms. Anything strikingly small and
insignificant, from a church to a bank, and from a governor to a
constable, is a poor one-horse affair, a figure obviously drawn from
the plough and the wagon. The indignafit settler who has been
ill-treated, as he fancies, in court, denounces his attorney as a
“miserable, one-horse lawyer ;” and the Yankee newly arrived in
England does not hesitate to declare that “ Liverpool is a poor
one-horse kind of a place,” a term applied by Mark Twain to no
lessa city than Romeitself. Dr.O. W. Holmes delights his readers
by his “one-horse shay;” and a witty clergyman of Boston in-
veighed once bitterly against “timid, sneaking, one-horse oaths,”
as infinitely worse than a good, round, thundering outburst. ‘The
wheel-horse is the Western man’s best friend, and the wheel-horse of
a political party its main prop and support. On the other hand,
the figure of speech swells up to a whole team, the highest term of
approbation Western men are apt to apply to a special favorite,
the “good fellow,” of England, as well as the man of great
wealth or marked energy. “I like the judge,” said a man from
St. Louis to Mr. Prescott, once, speaking of Dr. Story: “He is
none of your one-horse lawyers; he is a whole ¢eam:” and the New
222 AMERICANISMS.

York Herald, not long ago, declared’: “Grant is a whole team, a
horse extra, and a dog under the wagon.” Here the ne plus
ultra of recommendation is graphically conveyed by a charming
completeness of the original figure of speech. The slang term is
used and abused with boundless license, and a respectable journal
once said in sober earnest: “Fanny Fern continues to make one
of Bonner’s team” (Lippincott’s Magazine, July, 1869), wishing
to inform its readers that the well-known literary lady still
contributed to Mr. Bonner’s popular paper, the Ledger. A
new meaning has quite recently been added to the word team,
since the introduction of Chinese labor at North Adams in Mas-
sachusetts: a group of three or four Chinese shoemakers working
at the same bench is called a team.

There can be little doubt that this fondness for horse-terms,
strengthened by the American’s matchless skill in driving heavy
stage-coaches over roads that would appear impassable to other
men, has led also to the use of the verb to ¢rot out, in the sense
of to bring out. The term has become quite familiar to politi-
cians also; and in discussing the elections to take place two years
hence, a writer said: “It isa whole year too early to trot out a
candidate of our party for the presidency.” (New York Tribune,
January 23,1871.) It is probably a pure Americanism, on the
other hand, to apply the verb ¢o balk to the action of horses when,
in going up-hill, they suddenly stop, and refuse to move forward,
showing, on the contrary, a disposition to go back. Inthe Eng-
lish sense to bal& means simply to frustrate or disappoint, as in
the sentence given in Bailey: “ Balked are the courts, and con-
test is no more;” and as used by Spenser in his Faery Queen
(V., v. 10.) ; its application to horses is, hence, by no means inap-
propriate, and quite expressive. Even the slang phrase to cut
dirt, vulgar but very suggestive as to the effect of the rapid motion
of a horse on a muddy road, must be traced back to this fondness
for the popular animal, and fast-driving. “Now, I say, old hoss,
if you don’t hurry up and cuw¢ dirt like streak-lightnin’, this child
goes arter you, and you look out for a windin’ sheet, you hear?”
(Border Adventures, p. 231.)

A fine turn-out, meaning originally, as in England, only a
handsome carriage with showy horses, has in like manner come to
be applied to any display; and even a man who builds a large
THE GREAT WEST. 223

house or delivers an eloquent speech is, in the West, said to have
made a fine turn-out. It is not uninteresting to see how the phrase
has been changed in the far South, especially in Texas, where the
same meaning is conveyed by the term lay-out. It is probable
that the term is a gambler’s phrase, referring to the sum of money
which the banker at monte “lays out” allure customers. Now,
however, a man who appears well-dressed in the street, succeeds
in business or in a venture, is said to have made “a splendid day-
out.” To roll out, on the other hand, means there to begin a
journey or commence an enterprise. The phrase originated in
the fact that for many years the ox-wagon was the only means of
transportation in Texas, although a few short railways penetrated
the State for a short distance. Hence the teamster says; “I rolled
out at sunrise this morning,” and the merchant asks his partner,
consulting him as to the expediency of beginning business, “ when
Shall we roll out ?”

Nor is it so entirely out of the question, as has been maintained by
some modern writers, that the familiar term fast has been derived
from the same tendency. It is acknowledged to be an American-
ism in its first origin, but it has long since made its way into
England, ascending from the streets into the drawing-room, and
from the slang of the gin-shop to the leading article of the high-
toned review. Its meaning, however, has changed with its pat-
rons; it no longer reproaches the man, to whom the epithet is
given, with actual vice and debauchery, but, at the worst, desig-
nates him as a gay, unsteady, and thoughtless seeker of pleasure.
The prevailing idea seems no longer to be the rapid rate to a cer-
tain bad place, as Fielding suggests, but merely the rapid wearing
out of health and strength by late hours, high living, and con-
tinuous excitement. In this sense Mr. Dickens speaks of a fast
young man in the Christmas Story of 1859. Unfortunately, the
term has been extended to the other sex also, apparently without
much reluctance or opposition. The fast young girl of the period
affects masculine habits, talks slang, drives fast horses, and advo-
cates Women’s Rights. In England the judgment is harsher; the
Saturday Review calls the fast girl-“a young woman who has
lost her respect for men,and for whom men have lost their respect
also.” (July 28th, 1860.)

It is commonly assumed, though with doubtful justice, that the
224 AMERICANISMS.

odd extension of curt Str, into emphatic Sirree, is an effect of the
Western man’s tendency to augment both form and meaning of
the commonest terms. The extraordinary word, in the utterance
extended to a length by no means represented in its form, is how-
ever quite as familiar to the South as the West. A Hard-Shell
Baptist preacher in Georgia is reported to have criticised its use
in this manner: “ Bretheren, it won’t do, this talk that ain’t pri-
mitive; we must give up them worldly remarks—must we not,
bretheren, must we not, sisteren? Yes Str-ree, and no Sir-ree, is
slang terms and forbidden. I don’t like ’em nor no brother don’t
like ’em. I’m determined to set my face aginst them—ain’t ye,
bretherén ?—Yes Sir-ree, hoss! replied his tripping brother behind
him in the pulpit.” (Putnam’s Magazine, February, 1855.)
That the term has found its way to the great cities, also, may be
seen from the following police report: Ina case tried at Baltimore,
a juror was supposed to be intoxicated. “The judge, addressing
the man, said: ‘Sir, are you drunk?’ The juror, straightening
himself up, in a bold, defiant tone replied: ‘No Sir-ree, Bob!
‘Well,’ said the judge, ‘I fine you five dollars for the ree and five
for the 00”” (Baltimore Sun, March 20th, 1857.)

An active young man or a bouncing lass is apt to be admiringly
designated as a roarer, with an evident allusion to some powerful
and formidable animal that roars in the forest or on the prairie.
Here also an effort is made to intensify the expression by a curi-
ous epithet, having reference to the catamount: a specially fine
fellow of great size and strength is called a ring-tailed roarer.
Screaming seems to impress the Western man with the same
sense of strength and valor, for a screamer is another favorite
term of admiration. “Why, boys,” said a Georgia Cracker to a
colored soldier of the Federal Army, during Sherman’s famous
march, “if them’s the kind your regimen is made off, I knocks
under: them’s screamers.” (Recollections of the War, p. 21%.
By a Lady.) If animal spirits are a little too prominent, and
assert themselves with vehemence, they procure for the owner the
name of sorter, though here also the implied reproof is not
unmixed with a certain degree of admiration for the dash and the
daring. “I’m a roaring earthquake in a fight, sung out one of the
half-horse, half-alligator sort of fellows, a real snorter of the
universe. I can strike as hard as fourth-proof lightning and
THE GREAT WEST. 225

keep it up, rough and tumble, as long as a wild-cat.” (Thorpe’s
Backwoods, p. 183, B.)

The Mountaineer, as the man was called who earned his pre-
carious livelihood by “hunting for skins” in the mountains of the
Far West, is fast disappearing before nomadic cities and railways
crossing a continent. Here is his description: “ Mountaineers,
when divested of their hunting-coats of buckskin, appeared in
bran new shirts of gaudy calico and close-fitting buckskin pants,
with long fringes down on the outside seam, from the hip to the
ancle, with moccasins ornamented with bright beads and porcupine
quills. Each, round his waist, wore his mountain-belt and scalp-
knife, and some pistols sticking in their belt.” (Life in the Far
West.) A tow-head, originally nothing more than a light-haired
boy, or, in the Western rivers, a slight ripple caused by some
barely perceptible obstruction, is not unfrequently applied to a
city-man with store-clothes and carefully arranged hair, contrast-
ing with the long matted locks which the backwoodsman gener-
ally affects. The rowser is not only a man who talks very loud
and occasionally yells, but also any startling event or exciting
sermon. “That ar dare (deer), I tell you, was a rowser and no
mistake,” says the old hunter in Stories from the Backwoods,
while an accomplished gentleman is thus spoken of in a novel:
“He is a rouser at making punch, I assure you, though he only
sips it like a lady himself.” (Putnam’s Magazine, January, 1868.)
The English rowghs, common only in London and in small
boroughs at election time, where they are often known as “ lambs,”
abound unfortunately in the United States. They belong to a
turbulent class, recruited largely from the laboring and commer-
cial population; they drink, they swear, but they commit no
crime, save an occasional deed of violence in times when excite-
ment runs unusually high, and are for the most part affiliated
with one or the other of the two contending parties. They are,
however, not often designated as roughs, since they prefer gener-
ally some local name of more or less grotesque form and brutal
‘import, as Dead Rabbits in New York, Moyamensing Hownds in
Philadelphia, or Blood Tubs in Baltimore. The Western rough is
frequently a rowstabout—a term evidently derived from the old
English rouwst, quoted by Jamieson as meaning to disturb. He
_ isa favorite character in the West, noisy, but not necessarily a
226 AMERICANISMS.

rowdy, and frequently a useful member of society in some capaci-
ty which requires hard work and constant exposure. “As the
steamer was leaving the levée, about forty black deck-hands or
roustabouts gathered at the bow, and sang a rude Western sailor’s
song.” (On the Plains. Pwtnam’s Magazine, September, 1868.)
But the most curious of all Westeyn terms for men, is probably
the name of the city of Boston, which by some strange freak of
language has become the generic name of all whites among the
natives of Oregon. “With this force we marched out into the
Indian country, trusting that although the savages were at war
with the Bostons, the devil was dead, and we should elude the
traces of his lineal descendants on this march.” (Trail-Making in
Oregon. Overland Monthly, March, 1870, p. 204.)
Es

THE CHURCH.
THE CHURCH.

Mucu has been said, half-admiringly, half-sneeringly, of the
simple, homespun manner of American religion. There are here
no lofty cathedrals with costly carvings and glowing colors in
window and vault; no stately deans with their canons; even the
bishops have but quite recently adopted the silk apron and the
gilt crozier, which they had found so attractive at the Lambeth
Conference. The Catholic Church alone maintains a sober
splendor, but the stern Presbyterian, with his Puritan abhorrence
of all outward form and ceremony, the hard Baptist, eschewing
alike refinement and culture, and, the zealous Methodist, who
has neither time nor inclination to think of anything but his
holy errand, seem strangely devoid of all that makes religion
attractive to Europeans. Perhaps piety is only the more earnest
in its homespun garb, and the quaintness and simplicity of
religious language is but a reflex, perhaps an heirloom, of the
days when the older English divines also spoke plainly, even
bluntly, and men generally faced the facts of spiritual experience
more boldly than is done now, because they were more closely
inwoven in their every-day life. All the rationalism and skepti-
cism of the New World has not been able to work out the Puritan
leaven of the men in the Mayflower, and if religion is less formal,
perhaps even less orthodox here, it is neither less sincere nor less
fervid than in the Old World.

The most striking feature in our religious life is, no doubt, the
perfect freedom allotted to every one, old and young, high and low,
to choose his own mode of worship. No law prescribes church-
membership, as it is commonly called ; no inquiry is made by high
authorities after the religious standing of candidates for office ;
no control exercised over their attendance on church ordinances,
”

230 AMERICANISMS.

as is done on the Continent of Europe. As the Constitution of
the United States purposely abstains from the mere mention even
of God and of divine things, the citizen also is held accountable
to his conscience alone for his religious convictions. Society is
perhaps less tolerant, and while petitions have in vain been sent .
to Congress year after year for an open avowal of the Christian
faith in public acts, social standing is only exceptionally granted
to men professing openly to be without religion. Besides, every
shade and variety of faith and church organization finds itself
protected here, and Mr. Jefferson prided himself as much upon
being the author of the Statute of Religious Liberty as upon.
having written the Declaration of Independence. Hence names
of new sects and new meanings of familiar terms follow each
other in such rapid succession here, that even the initiated is often
at a loss to account for their origin and precise signification. The
language even has suffered from this reckless spirit of innovation,
although far more yet from the peculiar independence of all
American churches. While in England the ministers of the
Established Church and the better-trained preachers among the
Dissenters are the jealous guaxdians and principal disseminators of
pure English throughout the country, in America no such influ-
ence is exercised by the clergy. The very zeal of the majority,
unhampered by English phlegm and Oxford traditions, leads to a
freer use of the language, and the frequency of extempore preach-
ing prevents, as a matter of course, very careful composition.
Methodist and Baptist preachers were, until lately, kept, partly
from necessity and partly from choice, from. obtaining a high
grade of education, and being generally called upon to address
utterly uneducated hearers, their language was naturally adapted
to their own imperfect training and the ignorance of their congre-
gations. Even the best-educated clergymen were apt to seek new
forms for their new views, or ready to employ popular terms in
times of public excitement, as when the disastrous fashion of
political sermons was still in vogue. Thus they soon went far
beyond their brethren in England, who have often been accused
of allowing much slang and disagreeable yulgarism to creep into
the pulpits, which should give forth pure speech as well as pure
doctrine.

Thus the very word religion itself came early to be abused and
THE CHURCH. 231

to be forced to mean piety. Certain sects began by speaking of
men who wished to get religion, so that the Rev. Mr. Cartwright
could write of his own preaching: “It was remarked by many
that it seemed the easiest thing here, of any place or time they
ever saw, for sinners to get religion” (Autobiography, p. 27); and
of a friend -of his: “ Her husband was a Methodist, and several
of their children had got religion among the young converts. This
lady got powerfully convicted and concluded that she had never
- had any religion.” (p. 8%.) A thoroughbred Yankee boy, of
Keene, in New Hampshire, drew a nice distinction when he said:
“Pa is the piousest man in the valley, but I enjoys the most
religion.” (Putnam’s Magazine, Dec., 1869.) A person proposing
to join a church is expected first openly to come out, that is to
say, to profess his religion, and then he is admitted to member-
ship in the form peculiar to each church, and ever after known
as a professor of religion. The church is not only the build-
ing, but, contrary to English usage, the congregation, after the
apostolic manner, as employed in the words: “ When they had
ordained them elders in every church.” (Acts, xiv. 23.) To join
it, application is made to the pastor,or the deacon; hence the
account given of “Mr. Fips, who wanted to become a member of
Pilgrim church. It would have made him respectable. But
Deacon Flagg replied to his application gravely, ‘ Very sorry, Mr.
Fips, but the church is full. There isn’t a single vacancy. If
there should be one I'll let you know.” (Putnam’s Magazine,
Aug. 1868.) In the Methodist church this open avowal is fre-
quently made by persons who have met with a change, or have
been struck under conviction—a favorite phrase at times of great
excitement—or who have experienced religion. Thus the same
excellent divine, whom we have repeatedly quoted, says: “ When
they were done preaching, they opened the way for persons to
join the church by giving in their experience. If accepted, their
experiences were declared good, and the right-hand of fellowship
was freely given, and there was great joy in the camp; but it was
death in the pot to me.” (p. 67.) Any person who dwells much
upon religious matters, or his own state of mind, is said to be
serious, a term which perhaps originally was used with a sneer,
but now is applied in all earnestness and approbation. In some
localities, especially in the New England States, the church is
2382 AMERICANISMS.

also called a society, in others a parish, without referring in either
case to the original meaning : the former is “a parish, but without
territorial limits; the latter, a society of persons united for church
purposes, but consisting of persons only.”

The building itself is called a church only by some sects; others
followed the opinions of the Puritans, who “held that a church
was a body of Christians, and the place where they met was a meet-
ing-house.” (Elliott’s History of New England, I.,p. 131, B.) This
was but one of the points on which the men of Plymouth deter- -
mined to differ from their oppressors at home. “For,” says an
able writer, N. 8. Dodge, “‘ antagonism was their normal condition
of life. To meet and pass an approaching vehicle on the left-
hand was then, and still is, the custom in England ; they changed
it to the right. It had been customary, from time immemorial,
to kneel in prayer to God-; they changed it to the standing pos-
ture, whether in the family, the social meeting, or in public wor-
ship. Banns of marriage were in their native country proclaimed
in church; they advertised them in the vestibule. The funeral
service of the Rubric was read there at the burial ; they bore their
dead to the grave in silencey They abolished the sign of the cross
in infant baptism, the prostration before the altar in receiving
the holy communion, and the wedding-ring in marriage. The
evangelists and apostles niight not be designated as Saint Paul,
Saint John, and the like, because it savored of Papistry; the
Bible might not be read without comment in public worship,
since it was improper conformity to hierarchical service; and of
holy days none was recognized but Sunday, which they called
Sabbath. Good Friday gave place to the annual Fast Day,
always appointed on Thursday, and Christmas to Thanksgiving
Day in the autumn. The most devout were never to groan aloud
during prayer, nor to say amen; marriages were to be celebrated
by civil magistrates, who not only gave the covenant to the par-
ties interested, but made the prayers; and the melody of viols and
organs in public worship was numbered with ‘Nebuchad-
nezzar’s idolatrous concert of the cornet, flute, dulcimer, sackbut,
psaltery, and all kinds of music.” The church was called meeting-
house, the service the meeting, and the priest the minister. Sunday
began at sunset on the previous evening; thanks were returned
after every meal as well as grace said before, and fish made the
THE CHURCH. 233

Saturday’s dinner instead of Friday’s. Theatres were not per-
mitted, and actors were flogged. Officers of the government were
selected from among church members only, and the latter were
known to have been converted by being able to name the day and
the hour when they had experienced the new birth.” This Puritan
leaven is still as active as ever, and shows its strength nowhere so
strikingly as in matters and terms of religion. With the Yankee,
the meeting-house, with its steeple—the word “spire” is hardly
ever heard in America—has found its way to every part of the
Union; only the stately building of New England is in Georgia
“ built of hewn logs, unceiled. and unplastered, with sliding win-
dow-shutters of planks, having low benches placed as in a school-
room, for seats; it is situated in a grove not far from the village,
near a pleasant spring of water.” (Southern Life, p. 137.)

The inside of the meeting-house is, however, not always so sim-
ple as it was in the days of the Puritans. Even then the high
seats were much in demand, and the yearly seating, as the assign-
ment of seats according to rank and office was called in New
England, gave rise to much silent envy and-open controversy.
The custom still survives in the annual renting of seats in certain
churches, on which occasion the lively competition for choice pews
induces ambitious members to pay often enormous premiums, and
thus fills the treasury of the church without trouble and com-
plaint. The system of pews made its way but slowly into some
of the churches, and the word seat was long used and abused in
this connection. Thus we are told that the Methodists in the
West used “to erect a shed, sufficiently large to protect 5000 peo-
ple from rain and wind, and cover it with boards, after which
they would sea¢ the shed, and collect there people from forty and
fifty miles around.” But “Since the Methodist Church,” says
the Rev. Mr. Cartwright, mournfully, “has risen in numerical
strength and become wealthy, the system of pewed churches is
fast becoming the order of the day,” thus using one of the new

- words of the language. As if in derision of the custom, they speak
in Nantucket of a pew-cart, “a kind of one-horse, two-wheeled,
springless carriage, a sort of pew upon wheels, or a box without
seats, simply to stand up in, and with high sides, around which
runs a rope to hold by.” (N. P. Willis, Home Journal, Oct., 1857.)

‘The word meeting gains a new significance in the compound
234 AMERICANISMS.

canyp-meeting, a term not unfrequently used in ridicule or reproof,
though without a shadow of excuse. ‘ Somewhere between 1800
and 1801,” says the father of Western Methodism, “in the upper
part of Kentucky, at a memorable place, called Cane Ridge, there
was appointed a sacramental meeting by some of the Presbyterian
ministers, at which meeting, seemingly unexpected by minister
and people, the mighty power of God was displayed in a very ex-
traordinary manner. It was kept up day and night, protracted for
weeks; there were from 12,000 to 25,000 people present at times.
It was said by trustworthy witnesses that often more than a thou-
sand persons broke out into loud shouting at once, and that the
shouting could be heard for miles all around..... This was the
first Camp-Meeting ever held in the United States, and here our
Camp-Meetings took their rise.” (p. 31.) The idea is not new.
When St. Francis assembled 5000 of his followers on the plains
of Assisi, and held, what has been called in the records of the
Franciscan order, the Chapter of Mats, the people had no other
shelter but rude tents made of mats, just as at camp-meetings sim-
ple tents and booths made of branches serve the purpose. Nor
does the resemblance end here. The Saint had to moderate the
excesses of fanaticism and penance in which his disciples indulged,
in precisely the same manner in which even backwood-preachers,
as they are called in the West, have now to repress the over-
wrought zeal of their followers.

In the West, specially large and long-continued assemblies of
this kind are called Big Meetings, whilst in the New England
States they are more commonly designated as Protracted Meetings.
Notice is given a long time beforehand, renowned preachers are
announced as coming to the help of local ministers, and the
preaching, praying, and exhorting are protracted for a week and
occasionally even for a longer period. At all of these various
meetings, revivals are frequent, as is well known, but certain fea-
tures of these extraordinary occurrences among the Methodists
have Jed to the technical use of certain words. Thus, persons
who are peculiarly excited to a consciousness of their sinfulness,
and the necessity of seeking salvation, are called anaious mourn-
ers, and led by the minister or deacons to the anvious bench or
scat, a bench near the altar, there to.receive aid and comfort. In
their intense excitement they are apt to become nervous and hys-
THE CHURCH. 235

terical, and one of the symptoms of this state is known as the jerks.
The Rev. Mr. Cartwright calls them a new exercise, overwhelming
in its effects on the minds and bodies of the people. No matter
whether they were sinners or saints, his hearers “would be taken
under a warm song or sermon and seized with a convulsive jerk-
ing all over, which they could not resist, for the more they resisted,
the more they jerked. More‘than five hundred people would be
jerking at once. Proud young ladies and gentlemen, dressed in
silks, jewelry, and prunella, from top to toe, would take the jerks.
At the first jerk you would see their bonnets, caps, and combs fly,
while their long, loose hair would crack like a wagoner’s whip.”
At a large revival, where numbers of Arians attended, there was
a wholesale exorcism ; in that meeting the crowd fell by hundreds;
mourners were grovelling on the ground in every direction; the
cries of the penitents and the shouts of those who had gotten religion
went up without intermission day and night, and amid them all
danced, and whirled, and flew about in seemingly uncontrollable
madness, countless jerkers.

In 1804, a revival occurred in Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and
other Western States, remarkable for another symptom, approach-
ing in its character a regular malady. At the large, open-air
meetings, almost as soon as the sermon commenced, numbers
suddenly fell to the ground, deprived of bodily strength, and some
were violently convulsed. These affections received the name of
Falling Exercises. Whirling Exercises were still more grotesque
affections, in which, during a sermon, persons spun round like a
top for upward of an honr, without experiencing any fatigue,
precisely after the manner of the dancing dervises of the Hast.
Although these symptoms for many years accompanied almost
all religious exercises held in the open air, and attended by large
numbers, it need hardly be added, that they are quite rare now-a-
days, and little encouraged by the majority of preachers.

A church wishing to obtain a minister, depute some of their
number to invite him, and hence a reverend gentleman tells us:
“He was at the head of a movement to give me what ministers
term a call, for I then received a letter from the old pensioners,
asking me to come and be their chaplain.” (Lippincott’s Magazine,
Oct., 1869.) If the call is accepted, the minister is said to settle,
so that the biography of Bishop Asbury mentions “his having
236 AMERICANISMS.

been settled at the early age of seventeen” (p. 137)—a ceremony
which in his case was simple enough, but in many churches is
made the occasion of much ceremony and great rejoicings, giving
occasionally rise to an old-fashioned ¢nfare or installation. He
becomes what in some churches is called a stated preacher, and
assumes now the desk, for the distinction made in England be-
tween the pulpit and the reading-desk is not observed by all the
churches of America, and in New England especially, the words:
' “What we want for our security is that the voice from the pulpit
may concur with the voice from the desk,” would not be very
intelligible to many pious readers.

As these cails, after the first, are very apt to be accompanied by
the temptation of an increase of salary, sneerers have occasionally
pretended to believe that ministers feel bound to see what is
called a Providential Cail in such an invitation. The sneer is,
of course, utterly unfounded, although the offers thus made.
would probably prove irresistible to less unselfish men. Even
where the s¢ated salaries, as they are called, seem moderate, hand-
some perquisites are apt to come in with the rites of the church.
New Year’s remembrances are quite fashionable in large cities,
while in smaller towns and rural districts preachers have to famil-
iarize themselves with a custom peculiar to American churches,
and founded upon true Christian humility: they learn to accept
presents in money, in provisions, and even in clothes, which they
would probably hesitate to accept in any other walk of life. It
is by no means unusual for a liberal church-member to present his
pastor with a supply of linen, a suit of clothes, a new hat, or even
more modest gifts, though more frequently all the members com-
bine and have a dasket-meeting, as it is called in the West, or in
the Eastern States, hold a donation-party. On such an occasion
friends and parishioners appear suddenly-—for it is generally a
surprise-party at the same time—at the parsonage, request the
owner to retire to his study, set his table in the dining room,
loading it with good things, fill his pantry, lay out presents, and
then invite their willing host and his family to join them at the
merry feast. As the salary of ministers is small everywhere out-
side of the large cities, where it sometimes rises to twenty thou-
sand dollars, as in the case of Mr. H. W. Beecher, and as the rules
of the Methodist Church strictly limit the minister’s income to
THE CHURCH. 237

a mere pittance, this method of supplying an addition is as wel-
come as suitable. Cases are, however, known in which the com-
pany was larger than the supply they brought, compelling the
minister to contribute more than his parishioners had done; in
this case his feelings must be akin to those of a poor housewife
who is suddenly called upon to entertain a surprise-party.
During the late war, especially, families were often unable to keep
up the style of entertainment of former years, and it became a kind
of fashion for their friends to drop in unexpectedly, with the tacit
understanding that the use of the house was all the owner had
to furnish. This was, however, but rarely taken literally, and
hence it has been said of them, that “as to surprise-parties, there
was a delightful freedom and absence of form in the notion, but
the mutual friend’s wife. must be an angel if she can appre-
ciate the joke.”

In many churches the minister—a term which stands uni-
formly for the clergyman of the Established Church also, and not,
as in England, only for the minister of a dissenting house of
worship—is both supported and somewhat controlled by his
deacons. The power enjoyed by the latter, especially in the New
England States, has descended upon them from the days of the
Puritans, among whom deacons were men wielding great author-
ity and formidable powers, in worldly matters as well as in the
concerns of the church. Among their duties was that of reading
aloud the hymns given out by the minister, one line at a time,
the congregation, having no hymn-books in those early days,
singing each line as soon as read. Hence was derived the phrase
of deaconing off at a meeting, which is explained by J. R. Lowell
as meaning to give the cue and lead the debate. (Glossary to Big-
low Papers.) As Yankees have a popular proverb that “All
deacons are good, but there is odds in deacons,” the difference
may have given rise to the phrase; to deacon berries, which, we
are told by the same high authority, means, to place the largest
berries on top—we trust without any sly desire to impose,

“To funk right out o’ p’lit’cal strife aint thought to be the thing,
Without you deacon off the time you want your folks to sing.”
(Biglow Papers.)

But why the same word, when applied to a poor, new-born
238 AMERICANISMS.

calf, should mean to kill it, is a mystery to all but Yankees,
among whom the phrase of deaconing a caif is said to prevail to
the present day.

. The minister is, by such and similar means, brought into close
contact with his congregation, and this intercourse is barbarously
called fellowshipping. Fortunately the term—of comparatively
recent origin, and probably unknown before 1813, when it was
first met with by Mr. Pickering—is still confined to ecclesiastical
writings and discussions, and may soon—to use its ill shapen com-
panion—be disfellowshipped (!) altogether. At times it begins to
creep into humorous language, as when an indignant damsel is
made to say: “No, thanky, Miss Randall, Dely Bligh aint such a
fool as that yet; she hasn’t never fellowshipped the minister,
though he did court her, I say for’t, considerably of a spell. I
am glad on it, too.” (Atlantie Monthly, Feb., 1861.) He now hasa
congregation, rarely a parish, a word which is generally used only
in the Episcopal and Catholic Church, and in Louisiana has so
far lost its original meaning as to designate simply the district
of South Carolina and the county of other States. In his official
duties he is, of course, guided by the rules of his church, only of a
marriage he is asked to make a pudblishment of the banns, and in
the case of funerals, two peculiarities may be noted here. The
great distance at which the first settlers lived from each other,
made it often impossible to obtain the services of a minister on
such occasions; this led to the custom, still prevailing even in
densely-settled districts, and especially among the freedmen of the
South, to have funerals, i. e. special funeral sermons preached
some time after the death of the person. As the grief of a crowd
is not expected to be very deep, and the year or two which may
have clapsed since the burial may safely be presumed to have
ullayed even the sorrow of the family, such funerals are apt to
become an occasion for merry-making. This is all the more
likely to occur, as in many parts of the Union, especially in Penn-
sylvania, the custom still prevails—not of giving wine and cake
as formerly—but of those who attend the services returning to
the house of mourning and dining there. No liquor, however, is
offered, and there is nothing convivial in the meal; it is simply a
refreshment offered to those who have come from a distance to
show their respect for the departed. This, however, is also called a
THE CHURCH. 239

funeral, apart from the religious ceremony, and while the duties
performed during the latter have been barbarously called to funer-
alize, the former has escaped the corruption. A somewhat curi-
ous phrase has been made by the aid of this word funeral, which
is apparently purely American. “This is none of your funeral,”
is heard quite frequently as an indirect rebuke for intermeddling,
with the ludicrous undercurrent of thought, that the troublesome
meddler has no right to be crying at a strange man’s funeral.

The word platform, in its frequent application to ecclesiastical
constitutions, is by no means an Americanism. Lord Bacon
speaks of “the exemplar or platform of God” (Advancement of
Learning, p. 225), and Hooker mentions views “conformable to
the platform of Geneva.” “A Platform of Church Discipline,” is
the title of a book printed as early as 1653, in London. (B.) The
use of the word in politics is more likely to be peculiar to America,
and to speak of a plank of a platform, is a genuine and exclusive
Americanism, “not yet naturalized in England.” (Blackwood’s
Magazine, Oct., 1867.)

In his sermons, lectures, and discourses, the American minister
uses better English than any other class of professional men ;
there are very few words which may be said to be either peculiar
to the pulpit or objectionable to the purist. He rarely uses slang,
with the exception of the occasional and unwarrantable introduc-
tion of politics; and on the whole escapes wonderfully well from
the national fondness for big words and picturesque phrases. He
will, perhaps, speak of amenadility with the political orator, and
of accountability, instead of the English accountableness, and
quote Robert Hall as his authority. In the West he may argufy
a point, and find support in Hallowell’s Dictionary, where the
word is referred to various dialects. In Virginia he notices with
pleasure “one who listens well, a respectable, assentatious stran-
ger” (J. D. Kennedy. Swallow Barn, p. 224), and encouraged by
this silent assent given to his position, may forget his curtitude
(Prof. 8. 8. Haldeman), and expatiate too long on the ways by
which we may be happified. Thus he is in danger of becoming
lengthy, a word admirably suggestive, though as yet not admit-
ted to the sacred pages of an English dictionary. A Scotch
critic says, however, forcibly: “This daring interloper has made
good its way in the language. Expressive of a new meaning, the
240 AMERICANISMS.

word must be accepted, whether or no the grammarians and lexi-
cographers approve; and lengthy, whether of American or Eng-
lish origin, will probably remain English while the language lasts.”
(Blackwood, Oct., 1867.) And the master of American English,
J. R. Lowell, says of the same word: “ We have given back to
England the excellent adjective lengthy, formed honestly like
earthy, droughty, and others, thus enabling their journalists to
characterize our Presidents’ messages by a word civilly compro-
mising between long and tedious, so as not to endanger the peace
of the two countries by arousing our national sensitiveness to
British criticism.” (Biglow Papers, IL, Pref.) It is probably
not essential to Mr. Jefferson’s fame whether he may or may not
be credited with the invention of the word lengthily, as stated in
Webster’s Dictionary. If the minister’ summarizes his points, he
uses but a phrase frequently met with in the writings of good
authors, and will be readily pardoned for it; his listeners will
thus escape from the favorite habit of many preachers, renewedly
to impress their points, a word as repugnant to good taste as to
patience. The word solemnizing, in the sense of making serious,
was long condemned as a clerical fault, but like lengthy, it has
forced its way, by its usefulness, into later English diction, and is -
now sanctioned by the best orators, and even an author, so sensi-
tive to the delicacies of language as De Quincey. If he finally
adds one or two improvements, in order to apply and enforce his
doctrine, he may offend Mr. Webster, who refuses to give that
meaning of the word in his unabridged edition, but he will, nev-
ertheless, let us hope, improve his hearers. A quaint allusion to
this part of the service is made in an account of a church at
Windsor, in Connecticut, built in 1709, which had neither pews
nor seats. “Where,” says the chronicler, “during President
Edwards’ long sermons running on to a Tenthly, with a goodly
number of improvements appended, cowld the people find a sitting-
place? Where, indeed, but on the sills and sleepers? Soon, how-
ever, the socicty passed the liberal vote, that the young men
should have the liberty to make a seat upon the beams.” (Put-
nan’s Magazine, August, 1869.) Should he conclude his sermon
without saying, if he isa Southern man, “ Grant to hear us,” in-
stead of “Vouchsafe to hear us,” and if he is a Northern, man,
without asking his hearers to join him prayerfully, instead of
THE CHURCH. 241

devoutly, he may well be commended for having escaped the few
objectionable words with which American preachers, as a class,
can be charged.

The absolutely unlimited freedom enjoyed by every citizen, not
only to connect himself with any church he may prefer, but, if
he can, to found himself a new church, has naturally led to the
rise of sects innumerable, generally known as denominations. It
it, perhaps, not absolutely certain that Americans are really the
most religious people on earth, because, as a young American
lady once assured the Holy Father, to set him at his ease, upon
being presented to him, “they have so many denominations.”

Sometimes these rise within the bosom of a well-known church,
as in the case of the Baptist Church, which counts quite a num-
ber of subdivisions, known occasionally under somewhat peculiar
names. Such are the Soft Shell Baptists, so called on account of
their less stern manners and less rigid principles, which allow
them to be indulgent to certain worldly usages, and to educate
their ministers carefully for the pulpit, while the Hard Shell
Baptists, who call themselves Primitive Baptists, set their faces
like flint—to use their own term—against an educated ministry,
and especially against all foreign evangelical missions. Hence, a
member of Congress in recommending a friend for the position
of Chaplain to the House, could say of him: “Mr. Morris is a
regular member of the Hard Shell Baptist Church, a very pious
man, not of very eminent ability, but just the man to pray for
such a crowd as this.” (B.) The Presbyterian Church thus gave
existence to a new sect, when in 1801 their Synod in the State of
Kentucky censured and silenced preachers, who had taken part
in revivals, which they thought a disorder. These ministers im-
mediately renounced the jurisdiction of the Presbyterian Church
and organized one of their own. “Here,” says the Rev. Mr.
Cartwright, triumphantly, “was the origin of what was called
New Lights. They renounced the Westminster Confession of
Faith and all church-discipline, and professed to take the New
Testament for their church-discipline. They established no stand-
ard of doctrine. Every one was to take the New Testament and
read it, and abide by his own construction. They adopted the
mode of immersion, the water-god of all errorists.” (Awutodiog-
raphy, p. 32.)

: 11
242 AMERICANISMS.

In other cases the new sects became known by the name of their
founder. Most prominent among these, if not by their number,
at least by the publicity of their proceedings, were the followers of
William Miller, known as AMtilerites. Expecting the first judg-
ment, when the dead bodies of the saints would rise, and the liy-
ing would be changed, so that both should be caught up in the
air to meet the Lord, to take place in 1844, they settled their
earthly accounts, bade farewell to their friends, assumed their
white ascension-robes, and prepared for the sounding of the last
trumpet. The 23d day of October, 1844, was the appointed time,
and in some parts of the Union, in Ohio, New Jersey, and Dela-
ware, the astonished traveller could see the highways and byways
thronged with anxious crowds of men and women, while the trees
in the orchards and the roofs of houses were filled with the more im-
patient Willerites, who thus hoped to be nearer to their new home
in heaven. The disappointment on that and several other days,
. which were announced subsequently, rapidly diminished their
number, but they are by no means extinct,-and Mr. Miller, like
Dr. Cumings, continues to foretell the near approach of the
Millennium. Christians (pronounced like the word Christ) has
been a favorite name with several sects, of which some re-appeared
as Marshallites or Stonettes, while the more pretentious Restitu-
tionists of Massachusetts believe in an immediate return of all
things to their original form and purity. The South has its
numerous Campbellites, founded by a learned and zealous Dr.
Campbell, and Thomasites, seceders from his creed, who believe in

the annihilation of the wicked, and a second creation of the good. ° °

The Cochranites of the New England States held public exhibi-
tions of so gross a character that the civil authorities were more
than once compelled to intervene, for the vindication of public
decency. They professed to be the successors of the Puritans of
an earlier day, who derived their name not from the noble exiles
at Plymouth, but from the fancy that they were perfectly pure in
heart and conduct, and completely emancipated from human pas-
sions, a beatific condition which they attempted to prove by dis-
carding all clothing at their public assemblies. Even the simple
Quakers haye their Hicksites, who adopted the name of their first
leader, Mr. Hicks, and are Socinians.

The Dunkers or Tunkers, so called from the German word
THE CHURCH. 243

tunken, to dip, are one of the oldest as well as one of the quaint-
est of American sects. Already in 1744, when Virginia sent her
first Commissioners to Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, in order to
make a treaty with the Six Nations, they went “the next day,
being Saturday, to the Dunkers’ Nunnery, and the Indians‘danced,
drank, and shrieked.” (History of Early Settlements, Wills De
Hass, p. 97.) Branching off in 1724 from the so-called Seventh-
Day Baptists, they adopted several new features, such as a new
mode of immersion, by plunging the candidate three times into
the water backward, love-feasts, and foot-washings, and a costume
and mode of address of their own, and soon grew in numbers and
wealth. Their farms, extending along the base of the Alleghany
Mountains, from Pennsylvania through the fertile Valley of Vir-
ginia toward the South, are marked by careful location, great
thrift, and abundant harvests.
By far the most remarkable of American sects are the Mormons,
a name which the deluded Saints, as they call themselves, are said
to owe in poetical justice to an imposition practised some two hun-
dred years ago. A very clever French writer, the Abbé de la
Mothe de Vayer, engaged, in 1650, in a spirited controversy with a
famous scholar and wit, M.de Montmor. Ina series of brilliant
but whimsical attacks the Abbé plays countless variations on the
name of his adversary, and repeatedly pretends to derive Montmor
from Mormon, which he declares to be the Greek word popyuay,
a scarecrow! Nor does the curious coincidence stop here; for
the fictitious Mormon of 1643—a book. pretending to have been
written by M. de Montmor, but in reality a scurrilous parody—
argued in favor of polygamy! Hence, argues the well-known
Thomas Boys, in Notes and Queries (Jan., 1858), this early French
work most probably furnished the author of the new book of
Mormon, whoever he may have been, with the leading idea and
“many prominent features. The history as well as the shocking
theology—if their creed can be honored with such a name—of this
most gigantic of all impostures since Mahomet’s days, have been
so fully and so admirably described by recent travellers, that noth-
ing need be added here. The Latter-day Saints may well be left
to the just retribution by which they must sooner or later be over-
taken. The Gentiles, as they contemptuously style all outsiders,
are daily encroaching upon their territory, where, according to a
244 AMERICANISMS.

recent President’s message, “Brigham Young is at once spiritual
head of the Church and governor of the Territory of Utah, so
that all authority, secular as well as spiritual, centres in himself.”
They still sing their famous song of invitation at their wood-meet-
ings, a8 they call their assemblies in the open air:

“Come wretched, come filthy,
Come ragged, come bare ;
You can’t look too horrid,
Come just as you air ;”

crowds still come from distant lands, where wretched poverty and
filthy crime rule supreme, in unison with ignorance and supersti-
tion, and dozéns of women are still sealed or scaled—as the varie-
ties of spiritual marriage are called by them—to one husband, in
order to enter heaven through his agency—but their days are
numbered. Mormon rule in Utah has evidently come to an end.
“ A free press has disputed Brigham’s powerful influence over the
minds of his ignorant followers. Honest Federal judges have re-
fused citizenship to the Prophet’s latest recruits, because of their
polygamy, and a large influx of miners of Gentile morals, or no
morals at all, has greatly lessened the overwhelming, political
majority, by which the Saints have long controlled the territory.”
(New York Tribune, March 7, 1871.)

The Shakers deserve mention here only in as much as they are
now confined to America, and the name may hence be considered
an Americanism. Their doctrine also has essentially changed
since they seceded about 1770 in England from the Quakers. They
now derive their name and their worship from their solemn though
shaking dance, and the importance they attach to shaking as
mentioned in the Bible, quoting words like: “The Lord promised
that he would shake the earth with terror,’—“In that day there
should be a great shaking in the land of Israel,”—* He would
shake the heavens and the earth,”—TI will shake all nations and
the desire of all nations shall come,”—and according to the apostle:
“Yet once more I will shake not the earth only, but also heaven,
signifying the removal of things that are shaken, as of things
that are made, that those things, which cannot be shaken, may
remain.” At the same time they declare that the word Desire in
the verse, “And the desire of all nations shall come ” (Haggai,
THE CHURCH. 245

ii. 7), is feminine, that consequently salvation was announced to
come to mankind through woman, the nuptial “Bride of the
Lamb,” and this female Saviour was Ann Lee, the founder of their
sect! She is to them the “Desire” of the prophet, and their
spiritual mother, and as thus redemption is completéd in both
_ sexes, the race must die out, and the Shakers are called upon to
accomplish this extinction by preaching and practising celibacy.

It can hardly be presumed that the Spiritualists, not unknown

to England, but abounding in America, claim any religious

character; at least Mr. Perry, as quoted by Mr. W. H. Dixon, says:

“As a spiritualist, I have yet to learn that we hold anything as
sacred. JI am opposed to any resolution that has the word

sacred in it.’ Their terminology is as trite as their doctrine.

“There is a dark, motley crowd of wizards, witches, and spiritual

rappers, so called, that have sooner or later invested all lands, and

are the common property of the devil,” said that zealous divine,

the Rey. P. Cartwright, long before the famous fox Girls, of

Rochester, in New York, revived the absurd theory of spirits in

heaven or elsewhere communing with men on earth by knocking on

tables and walls. Hysteric women and silly men serve as mediums,

through whom the spirits have spoken much balderdash, but so

far failed to make known a single fact of real usefulness; and

their papers, such as the Spiritual Age of Boston, Massachusetts,

‘advertise sedulously, that “a Circle is held for Medium Develop-
ments and Spiritual Manifestations at Bloomfield-street every

Sunday, morning and evening, admission five cents; and every

Sunday afternoon, admission free.” The naiveté of these organs

of misled enthusiasts may be judged of from the following

anecdote told in the same paper (October 3, 1868) : “ A few evenings
since, as a private Circle of Spiritualists were receiving commu-

nications from the other world from a little child, it ceased
suddénly to communicate, but after repeated solicitations it came

back, and in infantile language said: “There’s a good deal of
difference now, than when I was on earth. Then my dear mamma
used to tell me little children should be seen and not heard; now
little children must be heard and not seen.” And upon the
strength of such revelations, the Insane Asylums of the Union
are filled with hundreds of victims of Spiritualist visitations.
It would be difficult to understand how the practical sober mind
246 AMERICANISMS.

of the American can be so easily led astray, if it-were not for the
insatiable curiosity of some, who are eager to know the secrets of
the other world, and the satisfaction which free and independent
spirits have always found in venturing upon forbidden ground for
the sake of the risk, and in the confidence of their strength to
conquer where weaker minds succumb. It is gratifying to think
how energetically such errors are combated, and how trium-
phantly the fraternal love among all Christians has been proven
by the Union Meetings held in all the States of the Union, where
every sect is represented, and joint prayers are offered for national
as well as individual salvation.
Vv.

2 O LLP CS:
POLITICS.

“Than politics the American citizen knows no higher profession—for it 1s
the most lucrative.”
De Tocqueville.

Tux political language of every nation bears naturally the
stamp of the peculiar character of the laws and the constitution
under which they live, and thus English conservatism is reflected
in the steady maintenance of familiar names and terms, gener-
ation after generation, whilst the speech of the moddle vulgus in
the great Republic changes almost from year to year. The active
participation of the masses, and the extension of the right of suf-
frage to the very lowest and mostignorant classes have, moreover,
favored the admission of so many vulgar and cant terms that in
politics, above all, the line between slang and solemn speech is not
always perceptible. Where appéals are made at every election to
vast assemblies, not unfrequently consisting largely of so-called
Mean Whites, and of Blacks but recently emancipated from
slavery and all its blighting consequences, strong colors must be
used to paint the adversary, and still stronger language to impress
the dull minds. The newspapers join, as a matter of necessity,
in the general hue and cry, and foster the taste for violent epithets
and picturesque expressions. The very heroes of the day are
recommended on the score of their humble origin and modest
occupation—the self-made man is preferred to the accomplished
son of distinguished parents, and to be a gentleman has well-
nigh become an insuperable barrier to success in political life.
From an early period in the history of the republic the people
have felt the indirect flattery of the boast that its great men had
once been among the lowest; it implied the prospect and the
right of the lowest to rise, as self-made men, to the highest. place
of honor. They recollected with pleasure that Roger Sherman

11*
250 AMERICANISMS.

had been a shoemaker, Benjamin Franklin a soapboiler and
printer, and Rufus Hatch a peddler. Henry Clay, the great
Commoner, as his friends loved to call him, was spoken of during
election-time as the Miller boy of the Slashes, and Abraham Lin-
coln as the Raitl-splitter and Flatboatman. Under the presi-
dency of Andrew Johnson, once a tailor, Congress boasted of
Senator Wilson, a journeyman shoemaker, and of Representative
Banks, a blacksmith. Vanderbilt, the owner of a continuous
railway from New York to Niagara, loves to tell how he rowed a
huckster’s boat when a youth, and Dr. Helmbold, the millionaire,
how he began life as a cabin-boy.

Hence also, the tendency to familiarize great men by their-nick-
names, and thus bring them down, as it were, to the level of the
masses. General McClellan was Zittle Mac or Young Napoleon,
Hooker became Fighting Joe, and Sheridan is still Little Phil.
Sherman was known as Mad Tom, and Sumner as the Bull of the
Woods—even the Orleans Princes, who made a campaign under
General McClellan, had to submit to the universal fate, the
Count of Paris becoming Captain Perry, and the Duke of
Chartres Captain Chatters. Nor were the commanders of the
Confederates spared on their side: General Lee was Mas Bob,
Johnston Old Joe, and Longstreet the War-Horse ; Jackson be-
came immortal as Stonewall, and an unlucky namesake as Mud-
wall ; the dashing Cavalry leader Stuart was known as Jed,
Early as Crackers, and poor old General Price, in the West, as
Old Dad. .

Even the name of the confederacy of States, the Union of the
United States was, from the beginning, too formal for the good
people, and the familiar letters U. &., seen on all government prop-
erty throughout the land, were soon universally read Uncle Sam.
The story of its origin, in the year 1812, is generally told thus:
A Mr. Samuel Wilson, invariably called Uncle Sam by kindred
and friends, was an inspector appointed by the government to
receive large supplies for the army, contracted for in New York,
and to be delivered at Troy, on the Hudson. It so happened that
casks and chests were all marked with the initials of the con-
tractor, Elkert Anderson (EH. A.), above and beneath those of the
country, United States (U. 8.) A facetious workman, being
asked the meaning of the latter, in jest replied: “he did not
POLITICS. 251

know, unless they meant Elbert Anderson and Uncle Sam.” The
jest took, was repeated by the other workmen, and by them car-
ried into the army, and recalled wherever articles marked with
the familiar U. S. reappeared in their presence. Thus the name
spread from the Commissary’s barrel of beans throughout the
land, and has never since lost its hold upon the public mind.

Now, J. R. Lowell sings:

“For I have loved my country since
My eye-teeth filled their sockets;
And Uncle Sam I reverence,
Partic larly his pockets.”
(Biglow Papers, 1.)
In the army, it seems, even this designation was deemed too full
and formal, and, as early as the year 1827, it became a familiar
saying among soldiers, to stand Sam, whenever drinks or refresh-
ments of any kind had to be paid for. As they were accustomed
to see Uncle Sam pay for all their wants, to stand Sam, became to
their mind equivalent to the ordinary slang phrase: to stand
treat.

Whilst this is the familiar name of the national government at
home, it is abroad, perhaps, better known as Brother Jonathan.
The name is taken from Jonathan Trumbull, who was governor
of Connecticut at a time when General Washington had come to
Massachusetts to assume command over the army, in the War of
the Revolution. He discovered here such a want of supplies,
ammunition, and even good-will, that the cause seemed almost
hopeless. In this difficulty he found great support in the ener-
getic and wise governor, and thus contracted the habit of saying,
in every emergency, “ We must consult Brother Jonathan.” The
phrase became soon familiar to his aids and subordinates, and
through them to his army; they took it up, and the by-word
spread quickly over the country. Brother Jonathan became,
henceforth, the familiar designation of this country, as John Bull
is that of England, and “since that day,” says a recent writer,
“a great many people have found Brother Jonathan a very help-
ful relative in time of need.” (Overland Monthly, March, 1871.)

Almost all of the technical terms connected with the govern-
ment of the United States, were necessarily those long familiar to
English ears, but many received here a very different meaning and
252 AMERICANISMS.

use from their originals. The use of Government itself, without
an article, and still more sv of an adjective governmental, long
condemned by English authorities as a barbarism, is peculiar to
this country, while the term gubernatorial finds its local limits in
the powers of a State governor, in contradistinction to the national
government. Nor is the special meaning of the Haecutive, instead
of executive officer, for the president of the United States, given
abroad to the term; the Judiciary also, as denoting that branch
of government in which judicial power is vested, is American.
The third branch of the government of the Union, the legislative
body, is in like manner known as Congress, consisting of the
Senate and the House of Representatives. Formerly it was here
customary to speak of The Congress, but the name became soon so
familiar that the article was promptly omitted, and we are assured
that “since the last thirty years in England also, a half-educated
man may speak of The Congress as well as of The Parliament;
but such is not even the conversational practice of well-educated
Englishmen.” Its labors, its powers, and practices, are all called
congressional, and thus Mr. EH. Everett distinguished between
“congressional and official labor.” The Senate, consisting of two
members for each State, the general interests of which they repre-
sent, is presided over by the Vice-President, and it and the House
of Representatives, who are chosen by a certain number of inhabit-
ants, and represent the people more directly, constitute jointly the
legislative branch of government. A Congressman is generally a
member of the House, though some writers apply the term to
Senators also. The States, which form the Union, have the same
three branches, though under different names: the Executive is.
here styled Governor, the legislative branch a General Court (in
Massachusetts), a General Assembly, or briefly the Legislature
(in Virginia). Members are chosen to sit on the Legislature in
many States: “In this year Governor Randolph was to be chosen
to sit on the Legislature, but Mr. Jefferson was long violently
opposed to sucha plan.” (Tucker’s Life of Jefferson, 1, 319.)
This body generally meets or sits at the State-House, a term
either specially made to serve the purpose, or possibly derived from
the Dutch Stadhuys, butin either case peculiar to America, while
the judiciary sit at the Court-House. The latter name is in some
of the Southern States very generally given to the county town,
POLITICS. ‘i 253

and thus Fairfax Court-House and Culpeper Court-House have
become famous in the late Civil War, while the real names of the
towns are utterly unknown to history.

The States, it is well known, claim having given up certain
rights of their own to the Federal Government, reserving, however,
certain other rights necessary to their independence. These latter
have become most fatally known of late as State-Rights, since the
question as to their precise nature and extent was ostensibly the
cause of the late Civil War. The tendency is here, as in Europe,
toward centralization of power, and the Federal Government is daily
growing stronger at the expense of the States. The constitutiou-
ality of every such so-called usurpation of power is necessarily
much discussed, but has received a severe shock in the recent
adoption of two new theories of government. The one was Mr.
W. H. Seward’s device of a Higher Law, first broached by him, in
1850, in a speech made in the Senate, on freedom from slavery in the
Territories. He said: “The Constitution regulates our steward-
ship; the Constitution devotes our domain to union, to justice, to
defence, to welfare, to liberty. But there is a higher law than the
Constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain.”
Vast and vague as the authority is, that may be thus claimed, it
is at least founded upon an alleged law; but another authority has
been appealed to and successfully established in the government,
and this is the War Power, a new word made to meet new exi-
gencies. Mr. J. Q. Adams is believed to have first used it in some
of his State papers, for the purpose of designating the scope of
the martial law, which, in certain cases, necessarily supersedes the
orders of the legislature. Its first actual application is generally
attributed to General Fremont, when he availed himself of his
military authority, as Commander-in-Chief in the West, to declare,
that all slaves were free by the mere presence of the Federal ar-
my. The measure itself was not sanctioned by government, but
the doctrine was adopted, and subsequently made to justify some
of the very boldest steps taken by the Federal authorities.

By the side of the States, the Union contains within its con-
federation Territories, embryo States, as it were, not yet possess-
ing the necessary population to entitle them to representation in
Congress, and a share in the common government. The Execu-
tive appoints their officers, governor, etc., and they are represented
R254 AMERICANISMS.

by Delegates, having a voice, but no vote, on the floor of Con-
egress. Each State is again subdivided into smaller fractions,
which in the Eastern States are known as towns or townships ; in
Louisiana, from the former French régime, as parishes ; in South
Carolina, as districts ; and in all the other States, as cowzties. In
connection with the latter term, Mr. Pickering already notices the
universal pleonasm used by Americans in speaking of the Cownty
of Berkshire, forgetful of the fact that shire (a share) means the
same thing as county.

It has already been stated that in popular language the Union
is, on a larger scale, divided into the North and the South, the
Fast and the West, with a disposition to speak of each of these parts
as of a section, and of its special interest or characteristics as sec-
tional—a distinction which the strong tendency toward centrali-
zation is likely to efface more and more. A necessary political
division, however, is that into districts, of which each contains as
nearly as possible the number of inhabitants which are entitled to
send one representative to the House.

For the purposes of an election, these districts, and often large
cities also, are still further subdivided into prectnets, within
which polls are established. “The result of the election has not
yet been ascertained, as the reports from the outlying precincts
will not be in for several days.” (Richmond Hnquirer, November
8, 1870.)

As the proper arrangement of districts is of the very greatest
influence on the result of the elections, the manner of apportion-
ing, as it is called, their due share of representation to all, is often
a political measure of vast importance, and, it is feared, not always
carried out with undoubted impartiality. Whenever, for instance,
anew Census is held, as the enumeration of all the inhabitants of
the United States every ten years is called, and shows that certain
districts have increased in their population, a new apportionment
has to be made, and in doing this more regard is generally had to
the interests of the party than the rights of the people. The
word has become so familiar to American cars, that it is not
unfrequently used for other purposes also, as when J. C. Neal
speaks of “'Those ladies who get too little in dame Nature’s
apportionment bill.” (Charcoal Sketches, I1., 8%.)

The process of laying out the districts themselves, also, is one
POLITICS. 255

calling for much political ingenuity, and the districting new States,
or redistricting old States, as it is technically called, is an occasion
of intense excitement. It has even obtained a special name—
gerrymandering—trom a Mr. Elbridge Gerry, a° prominent poli-
tician of Massachusetts, who in 1811 first proposed to redistrict
that State in such a manner that those sections which gave a
large number. of Federal votes, might be brought into one dis-
trict. From that time this process, by which one party may
obtain a majority in an election, although the opposite party
have a majority of all voters, has been called after the ingenious
author.

The prevailing fondness for fancy names has, of course, not
spared the Union and its great divisions also, and thus, among
many that are merely local, three such terms, at least, are in uni-
versal use. The Western States, with their youthful vigor and
daily increasing political power, are generally designated as the
Great West ; the New England States, that have so long ruled
the country, are familiarly known as Yankeedom, and the South-
ern States—during the war, the whole Confederacy—as Divie; a
popular term most probably derived from the geographical line
drawn by Messrs. Mason and Dizon, which formerly separated the
free from the slave-holding States. It came first into use when
Texas, anew State that had just joined the Union, was believed
to be an Eldorado, where colossal fortunes. could be made in a
short time; and thousands went there, alone or with their slaves
to begin a new career and accumulate treasures. Negro melodies
used the shortened term, and from them Diaie passed into com-
mon use, as the name of the happy, abundant South. It ought,
however, to be mentioned here, that another version exists of
its origin. A Mr. Dixy is said to have lived during the last
century, when slavery still existed in the State of New York, on
what is even now known as Manhattan Island. He had large
numbers of slaves, many of whom, in the course of his long life,
he sent to the South, to cultivate broad tracts of land which he
owned there. These poor people, torn from their home and their old
associates, looked back with intense longing to the land of their
birth, negroes having in those days a surprising attachment to
localities, and in their memory Dizy’s farms, and all concerning
them, gradually assumed most charming colors. Thus they would
256 AMERICANISMS.

talk and sing of Dizy, till negro-minstrelsy sprang up, fashioned
one of these songs into a ballad, and Dixie was born. The version,
if not strikingly probable, has at all events the merit of reconciling
the Northerner to a term regarded with much dislike and polit-
ical hatred. :

Of really historic names which designate certain parts of the
United States, the Old Colony and the Old Dominion are perhaps
the only two that survive. The former designates the territory
held by the original Plymouth Colony, which preceded by many
years the establishment of a colony on Massachusetts Bay; in
1692 the two colonies were united in one, the State of Massachu-
setts, but the old name still survives, and is cherished by the
descendants of the first settlers. The other name was earned for,
Virginia by her loyalty to the Stuarts during the time of the
Commonwealth. The colonists on the James River refused to
recognize Cromwell and the Protectorate, and strenuously main-
tained their allegiance to Charles IIL, who was then in exile on the
Continent. They even wrote to him, through their governor,
Sir William Berkeley, assuring him of their loyalty, and express-
ing the most earnest wishes for his health, happiness, and restora-
tion to the throne. They also invited the king, who was then at
Breda, in Holland, poor in purse and apparently poorer in pros-
pects, to emigrate to Virginia. Cromwell sent a fleet to -bring
them into submission, and, as Bancroft states it, “they refused to
surrender to force, but yielded by a mutual deed and voluntary
compact.” As soon, however, as news was received of Cromwell’s
death, Charles II. was solemnly proclaimed King of Great Britain,
Ireland, and Virginia, and all writs and processes were issued in
his name, so that he was virtually King of Virginia, in fact, be-
fore he had begun to reign at home, de jure. For onée the Stuart-
king was not ungrateful; he restored the governor, deposed by
Cromwell’s order, to his place, commanded the arms of Virginia
to be quartered with those of Great Britain on the royal escutch-
eon, as they appear on coins struck as late as 1773 by order of
George III., and authorized—at least by tacit consent—the use of
the words Old Dominion. It has been asserted that, with a view to
recognize and cherish similar loyalty elsewhere, the English Gov-
ernment has recently bestowed upon the remaining British prov-
inces of North America the title of “The Dominion of Canada.”
POLITICS. 257

Another division, frequently found alluded to in books as well
as in the daily press, and when tariff questions are discussed in
Congress, of constant occurrence in political speeches, is that of
Atlantic, Pacific, and Gulf States, according to their bordering
upon the two great oceans or the Gulf of Mexico. The latter,
especially, have always had interests and strong claims of their
own, as they alone produce cotton, and long believed that Cotton
was King.

The motto of the new republic, # Pluribus Unum, however
appropriate to the confederacy of many States which constitute
but one great Union, has still the disadvantage of being neither
new in thought nor original in form. The fact is, it was taken
from a modest, metrical composition in Latin, written by Mr.
John Carey in Philadelphia, and entitled: “The Pyramid of
Fifteen States,” in which occurs the following verses :

“ Audax inde cohors stellis ¢ pluribus unum
Ardua pyramidos tollit ad astra caput.”

The three famous words were, of course, here also but a quota-
tion, and the same motto occurs already in 1731 on the title-page
of the Gentleman’s Magazine, published in London. (Overland
Monthly, March, 1871.)

The flag of the United States, containing originally only thir-
teen stripes, alternately red and white, was adopted by resolution
of Congress, June 14,1777, with a Union of thirteen stars on
blue ground “representing a new constellation.” The concluding
words suggested two facts. The number indicated the number
of States in the new Union, and has, hence, been steadily in-
creased with every accession of a new State. The Union itself
was, however, added, because the stripes were in all probability
but a modification of the first republican flag of Boston, which
retained the colors of the old St. George ensign, though the cross
had been abolished by Governor Endicott as a sign of antichrist.
It is frequently stated that the coat-of-arms of General Washing-
ton, containing three stars in the upper portion, and three bars
running across the escutcheon, may have suggested the new flag ;
there is, however, no authentic evidence of such a fact, and it
seems in the highest degree improbable that a young republic, in
the first flush of enthusiasm and liberty, would adopt as its ensign
258 AMERICANISMS.

the heraldic blazon of a modest English house. The Stars and
Stripes of the United States have since advanced to the front rank
of flags among the nitions of the earth, in spite of the poet
Trumbull’s bitter lines, complaining that they
“ Tore the azure robe of night

And set the stars of glory there,

Inscribed with inconsistent types

Of liberty and thirtcen strtpes.”

Sailors laugh at it good-naturedly, and seeing it hoisted, say:
“There goes the gridiron ;” while the Confederates in their day
used to speak of it, in derision, as the Stars and Bars. Stripes
and Stars isan unusual designation, popular perhaps only with
poets for the sake of the rhyme, as in the well-known lines— ~

“Hurrah for the Str¢pes and Stars,
Hurrah for annexation ;
Hurrah for our Yankee tars,
And our Universal Nation.”

A national anthem the great republic has not yet achieved.
The Star-Spangled Banner, written during the war of 1812 by
Mr. Francis 8. Key, when on board a ship lying opposite Fort
McHenry, near Baltimore, over which the American flag was
flying, is probably most generally accepted as such. Its conclud-
ing lines—

“Oh say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?”

never fail to inspire the patriotic heart. It is, perhaps, but in
keeping with the foreign extraction of the vast majority of
American citizens, that the most popular song and the only tune
that can be called national, from its universal popularity, is the
foreign-born melody of Yankee Doodle, which was first printed in
1775, during the siege of Boston.

Congress holds its sessions after the precedent of the British
Parliament; but the same term is applied in some of the States
to special courts of justice, engaged in regulating merely local
affairs, like the granting of licenses or the building of bridges.
The members, who, after English precedent, are styled Honorable,
but, with American fondness for titles, retain the prefix for life,
here have, or try to get, the floor, in order to deliver their speeches.
POLITICS. 259

These are said to be not unfrequently delivered for Buncombe, an
expression which has made its way with a large number of Amer-
ican political terms to England, and is almost naturalized there.
The imported term denotes there false sentiments in speaking, as
pretended enthusiasm or fictitious sympathy. The term origi-
nated thus: “A grave member of the Lower House of Congress,
from the venerable State of North Carolina, representing a dis-
trict, which included the County of Buncombe, in which he
resided, whose style of speaking produced the very common effect
of driving the members from the Hall, was one day addressing
the House, when, as usual, coughing and sneering commenced,
and the members began leaving. He paused a while, and assured
the House that there need be no uneasiness on their part, and that
for himself it mattered not how many left, for he was not speak-
ing to the House, but to Buncombe.” (Richmond Compiler,
August 17, 1841.) Henceforth Buncombe became the generic
name for any constituency, and politicians, who speak not on
what interests their audience, but what may influence those who
have chosen them as their representatives, are said to be talking
Buncombe. An English writer thinks “This parable, explaining
the origin of Buncombe, would form a very useful] text to set up,
handsomely illustrated, over the Speaker’s chair in Parliament.”
(Blackwood, April, 1861.) With us the word has suffered much
by constant use, and already in 1856 we find: “That a great deal
of all this (celebration of Washington’s birthday) was duncom
(sic) and bogus patriotism, is an opinion very possibly entertained
by many of the judicious and grave of our readers.” (Harper’s
Magazine, Editor’s Hasy-Chair, April, 1856.)

The work done by Members of Congress is very largely influ-
enced by agents from without, and by certain established usages
of their own. The former is collectively called the Loddy, a term
which, originating in the German Lawbe, a bower or small sum-
mer-house, meant for many centuries nothing more than a small
hall or entering-room, preceding a larger room. In America, the
rooms and passages surrounding the hall, in which legislative
bodies hold their meetings, soon monopolized the term, and in a
short time the men who assembled there to exercise whatever
outside pressure they could bring to bear upon the legislators,
were themselves called the Lobby. All who had petitions to be
260 AMERICANISMS.

granted, contracts to be given, or favors of any kind to be bestowed,
either went themselves or sent well-qualified agents to Washing-
ton, to lobby their cause, as it was called. Capitalists used the
power which wealth gives, even where no bribery was attempted;
high social standing was made serviceable, and even beauty and
the charms of a silvery voice were not wanting to secure the votes
of susceptible members. “A committee,” said the New York
Herald recently, “has been sent to lobby a new appropriation for
our Post-otfice through the House.” (Jan. 13, 1871.) And a
young lady of great personal attractions, but not equal artistic
endowments, was thus held to account: “Oh, Miss Vinnie Ream,
lobbying is all very well, and even button-holing has no harm in
it; but to go and smile bewitchingly till green banks bring forth
golden butter-cups—isn’t that a leetle too much?” (Chicago
Evening Post, Feb. 7, 1871.)

The members themselves are apt to have some favorite project
which allows them to appear generous while they act from a self-
ish motive; in that case they are said to have an ave to grind.
The incorporation of a trading company, the chartering of a new
railway, the renewal of a valuable patent—all such schemes are
axes to grind. The term is attributed to J. K. Paulding, but
occurs before his time in a newspaper sketch in the style of Ben-
jamin Franklin’s “Too much for your whistle.” It introduces
a boy, who was induced by a clever fiction to turn the grindstone
for another man to grind his axe. (Professor 8. 8. Haldeman.)
“Special legislation in behalf of private interests is one of the
curses of this country, otherwise so blessed by the smiles of Divine
Providence. The number of aves which are taken to the various
State Capitols, to be grownd at the public expense, is perfectly
enormous.” (New York Tribune, March 23, 1871.)

As many members are apt to be in the same position, pat-
liamentary usage has established a system of Jlog-rolling, as it
is called, by which they engage to help each other mutually.
The term is taken from the habit of loggers, in the great lumber
regions of the Northern States, to help each other in the hardest
work they have to perform—the rolling of their immense logs
from the place where the tree has been felled, to the water on
which they are to be floated down. Each logging-camp thus
assist the others in accomplishing a work which would be beyond
POLITICS. 261

the power of any single one. In like manner, one member of the
legislative body, unable to command sufficient votes for his own
purpose, says to another member in the same position: Vote for
my bill and I will vote for your bill; and this is called log-rolling.
The process is especially resorted to by a new class of men, that
has lately come into prominence, applicants for large grants of
public lands to companies chartered to build railways, lay deep-sea
telegraph lines, or to engage in other great works of national impor-
tance. The frequent impudence of their demands and the perti-
nacity with which they pursue their end, have brought them the
unenviable name of land-grabbers. They are thus referred to in a
sketch characterizing a recent governor of California: “ Haight has
made, on the whole, a good governor. He has fought rigorously
the ring of land and money gradders, and his course on this
* question has made him feared and disliked by them; but with the
people generally it has made him popular.” (Boston Advertiser,
January 7, 1871.)

In more recent times log-rolling has lost much of its former
prestige, as now-a-days all schemes of importance are taken up
and pushed through by rings, combinations made outside the
House, by whose activity and ample means everything is
prepared beforehand, and all interests are secured, before the
matter is reached by the House. Men who are not in the ring,
either from conscientious scruples or because they command
no influence on the floor, are called outsiders, and are left owt in
the cold. Wire-pulling is not an American custom exclusively, as
the figure of speech is as old as the Marionettes of Italy and
France, on whose miniature stage the actors were set in motion
by wires, which the exhibitor pulled from above; but wire-working,
as it is also called, has probably reached a higher degree of perfec-
tion here than abroad. “You can have no idea of the extent to
which wire-pulling is practised in the Congress of the United
States,” wrote already poor, querulous. Miss Martineau; “every
man of the floor seems but to move in obedience to some power
on the outside.” Great skill in this art is facetiously called
sculduggery in the West. Pipe-laying, on the contrary, is an
original term here, derived from a fictitious and treacherous
correspondence, which pretended to give an account of the method
by which voters from Philadelphia were brought to the polls in
262 AMERICANISMS.

New York, while the fraudulent scheme was concealed under the
form of a contract for the laying of water-pipes from the Croton
Aqueduct. The whole scheme was first denounced by the press,
then examined in Court, and discovered to have been devised
purely for the purpose of casting odium upon a political party,
It made, however, so deep an impression upon the public, that
the term pipe-laying was at once incorporated in the dictionary
of political terms, and is still used to designate the employment
of persons as voters, who are not entitled to vote, by fraudulent
means. Two terms applied to special classes of bills are of very
recent origin, but have already established themselves too firmly
in political slang to allow any hope of their speedy disappearance.
Pincher is the curious name applied —probably in the Legislature
of Pennsylvania first—to a bill which promises to secure a pecu-
niary reward to those who are interested in its defeat! Of the
other, Professor 8. 8. Haldeman says: “American demoralization
and ‘sentimental delicacy rivalling that of London thieves, who
call a handkerchief a wiper, has carried rooster into the halls of
republican legislation, where it indicates a bill, or proposed law,
which will benefit the legislators—and no one else—for as the
rasorial fowl scratches for his sustenance, so his figurative name-
sake is supposed to scratch the dunghill of modern legislation.
The term was in 1870 extended from the bill or law to the
proposer of it.” (Letfer, February 6, 1871.) A new word, not yet
found in our dictionaries, is the name of persons delegated from
the two Houses for the purpose of devising an agreement on some
point in dispute between them; as they form a Conference-
Committee, they are individually known as Conferees. “The Con-
ference-Committee on the Appropriation Bill failed. The Conjferces
on the part of the House would not agrec to the proposition of
the Senate to raise the salaries of all the United States Judges.”
(New York Zribune, February 27, 1871.) To this class belongs
also the Floater, a candidate representing several counties, and
therefore not considered directly responsible to any one of them.
The term originated in Texas and has never become very general:
“J. W. Lawrence, Esq., requests us to withdraw his name as a
candidate for /loater in the district composed of the counties of *
Fayette, Bastrop, and Travis.” (Texas Stale Gazette, July 16,
1853.)
POLITICS. 263

The English term ¢o rat, as applied to members who suddenly
back out from a position they have long maintained, is in America
replaced by the equally suggestive term to crawfish or crayfish,
derived from the peculiar mode of locomotion of the animal.
The use of the word originated in the West, but has become quite
general. “General Wise,” said the Richmond Enquirer, “craw-
Jished awfully ; he has actually appeared in a United States Court,
and, what is more, has complimented Judge Underwood on his
courtesy and other good qualities.” (May 13, 1870.) When a
measure, odious to one party, is to be forced through by the
strategy of the other party, the former are apt to attempt delaying
the final vote by every available device, and this, as has been stated
elsewhere, is called filibustering. One of the means employed for
this purpose is to deliver long speeches, merely to consume time,
and for this the expression ¢o gas, has, of late, come into use. Gas
itself has long been acknowledged to be an essential element of
many popular characters, and R. W. Emerson says with rare candor
and great severity: “’Tis odd that our people should have not
water on the brain, but a little gas there. Can it be that the Ameri-
can forest has refreshed some weeds of old Pictish barbarism,
just ready to die out—the love of the scarlet feather, of beads,
and of tinsel? The English have a plain taste. Pretension is
the foible especially of American youth.”

If the lobby and the rings are said to be bent upon filling their
purses at Uncle Sam’s crib, as the National Treasury is often
called, the members are sometimes accused of providing for
their own interests not less eagerly. While in Congress they
receive, besides their regular salary, mileage, a somewhat extrava-
gant compensation for their travelling expenses from home to
Washington and back again. Constructive mileage is paid when
the members are only supposed to have gone home, and to have
returned to the seat of government, without having actually
been absent. ‘This is the case, for instance, when one Congress,
as it is called, expires on the 3d of March, and the next Con-
gress begins its sessions on the 4th of that month: all the mem-
bers who hold over, 7. ¢., are re-elected for a new Congress, are
paid their full mileage as if they had returned to their home and
then came back to Washington. The matter is trifling as far as-
the majority is concerned, but in the cases of members from dis-
264 AMERICANISMS.

tant States, as from the Pacific coast or New Mexico, the sum
assumes gigantic proportions. It was thus that “Dr. Miller, the
new Senator from Georgia, who had been kept out of his seat
since 1868, and only sat four days in the last Congress, was
allowed fourteen thousand dollars back pay.” (Washington
Patriot, March 7, 1871.) It is a painful fact that, besides this
compensation, members are frequently accused of enjoying, like
other officials of the government, certain perquisites of their
position, which are known by the offensive slang term of pickings
and stealings. The figure of speech is taken from the habit
of loafers and thieves to loiter on the wharves of seaport towns,
and of picking out flakes of cotton from the bales that are there
lying about in great numbers, or of stealing even larger quan-
tities. The sweepings are more exclusively the side-earnings of
lucrative offices, of which a humorous writer says: “ Sweepin’s,
they tell me, is quite a circumstance in New York; the seweepin’s
of the Post-Office is about three thousand a year, and they say
the sweepin’s of the Custom-House keep eighty-nine 2.40 horses
agoing night and day.” (Josh Billings’ Sayings.) A curious term
has, of late, sprung up in the South, to designate the necessary
expenses for purchasing legislative votes and newspaper influence,
in order to get even routine-business safely done. These are
called Chicken-pie. J.G. Tracy, State Printer of the State of
Texas, having failed in obtaining a partner’s share in a Galveston
paper, was accused by the owner of the latter, that he had offered
him, besides the purchase-money required, “ slices of chicken-pie,”
thus fastening upon him an unenviable notoriety. When the
term for which a Member was elected, expires, he returns into
private life, but frequently is rewarded for his services by an office,
in proportion to his merits or his political influence. Some of these
offices in the gift of the administration are peculiar to the United
States, as, e. g., that of Surveyor, an official who surveys all the
inspectors, weighers, gaugers, and other employés in a United
States Custom-House, and enjoys a very large income and patron-
age. Another such office is that of Naval Officer, whose duty
it is to receive copies of all manifests and entries in the Custom-
House, to estimate duties, examine accounts, and perform other
responsible duties, for which he receives a liberal salary and en-
joys large perquisites.
POLITICS. 265

Tt is well known that the political doctrine of rotation in office
prevails in the United States. Few offices are held “ during good
behavior,” outside of the Judiciary; all others change with the
result of the presidential elections every four years. General
Harrison is generally credited with having first used the phrase
and applied the principle that Zo the victors belong the spotls,
meaning by the latter word all the offices in the gift of the gov-
ernment. By this rule the President becomes the head of an
army of several hundred thousand office-holders, who depend
entirely on his will, and whom he can at pleasure deprive of their
position, from the humble light-house keeper in Maine to the
great minister at the Court of St. James. J. R. Lowell explains,
therefore, pointedly, in his Glossary, the term spoils as meaning
“the object of political ambitions!” while his hero, Hosea Biglow,
spells it, of course, never otherwise than spiles. When the poor
office-holder, whose tenure is at best limited to four years, is
superseded by a successor, he is, in political language, beheaded
or decapitated. “The axe,” wrote a correspondent from Wash-
ington, “is still doing its bloody work, and heads are flying off
in all directions. The clerks in the Treasury Department be-
gin to feel anxious, as the work of decapitation will soon make
an end of them also.” (New York Herald, August 5,1869.) Not
even the ministers, here called secretaries, are exempted from this
rule, as they are not, like their English namesakes, responsible to
Congress, but simply advisers of the President, whose Cabinet
they are by courtesy said to form. In this capacity they are
called upon, for instance, to furnish periodical, reports of what
has been done in their respective departments, and upon the basis
of these papers the President founds his official communications
to Congress, known as Messages.

In the process of electing those officers which are chosen by
the people—a class including unfortunately even the Judiciary-—
and its representatives in the legislative bodies of the Union and
- the individual States, many words occur, either entirely new, or
used in a modified sense, as compared with their meaning in Eng-
land. Popular sovereignty is naturally the fundamental doctrine
of the republic, vindicating for the people the right of self-gov-
ernment, and consequently of choosing its own rulers and officers
of every kind. A few of the latter are, however, still elected, not

12
266 AMERICANISMS.

by the masses directly, but by proxy, as it were; thus the Presi-
dent is, at least nominally, not chosen by the people, but by
Electors, who are voted for at the presidential election. But
whenever an election is to take place, from the Chief Magistrate,
as the Executive is frequently called, to the town-constable, a
regular campaign is inaugurated. Thisis the grandiloquent name
for the simple English term “contest,” the time between the
primary meeting and the election itself; sharply but not unjustly
criticised by James Grant White as “bloated, army-bumming
bombast.” (Words and their Meaning.) As soon as the time ap-
proaches for an election, the friends of the different candidates
for office meet first in private to discuss their chances, 7. ¢., their
popularity, and their usefulness for the party. As to their quali-
fications for the office, they are considered a matter of course;
the German proverb: “to whom God gives an office, he gives the
sense for it,” finds here its fullest application ; besides, the Ameri-
can never doubts his ability to do everything, from keeping a
hotel to ruling a nation, and, what is more, he generally does it
better than one would expect. The whole of the candidate’s life
is ransacked to find events, successes, or votes, out of which may
be made political capital, a term purely American in its origin,
though long since transplanted to England, and naturalized there
in the political slang dictionary. “ Political capital!” exclaims
an indignant writer of Tory principles; “one might just as well
speak of a man’s moral capital!” (Blackwood, October, 1867.)
If he has been in political life before, his record is carefully
searched to find out if he is sownd, that is, if he has always voted
strictly with his party, and can, therefore, not be reproached with
inconsistency by his opponents, since that is the unpardonable
sin of the politician. Often it is not enough to ascertain the
soundness of the candidate; it must also be proven that he has
on all occasions come out flatfooted in behalf of his party and
all party measures. The term is of Western origin, and derived
from the manner in which men place their feet firmly and “ flatly”
on the ground, when engaged in a tussle or personal combat.
“Now the committee of the vestry . . . put their foot flatly down
on auricular confession and priestly absolution.” (The Row at
St. Clement’s Church. Philadelphia Bulletin, March 23, 1871.)
Should he be found wanting in this aspect, he is called shaky,
POLITICS. 267

as not. being firm and resolute in his principles; or he is denounced
as weak in the knees, that is, unsettled in his political convictions
and infirm of purpose. “ General Butler is setting a good.example
to his weak-kneed brethren, which will do them good.” (New
York Times, Sept. 7, 1870.) The shaky and the weak-kneed poli-
tician is quite sure of being dropped by his inexorable party, as
soon as he ceases to be useful. Should the candidate prove to
have always stood up bravely for every measure adopted by his
party, and to have resisted with energy every effort to over-
throw or thwart it, he is said to have backbone. “Men do not
know how to resist the small temptations of life, from the same
deficiency in their dorsal arrangements (!). Backbone is the mate-
rial which makes an upright man, and he must be firm on all
points, if he would pass scathless through the struggle of life.”
(The Republic, March 17, 1859.) The abolitionists of former days
affected the term especially; thus Mr. Wendell Phillips said,
that “General McClellan cannot end the war. He has no back-
bone ;” and Miss Anna Dickenson even spoke disparagingly of the
President, saying, that “if Mr. Lincoln had backbone enough,
which he has not, he would not tamper or treat with slavery, but
abolish it at one stroke, at once and forever.” At times this
soundness refers to a particular tenet, as in the days when the
whole country was in great excitement about the question, whether
the new State of Kansas should enter the Union as a free State,
or admit slavery within its borders. Thus a man in favor of the
latter alternative was, half-humorously, half-contemptuously, said
to be sound on the goose, as J. R. Lowell sings—

“ Northern religion works wal North, but its ez suft ez spruce,
Compar’d to our’n for keepin’ sound, sez she, upon the goose.”

(Biglow Papers, II, p. 88.)

Was it because slavery was looked upon at the South as the goose
that laid the golden eggs, which was accordingly killed in due
process of time? Now, sound on the goose means simply to be
stanch on the party question, whatever that may be for the
moment.

A politician of the right stamp, unmerciful to his adversaries,
and inexorable in exacting every inch of his followers, is called
dyed in the wool; and even poor General Taylor, whose success
268 AMERICANISMS.

in Mexico led to his death at the White House, as the President's
modest niansion is called, was at one time claimed by the party
“as a democrat dyed in the wool, as a democrat of the Jeffer-
sonian order of 1798.” (New York Commercial Advertiser, May
24, 1847, B.) The great Daniel Webster once illustrated the origin
of the phrase, by relating an adventure of his own. Students in his
time of college-life were in the habit of riding on horseback to Dart-
mouth College, where he was bred, and rented a pasture there for
their horse till the end of the term. So he went also, in his
homespun clothes, and with his books in a pair of saddle-bags,
He “had the blues for many days after his arrival,” he would
add, with his hearty laugh, “ because a drenching rain had washed
the indigo from his new suit dyed im the wool at home, into hig
skin, coloring it deeply, darkly, beautifully blue.” (College Cou-
rant, January 21, 1871.)

When these general questions are satisfactorily settled, a caucus
is called, to decide on the men and the principles which are to be
presented to the people in public meetings and through the press.
This word, it is well known, has been traced to various sources,
and it can hardly be said that the mystery is yet fully explained.
Classic scholars, with that enthusiastic love of antiquity which
admits of nothing good that is not ancient, claim the ancestry of
the term for the Latin-Greek “scyphus,” the name of the cup
which Joseph used for divination (Genesis, xliv. 5, 15), and
which was carried off by his brethren in their bag. More liberal
linguists have raised the question, if cawcws might not be con-
nected with the Latin joculare, or the German gaukeln, in both
cases referring to the fact that the caucus predestinates by appa-
rent, if not actual, chance what is to be done hereafter. The only
historical basis is the authenticated fact that, in the year 1763, a
caucus was held, since such a meeting is mentioned by that name
(Caucus-Club) in Adams’ Diary. Dr. Gordon, in his History of
the American Revolution (1788), traces the term still farther back
into antiquity. He says: “The word is not of novel invention.
More than fifty years ago (1735), Mr. Samuel Adams’ father, and
twenty others, one or two from the north end of town (Boston,
Massachusetts), where all ship-business is carried on, used to
meet, make a caucus, and lay their plans for introducing certain
persons into places of trust and power.” (L, p. 240.) Hence it has
POLITICS. : 269

been generally supposed, and not without good reason, that the
word was originally derived from meetings held by ship-caulkers
on strike, or with a grievance, and that it gradually assumed its
present meaning. The word has crept slowly into English par-
lance, and is now used in Great Britain in the sense of a private
assembling of politicians before an election, where candidates are
chosen and measures of action agreed upon. In America its
privacy is not an essential feature, and even the Senate of the
United States holds its caucus meetings in public, at least so far
as the press isconcerned. R. W. Emerson, in his Lssay on Poli-
tics, says: “Ifaman found himself so rich-natured that he could
enter into strict relations with the best persons, and make life
serene around him by the dignity and sweetness of his behavior,
could he afford to circumvent the favor of the cawcws and the press,
and covet relations so hollow and pompous as those of a politician ?

Here, in these preliminary assemblies, the great principles of
the party are laid down in a compact form, to which the candi-
dates are expected to swear allegiance, and to devote all the influ-
ence of their official position. They are embodied in a platform,
a word new only in its application to purely political principles,
while it has long been used in matters of church discipline or
faith ; a plank of a platform, meaning one of the principles of
which the latter is constructed, is, however, a pure Americanism,
and hardly yet naturalized in England. The tendency to carry-
ing out such figures of speech to its last extremes, is well shown
in the phrase: “every plank and splinter of the platform,’ used
by an energetic writer in the Providence (Rhode Island) Journai.
After the platform, which in our day is generally expressed in
sufficiently vague terms to allow great latitude, the caucus will
generally agree upon a Jicket, a word taken from the actual
ticket or ballot which is dropped into the ballot-box at the time
of election, and. on which the names of the candidates are written
or printed. It means, in this case, the whole list of candidates
agreed upon, which are to be presented to the. people for ratifica-
tion. It undergoes, however, often before its actual use, many
changes, and only when a man adopts the whole list as made up
by his party, is it called a clean or straight ticket; but if he takes
off one or more names to substitute others which he prefers, the
ticket is.scratched. At times the party itself is divided into frac-
270 AMERICANISMS.

tions, each one of which rejects some candidates of the others,
and the result of such a split in their own ranks, is a split ticket,
while aman voting for some candidates of his own party and for
one or more of his opponents, would deposit what is known asa
mixed ticket. Sticker is the familiar name of a candidate printed
on a slip of paper with the back gummed, to be pasted over the
name of another candidate by those who wish to vote a split
ticket; the term originated in 1860 in Pennsylvania as a mized
ticket. The candidates thereupon begin the campaign; they run
for an office, with American haste and energy. Hence the Rey.
Mr. Cartwright says: “The first time I ran for office in Sangamon
County, I was on the North side of the river, as they say in Eng-
land, electioneering.” (Autobiography, p. 262.) Generally he begins
canvassing the county or the State, and to stump it, as the indis-
pensable electioneering tour is now very generally called—only
the candidate for the presidency being considered exempt from
the duty of presenting himself in person before the people to solicit
their suffrages. Sometimes, however, a mass meeting is previously
held, such as were known as monster-meetings in Ireland during
Mr. O’Connell’s agitation. The term was first used in America
during the famous Hard-Cider Campaign for and against General
Harrison and Mr. Tyler; now it is universal], even the French and
the German languages having adopted and fully naturalized the
word in their scanty, political dictionary. When the great Rad-
ical, Mr. Beales, summoned the people to assemble in Hyde Park,
August 5, 1867, London was placarded all over with the announce-
ment of the proposed Mass Meeting, and German papers abounded
with similar advertisements, when the victorious troops were
expected to return from France. In the meeting, or on the stump,
the candidate is expected to define his position, a phrase probably
invented by Virginians, who became accustomed to it in the hal-
cyon days of democratic supremacy, when eloquent members were
‘in the habit of making unanswerable speeches of a day or two in
the Legislature, or filled with their definitions the columns of the
then famous paper, Mr. Ritchie’s Richmond Enquirer.

On the floor of Congress, during his visits home, when address-
ing ‘his constituents, and above all on Fourth of July orations
the Member of Congress vies with the politician generally in
kind of exaggerated patriotism, which is designated as Spreaa-
POLITICS. 271°

Lagleism. It consists, mainly, in boundless praise of the great-
ness, power, and glory of his native land, and is, therefore, rather
too severely denounced by the North American Review as “a
compound of exaggeration, effrontery, bombast, and extravagance,
mixed metaphors, platitudes, defiant threats thrown at the world,
and irreverent appeals flung at the Great Being.” (October, 1858.)
The Eagle of the United States, on such occasions, is made to
spread its wings and to soar high—hence the term. The same
bad taste, when found in oratory not confined to political subjects,
is commonly called high-faluting, a term variously traced back
‘to a corruption of high-flighting, high-floating, or even to a Dutch
word verlooten—to flay by whipping. While Spread-Eagleism
pleases all enthusiastic patriots, the cultivated dwellers in cities,
as well as the plain-spoken multitudes who delight in the oratory of
the stump, high-faluten, as it is frequently written, is almost always
addressed to educated or half-educated audiences, who are supposed
to appreciate bombast, big words, and high-sounding phrases, with
or without meaning. An after-dinner high-faluting speech,
attributed to the great Daniel Webster, reads thus: “ Men of Roch-
ester, I am glad to see you, and Jam glad to see your noble city.
Gentlemen, I saw your falls, which, I am told, are a hundred and
fifty feet high. Gentlemen, Rome had her Cesar, her Scipio, her
Brutus, but Rome in her proudest day had never a waterfall a
hundred and fifty feet high! Gentlemen, Greece had her Demos-
thenes, her Pericles, her Socrates, but Greece in her palmiest
days had never a waterfall a hundred and fifty feet high! Men
of Rochester, go on! No people ever lost their liberties,
who had a waterfall a hundred and fifty feet high.’ That the
vein has not run out, we may rest assured after reading the
following extract from the Report of Legislative Proceedings in
Indiana: “The American people—and we are proud to call
ourselyes that—are rocked in the bosom of two mighty oceans,
whose granite-bound shores are whitened by the floating canvas
of the commercial world; reaching from the ice-fettered lakes of
the north to the febrile waves of Australian seas, comprising the
vast interim of five billions of acres, whose alluvial plains, romantic
mountains, and mystic rivers rival the wildest Utopian dreams
that ever gathered around the inspired bard, as he walked the
Amaranthine promenades of Hesperian gardens, is proud Co-
272 AMERICANISMS.

lumbia, the land of the free and the home of the brave.” (My.
Heywood’s Speech on Gravel Roads, January 21,1871.) A writer
on the “Good Looks of Americans” closed his article with the
modest assertion: “It is even easier to come into this world of
America, say the midwives, than into any other world extant.”
(Putnam’s Magazine, March, 1853.) And yet the word—and
perhaps the substance, if substance it can be called, with the
shadow—has found its way to the Old Country, and the Slang
Dictionary (p. 154) assures us that high-faluting is now quite
common in Liverpool and London, East, while the London Times
uses it soberly, in the sense of “ fustian, high-sounding, unmean- +
ing eloquence.”

When the election at last approaches, the excitement, fanned
by all these preliminary measures, runs, of course, very high, and
violence is not rare; but only one feature in the process of voting
is known by an American term. This is the dallot-bow stuffing, a
crime which consists in filling the boxes intended to contain the
votes deposited during the day, previous to the election, with a
number of ballots, so that when the whole is examined by official
judges of election, the majority is securely established. The term
is not yet used in England, because the ballot has not yet been
introduced; but as this is impending, the stuffer, as the criminal
is called, will no doubt soon be known there also.

Among the great questions that have divided the nation, and
hence have occupied the public mind more pre-eminently, some,
dating from the time before the late Civil War, have become known
by special names.. Already in the earliest days of the Republic,
the Blue Laws of New England excited uncommon interest at
home and abroad, and recent publications of great value have
once more directed public attention to this remarkable feature in
American history. Connecticut is still often mentioned as the
Blue State, unquestionably from its being the original stronghold
of the Presbyterians, who were once known by the contemptuous
name of Blueskins, as Butler says:

“twas Presbyterian true blue,
For he was of the stubborn crew
Of errant saints, whom all men grant
To be the true Church Militant.”
(Zudibras, I., p. 26.)

*
¢

POLITICS, 273

Even generations afterward, when the inhabitants of the land of
steady habits were accused of having made signals along the coast
for the benefit of the British, during the war of 1812, these lights
on the coast of Connecticut were called Blue Lights, adding a
new word to the vocabulary of treason. The charge, it is said,
was utterly unfounded, but the term has survived to this day, and
is frequently used in political controversies. The famous laws of
New Haven, also, perhaps the most striking illustration of the
innate tendency of the human heart toward intolerance, are
known as the Blwe Laws, thus joining them to the Blue Laws of
all the colonies of New England, among which they were the last
to secure a sad pre-eminence. Their authenticity has often been
denied, and Dr. Peters’ well-known book on the subject has been
declared a libel; as, for instance, by a well-informed correspond-
ent of Notes and Queries (Vol. XI. p. 821), writing from the’
State Library at Hartford, Connecticut. They are, however,
repeatedly quoted by good authorities, as by Judge Haliburton
(English in America, I., p. 814), and are confirmed beyond any
doubt by the reprint of the “ Abstract of Laws of New England,”
in Governor Hutchinson’s Collection of Papers, London, 1655,
where the identical provisions may be found. They fully illus-
trate the characteristic words of the melancholy lawgiver of
Shawmut, that “he had left England because he did not like
the Lord Bishops, but that he could not live under the Lord
Brethren.”

It is aquestion more curious than important whence the term
blue originally came. <A patriotic “ Antiquarian’ of Hartford”
claimed, in 1838, that it was applied to the New Haven code,
from the simple fact, that the first printed laws of that colony
were sent out on blue-colored paper. As he fails to adduce any
proof for his statement, the conclusion can hardly be admitted ;
for there is abundant evidence that the term blwe was known in
England long before, and used in a very similar mauner. It is
not improbable that, quite accidentally perhaps, an allusion was
made to the extreme Puritan zeal of the Presbyterians for a literal
following of Scripture, by referring to the “ribands of blue,”
enjoined upon the Israelites. (Numbers, xv. 38.) Or it may be,
that the annotator of Gray’s Poems explains the matter, when he

states that the poet’s blue aprons bad reference to the preachers
12*
&

Q274 AMERICANISMS.

in blue aprons, of those times, when persons were admitted to
preach who wore blue aprons in their trade. This is evidently
the meaning of a cotemporary political squib, in which a visit to
a church is called a going
“ to a lecture,
Where I a tub (pulpit) did view,
Hung with an apron blue,
’Twas the preachev’s, I conjecture.
His use and doctrine, too,
Was of no better hue,
Tho’ he spoke in a tone most mickle.”

(Loyal Song.)
The same term of diwe apron had, in the mean time, been applied
to the Parliamentary party also, as a reproach, because it con-
sisted so largely of men in humble situations of life. Thus it was
especially used after the Restoration, as a term of ridicule and
contempt, as in Butler’s lines :

“Can fetch in parties (as in war
All other heads of cattle are),
From the enemy of all religions,
As well as high and low conditions,
And share them, from blue ribands down
To all dlwe aprons in the town.”
Hudibras, p. 3, c. III. 1, 870.)

This species of ridicule was, almost as a matter of course, car-
ried over to New England, and used in the colonies, as it had been
at home, by those who wished to bring the institutions of the
early Puritan colonists into disrepute and contempt. The term
blue was perhaps even more extensively used there than in the
mother country, and was more especially employed to characterize
the laws as brutally strict aid bloody, and yet not without their
whimsical oddity. It is certainly not without a quaint and almost
ludicrous air that an article like the following could appear, little
more than a hundred years ago, in an English newspaper, printed
in the colonies :

“ MILFORD, CONNECTICUT,
“Noy. 21, 1755.

“ After perusing a false and scurrilous letter, printed at New

York, signed Edward Cole, it was thought proper that the same
POLITICS. 245

should be publicly whipt, as tending to beget ill will, and brush-
ing a disunion in the several governments in America, the con-
trary of which, at this time, and present situation of our affairs, is
much wanted; accordingly it was here, at 4 of the clock this
afternoon, after proper notice of drum, publicly whipt, according
to Moses’ Law, forty stripes, save one, by the common whipper,
and then burnt.” (Connecticut Gazette, Nov. 29, 1755.)

It must, however, not be concluded from these suggestions
that Blue Laws, in this sense of the word, were strictly confined
to the New England States. The early settlements in Virginia,
with all their abhorrence of Puritanism, enacted very similar
regulations. Here also swearing was severely punished ; here also
the church required attendance on all its services, under heavy
penalties, and here also domestic discipline was enforced by public
laws, only the church was the Established Church of England,
and the fines were all paid in tobacco.

Captain Grose gives still another version, which may account
for the strength derived by the epithet blue from an additional
meaning. Ie states that Coventry was formerly famous for dye-
ing a dlue that would not change its color, and could not be dis-
charged by washing, Therefore the epithets of Coventry Blue
and Jrue Blue were figuratively applied to persons who would’
not change their party or principles on any consideration. As
the Presbyterians were equally famous for their stern and sturdy
eadherence to their own convictions, the term was perhaps as
generally as deservedly applied to them in this sense also. What-
ever may be thought of these stern Puritans as lawgivers, their
memory is dear and sacred to all New Englanders; they cele-
brate the day on which they landed at Plymouth, the 22d of
December, as Forefathers’ Day, and they love to speak of them
reverently and affectionately as

“The Pilgrim Fathers—where are they ?—
The waves that brought them o’er
Still roll in the bay, and throw their spray
As they break along the shore ;
Still roll in the bay, as they roll’d the day,
When the Mayflower moor’d below,
When the sea around was black with storms,
And white the shore with snow.”
‘(John Pierpont.)
276 AMERICANISMS.

During the war of the Revolution the term continental acquired
a new meaning in America, being applied to all that concerned the
colonies as a whole, even before they were united into a Confede-
racy. Hence their troops and their paper-money were both Con-
tinental. “Delaplace,” says a recent writer, “had about as much
respect for the Continental Congress as Allen had for Jehovah,
and they respectively relied upon and feared powder and ball
more than either. In fact, the Continental Congress was then
but a shadow, for it had no existence till six hours afterward,
when it assembled in Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia, and its
authority was hardly acknowledged in prospect, even by the
armed patriots in the field.” The slang term, Continental Damn,
almost universally applied to the utterly valueless Continental
paper-money of those days is, nevertheless, traced back to a very
different origin by an acute and positive scholar, James Grant
White. “The phrase seems to me a counterpart, if not a mere
modification, of others of the same sort—a tinker’s damn, a troop-
er’s, etc., and as the troops of the colonies were called Continental-
ers or Continentals during the war, and for many years afterward,
it seems to me probable, that the phrase in question was at first a
Continental?s damn, from which the sign of the possessive was
gradually dropped.” (Words and their Uses, p. 396.) A political
doctrine of much notoriety, and likely to gain in importance, is
called the Monroe Doctrine. My. J. Q. Adams first originated
one part of this famous doctrine: that which declares the Ameri-e
cau Continent, even where not yet actually occupied by settlers,
as no longer open to colonization by European powers. The
second part dates only from the year 1823, and originated with
Mr. Monroe, who was then President of the United States. As
the former State-paper was directed against certain reputed inter-
ferences of Russia in the Northwestern part of the continent, so
this manifesto was intended to meet similar presumed intentions
on the part of the Holy Alliance. It declared, in substance, that
any extension of the system of government, as it prevailed in
Europe, to any part of this hemisphere, would be looked upon as
“dangerous to our peace and safety.” The doctrine has been
strictly maintained ever since, and found its last practical illus-
tration in the successful effort to relieve Mexico from a foreign

ruler and French armies.
4
POLITICS. ‘ 207

Among the later sources of political excitement which have
deeply agitated the public mind, and seriously threatened even a
disruption of the Union, were the three doctrines of Free Love,
Free Sovl, and Free Labor. The first-mentioned is not peculiar
to America in name or in principle, and having failed in spite of
being never in any way impeded, so that even the “right of suf-
frage, and a husband every four years,” do not promise content,
is likely to be entirely merged in the more comprehensive ques-
tion of Women’s Rights. The principle of Free Soil, on the con-

‘trary, American in form and in practice, as opposed to Slavery,
has led (it need not be explained how) to a terrible war, and the
utter extinction of the Peculiar Institution, as Slavery was long
called. The question of the day, full.of import here as in the
Old World, is that of ree Lador, as far as it involves the impend-
ing conflict between Capital and Labor, the term itself having”
been transferred, from its first use in opposition to Slave Labor, to
the independence of the workman as regards his employer.

American politics abound in catch-words, the great majority
of which pass away with the accident that gave them birth, while
others please the fancy of the populace, or acquire, by an unex-
pected success, such a hold on the public mind as to secure to them
a longer lease of life. One of these is as Iudicrous in its origin as
tenacious in its persistency in the slang of the day. The story
goes that General Jackson, better known in American history as
Old Hickory, was not much at home in the art of spelling, and
his friend and admirer, Major Jack Downing, found therefore no .
difficulty in convincing the readers of his “ Letters,” that the Presi-
dent employed the letters O. A. as an endorsement of applications
for office, and other papers. They were intended to stand for
“All Correct,” which the old gentleman preferred writing Ol
Korrect, and hence they are used, to this day, very much in the
sense of the English “All Right.” To the question how a conya-
lescent is, the answer comes back: “Oh, he is quite 0. X. again!”
The term has found its way to England, and is quoted in the
Slang Dictionary (p. 191), though without explanation.

A far more serious phrase is the Manifest Destiny of Mr. Web-
ster, which fairly represents the mischievous power of such slang
words. Designed originally for the expression of a perfectly jus-
tifiable doctrine, that. America was intended by Providence to be
278 AMERICANISMS.

a republic, and a refuge for all who wished to be free, it was soon
found to be a convenient cloak for every measure of aggrandizement
or violence. It was Manifest Destiny that conquered part of
Mexico and purchased Alaska; it is Manifest Destiny that Cuba
should be annexed and Canada ceded to the United States. J. R.
Lowell terms it justly a phrase characteristic of “that national
recklessness as to right and wrong,” of which Mr. Birdofredum
Sawin, in the Biglow Papers, is the very incarnation. Before
the abolition of slavery the Underground Railway had become quite
an important feature in Northern efforts to aid escaping slaves,
and to provide for-their future, and a grievous cause of complaint
on the part of Southerners against the Abolitionists. The sub-
stance having passed away, the name, no doubt, will soon be for-
gotten.

Nullification, another term full of weighty meaning, will, on
the other hand, probably retain its place in the national speech as
long as the Union lasts, though its meaning changes with the dif-
ferent phases through which the country passes. The term was
transplanted into American politics as early as 1798, when, on the
passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Legislatures of Vir-
ginia and Kentucky adopted certain resolutions, drawn up chiefly
by Jefferson and Madison, one of which declared that, when the
* Federal Government assumed powers not delegated to it by the
States, a nullification of the Acts was the only rightful remedy.
But the word and the idea had a very different and far more
serious significance as used by Mr. Calhoun. As interpreted by him,
aullification was an exclusively Southern principle, amounting
to open and absolute defiance of the laws of the land and the
constituted authorities. Its legitimate fruit, secession, was de-
nounced as treason long before it led to civil war, even so far’
back as the dark days, when Non-Intercourse and Embargo Laws
seriously threatened the prosperity of the country. Since then,
the ominous word has every now and then been heard in faint
iInurmurings, now in one, now in the other section, but the horrors
of the late war will do more than all policy and legislation can do
to lay the grim spectre.

Mr. Calhoun has often been credited with another such phrase,
very popular at one time, and often revived as the occasion offered—
Masterly Inactivity. It was by him employed in speaking of the
POLITICS. 279

acquisition of Cuba, which he deprecated, alleging that when the
proper time came the island would gravitate to the United States,
and in the mean time the policy of the government was a masterly
inactivity. The term, however, was not new, having peen used in
the British Parliament repeatedly, and attracted much public
attention during the first French Revolution. It has been sug-
gested that the idea originated in the prophet’s words, “their
strength is to sit still.” (Isaiah, xxx. 7.)

Difficulties which were grave enough to call for the use of arms
had as yet but rarely disturbed the peace of the Union. A Whis-
key War in Pennsylvania, arising from troubles connected with
illicit distilleries, survived long in the memory of men, and was
in 1838 followed by the so-called Buckshot War in the same State.
The well-known statesman, Thaddeus Stevens, was accused of a
desire to retain Joseph Ritner as Governor of the State of Penn-
sylvania for a second term, after he had been defeated at the elec-
tion. This led to serious disorders; the troops were called out,
and orders were issued that they should have their cartridges
loaded with “buckshot and ball,” from which circumstance the
short and unbloody war received its name.

The late Civil War has produced a smaller crop of political
terms, and even slang words, than might have been expected. .The
Peculiar Institution, as Slavery had long been called, because it
was peculiar to the Southern States, was, of course, one of the
principal causes of the calamity. The word arose in connection
with the abuse to which the term Jnstitution has been subjected
in all its uses. Whatever is looked upon as a permanent and
essential part of any system, is apt to be so designated by careless
writers. “Garroting, as an institution, may be said to be almost
extinct in New York.” (Tricks and Traps of New York, p. 4.)
Even the usually careful writers of the New York Tribune once
said: “Woman cannot be counted out and classified as a mere
appendage. She is an institution, and hereafter must receive the
most genera] culture and recognition.” (August 11, 1858.) The
buzzards of Charleston are gravely described as an “ institution of
the city ;” and when Mr. Seward visited China, a correspondent
wrote: “ On that morning the visitors were, for the first time, made
acquainted with an Eastern institution, which, though doubtless
entertaining as a topic for future narrative, is seldom amusing as
280 AMERICANISMS.

an actual experience. At an early hour a typhoon of great severity
swept over the bay, destroying a vast amount of property, and
causing the death of hundreds of natives.” (New York Times.)

The evils of the Peculiar Institution brought about finally the
Secession of ont Southern State after another. They seceded, that
is, they broke the compact into which they had entered when the
Union was formed, and went out. Hence, the Union-men on the
other side, or Federals, as they long preferred being called, fought
for the Union against rebellion. The soldiers soon learned to be-
stow nicknames upon each other; the Southerners were Secesh
or Rebs, or, more good-naturedly, Johnny Rebs. “There was a
notion about that the leading Zeds, that is, the Rebs who had
property, would have to forfeit, and that the leading patriots
would find that loyalty was not only beautiful, but also profitable.”
(Once a Week, May, 1871; p. 506.)

Even the more expeditious Johnny, familiar already in many a
word, as in Johnny-cakes, had to answer the purpose, and a recent
writer was very well understood when he wrote: “Just enough
of excitement and peril was there in hunting these cattle, wild
almost as the buffaloes on the prairies, and in bringing them
safely in, in spite of the vengeful pursuit of the enraged Johnnies.”
(Putnam’s Magazine, October, 1868.) The Northerners were
Yanks, or Biuebellies (from their blue uniform), or Boys in Blue,
a term which has since become the official name of certain half-
military associations, frequently consistfig of negroes. Nor were
names wanting for the different fractions of political parties,
though at the South not much diversity of opinion was allowed.
The North had, besides the familiar party-names, its Doughfaces,
Northern abettors of Slavery, perhaps deriving their names from
an appreciation of the kneadable character of dough. J. R,
Lowell explains the term in his Catalogue Raisonné as meaning,
“A contented lickspittle, a common variety of Northern politi-
cians,” and alludes to it again in the lines—

“Each hon’rable doughface gits jest wut he axes,
An’ the people—thur annual soff sodder and taxes,”
(Biglow Papers, 1, p. 51.)

It is said that John Randolph, of Roanoke, in denouncing the
famous Missouri Compromise as “a dirty bargain,” also branded
the eighteen Northern Congressmen, who helped to displace

,
POLITICS. 281

Mason and Dixon’s Line, as dowghfaces, and that the epithet at
once passed into the slang dictionary of politics. Then, there
were Copperheads, so called from the contempt entertained for the
snake that bears that name, or from the poor Redman, who used
to be thus stigmatized ; they were Democrats, and retorted upon
violent Union men by calling them Miggerheads. Butternuts were
the sympathizers with the South in the North and the Middle
States: the term was derived from the color of the uniforms worn
in the early part of the war by Confederate soldiers in the West,
which, being homespun, were dyed brown with the juice of the
butternut (Juglans cinerea). The most advanced among the re-
publicans, who were willing to sacrifice every constitutional right
rather than give up the Union, were called Radicals, or from the
lips of their adversaries contemptuously Rads. “Burrell isa good ,
fad, and has as much right to embezzle a little as Reed had.” (New
Fra, April, 1871.) The third party in the strife, the slave, who
had before been.a chattel, and called a nigger, became gradually,
as his importance was more clearly. perceived, and finally made
itself portentously felt at the polls, a negro, a contraband, and a
freedman. In familiar intercourse, he appeared suggestively as
darkey, a term not unknown in England (Slang Dictionary, p.
117), or humorously as an unbleached American. The Colored
Man, once popular at the North as well as at the South, has
almost disappeared, since the difficulty of deciding in the use of
this euphemism between the quadroon and the “negro so black
that charcoal makes a chalk-mark on him,” has become manifest.
It is said that the freedmen, in the first glow of their new rights,
proposed to call the Whites Plain People, in return for the term
Colored People, by which they were designated themselves.
Among the terms brought out by the war is the old Scotch word
raid, so well known to all readers of Scott’s poems, from the lines—

“Widow and Saxon maid
Long shall lament our raid.”

(Lady of the Luke.)
The word, meaning a warlike invasion on horseback into the
enemy’s country, and derived from the verb to ride, assumed new
life and new force by the brilliant raids made on both sides,
and often producing unexpected results. Officials, who were not
expected to expose themselves to the fire of the enemy, like quar-
termasters, commissaries, etc., were nicknamed bombproofs, while
282 AMERICANISMS.

the long-forgotten bummer reappeared on the flanks and in the
rear of the two armies. The bummer may be a cousin of the
bumble-bee, as far as his erratic movements and pilfering propensi-
ties are concerned; but he is, far more likely, descended from the
German Bummler, a man who goes about without aim and pur-
pose, and lives on the fruits of other people’s labor. In German,
the term is used good-naturedly, and has nothing offensive in its
meaning; here, however, the practice of stealing is inseparable
from the word. Hence, Major Nichols makes the bummer give
this account of himself: “Look hyar, Captain, we ain’t so bad
after all. We keep ahead of the skirmish-line allers; we lets ’em
know when an enemy’s a comin’, and then we ain’t allers away
from the regiment. We turns over all we don’t want ourselves,
aud we can lick five times as many Rebs as we are any day.”
(Sherman’s Great March.) J.G. Leland’s Hans Breitmann, who,
having himself been a bummer, as he has since become an
“Uhlan,” reports that the old original bummer was “a man
named Jost, belonging to a regiment of Pennsylvania cavalry,
whose proficiency in dumming, otherwise looting, in swearing,
fighting, and drinking lager-beer, raised him to a pitch of glory on
the Federal side, which excited at once the envy and the admira-
tion of the boldest bushwhackers and the gauntest guerrillas in the
Confederate host.” Occasionally, the bummer was called a buffalo,
a term peculiar at first to North Carolina, and thence spreading
over the South.

The Jayhawkers were a more offensive class of men, combining
murder with marauding, and were famous before the war already,
during the bloody strife carried on in Kansas. The term is not
American, but an importation from Australia, where it is said to
have been coined by convicts, and came to us by way of Cali-
fornia. They fought in Kansas often side by side with the
equally ill-famed Border-Ruffians, a term invented by the New
York Herald to designate the bands of lawless men who infested
the borders of some of the Western States, but especially Kansas,
waging relentless war against all parties alike. The terrible state
. of things there led the New York Tridune, some time previous,
to speak of. Bleeding Kansas, and the expression conveyed so
exactly the feeling of thousands of sympathizers with the Free-
soil movement, that it was at once adopted, and became a rallying-
cry, which will not soon be forgotten.
POLITICS. 283

The Mossybank, on the contrary, was the man of the South,
who secreted himself in a remote forest, or an inaccessible swamp,
in order to escape conscription. His name was derived from the
quaint fancy that he was determined to keep in hiding till “ the
moss should grow on his back—” as German students used to call
the oldest veterans at the university, Bemooste Hdupter (moss-
covered heads).

The immense bounties paid at the North to volunteers led to a
new trick and a new term: men would receive in one State a
bounty of many hundred dollars, enlist, join their regiment,
and run away after a few days; they went into another State,
enlisted once more, receiving a second bounty, and sometimes
repeated the experiment several times in succession. They ob-
tained the title of bownty-jumpers ; while at the South, a man
who dared not return after the war was over, and left his country
to escape the consequences, was called contemptuously a rat.
The Musical-Box of the Confederates was also known as Jeff
Davis’ Box: it was the humorous name given by the men to the
lumbering, ill-built army-wagons, which were apt to creak hor-
ribly for want of greasing; but their Wooden Horse, which was
at one time thought at the North to be an infernal-machine, to be
sent into New York: or Boston Harbor, was a secret society,
organized for political purposes, and dissolved as the latter ceased
to exist. The old Bastille, and its painful memories, were revived
in American speech when the term was applied to the secret
military imprisonment of suspected sympathizers with the South,
a measure silently deprecated but passively consented to by the
Hickory Unionists of the Border States, a large and influential
class of men, who, like Dante’s fallen angels, impaled upon some
of the iciest spears of his terrible irony—

“non furon ribelli,
Né fur fedeli a Dio, ma per sé foro.”
(Edward Spencer, Helectie Magazine, December, 1870, p. 662.)

It is curious that the same term has recently been revived in Eng-
Jand also, where it is used as a slang term to denote a prison or
lock-up, its abbreviated form steel being, however, the favorite
expression with the lower orders. (Slang Dictionary, p. 71.) The
poor prisoners were rarely said to have been “captured ;” but like
284. AMERICANISMS.

personal property that was taken swiftly, seized and thrust into
a bag, soldiers also were bagged. “We stole upon the Secesh un-
awares, on the other side of the creek, and by pouncing upon them
all of a sudden, we dagged the whole lot.” (Louisville Journal, Sep-
tember 7, 1864.) A more cruel word, in the true sense of that term,
was during the war but too frequently applied to the disposal of
peculiarly obnoxious prisoners. They would be intrusted to a
guard to be conveyed to the nearest headquarters; but when the
latter reached the place to which they were sent, the report was
usually, “ Prisoners were Jost,” and no further inquiry was deemed
necessary. “The two horse-thieves were escorted to the county-
town by some forty or fifty gentlemen, most of whom had been
aggrieved by the robbers. But as they approached the wood near
Vandalia, all fell back except five or six, who soon disappeared in
the forest. When they rejoined their friends on the turnpike, they
simply declared that they had Jost their captives, and thereupon
all returned to their homes.” (St. Louis Democrat, July 14, 1863.)
Even the battle did not escape the tendency to give to all things
nicknames. The “boys,” with a witty turn of the military signi-
ficance of the word, were in the habit of terming a battle a drevet-
hell!

Two much discussed terms are shebang and skedaddle. The
former, used even yet by students of Yale College and elsewhere
to designate their rooms, or a theatrical or other performance in a
public hall, has its origin probably in a corruption of the French
cabane, » hut, familiar to the troops that came from Louisiana,
and constantly used in the Confederate camp for the simple huts,
which they built with such alacrity and skill for their winter-
quarters. The constant intercourse between the outposts soon
made the term familiar to the Federal army also. “Many a poor
fellow,” says an old soldier, “who enlisted to do hard fighting,
lost the number of his mess, and was carried out from his shebang
to his long home.” (Overland Monthly, March, 1871.)

The word skedaddle even crossed the Atlantic, and was once
gravely discussed in Parliament. It appeared. in print, probably
for the first time, immediately after the battle of Bull Run, and
was at once caught at and repeated all over the country. In answer
to inquiries about its origin, some Irishmen at once claimed it as
their own, deriving it from their sgedad-ol, which means “scat-
POLITICS. 285

tered all,” and naively suggested that one of their valiant country-
men might have uttered the words while running away from Bull
Run. It cannot be denied that in an old Ivish version of the
New Testament the word is used thus: “I will smite the shep-
herd and the sheep of the flock shall be sgedad-ol.” The soldiers,
at all events, were tickled by the sound of the word, which
served to give a humorous appearance to a somewhat ignominious
act, and thus it spread, appearing in the reports of correspondents
of London journals. The Times noticed it particularly, and
repeated the phrase, “A Northerner, who retreats, retires upon
his supports, but a Southerner is said to skedaddle.” Thereupon
Lord Hill wrote a letter to prove that the term was excellent
Scottish, well known in the North of England also. It is true
that in Ayrshire and Dumfrieshire people use it quite frequently
to describe the spilling of milk or water from a pail. Milkmaids
are heard to say, “ Mind, you are skedaddling all your milk,” and
farther North the dropping of coal from the bucket is also called
skedaddie. The probability of this derivation is much strength-
ened by the fact that the word exists-in the kindred Scandinavian
dialects, as Swedish has a term skuddadahl and Danish its skye-
dedehl, with exactly the same meaning: what therefore the Scotch
may not have done—importing the word into the army—may
have to be credited to the numerous Scandinavians from Wiscon-
sin. A facetious writer in the Louisville Journal was probably
the first to trace the word to a still more ancient form. He de-
rived it “from the Greek verb oxedavvuyu, to scatter or disperse
tumultuously,” and its infrequent aorist oxédaoa, used by He-
rodotus and Homer, the latter of whom employs also the noun
oxédaozs in the sense of an emphatic scatteration. (Iliad, XIX.
171— XXIII. 162; Odyssey, I. 113, as quoted’in Crusius’ Lexi-
con.) The English Slang Dictionary endorses this view, declar-
ing that Lord Hill and the Times were both in the wrong, and
attributing the odd word to some professor at Harvard, who may
have set it afloat, utterly unconscious that the bantling would
meet with such unexpected success. For whatever it may mean
or wherever it may originally come from, there is something
so descriptive in the term, that it is likely to maintain itself in
our speech in spite of all grammarians, and will probably be proof
against all attempts to remove it. Its very success in the two
286 AMERICANISMS.

armies speaks in its favor; for at the time when General McClel-
lan was making his vain efforts to reach Richmond (in 1863),
even the French princes on his staff had picked up the novelty,
and it was gravely quoted in some French publications abroad.
Short phrases also became, at times, very popular, and have not
lost the prestige yet, which they acquired during the war. Such
was poor Mr. Lincoln’s naive expression, when he was asked why
he did not make an end to the war, and replied, that few knew
what a big job it was, but, with his marvellous cheerfulness and im-
plicit trust in the nation, added: “If we just keep pegging away
it “ll all turn outright.” The term may possibly be taken from the
shoemaker’s patient work, but to peg means at the same time to
strike, and Mr. Halliwell already quotes: “I gave him such a
pegging,” meaning such a beating. The phrase All quiet on the
Potomac, since repeated in many a song, and familiar as a com-
mon expression for an undisturbed state of things generally, be-
came stereotyped on the nation’s mind by its constant repetition
in the War Bulletins of Mr. Cameron, then Secretary of War.
The fact that almost every Federal Commander-in-Chief, when
disappointed in his efforts to break through General Lee’s lines
and to enter Richmond, professed in his official reports to have
—not fallen back—but changed his base, made the phrase quite a
by-word at the North as well as in the South. To this day,
therefore, it is used as a humorous way of admitting a defeat, or
at least the necessity of trying once more in some other way.
Thus an enthusiastic writer, recommending to the public his new
invention of a Gentleman’s Pocket Spittoon, writes thus: “For
years my attention has been called to the necessity of a change of
base in the matter of tobacco-spitting, from the public floor,
under the public eye, to some more private receptacle, under the
individual care of the devotee.” (New York Tribune, February 2,
1871.) It is well known, that as far as the war was concerned,
the final conqueror at once superseded the phrase by adopting
the new resolve: * To fight it out on this line.” Of more humble
meaning, but infinitely diversified is the term, to flank, which,
from the strategy of the generals, descended in the mouth of pri-
vates to very lowly and not always honorable meanings. When the
men wished to escape the attention of pickets and guards by slip-
ping past them, they said they flanked them; drill and detail and
POLITICS. ‘ 287

every irksome duty was flanked, when it could be avoided by some
cunning trick. Soon, however, honesty itself was thus treated,
and the poor farmer was flanked out of his pig and his poultry,
and not unfrequently even the comrade out of his pipe and
tobacco, if not his rations. The height of strategy was employed
in these various flank maneuvres, when the Commissary could be
made to surrender some of his whiskey, and thus it came about,
in the South at least, that to flank the whole bottle was a phrase
expressive of superlative cunning and brilliant success.

Among the minor details of the war that produced new terms,
may be mentioned the word sorghum pulling or tugging, as found
in the line: “We hear in this county of several marriages, one
or two hops, some sorghum-tuggings, and any number of gum-
suckings, for the holidays.” (Richmond Dispatch, December 20,
1870.) The curious term has its origin in the name of the Chinese
sugar-cane (Sorghum saccharatum), which was very largely culti-
vated in the South during the Civil War; syrup was made from it
in large quantities, and became soon the general substitute for
sugar, which could not be obtained. Hence sorghum became not
only itself a favorite with soldiers and all classes of society, but
soon acquired a general meaning, denoting anything specially
pleasant or desirable. As the people of the South had always
been fond of molasses stews, in which the boiling molasses was
pulled or tugged out into long strings, the same was now done
with the sorghum-molasses, and hence the name.

Since peace has been restored, the great work of Reconstruction
has gone on uninterruptedly for six years in the South, apparently
unsuccessfully, although the formal restoration of the Union was
accomplished. This process, also, has given rise to some peculiar
terms. To secure the loyalty of conquered Southerners a multi-
tude of oaths were exacted of them, and among these two assumed
new names: the Amnesty Oath, which secured pardon according
to the terms of an amnesty granted by the President, and which
was irreverently called “ Damnasty-Oath” by those who swallowed
it, and the still more hateful Jron-clad Oath. General B. F. But-
ler, sometimes considered the author of all those peculiarly harsh
and severe measures, nicknamed Jron-Clad, spoke of these oaths
in 1870, thus: “Oaths have become odious in this country by
reason of their frequency and their iron-clad character. They
288 AMERICANISMS.

have become as cheap as custom-house oaths or dicers’ oaths. No-
body seems to care much for them.” In 1871, he said, however:
“Every giving way that Congress had so far allowed, had been
the death-knell of some black or white friend of the Union. He
hoped that the tron-clad oath would never be repealed. It was a
patent of nobility for royalty, referring to the Ku-Klux outrages.”
(New York Tribune, February 2, 1871.)

The necessity of providing loyal officers for the States, whose
citizens were almost all disabled from taking these oaths, without
which they could not hold office, required the employment of a
number of men from the North, who flocked to the South in
search of employment and emoluments. Some performed their
duty faithfully and wisely, and rose rapidly in the confidence and
esteem of Southerners, being by them chosen to fill high places,
as governors, senators, etc. But a large number, also, sought only
their private interest, and having entered the South poor, quickly
became rich; these the suffering people soon began to designate
as Carpet-baggers, from the only piece of luggage which they had
brought with them on their arrival from the North. Colonel
Joseph Hodgson, editor of the Afai/, a paper published at Mont-
gomery, in Alabama, is said to have invented, or at least to have first
used in print, the opprobrious term, which quickly became popular
as a name for all adventurers in search of fortune in the South.
“The general drift of public sentiment is, that the carpet-baggers,
scalawags, ex-slaves, ex-slaveholders, rebels reconstructed, rebels
unreconstructed, and Southern loyalists should be left, for a brief
period at least, to fight out their own battles, in their own way;
and that if the nation is ever again to become a party to their
quarrels, it shall be on no slight pretext and for no trivial pur-
pose.” (New York Post, April, 1871.)

The evidently dishonest among the Southerners, who went over
to the dominant party, and unblushingly lived on their conquered
friends and neighbors, were called Scallawags or Scalawags, trom
an old variety of wags described by Mr. Bartlett as a “compound
of loafer, blackguard, and scamp.” (Dictionary, p. 382.) “That
scallaway of a fellow ought to be kicked out of all decent society.”
(Western Sketches, B.) It was one of this class, rather. than the
eloquent advocate of Women’s Rights, often charged with the
crime, who first publicly used the illshapen word méscegena-
POLITICS. 289

tion, and openly dared to advocate the expediency of favoring, by
every agency of State and Church, the mingling of the black and
white races. It seemed hard to make a word that could be worse,
and still even this has been accomplished by American genius,
for we read that “A Miscegenationist, named Williams, was tarred
and feathered, and dumped into the river at Grenada, Mississippi,
the other day.” (Richmond Dispatch, March 15, 1871.

The word Joyal itself, one of the noblest words in the language,
though of foreign birth, had to answer new purposes. Loyal
Leagues, as well as Union Leagues, were formed all over the
country, to aid in re-establishing and firmly consolidating the
Union that had been so near to disruption, and Loyalty became
the test of all who sought preferment, or wanted aid from the
restored powers. But as the sacred thought expressed by the
word was abused by flatterers and hypocrites alike, the term itself
also suffered curtailment in its sonorous sound, and the oz] man,
as he was often called, inspired the upright at once with a
suspicion of-lip-service or selfish zeal. No such doubt hung, on
the other side, at any time over the meaning of the word A‘u-
klux (written Ku-Klux, Ku Klux, and Ku-klux), a meaningless
name of an abomination, the sad result of lawlessness on one
side. and tyranny on the other side, such as results almost
invariably from an imperfect pacification. The Aw-Mlux-Klan
was or pretended to be a secret political organization, “the
original purpose of which was, by their ghastly apparel, in which
they traversed the country, to appeal, to negro superstition, and pre-
yent devastations at night. But Radicalism raised such an infernal
howl, and thieves at length assuming the Ku-Xlua garb, the
organization was finally abandoned.” ‘This is the explanation
given at the South, through one of its organs. (Memphis Appeal,
January 17,1871.) At the North the Aw-Kluzx are looked upon as
men who, under some specious pretext, but always under the -
shelter of night and disguise, perpetrate political outrages,
terrify some, murder others, prevent the freedmen from enjoying
their newly-acquired rights and from pursuing their labors in
peace and safety, and seriously endanger the republic itself. It is
certain that whatever may be said in defence of such secret,
irresponsible organizations, they can, in their best aspect, aim no
higher than to substitute Lynch-law for equity and justice. No

13
290 AMERICANISMS.

well-ordered State, no conscientious government can, tolerate them
for a moment; fortunately their reign in the South is limited to
very few and very small districts, and as peace and order are
restored by a wise administration of the laws, they will disappear
with other evils engendered by the war. We have called the Ku-
Klux as unmeaning as unwarranted. It ought, perhaps, to be
mentioned that some ingenious suggestions have been made to
explain the absurd name, among which the following is the least
improbable: “On the borders of Texas, near the Rio Grande,
there lived a Mexican by the name of Nal. K. Xulkuk. He, like
the Bowies, who invented the Bowie knife, was a desperado, but,
unlike them, he fought against and depredated upon the American
settlers. He is still remembered in Texas by many who have seen
and heard of him, as well as dreaded him. His motto was to
seek unceasingly to avenge a real or fancied wrong to himself, his
followers, or his country. His name spelled backward gives us,
as it gave to the founder of thé new order, its name of Ku Klux
Klan.” (Correspondence of Chicago Republican, March, 1871.)
Another theory derives the odd name from “ Aruked Kluks,” the
Scottish for “crooked clutches,” ascribed to the Evil One, and
thus mentioned in an old poem, written on the death of John
Peney, a Welsh non-conformist :
“The Welshman is hanged,
Who at our kirke flanged,
And at the state banged,
And brened are his buks;

And tho’ he be hanged,

Yet he is not coranged,

The de’il has him fanged

In his kruked kluks.”
(From Weever’s Funeral Monuments, ed., 1631.)
The many absurd attempts at explaining the odd term, led
‘an indignant English writer to exclaim: “Why, Sir, the word
Ku-Kluz is an invention, just letters shot together promiscuous. . .
Presently a learned party will trace Ku-Klux to the Indians or
to the Feejee mermaid, and get a medal for his discovery.” (Once
a Week, May, 1871.) “But the general cause of dispute with the
Kru-Kluxers has been some action on the part of the carpet-bag-
gers through the niggers.” (Jbid.)
As the government of the United States reserves to itself the
POLITICS. 291

usual prerogative of coining money, it may not be amiss to men-
tion the few peculiar terms that are connected with the currency.
A truly national coin is the Hagle, so called from the emblem of
the republic, which it bears; it is of gold, and of the value of ten
dollars; double eagles, as well as half and quarter eagles, are in ex-
istence, though rarely seen. The only other coin peculiar to the
United States is the dime, a silver coin of the value of ten cents,
and the half-dime, both also very generally ‘known as fen cent
pieces and five cent pieces. Copper-money is represented by cents.
In Texas at least the words dime, bit, two bits, etc., are still exclu-
sively heard in shops and stores. The Spanish silver coins, which
were long current in some parts of the Union, have nearly all dis-
appeared, and with them their local names, as the jfip and the levy,
coins representing six and a quarter, and twelve and a half cents, the
former a contraction of five pence through the English fippence,
the latter the scant remnant of eleven pence. “A jip’s worth of
‘dinner and a levy’s worth of sleep,” were the words of a loafer of
Philadelphia, where the names remained longest in use. (J.
C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches, 1,, p.58.) The sixteenth part of a
dollar is, in like manner, still frequently called a picaywne, in
New Orleans. Since the war a few new coins, of the value of a few
cents, have been issued, mainly of nickel, and hence often so called,
constituting what is known to the laws a Fractional Currency, or
copper and nickel tokens. As the United States have, since the war,
had exclusively paper-money, the cant name given to it from the
green color of the back, Greenbacks, has become universal. “The
word Greenbacks has become entirely domesticated as a respecta-
blé and generic term for an all-pervading species of evil, than the
presence of which nothing can be worse, except its absence.” (I.
N. Spenser, “eclectic Monthly.) The confederate notes bore, for
the same reason, the name of Bluebacks, which was, however, soon
exchanged for the slang term of shucks. Nor have the solid gold
coins escaped entirely the contamination of slang. When the
Hon. T. H. Benton, of Missouri, put his whole strength forward
on the floor of Congress and through the press to introduce a gold
currency, he accidentally called the latter mint-drops, with a
slight attempt atapun. The word, however, became popular, and
for many years gold coins were very largely known as Benton’s
mint-drops, while the author of the phrase was called Old Bul-
lion.
VO

=

TRADE OF ALL KINDS.
TRADE OF ALL KINDS.

“ Bair weight, fair measure, fair speech.”
B. Franklin.

It cannot be denied that if the English are a nation of shop-
keepers, and have never proved the truth of Napoleon’s charge
more fully than during the last years, the Americans are not un-
mindful of the same source of wealth, and shop-slang, as their
British cousins call the terminology of the counting-house, forms
no insignificant part of our peculiar speech. Much, however, is
here also looked upon as American, that has long been in use as
good—or bad—English, and among these terms, wrongfully im-
puted to us, stands naturally foremost the Almighty Dollar. How
often have English authors cast the unlucky word, first coined in
its modern form by W. Irving in 1837, in his Creole Village, into
our teeth, and tried to make the world believe that none but
Americans knew the “almighty” power of money! We hope they
will recall the first lines of Ben Jonson’s Epistle to the Countess
of Holland, which read thus:

“Whilst that for which all virtue now is sold,
And almost every vice, almightie gold ;”

and substituting the dollar for the guinea, they may safely claim
the authorship of the phrase. It may even be doubted whether
the dollar is as powerful in America as gold is in England, al-
though a sarcastic writer speaks severely of the “unrelenting and
desperate onwardness of the great Yankee dollar-chase.” (Putnam’s
” Magazine, April, 1855.) It is certainly remarkable that, with all
this veneration for the Dollar, the sign by which it is represented
296 AMERICANISMS.

in writing ($) should still be an unexplained mystery. The most
plausible explanation among the many that have been offered, ig,
that it represents the letters U. 8. (United States) drawn in one,
for brevity’s sake, so as to distinguish the American currency from
the Spanish coins, which were largely used before the young re-
public could establish its own coinage. It is equally unjust to
charge Americans with the invention of the phrase, to make money,
much as they may be addicted to the practice. Dr. Johnson al-
ready rebuked Boswell sharply for using it, and said: “ Don’t you
see the impropriety of it? To make money is to coin it; you
should say, to get money.” Moreover, if Americans are fond of
making money, they are also able to make a good use of their
earnings, as England has seen in the benefactions of Mr. Peabody.
They may well be pardoned, therefore, the almost endless variety
of terms they employ in designating large sums, speaking of a
mint, an ocean, a mine, a sight, and a power of money.

Money itself has in the United States, as in England, probably
more designations than any other object—liquor alone excepted—
many of which are purely whimsical, while others may be traced
back to the material of which coins are made. Among the less
generally known terms are John Davis or the Ready John, some-
times simply John or Ready, spondulics, dooteroomus, often short-
ened into doot ; tow, wad (both of them evidently tailors’ slang);
hardstuff or hard, dirt, shinplasters, or simply plasters ; where-
with, shadscales, or scales, “for short ;” dyestuffs, charms, and also
the more modern designation of stamps ; all of which are missing
in the list given in the English Slang Dictionary, and may there-
fore be considered as Americanisms.

Unfortunately, the skill in making money is sometimes illegally
employed after the manner of Dr. Johnson’s suggestion. False
coins, the makers of which are curiously called coniackers,
abounded as long as specie was in use, and since greenbacks are
the only currency, counterfeit paper-money is quite as plentiful.
The great success of one of the earlier counterfeiters has made his
name a byword, as that of the great resurrectionist in England
has become familiar to all readers. Burke abroad has his counter-
part in Bogus at home. The latter is, however, a vile corruption
of a most noble and romantic name, the Italian Borghese. In the
year 1837 there passed throngh the Western and Southwestern
e

TRADE OF ALL KINDS. 297

States a man calling himself thus, who drew large numbers of
fictitious checks, notes, and bills of exchange upon the principal
traders and bankers, and succeeded in swindling the public out of
large sums. His transactions were so extensive, and the distrust in
commercial circles so very great when his forgeries were. discov-
ered, that his name, pronounced, with American freedom, first
Borges and then Bogus, spread over the whole Union. It soon
became synonymous with any doubtful money transaction, and as
it took the fancy of the people, its meaning rapidly extended to
everything suspected of being unreal, spurious, or fraudulent.
Thus a member of a Legislature supposed to be unfairly elected,
was called a dogus representative ; a woman with false hair and
teeth, painted, or otherwise gotten up to look young, when she
was old, was a bogus beauty ; and famous—or infamous—Mrs.
Cunningham, who, like Joanna Southcote, pretended to have had
a child, without such being the case, was declared to have been de-
livered of a dogus child. .The fondness of Americans for such
terms, full of suggestive force, and yet avoiding the unpleasant
directness of a charge, is strikingly seen in the almost endless
variety of meanings to which the term has since been bent: ladies
are accused of wearing bogus diamonds ; overdressed, assum-
ing upstarts are called bogus gentlemen ; maimed soldiers wear
bogus-legs, blind men bogus eyes, and even in courts of justice
bogus charges are of constant occurrence. J. R. Lowell proposes,
in spite of the almost historical descent of the word from this
source, another derivation of degus from the French bagasse, the
worthless refuse of sugar-cane, which he thinks gave the name to
other worthless things, and travelled gradually up the Mississippi
from its birthplace, New Orleans.

Another term of similar character was the Wild-Cat Money of
the last generation, which took its name from the notes of a
bank in Michigan, bearing a Wild Cat or wu panther on its face as
a vignette. The bank proved utterly insolvent after having sent
out a large number of notes, and for many years afterward all
irresponsible banks, which then abounded, were designated as
Wild-Cat Banks, and their notes often very curtly and severely as
wild cats. “Does the honorable member in good earnest mean
to revive the disastrous times, when thousands and tens of thou-
sands were ruined by Wild-Cat Banks?” was asked on the floor

13*
298 AMERICANISMS.

of Congress in March, 1865. Other efforts at cheating are desig-
nated as chiselling—not as some have believed from the practice of
chiselling, that is, opening by means of cold chisels the safes of
banks and merchants, since the term is much older than the
introduction of safes. “ When the books were overhauled by the
Comunuittee, it was found that their late Cashier had appropriated
to himself nearly two hundred thousand dollars, and that the
stockholders would be chiselled out of a pretty considerable sum.”
(Savannah Republican, May 17, 1858.) A somewhat stronger
term for the same operation is gouging, the figure of speech being
evidently drawn from the carpenter’s shop, where it means to
scoop or chisel out with a hollow, cylindrical tool. An Ameri-
can lady wrote recently from Germany to the New York Tribune:
“T should like to be informed in what sense the Germans can be
called a suffering people; I look upon them as eminently pros-
perous. Between plundering and gouging France, as they will in
the indemnity, they will pay the expenses of the war a dozen
times over.” (March 22, 1871.)

* Very general in use, and, like dogus, applied to an infinite vari-
ety of uses, is the term shoddy, which we have obtained from
England in more recent times. Meaning originally cloth made
of a new warp filled with shreds (hence the name shred-dy,
shoddy) of old‘and wornout cloth, it soon became synonymous
with the poor material largely furnished to Government during
the late Civil War by the class of contractors whose desire for
riches was greater than even their patriotism—or their honesty.
“The Pennsylvania regiments, who plead the Statute of Limita-
tion against the debt of doing duty at the battle of Bull Rua,
were said to have been equipped for the field by certain ardent
friends of the cause, with contract coats, that would not bear the
strain of buttoning, and contract boots, the glued soles of which
deserted the uppers in the first rain. As shoddy was very cheap,
those who substituted it for real cloth became suddenly rich, and
this, very naturally, led to the use of the term generally, as ap-
plied to all who acquired wealth by contracts. Shoddy became
the name, more especially, of those who aped the aristocracy of
other lands, and of all kinds of hollow schemes and nefarious
undertakings.” (My. Spencer.) We have now shoddy-men as well
as shoddy-manufacturers; unprofitable preachers, unwise politi-
TRADE OF ALL KINDS. 299

cians, and unsafe merchants are all shoddy, and the same author,
quoted above, suggests that the weaving in of so much cast-off
material from the shores of Europe and Asia, into the fabric of
American society, may ere long end in producing a great shoddy
nation. It is certain that art has become shoddy to a high degree,
and New York especially can boast of a marvellous shoddy archi-
tecture, brown-stone fronts with nothing behind them, and grand
structures so flimsily built that they fall before they are finished.
There is even mental shoddy, such as J. R. Lowell sings of when
he says—

“T call it shoddy,
A thing, sez he, won’t cover soul nor body,
T like the plain all wool of common sense,
That warms you now and will a twelvemonth hence.”
(Biglow Papers, I1., p. 67.)

A verb, even—to shoddyize—has been made to supply an apparent
demand.

Peter Funk, who also plays a prominent part in a certain class
of commercial transactions, is, in all probability, a myth like Wil-
liam Tell, although tradition speaks of a person of that name
having once been famous, by his skill in exciting buyers at an auc-
tion, to raise their bids till they often exceeded the value of the ar-
ticle they wished to purchase. The name is perhapsa simple manu-
facture, from the vague and unsatisfactory meaning of the word funk.
It now designates the person who aids in getting up so-called mock
auctions, sales held for the sole benefit of inexperienced countrymen,
at which more or less worthless articles, imitation jewelry, watch-
es of gilt copper and the like, are offered ; where unwary purchasers
are forced to take a large quantity while they only bid for a very
small portion. The whole establishment is a cheat, and Peter
Funk, one of the confederates, plays the by-bidder or puffer, as it
used to be called in England. (Grose’s Dictionary, sub voce.) “The
Mayor has once more ordered a police sergeant to be stationed at
the door of every Peter Funk auction-room in Broadway and the
Bowery, but in spite of their warning voice, greenhorns will walk
in and be fleeced.” (New York Herald, November 14, 1859.) A
peculiar feature at genuine auctions is the so-called upset price, a
price mentioned by the auctioneer before beginning the sale, as the
300 AMERICANISMS.

lowest sum at which the article offered will be disposed of.
“ He says: Business before soup. Between fish and pudding he will
sell aprairic. The wpset price is knocked down with a knife-han-
dle, and the bargain is clinched by the help of the nut-cracker
and the sugar-tongs.” (Pulnam’s Magazine, December, 1854.)

A less mythical personage has imported his name from England
to these shores, and established himself in commercial circles with
surprising success. This is the Arab messenger, or Chiaous, who
was seht in 1607 by the great Signior, as the Sultan of Turkey
was then called, to England, and availed himself of his position in
London to commit gigantic frauds upon the Turkish and Persian
merchants of the great city. The transaction became known at
*Change in all its details, and the extent as well as the notoriety of
the facts led to the formation of a verb, to chowse, as synonymous
with cheating or defrauding. The word Chiaus is, of course, well
known from of old: in Sandys’ Travels (p. 48) it is defined as mean-
ing “one who goes on embassies, executive commandments, etc.,”
and in our days thousands have flocked to admire the French
painter Boulanger’s admirable picture of “ Algerine Chaouses.”
Nearly all the great poets of England use the word, though with
varied spelling, from the chowse of Halliwell and Ben Jonson’s
chiause to the simpler chouse of Landor, Browning, and Foster.
The word is quite familiar on this side of the Atlantic also, and
by no means limited tomoney matters, as in the lines: “Dr. Dore
should have consulted his beloved Germania, before he choused
her out of her hoped-for Kaiser, and substituted an archangel so
fat and scant o’ breath in his place.” (New York Tribune, Janu-
ary 19, 1871.)

The man who is not liable to be choused on a large scale, is
nevertheless apt to fall into another danger, that threatens stran-
gers in the large cities. A man walking before him, pretends
to find a well-filled pocketbook, and either offers it to him, minus
acertain sum for immediate need, for advertising, with the ex-
pectation of a liberal reward, or, with more cynicism, downright
suggests a division of spoils. In either case his greed is justly
punished by finding himself the owner of a roll of counterfeit
bills, and out of pocket for the sum of good money he has given
the finder, who goes rejoicing to try again and again his success-
ful drop-game, as the cheat is called.
TRADE OF ALL KINDS. 301

The man who means to employ his capital and his labor in
commercial enterprises is not, as in England, said to go into
trade, but he either connects himself sti a Moneyed Institution,
as chartered companies are generally called, like banks, insurance
companies, and the like, or he devotes himself to merchandizing,
a barbarous euphuism ; the offspring of American grandiloquence.

A trade is only a single transaction, and often employed to
designate an exchange; hence, small country shops express in
advertisements their readiness “to ¢rade for anything, meat, eggs
oats, and all kinds of country produce.” When an agreement as
to price and time of delivery has been reached, the question is. apt
to be asked: “ Well, is it a ¢rade?” and if replied to in the affirma-
tive, the contract is binding, as far as verbal agreements have any
force. The tradesman is consequently more or less than the retail-
merchant of England, and to trade,is by no means confined to
regular commercial business. It includes, on the contrary, every
similar transaction in daily life, and hence a traveller could report
that “The Southerners are not nearly as commercial a race as
the Yankees, but still they are much giving to trading amongst
each other, and the other day, at a hospital in Gettysburg, an
artilleryman, whose leg was to be taken off, no sooner knew that
_ amputation was decided upon by the doctors, than he turned to
another wounded man in the next bed, and before the operation
was performed, had traded the boot which was henceforth to be
of no use to him.” (Blackwood, December, 1864.) Perhaps they
remember too well the prophet’s praising words about Tyre:
“Javan, Tubal, and Meshech, they were thy merchants: they-
traded the persons of men and vessels of brass at thy market.”
(Ezekiel, xxvii. v. 13.)

Different branches of commerce have peculiar names in Amer-
ica, which are only very slowly becoming known in England.
Such are Drygoods, cloths, stuffs, laces, etc., referred to in the
following description of the greatest establishment for their sale:
“Here an army of young men encounter the flood of women with
their greedy, anxious eyes; they keep them at bay by piling up
barricades of drygoods of every shade and pattern ever produced.
This is Stewart’s, a spot better known to the female mind of
America than the graves of the fathers or the shrines of the
saints.” Among Prygoods one branch plays a specially promi-
302 AMERIC ANISMS.

nent part in all public discussions on Tariff and Protection ; this
contains the so-called Domestics—used only in the plural—or
goods manufactured in the country, as distinguished from im-
ported goods. The word goods itself has its American meaning:
a stock in trade is goods, and hence drygoods are so called, but
although the word is used in the sense of the English term
“stuff” also, it is never applied to the dress of a lady. In the
West alone the use of goods for a single piece of material occurs
occasionally; a clerk will recommend “that goods as an exceilent
fabric; sure to retain its color.” Drygoods are kept carefully
apart from Groceries, a word used here in the plural for the
articles themselves, while English usage limits it to the singular,
as denoting a grocer’s shop or the grocer’s ware. As among tea
and coffee other stimulants readily find a place, the grocery has in
America very speedily become a name for a groggery also, and
from Pennsylvania southward groceries are apt to include, if not
actually to mean, ardent spirits. “Families ought always to lay
in their stock of groceries at the beginning of the year, as they
thus reduce the cost, and are sure not to run out at an inconven-
ient time.” (Housekeepers Manual, p. 28.) The use of Hardware
for articles made of metal, is now probably as common in Eng-
land as with us, but it includes the “iron-monger,” and all the
subdivisions of this branch of trade known to English merchants,
and ignored here. Of these various kinds of goods the merchant
is expected always to have a large stock on hand—a phrase which
in America is strangely abused, being applied to persons as well
as to merchandise. “Be on hand early and vote the Republican
ticket!” is the earnest summons of radical newspapers at the time
of election. “A broker from Wall-street was on hand, and tried
to pray, but he broke down half-way in the Lord’s Prayer, and
there seemed to be no one able to assist him.” (New York Hxpress,
August 11, 1856.)

In no point does commercial language, however, differ more, as
far as English and American usage are concerned, than in the terms
shop and store. The English shopkeeper is unknown to us: the
day of small things has long since passed for the Great Republic.
To go shopping is perhaps the only phrase in which the humble
word yet survives; everywhere else it is disdainfully put aside.
The smallest cobbler’s stall is a shoe vr boot store, and the shoc-
TRADE OF ALL KINDS. 303

maker’s workshop a Boot and Shoe Manufactory, and every vil-
lage of a few houses has its Variety-Store, where country people
purchase anything they may want. The shop is so haughtily
ignored that the zealous Temperance .lecturer gathers his whole
indignation into the contemptuous term of grogshop, where alone
it seems to be in place. Nor does the American merchant—for no
other title is thought suitable for the owner of the smallest estab-
lishment—condescend to “open a shop;” he sets up a store, a
grocery, or a bazaar, at once. Quite as frequently, perhaps, he
proposes to rwn it, a word applied with reckless freedom to every
possible enterprise, from running the machine of the government
to running a little grocery “round the corner.” The following
advertisement appeared in the leading New York papers: ‘“‘The
two largest retail bookstores in New York will be run by Shel-
don & Company during the coming holidays, first, their present
store, 498 Broadway, second, the elegant new store under the Grand
Central Hotel.” (December 20, 1870.) Even to run one’s face is
a frequent phrase, meaning to obtain money upon credit, in re-
turn for the borrower’s name being placed on the face of a prom-
issory note, which is then rwx. The kindred term to circulate,
which originally applied to dank-bilis—as the English bank-notes
are still very generally called in America—is now applied to a
variety of movements, and gentlemen circulate in good society, as
if they were promises to pay themselves. By a similar process
the fact that bank-notes may be above par or under par has led
to the application of these terms to articles of other kinds, and
even to man’s conduct. Certain silks or laces are offered for sale
with the recommendation that they are above par, or far supe-
rior to the common run of such goods, while a mean man’s con-
duct is stigmatized as under par. “He was popular, but did not
get money enough to support him, so he located and went into
land speculations and got wnder par as a good man.” (Rey. Mr.
Cartwright, Autobiography, p.114.) A man who has thus gone
under, as commercial slang has it, afid finds himself unable, for
want of capital, to begin a new “ business,” has nothing left but
to clerk it, that is, to engage himself as clerk (never pronounced
clark asin England) to some more fortunate man, who owns a
store. A kind of limited partnership is, in the West, not unfre-
quently called ¢o go on lays. The term is evidently derived from
304. AMERICANISMS.

the slang term lay, which means some, a piece, etc., and is thus
used in the North of England. (Slang Dictionary, p. 169.) Ordi-
narily the term is restricted to operations in which many partici-
pate and work jointly, as in whaling-voyages and gold-diggings,
where all labor alike and each receives a share of the profits,
“ Who is going to dig gold on the hundredth or two hundredth
lay?” (Overland Monthly, March, 1870, p. 236.) From this use
the word is transferred to meaning the right proportion, and the
right thing generally, as in the phrase, “I’m goin’ back and
p’raps I may meet Canvas in heaven, ef I keep my word, which
the preacher says is the right lay.” (Overland Monthly, January,
1870, p. 88.)

If the young merchant is, on the other hand, successful, the
world says that he makes his pile, a term taken, no doubt, in the
first place, from the actual pile of coins, but soon used to mean
simply a man’s available means, his fortune. In the first sense it
still serves the gambler, who really piles up his stakes and his
winnings, as in the lines, “ Three days ago I came down the river
to sell my goods and furs. I made a pretty good trade, but that very
night I lost my whole pile at poker. J was dead-broke, and hadu’t
a confounded cent left.” (A Trapper’s Adventures, p. 227.) In the
sense of a large amount of money it is used by J. R. Lowell, when
he says, “The government owed me quite a pile for my arrears of
pension,” (LBiglow Papers, I1., p. 23,) and meaning the available
resources of a merchant in a creditor’s words: “ We never go over
a party’s pile, nor higgle, nor do anything small in these matters.
Give us what you’ve got, and we'll take the balance when you
are flush.” (Putnam’s Magazine, November, 1868.) If he does
not succeed, he may at first be merely hard pushed or hard run,
and means may be found to extricate himself; but if that is oul
of question, his business is wound up. It depends, of course,
upon the state of his assets, whether he can se¢tle with his credit-
ors, or is found to be dead-broke. The use of the former term in

such a case is unknown in ‘England, where se¢éling means simply

arranging a matter, and also an account, by payment or otherwise.
In America, however, to se¢tle is generally intended to mean pay-
ing a debt, although evidently accounts may be settled and yet
not paid. A man called upon to settle a bill is expected to do
nothing less than to pay it; and even Mr, Howell, in his carefully
TRADE OF ALL KINDS. 305

written Idalian Journeys, uses the Americanism, “When we came
to settle for the wine.” It is in this sense, also, that passengers
on board steamboats are commonly summoncd by a fearful ring-
ing of bells and shouting of colored porters, “to please walk up to
the captain’s office and se¢tle.” If he cannot arrange matters
amicably he is dead or flat broke, in the far more energetic than
elegant language of the trade, meaning that he is utterly ruined,
and left without any resources whatever. “When he left the
gambling-house, he was observed to turn toward a friend with the
words, Dead-broke! and then to disappear round the corner. A
moment after a shot fell, and upon hastening to the spot, he was
found lying dead on the pavement, a revolver by his side.” (Cin-
cinnati Hnguirer, July 17,1866.) It may be that, before the crisis
is reached, he has tried to help himself by getting his paper shaved.
A shaver, in the American sense of the word, is a person who buys
up another man’s note at a heavy discount or more than legal
interest—a practice formerly not unknown to banks even, which
were then called shaving banks. The term is said to have origin-
ated at sea, where a shaver has long been the sailors’ name for a
sharp fellow, derived very naturally from the delicate but cruel
operation of shaving on board ship. “May I be hanged myself,”
says N. Hawthorne, “if I believe Mr. Higginbotham is unhanged
till I see him with my own eyes, and hear it from his own mouth ;

and, as he isa real shaver, ’'ll have the minister or some cbirer
responsible man for an indorser.” (Mr. Higginbotham’s Catas-
trophe.) In his efforts to obtain money he has probably had
much shinning to do, as slang calls the running about to friends
and acquaintances, regardless of all obstacles in the way that en-
danger the safety of the borrower's shins. In England the same
meaning is attached to the term in city slang, but in America it
has been largely extended, and is applied to any eager search after
help. “‘ Shin it, good man!’ ejaculated a good-natured urchin,
‘shin it as well as you know how!’ The qualification was a good
one, Berry not being well calculated fora shinner of the first
class.” (J.C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches, IL, p. 13.) A political song
in praise of the Whig Party, of the year 1840, speaks of the de-

lectable associates—
“ Coxcombs and dandies, loafers and nibblers,
Shavers and shinners, peddlers and scribblers,
306 AMERICANISMS.

Bankers and brokers, and cunning buffoons,
Thieves that steal millions and thieves that steal spoons.”

This process of shinning is resorted to whenever the merchant
or banker is shoré, that is, in want of the necessary means to com-
ply with his obligations. The meaning of this term differs, like-
wise, from that which it receives in England, where, for instance,
the conductor of a ’bus is short, when he does not give up all the
money he has received. In America, short has to cover the ab-
sence or want of everything that ought to be on hand; hence, “a
common practice is to withhold a little of a poor sewing-girl’s pay
from week to week, on the plea of being short, and when a
handsome aggregate has been reached, to boldly deny the debt.”
(Putnam’s Magazine, April, 1868.) When the express companies
fail to deliver parcels at the right time, the agent is apt to say,
“The box is on the way-bill, but itis short to-day; it will reach
here to-morrow.” In this sense the term is a genuine American-
ism. Finally, the merchant winds up his business, using thus a
term familiar wherever English is spoken, but the same verb is
also used intransitively here, and of a National Bank, which had
suffered severely by defalcation, it was said: “A receiver has been
appointed, according to law, and the bank will wind up, probably
without serious loss to the stockholders.” (Philadelphia Ledger,
May 7, 1867.) His property is, of course, sold, including both his
personal property and what is here called real estate, a term which,
when not taken in the strictly legal sense, is nothing more than
a big-sounding, vulgar phrase for houses and land; hence the
newspapers abound with columns headed, Real Estate Transac-
tions, where Land Sales would have been quite as expressive. The
avails, as the proceeds of all sales, or of rents, profits, etc., are apt
to be called, in New England especially, remind us of the vatls
given to servants in old England, two terms which J. R. Lowell
maintains are identical.

If the poor bankrupt is not set up again by his creditors, he is
very apt to become a drummer, an agent of other houses of com-
merce, represented in England by the “touting bagsman,” or the
more ambitious “commercial gent.” The larger houses of the
North especially, employ, often at high wages, numbers of such
drummers, who travel through all the Southern and Western
States, soliciting orders, informing themselves of the standing of
TRADE OF ALL KINDS. 307

customers, and collecting outstanding debts. “ Look at that inan,
he is drummer for A. T. Stewart, and carries blank checks in his
pocket-book which he is authorized to fill up to the amount of fif-
ty thousand dollars.” (A Cowntry Merchant owt West, p. 217.) He
carries with him, probably, not such fabulous checks, but careful
extracts from the tickler, as the great book is facetiously called,
in which all debts and notes falling due are recorded, because it is
used to tickle the memory of the debtor, as well as of the creditor.
The business of the drummer is probably not esteemed the most
distinguished, even in the trade, but the peculiar qualities neces-
sary for success in this line, great tact, a pleasant address, a per-
suasive tongue, and a keen eye to business, give to the class of
superior drummers a character of its own.

Among the varieties of trade, two appear under special names.
Dickering, or bartering in small articles, is probably a word of
Dutch origin, and explains the line in Whittier’s poem,

“For peddling dicker, not for honest sales,”

although Cooper speaks very much in the same manner of “ dicker
and swap.” The minuteness of the ware in which this kind of
trading is generally confined, is shown in the fact that “Sam
Jonés called at the store of a Mr. Brown, with an egg in his hand,
and wanted to dicker it for a darning-needle.” (Sam Jones, p.127.)
The other way of trading is, also, not unknown to England, though
often, by English writers, represented as peculiar to America. This
is the swapping, or, as it is more frequently written and almost
always pronounced, the swopping. J. R. Lowell says very point-
edly: “The fallacy that swop, as a New England word, is describ-
ing accurately the New England propensity to barter or trade
anything, from jack-knives to horses, is shown by the line of Dry-
den :
‘I would have seopp’d
“Youth for old age;

and Ray in his North Country Words has: “To Coup: To ex-
change, or swap.” Ben Jonson, Dean Swift, and a host of classic
writers, were in the habit of using it, and even the swopper was
not unknown in England, for—
308 AMERICANISMS.

“The headlong fool who wants to be a swopper
Of gold and silver coin for English copper,
May in ’Change Alley prove himself an ass
And give rich metal for adulterated brass.” (Old Poet.)

The word is said, however, to have fallen among low company.
The South Sea stockjobbers damaged its reputation, and it hag
since lost all character by becoming a household word with horse-
jockeys. In this country the term is universally used, even Mr,
Lincoln often employing it as an illustration of his policy, when
he assured wise counsellors that “when a man was swimming
across a river was not the time for swopping horses;” and the
very Indians on our Western plains have become familiar with .
the word as well as with the transaction. “As soon as he saw me,
he cried out: Well, Mark, what do you say? Will you swop your
mare for my mule, if I give you a twenty-dollar note to boot?”
(J. P. Kennedy, Swallow Barn.)

Perhaps the only commercial term that ever became a universal
favorite in the army is the going up the spout, which was used, in
the Confederate army almost exclusively, for any disastrous con-
clusion of an enterprise,as well as for the loss of an article A
man’s mule, that had strayed away from camp, was said to have
gone up the spout, and the Confederacy itself, after the surrender
of Richmond, had simply gone wp. The figure of speech is taken
from the spout, or tin-tube, up which pawnbrokers send the tick-
eted articles.to be kept till redeemed, and which generally runs
from the ground-floor to the wareroom in the upper part of the
house. (Slang Dictionary, p. 204.) That the term was not u-
known to the Federal army, also, may be seen from the following
account: “Dr. B., Assistant Surgeon in the army, was very fond
of milk, and on a march in Virginia rode up to a mean-looking
house by the roadside, and, cap in hand, addressed a slatternly-
looking girl, standing arms akimbo in the doorway, while the
men of the column were listening and watching the negotiation:
‘Madam, can I purchase a canteen of milk and a loaf of bread of
you? Slowly and loudly the answer came: ‘ We haint got no
bread. We haint got no milk. We haint got nothing. We're
clean done gone up the spout. So ye can tote yourself away from
hyar’” Itis not quite clear why the Southern States, which are
naturally much more given to agriculture than to commerce,
 

TRADE OF ALL KINDS. 309

should so specially affect the phrase of no account, evidently bor-
rowed from the ledger. But the wealthy planter and his humblest
field-hand both know hardly a stronger expression of utter con-
tempt than to say that a man is of 20 account, or, as the negro is
sure to say, of 20 ’count. A warning friend says, therefore, to a
gentleman: “It is not fit for such as you to concern yourself with
Miles Rutherford; the man is half in liquor, and of no account if
he was not.” (J. P. Kennedy, Swallow Barn.) Pretended ghosts
in Virginia are thus spoken of in a Northern paper: “They are
delightful fellows, these ghosts; they possess, in common with
other more celebrated ghosts, a tendency to be extremely frank—
making no bones at all of informing the said hosts that they are
no-accownt people.” (New York Tribune, January 17,1871.) “ Lur
a’Mussy!” cries Tom Brooks, the clever house-carpenter ; “ Pete!
he xo ’cownt nohow, he poor fie’hand nigger!” (Flush Times of
Alabama, p. 11%.)

A stern old Puritan has left his name to his far-off descendants,
to be held in esteem here as Cocker is in England, and in those
. parts of the. Union where New England rule is not supreme. It
seems that a worthy inventor, called Gunter, brought out in 16283,
about the time of the great Puritan exodus to this country, his
famous Rule of Proportion. This became then familiarly known
as Gunter’s Proportion or Gunter’s Line, and the term has ever
since remained a popular standard of appeal in cases of doubt and
dispute. (Slang Dictionary, p.104.) Since that time the phrase
According to Gunter has held its own in Canada almost exclu-
sively, and in the New England States at least very largely, instead
of the old-fashioned “ According to Cocker,” being frequently
used without the slightest idea as to whom the debt of gratitude
ought to be paid. In the West the name is rarely heard except
in jocular application ; in the days of specie currency, for instance,
coppers was quite a common term for the cents then in circula-
tion, and if any difficulty occurred in counting up a small sum,
Gunter was appealed to for assistance. In the same happy days,
dimes, ten-cent pieces in silver, were apt to represent all the money-
property of a person, and a young lady was said to have the dimes,
when she was reputed rich. The English sixpence, on the other
hand, survives in a phrase that has come down to us from Indian
times. Conrad Weiser, a famous trader among Redmen during
310 AMERICANISMS.

the last century, relates that an Indian arrived on a Sunday with
his furs, and found the trader unwilling, either to give him more
than two-and-sixpence a pound, or to close the business on that
day at all. The Indian had, of course, to submit, and was asked
to go to church with the trader, where, he was told, the white
people went once a week to learn good things. He gotalong quite
well till the sermon began, when he fancied the clergyman was’
looking at him angrily, and speaking of him to the congregation.
So he retired, and smoked his pipe upon the steps till the meeting
broke up. He then went round to the other traders in the town,
but as they all offered him only the same price, he swore a little
at the same old two-and-sixpence, and concluded that the whites at-
tended church, not to learn good things, but to cheat poor In-

dians in the price of skins. (Notes and Queries, March 6, 1838.)

From that time the phrase, the same old two-and-sizpence, has re-
mained a part of our speech, and may be still heard in every part of

the Union. Paper-money, in like manner, early earned its slang-

name, and has ever since been familiarly known as shinplaster, the
ludicrous term being professedly derived from the times of Con-
tinental paper-money, which was of little value, so that old soldiers,

wounded in the leg, dressed their wounds with the worthless

notes, which thus became literally shinplasters. “If you have no

brass and no tin, give us a shtnplaster then—them’s my terms.”

(J. C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches, II., p. 23.)

The process of paying what is due enjoys its own list of terms,
since the verb to pay is used in America in the very largest sense.
In familiar language the cui bono of olden times is rendered by
the practical: Does it pay? and hence men complain, that litera-
ture does not pay, if it does not secure a liberal reward, and that
it does not pay .to try and be friends with a man who is an
obstinate enemy. What's to pay? means simply, What is the
matter? Of attractive mountain scenery in Maine, it is said:
“The rocks are very beautiful at those falls of Ammonoosuck.
A drive anywhere in these hills pays, to borrow the slang of this
bank-note world. It is pure enjoyment.” (The White Hills, Put-
nam’s Magazine, October, 1853.) To foot a bill, by paying the
amount at the bottom of the account, is a phrase equally well
known abroad and with us; but why we should borrow from the
thieves’ language the old cant term for picking pockets, to fork
TRADE OF ALL KINDS. 311

over or fork out, to represent an honest payment of a bill, is not
quite evident. The stiff fingers, slyly inserted into a pocket, and
seizing its contents as with a fork, explained the phrase well
enough, so long as theft was contemplated, but in America fork-
img out means nothing more than paying money. There may be
occasionally a threat concealed in the words, as when an indignant
creditor says, “ Now, sir, you will please fork over that money to
me, and pay your bill, or P’ll have the law out of you, as sure as
you are born.” (Albany Argus, September 5, 1867.) Such a
process, by which a man is made to pay under threats, is here, as
in England, expressively called bleeding, a term quoted already
in Bailey’s Dictionary. (Slang Dictionary, p. 76.) If all cannot
be paid, there remains what in American phraseology is called a
balance, the term being transferred -from money-transactions,
where its use is, of course, perfectly legitimate, to almost every
kind of remainder that may be suggested. “We listened to
Wendell Phillips for about half an hour, and having an engage-
ment elsewhere, we were forced to leave, and so lost the balance of
his oration.” (Boston Transcript, December 27, 1861.) “Most
of the respectable inhabitants held commissions in the army or
government offices; the dalance of the people kept little shops, or
cultivated the ground.” (Words and their Uses, R. G. White.)
The word is thus used very much like the Scottish lave (what
is left), as already quoted by Grose, and used by Burns in the
line—
“Tl get a blessing with the lave,
And never miss it.”

In some parts of Virginia the word shank is quaintly used for
the same purpose, and one friend will say to another, “Suppose
you come in and spend the shank of the evening with me?”
The dalance has, moreover, made its way into England also, and
in Once a Week we find the advice: “ Whoso wishes to rob the
night to the best advantage, let him sleep two or three hours, then
get up for two hours and work, and then sleep out the balance of
the night.” (Words and their Uses. R. G. White, p. 94.)

Wall-street, in New York, represents Change in London, and,
like the latter, abounds in technical terms, which are, however, of.
such strictly professional character and ever-changing nature,
312 AMERICANISMS.

where they do not belong to commerce generally, that’ they can-
not in justice be called Americanisms. Bulls and bears strive here
as elsewhere for the mastery, by means of longs and shorts, trying
to make a corner, selling or buying call-loans, which have to be re-
paid whenever the debt is called for, despising Aite-fliers, who try
to rise by means of fictitious paper, as long as’ they are unsuc-
cessful, and pitying a dame duck, a stock-jobber who is unable to
meet his engagements.

Among colloquial terms derived from Commerce, and more
directly from book-keeping, few are more frequently heard than
posting and posted up. The former has gone through various
transformations; its first meaning of going by post, that is, with
great speed and safety, has then been applied to the transfer of
items from one column or one ledger to another, and finally
serves in the phrase of posting books, to express the satisfactory
closing of accounts generally. “ My books are posted, and I shall
give up all official duties, to enjoy alittle leisure, which I hope to
be able to employ with advantage.” (W. H. Seward, Letter, May,
1870.) To be posted up means, by a natural transition, to be
well informed, primarily, of course, as to commercial transactions
of the counting-room and the Exchange, and is probably derived
directly from the prevailing custom of posting up, literally on
post and pillar, slips of paper containing the latest intelligence.
A man is, however, said to be well posted up on any subject, if he
is found to be in possession of the newest facts and latest dates,
such as involve all recent changes. “Miss Fudge has kept a close
eye on equipages, caps, cloaks, and summer recreations. She is
well posted up on these matters.” (Ike Marvel, Pudge Doings.)
The phrase is known in England, and quite recently even the Lon-
don Times was pleased to say that “ American papers were remark-
ably well posted wp on European affairs during the war.” (Janu-
ary 19, 1871.) The post-note of commerce retains the old word
post, for which mail is now almost universally substituted ; it
means a note, payable to order (not to bearer), and intended for
transmission by mail. In like manner a Memorandum Check,
so named because it has a Mem. on its face, designates a check
not to be presented immediately for payment, but at such a time
as may be mentioned in the Mem.

Certain branches of commerce are peculiarly fertile in cant and
TRADE OF ALL KINDS. 313

slang terms, of which a few at least have become actually parts of
our speech. Such is the fate of boot and shoe makers, who pass, with
all the cobblers of England and the brethren of Hans Sachs, for
men of eccentric habits and quaint genius. Sons of waz is neither
an uncommon nor an uncompkmentary name for them, although
the address, “How are you, my son-of-waxes?” quoted by Pro-
fessor 8. 8. Haldeman, can hardly be excused. Since they have
formed themselves, however, into a most formidable association,
called the Sons of Crispin, they are universally known and quoted
by the name of their tutelary Saint, who stole leather to
make shoes for the poor. A late “strike,” in which they in-
dulged, led to the importation of a number of Chinese into Mas-
sachusetts, who took the place of the rebellious men, and soon
excelled them in neatness, though not in quickness of work. To
this fact a paper referred, saying: “The same spirit protests
against the despotism of the Crispins, which the gentleman, who
means to be master of his own business, has, by his Mongolian
battery, effectually demolished in his own town (North Adams).
It was diamond cut diamond. Fora large and influential element
of the Crispin organization was brought into the country by
capital, in the same way in which it now complains that capital is
bringing the Celestial shoemakers.” (Appleton’s Journal, Sep-
tember 21, 1870.) Like so many other American terms, this also
has already become well known in England, where we find it
used thus: “Away went the customer after his hat, and Crispin,
standing at his door, clapped his hands, and shouted, ‘Go it,
youll catch him’” (Slang Dictionary, p. 105, foot-note.) Even
a local Crispin, meaning the one cobbler of a little village,
appeared recently in the Home Journal of New York.

An almost ludicrous slang term, possibly of negro manufacture, is
the expression Forty-leven. The first part is in all probability the
familiar number used, like other round numbers in Hebrew, as an
indefinite expression, as boys say, “ You have scared me like forty,”
and teamsters boast of a powerful horse, that will pull like forty.
The addition of eleven is the element of incongruity added to the
humorous exaggeration already expressed, and thus “a forty-
eleventh cousin, for instance, expresses an infinitesimal degree
of relationship, one too small to be stated accurately, and hence
stated in fictitious numbers.” (Professor 8. 8. Haldeman.) J. R.

14 :
314 AMERICANISMS.

Lowell does not fail to make good use of this Americanism,
also, and says:
“Nor don’t want forty-leven weeks o’ jawin’ an expoundin’
To prove a nigger hez a right to save him, ef he’s drownin’.”
” (Biglow Papers, IL., p. 106.)

Another ludicrous exaggeration of this kind is taken from the
violence and noise with which ordinarily bricks are dumped out
of carts; a thing done vehemently and with much display is said
to be like a thousand of bricks. “When Myr. Nye had finished,
Mr, Stewart rose, and with his irresistible logic and impressive
language came down upon him like a thousand of bricks, till he
was utterly crushed and demolished.” (Western World, March
5, 1864.)

Of all trades, however, the trade in liquors abounds most in
more or less grotesque terms, and phrases of the greatest variety,
some few of which only are genuine Americanisms, and others.
mere applications of familiar words to new purposes. Asa matter
of course, no man acknowledges frankly that he “ drinks liquor ;”
that would apparently shock the sensitiveness of a man laboring
under delirium tremens, so numerous are the substitutes for the
plain truth. He may be disposed to déguor, when he is perfectly
free and easy among friends and associates, and, as nearly two
hundred years ago (April, 1699), an Englishman would exclaim:
“When we had liguored our throats” (London Spy, p. 15), he now
roars out: “Come, boys, let’s déguor—what’ll you have?” (J.C.
Neal, Charcoal Sketches, I. p.36), but generally he condescends only
to smile. This oddest of all euphuisms ever invented to hide a
hideous thing, is now almost universally in use in all parts of the
Union, though it was at first confined to the West. “There are
many fast boys about, some devoted to the fair sex, some to horses,
some to smiling.” (Baltimore Sun.) An Englishman tells us
that “an American lady, Mrs. Christie, having sent some fine old
rye-whiskey to him, he, unconscious of the pun, said to his travel-
ling companion, an American: This cannot be called Lacrymae
Christi, suppose we call it the Smiles of Christie! Good, said the
American, I see you are learning our language.” (Blackwood,
October, 1867.) Nor is the noun less frequently used, and Mr.
Bartlett quotes an account of a wedding, at which the alderman
who performed the ceremony invited the company to smile with
TRADE OF ALL KINDS. 315

him, and “one general smile entirely absorbed the fee.” (New
York Tribune, January 31,1855.) This invitation, a universal
custom in America, has naturally also its own name, to freat, an
abbreviation of the original ¢o stand treat, which is not quite
obsolete yet. A man ¢reats, when he invites his friends to go to
a place where ardent spirits are sold, and to order whatever “they
like, volunteering at the same time to pay for all that is consumed.
The custom is peculiar to this country, and considered imperative
in certain classes as an act of common courtesy. The casual
meeting of two men, who may never have exchanged a word with
each other, is a signal for both instantly to exclaim, “Come, let’s
have something,” and down they dive into the nearest subterra-
nean dar. The one who spoke first insists upon paying the shot,
not without the reasonable assurance that at the next meeting his
new friend will return the compliment, as a matter of course.
If two friends meet, the phrase is: “ Let’s drink to old times.”
To Do as I do is nearly obsolete. “ Come, gentlemen, do as I do?”
was once the polite request of one who wished his friends to join
him at the bar. If a man has a large number of friends, and wants
“ to do the thing princely,” or if he runs for an office, and knows
where to meet the independent voters, he has only to take them to
a saloon, and order some complicated beverage all around, to secure
their good-will for the day. The disastrous effects of this almost
universal custom, which produces an endless chain of visits to
such places, can easily be imagined. Besides its fatal consequences,
it has its ludicrous side also, and a writer in the Chicago Hvening
Post very pertinently asks: “If a man, upon meeting an old
friend, were to pull out a handful of postage-stamps and say,
Let’s have some, stamps, I pay! or if several persons happening
to meet in a store were invited by a generous patron to ‘come
and help themselves to a few suspenders and socks ;’ what would
be thought of it? And yet, why can liquor be offered thus, and
nothing else?”

The same fanciful phraseology surrounds the places where these
scenes take place. Groggeries or Doggeries are only found near
the shanties of Irish laborers or in remote Western and Southern
settlements, where things are still occasionally called by their true
name; in the cities Shades are perhaps most numerous, suggest-
ing cozy retreats, secure from the bright light of day. Saloons
316 AMERICANISMS.

abound mainly in the West, at least in this sense, for everywhere
in this country the term is applied to any room from a parlor toa
cookshop. “The eminent pioneer of American sculpture, bril-
liant talker, and accomplished gentleman, the lamented Horatio
Greenough, we are told, was indignantly eloquent against the
American abuse of this graceful importation from the French,
applied as it isin the United States to billiard-rooms, oyster-cel-
lars, grogshops, and railroad cars!” (G. H. Calvert.) A more
recent euphuism yet is the Sample Room, where, under the pretext
of allowing customers to judge by samples, any number of small
glasses of liquor are sold behind a transparent screen, which pro-
tects the samplers from the eye of the public.

It is in these places, known besides by a number of equally fan-
ciful but less general names, that an important personage, the bar-
keeper, rules supreme. It is he who distributes the simple and
manufactures the compound drinks called for by the imaginative
and thirsty American, the odd names of which have excited so
much wonder and amusement in the minds of all travellers. It
was probably after having practically tested the matter that N. P.
Willis wrote of one of these heroes at the St. Louis Hotel in New
Orleans: “The gracious and gentlemanly master-barkeepers stood
braiding rainbows across their firmament of decanters, as they
flung the ice and the rosy liquors back and forward into fragrant
contact with the mint.” The usual small glass of simple spirits is
technically known as a smaller, though the term is also used in
derision, as in the order, “Bring us one of the largest kind of
smallers, a tumbler full of brandy and water, without no water in
it.” (J.C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches, IIL, 23.) Of artificial com-
pounds, most of which have ephemeral renown only, and change
names as well as elements, only a few are genuine Americanisms,
and have almost attained to the dignity of what is in cant called
an “institution.” ‘Such is the egg-nog, the indispensable beverage
taken at Christmas all over the South, derived from Nog, ale
(Grose), and consisting of eggs, cream, and brandy, beaten up to-
gether; the mint-julep, made of brandy and water, iced, and fla-
vored with aromatic mint. The Julep is, of course, the old word
familiar to us from Milton’s Comus, the same juwlep which in Ata-
bic already meant a sweet potion, and thus was adopted in Eng-
lish ; the mint, however, is an American invention, and since
TRADE OF ALL KINDS. 317

pounded ice has been added to the compound, it has been asserted
that
“Juleps the drinks of immortals became,
When Jove himself added a handful of hail.”
(C.F. Hoffman.)

A julep, however, is not limited to this meaning; in Virginia,
at least, the word has from the first settlement of the colony, con-
tinued in the same sense in which the word dram is used at the
North. The English early borrowed it from the French. Two
centuries and a half ago it was customary to make juleps by the
gallon, ready for immediate use without the trouble of present
preparation. Pepys, in his Diary, June 22, 1660, says: “Thence
to my Lord’s and had the great walk to Brigham’s, who gave me
a case of good julep.”

Cobblers and Sherry Coddlers are known to have been old favor-
ites with our forefathers, thotgh nearly forgotten when they were
revived in this country, but the practice of sucking in leisurely
the delicious beverage by means of straws—not unfrequently rep-
resented by slender glass tubes—is earnestly claimed as a genuine
Americanism. The excessive fondness of Americans for these
and a thousand other strange but always very: palatable com-
pounds, may be judged by the simple fact that, in spite of the
high duties on wines and ardent spirits, and the large salaries
demanded by skillful, experienced darkeepers, the bars of most of
the large hotels suffice, by their own profits, to pay the annual rent
of the building. :

» The Ring, as unfortunately not only the P. R., familiar to Eng-
lish ears, but every combination of politicians, speculators, etc.,
is called here, has naturally contributed its share of cant terms to
our speech. The American is, on the whole, far less fond of sport
itself than the Englishman; he hardly knows sport as a national
pastime, however excellent a sportsman he may be individually,
and, with the exception of racing, public sport is little known
away from the large cities. But he is, on the other hand, passion-
ately fond of excitement, loves to risk much in order to gain
much, watches the ventures of others with keen interest, and loves,
therefore, the use of all sporting terms for the sake of the flavor -
they bear. He is perfectly familiar with all the phraseology
318 AMERICANISMS.

belonging to English sport, and fond of applying it to the ordi
nary occurrences of life. The chalk of the pugilistic ring, which
marks the limits that bind the two contestants, reappears in many
a phrase of his daily life. The President, in whom he is disap-
pointed for one reason or another, does not come up to chalk;
when he dismisses an official, he is made to walk the chalk ; and
if an antagonist or a competitor declines to meet his rival in open
discussion, he is denounced as not having come up to the scratch,
as the chalk-line is called, which divides the ring fairly. Even
the tavern-keeper’s—not as in England the inn-keeper’s—chalk
must lend itself to such figurative language. “You can’t do that
by a long chalk,” is a common expression for a man’s inability to
accomplish his purpose, derived from the chalk-marks of credit
on the owner’s door or shutter. It is thus often literally applied
to the fact that a speculator, for instance, cannot succeed by a long
chalk, in other words, by all the credit he may be able to com-
mand. The phrase is one of the oldest in the English language,
from the familiarity of the people with inns and their customs,
and appears under a great variety of forms, from A. Smith’s pun—

“ And if you want fresh liquor, you must pay,
For chalks too often walk themselves away—”
(Alhambra.)

to the more modern expression of, To beat by long chalks, which
is also not unfrequently heard here. (Slang Dictionary, p. 97.)
The word strike is quite a fruitful source of colloquial terms,
from the combination of workmen for cessation of labor till
higher wages are paid—a word of comparatively recent origin wm
America, but already quite naturalized in England, to the striking
a lead in a gold-mine. Tenpins, as the old-fashioned Ninepins
are uniformly called since a pin was added in order to escape
from the penalties of a law which prohibited Ninepins, have fur-
nished the expressive phrase, for an unexpected success, to make a
ten-strike. “TI tell you what, my son, if you have really bought
that plantation, you have made a ¢en-strike of it; it is worth a
hundred thousand any time you bring it into market.” (Flush
Times in Alabama, p. 217.) The miner literally with his pick-
axe strikes a vein, while he is hard at work prospecting, and
from his luck the phrase is transferred to any sudden discovery
TRADE OF ALL KINDS. 319

of good fortune. “It was thought in the mines and gulches that
Mliss has s¢ruck a good lead.” (F. B. Harte, Luck of Roaring
Camp, p. 153.) But the greatest success of all was made by the
fortunate owners of sterile lands in Pennsylvania, who struck ile
(oil), as it is called in common cant; the petroleum-wells thus
opened were a source of immense wealth to them, and colossal
fortunes have been amassed in an incredibly short time in the
so-called Oil Regions. This phrase also has made its way into
the language of the day. “We are told Mr. Harte has struck ile
in Chicago. Ata dinner given in his honor, each guest brought
five thousand dollars as his contribution to Brett Harte’s new
magazine.” (Philadelphia Ledger, February 15, 1871.) In the
West a s¢riker is not only a shoulder-hitter, as might be suspected,
but a runner for gambling establishments, who must be as ready
to strike down a complaining victim as to ensnare an unsuspect-
ing stranger. ‘He was one of the most accomplished strizers, or
barkers, as they are called, in the employ of the hells.” (The
Country Merchant, p. 317.) Cappers they are called, when the
game is the famous Z'hree-Card Monte.

Striking is, however, by no means a favorite word for such acts
of violence; it has too many figurative meanings. Kicking seems
to be more popular, if we may judge from its frequent application
to other purposes. The disturber of the public peace is said to
kick up a row,and so is the man who brings discord into a public
body or party. “The ill-treatment of Mr. Sumner will not be
borne patiently by his friends and the New England States; it is
sure to kick up a row in the Republican party, the effects of which
will be felt at the next Presidential election.” (Louisville Courter-
Journal, March 19,1871.) More ungracefully still, an unfortunate
lover, who is simply “jilted” at the North, is more violently kicked
at the South—a phrase marking most characteristically the con-
trast between the free and easy manners of our day with those of
past days, when the strongest term used for the painful occasion
was to give and to get the mitten. The latter word ought, how-
ever, always to be mittens, as the phrase is derived from the same
use made of the French mitaines, which had to be accepted by the
unsuccessful lover instead of the hand, after which he aspired. If
a combat really takes place, it may be a simple wrestling, which is
often pronounced rassling, not without good reason, since wrast-
320 AMERICA NISMS.

ling is good old English, and so used by Chaucer, whose Miller
“at wrastling bore away the palm.” It is rather a curious taste
which led Mr. Motley, in his admirable work on the United Neth-
erlands, to use a very familiar phrase, and to state that “ Howard
determined to wrestle no farther pull.” In fighting, a horrible
contrivance is sometimes used, called in savage irony knuckle-
dusters, an iron instrument contrived to cover the knuckles go ag
to protect them from injury when striking a blow, adding force at
the same time, and with knobs or points projecting, so as to dis-
figure and mutilate the person struck. It is stated, upon English
authority only, that “this brutal invention is American, but has
been made familiar in England in police cases between the officers
and sailors of American vessels.” (Slang Dictionary, p. 168.) A
knock-down is familiar wherever Knglish is spoken, both in the
sense of actual prostration and of an argument which completely
floors the adversary. .“ That was a clincher; I don’t know when
I have heard a knock-down argument which left the opponent so
little life and breath. Governor Walker skinned him alive.”
(Richmond Whig, July 7, 1870.) Knocking off means to stop
work, and has been a common phrase with workmen of every
kind for more than two hundred years, though but of late admit-
ted into good company. “I have a great mind,” says an opera-
tive employed by the day, “to knock off and call it half a day.”
(J. C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches.) A similar term, derived from the
slang of operatives, is to knock aut the wedges, which is used to
express a painful embarrassment in which a man is left by his
friends, after having been led into it by their agency. The figure
is taken from the danger threatening a woodchopper, who has
driven wedges into a log, and in helping to remove one, may have
his hand caught by the carelessness of his companions. To this,
J. R. Lowell refers in the lines—

“T don’t approve o’ givin’ pledges ;
You'd ough’ to leave a fellow free,
An’ not go knockin’ out the wedges,
To ketch his fingers in the tree.”
(Biglow Papers, I., p. 90.)

To knock up is likewise a familiar term, but is not unfrequently
applied in the United States to a very curious purpose, character-
.

TRADE OF ALL KINDS. 321

istic of the false prudery of the people. An English traveller
relates, with comic distress, how he inquired after a lady’s health,
and was told by her sister that she was knocked up. He insisted
upon knowing what had brought on the excessive fatigue—as he
understood the term—and was only more embarrassed than the
lady, whom he fairly put to flight, by learning afterwards that the
phrase was used in speaking of ladies when in an interesting con-
dition.

The purpose of such a tussle need, however, not necessarily be
a regular fight; it may be the result of a simple desire to inflict
punishment. ‘The good old English word to Jam, quoted already
in Bailey’s Dictionary, as meaning “to beat or bang,” still does
good service in our country. Its derivation from the same root as
the verb to lame, was long considered good, and strengthened by
Grose’s spelling of the word lamme; but less credit was given to
those who saw in it the remnant of the Latin lambere, as J. R.
Lowell, perhaps with a facetious smile, suggests, and to the fol-
lowers of Sir W. Scott, who gave the parentage to one Dr. Lamb.
The presumption is, that the word is the direct descendant of the
Old Norse fam, a hand, which happens also to be Gaelic. (Slang
Dictionary, p. 169.) A curious addition has extended the modest
word into lambasting, evidently combining the two effective
agencies of damming and basting into one formidable operation.
“T can’t hide,” says a braggadoccio, “when anybody owes me a
lambasting.” (J. ©. Neal, Charcoal Sketches, IL, p.'79.) Other
fast characters prefer to Jarrup unruly and troublesome youths,
employing a word well known as an English provincialism
(Forby), and said to be a corruption of the sailor’s Zeerope, from
which he suffers on board ship. If the sufferer be a child, it is
spanked, that is, punished by. slapping with the open hand. Moor
gives the word as in use in Suffolk (England), and as denoting a
mother’s punishment. Bailey also has it, and derives it from an
old Saxon term; and to this day itis in constant use in the South,
where many old English words still survive and flourish, that
have long since become obsolete everywhere else. As we call re-
markable excellence striking, it is perhaps not unnatural that
very showy things should be called spanking, and hence, here as
in England, it is no uncommon expression to speak of “a pair of
spanking bays.” (Slang Dictionary, p. 240.)

14*
822 AMERICANISMS.

Happy, however, the fight that ends without more serious con-
sequences, since the habit of carrying arms is almost universal in
America, and nothing is held cheaper than human life. The very
readiness with which the American risks his own life, now
bravely battling in war, and now venturing wantonly across the
Atlantic in a nut-shell, makes him think of the life of others ag
little as of his; and since everybody entertains the same fatal
view, life seems to need more immediate protection than the laws
can afford. Hence the numerous Bowte-knives of the South and
West, formidable weapons, over a foot long and two inches broad,
which derived their name from two or more brothers, desperadoes,
called Bowie, who figured in Texas during the time of Davy
Crockett and Sam Houston. In Arkansas they prefer a variety
which can shut up into the handle, because it is more easily worn
on the body, and call it, with savage irony, an Arkansas toothpick.

“Straightway leaped the valiant Slingby
Into armor of Seville,
With a strong Arkansas toothpick,
Screwed in every joint of steel.”
(Ben. Gaultier, American Ballads, B.)

Hence, also, the still greater number of revolvers, as all revolv-
ing firearms are called, from the heavy Navy Revolver with its
long range to the diminutive Derringer, little over two inches
long. The professional rough is almost always thus prepared for
mortal fight: the term rouwghs is, however, less familiar in
America than in England, its place being largely taken by the
rowdy, « word made in this country by legitimate descent from
the row, in which he loves to engage. A recent Boston paper
said sadly but frankly: “ Roughs and rowdies are multiplying
fearfully in our Borders; this Commonwealth is not “properly
policed, and we want a patrol, day and night, of gensdarmes.”
(Boston Courier, March 19, 1871.) The row was probably at first
an Oxford term for any noisy disturbance, but soon spread
throughout fast society, and has lately emerged from the Bohe-
mia of slang into the kingdom of good English. The word
rowdy, however, has but quite recently crossed the Atlantic, and
will probably wait for the row, before it also takes its place in
English parlance. A vumpus —perhaps from the same root as
the German rwmpeln—denotes any great noise, not necessarily
TRADE OF ALL KINDS. 323

connected with deeds of violence, after the manner of the En-
glish shindy, but when the rowdy is in earnest and his blood is
up, he has a terrible term by which to designate the nature of his
action: he raises Cain. “He had been knocking around all day
in every grog-shop and bar-room in town, and whey evening
came he was seen swaggering down Main-street, his head bare,
his eyes bloodshot, and his revolver in hand, shouting: Who'll
hinder this child? Iam going to raise Cain! Who’s got any-
thing to say agin it?” (Scenes in the Far West, p. 117.) <A spree
is a very innocent amusement in comparison, hurting generally
no one but the merry fellow who pays for his frolic with a bad
headache; and yet there are those who will derive the word, like
the kindred spry, from the French esprit, which they say pro-
duced the two bantlings in Louisiana! The English, in like
manner, hold their Canadian brethren responsible for the two
words, of which spry, much used among us, has not yet been ad-
mitted into careful writing. Grose has already sprey, which he
says means ingenious, spruce, and in this sense the word is much
used in conversation; with us it means, besides, quick motion
aud prompt action, so that peopk say, “ Come, be spry!” when
they wish to urge others to haste. “He was the spryest chap I
ever saw,” is high praise from a Yankee’s lips, and J. R. Lowell
makes it serve a good purpose when he says, “ Hosy sez he sed
suthin anuther about Simplex Mundishes or sum sech feller, but I
guess Hosea kind o’ didn’t hear him, for I never hearn 0’ nobody
o’ that name in the villadge, and I’ve lived here, man and boy,
seventy-six year cum next tatur digging, and thar aint nowheres
a kitting spryer w’ I be.” (Biglow Papers, Preface.)

In his outward appearance the rowdy of America differs little
from his brother in the Old Country, except, perhaps, in the one
point of wearing frequently a soaplock, a lock of hair which he
makes to lie smoothly by means of soap. It is the descendant
of the Cavalier’s sidelock, of which Sir W. Scott says: “The
gauntlet is speedily drawn off, that he may adjust his side-
locks ;” but it has sadly degenerated in the wearer, and now as
often designates the latter himself as his absurd ornament. “'The
police took up in the Bowery, last night, a number of men and
women, who were engaged in a grand mélée near Thomas’ bar-
room; the majority of the former were well-known rowdies and
824 AMERICANISMS.

soaplocks.” (New York Herald, June 11, 1857.) The female orna-
ment,corresponding to the soaplock and worn by the g’als of the
Bowery as the latter is worn by the d’hoys, is the spit-curl. Thig
is the descendant of the bow-catcher (sic) or kiss-curl of Eng-
land, just as the aristocratic love-lock of the days of Puritanism
was the ancestor of the republican soap;lock. The name, given
in derision to the short. hair at the side of the head, curled into
little volutes and gummed to the skin, is happily fast going out
of fashion. When poor Mrs. Trollope was a refugee in this
country, in 1832, this was one of the features in our social life
that caused her such poignant sorrow. “Indeed, Mamma, said
Miss Maria,” she reports, “arranging her spit-curl in that par-
ticular manner, which at once explains the meaning of the
rather particular appellation given by American ladies to the
captivating little lock which adorns their temples.”

As long as the rowdy is thus at work in comparative harmless-
ness, 07 a spree or in a rumpus, he is very fond of designating his
peculiar proceedings as cutting up something, apparently desirous
to convey the idea that some mischief, some cutting must be
mixed up with it or there would be no fun in it to him. He cuts
capers, he cuts up shines, he even cuts didoes, as if he would
imitate famous Queen Dido in her cunning device by which she
received her magnificent “hide” of land. Such at least is Pro-
fessor Mahn’s interpretation of an expression which so far has
baffled all research. “If you go to cutting up shines in court, I
shall fine you or send you to the Tombs for a fortnight.” (Police
Report, New York Herald, March 28, 1859.) “This ’ere French-
man has been cudtjng up didoes in my house now for several days;
he ain’t sober onst a week, and breaks all my cheers and tables,
Mr. Recorder.” (Pickings from the Picayune, p. 147.) The
transition from the innocent amusement to the serious fight is,
however, a very slight one, thanks ‘to the tendency of Young
America to pitch in. The term originated probably with Western
settlers, to whom the familiar expression of falling to did not
seem strong enough to convey their superabundant energy, and
thus changed the falling into a pitching. “I had no one to help
me,” says a new settler, “so I concluded to pitch in and do it my-
self” (A Trip to the West, 1853.) Pitching it strong, is perhaps
best illustrated in American humor, which is not content with
TRADE OF ALL KINDS. 325

small measure or modest criticism, and to pitch into a person is
expressive of its application to some rival or adversary. “Grace
Greenwood, supposed to be buried somewhere in the West, recently
gave signs of remaining vitality by pitching into a younger
pseudonyme, the sparkling and saucy Gail Hamilton.” (Lippin-
cot’s Magazine, July, 1869.)

A special kind of rowdy, known only to America, is “ the b’hoy
that runs wid de machine,” as he is called in his own slang lan-
guage. The particular machine in this case is the fire-engine,
with its hose, ladder, and other paraphernalia, that he delights in
literally running through the streets amid deafening shouts and
yells. He loves the din and turmoil, he loves the excitement of
the fire itself, and—to his eredit be it said—he loves fearlessly
and recklessly to risk his life a thousand times in order to save
that of others, or even property only. In our day, however, the
phrase has become a favorite expression for the management of
any great enterprise, and it was in this sense that Mr. Lincoln
once told a friend, in return for a liberal amount of advice and
admonition about his administration; “Now look here! If I
have to run this machine I shall run it my own way, and be
accountable to God, my conscience, and the people, but not to
you!” Inthe same manner people run a bank, a store, and any-
thing they undertake—even their own face, when they obtain
credit solely on account of their respectable appearance. It ought
to be borne in mind, however, that this cant use of the word
machine is by no means an Americanism. England has its bath-
ing-machines now, stage-coaches used to be generally called
machines, and as late as 1858, municipal reports in London spoke
of the horses employed in stage-coaches and omnibuses as
machines. We find in Notes and Queries this early evidence of
such use:

“Fen tho’ ’d the Honour of sitting between
My Lady Stuff Damask and Peggy Moreen,
Who both flew to Bath in the London machine.”
(Anstey’s New Bath Guide, 1766, p. 93.)

The rowdy may be at the same time a bully, if he is given to
ruling others by threats and acts of violence. This term, how-
ever, has of late acquired a new meaning—it is not quite sure
whether first in England or in America-—of a more harmless
326 AMERICANISMS.

character, though decided slang in its nature. “Bully for you,”
was a phrase which became very popular during the late Civil
War, and everything remarkable for strength or efficiency hag
since been designated as bully. The term is such good old Eng-
lish, that there would be no objection to its revival, but for its
modern allegiance to slang. Shakespeare asks: “ What says my
bully rock ?” (Merry Wives of Windsor) ; Sir W. Scott makes his
Friar Tuck sing—

“Come trowl the brown bowl to me,
Bully boy, bully boy '”

and in his Lady of the Lake he sings—

“Yet, whoop, bully boys! Off with your liquor,
Sweet Marjorie’s the word, and a fig for the vicar !”

It is in precisely the same humor that duly is used in America.
A Mississippi boatman’s song has the lines—

“ Now is the time for a dully trip,
So, shake her up and let her rip ;”

and it has been suggested by a prophetic critic that a Bohemian
version of the Bible would probably speak of the “ great hunter”
as “ Even Nimrod, the dudly shootist before the Lord.”

The corresponding modern term—for a few years are often a
long life-lease for a popular cant word—is the phrase, “How is
that for high ?” borrowed from a low game, known as Old Sledge,
where the high depends, not on the card itself, but on the adver-
sary’s hand. Hence the phrase means, What kind of an attempt
is that at a great achievement? It is of Western origin, having
made its appearance in some of the Northwestern journals, but
has spread, as weeds do, rapidly, all over the Union, and will no
doubt soon find its way to England also. A familiar nursery-
rhyme is thus altered to “suit the times:”

“Mary had a little lamb,
It jumped up to the sky,
And when it landed on its feet,
Cried : How is that for high ?”

while an editor, overcome with difficulties, made this touching
though indirect appeal to his subscribers:
TRADE OF ALL KINDS. 327

“T had a dream the other night,
When everything was still;
I dreamed that each advertiser
Came up and paid his bill;
Each wore a look of honesty,
And smiles were round each eye,
As they handed over the stamps.
They yelled: How’s that for high ?”
(Pennsylvania paper, February, 1871.)
Besides this favorite game, known under a variety of names, as
Seven Up, ete, Monte is most generally known in the South and
Southwest; a sad inheritance of the former owners of the soil,
and passionately indulged in by the mixed population of those
regions. The fact that players at Three-Card Monte, as it is most
commonly called, are said to duck at monte, causes the familiar
phrase of ducking at anything, in the sense of putting forth one’s
whole energy. “You'll have to buck at it like a whole team, gen-
tlemen, or you won’t hear the whistle near your diggings for many
ayear.” (San Antonio paper, 1870.) Far more generally, how-
ever, than these games, the fast and the rowgh American like two
or three others, which have become almost inseparably connected
with théir favorite resort, the bar-room of the city or of the West-
ern steamboat. One is known as Huchre, said by Professor Mahn
to be of German origin, and proving its ancestry to some extent
by designating its two highest cards as Right and Left Bower,
evidently the German Bauer or peasant. The universal popularity
of the game, which is not unknown to the ladies of the South
especially, has led to the use of many a phrase drawn from its
peculiarities. The verb to ewchre is thus pressed into the service
to denote a defeat, not at cards only, but in any rivalry. “Tl
euchre him if I can, and I think I can. [ve got a little money to
put up on it, anyhow, and I’ll put it up, too.” (Putnam’s Maga-
zine, November, 1868.) The game of Loo furnishes in like
manner a verb, to loo, meaning to defeat. “Douglas was loved.”
Another such game is known as Poker, evidently a distant relative
of poke and the French poche, representing what in other games
is called a pool. Like its near cousin, suggestively called Bluff,
poker is a mere hazard game, with which, however, is combined
great skill in bragging to a purpose. One man offers a bet on his
hand, another doubles the bet, and “goes one better;” then the
328 AMERICANISMS.

first tries to dluff him off by a still higher bet, and thus the stake
rises rapidly to often enormous sums. When finally the hand has
to be shown, it often turns out to have amounted to nothing, and
the whole has been a game of bluff or of brag. In making a bet,
the player says: I'll see it (that is, your hand), and go two (or
more) better. Hence again various phrases used colloquially all
over the Union. J see tt, is now as common in England as with
us, and generally ascribed to the old use of the word, as it occurs
already in Cibber’s Careless Husband, “I don’t see tt ;” but there

can be little doubt that the great number of uses to which the ___

verb to see is now-a-days put in slang phrases, have more recently
been obtained from the popular game. “In street parlance, to see
is to know or to believe, and J don’t see 1¢ means, I put no faith
in what you offer, I don’t believe you.” (Slang Dictionary, p. 223.)
“The matter was presented to Mr. Lincoln by Mr. Seward and
several other gentlemen; but he simply said, I can’t see it as you
see it, gentlemen, and there was nothing more to be done.” (Wash-
ington paper, July 29, 1861.) Poker, when played by betting
before looking at one’s hand, is called Blind Poker, and this has
given rise to the very common phrase, to go i¢ blind, used whenever
an enterprise is undertaken without previous inquiry: J. RB.
Lowell in speaking of Jefferson Davis, praises ironically his great
skill and power
“to impress on the popular mind
The comfort and wisdom of goin’ tt blind.”
(Biglow Papers, II, p. 118.)

When a lady in California is threatened by her husband, furious
at having been betrayed by her, and aiming a rifle at her head,
she suddenly presents two small revolvers and cries out, “I can
play a hand at that game, and go one better.” (Overland Monthly,
March, 1871.) The latest invention seems to be a chance game,
called keno, very popular in New York, and played in public
places of amusement by one or two hundred persons at a time.
The ordinary Faro is generally veiled under the euphuistic term
of Ye Tiger, a curious name, quite adequate to express the destruc-
tive and voracious nature of the game, but recently attributed to
a Chinese deity! “A favorite figure of one of the Chinese gods
of gambling is a ¢iger standing on his hind-feet, and grasping a
large cash in his mouth or his paws. Sometimes the image is
TRADE OF ALL KINDS. 329

made of wood or clay, or drawn on a piece of paper or board. The
title of the beast, ‘His Excellency, the Grasping Cash Tiger, is
frequently written on a piece of paper, and placed in the gambling-
rooms between two bunches of mock-money suspended under the
table or on the wall behind it. This figure is the sign for a gam-
bling house: ‘The Fighting Tiger” It is curious that we should
have to look to China for the origin of this phrase.” (Appleton’s
Journal, January 7, 1871.) A technical term is the sweat-cloth,
a cloth marked with figures, and used by gamblers with dice;
while the generic name of hell, derived from England, is quite as
frequent here as in its native land.

Such occupations, drinking, fighting, and gambling, are, of
course, sure to lead to crime, and the rowdy is apt to find himself
some unlucky day on his way to prison, which in New York bears
the melancholy name of the Zomds, though built in the heaviest
Egyptian style of architecture. His fate there presents nothing
peculiar to the locality, with the exception of an undesirable ac-
quaintance he is likely to make there; this is the shyster. Law-
yers are hanging continually about the Tombs, in which certain
courts are held, and some of these ill-reputed men offer their
services to the new-comer, compel him to pay a fee in advance,
and then—do nothing. On the contrary, they fight shy of him,
and hence they have obtained their name. “A shyster indicted
and locked up,” is the heading of an article, which states that
« ®. J. Anderson, the lawyer who is charged with having taken
$50 from two seamen to defend their case, and not going near
them afterward, was, in default of $6,000 bail, summarily com-
nitted to the Tombs to await trial.” (New York World, March 8,

1871.)
ge is

AFLOAT.
AFPLOAT.

“Think of our schooners, our clippers, and our monitors.”
7 Hon. Thaddeus Stevens.

A NATION so eminently successful in all matters pertaining to
navigation, having built the fastest clipper, the first monitor, and
the largest river-boat, and owning a continent bordering upon
two oceans, while gigantic streams and countless watercourses
traverse it in all directions, and the largest lakes on earth afford
ample sea-room within its own bounds,—such a nation cannot
but have numerous terms and phrases referring to the life on the
water and in the waters. Her sailors are found in every part of
the globe, her fishermen on every bank and in every sea where
daring energy and unconquerable perseverance find a reward, and
throughout the whole land there is scarcely a district where boats
are not handled, and fishing-lines thrown, by the boy already.

Nevertheless the number of new words coined, or of old words
used in a new meaning and form, for things connected with the
sea and its tributaries, and the life in the waters, is but small.
English terms, used for such purposes, ate so abundant and so
well suited to all the details of the profession, of sport, and even
of accidental variations, that there arises but rarely a necessity
for a new name. American sailors—not often of American birth
in our day—and American fishermen, use almost exclusively the
language of their British cousins, and Isaak Walton is perhaps
more generally read and known and quoted in America than in
his native land. It is only where names have been supplied by
French or Spanish settlers before the time of American rule, that
words like Canoe or Pirogue have made good their place in our
speech; these and their kindred have been mentioned under their
appropriate head. Of English forms a few refer to the peculiar

/
334 AMERICANISMS.

shape or use of vessels. Such are the dankers, vessels employed
in fishing on the Banks of Newfoundland, and deriving their
name from the locality. J.Q. Adams, in his report on the fisheries,
speaks in high terms of their value in a pecuniary aspect, and
their usefulness in training admirable seamen; while a recent
work on “Newfoundland Fisheries,” tells us that “the crew of a
banker is generally composed of twelve men, including the skipper
or captain, who exercises no direct control over the others, but is
recognized by them as the principal personage on board.” The
name must not, however, be confounded with the dankers of North
Carolina, people living near that part of the Atlantic coast which
there also is called the “banks,” and who used to be wreckers of
doubtful repute. They now combine the vocations of farming,
fishing, and wrecking, but it is said that their kindness and hos-
pitality to wrecked seamen is unfailing and unlimited. The
Chebacco boat, bearing the old Indian name of a town in Massa-
chusetts, now called Essex, where they were formerly built, is
another class of vessels engaged in the Newfoundland fisheries,
and characterized by a very narrow stern, from which feature they
also derive the name of Pinkstern, after the Dutch pink, a vessel
with such a stern.

These and similar boats are often propelled by a Setting-Pole,
a pole much heavier than the canoe-pole, and hence used very
differently. It is a stout pole, shod with a heavy-pointed “ sock-
et,” and has on the other end a knob, to place against the shoulder.
“The poles are se¢ upon the bottom by the boatmen standing on
each side of the bow, and as the boat advances the men move
along the running boards with the stationary poles at their
shoulder, sometimes walking bent almost on all-fours, until they
have arrived at the stern, when they draw the poles up and set
them again, the headway keeping the boat from receding. In
more rapid water, the men reset alternately.” (S. 8. Haldeman.)

A battery is the odd name given in Chesapeake Bay to a heavy
boat, not unlike a coffin in shape, and hence also known as coffin-
boat, used in duck-shooting. Its peculiar build enables the
hunter to float gently down upon his unsuspecting game, lying
below the surface of the water, while the heavy calibre of his gun,
and the fact that he fires it from a kind of miniature embrasure,
have, no doubt, led to the use of the word battery. The Monitor,
AFLOAT. 335

finally, a word beyond all question belonging to America, as well
as the formidable vessel to which, under various forms, it has
since given the name, is well known as the famous invention of
Captain Ericsson—the first ship built with a revolving turret. The
principles of her construction were altogether new in the history
of naval architecture, and, after the signal victory of the first
monitor in Hampton Roads, the name became a household word
at the North. The great inventor has not made it known what
induced him to choose the name: hence etymologists have evolved
it out of their inner consciousness that he must have borrowed it
from Gray’s Monitor Dracena, a large lizard covered with im-
penetrable armor. Irreverend Confederates called the hideous-
looking vessels cheese-boxes, and apparently one designation is,
etymologically, though not esthetically, as good as the other.
Their own unsuccessful imitations they still more disrespectfully
called Tinclads.

In speaking of the proéeeds of deep-sea fisheries, at least one
new term has become sufficiently familiar to the general public to
take it out of the class of merely technical terms, and entitle it to
the honor of an Americanism. This is the dunfish, cod pre-
pared so as to give it a dun-color, from which the name is derived.
For this purpose the fish are salted, and then laid in piles in a
dark room, covered with salt-hay or some similar substanee. After
two or three months the piles are opened and the fish examined,
after which they are piled up once more in a compact mass and
left to, ripen for another two or three months. In July or
August they are ready for use, and command a high price, being
far superior to ordinary codfish. J. G. Whittier describes an old
puritan’s outfit thus: °

“They had loaded his shallop with dunjish and ball,
With stores for his larder and steel for his wall.”

Another term connected with the cod is the name of the scaffold-
ing on which they are dried, the flakes, as the long poles are~
called, which are laid upon crotched posts and covered with brush,
so that the codfish can be spread upon the platform and dried.
But the word is not American; it is found in the singular, at
least, in Wright’s Collection as in use in the north of England,
and meaning a hurdle or a paling. In Whitbourne’s Discourse
336 AMERICANISMS.

and Discoverie of Newfoundland, London, 1622, we find, more-
over, “Some teare down flakes, whereon men yeerely dry their
fish, to the great hurt and hinderance of many others that come
after them.” (p. 66.) These flakes are referred to on the follow-
ing page as “stakes that are fastened in the ground, with rayles
on them,” thus fully establishing the antiquity of the term.

The clipper, also, a cutter or schooner built for fast sailing, with.
a long sharp bow and raking masts, can hardly be claimed as an
Americanism, but the clipper-built ship, a vessel of large tonnage,
but. of the same model, originated here, in consequence of the
eager competition for the new trade which sprang up between the
Atlantic seaports and the Pacific coast, after California had been
incorporated in the Union.

The primitive form of a raft, seen on the large inland waters,
of gigantic size, and requiring not unfrequently several months to
accomplish the enormous journey from the headwaters of a riv-
er, in frozen regions, to its mouth near the Tropics, has given
its name to an object peculiar to American navigation. These
are the stationary rafts, consisting of large numbers of trees and
timber, which have been arrested, as they floated down theriver, by
some sand-bar or shallow flat, and there lodge for years, to the great:
annoyance of flatboat and steamboat captains, and causing grave
injuries to trade and commerce. The Great Raft in the Red Riv-
er of Arkansas had become so serious an obstacle to navigation, as
to excite even the attention of Congress, and as its dimensions—it
extended over twenty miles—made its removal impossible to pri-
vate enterprise, it was undertaken at national expense. The
first improvement.upon the raft were probably the flatdoats, long
used for transporting produce on the great western rivers. They
are described as “simply an oblong ark, with a roof slightly curved
from the centre, to shed rain. They are generally above fifteen
feet wide, and from fifty to a hundred feet long. The timbers of
the bottom are massive beams, and they are intended to be of great
strength, and to carry a burden of from two to four hundred barrels.
Great numbers of cattle, horses, and hogs are conveyed to market
in them.” On the tributaries of the Mississippi, as well as on the
great river itself, they used to be known as Broadhorns, because
they were square at both ends; built during the summer and fall,
as soon as harvest was over, they received their vast freight and were
swept down the stream.
AFLOAT, 337

“We have seen family boats of this description, fitted up for the
descent of families to the lower country, with a stove, comfortable
apartments, beds, and arrangements for commodious habitancy.”
(Mississippi Valley, Flint.) Arrived at their destination, they
discharge their cargoes, and are then sold as lumber, often leaving
a handsome profit to the lucky owner. These arks, as they
are familiarly called, are now-a-days but rarely seen on the Missis-
sippi, the steamboat having almost entirely superseded them; on
the more remote watercourses, however, where time is of less vital
importance, they are still quite common, and the race of flatdoat-
men, a peculiar class of Western men, powerful, good-natured, and
rough, will long survive. They are not alittle proud of their
quondam companion, who once floated with them down the great
river, far from anticipating the high honor and the historic renown
he would earn as President and as a martyr.

The Keelboat, formerly as often seen on the Mississippi and its trib-
utaries as the old-fashioned flatboat, differed in every respect from the
latter. It was longand slender, of graceful build, too small to carry
more than about thirty tons at the utmost, but admirably adapted
by its light draft to pass over shallow places and other obstructions,
which would delay larger vessels. It is still frequently found in
Western waters, propelled by all the various means employed for
the purpose, from “ bushwhacking” to steam. Wharfboats, also, are
probably found more generally in America than in any other country,
and hence the term is almost an Americanism. It designates a large,
solid float, often covered in, on which merchandise, lumber, etc.,
can be stored, for loading or for inland transportation, and which
is generally moored to the shoreside to take the place of a regular
fixed wharf. The latter would be useless in rivers which, like
most of the Western waters, are subject to frequent and serious
changes of level, now suddenly rising so as to overflow the banks,
and then again falling low enough to leave vessels aground.

Schooners are generally believed to be an American invention,
named by an American word, the first vessel of the kind having
been built by a Captain Andrew Robinson at Gloucester in Massa-
chusetts, in the year 1713. When she was launched, it is said, a
bystander exclaimed, “How she scoons!” This word scoon was
then much used in the New England States, as it is still used in
Scotland, to denote the skipping of stones thrown so as to skim

15 ;
338 AMERICANISMS.

over the surface of the water. The builder, hearing the exclama-
tion, at once said: “ A scooner 1ét her be!’ and from that time
vessels masted and rigged in this manner have been known as
schooners. The origin of the term rests, as Dr. N. Webster says, on
abundant and unimpeachable evidence, and is endorsed by the
high authority of Professor W. D. Whitney.

A small fishing-vessel is known in the New England States as
‘a jigger, but the term is purely local, and not suggestive of any
peculiarity of rig or build, though subtle inquirers have been dis-
posed to notice a resemblance in its peculiar manner of moving
through the water to that of the ill-famed jigger, a sand-flea.
Liners, on the contrary, are well.known as the noble ships, be-
longing to regular lines of packets, which sail at regular dates
between American and English ports, and are thus distinguished
from other vessels which make the same voyage only as their in-
terest may demand. Although no longer in the hands of Ameri-
can owners, their high reputation, established in former days, still
secures to them a large patronage, in spite of the daily increasing
competition of fast steamers.

A few of the terms used on board ship may be regarded as be-
longing to our speech exclusively. Such is the fummadiddle, a
holiday-mess of New England fishermen, who lick their chops at
the very mention of this oddly-named delicacy. It consists of a
number of ingredients, the most important of which are stale
bread, pork-fat, molasses, cinnamon, allspice, and cloves; by the
aid of these materials a kind of mush is made, which is baked in
the oven and brought to the table hot and brown. If two whalers
should happen to meet upon the whaling grounds when such'a
dainty mess is served, they would be apt to have a very long and
merry gam, as the conversation is called under such circumstances.
“The gam,” says H. Melville, “was long, but sober and serious;
the two sea-dogs knew nothing of each other, and hence were cau-
tious not to let out any of their secrets; they compared reckoning,
hoped for whales, and discussed the weather in no complimentary
manner.” It is on such occasions that the flag of the approaching
vessel is most anxiously scanned to see what news may be ob-
tained, and great is the satisfaction of the Britisher even, when he
sees the Gridiron and Doughboys, as he half contemptuously, half
good-naturedly, calls the Stars and Stripes of this country. (Slang
AFLOAT, 339

Dictionary, p. 147.) The captain in American merchant-ships is
almost universally known as the old man, and even the gravity of
a high court could not resist the extremely ludicrous contrast,
when, a few years ago, the case of a vessel was discussed before
that tribunal, which had been brought home, after the master’s
death, by his brave widow, and the latter, a comely young woman,
was gravely alluded to by one of the sailors, in his evidence, as
the “old man down below.” The same sea-slang calls the quad-
rant a pig-yoke, from a more fancied than real resemblance to
that simple contrivance. It speaks certainly very eloquently in
favor of pork and beans, that this national dish of the New Eng-
lander, unknown in the land of his pilgrim fathers, should have
continued such a favorite for two hundred years. It is, of course,
the descendant of the well-known English dish of “boiled pork
and pease-pudding,” a great favorite abroad in provincial towns ;
but the dried pease are here replaced by beans, as the latter are
more prolific and of better quality in the United States. No
whaling captain, it is said, ever allows the toothsome dish to be
long absent from his table, and the vessels on the great lakes
always lay in a goodly store of pork and molasses, when they
undertake a longer voyage. The latter term, also, has on board
American vessels not unfrequently a new and special meaning:
sailors on board of whaling boats call their share of the proceeds
of their cruise a voyage, as this share is paid them instead of
money-wages.

In the pursuit of fishing, both at sea and in inland waters, a
few terms are peculiar to this country, though many are only in
loal use. The dipsy, for instance, the sinker of a fishing-line, is
only known in Pennsylvania; the name, of course, arises from the
dip the little weight takes as soon as it touches the water; the
dobber, on the other hand, the float of the line, is peculiar to
New York. An eel-spear, a kind of trident used in catching
eels, is the American substitute for the English “eel-shear,” and
gigging, in the sense of catching fish with a gig, is in Virginia
still used to denote night-fishing with a three-pronged spear, as it
was done in the days of Captain John Smith. The word gurry,
used by sailors and fishermen for the slime and blood of fish ad-
hering to their hands, is, in all probability, an inheritance from the
old English, though a connection with gory might, perhaps, be es-
840 AMERICANISMS.

tablished. Atbblings are the small fragments of fish used as bait
on the banks of Newfoundland, and Aid, a large box into which:
fish are thrown as fast as caught—a term, however, loca] in the
New England States. The /eader is a small line of hair, gut, or
grass, by which the angler’s hook is attached to the line itself,
also called:a snell; and a lig, in Maine, the hook, to which a little
piece of lead is cast to serve as a sinker. From the word line,
American daring has at once made a verb, and it is a very com-
mon phrase to say, “I shall'go lining this evening,” or “I lined
this fish.” “The squeteague,” says Dr. Smith, “is taken both by
lining and seining, and because it makes such feeble exertion and
resistance in being drawn in by a hook, it has received the appel-
lation of weak-fish.” (Fishes of Massachusetts, B.)

A mysterious term, probably originating in mispronunciation,
is the word scrod, meaning a small cod broiled ; its legitimate form
is escrod, but in its shortened form, which is largely used by
fishermen, it applies to any kind of small fish, fit for boiling.
An analogy with shreds (of fish) has been suggested, which would
lhe quite probable but for the existence of escrod.

Sharking is the convenient way of calling an expedition under-
taken to take sharks in a harbor, while the evil habits of the fish
have given occasion to name a lean hog, with its insatiable vora-
city, a shark in the West, and to form a verb, sharking, which
denotes the habit of preying upon others. W. Irving thus says:
“He was one of those vagabond cosmopolites, who shark about
the world, as if they had no right or business in it, and who infest
the skirts of society like poachers and interlopers.” (Knicker-
bocker, History of New York, p. 231.) Still-baiting, on the other
hand, is used in distinction from “trolling,” for fishing with a
line at one and the same spot.

Oysters are raised from their natural or artificial bed by oyster-
tongs, a ferocious hybrid between an iron-toothed rake and a pair of
scissors, having two long handles, crossing each other, so that at
fifteen or twenty feet depth the iron teeth bite between each other,
and, like fingers of clasped hands, gripe firmly whatever is in their
clutches. “It is a sight to watch the men pull up the heavy
oyster-tongs, and shake out bushels of luscious bivalves.” (Con-
necticut Georgics.)

Two very beautiful words, used and perhaps invented by our
AFLOAT. 341

coast-people, are moonglade and grayslick. The former denotes
the soft, silvery track which moonlight traces on the waters, and has
come down to sea-faring folk from the days of the pilgrim fathers,
among whom both sunglade and moonglade were used. The so-
called Old Colony people, retaining jealously much of the speech
of their forefathers, still employ these terms to embody in lan-
guage the falling of light aslant hillside or glen by night and by
day, and sometimes the track of light leading apparently from
the observer to sun or moon, is also called thus. The other word,
belonging more properly to the fishermen of Maine, means a state
of the sea when the wind has died away, and the water, unbroken
by waves, assumes the familiar “glassy” appearance. The men
will, hence, say: “We may just as well take to the oar, for we
have gotten into a grayslick.” While the first part of the word
refers to the dim but beautiful color, slick (sleek) fully expresses
the quiet, oleaginous condition of the sea in such places.

American sailors use the word handsomely in rather a peculiar
meaning; instead of ordering a sail to be furled carefully, the
captain is very apt to shout out, “ Handsomely, my men, don’t
hurry, handsomely for’ard there!” Nantucket fishermen, besides,
have a way of using the words on the coast, even when on shore, in
the often very ludicrous meaning of “near at hand,” and a gallant
lover will assure his lady-love that if she will only fix the day,
“he’ll be sure to be on the coast with the parson.” Slack water
navigation, also, is probably an Americanism; it means a kind of
inexpensive canal in the river itself, in which, by means of dams
and locks, a sufficient supply of water is maintained at all seasons.
Almost all the larger rivers, in the Eastern States, are thus made
navigable high above their original limits.

If there are few nautical and fishing terms that can be called
genuine Americanisms, the number of slang words and slang
phrases, originating with sailors and fishermen, is, on the other
hand, not inconsiderable. The majority of such expressions may,
of course, be found in England also, as the sailor is emphatically
a cosmopolitan, and his speech the same in every harbor of the
world. Some of them, however, can be distinctly traced to this
country, if not in. their first creation, at least in the special
meaning which they have acquired.

Thus the familiar designation of ships at Lloyd’s in England,
342 AMERICANISMS.

by letters, and a series of numbers attached to them, has led in
America to the use of the phrase A No. 1, for men and things
generally. “She’s a prime girl, she’s A No. 1,” said already Sam
Slick, and since Judge Haliburton’s day, the term has become
more common still. J. R. Lowell sings:
“He was six foot o’ man, A 1,

Clean grit and human natur’,

None could quicker pitch a ton,
Nor dror (draw) a farrer quicker.”
(The Courtin’.)

A No. 1 and no mistake is the intensified form the phrase
assumes here, while in England it is amplified into “First Class,
letter A, No. 1.” (Slang Dictionary, p. 17.)

The two words, ahead and aboard, are in like manner transfer-
red from sea-life to shore-life, and used in America with a fre
quency which can only be excused on the plea of their extreme
usefulness. Railroad conductors and stage drivers, coachmen
and cabmen, all urge you to “get aboard, and be quick, or you
will be left,” and ahead is used for every possible forwardness that
can be imagined. Schoolboys are ahead of others, the American
press is ahead of the English, and one church is ahead of another
in the liberality of its creed. To go ahead is commonly regarded
as a genuine Americanism, and even if the phrase should not be
original—which there is good reason to doubt—the tendency to
restless and energetic progress is certainly a characteristic feature
of the nation. The impatience of the term is well defined by
Mr. Howell in his attractive Venetian Life, where he speaks of a
“Sharp, bustling Yankee, who rushed into the Armenian Con-
vent on the island near Venice, one morning, rubbing his hands,
and demanded that they should show him all they could in five
minutes.” The goaheaditive American, as he alone of all men
would ever dare to say, is the type of the man of the period; and
when the Franco-Prussian war broke out, a New York journal
once more ventured upon the invariable prophecy, that “in this
complication of European difficulties, a favorable opportunity
was affordéd to American goaheaditiveness.” (Times, Aug. 1%,
1871.) Hence the English term: All Right! has disappeared
here, and its place, at sea and on land, is usurped by the national
Go ahead !

4
AFLOAT. 343

The familiarity with boating, which the unsurpassed number
of watercourses all over the country naturally produces every-
where, has led to the use, not only of paddling ones own canoe,
as has already been mentioned, but also of bailing one’s own boat,
in the sense of “minding one’s own business,” independently and
without waiting for help from others. To bear a hand is a simi-
lar term borrowed from the sea-phrase, and means, even in the
Far West, to be active and not to delay.

Gunboats and Floating Batteries are well known everywhere in
these days of naval warfare and armor-ships, but it was reserved
for the soldiers of the late Civil War to bestow the name of gun-
doats upon the contract shoes furnished them, which were apt to
be as clumsy and awkward as gunboats appear to sailors. There
was in the fancied resemblance a ludicrous correspondence with
the manner in which the ladies of Lima, famous for the ex-
treme smallness of their feet, look upon the less favored women
of other countries. It is related that some very beautiful English
ladies once created quite a sensation among the men of Lima;
but when the ladies were asked how they liked the foreign beau-
ties, the answer was, that they were well enough, but looked as if
they were walking in canoes. The term Floating Batteries was, in
like manner, applied in bitter irony to the army-bread furnished
by the Confederate Government. The word bogus, as applied to
an American beverage consisting of rum and molasses, is prob-
ably only an impatient abbreviation of the Calibogus of Captain
Grose, whose humor omits none of these pleasant compounds,
and who takes care to inform us, in his Classical Dictionary of
the Vulgar Tongue (ed. 1823), that in his day it was a nobler,
though hardly a healthier mixture of rum and ale! The ship’s
caboose, better known as the “galley” or shelter on deck, where
the cooking is done, has lent its mutilated name (cambdoose, from
Dutch Lombuis) to a small railroad-car, used for various special
purposes, and not known on English railways. Even the manner
of speaking to vessels at sea, by hatling aloud or through a speak-
ing-trumpet, has been transferred to land usage, and a man is
familiarly said to hail from his native State, or a stranger is ac-
costed with the words, “ Well, sir, and where did you hail from
last?” The hounds, also of a ship, the projecting parts of the
mast, which serve as shoulders for the top or trestle trees, have
344 AMERICANISMS.

been transferred to land, designating the parts projecting from
the front axletree to form a support for the tongue or pole.
The word is, in this latter use, not unfrequently written houns
simply.

Chowder also seems not to have been unknown to our ancestors,
for Grose speaks of it as a “sea-dish,” but the very indifference
with which he, a man of infinite taste, mentions it, proves that it
cannot have been the famous dish produced by the inventive
genius of the venerable and pious pilgrims of Plymouth. A new
halo has since been shed around the time-honored term by the
masterly manipulations and majestic name of the “mighty man
of Marshfield,” for it is well known that Mr. Webster excelled in
his chowder, which he did not disdain to make himself, as he had
caught: the fish for it with his own hands. It is described as “a
many-sided dish, of pork and fish, potatoes and bread, onions and
turnips, all mixed up with fresh chequits and seabass, blackfish
and long clams, pumpkinseed and an accidental eel, well peppered
and salted, piled up in layers and stewed together.” Cider and
champagne are not unfrequently added, and the “ matelote,” as
the French would call it, is a most tempting dainty—to very
hungry’people. It seems almost an insult, after that, to call a
dunce a chowderhead, but J. R. Lowell uses it, and he cannot fail
to be high authority in all matters concerning New England. It
has already been stated that sea-coast people have vulgarly
transferred the clamshell to the lips of their friends on shore, but
the power of slang is most strikingly illustrated by the fact that
even the Government of the United States condescends to allow
its patent locks on mail-bags to be officially designated as clam-
shells.

A dock-walloper denotes a trifling, idle fellow, who loiter’s
about the docks, and is an object of great contempt to Jack, prob-
ably not unknown to British ports, though, it may be hoped, less
numerous there than in America. The term is applied also to
the frequent crowds of unemployed emigrants in every large sea-
port. To go a cruise seems to be such a natural expression for
the man of Nantucket and most of his neighbors on the coast of
New England, that even when he goes inland, he is sure to go a
cruise, whether he ride on horseback to have an airing, or engage
a seat in a stage-coach to visit a distant neighbor.
AFLOAT. , 345

In what the great bliss enjoyed by clams—salt-water vegetables,
as the New Yorker derisively calls them—really consists, has never
been ascertained, but a very general impression of their great
happiness is evidently prevailing, for coast people—and after them
inland people likewise-—are very fond of envying others who, they
say, are as happy as a clam. The expression appears strangely
inappropriate, in a notice of a newly-married couple who “ left
the church and immediately set out on a two years’ wedding tour
to Europe, happy as two clams!” (Baltimore American, January
19, 1871.) Occasionally greater happiness yet is conveyed by add=
ing to it the words at high-water.

The ‘eel of the vessel,.of the utmost importance to the sailor,
has hence given rise to many a homely but not unpicturesque
expression in our language. The Heel itself serves, in regions
along the sea-coast, to name any broad, flat vessel, used for many
a domestic purpose; it is the keeler or keeler-tub of the New Eng-
land States, the vessel in which the dishes are washed, and to
which J. R. Lowell refers, when he says:

“ And greasy Joan does Keel the pot.”

Hence also the common phrase of keeling over, in nautical lan-
guage denoting the complete capsizing of the vessel, by which the
keel comes uppermost, and in social life used to express an entire
overthrow of a man’s hopes or circumstances. “We may safely
say,” writes the New York Tribune, “that the whole (Fenian)
enterprise has keeled over and shown bottom; there is not a grain
of hope left to the leaders.” (Sept. 14, 1867.) Even the nautical
phrase keel up has been forced to do ordinary work in the lan-
guage and to accept the duty of a verb: “As Iwas not in the
habit of using spirits at all,” writes the Rev. Mr. Cartwright, “I
knew that a little would keel me up; so I forbore, but with all
my forbearance presently I began to feel light-headed. I instantly
ordered our horses, fearing we were snapped for once.” (Azutodio-
graphy, p. 205.) :

It is a curious evidence of the facility which cant terms have,
like weeds, to grow up from a stray seed, and to take the place of
better words, that a long-extinguished custom, dating back to the
days when slaves were employed in river navigation, should have
given us one of the most familiar, colloquial phrases. In those

15*
346 AMERICANISMS.

times slaves, who had been delinquent in their work or disrespect-
ful in their manners, were frequently punished by being sent on
board the heavier keelboats that went up the Western rivers;
here they had to work very hard against the powerful current,
and hence to row up became soon identical with severe scolding or
actual punishment. “ We hope,” says the New York Herald, “the
President gave his Secretary a good rowing up ; he certainly de-
served it for his imbecility.” (May 7%, 1856.) This process of
rowing up seems, in early days, to have been especially difficult
and painful in a small tributary of the Ohio, which winds its
tortuous and unsafe channel through a part of Kentucky. A happy
allusion to the hardships connected with the navigation of this
river, made by a member from Kentucky on the floor of Con-
gress, took the fancy of his audience, and, after its publication, of
the people generally. Since then it has become a universal cant
phrase to say, that an unlucky wight, who has failed to be elected
to some public office, was rowed up Salt River. If the candidate,
or his party, should have been very grievously defeated, they
were apt to be rowed up to the very headwaters of Salt River. It
will be seen that by a strange confusion of ideas, not unfrequent
in the use of metaphors, it was not the poor oarsmen condemned
to the hard work, but the passengers in the boat, to whom the
unlucky aspirants to honors were compared.

“We thought.......
That Sag-Nichts and strangers would tread o’er his head,
And we up the Salt River billows.”
(Burial of Unele Sam.)

The importance which the shad has gained in American fisheries
and in commerce, has led to the use of its name for various
purposes. The good people of New-England are prosaic enough
to call the beautiful service-berry, with its beautiful sprays full of
delicate white blossoms, the shadbush, because, forsooth, it blooms
about the time when the fish ascend the rivers in early spring!
Hence W. C. Bryant writes:

» “the shadbush, white with flowers,

Brightened the glen.”
(The Ola Man’s Council.)

The peculiar shape of the Quakers’ drab-coats, which slope,
AFLOAT. 347

without the usual break, from the front gradually toward the tails,
has suggested, to eyes familiar with the shad, a resemblance to the
outline of that fish, and in coast-slang, therefore, the Friends are
apt to appear as shad-bellies. It is not quite so evident why
landsmen should take their revenge by subjecting Jack, when he
has indulged too freely in drink on shore, to the disgraceful process
called shanghai. The long-legged bird, with his ridiculous strut
and mock splendor, had long bestowed his Chinese name upon
a dandy, and became, from its striking appropriateness, as
popular a nickname as the English “swell.” But when the verb to
shanghai is applied to sailors, it refers not to the bird, but,
according to a seaman’s statement, to the town of Shanghat, where
the process so called is said to have been once very common. The
latter consists in drugging the unlucky sailor, when he enjoys him-
self after a long cruise, on shore, and carrying him, while in a state
of insensibility, to a vessel about to depart, where he finds himself
upon his recovery, entered in all forms on the book. “No doubt
the men were to have béen quiet till the following morning, and
before that time they would have been drugged, shanghated, and
taken away from all means of making complaint.” (New York
Tribune, March 1, 1871.)

‘The American who hesitates not to speak of himself as a gone
coon, or a live hoss, or an alligator, occasionally varying the phrase
and making himself out to be half-horse half-alligator, in Ken-
tucky, does not neglect the life on the waters any more than that
on the prairie and in the swamp. “I am a she-steamboal, and
have doubled up a crocodile in my day,” said a damsel who came
to the rescue of famous Colonel Crockett, as he lay caught in the
crotch of a tree, with a number of eagles pulling out his long hair
for a lining in their nests. “Wait till you have steamboated it
for a while, as I have done, and if there is more than an ounce or
two of you left, I’ll pay the damage,” was the warning an old
gambler gave a youngster who had begun life very fast, and was
showing the effects. (Southern Literary Messenger, June, 1854,
p- 117.) While the modern steamboat, with its noisy paddle-
wheels, represents thus the fast or energetic man of our day,
the old-fashioned vessel, with its small wheel at the stern, still
found in Western waters, and as a ferry-boat in all parts of the
Union, suggests to the picture-loving mind of the American the
348 AMERICANISMS.

slow progress of former days. Hence, J. R. Lowell describes an
inefficient “old-timey” place as having
“Many social priviledge, but a one-hoss starnwheel chaplin.”
(Biglow Papers, II., p. 20.)
The sailor’s legitimate dread of squalls in places where he has .
not sea-room enough, has led to the adoption of squwaily, in the
sense of “dangerous,” under almost all circumstances. Any-
thing looks sgwadly to the Englishman as well as to us, which is
threatening; hence, Major Downing wrote: “'The times are
now getting pretty sguaily, and if we don’t look out sharp, things
will go all to smash.” (Letters, p. 95.) Another sailors’ term
has, curiously enough, made its way to the Far West, and, from
the analogy of cases, obtained currency there. The ship which is
in danger on a lee-shore, or a narrow channel, may still escape if
she can swing clear; and so may the canoe, entangled in the
brakes of a swamp or the closely-matted grass of a river; hence the
phrase to swing clear, is often used in the sense of “ obtaining
elbow-room,” or, “ room to spread,” as lahdsmen would say. The
Rey. Mr. Cartwright thus characterizes one of his brethren: “He
was an ordinary preacher in common, yet at times, as we say in
the backwoods, when he swung clear, there were few that could
excel him in the pulpit.” (Autobiography, p. 324.) Sailors
return the compliment by borrowing the name of the lower part
of a flail, the swingle, which falls on the grain in threshing, and
giving it to a shark known as swingle-tail, since his long and
flexible tail is wielded sgmewhat in the same manner, and cer-
tainly as effective in thrashing his enemies. A similar mixture of
sailors’ names with landsmen’s notions has led to the cant terms by
which sturgeons and herrings are apt to be known on shore. The
former coming up the Hudson River as far as Albany, and being
highly esteemed there, especially when roasted in the form of steaks,
are popularly known as Albany Beef, while the common herring,
caught in great abundance near Taunton, in the State of Massa-
chusetts, is called there a Taunton Turkey, half in derision and
half, no doubt, for the sake of the alliteration :
“ Our fisheries o’er the world are famed,
The mackerel, shad, and cod;
And Taunton Turkeys are so thick,

We sell them by the rod.”
(Allin, Yankee Ballad, B.)
AFLOAT. 349

“Let’s wp jib, and say no more,” is a phrase often heard
on the Eastern coasts, but not very intelligible to those who are
entire strangers to ships and their main parts. Others will, of
course, know that the hoisting of the jib is a signal of departure,
and hence the sailor’s phrase has become synonymous with “ let
as be gone.” That the huge size of a whale should have led sail-
ors, and after their example others also, to speak of any man or event
of unusual and imposing proportions as a whaler, seems natural
enough; but it is not quite so certain whether the verb to whale,
used in the north of England and with us, instead of “to beat,”
is not rather a corruption of the more familiar term to wale, i. e.,
to strike so as to raise wales. The confusion may have all the
more readily arisen, as the animal is called wale not only very
largely in the United States, but also “at home,” for instance in
Harwich and other ports familiar with whaling. A Mississippi
paper, relating a somewhat marvellous story of an alligator float-
ing up, after receiving many shots, “with a sort of grape-vine
twisted round his head, to hide it,” adds that “the captain found,
on opening the ’gater’s body, two pigeons inside, whole and undi-
gested. Oh, he was a.regular waler, says the captain. On this im-
mortal occasion of shooting such a waler, the captain had recourse
to the old lure of all ’gater hunters, to a dog trained to yelp and so
attract the ’gaters, who like dog above all other meats.” (Missis-
sippi Clarion, January 17, 1865.) It is the same word used with
happy effect by J. R. Lowell in the Jines—

“Their masters can cuss ’em, and kick ’em, and wale ’em,
Aw’ they notice it less ’an the ass did to Balaam.”
(Biylow Papers, I., p. 18.)

The enormous steamboats of the Ohio and the Mississippi re-
quire such vast supplies of fuel for their long journeys, some of
which extend to weeks, that in early spring, upon the opening of
the navigation, detachments of men are set on shore at convenient
places, whose duty it is to cut wood, pile it uj) on shore, and carry
it on board the boat that has engaged their services. These men,
a rough and roysterous but not vicious race, lead here wretched
lives, consumed by low fevers and devoured by musquitoes, but
receive enormous wages. The boats necessarily stop often to wood-
up, as the term is, and tie up to such a wooding-place. The pas-
350 AMERIC ANISMS.

sengers avail themselves of the opportunity to take a stroll on
shore, to examine the snakes and vipers which are apt to accumu-
late beneath the huge woodpile, and to take a drink; hence, un-
fortunately, to wood, has in the West become a popular euphemis-
tic term for “to take a dram.” A distinguished British nobleman,
recently connected with royalty, was hence not a little puzzled
when a Western member of Congress, in a moment of hilarity, in-
vited him to leave the Minister’s house, where they met at a large
party, for the purpose of wooding-up.

On the Eastern coast another ship-term has made its way inland,
and even usurped a meaning for which it was probably never in-
tended. It seems that when horses were first brought from England
to the colonies, no vehicles came with them, and would, in fact, not
have been available, as there were no other roads, then, but bridle-
paths through the forest. Boats, on the contrary, were numerous,
and furnished the principal means of transportation, but had to
be laid up during the winter, when their tackling was carefully
stored away. As soon as the ice was thick enough for the purpose,
sledges were made, and as the colonists had no harness for their
horses, they very ingeniously used the boat-tackling instead. Thus
it came about that tackling was continually used in speaking of
fastening a horse to a vehicle, and when the rude contrivance
gave way to real harness, the term remained unchanged for two
hundred years. Tackling « horse, is, hence, to this day the com-
mon term for harnessing, all “the way up from the Old Colony to
Hampton Beach, and along the banks of the Merrimac River,
through a country as thickly populated and as highly civilized
as any of equal extent in the United States.” (C. Dodge.) “You
had better ¢ackle the horse at once,” said Prudence, “or we shall
be late.” (Atlantic Monthly, October, 1867.) “My friend promised
to send my tackling to town to be mended, so that we might go
down to the beach and enjoy a nice drive in the afternoon.”
(Letter from Newport in New York Herald, August 17, 1863.)

Another Americanism connected with steamboats is the smoke-
slack, as the chimney is universally called. Hence, after an ex-
plosion, we are told that

“Sure as you're born, they all got off,
Afore the smokestacks fell.”
(Jim Biudsoe of the Prairie Belle. John Hay.)
AFLOAT. 351

The navigation in Western waters has its peculiar dangers, and
among these none are more dreaded than the sawyers and snag 8
of the Mississippi, and some-of its tributaries. The former are
trees washed away by the current, either during a high flood or
after their roots haye been completely undermined, and then so
imbedded in the river-bottom as to impede navigation. As they
constantly change their places, steamboats often come unawares
upon them, and are sunk or at least seriously injured. Snags
derive their name from the old English snag, defined by Halli-
well as “a tooth standing alone,” whilst its meaning on our West-
ern waters is more like that in Gill’s proverb: A bird in the
bag is worth two on the snag,” quoted by J. R. Lowell. The sawyer
has the advantage of moving to and fro with a sawing motion, as
the current tries to dislodge it; the snag is too firmly imbedded
to move. “Snags and sawyers,” says C. Lanman, “abound
throughout the whole extent of the Mississippi; they are taken
from the shore by a rushing tide and planted in the channel quite
as rapidly as the snag-vessels can extricate them from their dan-
gerous position.” (Summer in the Wilderness, p. 124.)

A somewhat technical term, perhaps, is the hugging-frame, the
arched truss-braces which span the length of the majority of
American steamboats. (Zhe Engineer.) To this class belongs,
likewise, the spreaderstick of the person who drives horses on the
towpath, which pull a canal-boat. “The captain had started on
his downward trip, and had tied up his boat near Oldtown, when
he was attacked with a spreaderstick (a piece of wood used as a:
swingle-tree on the tow-track), and was brutally murdered by
Howard.” (Cumberland Journal, February 10, 1871.) The name
is evidently derived from the use to which the stick is put, in
spreading and holding apart the traces or ropes by which the
horses pull the boat. A like term is the Mish-Basket of Pennsyl-
vania, which designates a structure for taking fish, and is figured
in Eli Bowen’s Sketchbook of Pennsylvania (I1., p.83). “ Various
species,” says Professor 8. 8. Haldeman, in a Memoir of 1844,
“are abundantly caught... in fish-baskets, made of lathwork,
with diverging walls of stone.” The fact that the plural of the
word wharf differs in England and here, is characteristic of the
manner in which words generally are treated by us and by our
English cousin. Here we say wharves, although Bancroft writes,
352 AMERICANISMS.

“Commerce pushes its wharfs into the sea,” while in England
wharfs is considered alone admissible, although there also we
find—

“Out upon the wharves they came,
Knight and burgher, lord and dame.”
Tennyson.
The English are, however, following our example very largely,
and ere long, no doubt, both nations will use wharves alike.
VITL.

ON THE RAIL
ON THE RAIL.

RAILROADS, as they are now uniformly called in America by
the public, although some companies owning large leading lines
prefer the English ‘name of Railways, have contributed, on the
whole, fewer words and expressions to American-English than
might be expected, from the enormous extent of their widespread
network, the number of persons to whom they give employment,
and the ingenuity which they stimulate. The fact is partly
accounted for by the perfect identity of the systems prevailing in
England and on this continent, and their almost simultaneous
introduction in both countries. Besides, so many of our rail-
roads are built by British capital, and therefore, in part at least,
under foreign control, that the terminology has not yet become
quite independent of that of the Old World. And yet the very
elements of nomenclature, so to say, are different: railways abroad
are railroads here, stations there are depots here, and English
carriages and coaches have become American cars. The prefer-
ence for Road lay probably in the greater familiarity with the
term generally; highways were rarely known to the people here,
as they are in England, and everything was called a road, from
the National Road crossing the Alleghanies on its way West to
the roadside inns, along the corduroy-roads of the South. Why
We should ever have exchanged the sensible station of the English
for the absurd depot of the French, is perfectly unaccountable;
all the talk about the old friendship for France, dating from the
days of Lafayette and Rochambeau, will, we fear, not explain the
absurdity. And if we but gave it either its French sound, which
is not hard to acquire, or anglicized it at once, like men! But no,
-we must needs call it dee-po, and thus add to the absurdity. Justly,
therefore, does R. G. White, in his clever book on Words and Their
356 AMERICANISMS.

Uses, call it “the height of pretentious absurdity to give the
name of dépdt to a little lonely shanty, which looks like a lodge out-
side a garden of cucumbers, a staging of a few planks upon
which two or three people stand*like criminals on the scaffold.”
(p. 149.) But then, the American loves big names, and ere long,
he is quite sure, the depot becomes what the name indicates,
so rapid is the growth of the country, and so marvellous the
power of railroads in developing its resources. He makes amends,
moreover, by calling the coaches of England simply cars, though
the increasing demand for comfort has quickly led him to seek
compensation in naming the truly superb carriages which now,
virtually though not in name, represent the first-class coaches of
foreign railways, Palace-Cars, and even Stlver Palace-Cars! It
is the same unfortunate tendency which makes him adorn his
magnificent steamers with that outrage on decency, Bridal Cham-
ders, and tempts writers for the press to dub every comfortable
town-house a palatial residence. It is to be hoped that the
introduction of Stock Palace-Cars on some of the Northern roads
will speedily lead to the adoption of more appropriate names, for
surely all the sensible and most praiseworthy improvements in
cattle-trains would not justify the name of palaces for their stalls.
A special car is, on all the more important routes, as the Post-
Office Department calls the lines, provided for a mail-agent, who
performs his duties there, and receives letters dropped in an out-
side box on the way. This is called the Mazl-Car, of one of
which the following terrible story was recently reported: “Two
sons of Governor Miller of Minnesota were arrested in January
for robbing a matl-car on the Central Pacific Railway. One of
them turned State’s evidence against his brother, and the other
committed suicide. So they both obtained acquittal.” (New York
Tribune, March 23, 1871.)

The sleeping-cars, introduced a few years ago on American rail-
ways, and an inestimable comfort on long journeys, which often
extend through a whole week on a continuous line, have given rise
to a new form—the sleepers, as they are briefly designated. In an
account of a fearful accident in the State of New York we read:
“Tn front was the Buffalo sleeper of the Chicago Lightning Train ;
it had twenty-seven passengers, and not a soul was saved.” (New
York Tribune, February 6, 1871.) This tendency to shorten
ON THE RAIL. 357

words, most pardonable perhaps in the haste engendered by rapid
railway travelling, has also led to the use of rail as a noun and
a verb. No one answers the question, How are you going to
travel? by a fuller reply than by saying, “I'll go by rail,” or
still more briefly, though in language as yet bordering upon slang,
“Tl rail it all the way.”

The train, as it appears in sight, introduces us at once to an
Americanism, the cow-catcher, the well-known, triangular fender
of iron, placed in front of the locomotive, to clear the line of cattle,
sheep, pigs, and such like trespassers—an instrument unknown
to the well-guarded railways of Europe. Here they are eminently
useful, often saving stray animals from destruction and preventing
serious accidents. Not long ago a runaway horse with a sleigh
and its owner was met by a locomotive on a branch-road near
Philadelphia; the fireman, in the moment of contact, passed for-
ward and seized the horse by the bridle. “The train continued
for some distance with a man and a horse on the cow-catcher, and
when it was stopped, both were found to be uninjured; the sleigh
was entirely demolished.” (Philadelphia Ledger, Dec. 19, 1870.)
Next to the locomotive comes another feature peculiar to Ameri-
can trains—the express-car ; since the business of great Express
Companies has become so immense as to require a special car of
the largest dimensions on almost all the great railroads of the
country. Since Americans have given up the word luggage—ex-
cept perhaps in Boston and Boston-dependencies—the car which
here is exclusively used for its conveyance is, of course, called the
Baggage-Car. It generally follows the tender, and is quite a place
of interest to foreigners, with its simple but most effective system
of checks—which are by means of a leather-strap fastened to
the trunk, while the stamped marks are entered into the Jaggage-
agent’s books—and its countless variety of portable and not port-
able trunks. This system of checks, an exclusive peculiarity of
American railways, is apt to strike travellers from abroad as the
greatest improvement devised for the purpose, and thus elicits
praise like the following: “Luggage is the pest of the traveller,
but the Americans have a way of lessening the evil. When you
come to a railway-station, an official receives your luggage, and
learns your destination. He then brings a bunch of brass-tickets,
each fitted with a looped strap, and each furnished with a tally.
358 AMERICANISMS.

Handing you the tally, he at the same instant loops the ticket
on to the article by its most prominent handle. The articles are
thus labelled for their destination, and you have been supplied
with a record of the deposit. At no intermediate stage, change of
carriage, ferry, or any other stoppage, need you be under the least
anxiety. The articles are sure to appear at the proper place.
Moreover, as you approach the end of the journey, a porter or
omnibus-conductor comes forward, who, for a small fee, under-
takes to collect your baggage, and bring yourself and it, or tlie bag-
gage by itself, to any hotel, or other house you may name.” (Lon-
don Athenwum, September, 1870.)

In this sanctum of the baggage-agent you see hand-trunks,
containing in an incredibly small place the supply of the expe-
rienced and self-denying traveller for many months, who finds it
cheaper to purchase collars and socks, and other small articles,
whenever he wants them, than to have them washed. By their
side you see colossal Saratoga-trunks, as they are called from the
most fashionable of American watering-places, in which ladies’
dresses find ample room for expansion. Some are iron-shod on
the sides, others are protected by gutta-percha knobs at the
corners, still others stare at you with broken locks and gaping
rents, for the baggage-smasher, as the porter is commonly called,
handles his burdens with appalling recklessness, and responsi-
bility there is none. The long, roomy cars of the American
train are, of course, not set directly upon their wheels as En-
glish coaches are—the latter would not stand our rough, chéap
structures. They are, on the contrary, built so that they rest
upon two separate and independent centre-bearing trucks of
four, six or eight wheels each, which secure to them both safety
and great elasticity. The English buffer, a cushion resting upon
strong springs, to meet and deaden the shock with another car,
appears, in this country, as a bwmper, and the stoker as a fireman ;
but for this unusual simplicity ample compensation is found in
giving the driver, as he is called in England, here the proud name
of engineer. The most important official on the train is, of
course, the conductor, whose functions on the whole resemble those
of the guard abroad, but on whose shoulders rests the entire respon-
sibility for the promptness and safety of the train and its entire
contents. While this is his official title, he is universally ad-
ON THE RAIL 359

dressed as Captain, for Americans insist upon carrying the
analogy with the steamboat, with which they were universally
familiar long before railroads existed, through all the details.
The passengers are summoned by loud calls of, “All aboard for
Chicago!” or whatever the place of destination may be. The
train is started, not by the English phrase, All right! but by
the usual Go ahead! and persons walk from car to car to see
what friends they may find on board. They are called upon to
settle their fare, precisely as they are summoned to do on board a
Western steamboat, and in the new Palace Cars they pay more,
if they engage a state-room, while sleeping-cars have their upper
and lower derths. The usual Express Train is not half fast
enough for the impatient traveller; he must have his Lightning
Express Train, and in the Far West improves still farther by
calling it Greased Lightning, after a favorite Yankee term.

The road-bed, and especially the space between the rails, is
called the track, but a train is said to be off the track when the
wheels have, by some accident or other, lost their hold on the
rails. As American railroads are not generally ballasted, and
thus liable, in sandy regions, to be enveloped in unbearable
clouds of dust, track sprinklers are frequently employed to water
them. This process must, however, be carefully distinguished
from another kind of watering, to which railroads, or rather rail-
road companies, have of late become liable. “To water stock,”
says an indignant writer, “is necessary on a stock farm, but I
question if it be wise in running a railroad to water anything
but the engine, and perhaps the track.” (Avery Saturday, Dec.,
1870.) “ This process consists in creating fictitious stock, without
its being a representative of industry expended or work done, and
thus resembles very much the debasing of coins practised by
former sovereigns. Upon such increase dividends are secured by
the imposition of rates far in excess of the cost of transportation.
The difference between charge and cost is the measure of the
gains. These spoliations have been carried on to such an extent
as to embarrass, most seriously, the industries and commerce of
the country. A competent writer affirms that in two years the
capitals of twenty-eight Northern railroads have been watered to
the extent of nearly two hundred millions.” (New York Tribune,
December 17, 18°70.)
360 AMERICANISMS.

The word ¢rack has lent itself very naturally to the formation
of several cant phrases, of which, however, perhaps but one
belongs legitimately to the railroad-track, all the others being of
older date than the earliest use of the latter. This is the favorite
admonition to clear the track, when persons are summoned to get
out of the way, either literally or figuratively. “When the ¢rack
was thus cleared of all obstructions, Mr. Bingham introduced his
bill, and announced at once that at one o’clock he would call for
the previous question upon it.” (Congressional Proceedings, Jan-
uary 17, 1870.) To make tracks, on the contrary, is a metaphor
drawn from Western life, and refers to the importance attached to
trails, tracks, and signs of every kind, in all regions where Indians
and wild beasts have still to be encountered. It is said that in a
camp of United States troops on Staten Island, near New York,
in the year 1862, an officer was heard to call upon a private in
these words: “ Pat Doolan, make tracks right off, and slant into
your position!” (Once a Week, February 15, 1862.) To catch a
man in his tracks is a phrase of the same nature, and suggested
to J. R. Lowell the Latin e vestigio, and the Norman French
enes les pas, both of which have the same meaning as the Ameri-
canism, immediately. Even to be on the right track must be
referred to the hunter’s language, but the new phrase, just
coming into use, You are off the track, promises, if adopted, to
add another contribution to railway slang. Even here, however,
the track of the race-course comes into serious competition with
the railroad, and in the case of the cant phrase, He has the inside
track, which means that he has luck on his side, and great advan-
tages over his competitors, there can be no doubt that it origi-
nated with jockeys, and has sole reference to the race-course.

The railway officials have borrowed from nautical language the
word ru, to denote the distance which their engine or the whole
train has run in a given time. First they speak of running one
or more trains, and then they state that the vw2 will be made in
so many hours. “Engineers and firemen often arrive at the end
of their rwn somewhere among the small hours of night, and
from that or other causes have to spend considerable time about
the round-house.” (Rail-Road Gazette, 1870.)

Even the flag, with which the watchmen signalize in the day-
time, has been yerbalized, and a train is now said to have been
-ON THE RAIL. 361

flagged before a collision. An awful catastrophe occurred early
in 1871 on the Hudson River Railway, and an influential paper
said, “The trains were to be flagged from the tank instead of
the bridge, and at night the white light, indicating All Right!
was left permanently at the post, seventy rods from the nearest
watchman!” (New York Hvening Post.) An ominous word,
verbalized with like freedom, is ¢elescope. The frequency with
which trains collide on American railways, has led to the use of
the word for the purpose of designating the manner in which, on
such occasions, one train is apt to run right into the other, as the
smaller parts of the telescope glide into the larger. Hence the
following article: “Two through-trains on the Erie Railway
came in collision yesterday, near Paterson. One of the trains had
stopped, and the locomotive of the other train, which was follow-
ing, telescoped into the rear cars of the first. The smokestack of
the locomotive and several cars were smashed. We append the
list of the wounded. The brakeman, Sol. Collins, was instantly
killed.” (New York Herald, September 17, 1859.) The important
signal-flag of the railway-guard has in like manner, been con-
verted into a verb, and persons who wish to hail a passing street-
car or to stop any conveyance, are very apt to say that they mean
to signal a car. “The lady was standing on the sidewalk, and
with her parasol signalled the next car just coming in sight.”
(Philadelphia Ledger, June 7, 1861.)

In the Western States, with their level surface and vast un-
broken prairies, railroads could often be built in straight lines,
avoiding all curves and days, as they are apt to be called there,
steep grades (vice English gradients), and expensive windings. In
that case, a railroad was frequently called an Atr-Line Road, or,
in common parlance, a Straight Shoot. Since the number of such
roads has increased in the more thickly settled parts of the Union,
the advantages of direct lines between two great centres over
others which meander from town to town, have become very
manifest, and for a few years a tendency to build such azr-lines
has agitated Legislatures, from whom help was asked, and finan-
cial circles at home and abroad. An air-line road from New York
to Washington is warmly advocated, and others have been actually
built, not unfrequently running for long distances by the side of
older lines.

16
362 AMERICANISMS.

On the track, American railroads show us of things peculiar to
them-—/rogs, or iron plates placed where two lines intersect, and, as
J. R. Bartlett suggests, so called from the resemblance they bear
to the frog in a horse’s hoof; switches, where the English shunt
their trains, and above all snakeheads, pieces of rails thrown up in
front of a train and passing through the bottom of the cars with
fearfully destructive power. Fortunately, the flat rails, which
alone made such formidable accidents possible, have now gone
entirely out of use, and this danger at least is no longer to be ap-
prehended. Alas! that it should only have given way to far
graver and more frequent accidents, which have made articles
under the head of Railroad Disaster almost a standing paragraph in
every journal of the Union! The mortality on American railroads
is frightful; careful] statisticians compute that to every one who
perishes on French railways, twenty-nine perish in America. But
a graver evil is yet behind—the utter absence of all responsibility,
which increases the recklessness of companies, and the indifference
to the loss of human life in thé public.

It must not be forgotten, finally, that the Americans had an
Underground Railway long before London bethought herself of
this remedy for her overcrowded streets; only it was so far under-
ground that it was never beheld by human eyes. Mrs. H. B. Stowe
said in her famous work that “nothing has awakened more bit-
terly the animosity of the slaveholding community than the ex-
istence, in the Northern States, of an indefinite yet very energetic
institution, the Underground Railroad.” (Dred, IL. p. 302.) If
that be so, we may be grateful that the abolition of slavery in
the Union has made an end to this secret conveyance, by which
fugitive slaves were enabled to escape from their bondage to the
Free States and Canada, and that thus one more of the great
causes of irritation has been removed, which have so long pre-
vented cordial friendship and true union between the North and
the South.

Among the passengers on board the train, but one class enjoys
a special name, and they are known by the painful title of Dead-
heads. Whether the term originated in theatres, where it is well-
known to box-keepers, or on railways, the meaning is always the
same: the deadhead enjoys whatever may be had for money with-
out paying. Hence the class of deadheads is almost endless, every
ON THE RAIL. 363

favor being returned, every adverse criticism averted, and every
service acknowledged by a free ticket. The deadhead receives his
newspapers without subscribing, travels free of charge on steam-
boat, railroad, and stage, walks into theatres and shows of every
kind unmolested, and even drinks at the bar and lives at the hotel
without charge. While similar favors are not unknown in Europe,
where journalists and critics, officials and the managers’ friends,
enjoy their privileges, the custom of allowing ministers of the
gospel to travel free of charge, which prevails very largely in the
United States, must be looked upon as a genuine and praise-
worthy Americanism. The word has even been made into a verb,
and is used thus: “ Elder Knapp, the noted revivalist, is exciting
a theological fever in the towns of Massachusetts. In Pittsfield,
recently, he is reported to have advertised that he would furnish a
‘free pass to glory,’ but very few of the unrighteous population
seemed anxious to be deadheaded on this train.” (New York 7'ri-
bune, May 2, 1871.)
Tx

NATURAL HISTORY.
- NATURAL HISTORY.

“In America, Nature’s children are grand and grotesque, in form and in
name.”

De la Condamine.

In the nomenclature of the various departments of Natural
History little that is truly and originally American can be ex-
pected, since the most prominent objects classed under that head,
are well known in Europe, and have long since been named there,
while the few that were first discovered here, received their names
generally by the first settlers, Frenchmen and Spaniards included.
Where this was not the case, they are of such rare occurrence
and limited usefulness, that their proper designation is known
only to men of science. We have endeavored to give elsewhere
those terms which are clearly traceable to foreign idioms, and
shall here content ourselves with mentioning such names only as
deserve consideration for some special reason.

Among Animals peculiar to this continent, the American Buf-
falo stands naturally foremost, both on account of the vast num-
bers which still are found in the West, and for its vital importance
for the preservation of the Indian race. The name is a very
ancient one, given by Pliny, as Govfados, to the wild ox (Urus),
then attributed to various wild animals of large size, and finally
transferred to our Bison (Bison americanus), a near kinsman of
the German Auerochs. The immediate ancestor of that name is,
no doubt, the Spanish dufalo (Bos bubalus), as the French duffle
could not well have lent itself to such an enlargement. The ani-
mal, too well known to require a description here, lends its name
to a number of other objects. Buffalo-Cider is the ludicrous name
given to the liquid in the stomach of a buffalo, which the thirsty
hunter drinks, when he has killed his game ata great distance
368 AMERICANISMS.

from water. The name is, likewise, given to several plants, of
which the buffalo was formerly believed to be particularly fond,
such as the Buffalo-Grass (Sesteria dactyloides), which has the
remarkable property of giving, every spring, new life to the
winter-killed blade, without casting its stubble or sending out
new shoots. The Bujfalo-Clover, on the prairies most frequented
by the animal, and the Buffalo-Berry (Shepherdia argentea),
found only on the upper Missouri, are narned in the same manner.
A fish even bears the same name as the gigantic bison, on account
of its remarkable shape, which has in science also procured for
him the title of Tawrichthys (8. F. Baird). The hide of the but-
falo alone is called a robe, but where it is most used as a cover, it
is never known otherwise than as a buffalo only. “I put my
blanket over my head, drew my buffalo close around me, and let
the snow fall upon me till I was fairly buried, my breath alone
making an opening through which I could breathe.” (Adventures
in the Rocky Mountains.)

The Hk, constantly confounded with the Caribou, the Wapiti,
and the Moose, has been mentioned elsewhere. The Catamount
(Felis concolor), is an animal peculiar to this continent, and oc-
curs in different parts of America: as the Cougar, from the couguar
of the French, which they themselves again took from cuqua-
racu, the name of the animal among the Guaranies of South
America—as the puma from Mexico to Cape Horn, so called by
the Quichuans of Peru—and as the painter or panter, the famil-
jar corruption of panther, found in the everglades of Florida,
where it hides in the high grass or crouches on the branches of
the live oak to spring upon its prey. “* Painter-meat can’t shine
with this,’ said a hunter, to express his delight at the delicate
flavor of an extra cut of tenderloin.” (Life in the Far West,
p. 311.) In the Chippewa dialect, it re-appears as missi-pezhew,
the Great Cat, and this is the animal found in Canada and Maine,
the only one in the latter State that man necd fear. As for the
name Catamount, it may have been derived from the Spanish
words gato, a cat, and monte, » mountain, as many maintain, but,
if this be so, the derivation is, of course, older than the American
usage; for Beaumont and Fletcher have already the English
combination, which seems to be, fur more justly, the true ancestor
of the modern word—
NATURAL HISTORY. 369

“Would any man of discretion venture such a gristle,
To the rude-claws ot such a cat-a-mountain.”
. Pope and Arbuthnot call it by the same name, and nothing is
more probable than that catamownt is simply a shortened form
of the fuller and older name.

“The blinded catamount that lies
High in the boughs to watch his prey,
Even in the act of springing dies.”
(W. C. Bryant.)

The Chickaree is the red squirrel (Sciurus hudsonius) of the
North, from the Atlantic to the Missouri, named so, no doubt, from
the peculiar noise he is fond of making ; as a tiny bird has, in like
manner, received the name of chickadee from its peculiar note.
“TI woke up to find myself the subject of discussion of a troop of
chickarees.” (The Adirondacks, Putnam’s Magazine, August,
1868.) The same squirrel is, in North Carolina, known by his
Indian name of Booma. The Ground-Squirrel, on the contrary,
is a@ name erroneously given to the Striped Prairie-Squirrel
(Spermophilus tridecemlineatus), mentioned elsewhere as Gopher.
The Cross Fox (Vulpes fulous, var decussatus) so called from the
black cross on the back, is dear to the trapper for its fur; a cross
between silver-gray and the common reddish is highly prized by
peltry dealers. A very curious animal, peculiar to this country,
is the Ground-hog, as it is commonly called in the South, or the
Wood-chuck (Arctomys monax), familiar to Northern farmers. It
is a species of the marmot tribe, very destructive to grass and
growing crops generally. Like other marmois, it lies hid in its
burrow, and dormant during the winter, emerging in early sum-
mer. “As Icame home through the woods, with my string of
fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse
of a wood-chuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill
of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour
him raw—not that I was hungry then, but for that wildness
which he represented. (Walden, H. D. Thoreau.) One of the
few superstitions found native in this country is connected with
this animal. Candlemas is known us Ground-hog Day, for on
that day the ground-hog comes annually out of his hole, after a
long winter nap, to look for his shadow. If he perceives it, he
retires again to his burrow, which he does not leave for six weeks

16* ;:
370 AMERICANISMS.

—weeks necessarily of stormy weather. But if he does not see
his shadow, for lack of sunshine, he stays out of his hole till he
can, and the weather is sure to become mild and pleasant. “It is
feared,” says a distressed Low-Churchman, “that the introduc-
tion of ritualism and candles on that day may have thrown this
year undesirable light and shadow on the emerging grownd-hog,
and brought confusion upon the weather.” (New York Tribune,
February 7, 1871.) The negroes of the South are keen hunters
of the poor creature, who, in winter a mere ball of fur, during
the summer grows into a perfect ball of fat, and is considered a
great luxury at the “quarters.” The second part of wood-chuck
is used as hog is in grouwnd-hog, for pigs are almost universally
summoned to the feeding-trough by the word chuck! chuck!
repeated several times, evidently the descendant of the old En-
glish sug / sug! which Grose says is a word used in Norfolk “to
call pigs to eat their wash.”

A curious but by no means inappropriate name is that of a
tiny rabbit, which is called Jackass-Rabdit, in honor of its very
large ears, and long, slender legs (Lepus callotis). It is found
only in Texas and the neighborhood of the Rocky Mountains, and
known to hunters under a great variety of other names also, such
as 'Texas-hare and Mule-rabbit. The ZLucyver of Maine, a wild-
cat or lynx, has, on the contrary, no right whatever to a name so
nearly akin to Lucifer; the word is a corruption of loup-cervier,
the name given it by the early French settlers. The Mink, some-
times called a miniature otter, and then again an aquatic weasel,
haunts all the streams and lakes of the United States, harboring
under roots and hollow banks, from which it darts forth to prey
upon fish, craw-fish, and all the tenants of the water. It even
makes occasional predatory excursions into the poultry-yard, and
is a great lover of fresh eggs. Its fur, very popular among ladies,
is one of the most beautiful of American peltries, and brings a
good price in the market., Hence it is much persecuted, and
needs not the poet’s suggestion to

“Mind the mink
Paddling the water by the quiet brink.”
(J. G. C. Brainerd.)

The Musk-Ox (Oribos moschatus), and the Musk-Rat (Fiber
zibethicus), owe their names, of course, to the powerful odor which
NATURAL HISTORY. : 371

they exhale under peculiar circumstances. The former is only
met with in the country around Hudson’s Bay, the Barren
Grounds of Arctic America; but the latter, closely allied to it in
form and habits, abounds near all our lakes and streams. In the
Northern States it is generally called Musquash, from its general
Indian designation, which has in science also given it the name
of Ondatra, from the Huron dialect of the Iroquois tongue.
Another animal, peculiar to America, and found on the plains
west of the Missouri River, is the Bighorn (Ovis montana) the
Rocky Mountain sheep. “The Bighorn is so named from its
horns, which are of great size, and twisted like those of a ram.”
(W. Irving, Astoria, 1, p. 253.) The Pronghorn (Antilocapre
americana) is not a true antelope, because it sheds its horns, and
has its name from the fact that each horn has a prong jutting out
of it. It is called Cadrée by the Canadian voyageurs, and the
Goat by the fur-traders. The hunters of the West value its
meat very highly, and travellers on the Pacific Railway are elo-
quent in their praise of the animal’s swift and graceful motions.
The Mule-Deer (Ceryus macrotis), the largest deer found on this
continent, derives, in the same way, its less poetical name from
its unusually long ears, while the variety found on the Pacific
coast (Cervus columbianus), is more commonly designated as the
Black-tail Deer, from the black tip to its tail. (S. F. Baird.)
Birds suffer in America more, perhaps, than in any other
country, from the general want of instruction in Natural History,
which leads to profound ignorance of all that concerns them, ex-
cept, perhaps, local habits. The same bird appears often under
half a dozen different names, in different parts of the Union ; and
again, distinct varieties are considered as one, because they are
all called by the same name. Such is, for instance, the case of
the grouse and the bodolink. The partridge proper (Perdix cine-
rea) does not exist at all in America; the name is usurped by a
quail in Pennsylvania and the South a pheasant (Ortyx virginia-
nus) and a grouse (Bonasa umbellus); hence, W. C. Bryant sings:

“T listened, and from midst the depth of wood,
Heard the low signal of the grouse, that wears
A sable ruff around his mottled neck ;
Partridge they call him, by our Northern streams,
And pheasant by the Delaware.”
372 AMERICANISMS.

From its cry it has obtained here, as well as abroad, the addi-
tional name of Bobwhite. The bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivora),
so called from the peculiar notes of its song, also Bob of Lincoln,
is the same bird as the Reed-bird on the banks of the Delaware,
and the Rice-bird still farther South. His quaint pied garb, his
busy, active manner, and his inimitable song as he flutters across
a meadow, have made him a pet with the farmer and a favorite
of American poets.

“Meanwhile that devil-may-care, the dobolink,
Remembering duty, in mid-quaver stops,

Just ere he sweeps o’er rapture’s tremulous brink,
And ’twixt the winrows most demurely drops,

A decorous bird of business, who provides

For his brown mate and fledglings six besides,
And looks from right to left, a farmer ’mid his crops.”

(J. R. Lowell. An Indian Summer Reverie.)

Their cheery, laughing manner is well reproduced in the lines:

“ One day in the bluest of summer weather,
Sketching under a whispering oak,
T heard five bobolinks laughing together
Over some ornithological joke.”
(C. P. Cranch. Summer Pictures.)

In another place J. R. Lowell describes his song, thus:
“ June’s bridesman, poct o’ the year,
Gladness on wings, the dobolink, is here.
Half hid in tip-top apple-bloom, he swings,
Or climbs against the breeze with quivering wings,
Or, giving way to it in mock despair,
Runs down, a brook of laughter, thro’ the air.”
(Biglow Papers, II., p. 158.)
The merry bird is also known by the spurious name of Ameri-
can Ortolan, but is a very different bird from the European orto-
lan ; the transfer of the name being a literary perversion like that
of peewee into peewit, the name of a European water-bird. Its
saddest name is the common one of Skunk Blackbird, not untre-
quently heard in the South, and due to the coloring, which re-
motely resembles that of the ill-smelling animal. It has a formi-
dable rival in the Caé-bird (Mimus carolinensis), who earned his
name from his cat-like cry when alarmed, as well as from his
inimitably sly ways, in slipping stealthily through the bushes close
NATURAL HISTORY. 373

up to your feet and away again, before you are quite sure he was
there. This thrush possesses great imitative powers, and in spite
of its plain, gray costume, and often very discordant cries, the
result of fear or anger, is a great favorite in almost every part of
the country. Itis of him F. Cozzens wrote with a certain enthu-
siasm: “Hush! he musical monologue begins anew ; up, up, into
the tree-tops it mounts, fairly lifting the leaves with its passionate
effluence; it thrills through the upper branches; and then,
dripping through the listening foliage, in a cadenza of matchless
beauty, subsides into silence again.” (Sparrow-grass Papers.) The
master, universally acknowledged as matchless in his powers, is,
however, the Mocking-Bird (Mimus polyglottus). Plain in color
and unattractive in form, so common as to be found through the
whole length of this continent, from the frontier of Canada to the
Empire of Brazil, there is still no bird more highly prized, none
more eagerly listened to, than the little brown mimic, often called
the Long-Tailed Mocker, who has in his marvellous throat every
song and every sound that can be heard by the earof man. In the
forest and in the garden he mocks every bird, from the musical
strain of the thrush to the ludicrous gobble of the male turkey,
and, hung up in his cage in town, he imitates with equal success
the cries of itinerant merchants, the rumbling of heavy drays on
the pavement, and the shrill whistle of idle boys. And ever and
anon there come in between a few notes of ineffable sweetness and
great pathos, as if he were, after all, not unmindful of his home
in the country, and bethought himself of his mate and his brood.
It is all the more unjust to confound him with the butcher-bird
of the North (Lanius septentrionalis), whose popular name is
Nine-killer, a name derived from the prevailing notion that the
number of his victims, which he actually impales and hangs up as
a butcher does his meat, never exceeds the number nine at a time.
In Canada and some of the Northern States they bestow upon this
ignoble, almost songless bird, the name of Mocking-Bird.

Similar confusion prevails here about the name of Buzzard,
which is commonly misapplied, being given to a vulture instead
of a hawk, since true buzzards bear at least some resemblance to
the two American Henhawks (Butes borealis and Butes lineatus),
the latter known as the red-shouldered hawk.
374 AMERICA NISMS,

“Silently overhead the henhawk sails
With watchful measuring eye, and for his quarry waits.”
(J. R. Lowell. Indian Summer Reverie.)

Even the oft-quoted Bald Hagle (Haliaetus leucocephalus), or
Baldheaded Eagle and Whiteheaded Hagle, are only spurious book-
names, and perhaps on this account the poor bird has so readily
been adopted as the emblem of the United States. He does not
seem to have always kept good company, for Richard Frame spoke
already in 1692 of

“The Turkey-Buzzard and the Bald Eagle high,
Wild Ducks, which in great companyes do fly ;”
and Benjamin Franklin wrote almost plaintively: “For my part,
I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative
of our country.”

A double blunder is committed in giving the name of Turkey
Buzzard toa bird that is neither a turkey nor a buzzard, but a
vulture (Cathartes aura), and bearing but a very faint resem-
blance to a turkey, while he is remarkable for his graceful flight
in the higher regions of the air. “ My. N. P. Willis had vultures
before his eyes, but because the vulgar name of turkey-buzzard
suggested the name of an English hawk, called buzzard, this was
sufficient to cause him to turn an ugly, unclean, filth-devouring
scavenger, into a splendid-looking, proud, handsome bird of prey,
capable of being married to falconry!” (S. 8. Haldeman, Southern
review, January, 1868, p. 216.) It isthis bird which acts as health-
officer in the Southern cities, and may, therefore, be seen stalking
through the streets or perched on roofs and awnings, unmolested
and absolute master, as the special pet of the authorities. To kill
one of them is a high misdemeanor; and the negroes used to look
upon them as little less than sacred animals.

The Oriole deserves a place among American birds only as far
as the variety peculiar to this continent differs slightly from the
Huropean, having a rich orange where the other has pale yellow,
and deserving therefore, best of all, its name, derived from aureolus,
the golden. It is also known as Laltimore-Oriole (Icterus balti-
more) from the numbers found near that city, and as Hangbird
from its peculiar nest, of which C. F, Hoffman sings—

“Where the Ortole’s pendant nest, high up,
Is rock’d on the swaying trees.”
NATURAL HISTORY. 375

The name occurs already in Bailey’s Dictionary (1730), under the
Mexican word, “ Xochaitotl, a bird in America... called the
Hang Nest or Hang Bird,” and hence J. R. Lowell says correctly ;

“The six old willows at the causey’s end,
Striped here and there with many a long-drawn thread,
Where streamed, through*leafy chinks, the trembling red,
Past which, in one bright trail, the Aangbird’s flashes blend.”
(An Indian Summer Reverie.)

The Whip-Poor- Will (Antrostomus vociferus) is, on the con-
trary, a genuine American bird, and, with his sad, monotonous
cry, a striking element in Southern nature as soon as the sun
has set. Its utterance is so peculiar, that already the Indians
tried an imitation by which to name the bird; they called it
Waw-o-naisa, while the first Dutch settlers, with a similar pur-
pose, named it Quok-koree. Thus also Whip-poor-will, univer-
sally pronounced Whipperwiill, is an adaptation rather than an
imitation of the original sound, like the Wish-ton-wish, Willy-
come-go, and Who-are-you, all names applied to various species.
W. Irving already complained of the sound, when “ever and anon
was heard the melancholy plaint of the Whip-Poor- Will, who,
perched on some lone tree, wearied the ear of night with his un-
ceasing moan” (Knickerbocker, History of New York, p. 231),
and J. K. Paulding speaks in like strains of

“The lonely Whip-Poor- Will, our bird of night,
Ever unseen, yet ever seeming near,
His shrill note quaver’d in the startled ear.”

Audubon used another name, familiar to the Southern. States,
and said: “No sooner has night fallen and the nocturnal insects
emerged from their burrows, than the sound Chuck- Wil?s- Widow,
repeated with great clearness and power, six or seven times in as
many seconds, strikes the ear.” (Ornithology, I. p. 273, B.) The
only vulgar name of the poor, solitary bird is Bul/-Bat—the large

. bat—and this may have instinctively led to the adoption of a
similar term, Cow-dird, or Cowpen-bird, for another bobolink
(Molothrus pecoris); the former in allusion to the prevailing
notion, that the bird loves to seat himself on the backs of cattle
and to rid them of vermin; the other from the preference they
show to cowpens (pronounced coppen) as the enclosures for cattle
376 AMERICANISMS.

are frequently called in the South. Another far more respectable
relative is the Brown Thrush (Harporhynchus longicauda), an
American thrush endowed with fair musical talents, and hence
popularly known also as the Ground or Mountain Mocking-Bird,
from its habit of slipping stealthily through the bushes, close to -
the ground. It has curiously enough, in addition, the name of
Thrasher (probably a variation of Thrush), and it appears as such
in many authors: “I love the city as dearly as a brown thrasher
loves the green tree that sheltered its young.” (C. Mathews, p. 125, B.)
Less loved, but hardly less pleasing, is the song of the thrush, which
is popularly known as the Veery (Turdus wilsoni), common in
Massachusetts and in autumn in Virginia, mentioned thus: “The
singular, quaint, and musical song of this querulous species.”
(Nuttall, Ornithology, I, p. 597.) The Bull-bat isa night-hawk
(Caprimulgus americanus), marked by its wide and capacious
mouth, and called duli-bat by the common people because of its
nocturnal habits, in which it resembles bats, and its large size and
fierce movements.

Our Robin (Turdus migratorius), a useful bird, destroying in-
credible numbers of grubs, is not to be confounded with its Eng-
lish namesake, which it resembles slightly. “The Red-breasted
Thrush, which in New England we used to call the Blackbird
(the English blackbird being also a thrush) and in Canada the
Robin.” (P. H. Gosse, Letters from Alabama, p. 295.)

Another bird, the English name of which is an imitation of its
peculiar cry, and which we frequently find misapplied in this coun-
try, is the European Pewit or lapwing, which is not at all known
in America, and yet often quoted. Even W. Irving seems to have
been so little mindful of the birds of his beautiful home as to
write: “The Pewit or Pe-wee or Phoede-bird, for he is called by
each of these names,” (Knickerbocker Magazine, May, 1839, p.
434.) He evidently fancied that the familiar fly-catcher, which
calls itself and which we call peewee (Contopus virens), must be
a water-bird, because the English lapwing or green plover calls. :
itself pewit. Noy is it much more easily understood how the name
of a bird with so marked a cry—whom even the French call on
that account familiarly Diz-huit—could have been used in rhym-
ing by the Poet-Laureate of England, as if his name sounded
Puc-el.
NATURAL HISTORY. 377

Its quaint, jerking motions have procured for it quite a number
of popular nicknames, such as Zilt-Up, from the tilting of the
tail, and Yeter, pronounced here ¢ee¢er and not as in England
titter, the see-saw amusement of children on a balanced plank.
Here, however, the word is used more extensively for a mental
process of the kind, approaching to fretting, so that when Mr.
Peabody was to be buried at his native place, a member of the
Maine Legislature said: “Mr. Speaker, I am disgusted with the
conduct of this House. This funeral at Portland is going to be
a grand affair, but when I see this house ¢efering and sea-sawing
as if it didn’t know its own mind, I declare I wish Mr. Peabody
had not died.”

The Humming-Bird is peculiar to this continent, but strangely
diffused over every part of it, so that Professor John Gould could
journey from Hudson’s Bay to Patagonia and collect numbers
everywhere, capturing in all two thousand specimens of two
hundred and thirty species. The tiny Mango Humming-bird
(Trochilus colubris), with its brilliant plumage, sudden, almost
ecstatic flight, and inexhaustible energy, is one of the most
characteristic as well as most pleasing features of American land-
scapes, and known familiarly, from the sound caused by the mar-
vellously quick beat of its wings, as um-bird or Hummer simply.

The Chewink is only the ground-robin under a more proper
name, derived from its note, which in some parts of the Union is
reproduced in its equally familiar name of Towhee, while the
French of Louisiana, in appreciation of its plumpness, call it
grasset. It is the Pipilo erythrophthalmus, and thus described by
P. H. Gosse: “The Towhe-Bunting is a prettily marked bird, black
above, with white bands on the’wings; the sides are chestnut-red
and the underparts white. His note resembles the word towhé.”
(Letters from Alabama, p. 297.)

The Chickadee (Parus atricapillus), elsewhere known by the
quaint title of Hoary Titmouse, bears its name also from its
utterance: it is the tiny, black-cap titmouse, of which J. R.
Lowell says—

“Far distant sounds the hidden chickadee,

Close at my side; far distant sound the leaves... .
(An Indian Summer Reverie.)

The same fate has befallen an aquatic bird, peculiar to this
378 AMERICANISMS.

continent (Oxiechus vociferus),.whose very sharp and piercing -
note is represented in the name of Killdee, or still more strangely
corrupted Kilideer, while the harassing sound of a small owl
(Ulula acadia), has procured for 1t the popular name of Saw- Whet,
from the resemblance it bears to the sharp rasping or filing of a
saw.

Dippers are small birds (Hydrobata mexicana; Baird), so called
in Europe also, because they dip under water in search of their
food ; like so many of their class, they also re-appear in different
parts of the country under different names, now poetically as
Water Witches, from the quickness with which they dive after the
flash of a gun, and now more energetically than gracefully as
Hell-Divers. Among such vulgar names is found also Mud-Hen
or Marsh-Hen for the Virginia rail (Rallus crepitans), although
the common bluish-black wading-bird, the Corn-crake (Fulica),
shares with it the name, and deserves it better. Even a tall, likely
crane has been dragged down into the mud, as W. Irving tells us:
“Squatting himself down on the edge of a pond, catching fish for
hours together, and bearing no little resemblance to the notable
bird of the crane-family, ycleped Maud-Poke.” (Knickerbocker,
History of New York, p. 31%.)

In the Far West we meet with one of the most singular birds
peculiar to the New World, the Burrowing Owl (Pholeoptynx
cunicularia), a species of day-owl, well known for its abnormal
habits. It lives on the prairies, in the “ villages” of the Prairie-dog
(Arctomys ludoyvicianus,) residing in the forsaken burrows. Au-
dubon says of it, “The burrow selected by the Burrowing Owl is
usually at the foot of a wormwood bush, (Artemisia,) upon the
summit of which the owl often perches, and stands for a consider-
able while. On being approached, they utter a low, chattering
sound, start, and skim along the plain. When winged, they make
for the nearest burrow, and when once within it, it is impossible _
to dislodge them.”

The Pratrie-Hen (Cupidonia cupido) has so many names, that
Americans themselves will speak of them, not unfrequently, as if
there were as many different species to be found in the West. It
is quite common to hear them called grouse, a family to which
they undoubtedly belong, and hence are, even by men of science,
occasionally quoted as Pinnated Grouse. In Heath-hen, the more
NATURAL HISTORY. 379

familiar heath of Scotland has simply been substituted for prairie;
but the Sage-hen (Centrocercus urophasianus) of the Northwest,
though of the same species, has a much longer tail than the
Prairie-hen, carries it differently from the latter, and grows so large
that strangers are apt, at first sight, to mistake it for a turkey.
“Near Fort Laramie we saw the first Sage-hens ; they were hard
to get at, but Kit Carson soon had two or three hanging at his
side, and they made us a feast.” (A Ride with Kit Carson.) Sap-
suckers (Picus varius and others) are absurdly so called in the
United States, from a belief that they suck the sap of trees, and
thus cause them to die—one of the few utterly groundless supersti-
tions peculiar to this country, and in all probability brought here
by ignorant foreigners. The Sora (Porzana carolina,) so quaintly
called Saurer by R. Beverley, (History of Virginia, p. 185,) has
already been mentioned.

The proud name of King-bird is very fairly given to the bray-
est of birds, the Scissor-tail (Tyrannus carolinensis), who comes
to us in summer from the far South, and excites the admiration
of all, who, in earnest or in sport, attempt to trouble his young.
He flies at the intruder with marvellous energy and intrepidity,
and does not shrink from attacking even hawks and eagles in defence
of his young. The Narragansett Indians and other tribes called
him, in appreciation of his bravery, the Sachem, while in some
parts of the South he is known as Meldmartin. The Yellow-Ham-
mer or Flicker (Picus amatus), the most beautiful of American
woodpeckers, with bright, golden wings, is universally known as
Clape, from a name bestowed upon him by the first settlers. In
western New York he is called characteristically High-hole, and
in Louisiana as Pique bois jaune. The Yellow-Throat (Sylvia)
derives, in like manner, its name from its golden throat, which
utters most pleasing music during pairing-time, while the Yellow-
Bird (Chrysomistris tristis), also called Thistle-Bird, is quite yel-
low, with black wings. “The Vellow-dird begins to occur in rest-
less flocks, flitting from weed to weed with alternate openings and
closings of the wings, twittering all the way, very much like our
English goldfinch.” (P. H. Gosse, Letters from Alabama, p. 295.)

Tn addition to such popular names bestowed upon the more
familiar or more striking birds, similar terms are also frequently
heard in connection with domestic fowl. The Pea-Hen or Guinea-
380 AMERICANISMS.

Fowl, for instance, appears often as Guinea-keet or keet, simply
from its peculiar and unpleasant note; a tailless fowl is in Penn-
sylvania called a dunty, and a small speckled kind a creepy,
(8. S. Haldeman.) But the manner in which the common
dung-fowl is treated, deserves special mention and—reprobation.
There is little harm, perhaps, in calling a hen a diddy, a term
already mentioned by Halliwell, and frequently used abroad and
with us in calling chickens to feed; but to make from it a he-
biddy for the cock, and chickabiddy for the little ones, is a some-
what violent proceeding. Much better, however, to do this, than
in absurd prudishness to shrink from the good old English word
Cock, and translate it into the unmeaning fooster, as if it were not
known that almost all birds are roosters, and hens certainly,
quite as much as cocks. Dr. Hyde Clark, perhaps too severely,
calls the term rooster “‘an American ladyism for cock,” and a
recent English writer professes even to have heard a Rooster and
Ox Story in the United States!

It is probably only the effect of carelessness in writing, and the
fondness of a certain slipshod style, which introduced the use of
Barnyards for the fowl most frequently found there; still even a
poet, like Fitz G. Halleck, could write to a friend, “I recollect
his (Dr. Banks) discovery of an ale-house at Brooklyn, where the
English mistress was superior in her choice of darnyards, and
their cooking.” (Mount’s Memoir of F. G. Halleck.)

Ocean-birds and coast-birds are, of course, not as familiar to
the eye of the people at large, and hence comparatively safe from
nicknames; but, on the other hand, the want of knowledge con-
cerning them has, especially i in the United States, led to a great
confusion of names in the case of many varieties. The Broad-
Bill (Fulix marila), for instance, which in October appears in
large numbers on the Eastern coast, is called a Black-Head on the
Chesapeake Bay, and a Raft-Duck in Virginia, while the most
highly prized of all ducks, the pride of the American kitchen, is
known from its color as the Canvas-Back (Aythya vallisneriana)
wherever it appears on the coast of the Middle States. The
Lawyer is the little, black-necked stilt (Himantopus nigricolus),
whom the people of New Jersey are reported to have wittily nick-
named thus “on account of its long bill” (B), although Stilt and
Long-Shanks are far more obvious names.
NATURAL HISTORY. 381

The Loon (Colymbus torquatus), generally called the Black
Swimmer, deserves mention here only because of the many terms
and phrases derived from its peculiaritiés which have been trans-
ferred to our speech, more even than to colloquial English. Thus -
the phrase, “straight as a loon’s leg,” has already been suggested,
and to call a man a loon isa common term of contempt, though
it must not be overlooked that the word has repeatedly been
explained as a corruption of a low one, probably upon no better
ground than the fact that Grose, in his Vocabulary, writes it also
town. The Old Wives, of our coast, are probably of two different
kinds, for Sonnini gives that term as the name of sea-gulls in
South Carolina, while other authorities state that the Brown
Duck (Harelda glacialis) is popularly known by that name. It
has also the still more equivocal title of Old Squaw in some of the
New England States. The Whistler or Whistle- Wing (Bucephala
americana) is, on the other hand, a duck well known on the
Susquehanna and in Canada, though generally quoted as the
Golden Hye. “The silence of the forest was unbroken save by
the whirring sound of the large white and gray duck called by
the frequenters of these lonely waters the Whistle- Wing.’ (Mrs.
Trail, The Canadian Crusoes, p. 230.)

If the names of birds are not always easily traced, owing to
their diversity in different parts of the Union, the difficulty is still
greater in the case of fish, which are bound to certain localities,
the seashore, the great lakes, or a few rivers or brooks, and hence
are apt to appear under a variety of names. Only such will,
therefore, here be mentioned as are more generally known, and
whose names may be said, to some extent, to have established
their claim as being considered a part of our speech.

One of the most ill-treated of the kind is perhaps the sunfish
(Pomotis vulgaris), whose name is borne alike by a shark and a
sea-monster, looking more like the dissevered head of a fish than
an entire animal. The little perch, however, deserves its name,
for it is a beautiful, glittering creature, although J. R. Lowell
sneers at him under two other names which he likewise bears:

“ Lazy as the d7'cam,
Whose only business is to head up the stream,
(We call him punkin-seed.)”
(Biglow Papers, II., p. 38.)
382 AMERICANISMS.

The latter name the fish earns from the curious spots on its sides,
which to a lively imagination look somewhat like pumpkin-seed ;
but to the name of Bream, used in New England, it has no title
whatever. In other States it re-appears even as a pond-perch, a
tobacco-box, and as a roach. (8. 8. Haldeman.)

The most remarkable of sweet-water fishes, known by an odd
English name, is the Stone-Toter, mentioned thus by J. K. Pauld-
ing: “The most singular fish in-this part of the world (the Valley
of Virginia) is called the Stone-toter, whose brow is surmounted
with several sharp little horns, by the aid of which he ¢otes small
flat stones from one part of the brook to another more quiet, in
order to make a snug little enclosure for his lady to lie in in
safety.” (Letters from the South, IL, p.4.) This is probably the
Stickleback (a Gasterosteus), who builds his nest in the manner.
indicated by the author, though a mullet also is occasionally
called by that name.

One of the most common fish of the United States is the Cat-
Jish (Pimelodus, of several species), which hence enjoys a number
of aliases; its popular name being simply Cat, or Catty: “He'll
fetch you up like a catty on a cork-line—jerk!” (J.C. Neal, Char-
coal Sketches.) Its thick head, with its long feelers, has procured
for it the names of Bulihead and Horned Pout, while a species is
known also as Mudpout, from its preference for the mud of rivers
and creeks, and irreverently, from its black color perhaps, as
Minister. :

The Catfish of the Mississippi sometimes grows to a length of
three or four feet, and strikes with great force any object that
comes in its way, endangering eyen the safety of a canoe. The
Chub and the Blackfish are but local names for the Tautog, of
whom mention has been made under the head of Indian words.

The Gar, so called from the resemblance its long, slender body
and sharp-pointed head bear to a spear or dart, called gar in
Anglo-Saxon and old English, is represented in American waters
by several species, the Banded garfish (Belone truncata) of the
coast, also known as Bill-Fish, and a pike-like fish (Lepidosteus),
found in fresh waters. The latter is a formidable animal, half
fish, half reptile, having rhombic scales, and found only in the
lakes and rivers of Western America. It has, besides, an air-blad-
der that serves almost the purposes of a lung, and it can thus live
NATURAL HISTORY. 383

longer out of water than any other fish. He' is, as they described
him to Sir C. Lyell, “a happy fellow, and beats all creation ; he
can hurt everything and nothing can hurt him,” Growing some-
times to a length of ten feet, he is said not to shrink from en-
countering an alligator even, although his name of Alligator Gar
refers less to these hostile meetings than to his resemblance to the
reptile. The Blue Perch, also'known as Nibddler, from the wicked
delight he seems to take in nibbling off the fisherman’s bait, and
as Conner on the coast of New England, is the Burgall mentioned
elsewhere, as the Bony Fish is the famous Menhaden, called
Hardhead in the State of Maine.

The Bubbler deserves his name well, for when drawn from the
waters of the Ohio, which he frequents, he makes an extraor-
dinary bubbling noise, as if protesting against such ill-treatment,
just as the Croaker does, in his way, when caught in the bays and
inlets of the Gulf of Mexico. Among fishes, as among birds, we
meet with a Lawyer (Lota),so called in Canada, we are told by
the fishermen there, “because he ain’t of much use, and the slip-
periest fish that swims.” (J. Hammond, Wild Northern Scenes,
B.) The Lake-Lawyer (Amia) is the Mud-Fish of Western
waters, so called from its “ferocious looks and voracious habits”

. (Dr. Kirtland, B.), while in the lakes the same qualities have pro-
cured for him the name of Dog-Fish. The Red-Horse (Catos-
tomus duquesnii), a sucker, found in the Ohio and its tributaries,
derives its odd name from its red color and large size.

Among saltwater-fish, the Sheepshead (Sparus ovis), is probably
the most highly esteemed for the table; the name is not improp-
erly derived from the resemblance of his head and teeth to that
of asheep. Rock-Fish, also not unfrequently called rock simply
(Labrax lineatus), is highly esteemed; it is caught in American
rivers, which it ascends, and differs from the sea-dass, which
abounds in the Atlantic, and belongs to the perches. The Rock
is beautifully marked with seven or eight black lines on a silver-
bright ground, and hence is generally known as Striped Bass, a
great delicacy in the opinion of connoisseurs. The Sea- Rodin has
its strange name from the striking resemblance it bears to a bird,
as with long, outstretched, pectoral fins it floats along under
water as if poised upon two broad wings. This peculiarity has
also procured for it the name of Flying Fish, while a very strange
ot AMERICANISMS.

grunting noise, which it makes when caught, has led to its being
called the Pig-Fish on other parts of the coast. The Rusty Dad
(Platessa ferruginea) is the popular name of one of the flat-
fishes, caught on the coasts of Massachusetts and New York,
where also a small mackerel is called a tinker, while a small shad
of inferior quality is contemptuously dubbed a ¢atlor—the Blue-
fish (Temnodon saltator) of the Lower Potomac being a Saltwater-
Tailor.

The Rudder-fish (Palinurus perciformis) abounds on the south-
ern part of our Atlantic coast, and is thus referred to: “That
splendid creature, the coryphene or dolphin of mariners . . . the
spotted rudder-fish and the purple-banded pilot were often seen
beneath the stern.” (P. H. Gosse, Letters from Alabama, Lon-
don, 1859, p. 11.) Another fish with remarkable spots is the
Groper (Serranus erythrogaster), which is found near Florida.
“The most numerous kind was a thick-set fish of considerable
size, called a groper, covered with olive-colored irregular spots; the
inside of the mouth and throat was of a brilliant vermilion.”
(P. H. Gosse, Letters, &c., p. 18.) It does not clearly appear how
the Vellow- Tail obtained its name, since this remarkable creature,
which is only occasionally seen on our coasts, has a pale, crimson
tail, which contrasts beautifully with the long bands of delicate
pink and yellow marked alternately on its body.

The King-/ish (Umbrina alburnus), a sea-fish four or. five feet
long, and thus called at New York, re-appears as Whiting in South
Carolina and Florida, while the familiar Halibut in many parts of
the United States recovers its original name Holibut ; for Phillips
in his World of Worlds takes great pains to make us aware that
the proper name of the fish is Holy But, and Bailey also quotes it
as holibut in his Dictionary.

The Cludtail is nothing but a shad, whose tail is swollen with
the great amount of fat which he is apt to accumulate at certain
seasons of the year; the name is nearly limited to the Carolina
coast, where the fish is taken in large numbers. Coverclip is the
‘curious name by which the sole is known in the waters of New
York; but even more mysterious is that of Calico, which may be
heard quite as frequently. One of the most remarkable of Ameri-
can fishes is the Angler (Lophius americanus), so called from its
long feelers, which it protrudes from its hiding-place in the mud
NATURAL HISTORY. 385°

for the purpose of attracting the smaller fry on which it. feeds.
A more popular name is Devil-Fish or Sea-Devil, a name to which
it is not entitled, as that belongs to the gigantic ray (Cephaloptera
vampyrus), which has earned it by its hideous form and cunning
devices. This is the stingray, or, as it is often mis-named, stin-
garee, which excited the utmost amazement among the early set-
tlers. Captain John Smith writes: “Our captaine taking a fish
from his sword (not knowing her condition), being much of the
fashion of a Thornback, but a long tayle like a riding-rodde, where
on the middest is a most poysoned sting, of two or three inches
long, bearded like a saw on each side, which she strucke into the
wriste of his arme neare an inch and a half; no bloud nor wounde
was seene, but a little blew spotte; but the torment was instantly
so extreame, that in 4 houres we all with much sorrow concluded
his funerall and prepared his grave in an Island by. Yet it pleased
God by a precious oyle Dr. Russell at fyrst applyed to it, his tor-
menting paine was so well asswaged that he eate of the fish to his
supper, which gave no less joy and content to us than ease to him-
self, for which we called the Island Stingrai-Isle, after the name
of the fish.” The huge creature grows in the waters of Florida to
such a size that Dr. Stover, of Boston, once captured one eigh-
teen feet broad and seventeen feet Jong, with a tail of the same
length.

One of the remarkable family of fishes, whose skin is granulated
like a file, and which are hence known as File-Fishes (Balistes),
has in addition the uncomplimentary name of Fool-Fish, because
of the extremely odd manner in which it swims, the body being
sunk below the surface and the open mouth on a level with the
water—a position which gives to the poor, wriggling creature an
appearance of extreme stupidity. The Frost-Fish is the Tomcod,
mentioned elsewhere, and so called from its appearance on the
coast during the winter months.

There are few more splendidly-colored creatures in the world
than some of our American fish, and among them the Southern
King-Fish (Lampris guttatus), or Opah, stands foremost. Its steel-
blue back contrasts strangely with its bright green sides, while the
remaining parts are of delicate rose-color; its flesh is as palatable
as its appearance is gorgeous. On the coast of New Jersey the
fish is known by its more modest name of Hake.

1%
386 AMERICANISMS.

“Fish of all kind inhabit here
And throng the dark abode ;
Here haddock, hake, and flounders are,
And eels and perch and cod.”
(Joseph Green. Burlesque on M. Byles, 1788.)

A peculiar name is that of the Lafayette (Leistormus obliquus),
which arose from the fact that this delicious sea-fish one summer
arrived in the waters of New York precisely at the same time when,
General Lafayette paid his last visit to this country. (Dr. 8. F.
Baird.) It abounds mainly on the coast of New Jersey, and, as
people there appreciate the delicacy fully, it is also called Cape
May Goody.

Herrings appear in America under such a variety of names that
it is often very difficult to identify the precise species. Besides the
common American Herring (Clupea elongata), which differs from
the European species, this name is applied to various genera,
which have no other claim to it but a distant resemblance. Such
is the Moon-Hye (Hyodon tergisus), also known as lake and river
herring, and as toothed herring, the Shad-Herring (Chatoéssus
signifer), sometimes called thread herring, or threadfish, and the '
Herring-Salmon (Coregonus clupeiformis), which appears often as
Shad salmon, and even Whitefish. The Pencil-Fish, a small fish
of the Pacific coast, also loses its identity not unfrequently in the
same manner, while the genuine herring has given its own name
to the well-known Herring Guill (Larus smithsonianus) of the
Atlantic coast.

Oulachan (Mallotus pacificus; Richardson), is the native name,
often misrepresented as Hoolikan, and even Eulachon, of a small
salmonoid fish of the Pacific coast, thus described by good author-
ity: “ Hoolikans, sometimes called Lulachons, very delicious fishes
of the size of small herring, come in April in shoals as far south
as the mouth of the Columbia. Flocks of sea-gulls herald their
march by hovering over the column and swooping down on it.
Up the rivers they follow the fish, screeching and swooping. The
hoolikans are so fat as to baffle ordinary methods of cooking them
for the table. Oil is expressed from them by the Indians in large
quantities and sold up and down the coast.” (8. Wilkeson,
Christian Union, March 22, 1871.) W. Irving reported the same
NATURAL HISTORY. 387 |

fish as “about six inches long, called by the natives the Uthlecan,
and resembling the smelt.” (Astoria, IL, p. 79.)

The Toadfish (Batrachus tau), allied to the fishing-frog and re-
sembling it in repulsive ugliness, appears also as Oyster-fish on
the coast of New Jersey, where it is found to frequent the oyster-
beds, and as Grubley on the coast of New England. A rival in
appearance at least is the Horned sucker, also known as Chud-
sucker (Catostomus storer); sucking with the lips, and thus dis-
tinguished from the remora, which sucks by means of a remarkable
disk upon the head, and thus fastens itself to other large fishes or
the bottom of vessels.

The lower animals are either not sufficiently known to the peo-
ple at large to obtain correct or even significant names, or they
have, when referred to: by well-informed persons, the names they
bear in England. The most characteristic of this class, as is best
known abroad, is probably the Rattlesnake (Crotalus durissus;
Linn.), which was at an early period of the republic chosen as the
national emblem. For when the first fleet of the United States
sailed on the 17th February, 1776, from the Capes of Delaware, the
vessels bore a yellow flag containing a rattlesnake in the act of
striking, with the motto, “Don’t tread on me,” and under the same
emblem the troops of South Carolina fought for some time. It
was more than a year before the unpleasant flag was superseded
by the Stars and Stripes, “representing a new constellation.”
(Act of Congress, June 14th, 1777.)

The rival of this formidable snake is the Copperhead (Trigono-
cephalus contortrix), which rejoices in nearly a dozen names,
having apparently a different one in every part of the country.
It is known as Copperbelly and Chunkhead, as Red Viper, Adder,
and Deaf Adder, even as Dumb Rattlesnake, because it does not
give the warning before it strikes, on account of which chivalrous
challenge the Indians call the rattlesnake a Brave. The Cotton-
Mouth, probably the same as the famous Moccasin Snake, is an
equally dangerous snake of Arkansas, while the true Copperbelly
(Nerodia erythogaster) is perfectly harmless and of aquatic habits.

Turtles also and tortoises abound, especially in the Middle and
Southern States, the land-tortoises appearing under the fanciful
shape of tortles in Pennsylvania, to distinguish them from turtle-
doves, which are never thus designated.
388 AMERICANISMS.

Swam Bo-si-ka-do the turtle, *

Swam behind him with the baggage,

Zhin-ga-den-i-quan the tortie.

Old Mik’nak was drown’d quite early—

Mikenik—terrestrial tortoise,

Whose ancestral home is standing

Where Mishinimakinong lies.

(MS. additions to Ward’s Higher Water.)

Hence the verb to tortie, to move off in the awkward manner of
a turtle, which J.C. Neal uses in the phrase: “Now, you two
hook to one another like two Siameses and mosey. ... Toréle off,
it’s slick going, ’specially if yow’re going down.” (Charcoal Sketches,
I, p. 77.) The Turtle ordinarily is the marine tortoise, and is said
to have received its name from the French tortwe, Latin tortus,
from its crooked feet. In old writers it is frequently written
turkle, and may, after all, be nothing more than a corruption of
the word tortoise. The Mud-Turtle (Sternothuerus odorata), is a
common variety, found in swamps and marshes, while the Snap-
ping Turtle (a Chelonura), also called simply Snapper, is a fero-
cious kind, snapping at everything, and inflicting a painful bite.
“Yesterday, much amusement was created at "Change by a pick-
pocket, who investigated a gentleman’s pocket and found his hand.
suddenly caught by a fierce snapping-turtle. It appears the
gentleman had recently been robbed of his pocketbook, and adopted
this method to catch the thief” (Philadelphia Ledger, June 1%,
1851.) Another tortoise of greater size and equal ferocity is the
Softback (Trionyx ferox). Terrapins, said to be so called from
the French terrapéne (?), are salt-water turtles, highly valued by
epicures for their delicious flesh; they are most frequent in the
salt-water marshes of the Middle States, and Baltimore, especially,
was long famous for its terrapin stews.

The innumerable hosts of lizards, living in the water and on
land, which are found in the United States, pass in the same
manner under such a variety of names in different States that it
is often impossible to identify the precise species. It is curious,
however, that water-lizards especially should be so often compared.
to dogs. One large species, a salamander, with smooth, naked
body, appears thus as Water-Dog in the West, while others are
indifferently called Water-Puppies and Grownd-Puppies. The
smaller kinds are known in the Eastern States as Spring-Keeper,
NATURAL HISTORY. 389

from a boyish notion that they guard the springs in which they
are generally found. They even enter the spring-houses, small
buildings erected over a spring to keep milk and fresh meat, by
placing the vessels in shallow troughs, through which the water
runs; a term not mentioned even in Loudoun’s Encyclopedia of
Agriculture. (S.8.Haldeman.) The term Salamander is, on the
other hand, without any ostensible reason, transferred from the
real owner to a pouched rat (Geomys pinetis), common in some of
the Southern States, while the name, as bestowed upon safes,
Salamander Safes, is quite appropriate, being suggestive of the
ability of these huge iron boxes to withstand, like the fabled sala-
mander of old, the action of the fire. Fast-Runner is the well-
deserved name of a lizard (Tachydromus sexlineatus) which com-
bines with great beauty wonderful swiftness of motion.

In Virginia, and the Southern States generally, almost all active
wood-lizards are called scorpions. ‘There are three or four
species,” says P. H. Gosse, “the most common of which is called,
by a strange misnomer, the scorpion (Agama undulata), and it is
this species which so rapidly scuttles along under the crisped
leaves.” (Letters from Alabama, p. 48.)

Hellbender is the energetic name of the American Salamander
(Menopoma alleghaniensis), an aquatic reptile, often eighteen
inches long, and so called on account of its extraordinary hid-
eousness.

Reference has already been made to the curious variety of
crabs, known here as Fiddlers, small, gray, one-armed crabs, who
scuttle and dodge about as jerkingly and nimbly as a fiddler’s
bow, whence their familiar name. At the time of their annual
marches they proceed, each male with his large claw raised in
front like an immense club; the poor females have no such large
arm, and march under the protection of the males. These little
creatures are, however, under Providence, made useful, for we
learn that “the ditches in the land near the Mississippi would
not suffice to carry off the fresh water during the high water of
spring and early summer, were they not aided by the myriads
upon myriads of fiddlers, everywhere boring into the soil and
honeycombing it with innumerable chambers and passages.”
(Putnam’s Magazine, May, 1869.) When the poor crab is under-
going the painful process of changing its armor, and hides its
390 AMERICANISMS.

sensitive naked body, it is called a Shedder, and eagerly sought
after to appear as a great delicacy on the table under the name of
Soft Crabs, or Soft-shell Crabs. The King-Crab of England is
known here as Horsefoot (Limulus polyphemus), having some-
what the form of a horse-shoe; it is so common on the Atlantic
coast from Canada to Virginia as frequently to be used for
manure. The Bullfrog (Rana pipiens) excited at a very early
period of American history the greatest amazement abroad, for
John Josselyn reported in 1672 already, that in Virginia not only
barley changed readily into oats, but “ frogs were found on river-
banks and edges of ponds, a foot high.” (New Lngland’s Rarities
Discovered, p.'t3.) Another writer recently spoke of his amaze-
ment when he first heard, “ mingled with the batrachian chorus,
an occasional dissonant croak, deep, heavy, and of such roaring
volume as to deceive Taurus himself;” for the dbulifrog’s potent
voice at times really resembles the low roar of a bellowing bull.

The American Locust is not the same insect as that which is so
called in Europe, but a cicada or harvest-fly, instead of a grass-
hopper, of which J. R. Lowell says,

“ The locust’s shrill alarum stings the éar.”

The genuine locust is, of course, not unknown to this continent,
and there are several allied species found here, one of which is very
numerous and terribly destructive in Utah, so that it is only kept
in abeyance, “thanks to the beneficial gluttony of the gulls, those
beautiful birds of a bountiful God,” as Brigham Young once said
in one of his sermons. A variety, very different indeed (Cicada
septendecim), which appears only every seventeen years, and
ought not to be confounded with the former, struck already the

first settlers with surprise ; an anonymous description of Bacon’s

Rebellion, dated July 13, 1705, says: “The third strange appeat-
ance were swarms of flies, about one inch long and big as the top
of a man’s little finger, rising out of spigot-holes in the earth,
which eat the new sprouted leaves from the tops of the trees,
without doing other harm, and in a month left us.”

A species of grasshopper (Cyrtophyllum concayum) has ob-
tained the quaint name of Katydid, in imitation of the peculiar
noise which the male makes in autumn toward evening, by means
of the membranes of his wing-covers. The harsh, grating sound
NATURAL HISTORY. 391

is nevertheless almost articulate, and hence easily interpreted as
meaning Katy did, the answer being, in children’s views, Katy
didn’t.
“The nights grow cool,
And see-saw Katydids foretell the chill
Of leafless forest and of icy pool.”
(C. P. Cranch. Summer Pictures.)

An English traveller heard the concert differently: “A large
species of gryllus,” he writes, “called provincially Katedid, fills
the air with its nightly music, such as it is. Fancy a score or two
of people with shrill voices, divided into pairs, each pair squabbling
with each other, I did!—You didn’t!—I did!—You didn’t! the
objurgation maintained with the most amusing pertinacity, and
without a moment’s intermission, on every side.” (P. H. Gosse,
Letters from Alabama, p. 183.)

Another variety shares with a species of Dragonfly the name of
Devils Darning-Needle, provincially known in England as the
Devil’s Needle (Wright), while the common Mantis is at the
South graphically designated as the Rearhorse, from its odd way
of rising on its hind-legs.

Yellow-jacket is the familiar and descriptive name of a small
hornet (Pelopsus), and of the Sand-wasp (Ammophila), one of
whose cousins is familiarly known by the name of Dauder, from
the manner in which he builds his nest, literally daubing it all
over, so as to make it waterproof, and quite astrong structure. “TI
watched,” says P. H. Gosse, “ with much interest the proceedings
of a Dawéder in building her mud-cell; it is a pretty species” (Pe-
lopsus flavipes). (Letters from Alabama, 1859.) Both of these
insects are endowed with formidable powers of stinging, and yet
but little more dreaded than the Gadlinipper, a very large mos-
quito, quite common in the South and West. The term is usually
derived from gall and nip, but it seems more likely that the first
part of the word originated, like the gallibagger of the Exmoor
dialect (Grose), from the provincial expression gailier, which
means to fight, and galliment, a great fight. An English traveller
relates how a huge, brawny deck-hand, on board a Mississippi
steamer, once offered to lie naked on deck, and endure the stings
of all the mosquitoes that might settle on him, without wincing,
if the traveller and his friends, who had wagered large sums on
392 AMERICANISMS.

the question, would keep off the gallinippers. He lay there several
minutes, covered with ravenous insects, and among them several of
the latter species, when the narrator, to test his powers of endur-
ance, applied the burning end of his cigar to the poor fellow’s
back. He jumped up with a terrific oath, exclaiming: “Did you
not promise to keep off those gallinippers ?”

The Hessian Fly (Cecidomyia destructor; Say), a small midge,
very destructive to young wheat, is said to owe its name to the
popular notion that it was first imported into America in the
straw-beds of Hessian soldiers, enlisted by the British Govern-
ment during the Revolutionary War. It is certain that the insect
first appeared on Staten Island, and in 1796 in Virginia, thus
making its way gradually over the whole country; but its precise
mode of introduction can now no longer be positively ascertained.
The Midget of Canada and some of the Northern States, is the
Sand-fly of Europe, as Moth is in the United States commonly re-
stricted to the domestic pest, while the night-flying Lepidoptera
are erroneously called Butterflies, and the Coleoptera Bugs. En-
glish writers are apt to amuse themselves at the American habit
of calling their beetles bugs, but forget their own great poet’s lines:

“Let me flap this dug with gilded wings,
This painted child of dirt, that stinks and stings.”
(Pope.)

We speak thus of May-bugs and June-bugs, of Golden Bugs and
even of Lightning-Bugs, instead of fireflies, and the only bug of
English usage (Cimex) passes, in the South especially, under its
Spanish name of Chinch, brought from the West Indies. “Chint-
ses (so buggs are by the Negroes and by some others called, in Ja-
maica).” (John Southall, A Treatise of Buggs, London, 17%3-.)

Persons of great wealth and distinction are irreverently called
Big Bugs, and “1-street, in Washington,” is thus said to “be in-
habited by the foreign ambassadors and other big bugs.” J.C.
Neal makes a nice distinction when he says of a rich man with-
out social importance: “He is one of your dig bugs, with more
money than sense.” (Charcoal Sketches, III, p. 117.)

The word “stag” is very rarely used in America, deer being
almost universally employed for the purpose; the Stag-Beetle
(Lucanus) of England also re-appears here as Hornbug ; the small
NATURAL HISTORY. 393

beetle which lives and feeds upon pease as Peabug, and the German
Petz Keffer (Petz-kifer) of Pennsylvania has been Americanized
by a third metamorphosis into Pinchbug, while the larva of the
ant-lion is, in Virginia, called Hoodlebug.

The honey-bee is, of course, a European importation, and was
early known to the Indians as the white man’s fly, because it
generally preceded even the first settlers of the new race. ‘Che
only truly native honey-makers are the burly, dozing dumble-
bees of several species, of which R. W. Emerson sings:

“When the Southern wind in May-days
With a net of shining haze '
Silvers the horizon wall,

And witb softness touching all,
Tints the human countenance
With a color of romance,

And, infusing subtle heats,
Turns the sod to violets,

Thou, in sunny solitudes
Rover of the underwoods,

The green silence dost displace
With thy mellow, breezy bass.”

Etymologists generally see in the name the Greek BouSvAzos,
and refer it, moreover; to the name of the genus Bombus, to
which the insect belongs. In Scotland, the sound of the bee is
called bumming, and hence the insect was first called Bum-bee,
and then Bumble-bee, the second 6 having been produced by
eduction. The name thus written occurs already in Barham in
the line, “Black Beetles and Bumble Bees, Bluebottle Flies”
(The Knight and the Lady), and the German verb dummeln
strengthens the theory. Nevertheless, a fallacious opinion is en-
tertained that the name is a corruption of Humble Bee, connected
with the German word for it, which is Hammel, and derived from
the Scotch hummel, which originally means hornless, and makes
hummel-cow a cow without horns, but in this case implies the
want of a sting. Both terms are in use in the United States, the
latter especially in the South.

Another native insect is the Sguash-Bug (Coreus tristis), a
common species, so called because of its destructive power in eat-
ing the vines of squashes and melons; the Twmble-bug (Canthon

17*
394 AMERICANISMS.

lolvis) akin to the sacred scarabeus of the Egyptians, who so indus-
triously rolls his balls of dung on dusty roads and lonely paths;
the Sand-flea or Sand-hopper (Orchestra), dwelling on the sea-
coast of Long Island and other sandy places, where he diverts
children by his sudden and energetic leaps, by which he tries to
escape pursuit; and the Seed-tick, a minute and noxious Ixodes,
which burrows in the skin, and produces often very serious incon-
venience. The whole company is designated by the poet above as
“sandfleas, junkies, and greenheads.” The Seed-tick is, in all
probability, the same insect as the. hated Jigyer or Chigre, of Ken-
tucky, which has derived its name from the genuine Chico of the
West Indies (Pulex penetrans), but does not, like the latter, cause
torment by depositing its eggs under the skin of the feet, partic-
ularly the toes, which often produces quite formidable sores. They
are so numerous and perpetually present in the South, that they
have their changing nomenclature according to age. “The first
season they are called Seed-ticks, the next year they become
Yearling-ticks, and the third, Old-ticks.” (P. H. Gosse, Leiters
from Alabama, p. 220.)

Plants have the privilege in every country on earth of appear-
ing in a double character: with a scientific name, useful, but
known only to the botanist, and with a homely name, familiar to
all, and generally derived from some peculiarity of form or color,
or some medicinal virtue, ascribed to them from experience, or,
more frequently, from superstition. This is, perhaps, more gen-
erally the case in America than in Europe, because the first set-
tlers were rarely acquainted with botanical names, and, on the
other hand, very careful observers of every new tree or shrub,
flower or root, they met, always expecting to make some valuable
discovery, when they did not apprehend a new danger. Thus they
were naturally led to name new plants from those features in
their appearance that struck them most forcibly, or from the
manner in which they could make them useful in the field or the
house.

The herds of the land suffer under the unfortunate tendency
Americans have to soften initial vowels by an additional y; as
they say year for ear, and even yere for here, chiefly iny Maryland
and southward, so they also say over a wider region, yard very
generally for herb, and yarb-tea ig 2 very common article, espe-

et
NATURAL HISTORY. 395

cially in the New England States. “Then we had an Erie Railroad
‘splendid breakfast:’ bean-coffee, yerd-tea, leather-steak, and
rain-water milk.” (New York Tribune, January 23, 1871.)
That article of tea is altogether a great mystery in the United
States. While their fast clippers bring fresh teas in enormous
quantities, and the new railway from the Pacific enables the best
qualities to reach the great markets in still shorter time after the
crop has been gathered, Americans drink perhaps a greater variety
of decoctions under the name of. tea than any other nation. It
was a great puzzie to benevolent ladies, who, at the heginning of
the late Civil War, tried to make themselves useful in tending
and nursing the wounded soldiers. The question, “ Will you have
a cup of tea?” was very apt to elicit the counter-question, “ What
kind of tea have you got? sage- or sass- or store-tea?” It was soon
discovered that store-tea was all over the interior of the country
the name for genuine tea, or at least such as is sold under that
title in “stores.” Tay, however, they pronounced it, the Irish of
Swift—
“And sneers as learnedly as they
Like females o’er their morning tea,”

whenever they were Southerners, following here also the good
old English custom, derived from the Chinese—

“Here, thou great Amra, whom three realms obey,
Dost sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea.”
(Pope.)

Sage-tea and Mint-tea were, of course, familiar to all nurses,
and Sass-tea made itself known as Sassafras-tea, a decoction
made of the tender shoots and the roots of a laurel (Sassafras offi-
cinale), the bark of which has an exceedingly pleasant taste and
fragrance, and valuable medicinal properties. Spice-tea is, in like
manner, made from another laurel common at the South, the
spice-bush (Laurus benzoin; Linn.), the bark of which is very
spicy and much valued in fever, whence it is also known as Fever-
bush. Under the former name it appears in W. C. Bryant’s lines—

“This tangled thicket on the bank above
Thy basin, how the waters keep it green!
There the spice-bush lifts
Her leafy lances,” ~ (The Fountain.)
396 AMERICANISMS.

Jersey-tea (Ceanothus americana) is known to New Jersey only,
and Bohea-tea means a dark tea made of every other plant and
herb in America—only not of the Chinese shrub known by that
name. South-sea-tea or Yopon (Ilex vomitoria) occurs North
and South, and, in spite of its formidable, scientific name, makes
a pleasant and slightly intoxicating tea—at least so say the people
of North Carolina, in whose State it is indigenous. They dry the
leaves by a slow heat and then make an infusion of it, which may
be quite palatable, as the plants belong to the same family from
which, in Peru, the famous Maté-tea is prepared. Even distant
Labrador is called upon to aid in furnishing a variety of the
favorite beverage; at least in the Northwest they have a tea called
Mash-Tea, and another called Labrador-tea, made from. two plants
(Ledum palustre and Ledum latifolium), the leaves of which
possess moderate narcotic qualities, and are said to furnish a
pleasant infusion. At the other end of the Union, in Texas, New
Mexico, and the adjoining territories, Santa Fé-tea is popular,
made of the leaves of a plant which has the modest merit of look-
ing like the tea-shrub (Alstonia theaformis), although the likeness
does not extend to taste or flavor. In the Far West, at the foot of
the Rocky Mountains, grows a shrub known as Red Root, which
produces a tea not unlike the genuine article, and is said, like the
latter, to “ cheer and not inebriate.” The sarsapariila of the United
States is not the Mexican plant (smilax) with its tea and other
far-famed preparations, but a variety of the ginseng plant, an Aralia
and other herbs, used as substitutes. Teas are made, besides, from
balm and elder blossoms, catnip and pennyroyal, horehound and
snakeroot (ludicrously written snecrut by Signor Boccone, Rayo,
1698). Dittany (Cunila mariana) also furnishes a tea, and, as it is
apt to grow plentifully in its localities, there is a popular notion
that, when one has been found, its leaves will point out the direc-
tion of others.

Another preparation of vegetables appears in almost as great a
variety of forms, and certainly contains as many different pro-
ducts; this is the famous sauce, pronounced generally sass, but
in Pennsylvania saas. The term itself is old, and already in Forby
and other glossaries quoted as meaning, vegetables eaten with
flesh-meat. But America has given it a far more extended use-
fulness than it ever had in England, and whilst at home it has
NATURAL HISTORY. 39%

almost everywhere, except in Norfolk and a few outlying districts,
given way to the modern terms of “ garden-stuff” and “ garden-
ware,” it has held its own altogether in the New England States.
In the Southern States it is, on the other hand, almost unknown,
and its place supplied by greens. R. Beverley, nevertheless, used
it in speaking of Virginia: “ Roots, herbs, vine-fruits and salad-
flowers, they dish up in various ways, and find them very delicious
sauce to their meats, both roasted and boiled, fresh and salt.”
(History of Virginia, p. 217.) Beaumont and Fletcher use Green
Sauce for vegetables, and hence the Southern usage, which per-
mits, even in the best society, the appearance of Bacon and Greens.
“You shall have horse to ride and weapon to wear,” wrote John
Randolph of Roanoke to J. K. Paulding, the novelist, “ bacon and
greens, Virginia fare, and help me make hay in the finest meadows
in the world.” The Sass of New England is scientifically spoken
of as Long Sauce, when beets, carrots, parsnips, and the like are
referred to, and as Short Sauce, if onions are meant, and other
bulbs; but the variety of sauces generally far eclipses even Ude’s
historic boast, that he could invent a. new sauce for every day of the
year. W. Irving, therefore, already speaks admiringly of a vener-
able dame, “deeply skilled in the mystery of making apple-sweet-
meats, long sauce, and pumpkin pies.” (Knickerbocker, History
of New York, p. 234.) The word is used as a verb also; so that
N. Hawthorne could write, “ He was a bright-eyed. man, but
wofully pined away, which was not more than natural if, as some
people affirmed, his ordinary diet was fog, morning mist, and a
slice of the densest cloud within his reach, sauced with moonshine,
whenever he could get it.” (The Great Carbuncle.) Then arose
the noun sauceman, the green-grocer of other lands, of whom the
same author speaks thus: “ Behind comes a sauceman, driving a
wagon full of new potatoes, green ears of corn, beets, carrots,
turnips, and summer squashes.” (The Toll-Gatherer’s Day.) By
a natural transition the sharp, spicy character of ordinary sauce,
with its origin in the Latin term for salt, was transferred to an
impudent, sharp reply, and the person gifted with the power of
readily giving them was called saucy. Thus sauce, or in Yankee
speech, sass, has the same meaning of abuse or impudence of
speech, which Halliwell already gives to the term in older times.
J. R. Lowell writes it his own way in the lines—
398 AMERICANISMS.

“ Of all the sarse that I can call to mind,
England does make the most unpleasant kind—”
(Biglow Papers, I., p. 58.)

while J. C. Neal uses the more common form: “I’ve a good mind
to strike and be sassy,” and “Don’t give me none of your sass,
for I don’t mind sass.” (Charcoal Sketches.) The term is, of
course, not of American origin; sauce is to this day used in Essex
(England) not only in precisely the same meaning of garden-stuff,
but also corrupted there into sarce and sass, with the meaning of
impudence.

The American continent abounds in a number of underground
plants, which are frequently made available for some useful pur-
pose, as the early settlers learned it from the Indians. Such is
the common Putty-Root (Aplectrum hyemale), more generally
known by its familiar name of Adam and Eve, which it owes to
the pair of tuberous roots always found together, though belonging
to the growth of different years. ‘The plant is an opyzs in Greek,
and was in Arabic called khusjut-al-salib (‘Testiculis vulpis), from
which the English Salep is derived. The latter, a beverage made
from the powdered root of the Orchis, called in England the Red-
handed Orchis, with sugar and milk, was formerly much sold in
stalls at London at*an early morning hour. It is now almost
forgotten, having been entirely superseded by the cup offered at
modern coffee-stalls, but even Charles Lamb still mentions the
bowl of salep. (Slang Dictionary, p. 218.) The Alum-root
(Henchera americana), so called on account of its astringent
qualities, used to be formerly much used by herb-doctors, and has
not yet entirely been abandoned, as the Plewrisy-root (Asclepias
tuberosa) is used as a mild tonic and stimulant. The Blood-root
(Sanguinaria canadensis) has its name from the blood-red juice of
its root, but is perhaps more generally known by its Indian name:
of Puccoon, of which R. Beverley already reports: “They have
the puccoon, with which the Indians used to paint themselves red,
and the sumach and sassafras, which make a deep yellow.” (His-
tory of Virginia, p. 238.) The Bowman’s root (Gillenia trifoli-
ata) is in like manner better known as Indian Physic, “a species
of American ipecac, and frequently used as a vomit” (8. Kerche-
val, History of the Valley of Virginia, p. 238); “though,” he
adds, “more frequently a decoction of walnut-bark, which, when
°

NATURAL HISTORY. 399:

used for a purge, was peeled downwards, when used for a vomit it
was peeled upwards.”(!) Bread-root (Psoralea esculenta) is the
well-deserved name of a beet-like plant growing abundantly in the
» Rocky Mountains, and exceeding not unfrequently twenty inches
in circumference. The white pulpy substance within is full of fari-
naceous matter, and furnishes a most palatable and nutritious
bread. It has also the name of Indian Turnip, having been long
used by the Sioux and other tribes of the neighborhood, and a
variety of it (Camassia esculenta) that’ of Kamas-Root, the
support of the Digger Indians, while the early French hunters
called it Pomme Blanche, or Pomme des Prairies ; but it must be
held carefully distinct from another Indian Turnip (Arum tri-
phyllum), the root of which is acrid, and, when fresh, highly poison-
ous. One of the thousand pretended remedies for that dread afilic-
tion, the cancer, is drawn from a yellowish plant (Orobanche) found
in almost all parts of the Union, and hence called Cancer-root.
The Pink-root (Spigelia marilandica) is by no means limited to
Maryland, as the name would seem to indicate, but grows far to
the South, and is quite generally known as Carolina Pink also—
a plant bearing very beautiful flowers, and having great medicinal
powers as a purgative and avermifuge. The various plants which
furnish, in so-called Snake-roots, an antidote against snake-bites,
have already been mentioned in connection with snakes. The
Stone- Root (Collinsonia canadensis), the flowers of which have an
odor like lemons, is also known as Rich Weed from this fragrance ;
it is much used in family practice as a diuretic, and is said to
enter largely into the manufacture of fashionable stomachics.
The Whiskey-root suggests its purpose by its name. It is a cactus,
growing on the sandy hills along the Rio Grande, and similar dis-
tricts farther South, and known to the Indians as Pieoke. The
latter dig up the root, slice it, chew the pieces, and swallow the
juice, which has a powerful intoxicating effect. “Our men had
found some Whiskey Plants, and Jack, having long been with
the Indians, taught them at once how to use the delightful treasnre :
in a few hours they were not only merry, but wild as devils, and
we had to guard the corral ourselves all night, for they were
utterly unconscious of what they were doing.” (Across the
Isthmus.)

The Mandrake of Europe has a namesake on this continent,
400 AMERICANISMS.

which, however, is a very different plant (Podophyllum peltatum).
H. T. Tuckerman tells us that there lived in Medford (Massachu-
setts), more than a hundred years ago, Jane Turrell, who wrote:

“The blushing peach and glossy plum there lies,
And with the mandrake tempt your hands and eyes.”
(America and her Commentators, p. 83.)

The same plant is, outside of New England, generally known
as May apple, and thus described in the lines of an American
poet:
“Mysterious plant, that nurse a luscious fruit,
The star, transformed by summer’s sultry air,
And in the fibres of the long, slim root,
A potent medicine bear ;
While in each shield, which the pure blossom hides
So carefully, a poisonous death resides.”
(W. L. Shoemaker.)

The same term of May-Apple is not unfrequently applied toa
large, globular excrescence produced by the sting of a wasp on the
miniature flowers of the Swamp Honeysuckle (Azalea mediflora),
and, on account of its frequent occurrence, occasionally to the
shrub itself. - :

It is not impossible that the word Goober or Guber may be con-
nected with the geographical division of the country, as Guber
is the name of a district in the Haussa (How-sa) country, where
the nut abounds, and the Haussa language is in extensive use in
trade. In some parts of the United States a kind of chocolate is
made of the nut; in others it serves, when parched and beaten
with sugar, as a dessert-sweetmeat; while in England it is not
only eaten, but used to furnish a valuable and palatable oil.

The potato, from the Spanish batata, appears in the United
States almost uniformly as the Zrish Potato, to distinguish it from
the native Sweet or Carolina potato (Batatis edulis), akin to the
corvolvulus, and so called by Linné. It has, however, given rise
to the familiar phrase of Small Potatoes, applied in derision to
anything mean or petty. It is the agricultural slang-word op-
posed to Some Pumpkins. “Give me an honest old soldier for the
Presideucy—whether Whig or Democrat—and I will leave your
small-potato politicians and pettifogging lawyers to those who
NATURAL HISTORY. 401

are willing to submit the destinies of this great nation to such
hands.” (New York Herald.) “All our American poets are but
small potatoes compared with Bryant,” says an enthusiastic ad-
mirer of the poet, in the New York Tridune. In New England,
where potatoes are not as easily raised as in more favored regions,
the phrase is occasionally strengthened by an intensifying addi-
tion. A Yankee says: “ Small potatoes—few in a hill—the hills
fur apart—and a gra-ate way to go and dig’em.” (Hon. J. H.
Trumbull.)

Among peculiar plants of this kind must be noticed also the
Groundnut (Arachis hypogaea), which has the strange habit of
burying its pods underground after flowering, in order to ripen its
nuts. Hence it is also known as Larthnut, while its most common
name at the South, where it is extensively cultivated, is Peanut,
from the pea-like pod and seed. Among the negroes in Florida it
is, moreover, known as Pinders, while in Virginia and North Caro-
lina it re-appears as Gooder, or Gooberpease, and is as such even

-quoted in market reports.

The Cowpea is a genuine pea, and cultivated largely for the
same purposes as clover. In Oregon the Chinook Indians live
largely on an edible bulb called Wapatoo (Sagittaria sagittifolia),
which is called Tuk-hat in their native dialect, while another root
of the sathe distant region is the Zhistle-root, mentioned by
George Gibbs.

By the side of these underground plants peculiar to the Union,
there are numerous berries known here under new or newly-ap-
plied names, of which some assume quite an importance as com-
mercial articles. Such are, for instance, Cranberries (Oxycoccus
macrocarpus), a different variety from that common in Europe,
and largely cultivated for the market. They were noticed already
by Captain John Smith, though not approved of; for R. B. Bever-
ley tells us that cranberries “are of a lively red when gathered
and kept in water, and make very good tarts. I believe these are
the berries which Captain Smith compared to the English goose-
berries, and called Raw comens, having perhaps seen them only
on the bushes, where they are always very sower.” (History of
Virginia, p. 114.) The Tree-Cranberry (Viburnum opulus), also
known as Oramp-Bark, is not equal to the former, but much
relished by lumberers in Northern regions, who cook them with
402 AMERICANISMS.

molasses ; they played quite a prominent part in the accounts of
Arnold’s expedition. A third cranberry (Viburnum lentago) gives
only a small, shrivelled fruit, which is known as Cowderry, and
brought to the market in Massachusetts and Canada, mixed with
many little stems, very much like raisins, and quite insipid. The
French Canadians, however, are fond of them, and call them
cérises. The Service-Berry, called by Sir George Simpson “a
sort of cross between the cranberry and the black currant,” is the
fruit of a shrub (Amelanchier canadensis), which is also called
Shadbush (see Shad), and eaten either alone or mixed with pem-
mican. General T. F. Meagher says of it: “The ¢eé-amp, or ser-
vice-berry, abounding in the Rocky Mountains, has a dull, sweet
taste, the richness of which makes most people in this region fond
of them. The Indians gather and dry large quantities, and when
properly prepared and cooked, they are very palatable and whole-
some. They grow upon a bush varying from two to twelve feet
high, but seldom exceeding two inches in diameter. The wood is
very hard and tough, and is much used by the Indians, who dis-
play great skill in straightening it out for arrows and ramrods.”
(Rides through Montana.) In the Southern States, where the
Service-Berry is quite common, the shrub grows to the size of a
respectable tree.

The Partridge-Berry (Mitchella repens and Gaultheria pro-
cumbens), is the name of two very different plants, of which the
former (Mitchella) is tasteless, while the latter is equally bright
in color but pleasant to the palate. In the New England States
and in Canada itis often called twin-derry, from its uniformly
double scarlet-berry, while in Eaton’s Botany this name—and fly-
honeysuckle—is given as the English name of Xylosteum cilia-
tum, and the Xylosteum solonis is called the swamp twin-berry.
(S.S. Haldeman.) N. Hawthorne says of it, that “The forest
offered her the partridge-berries, the growth of the preceding
autumn, but ripening only in spring, and now red as drops of
blood upon the withered leaves.” (Scarlet Letter.) It has a rich
aromatic flavor and odor, which is made use of in the manufac-
ture of odor, though it is curious that in such cases the odor of
the inner bark of the black birch (Betula lenta) can hardly be dis-
tinguished from that of the partridge-berries. It is also known as
chequer-berry, and in New England occasionally as chich-berty.
NATURAL HISTORY. 403

Dew-berries (Rubus canadensis) differ from the English variety in
color, being black, and utterly unlike dewdrops, which the Eng-
lish berries represent by a white, wax-like covering ; they grow ona
low, trailing blackberry, while the black raspberry itself (Rubus
occidentalis) is more generally known as Thimble-herry, from its
resemblance to a thimble. ilberries, a corruption of blueberries,
are here as in England only another name for whortleberries, and
the same to which Shakespeare refers in the line—

“There pinch the maids as blue as dilberry.”

It is, however, maintained, that here also the variety is not the
same as the English, but belongs to the division Huvaccinium.
They are great favorites with American poets, and R. W. Emerson
sings of them:

“ Aught unsavory or unclean
Hath my insect never seen,
But violets and dilberry bells,
Maple sap and daffodils.”
(The Humble Bee.)

With this exception the term huckleberry has entirely superseded
the old form of whortleberry, even when the latter spelling is still
retained. This is quite natural, as the old English term whort,
meaning a small blackberry (Halliwell), is now quite obsolete.
Fields in which they grow abundantly are in New England fre-
quently called pastures, and to this custom J. R. Lowell alludes
when he says: “The greater part of what is now Cambridgeport,
was then, in the native dialect, a huckleberry pasture.” Very dif-
ferent is the so-called choke-berry, in reality the fruit of a low
apple-tree (Pyrus arbutifolia), and deserving its name as fully as
the choke-cherry (Prunus borealis), with which it shares remarka-
ble astringent qualities.

Bayberries are gathered from a plant called wax-myrtle (Myri-
ca cerifera), because its fragrant leaves, resembling those of the myr-
tle, have an odor like that of the bay ; when boiled down they give
a fragrant green wax, which is used in making candles and for
other purposes. Hack berries or Pompion berries, on the contrary,
are obtained from a shrub, which at times reaches nearly the size
of a tree (Celtis occidentalis), and are sweet and edible, not un-
404 AMERICANISMS.

like so-called bird-cherries. The queen of them all is said to be
the lovely, creeping snowberry (Chiogenes hispidula), whose long
delicate sprays trail over the bare rock and moss, bearing a fresh
white berry, larger than the small, pointed leaves; although others
give the prize to the spice-berry, the “little, creeping wintergreen,
with its scarlet berries.” (Mrs. Trail, The Canadian Crusoes,
p. 175.)

Among the so-called weeds, we meet with the familiar Bind-
weed of England, referred to by Tennyson in the line—

“The fragile bindweeds’ bells and bryony rings”—

which, here as in England, designates the varieties of Convolvulus,
while the Black Bryony (Tamus) is called dlack bindweed, and
the Smilax rough bindweed (Loudon). Bugle-weed (Lycopus vir-
ginicus) is the name of a plant more commonly known as Virginia
hoarhound, and, in the South especially, highly esteemed in affec-
tions of the chest; it is taken asa tea or made up in candy. ‘The
Carpet-weed (Mollugo) is appropriately so called, as it covers the
ground, even in cultivated fields, with its small, spreading branches
as with a close carpet, while the Tvon-weed (Vernonia noveboro-
censis) is, on the contrary, the tallest weed found on the rich
blue-grass soil of Kentucky; at the North it is more generally
known as Flaé-top. Perhaps the most familiar of all these plants
is the Jamestown-weed (Datura stramonium), in the South uni-
formly called Jimson-weed or Jimson simply, deriving its name
from the ancient town of Jamestown, where it was first observed
to grow after its introduction from the West Indies; since then it
has spread over all parts of the country, and its beautiful flowers,
with their nauseous smell, are seen on every river-bank and in
every low place. R. Beverley says of it: “The Jamestown-weed
is one of the greatest coolersin the world. It being an early plant,
was gathered very young for a boiled salad by some of the soldiers,
to pacify the troubles of bacon, and some of them eat plentifully
of it, the effect of which was a very pleasant comedy; for they
turned natural fools upon it for several days.” (History of Vir-
ginia, II. p, 110.) Like all the Daturas, this plant also has cer-
tain poisoifous properties, which medicine employs as a remedy
against asthma and similar diseases; it is a favorite drug with wise
old women among the negroes, Jamestown-weed being justly held
NATURAL HISTORY. 405

to be one of the most cooling applications known to botanists.
R. Beverley derives from this “ coldness” a quaint hope of counter-
acting its poison: “ Perhaps,” he says, “this was the same herb
that Mark Anthony’s army met with in his retreat from the
Parthian war. . . Wine, as the story says, was found a sovereign
remedy for it, which is likely enough, the malignity of the herb
being cold.” (History of Virginia, p. 122.) Hardhack is the un-
poetical name familiarly bestowed upon a lowly plant (Spirea to-
mentosa), growing in low grounds and bearing a modest but
comely flower, which J. R. Lowell mentions, when he says, “ Our
narrow New England lanes, shut in by bleak stone walls on either
hand, and where no better flowers are to be gathered than golden-
rod and hardhack.”

Briers is the familiar name of all creepers with thorns or
prickles, among which ranks the wild raspberry, as well as the
trailing spinous brier (Schrankia uneinata), which is so irritable,
that the slightest touch makes the leaflets close instantly. It is
also known as the Sensitive Brier.

The Pickerel Weed (Pontideria cordata) owes its fishy name to
the superstitious belief, once quite general in England, that it bred
pickerel: its arrow-headed leaves and spikes of blue flowers are
very attractive in standing waters throughout the Middle States.
The Poke-weed or Poke simply (Phytolacca decandra) is one of
the most useful plants of the South, where all its parts are profit-
ably employed: the root for medicinal purposes, the young shoots
for the table after the manner of asparagus, and the berries as a
favorite dye of rich purple with ppor people. Poke-jwice is occa-
sionally used in beverages, and the Poke-berry as food for birds,
and other animals. From its great popularity the weed is known
by a variety of names, such as Po-can, the Indian name in Vir-
ginia, from which Poke is derived, as Cocum7at the North, and as
Garget and Pigeon-berry in New England. A peculiar usefulness
is that of the Rosin-weed (Silphium laciniatum), ‘the leaves of
which are supposed to point nearly North and South, and are
hence constantly consulted, especially by French voyageurs in their
journeys across prairies without landmarks. The weed is on this
account also called Compass-plant.

To the same class of plants belong a few others not designated
as weeds, such as the pretty little Bluets (Oldenlandia caerulea),
496 AMERICANISMS.

a delicate little herb, which in early spring fills the wood with its
tufts of pale-blue flowers, each having a small yellow eye in the
centre, known also as Quakers. The Blazing Stars, on the con-
trary, represents both a Colchicum and a medicinal plant (Aletris
farinosa), which, under the name of Devil's Bit, is highly. esteemed
in the West for its virtues, known to the Indians from of old.
The Boneset is the familiar name here of the English Thorough-
wort (Eupatorium perfoliatum), with its medicinal properties, like
the Fleabane (Erigeron canadense), which is similarly endowed
and largely used by the Shakers in their well-known preparations.
Its name is derived from the English fleabane, used for the pur-
pose indicated by the word, and as such mentioned already by
Bailey. The Shakers use, in like manner, large quantities of the
Coolworé (Tiarella cordifolia) and of the Frostewort (Cistus cana-
densis) ; it derives its peculiar name from the beautiful crystals of
ice which late in autumn shoot forth from the crackéd bark near
the root, and give it the appearance of frostwork. Horse-nettle
(Solanum carolinense) is the familiar name of a troublesome
nettle, a low weed, which in the Southern States is almost uni-
versal, and in fall and winter covers the fields with its bright yel-
low berries, that are often eaten by children, and cause grave incon-
venience by their poisonous qualities. The English name. penny-
royal has in.America been transferred to a plant resembling the
original mint, but different in kind (Hedeoma pulegioides), which
has not only a similar appearance but also the same very peculiar
taste and odor. Another plant resembling the pennyroyal of the
Union, is known as Blue Curls (Lrichostema dichotomum), from
the peculiar clustering shape and deep blue color of its flowers.
They resemble in this the Ladies’ Tresses (Neottia tortillis) of
the Southern States. Albany Hemp (Urtica canadensis) derives
its name from the fact that in Albany (New York) its fibrous
bark was once quite largely used in the manufacture of herp;
while a nettle with succulent, semi-transparent stems is called
Clearweed (Pilea pumila). The Everlasting (Gnaphalium),
Cudweed, is the American representative of the Immortelle of
Europe in name and peculiarities; “herb-doctors” alone ascribe
the name to a pretended virtue of the herb to prolong life indefi-
nitely. Lamé’s Quarter is the equally quaint name of an herb
(Chenopodium album) once supposed to be of special excellency
NATURAL HISTORY. 407

for young lambs’ food, making them rapidly fit for the table.
Mad Dog, on the other hand, was in the same early days believed
to be a cure for hydrophobia, and hence so called; a more
general name is Skwil-cap (Scutellaria lateriflora), from the
shape of its flowers, the calyx of which, when inverted, looks
like a helmet with the vizor open. The Bitter-Sweet (Solanum dul-
camara), recently chosen as the title of a volume of excellent poems
by J. G. Holland, deserves its name well, as the taste is first bitter
and then sweet; it is a beautiful plant, often large enough to be-
come almost a shrub, and famous for its clusters of orange-colored
shells in winter, opening like a corolla around the crimson berries.

Grasses abound naturally in a country of which so small a part
is as yet under cultivation, and” even springs up voluntarily in
richest abundance on certain soils. Some of these varieties,
known under French or Spanish names, have already been men-
tioned; others are dalled by some suggestive term, ‘not always
meaning the same thing as in England. Thus Bear-Grass (Yuc-
ca filamentosa), common by the side of little streams and shady
places, is not a grass at all, but a lilaceous plant, and has a much
better claim to its other name of Sitk-Grass, from the silky fila-
ments that appear on the edges of its leaves. Blwe-Grass (Poa com-
pressa), on the contrary, is a well-known and most valuable grass,
growing richly in several varieties on limestone soil, and spring-
ing up voluntarily all over the States of Pennsylvania, Tennessee,
and Kentucky. It remains green for the larger part of the year,
and serves to raise the enormous herds of superior cattle for
which those States are famous. Both the region where it grows
naturally and the settlers there are known as Blue-Grass simply,
and hence the State of Kentucky especially is often thus desig-
nated. “The Postmaster-General has restored the mails on the
route between Louisville and Lexington. It does not speak well
for the condition of the Blue-Grass Region, that he has felt war-
ranted in doing this only on assurances from the Secretary of
War, that troops have been placed along the line for the protection
of the mail-agents.” (New York Tribune, April 6, 1871.) A
distinction is sometimes, quite unjustly, made between lands pro-
ducing Blue-Grass, and the comparatively poor land, on which
grapevines grow wild, and which is hence called Grapevine Land.
Buffalo-Grass (Sessleria dactyloides) and Buffalo-Clover have
408 AMERICANISMS.

already been mentioned, in connection with buffaloes, from whom
they derive theirnames. Grama or Gramma-Grass (Choudrosium),
abounds in the Western borders, and is excellent food for cattle.
“In the middle of the day the cattle leave the high ground and
go to the river-bottoms for water. About four o’clock they go back
to the high ground and graze on the rich gramma and bunch-grasseg
until night, when they lay down on the warm, sandy soil and sleep
until next morning.” (Grazing on the Colorado, 1870.) Bunech-
Grass (Festuca) is limited to the plains of New Mexico, and the:
Cow-Grass is a plague of the South, being a very free grower and
quickly overrunning fields in which it has once taken root, in such.
a manner as to defy all efforts at destruction. An equal nuisance,
as far as crops are concerned, is fhe so-called Crab-Grass (Digita-
ria) of Louisiana and Texas, but it makes at least amends by its
usefulness as hay, in which form it cannot be surpassed as fodder.
Even the favorite Clover yields to it in nutritive qualities. The
white or Wild Clover is of indigenous growth, and abounds on the
banks of nearly all rivers. The red was introduced into the Val-
ley of Virginia by John Lewis, the father of that General Lewis
to whom Washington wished the general command of the Con-
tinental Armies to be entrusted. “It was currently reported by
their prophets, and believed by the Indians generally, that the
blood of the red men, slain by the Lewis’s and their followers, had
dyed the trefoil to its sanguine hue.” (Wills de Hass, History of.
the Valley of Virginia.) Cut-grass (Leersia oryzoides) has its name
from the manner in which careless hands or bare feet are cut by
the sharp edges of its leaves. Hel-Gtrass is again not a genuine
grass, but a seaweed (Zostera marina), which is thrown on shore
in large quantities, and derives its name from its inhabitants.
Guinea- Grass (Panicum maximum) has only lately made its way
into the United States, having been imported from the West In-.
dies, where it has long been cultivated mainly to, furnish fodder
for horses. Salt-Hay, a very important product of salt-marshes,
is of two principal sorts, called salt-grass and black-grass. They
are the fine, short grasses growing upon the level surfaces called
salt-meadows, alluvial deposits of a strange, unctuous mud, stretch-
ing along the New England coast in recesses, and up the river-
valleys. A twenty-foot pole may often be thrust down into it, find-
ing no bottom; and yet these dangerous meadows are regularly
NATURAL HISTORY. 409

mown, and rich harvests gathered from the ever-trembling sur-
~ face. The Yoothache-Grass (Monocera aromatica), is a curious
grass of Florida and a few adjoining districts, growing in a bare
stem to considerable height, and injurious to the milk of cows
who eat it when young and tender. The root, when eaten, affects
the salivary gland; this has led to its being looked upon as a re-
medy against toothache, and hence its odd name, which it shares,
however, with the Toothache-Tree, the common name of two
shrubs, the prickly ash and an avalia. But perhaps the most highly
valued of all cultivated grasses is one which gratefully bears the
name of the earliest propagator. It is the Herd’s Grass (Phleum
pratense), known universally as Timothy, after Timothy Hanson,
who carried it, about 1780, from America to England.

It would not seem improper to mention among the grasses some
of the wild-growing plants of this class, which are peculiar to
our continent. Such is, for instance, the variety known as Wild
Oats (Avena fatua), which grows wild upon the more elevated
parts of California, and furnishes admirable forage. “With a
little care,” says a local paper, “any amount of stock may be
maintained all the year round upon our wild oats, which will
spring up wherever moisture helps it, even after the seeds have
lain a long time dormant in the ground.” The Wild Rice (Ziza-
nia aquatica) also, although a water-plant, resembles the grasses,
and especially oats, so that the early French settlers used to call it,
after their home-fashion, folles avoines. The Indians of the
Northern regions, especially around the headwaters of the Missis-
sippi, depend largely upon the scanty produce of this perennial
plant, from whence it is also known as Indian Rice. It serves at
the same time to fatten the waterfowl that leave those regions for
the South, so as to enable them to perform safely their long,
weary journey. ‘To this class belongs, in appearance at least, the
Chess (Bromus scalinus), a troublesome weed growing up among
valuable wheat, and not unlike oats, which has given rise to the
common error that it is a degenerated wheat; hence its frequent
name of Cheat. If reaped and ground up with the wheat, it is
said to produce narcotic effects. The poorest of grasses, almost
approaching the nature of a moss, is the Poverty Grass (Hudsonia
tormentosa) of New England, which will grow in scanty bunches
on soil that refuses to produce anything else.

18
410 AMERICANISMS.

Among smaller plants a few are known in America under
special names when becoming useful for household or other
purposes. Such are the beans, known in England as Kidney-
beans or French-beans, while here they are called String-deans,
from the strings or fibres which are pulled off from the pods in
preparing them when green for the table, or Snaps, and occasion-
ally Snap-beans. The Wild-bean (Phaseolus diversifolius) is also
known as the Wild Potato of several Indian tribes; it grows on
all the rich bottoms of the West, and is very useful as food.
This is a very different plant from the Wild Potato Vine (Con-
volvulus panduratus), also known by its Indian name of Mechoa-
can, which grows in sandy soil all over the United States, and has
a root possessed of certain medicinal virtues. The so-called Oyster
Plant (a Tragopogon) is the familiar name of salsify, derived
from the resemblance which the plant has in taste, when cooked,
to the oyster; hence it is also called the Vegetable Oyster. The
Cantaloupe, named so by the French, is the same variety which
is elsewhere known as Musk-melon, and so easily raised in the
South that every negro used to have his own melon-patch. Bull-
briars are, however, limited to the Southwest, where the Indians
make bread from the farinaceous root; another name for it is
Bamboo-briar, and not improperly, because the very large briar
attains, in the rich alluvial bottoms which it prefers, at times the
size of the bamboo. Alonsenel is a Mexican name, familiarized
to American ears on the Western prairies, where the remarkable
plant (Cowania stansburiana) is highly prized as a styptic in
hemorrhages, and for other medicinal virtues.

Of very different usefulness are two other plants, the Creosote
Plant (Larrea mexicana), which covers vast districts in the sandy
parts of California and extends eastward as far as Arkansas. Its
odor, exhaled from the resinous matter it contains, fills the air to
a great distance, and makes it utterly unfit for food of cattle; it
is said, however, to possess certain properties beneficial in rheu-
matic complaints. The Soap-plant (Phalangium pomeridianum)
belongs to the same regions and is there known as Amole ; its
pulp, when stripped of the bark, and rubbed on wet clothes, pro-
duces an abundant lather, and even smells somewhat like new
brown soap. The Spanish inhabitants used, besides, to make
saddle-cloths of the plant. They also gave to one of the many
NATURAL HISTORY. 411

varieties of Yucca, peculiar to that country, the name of Spanish
Bayonet, from the resemblance borne to that weapon by its stiff,
sharp-pointed leaves. In like manner the name of Maguey, by
which they designate the plant, known in America familiarly
though incorrectly as Century Plant, has become quite common
in the Southwestern States, and with it the pulque, the well-
known intoxicating beverage prepared from its sap. Even Coontie
(Coontie Adka), the name of a preparation obtained from the
root, known more familiarly as Arrow-Root (Zamia integrifolia),
is now quite frequently used, since the plant is largely cultivated
in Florida and produces a valuable return. Cotton has given at
last. two special names to our speech: the Sea-Island Cotton,
grown only on the islands along the coast and on the coast itself
of South Carolina and Georgia, once celebrated as having the
longest and finest fibre of all varieties, but now no longer culti-
vated with success; the other, Upland Cotton, a variety often
grown quite near the former, but of shorter fibre and inferior
value. It is in all probability the peculiarly soft and pleasant
touch of the cotton-wool which has, from time of old, led to the ex-
pression, to cotton to a person, as if to make one’s self as pleasant
and agreeable as cotton to him, which is still very frequently
heard in the South and West. The phrase is so old that Halliwell
already terms it an Archaism, and quotes Halliday and Laurance,
saying— $
“ Her heart’s as hard as taxes and as bad;

She does not even cotton to her dad.”
(Kenilworth Burlesque.)

In Congreve’s Love for Love we find also the phrase: to cotton
together.

The Long Moss or Spanish Moss (Tillandsia usneoides) forms
one of the most striking features in the Southern landscape, as it
waves in long, graceful festoons from the branches of live-oaks
and cypresses. It is, of course, no moss, though at first sight it re-
sembles the Tree-moss (Usnea) of the North; but that isa lichen,
while this is a phenoganeous plant. It grows, like a true epi-
phyte, upon these trees, but without deriving any nourishment
from them. Having no roots that bind it to any one place, it
hangs in rich clusters, as if it had been thrown by accident over
412 AMERICANISMS.

the branches, and adds much to the impressive though melan-
choly appearance of the noble groves of live-oaks, such as are seen
to perfection in the neighborhood of Savannah. Even in winter
these long, dense garlands cover the bare stems and branches as
with a curtain, and give them a weird, fictitious appearance of life.
The Virginia Creeper (Ampelopsis quinquefolia) is, on the other
hand, one of the most graceful woody vines known; it is also
called American Ivy, though it has nothing to entitle it to such
aname, and the Woodbine. The Bermuda Vine (Vitis riparia)
is the Chicken Grape of Southern States, famous for its fragrant
blossoms, but bearing no fruit. The Yoz-Grape (Vitis labrusca)
was noticed by R. Beverley as growing “upon small vines and in
small bunches, and of a rank taste, when ripe, resembling the
smell of the fox, from whence they are called fox-grapes.” (History
of Virginia, p.116.) Another explanation of the name is derived
from the foxy pubescence which characterizes the surface of the
leaves. In the South a kindred grape (Vitis vulpilia) is known
by that name, which bears larger berries and is less acid than the
former. But there is still another source from which the name
has been traced: the old English word to fove, in the sense of
to intoxicate. For in the year 1640 Beauchamp Plantagenet
wrote of a wine in Delaware (Uvedale), and praised its intoxica
ting qualities in these quaint words: “A second draught, four
months old, will fuze a reasonable pate,” and hence, it is asserted,
arose the name of /ox-Grape. They abound in the Southern
States: Sir John Hawkins spoke of drinking a wine made from
American grapes in Florida, in the year 1564, memorable as the
birth-year of Shakespeare, and a high authority on the subject
says, in 1870: “The woods of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkan-
sas abound in varieties of wild vines, that yield masses of
fruitage, renowned as raccoon, bear, bull, chicken, and fox-grapes.”
(American Wines, p. 625.) The reddish color of the first-named
variety re-appears in a little phosphorescent moss, known as J’v-
fire. “The little catadid (ste) pierced the air with his shrill
music. The fox-fire—as the country people call it—glowed hid-
eously from the cold and matted bosom of the marsh.” (J. P.
Kennedy, Swallow Barn, p. 173.) It is a kind of rotten wood,
which at night resembles a mass of glow-worms, and owes its
brilliancy to the decaying micelium of a fungus. The Mustang
NATURAL HISTORY. 413

Grape (Vitis rotundiflora) is a native of Texas, bearing small
bunches with large berries, and capable of furnishing a very su-
perior wine, resembling Burgundy.

The so-called Supple Jack (Berchemia yolubilis) is a creeper
very much resembling the muscadine vine, but with a deeper
color; the name is derived from the very peculiar manner in
which it twists and curls around the shrubs to which it clings,
so as to produce very curious shapes and curves, which are made
use of in the manufacture of supple-jack canes. All these plants
which climb up trees are, in America, indiscriminately called
Vines. “There is among the Vines one called Cross Vine, from
the singular circumstance of its stem, on the stripping off of its
bark, spontaneously dividing into four parts, as if it split cross-

‘wise into quarters.” (P. H. Gosse, Letters from Alabama, p. 114.)

Among the shrubs peculiar in name and nature to America, the
Alder deserves a place only in so far as its name is recklessly trans-
ferred to a number of other shrubs, that resemble the original in
the form of their leaves. The people thus call a buckthorn (Rham-
nus aldiflorius) the Dwarf Alder, the Sweet Pepperbush (Clethra
alnifolia) the Spiked Alder, and even a Winter-Berry (Prinos ver-
ticillatus) the Black Alder. In like manner they appropriate
the name of the tropical Pimento to a sweet-scented shrub (Caly-
canthus floridus), the bark and wood of which have quite a spicy
flavor. At times, a more careful distinction is attempted, by call-
ing it the Carolina Alispice, from the State, in which it is quite
abundant. The Bution-Bush (Cephalanthus occidentalis) has its
name from the resemblance of its globular catkins of flowers to
round buttons, just as Buttonwood is the popular name of the
so-called Sycamore-tree (Platanus occidentalis), from the curious
ball-shaped seed-vessels which hang by a long slender thread, the
peduncle, from the branches, and do not drop till the following
spring. J. R. Lowell sings of it: ,

“Beneath a bony buttonwood
The mill’s red door swings open wide;
The whiten’d miller, dust-imbued,
Flits past the square of dark inside.”
(Beaver-Brook.)

The tree is known also as Sycamore and Plane-Tree. Calfkill is
414 AMERICANISMS.

the absurd name given in the North to one of the most beautiful
flowering shrubs of North America (Kalmia angustifolia), from a
foolish notion that its poisonous leaves were apt to kill calves that
browsed on them. The poison is there, no doubt, as in all the laurel-
family, to which the bush belongs, and owes its frequent name of
Laurel, but in so small quantities as to be comparatively harmless.
The plant is, in the South, more generally, though equally erro-
neously, known as Jvy. The Northern States have a Hobble-Bush
(Viburnum lantanoides), with long, straggling branches, which
impede progress, whence it is also called Tangle-Legs; while in
the South the Tear-Coat (Aralia spinosa), also humorously called
Shot-Bush, rises almost to the dignity of a tree, its prickles being
quite formidable to hunting-shirts and Indian blankets. With
the usual objection to the correct sound of ¢ear, Western men,
however, almost uniformly speak of it as Tar-Coat. The Honey-
suckle of the South has nothing in common with the shrub cor-
rectly so called; the name is given to a curious woody plant
(Azalea viscosa), the brilliant flowers of which are surrounded by
a viscous secretion. It is not quite clear why a most ornamental
evergreen shrub, which not unfrequently attains the size of a
small tree (Gordonia lasianthus), should be afflicted with the in-
sipid name of Lodlolly Bay ; it grows wild in all the maritime
parts of the Southern States, and is largely planted in parks and
pleasure-grounds on account of its beauty; its usefulness is lim-
ited to a moderate fitness for tanning which the bark possesses.
There is a dash of poetry in the name of Mine-bark, which is
given to a low shrub (Spiraea opulifolia) growing in the Northern
and Western States, from the fact that its bark is quite loose and
easily peels off, layer after layer, though the number Nine has
probably no more to do with it than with the lives of cats. An
exceedingly handsome, flowering shrub is a variety of the Judas-
Tree, familiar to the Kast, and so called from the legend that on
a branch of it Judas hung himself; the American species (Cercis
canadensis) is more simply called Redbud, from the profusion of
bright pink flowers with which it is covered in spring, before the
leaves have appeared.

Another beautiful but fleeting flower, is that of the so-called
Tree-Primrose (Oenothera fruticosa), a large flower flaming in
brilliant yellow. Another family is represented in some of the
NATURAL HISTORY. 415

States by the little Simell-Lemon (Cucurbita ovifera), the fruit of
which is about the size of a small orange, bright glossy red, with
stripes of yellow running round, like the meridian lines on a
globe. The smell is very fragrant, and hence the name.

A few plants, not before mentioned, are familiarly known from
their connection with the aborigines. An Indian Currant (Sym-
phoricarpus vulgaris), more generally called Coral Berry, and a
native of Missouri—Indian Hemp (Apocynum cannabinum), a
medicinal plant—Jndian Tobacco (Lobelia inflata), occasionally
used instead of tobacco by virtue of its acrid leaves; and less im-
portant Indian grasses, cresses, and strawberries.

The trees of America bear, with few exceptions, names given
them by the first settlers, which were very generally taken from
those they were familiar with at home. Hence the number of
those who appear either under new names or under old names,
differently applied, is quite small. Among the latter are a few
fruit-trees, with which some peculiar terms are connected. Ap-
ples, for instance, appear here in the shape of Apple-Butter, a
thick sauce made by boiling apples a long time in cider, which is
then put away, like butter, in tubs and firkins, and keeps for nearly
a year. Thrifty housewives in New England know it as Apple-
Sauce, while the frugal matrons among the Germans in Pennsyl-
vania and the Valley of Virginia call it by the former name.
Apple-Jack and Apple-Brandy furnish a genuine brandy made
from fruit—unlike the Russian brandy or brandy-wine, which is a
whiskey or grain spirit. Known even in the pretentious form of
Apple-John in New England, it has the terrible name of Jersey
Lightning farther south, and in Virginia rules supreme as Apple-
Brandy, although here a few peach-kernels are generally added
to give it the flavor of peach-brandy. “ We had no sooner scram-
bled out of the sleigh than a huge bowl of Apple-Toddy made its
entrance; the bowl was of solid silver, an old family-relic, with
the crest of the old Huguenot family as handles, and in the
golden liquid danced the roasted apples, which are here substi-
tuted for the usual lemons.” (W. M. Thackeray.) Apple-Slump
is the odd name of a favorite New England dish, consisting of
apples and molasses baked within a bread-pie in an iron pot. It
is also known as Pandowdy ; and the good people of those States
claim, with their usual assurance, that this apple-potpie is the true
416 AMERICANISMS.

father of the phrase, in apple-pie order. This may very well be,
as the latter was as well known to their ancestors in England as
the dish, Halliwell quoting the term as quite common in various
provinces. The Apple-bug (Conotrachelus nenuphar; Herbst,
1797) is thus described by J. P. Kennedy: “The apple-bug, as
the country people call the black, beetle-shaped insect which fre-
quents summer pools, and which is distinguished for the perfume
of the fruit that has given it its name, danced in hazy masses over
the surface of the still water.” (Swallow Barn.) The insect above
mentioned is also known as Plum-weevil, and destroys plums and
peaches, cherries and apples, by puncturing them to insert its
eggs, which causes the fruit to fall prematurely. (Harris, Insects
of Massachusetts, p. 66, 351. 8.8. Haldeman.) The apple-worm,
on the contrary, is the larva of the European Coddling-Moth
(Carpocapsa pomonetta), now at home in America also.
Castafas is the Spanish name for chestnuts, quite frequently
given in Texas and the Southwest to the palatable pinecones of
a screw-pine there (Pandanus). The Coffee-tree (Gymnocladus
canadensis), often called Kentucky Coffee-tree, or Kentucky Lo-
cust, derives its name from the fact that in the days of early set-
tlements the seeds were frequently used as a substitute for. coffee,
a practice renewed during the late Civil War. The Hickory,
mentioned elsewhere, bears an edible nut, which is not unfre-
quently dignified by the name of Walnut, especially in the North-
ern States, where the real walnut does not thrive, while a larger
kind of hickory-nut is known as Bullnut ; the Butternut (Juglans
cinerea) deserves its name by the large quantity of oil its fruit
contains, on which account the latter is also often called otlnut,
and the Mockernut (Carya tomentosa) is a variety of the hickory-
nut. The Pecan Nut (pronounced pecawn) is the fruit of another
variety of hickory (Carya olivaeformis), so called from the French
pacane, and often so written, which is a great favorite throughout
the Union. Part of its popularity is, no doubt, due to the facility
with which the soft shell of the nut yields up the meat, which lies
in two lobes and can be easily taken out; but the nut is, besides,
by far the most pleasant of all to the taste. Pecan trees are,
hence, very carefully managed, and a recent traveller says very
justly: “There is not a richer sight than to see a noble pecan
tree, as tall as the tallest hickory, full from bottom to top of the
NATURAL HISTORY. 417

oval nuts growing in dense clusters, a shade darker in color than
the leaves.” The smallest of the family and the least palatable
is, from that circumstance, called the Pig-Nut (Carya glabra),
though the same name is often applied to the root of an earth-
nut (Bunium).

The Honey Locust (Gleditschia triacanthus) is popularly so
called because it bears a large pod containing a pulp of honey-like
sweetness. It produces probably the most formidable of all
thorns, as remarkable in size as in number, and is, hence, in the
South and West quite as well known under the name of Thorny
Locust. The common Locust (Robinia pseudacacia) is the same
as the European acacia, and considered a very valuable tree for its
timber, which makes the best posts for fences and gates that can
be procured. he Mango is mentioned here only because the
name is borrowed from the delightful fruit of the West Indies, to
designate a pickle, consisting of a green muskmelon stuffed with a
variety of seeds and spices.

The Sand-Cherry (Cerasus pumila) is the name of a reclining
shrub, growing on sandy soil in the North and West, and of its
black fruit, which it bears in profusion; they are, however, not
pleasant to the taste. The Wild Cherry (Cerasus virginiensis)
bears a fruit entirely unfit to eat, but its wood is considered very
valuable, especially for cabinet work. The Black and the White
Spruce, both American, trees, deserve mention here, because from
their branches is extracted the flavoring material for a beverage
known as Spruce Beer, very popular in Canada, where it is sold in
immense quantities, and of late manufactured quite largely in the
United States also.

Oaks abound in America, not only in numbers, but quite as
much in varieties, of which some are known by names peculiar
to this country. The Black Jack (Quercus nigra) is the barren
oak of botanists, and mingles with dogwood, cedar, and tall pines
on the seashore, where it thrives most freely. The Burr-Oak
(Quercus macrocarpa), one of the noblest and largest-of the family,
is very numerous in the rich bottom-lands of Western States, and
frequently called Overcup White Oak, from the peculiar form of
its acorn. “The trees, with few exceptions, were what is called the
burr-oak, a small variety of a very extensive genus; and the
spaces between them, always irregular and often of singular

18
418 AMERICANISMS.

beauty, have obtained the name of openings.” (J. F. Cooper,
The Oak Openings, p. 27.) But the most beautiful of all is the
Live-Oak (Quercus virens), so called because it is nearly an ever-
green; a tree which loves the salt-air of the ocean, and furnishes
a highly-prized wood, admirably adapted for ship-building. It is
thus described :

“ With his gnarled old arms and his iron form,
Majestic in the woods,
From age to age, in the sun and storm,
The live-oak hath stood;
With the gray moss waving solemnly
From his shaggy limbs and trunk.”
(ZZ. R. Jackson.)

All the smaller, and some more or less dwarfish, varieties, are
comprehended under the familiar name of Serwb Oaks, such as
cover the sandy plains and sterile ridges of the Western Deserts,
where vegetation can barely maintain itself.

Next to the Oaks the Maples are probably most prominent
among American trees, both by their great variety of form and
their general beauty. In autumn especially some species assume
those gorgeous colors which have made the American Fall go
famous among painters. The most remarkable among them is
the Sugar-Tree or Sugar-Maple (Acer saccharinum), a beautiful
tree in trunk and branch and leaf, from whose sap sugar is made
by boiling. Its praise was once quaintly sung thus:

“We'll hang by our own staples;
Three cheers we'll raise for Indian Corn,
And nine for Sugar-Maples.”
(Putnam’s Magazine, October, 1851.)

They are generally preserved when the forest is cleared, and such
a collection of trees is known as a Sugar-Bush or Sugar- Orchard,
while the place where the sap is boiled in huge kettles during the
winter months is, in like manner, known as the Sugar-Camp.
Here farmers obtain the vast quantities of sugar which the gener-
ous tree affords them every year, and great is the merriment during
the process, till the time comes when all ends in uproar, thanks
to “ the boys enlivened by rye-whiskey, whiskey and water, whiskey
sweetened with sap-sugar, and small beer, all graduated to the
NATURAL HISTORY. 419

tastes and ages of the company.” (General Ogle. A Character.)
Two other varieties of maple are the Bird’s Hye and the Curled
Maple, which furnish peculiarly beautiful wood for the purposes
of the builder and the cabinet-maker. Among other trees pecu-
liar to this continent, we may notice the Arrow-wood ‘(Viburnum
dentatum), which obtained its name from the fact that almost all
the Indian tribes roving over the plains between the Mississippi
and the Rocky Mountains make their arrows from its long,
straight stems, as the Osage Orange (Maclura) received its com-
mon name of Bodok from its fitness for bows (bois d’arc). The
Balsam Fir (Abies balsamea) and the Balsam Poplar (Populus
balsamifera), owe their names tothe balsam which the former fur-
nishes from certain blisters under the bark, and the latter from
the resinous matter covering its buds. Only the former, however,
can be collected for practical purposes, and appears as Canada
balsam, while the tree is also known as Balm of Gilead, in imita-
tion of the Hastern terebinth. Basswood (Tilia americana) re-
sembles the genuine linden tree of Europe so closely in all but the
size of its leaves and flowers as to be fairly entitled to its botanical
name; the term dass means bast (German, Bast) the inner bark
of the tree, which was formerly much used for making mats
or cordage. J. R. Bartlett quotes from one of Brigham Young’s
sermons » graphic allusion to this pliant material: “I say, as the
Lord lives, we are bound to become a sovereign State in the Union,
or an independent nation by ourselves; and let them drive us from
this place if they can—they cannot do it. Ido not throw this out
as a banter. You Gentiles and hickory and Jasswood Mormons
can write it down, if you please, but write it as I speak it.”
(Dictionary, sub voce.)

The Black or Sour Gum is familiarly known in the Northern
States as Pepperidge (Nyssa multiflora), a name strangely illus-
trating the tendency which common people have to force a mean-
ing. upon words which to them are unintelligible. - Its ancestor
is the Latinized berberis (from Arabic barbarts), which in the first
place became Piperidge, and as such was applied to the proper
owner, the barberry, but subsequently, in a second metamorphosis,
re-appeared as Pepperidge, for one of the most beautiful American
trees, equally well known in New England under its probably
Indian name, Tupelo. “The woods,” says J. R. Lowell, “were
420 AMERICANISMS.

not wanting of pine, of oak, and maple, and the rarer tupelo with
downward limbs.” It is curious, that while the name pepperidge
is thus transferred, the term darberry (berberis) is properly applied,
although it has suffered from the belief that berry formed part of
the original—an idea to which the berries of the plant were sug-
gestive. The same false impression prevails in the corruption of
asparagus into sparrow-grass.

These two trees, Black Gum and Sour Guiiy a are, however, dif-
ferent varieties of the same family (Nyssa), the former more com-
mon in the North, the latter very abundant in the South. The
resinous gum exuding from these trees and the Juniper is much
used for chewing in North Carolina, Virginia, and the Western
States, where gumsuckings are quite a festive occasion for the
votaries of that amusement. The ludicrous facility with which
American speech-terms are interchanged, has led to an utter con-
fusion, in many minds, between the terms gum and rubber. The
great philologist, Dr. W. D. Whitney, tells us in his admirable
work on Language, how a Philadelphia gentleman, entering a
friend’s house without his wife, explained her absence by stating
that “she was cleaning her gums upon the mat”—meaning her
India-Rubber shoes. And in return, gum-trees are not unfre-
quently called Rwbdder-trees, and hence J. R. Lowell, in a different
sense of the term, speaks of the false notion—

“That rudber-trees first began bearin’
When p’litickle conshiences come into wearin’.”
(Biglow Papers, 1., p. 49.)

As Black Wood is, in the Northern States, used as a generic
term for the evergreens, hemlock, pine, spruce, and fir, so the
term cedar is there rarely applied to the genuine cedar; it is more
frequently applied to a cypress (Cypressus thyoides), and then
called white cedar, which fills the famous Cedar Swamps of the
South, or, as red cedar, to a Juniper (Juniperus virginiana.) The
Cedar Swamps are not, as in England, merely wet, marshy places,
often found in uplands even, but in the South are uniformly
low grounds under water, and filled with cypresses, as is the
case in the numerous bayous, known as Cypress Brakes. This
Cypress, however (Taxodium disticha), is a Southern tree en-
tirely distinct from the European tree of the same name, and
NATURAL HISTORY. 421

thus described by P. H. Gosse: “It is a tree of noble stature, be-
ing occasionally seen 120 feet in height, and very valuable for the
durability of its timber; hence it is much in request for building.
Its root generally swells in a great cone or beehive-shaped pro-
tuberance, several yards in circumference, from the summit of
which the tree springs.” (Letters from Alabama, p. 261.) From
the very dangerous nature of the swamps.in which they grow,
slang has derived the expressive verb to be swamped, instead of
~ tobe ruined. “To say the truth, if they hold me to the price I have
agreed to pay, ’'m afraid theyll swamp me. (Adventures of a
Country Merchant, p. 241.) The swamper, however, is avery harm-
less and useful laborer ; it is the man who, in Maine and the North-
west, breaks roads for lumberers through the great. pine-forests.

Another mis-named tree is the maple with ash-leaves (Negun-
dium americanum), which is universally known as Bow-elder.
The Tulip-tree (Leriodendron tulipifera), on the contrary, deserves
both that name and its alias of white-wood well, from its beautiful
white wood and its tulip-shaped, honey-filled blossoms. Although
very common in the South, where it is simplv called the Poplar,
it is one of the finest of American trees, and fully entitled to
W. C. Bryant’s praise:

“ the tulip-tree, high’ up
Opened, in airs of June, her multitude
Of golden chalices to humming-birds

And silken-winged insects of the sky.”
(The Fountain.)

Among the peaches, Americans distinguish Free-stone Peaches,
in which the stones lie loose, while in Cling-stones they adhere
firmly to the flesh of the fruit. The distinction was made early
after the first settlement of the State, and R. B. Beverley already
wrote: “The best sort of these. (peaches) cling to the stone,
and will not come off clear, which they call Plum Nectarines and
Plum-peaches or Cling-stones. Some of these are twelve to thir-
teen inches in girt. These sorts of fruits are raised so easily here
that some good husbands plant great orchards of them, purposely
for their hogs, and others make a drink of them, which they call
Mobby ; they sometimes distill it off for brandy. This makes the
best ‘spirit next to grapes.” (The History of Virginia, p. 179.)
Real plums are, when growing wild, frequently called Sells, and
422 AMERICANISMS.

hence a recent traveller through the Northern States, says:
“When snelis were mentioned, they went out in the dark and
plucked some; they were pretty good. They said they had three
kinds of plums growing wild—blue, white, and red.”

All the Magnolias are, in the South, familiarly designated as
Laurels ; the Big Laurel (M. grandiflora), as well as the South-
ern Cucumber-tree (M. cordata). Another variety of this noble
family of Magnolias is known as the Umbeella-Tree (Magnolia
tripetala), from the likeness which the large leaves, radiating from -
the end of its branches, and expanding over a surface of three feet
diameter, bear to an open umbrella. The Sweet Bay is the
familiar name of a much humbler relative (Magnolia glauca), and
not to be compared to the Swamp Magnolia (Magnolia grandi-
flora), while the Cucumber-tree (Magnolia acuminata), changes its
snowy-white blossoms into a fruit, not unlike green cucumbers,
which afterward turns a bright red.

One of the noblest of American trees, which, from its magnifi-
cent proportions and cherished associations, has almost come to be
considered the emblem-tree of the New England States, the Hin,
is in its very home sadly ill-treated, as far as its name is concerned.
The term isso generally corrupted into ellwm that it is often actually
confounded with alwm. J. R. Lowell, with his keen ear for Yan-
keeisms, and his subtle appreciation of their force, says, therefore,

“Tn ellum shrouds the flashin’ hangbird clings,
And for the summer vyage his hammock swings "—

(Biglow Papers, I1., p. 158.)
while Edward Miller reports that “the Mushroom Rock is an ex-
traordinary freak of nature in Kansas, in the Valley of Alam, or
more probably Him Creek, for in Western parlance the latter-is
pronounced as if it had two syllables, and it is difficult to distin-
guish between the two words.” (Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society, March, 1868, p. 382.) The Nahoo is acom-
mon species of elm (Ulmus alata), of peculiar beauty of form
and foliage.

A beautiful variety of horse-chestnut (Aesculus glabra), is
known by the picturesque name of Buckeye, given by the early
settlers in the West, on account of the resemblance which the
dark-brown nut bears to a buck’s eye, when the shell first cracks,
and exposes it to sight. As it used to abound in Ohio, that State,
NATURAL HISTORY. 423

as well as a citizen of the State, is apt be called a Buckeye ; but so
merciless has been the war waged against trees in those regions,
that not a single tree is found growing naturally near Cincinnati,
and very few in the State at. large. Mahogany (Swietenia maho-
gani), found in Southern Florida in great abundance, deserves a
place here only on account of the strange transposition of vowels
which has changed the original South American name of Maha-
goni, retained in German, into the modern form. The common
pines, found in many varieties in almost every State of the Union,
furnish at least one peculiar name, the Pinion, derived from the
Spanish pivion ; the term is applied to the tree which grows abun-
dantly in the Southwestern States and the regions at the foot of
the Rocky Mountains, and to the nuts, which are sweet and pala-
table, a favorite with birds and bears, and welcome to Indians and
travellers, when short of provisions. Hunters and experienced
travellers know how to find them, not only in their natural places
on the tree, but even in hidden storehouses—deep holes in certain
other trees, in which a Mexican woodpecker is in the habit of
depositing them with rare foresight, long before he lays his eggs,
that they may serve as food during incubation. It may not be
amiss to mention, in this connection, that the fallen leaves of all
the evergreen trees are familiarly known as pinetags or pinestraws.
“He was treading on a mat of pinetags, which soon.shall crisp
beneath his tread no more.” (Virginia Country Notes.) “ Pine-
straw, as the yellow sheddings of this tree are called.” (J. P. Ken-
nedy, Swallow Barn.)

A strange confusion of names has thrown two trees, entirely
different in family and features, into the same class, as far as a
common designation can produce such aresult. Dogwood is the
name given to the Cornel-tree (Cornus florida), and to the Poison
Sumac (Rhus venenata). The former, a beautiful though small
tree, covers American woods in early spring with a profusion of
large, snowy-white flowers, and adorns them in autumn with scar-
let berries, while its wood is useful for many a purpose. The
latter, an inmate of swamps, and well known by the beauty of its
semi-tropical foliage, hides a violent poison in its leaves, and even
affects susceptible persons who approach it too nearly.

American rocks have almost uniformly been first examined by
English geologists, and bear, therefore, with very few exceptions,
424 AMERICANISMS.

names familiar abroad as well as with us. Among the exceptions
may be mentioned the three varieties of limestone, which are
known as Bird’s Hye in New York, as Cavern in Kentucky,
from the numerous caves or sinks, as they are locally called, with
which the hard strata of this carboniferous formation abound,
and as Cliff in the West, from the bold cliffs or bluffs found upon
the banks of streams. The latter is partly Silurian and partly
Devonian, and form a very striking feature in American land-
scapes from the State of Ohio, westward. The local pronuncia-
tion of the word is Clift—found thus already in Spenser—from a
natural confusion with the cleft in a rock, such as is mentioned in
the lines, “ And it shall come to pass while my glory passeth by,
that I will put thee in a cleft of the rock.” (Zzodus, xxxiii. 22.)
Hence, also, the adjective clifty, designating rivers and creeks
on the banks of which these limestone-cliffs abound, and the
region generally in which they are found. “The valley was of
that character which is here called cli/ty—numerous bold bluffs,
overhanging beautiful bottom-lands, now clad in rich verdure,
and now picturesquely baring their snowy sides to the golden sun-
light.” (Scenes in the Far West.) Another variety of limestone
is known as Cotton Rock, probably because its light gray or buff
color, when first bared to the light, somewhat resembles fresh-
gathered cotton-wool; it isa Magnesian limestone, abounding in
Missouri, and valuable as a building material, because of its soft-
ness when first quarried: The unpleasant name of Stink-stone
—often changed into Swine-stone—is not altogether undeservedly
borne by a carbonate of lime which emits a very offensive odor
on being struck. The term sulphur is altogether erroneously
given to bituminous rocks occurring in Kentucky and Tennessee,
even when no sulphur is present, from the mere fact that gen-
erally this formation abounds in sulphurous springs. Wail-Rock
is the homely name given to granular limestone, used largely in
building walls.
x

OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW
FACES.
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW
FACKS.

“‘Tdeas which filter slowly into English soil and abide there for a gener-
ation, flash like comets into the elastic atmosphere of America.”
(Worth British Review, 1867.)

THE largest part of so-called Americanisms are nothing more
than good old English words, which for one reason or another
have become obsolete or provincial in England, while they have
retained their full power and citizenship in the United States.
Thus all the provincialisms of the Northern and Western coun-
ties of England have been naturalized in the New England States,
thanks to the Pilgrim Fathers, who had left the banks of the
Trent and the Humber, and subsequently by new colonists, who
followed from Norfolk and Suffolk. They brought not only their
words, which the Yankee still uses, but also a sound of the voice
and a mode of utterance which have been faithfully preserved,
“and are now spoken of as the “New England drawl,” and “the
high, metallic ring of the New England voice.” (Charles Went-
worth Dilke.) The former is nothing but the well-known Nor-
folk “whine,” the proverbial annoyance of visitors from the
“shires.” From New England words and sounds alike were car-
ried westward, and speedily extended through the neighboring
States, even to the Mississippi. Precisely the same happened in
Virginia, which also received through her cavalier-settlers and
the countless indenture-colonists a strongly-marked vocabulary
of her own, which she faithfully and with Southern conservatism
preserved, while at home and all around her everything changed,
and which she at a later period transmitted to those vast new ter-
ritories, that looked up to her as the Mother of States.

When these settlers were cut off from constant intercourse with
428 AMERICANISMS.

the mother-country, their language ceased, of course, to be influ-
enced by the court, the great writers, and the press of England;
it retained the familiar forms and sounds, undisturbed by fashion
and the effects of close intimacy with other nations. But greater
results yet were effected, when the colonies threw off the political
restraints that had heretofore attached them to England; the
language became as independent as the republic, and refused any
longer to be guided and controlled in any way by English author-
ities. At the same time, an unbroken stream of immigration
poured into this country vast numbers of persons, mostly of
humble origin and without education, who brought with them the
local words of English counties, and the provincialisms of the
sister kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland.

During all this time great changes had taken place in England.
At a very early period, already, a large number of good old Saxon
words were banished from polite society, and continued to exist
only as far as they were used by the peasantry or a few families
belonging to the upper classes in remote country districts. Put-
tenham, in his Art of English Poesie (ed. 1582), teaches (eleven
years before Shakespeare): “Our writer, therefore, in these days
shall not follow Piers the Plowman, nor Gower nor Lydgate, nor
yet Chaucer, for their language is now out of use with us; neither
yet shall he take the terms of Northmen, such as they use in
daily talk, whether they be noblemen or gentlemen or their best
clerks, nor in effect any speech used beyond the river Trent;
though no man can deny that theirs ts the purest Lnglish Saxon at
this day. Yet it is not so courtly, nor so current as our Southern
English is, no more is the far Western man’s speech. He shall,
therefore, take the usual speech of the Court, and that of London,
and the shires lying about London, within sixty miles and not much
above.” The English writers obeyed his behest, and the English
people followed their example; but not so the colonies. In
America the “purest English-Saxon” of Puttenham’s day was
carefully preserved, unaffected by court, or town, or shire, and
hence the curious result is obtained that by many an humble fire-
side in the Low Country of Virginia, the pines of New Jersey, or
in the shadow of the mountains of New England, words are heard
pronounced as they were in the days of Alfred, and with mean-
ings unknown to England. Moreover, whenever America has
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 429

needed a new word for new wants and new discoveries, it has
gone to that immense mine of treasure in the early English
days, from which to borrow—as William Hamilton eloquently
expresses it— -

“ Ancient words
That come from the poetic quarry
As sharp as swords.”
(Letters to Allan Ramsay.)

“Tnto this treasure,” says a Scottish critic, “the Americans are
dipping more deeply than we, and so far the influence of their
‘example upon the mother-tongue must be recognized as both
legitimate and beneficial.” (Blackwood, October, 1867.) Hence,
nothing is more common than to hear English writers blame
Americans for adopting a new word; then the word is found in
English writers, and we are scolded for claiming the honor of
producing it! Such was the case, as Mr. Pickering shows, for
instance, with the word to advocate, which was first censured as an
Americanism, and then, having been found repeatedly in the,
pages of Milton and Burke, was made the basis for a charge of
“unfounded claims to discovery.”

Nor must it be forgotten that the strange revolutions which
are stated to have taken place in the meaning of many common
words are, in most instances, nothing more than the result of the
preservation of an old sense, which, if carefully traced, may still
be found existing in remote districts of some of the English
counties. This is occasionally acknowledged even by British
travellers ; thus Waterton, after his fourth journey through this
country in 1824, said of the American as he found him: “He
has certainly hit upon the way (but I could not find out by what
means) of speaking a much purer English language than that which
is commonly spoken on the parent soil. This astonished me much,
but is really the case.” (Wanderings in South America.) The
nomadic character .of the American, the ubiquity of the news-
‘paper, and the diffusion of knowledge throwghout all classes of
society, have, subsequently, given a uniformity to this pure Eng-
lish which is unknown in other countries; and if really better
English is not spoken here than in the mother-country, the
American idiom is at least free from provincialisms, and the
masses speak it better than the people of England.
430 AMERICANISMS.

It has, hence, been the purpose of the compiler to collect, in the
following pages, mainly words which are obsolete in England,
while still preserving here their former power; such as have changed
their meaning to adapt themselves to new purposes and altered
circumstances, and a few entirely new forms, unknown to the Old
World.

A.

Abergoins, a Western corruption for Aboriginal, frequently used
for original. “That is an aboriginal idea; I never heard it be-
. fore.” Also instead of Indian: “Bolling Robertson, equally a
descendant of Pocahontas, had the Indian eye, and the whole °
cast of his countenance was aboriginal ; his temper was quick,
but his heart kind and excellent.” (Letters from the South, I,
p. 23.)

Academy, used with. grandiloquence for school ; as every college
of some pretensions must needs be a “ University.” “Schools no
longer exist in the towns and villages, rarely in the fields; acade-
mies and colleges supplant them.” (Putnam's Magazine, Feb-
ruary, 1855.) A custom denounced with great scorn by Boswell’s
father, the old Laird of Auchinleck: “ Whose tail do you think
he has pinned himself to now, mon? Dominie, mon—an auld
dominie ; he keepit a schule and call’d it an acaademy !”

Accommodate, to, is in New England especially used in the
sense of providing for travellers, from the meaning of accommoda-
tion as applied to public houses. “The question (where is the
hotel?) invariably called forth the response: Thar ain’t nun,
but farmer Smoot accommodates.” (Putnam’s Magazine, Janu-
ary, 1870.)

Admire is mentioned by J. R. Bartlett as being “often and
absurdly used in New England,” in the sense of a lively, eager
wish. “I should admire to see the President.” He seems to object
in like manner to the use of the word, when it means to wonder
at, to be affected with surprise; and yet this use has the highest
authority for it.

“The undaunted fiend what this might be admired,

Admired, not fear’d.”
(Milton. Paradise Lost, IL, v. 677.)

“The more I admire your flintiness.”
(Beaumont and Fletcher. Mice Valor.)
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 431

And Pepys, in his Diary, besides numerous other instances, says,
February 22, 1663-4: “ He, that is, Charles IL, is so fond of the
Duke of Monmouth, that everybody admires it, that is, wonders
at it.”

Ad is the printer’s usual abbreviation for “advertisement,”
adopted not only in newspaper-offices, but also in the daily ex-
panding advertising business of the country. “Ad means exactly
as much as advertisement, and is two letters instead of thirteen.”
(Putnan’s Magazine, August, 1868.)

Advanced Female is one of the most distasteful pet-terms of the
day, generally bestowed sneeringly upon women who claim all
the rights and privileges of men, in addition to those already will-
ingly granted to their sex in appreciation of its peculiar claims.
“ One of the oddest instances of the shortsightedness of the Ad-
vanced Female to the interest of her own cause, was given in the
petition recently offered to our State Legislature, for the appoint-
ment of young girls between the ages of fourteen and eighteen in
the place of boys, as pages in the two Houses at Albany. Now,
even if those petitioners, who seem to be in earnest, were blind to
the impropriety of thrusting young girls hardly past childhood
into such a position, it is strange that common sense did not sug-
gest to them, that a man with ordinary respect for decency, or
with daughters of his own, had no object in becoming equally
blind, nor would ever be likely to consent to such an arrange-
ment.” (New York Tribune, February 2, 1871.)

Advocate, to, a word once much objected to by English critics
as an Americanism, is not only good English—“ whether this re-
flect not with a contumely upon the Parliament itself, which
thought this petition worthy not only of receiving, but of voting
to a commitment, after it had been advocated and moved for by
some honorable and learned gentlemen”—(Milton, Animadversions,
§ 1.)—but has established itself beyond controversy in modern
writers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Afeared, still in use in the Southern States, especially in Vir-
ginia, is, of course, only the once familiar word preserved, while
elsewhere the modern form afraid has superseded it. The old
verb fearan and old English to fear, were constantly used in the
transitive sense of “to frighten or terrify,” and hence afeared came
to mean “ frightened,” as in Shakespeare’s well-known lines:
4382 AMERICANISMS.

“Though with his breath the hinges of the world
Did crack, we should stand upright and unfeared.”

Afore and aforehand, both generally supplanted by “before” and
“beforehand,” still survive in remoter regions of the New England
States, and are supported by J. R. Lowell on the plea that “Spen-
ser and his Queen, neither of them, scrupled to write afore, and
*fore was common till after Herrick.”

After night is a local expression, peculiar to Pennsylvania and
some of the Border States, where night is very commonly used for
the hours of the afternoon, and hence, “Court will open again
after night,” means simply “after candlelight,” as it is expressed
everywhere else.

Aggravate, to, in the sense of irritating or ill-treating, is not an
Americanism, nor used improperly. “This arose partly from a
belief that the quarrel was final, and that, therefore, there would
be no danger in aggravating Violet by this expression of doubt.”
(Trollope, Phineas Finn, ch. 73.) This is precisely the meaning
with which it is used by J.C. Neal: “One may be as philosophic
and as splenetic as he likes, when he is fishing, without risk of
being aggravated.” (Charcoal Sketches, 1., p. 118.)

Ague, frequently mis-called aguy, agy, and in the South even
ager, while in the North ague, pronounced like plague, is not un-
frequent, is rarely used without its companion, fever, and the two
form the familiar fevernagy of the West. The varieties of this very.
common and often fatal disease are thus designated: “On my way
I was suddenly taken ill with a real shaking-ague in a large prai-
rie, ten miles across, and shook so severely that I could not sit in
my sulky.” (Rev. P. Cartwright, Autobiography, p. 433.) “He
himself had been troubled with a dwmb-ager since last conference.”
(F. B. Harte, Luck of Roaring Camp, p. 166.) “The old prov-
erb, ‘An ague in the spring is physic for a king, wouldn’t be
highly appreciated in these diggings, whar agy is rayther objected
to.” (Southern Lit. Messenger, March, 1857, p. 247.) “ Lansing,
Michigan, is a very healthy locality for the ague. It comes creep-
ing up a fellow’s back like a ton of wild oats, goes crawling through
his joints like iron spikes, and is followed by a fever, which pro-
hibits the patient from thinking of anything but the Independent
Order of Good Templars. It isn’t the every-other-day kind, but
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 433

gets up with a man at daylight and sleeps in the small of his back
all night. His teeth feel about six inches long, his joints wobble
like a loose wagon-wheel, and the shakes are so steady that one
can’t hold any kind of conversation except by putting in dashes.”
(Philadelphia Age. Correspondence, April 3, 1871.)

Ail along, another so-called Americanism, in the sense of “all
this time,” is in use in England, for instance in Sheffield, where,
as we read, “She has been ailing all along.” (Sir Richard Phil-
lips’ Tour.)

All Hallow’s Eve, anciently the vigil of All Saints’ Day, 3 is one
of the few festive days still known in some parts of the Union.
In Pennsylvania the usual amusements of dipping for apples
floating in a basin, and other sports familiar in the north of Eng-
land, are well known. The boys pass through the streets throw-
ing shelled corn at the windows, transfer vegetables from the
garden to the porch, and indulge in other less harmless pranks.
(S. 8. Haldeman.)

Alley, the name given by boys to a choice taw made of alabas-
ter, and probably an abbreviation of the latter word, even when
made of inferior material. (Dickens, Pickwick Papers, p. 358.)

Allow, to, is constantly used in the Middle and Southern States
in the sense of affirming a statement. “I allow that’s a good
horse,” in Southern parlance means, I assure you. “ Mother is
perfectly ridiculous,” a young South Carolina lady said; “she
allowed she’d switch me if I didn’t go home, and she picked up a
bit of brush. I up with another, and told her to come on.”
(Putnam’s Magazine, June, 1868.) It is frequently, also, used in
a more vague sense, corresponding with the “guess” of the East
and the “reckon” of the South, as in John Hay’s recent lines:

“But I come back here allowin’
To vote as I used to do.”
(Banty Tim.)

Alter, to, when applied to animals, as is constantly done in the
South, means to geld—the transition from a general change to a.
special one of this kind being very natural. A pupil translating
Taurus by ox, the teacher asked him: “ Haven’t you altered that
animal ?” :

Amaigamate, to, generally used only of metals and other sub-

19
434 AMERICANISMS.

stances and of abstract ideas, is in America applied more particu-
larly to the mixture of the black and white races, The corre-
sponding noun, amalgamation, has of late given way to the horrible
compound, miscegenation, a term as little to be commended as the
idea it represents. ,

Amazing, in the sense of wonderful, is a melancholy ee
of the prevailing bad taste which loves to deal in superlatives. It
is, however, quoted with the same meaning in Bailey’s Dictionary
already, and hence not to be charged to this country.

Ambition, oddly and perhaps ignorantly used instead of grudge
or spite, is limited to Virginia and North Carolina, and those
parts of the West to which it has been carried from thence. “He
brought an action against me for ambition.” (Virginia. Literary
. Museum, 1829, p. 418.) The use of

Among for between, when only two persons are referred to, is
of course unwarrantable, but of frequent occurrence, and by no
means unknown in England. “ What can we do among us? We
are but two, and they are ever so many.” (Scenes in the Far
West, p. 317.)

Anent survives in the New England States, and is frequently
written anend, as in J. R. Lowell’s line: “The Yankee still uses
familiarly the old phrase, right anend for continuously.” Anan,
so constantly met with in J. F. Cooper’s novels, is now-a-days
heard only in New Jersey, and occasionally by old-fashioned per-
sons, meaning precisely what Halliwell says: “Anend: How,
what do you say? By lower class of persons to higher, when
they do not understand what is said to them.” (Sud voce.)

Applicant, in the sense of diligent student, is already noticed,

in Pickering’s Vocabulary, but can hardly be said to be thusused

any more. It means now, as in England, a petitioner.

Appreciate, to, has in this country, besides other meanings, the
peculiar sense of, raising in value: “These improvements will
appreciate the farm immensely.” (Rural Register, 1860, p. 29.) It
has, with its noun, appreciation, the more common meaning of,
increasing in value, likewise. “ His Pennsylvania lands have not
appreciated as he had hoped, and when he left the cabinet he was
a poor man.” (Bishop Kip, Life of Thomas Pickering.)

Argufy, to, a vulgar word used to signify, to argue and to im-
port, is perhaps less frequently heard in this country than in
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 435

England, though not unknown here. Halliwell mentions it as
found in various dialects, and the biographer of the Lord Chan-
cellors of Ireland, J. R. O’Flanagan, says: “He (Lord Clare)
doesn’t speak a word, but when the counsellors are done argufy-
ing he leans over the desk and gives a nod to Jack Dwyer, who
tells him what to do.”

Armory is, in. the United States, the name of a place where
arms are manufactured, as well as the house in which they are
kept—the latter meaning alone being known in England.

Around, like about, is constantly used adverbially with the
meaning of, in the neighborhood; the most violent abuse of
which liberty is mentioned by J. R. Bartlett, in the case of a
minister who was reported to have said of one of the Saviour’s
apostles that “he stood around the Cross.” “I was standing
around when the fight took place.” (New York Police Gazette.)
“Gail Hamilton is rather small, has a round, fresh, and happy-
looking face, blue eyes, and brown hair, worn.short and sort of
curled or frizzed. She is animated in conversation, talks as she
writes, is witty, fond of jokes, and must be pleasant to have
around. She doesn’t look a bit pedantic or blue-stockin’-ified,; and
should pass nicely for twenty years old.” (Washington paper,
December, 1870.) ;

Aft ig one of the particles most abused in American speech,
though here also much allowance ought to be made for. ancient
usage still surviving among the descendants of early English set-
tlers. Thus the old custom of saying af hill and at wood in desig-
nating a place on a hill or near a wood, from which so many
proper names like Atwood and others are derived, gives it the
meaning of dy in many cases. “I bought it at auction” is correct
English, but, “It is to be sold a¢ auction” is American only. It
is in like manner a provincialism, at least, to say, A¢ the East and
at the West, instead of in the East and West; and it is somewhat
curious to notice that this is not promiscuously done, but the bet-
ter-known New England States are’generally spoken of as in the
East, while the remoter South is designated as at the South. At
is used also’ instead of about or after, as in the familiar phrase:
“What is he at now?” meaning, “ What does he propose to do
now?” A¢ that, added as an expletive to strengthen an expression,
may be considered as an Americanism. “He is a Down-East
436 AMERICANISMS.

Yankee, and a smart one af that.” It seems to have here precisely
the same force as the German “und zwar.” “ He has a scolding
wife and an ugly one aé that.” (J. C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches, IL,
p. 1%.) J. Durand, in his translation of Taine’s Art in the Neth-
erlands, says of the complexion, “ Ordinarily, among the laboring
classes and in advanced life, I have found it wan, turnip-hued, and,
in Holland, cheese-colored, and moldy cheese at that.” As a
mere expletive a¢ plays a prominent part in Southern speech, well
illustrated in the remark of a recent traveller in the South:
“There is nothing so curious in the whole Southern vocabulary,
colored and white, as the use of this preposition. It seems the
indispensable finish of every sentence. Where is it a¢? Where
have you been at? Where are you going at? Where’s my lesson
at? Where does she live af? It is universally used in this way by
negroes and whites, except the best-educated classes of the latter.”

Attackted occurs in America, as in England, in the speech of the
illiterate, the result of an apparent misapprehension of its being
formed like transact and similar words. It is quoted by J. P.
Kennedy :

“From there we left nine hundred men in the Western Territory:
Our militia was attackted just as the day did break.”
(Swallow Barn, p. 218.)

Authoress, like poetess, condemned by W. C. Bryant, seems to
become more popular as the number of female authors increases
in the United States.

Avail, to, is beginning to be used actively instead of reflectively,
and men say: “He avatled.of the offer,” without the usual “him-
self” The construction is not unknown in English, for Pope
has the line:

: “ Explore
What means might best his safe return avail.”
(Quoted by Bailey.)

A recent telegram in the Northern newspapers ran thus:
“New York, Feb. 7,1871. To the Press of the United States.
Gentlemen: Availing of the courtesy of the Western Union
Telegraph Company, I send you, by wire, the annexed appeal in
behalf of the suffering people of France.”

Awful, in the sense of ugly and unpleasant, instead of its legiti-
mate meaning of, full of awe, is generally regarded an American
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 437

ism, and it must be admitted that its use here is unwarrantably
frequent and incorrect. “The brightést speaker of the (Wo-
men’s Rights) Convention has been Mrs. Adele Hazlett, the small,
slender, wiry little woman from Michigan, who has an indefinite
amount of snap in her eyes, and, in the words of a feminine ad-
mirer, an awfully cunning, little, turned-up nose, and is dread-
fully saucy.” (New York Tribune, January 13,1871.) But this
use of awful is at least as much of a Scotticism as an American-
ism, and “an awful swell” is heard as constantly in English slang
as similar expressions with us. The Cockney even improves upon
it and makes it orful. But to employ awful as an adverb and to
say, as in England, “She is an awful fine woman,” (Slang Dic-
tionary, p. 68,) can in no way be excused. _Still, it is constantly
done. “They couldn’t get Bill into a row, for he is afeard of
hisself, when he gets awful mad, and he allers lef his shooting-
irons in his room, when he went out.” (Story of. Wild Bill.)
“ A hot and dusty day! cry the poor pilgrims as they wipe their
begrimed foreheads and woo the doubtful breeze which the river
bears with it. Awful hot! Dreadful dusty! answers the sympa-
thetic toll-gatherer.” (Hawthorne, The Toll-Gatherer’s Day.)

Axe, instead of ask, survives with astonishing vitality in
Southern speech, and is almost uniformly used by the negro pop-
ulation. It has, of course, the warrant of great antiquity and
noble patronage, for, coming unchanged from the Anglo-Saxon, it
was used as the legitimate form by the highest in the land down
to Queen Elizabeth. “ Aze not-why,” says Chaucer’s Miller, and
in the Frere’s Tale we read: “ Awe him thyself if thou not trow-
est me.” After that period it was abandoned by the Court, but’
the common people continued its use and brought it to this coun-
try. The Cockney and the Norfolk hind use aze as exclusively as
the poor white folks and the freedmen of the South. It has, be-
sides, been well said that “for purposes of lyric poetry and musi-
cal compositions azed would be infinitely preferable to the harsh
sound asked, which no vocalist can pronounce without a painful
gasp.” (Blackwood, October, 1869.)

B.

Back is often used instead of ago, as in the familiar phrase,
“Why, that was a long time back!” Itis the remnant of backh-,
438 Ee AMERICANISMS.

ward, Which was formerly so employed by good English writers,
“ Look upon it some reigns backward.” (Locke.) The latter word
has frequently, as an adjective, the meaning of bashful, and, in the
West especially, that greatest of rarities, a modest, timid youth, is
called “a backward colt”—no doubt from an instinctive appre-
ciation of the contrast with “forward.” Back again is substituted
for backward in the phrase back and forth, which, in New England
at least, is universally used instead of “backward and forward.”

Bad is used for ill in familiar style, where badly ought to be
employed, as when a man says: “I feel quite bad to-day.” In
sentences like “I wanted to see him dad,” which may be heard
every day, its use is, of course, unpardonable.

Bagging, in the majority of cases, does not mean the material
for making bags generally, but the hempen bags made specially:
for packing cotton.

Ball, as far as it relates to games, is found in America as Foot-
Ball, Base-Ball, Town-Ball, Corner-Ball, Paddle-Ball, and a great
variety of other names. . Of these, Base-Ball is looked upon as the
national game, cricket being comparatively unknown, and found
only in some of the Catholic Colleges. Its predecessor was the
“Old Cat” of former generations; in 1825 the first Base-Ball Club
was formed in the City of New York, and of course named the
Knickerbocker Club. Now the numerous Clubs are united in a
“National Association of Base-Ball Players;” they consist, in the
main, of professional players who receive large salaries, often
amounting to. several thousand a year, and meet each other
during the summer, contesting for prizes. They assume odd
names, as the Kickenepawlings of Philadelphia, and the Kikion-
gans of Indiana. The Esculapeans of Brooklyn are all physicians,
and the Malta Club of New York contains nothing but milkmen.

Bamboozle, to, means here, as in England, to perplex or mis-
lead; but although it has been used here as long as in England in
familiar and popular language, its true origin has never been
ascertained. The Slang Dictionary quotes it simply as “ Modern
Gypsey,” whatever that may be intended to mean; others pro-
pose seriously to trace it back to damboo, and Swift says it was
invented by a nobleman in the reign of Charles 1I. Probably it
existed long before, and was only then first used in polite society,
as even Arbuthnot condescends to use it.
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 439

Bang-up, the old word for a heavy overcoat, now superseded
everywhere else by newer names, still survives in some parts of the
Union. “He was clothed in an old bang-up, black vest, grey
pants, and straw hat.” (Philadelphia Ledger, June 11, 1853.)

Banjo, often represented as an African word, is simply the corrupt-
ed and softened form of the old dandore, a descendant of the Greek
navédovpa,a musical instrument invented by Pan. Thomas Jeffer-
son speaks of it as an instrument “proper to the Blacks, which
they brought hither from Africa, and which is the original of the
guitar, its chords being precisely the four lower chords of the
guitar.” (Notes on Virginia, p. 47.)

Bannock, in Scotland a round cake of oatmeal, kneaded in
water only, and baked against a stone, called bannock-stone, while
the same cake is called a girdle-cake if baked on an iron plate,
means in America a cake of Indian meal, fried in lard.

Banter, to, in the West, means not merely to joke and jest good-
humoredly, but also to challenge to a match, and to provoke a
wager. “We had a fine danter, but the match was postponed till
spring.” :

Barm, or barme, is used in New England instead of yeast, the
initial letter of which, although persistently dropped (east), seems
to be a rock of offence to American organs of speech, so that there
are quite a number of substitutes for the unlucky word. It has the
sanction of Beaumont and Fletcher, and of Shakespeare, who uses
it in his Midsummer Night’s Dream, while Chaucer already sings:

“ Of tarte, alum-glas, derme, wert, and argoils.”

Batter cakes are the familiar cakes of Indian meal, made with
buttermilk or cream, and seldom absent from gq Southern break-
fast-table.

Bay not only designates an inlet from the sea, but very fre-
quently also any low, swampy region in the South, perhaps so
called from the bay-trees which are apt to abound in such locali-
ties. “They found themselves on the edge of a very dense forest
of pines and scrubby oaks, a portion of which was swallowed up
in a deep day, a swamp-bottom, the growth of which consisted of
mingled cypresses and day trees, with tupelo, gum, and dense-
thickets of low stunted shrubbery, cane-grass, and dwarf willows,
which filled up every interval between the trees, and to the eye
440 AMERICANISMS.

most effectually barred out every human intruder.” (W. G.Simms,
The Wigwam and the Cabin.) Bay-Galls are large, gloomy, al-
most impenetrable swamps in Florida, full of deer, bear, and cata-
mount.

Bazar is a word for which America is indebted to Mrs. Trol-
lope, who established the first in Cincinnati—-an enterprise which
unfortunately did not succeed, and was thought to have contrib-
uted largely to her bitter animosity against this country.

Be, instead of am or are, as frequently in the Bible, is still quite
popular in New Hampshire and Massachnsetts, as it survives in
like manner in some of the provincial dialects of England. “Be
ye content now, deacon ?” asks a woman in Mrs. H. B. Stowe’s
recent novel.

Beat, to, retains here the meaning which is given in Bailey’s
Dictionary, to surpass, excel. “Who beat? Why, of course,
Highflier deat the mare all to pieces.” (Louisville Courier, May
17,1854.) A further extension of this meaning has led to the use
of beat instead of beaten, as when people say, “We felt dead deat,”
meaning that they felt quite overcome. The verb is rendered in-
tensive by the addition of all hollow (instead of hollow, as in Eng-
lish). “In this matter we beat the English all hollow, and we mean
to do the same in everything else.” (New York Herald, December
18, 1867.)

Beau, to, a verb used by the uneducated instead of “to escort.”

Beautiful, like elegant, isa much misused term, being applied
indiscriminately to anything pleasing or good. The butter on the
breakfast-table is quite as often called beautiful or elegant as the
finest lady on Broadway. “That was beautiful conduct,” said the
New York Mirror, of a heroic act.

Becaise, instead of because, often made a matter of special
reproach to the South, since it is common to the Whites there, is
almost unknown to the Blacks. It is not a corruption, or at least
a corruption of old date, and sanctioned by usage at the time when
Virginia was settled, and the word was brought over from Eng-
land ; for Pepys, in the Appendix to his Diary, quotes a letter of
the Earl of Leicester to Cumnor Hale, requiring a strict investi-
gation into the sudden death of Amy Robsart, “decaise of my
thorough quietness and of all others hereafter.” (Vol. IV., p.339.)

Beef is often applied in the South to an ox, and the butcher
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 441

calls on the planter to see if he has any beeves to sell. “She'll
make a fine beef,” is said of a cow giving no milk, which is to be
fattened.

Beer, without the addition of a descriptive noun, is very rarely
heard in America, ale being generally used where an Englishman
would say deer. The first small-beer of the country, made in 1630,
is thus described by an anonymous poet:

“Tf barley be wanting to make into malt,
We must-be contented and think it no fault,
For we can make liquor to sweeten our lips
Of pumpkins and parsnips and walnut-tree chips.”

Bellowses, for lungs, not unknown in English slang (Slang
Dictionary, p. 72), is actually in use in New England and Penn-
sylvania. J. R. Lowell says, “His bellowses is sound enough.”
(Biglow Papers, L, p. 23.)

Belly-guts is the uneesthetic name given in Pennsylvania to mo-
lasses candy, and, in New England, by a corruption of belly-cut-
ter, to low sleds on which boys slide down-hill in winter, lying
flat on their bellies. (B.)

Belongings, in the sense of gentlemen’s shirts and drawers, is a
euphemistic term, by no means found only in Washington news-
papers, where it seems to have been first discovered, for we are
told that, “We observe that this substantive appears in the
Philological Society Dictionary, under the sponsorship of Mr.
Ruskin.” (Blackwood, April, 1861.)

Ben, the uniform Yankee manner of pronouncing deen, is thus
justified by J. R. Lowell, in his enthusiastic apology for Yankee-
isms, and with a special view to justify his brother poet Whittier,
who seems to affect the word particularly: “It has the authority
of Sackville, Gammer Gurton (the work of a bishop), Chapman,
Dryden, and many more, though din seems to have been the com-
mon form.” The Yankee only follows the old custom of Kent.

Bench, in the New England States, supplies the English term
form, when applied to a long seat without a back.

Better, for more, prevails in the East as in Herefordshire, Eng-
land, and in familiar language everywhere. “It is detéer than
ten bushels, I warrant you.” Bettermost, a redundant superla-
tive, is in like manner common to both countries, though not

19*
442 AMERICANISMS.

admitted into good society anywhere. Betternents, the legal
term for improvements, as explained by Bouvier, is a word hardly
ever used now-a-days, the latter word having taken its place.

Big, instead of great, can hardly be called an Americanism,
however common its use may be, since Jeremy Taylor, in his noble
sermon On the Return of Prayer, speaks of him “whose spirit was
meck and gentle, up to the greatness of the biggest example.”
(Quoted by J. R. Lowell.) But the over-energetic combination
of great-big, which is constantly heard in the South, may well be
regarded as a native extravagance. “I saw a great big snake in
the road.” The Big Drink is an equally intensive term for the
Mississippi River, full of droll humor, after the manner of Western
extravagance.

Bile for boil, almost universally regarded as a most reprehen-
sible vulgarism, has, in like manner, high authority for its use by
those who have bequeathed it to the present generation. “ Bile ;
this is generally spelt doz, but, I think, less properly,” says no less
an authority than the great Johnson himself. Thus endorsed,
dile has maintained itself throughout the country, and the diled
shirt of the late Civil War has anew proved its indestructible
vitality. “Pigs will be ketched by steam and will be diled fit to
eat before they are done squealing.” (J. C. Neal, Charcoal
Sketches, IL., p. 27.)

Bindery, as a place where books are bound, is a new word, and,
according to Webster’s Dictionary, an Americanism. “ Before long
the Mercantile Library will have a bindery of its own.” (Sertd-
ners Monthly, February, 1871.)

Biscuits, in England representing our “crackers,” a hard, dry
bread, mainly baked for ship-use, here designate a peculiar kind
of hot tea-roll, usually fermented.

Birdie, a frequent name in the United States, especially in the
South, derived from Bird or Burd, a Scottish term of endearment,
applied to young ladies,—

“And by my word, the bonny bird
In danger shall not tarry.”
(Thomas Campbell.)

Blackmail, originally the money paid to the agents of robbers
to secure protection from the latter, in Scotland, has in the
OLD FRIENDS -WITH NEW FACES. 443

United States obtained a wider signification, and designates any
money extorted under threat of exposure, public attack, or ill
treatment in the public papers.

Blackstrap, a mixture of molasses with some spirituous liquor,
and commonly distributed to the hands during harvest. “I am
carried back to long-ago noonings in my father’s hay-fields, and
to the talk of Sam and Job over their jug of Blackstrap under
the shadow of the ash-tree, which still dapples the grass whence
they have been gone so long.” (J. R. Lowell.)

Blather and blatherskite, probably fanciful derivatives from
blatant, are frequently heard in the West to designate blustering,
empty threats. Bailey quotes it as meaning loud talking or
disputing, and says that Skelton has it, that itis still known in
Northamptonshire, and adduces the phrase, “None of your
blatheration.” It seems to be of Irish origin; at least J. R.
O’Flanagan gives a curious etymology of the word: “ Lord Redes-
dale was ‘speaking of people who learnt to skate with bladders
under their arms to buoy them up, if they should fall into a hole
and risk being drowned. ‘Ah, my Lord,’ said Toler, ‘that is
what we, call dladderwm skate in Ireland.” (Lives of the Lord
Chancellors of Ireland.)

Blickie is, in New Jersey, a common term for atin-bucket.

Blizzard, a term referred back to the German Blitz, means in
the West a stunning blow or an overwhelming argument. “A
gentleman at dinner asked me for a toast, and supposing he meant
to have some fun at my expense, I concluded to go ahead and
give him and his likes a dlizzard.” (Crockett’s Tour, p. 16, B.)

Block, besides its ordinary meanings, serves in America also to
designate a connected mass or row of buildings, and even a whole
portion of a town, enclosed by streets, whether it be built upon or
not, and in this sense isa genuine Americanism. “The terrible
conflagration destroyed an entire block and a large portion of the
adjoining streets.” (Leavenworth paper, June, 1869.) The word
has been adopted in England, and is often met with in newspaper-
language. Occasionally it is substituted for dlock-house: “I
reckon it was a joyful surprise to Betsy, when we broke into the
block.” (W.G. Simms, The Two Camps.)

Bloomer designates both a costume devised by a Mrs. Bloomer
for independent ladies, and the wearer of such a costume. A well-
444 AMERICANISMS.

known damsel, who, during and after the late Civil War, appeared
very frequently in the press of England, as well as of her native
land, was thus described: ‘“‘ Doctor Mary Walker appeared before
the audience in a charming Bloomer-costume, much improved
upon the original, in bright colors, and very short on top and
no longer at the other end.” (Philadelphia Ledger, January 2’,
1865.)

Bobbery, a cant term for a noise, is generally used here in a
more good-natured sense, as differing from the objectionable row.
The etymology of the word is much disputed. 8. 8. Haldeman
derives it from the Hindoo harbart; other authorities also call it
“ Anglo-Indian” (Slang Dictionary, p. 79), and still others con-
nect it with the verb to 40d, from which bodbing around is derived,
and Chaucer’s famous town “ yclept d0b up and down.” “You are
a pair of impertinent rascals; what do you mean by kicking up
such a bodbery at this time of night?” (J. C. Neal, Charcoal
Sketches.) “People who declare themselves responsible only to
Nature’s God, are very apt to kick up a tremendous dodbery and
to make long scolding speeches.” (New York Tribune, February
6, 1871.)

Bogue, probably from the same root as bogy, is in frequent use
in New England in the sense of coming suddenly upon men. “I
don’t git much done ’thout I dogue right in along ’th my men.”
(J. R. Lowell.)

Bogus, the name of a beverage consisting of rum and molasses,
well known to sailors, is occasionally heard in the Eastern States,
especially among fishermen. It is probably an abbreviation of
the more familiar calibogus.

Bonny Clabber, quoted already by Ben Jonson in the lines—

“Tt is against my frechold, my inheritance,
To drink such balderdash as bonny-cladder,”
and by Swift—
“We scorn for want of talk to jabber
Of parties o’er our bonny-cladder,”

means in Pennsylvania and the South not ordinary fluid milk,
turned or soured by long standing or a thunder-storm, which is
there called Sour Milk, but thick milk, from which the whey is
drained to get the curds out, of which afterward smearcase is
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 445

made. The following verse seems to be an unprinted part of
Yankee Doodle—perhaps even unwritten before—
“ Baughnaugh claughbaugh all the week,
Sour milk on Sunday,
Pretty girls on Saturday night,
And go to work on Monday.”
(S. 8. Haldeman.)

The word is frequently shortened into clabber simply.

Book, to, is vory common in the sense of to engage a seat in a
stage or other public conveyance.

Bookstore, a place where books are sold, is the American term
for the English “ bookseller’s shop.”

Boosy, or more frequently deozy, originally a vile gypsy word,
but now very largely used, even by careful writers like G. W.
Curtis. The origin is the Dutch duysen, to tipple, and it came
with many other drinking-terms over from Holland in Queen
Elizabeth’s time. <A “douzing ken” was the old cant term for a
public house, and so it is still in modern days. “ Bousing and
belly-cheere” are frequently coupled by Elizabethan writers. It
is barely possible, that the word may have been introduced into
the United States twice: once by the English settlers, and again
by the Dutch colonists.

Bound, the participle of to bind, is frequently used for obli-
ged. ““She felt herself ownd, in American phrase, to prevent
Prussia from acquiring an accession of territory.” (London
Quarterly, January, 1871.) It is, like so many similar words,
only restored to its legitimate use; even in some parts of England,
and especially in the English districts of Southern Wales, it is
heard frequently with the same meaning: “He is bound to do it.”

Boughten, an. old participle with the adjective termination, still
survives in parts of New England and New York, and serves to
distinguish articles bought at a shop from those manufactured at
home. “Is this a home-made carpet or a doughten one?” The
term is evidently due to Scotch settlers, who also say, ‘‘I have
putten on my coat,” and “T have casten a stone.”

Boy, used, before the Civil War, to designate any (colored)
man-servant, without regard to age. Gray-haired men would be
addressed thus: “ Boy, bring my horse up, ’m going now,” and at
a dinner-table the servant would be told, “Boy, where is the
446 AMERICANISMS.

bread?” It is, after all, but the same tendency which in French
calls the waiter “ gargon,” and in English, gave to knave (Ger-
man, Knabe, a boy) the meaning of follower, so as to induce
Wiclife to speak of “the Lordes knaves.”

Branch is the generic name of every stream, large or small, in
the South, a large river and a mere bayou being the only other
designations. Bailey already defines it so, and shows how the
term has been preserved in this country: “If from a main river
any branch be separated, then, where the branch doth first bound
itself with new banks, there is that part of the river, where the
branch forsakes the main stream, called the head of the river.”
(Sir W. Raleigh, History.) While New England knows only
brooks and rivers, in other States it is the run and the creek that
prevail, forming finally a great river.

Brandywine is once more heard in parts of the United States
where the German element prevails, and where, hence, their own
“ Branntwein ” is easily understood by all. The river of that
name also recalls the ery: “Buy any brandewine? buy any
brandewine?” in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Beggar’s Bush.

Brash is in America much used for brittle, and applied to
wood and to vegetables. This originates, no doubt, with the use
of brash in some parts of England for broken twigs and refuse
boughs. The same idea underlies the meaning of brash-ice:
“When from the effects of abrasion the larger blocks of ice are
crumbled into minute fragments, this collection is called drash-
ice.” (Hugh Murray, Polar Seas, 1829.) The word is also used
with the meaning of harsh, probably from its former meaning of,
hasty in temper, impetuous, as quoted by Grose. “See here, you
are playing this a little too brash.” (Putnam’s Magazine, August,
1868.) In Southern New Jersey and in Pennsylvania, an acid
rising taste in the mouth is frequently called drash, and an indis-
posed person is said to be drashy. It has the same meaning in
the North of England. (Brockctt.)

Bravely is still, as of old in England, used in the sense of,
very well, excellently. As Bacon wrote: “Swart, with his Ger-
mans, performed bravely,” our newspapers report: “The paving
of Pennsylvania Avenue is going on bravely, and all will be

ready for the great carnival.” (Washington Ohronicle, February
27, 1871.)
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 447

Breadstuff, a most useful word, designating all the cereals
which can be converted into bread: corn, wheat, rye, etc., and
occasionally bread itself. “One great objection to the conduct
of Britain, was her prohibitory duty on the importation of bread-
stuf” (Marshall, Life of Washington, V., p. 319, B.) Now-a-
days the plural is more generally used: “ Breadstuffs have de-
clined, although farmers hoped for a rise in prices, in consequence
of the Franco-German war.” (New York Herald, October 21,
1870.)

Break, to, is in Virginia, and other tobacco-raising States,
applied to the opening of the hogsheads, as they are sent from the
plantations, previous to a public sale. The breaking is a process
watched with much interest by buyer and seller.

Breakdown, is here, as in England, the term for a noisy dance,
deemed violent enough to “break down” the floor ; the “ flare-up ”
of Ireland; in the South universally applied to the violent per-
formances of the negroes.

Brewis, in England, a broth made of bread with broth poured
over it, represents in New England crusts of rye and Indian
bread, softened with milk and eaten with molasses.

Srief is used in the South very often, as in some parts of Eng-
land, for prevalent, and has been regarded a corruption of “ rife.”
A traveller in Virginia hearing the driver say “The wind is brief,”
asked what that meant, and received the answer, “ The wind is a
sort of peart.”

Bring, to, takes in America almost altogether the place of the
English, to fetch. Bailey says the two verbs differ in this, that
we fetch things by another, but bring them in our own hand, and
refers to the verse: “As she was going to fetch it, he called to
her, Bring me a morsel of bread.” (1 Kings xvii. 11.)

Brown bread designates bread made of a mixture of two parts
of corn-meal with one part of rye-meal, once almost exclusively
used in New England, but now very common throughout the
country.

Brown stone, # dark variety of red sandstone, and highly
esteemed as a building material in New York, where a drown
stone front is apt to be looked upon as a sign of gentility. “The
brown stone, now so fashionable, is perhaps the most perishable
of all materials used in New York house-building. It is lami-
448 AMERICANISMS.

nated and unequal in density, particularly absorbent of water,
and susceptible to the chemical influences of the atmosphere.”
(New York Tribune, January 19, 1871.)

Buggy, in England, a light one-horse chaise, on two wheels,
means in America a single-seated, four-wheeled vehiclé, with or
without a top, drawn by one or two horses.

Bull is used by Americans in good society only as a financial
term, connected with “Bears,” or as an Irish bull. At least it is
commonly believed that oz is the only respectable term by which
a bull can be safely designated, and even “ gentleman-cow ” has
been attempted by very bashful prudes. There is a story current
and quoted abroad, that a gray-headed American gentleman was
seen to doff his hat reverently, and apologize to a clergyman for
having inadvertently used in his presence the plain Saxon term.

Bundle, to, a custom still prevalent in Wales, and not unfre-
quently practised in the West, of men and women sleeping with
all their clothes on, when there is not house-room to provide better
accommodation. “Among other hideous customs, they (the
Yankees) attempted to introduce that of bundling, which the
Dutch lasses of the Nederlandts, with their eager passion for
novelty and for the fashions, natural to their sex, seemed very
well inclined to follow, but that their mothers, being more expe-
rienced in the world and better acquainted with men and things,
discountenanced all such outlandish innovations.” (W. Irving,
Knickerbocker History of New York.)

Bun, recalling the English denn, the familiar name of the rab-
bit (Halliwell), is, in America, frequently applied to the squirrel.

“Whe.mountain and the squirrel
Had a quarrel,
And the former called the latter, Little Prig!
Bun replied :
You are doubtless very big.”
(R. W. Emerson. Fable.)

Bureau is the name in America commonly given to a chest of
drawers.
C.
Caleulate, to, a word generally looked upon as an Arch-Ameri-
canism, and inseparable from the fictitious type of the Yankee,
may be more frequently heard in the New England States, where
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 449

trade and barter thrive, so as to make calculations familiar to old
and young, but has made its way over the whole North and West.
“You all know, though neighbor Vale has the best heart in the
world, he hasn’t a mite of calkerlation, and none of the Vales
never had, as ever I heerd on. How he’s gittin’ on! and all for
nothin’ under the sun, only for the want of kalkerlate.” (Put-
nam’s Magazine, January, 1870.)

Can, to, a verb of recent origin, since the process of putting
up fruit in air-tight cans has been adopted.

Caney, an adjective made from cane, is often met with in the
West to designate places where cane is either still growing, or
once grew in abundance; hence, numerous names of Caney
Branch, and the like, in Kentucky.

Cant, to, in the sense of to turn over, is in common use with
_ us, while in England it is rarely heard. Bailey, however, explains
it thus: “In carpentry, signifies to turn, as when a piece of tim-
ber comes the wrong way, they say, Cavt it, that is, turn it about.”
The same meaning is evidently attached to Grose’s quotation : “ He
was canted out of the chaise.” Hence, also, cant-hook, a useful
instrument in the shape of an iron hook, attached to the end of a
wooden lever, by means of which heavy weights can be easily
canted over and moved. It is American in design and name.

Caption, originally a legal term, has been adopted by the Amer-
ican press to designate simply a title, a “heading:” “ Under this
caption I propose to consider two questions.” (Rev. H. W. Beecher.)

Captivate, to, instead of to capture, has been called an Ameri-
canism, but has at least very good English authority for this
meaning: “He deserves to be a slave, tlfat is, content to have the
rational sovereignty of his soul and the liberty of his will so cap-
tivated.” (King Charles I.) It is, however, rarely ever heard now
in this sense.

Carry, to, a verb constantly used in Virginia and the South,
instead of to lead. “ Carry the horse to water.” ‘The very oppo-
site custom prevails in parts of England, e. g., in Sheffield, where
“they lead hay, corn, coals, and almost everything which else-
where they carry or cart.” (Sir Richard Phillips’ Tour, p. 304.) -

Case, in, is said, in the Southern States, of tobacco, when it is
soft and pliant, or-in a condition to be packed away in casks

». without loss.
450 AMERICANISMS.

Catch is almgst universally pronounced ketch in the New Eng-
land States, and frequently as far South as Virginia. This is, of
course, only the old English sound and mode of spelling, retained
from early days, without change; for we read in Chaucer—

“Lord! Trowe ye that a coveitous wretche
That blameth love and hath of it despite
That of the pens that he can muche and ketche...
(Troilus and Cressida, JIL., B. 75.)

The Cockney and the Virginian alike modify it still farther, and
call it koiched. “I be kotched cold.”

Cater-cornered, a very common term in Virginia and the South,
is evidently derived from the French quatre, as in “Cater,” the
four of dice, etc.; and in “Cater-cousin.” The word occurs in
Carr’s Craven Glossary, and Grose has a similar word, cater-cross.
“You must go cater-cross the field, Kent.” (Sud voce.)

Catstick, in England the bat for playing certain games at ball,
is an Americanism as far as it is used for any unsplit stick of
wood with the bark on, which is small enough to be grasped by
the hand. This is probably the English provincial use of the
term. (J. R. Lowell.) A cat’s nap is, in New England, a short
doze.

Catsup, the more common way of writing catchup, as quoted in
the dictionaries, has Swift’s authority in its favor:

“ our homebred British cheer,
Botargo, catsup, and cavier.”

Cattle, in England, us®d generically for all animals that serve
for food or draught, is in America rarely used for any other
beasts but those of the bovine genus—perhaps because horses
were of much later introduction.

Centrical has, in Virginia especially, maintained itself in spite
of its more popular rival “central,” which has elsewhere completely
usurped its place. It was much used by Sir W. Scott: “It is time
to draw our party to a head, either at York or some other centrical
place.” (Ivanhoe.)’ “The State Papers of the Revolution use cen-
trical continually.” (Hugh Blair Grigsby.)

Certain belongs to a class of adjectives which Americans con-
stantly use as adverbs. “He’s done it sure and certain.” It is
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 451

frequently strengthened by the addition of for. “We shall be
burnt out for certain.” (Harper's Weekly, February 28, 1871.)

Chain-lightning, the Western term for “forked lightning,” is
generally rendered more redundant by being changed into chained
lightning. In both forms it is constantly applied to inferior
whiskey.

Chair is in South Carolina uniformly pronounced cheer, as stairs
become steers, and ai is generally transformed: into ee, with a
system of strict retaliation, by which, e.g. deer-meat becomes
dare-mate. :

Champ, on the other hand, has its peculiar sound of chomp in
New England as well as in the South, where stomp, in like manner,
takes the place of stamp. To chomp means here to eat greedily,
though it has also the meaning given to it in the Spectator
already: “The pieces of a tobacco-pipe left such a delicate rough-
ness on my tongue that I champed up the remaining part.”

Chance is used in the South to express a certain amount or sup-
ply: “He lost a smart chance of blood.”

Chaw, to, once the legitimate word, has, in England and here,
given way entirely to the modern form, to chew. “I saw here
the spruce-wax which the Canadians chaw, done up in little
silvered papers, a penny a roll.” (Putnam’s Magazine, January,
1853.) The older form, however, re-appears quite frequently yet,
and is especially retained for the quid of tobacco, which is called
achaw. “He said he didn’t give me nothing; never even gave
me a chaw of tobacco.” «(Sketches of Southern Life.) “ Sparrow-
grass, it don’t hurt a tree a single morsel to chaw it, if it’s a
young tree. For my part, I’d rather have my trees chawed than
not. I think it makes them grow a leetle better.” (F. Cozzens,
Sparrowgrass Papers.) Chaw is still the favorite word in Vir-
ginia and the whole South, as it came in the seventeenth century
from England, where it was in common use. Pepys writes, June
7, 1665, in his Diary: “It put me into an ill conception of my-
self and my smell (it was in the time of the plague), so that I
was forced to buy some roll-tobacco to smell and to chaw, which
took away the apprehension.” Thusitremained unchanged. “The
late eloquent Watkins Leigh was asked by a friend what he thought
of James Buchanan (the President), and answered, that he had
one serious objection to him, and when pressed to name it, said that
452 AMERICANISMS.

once, when he and Mr. Buchanan were sitting together in the
United States Senate, the latter asked him for a chew of tobacco in-
stead of achaw.” (Hugh Blair Grigsby, private letter, April, 1871.)

Check is in Pennsylvania the name of an impromptu meal of
cold provisions. (8. 8. Haldeman.)

Checkmate, to, in its secondary meaning of defeating any effort
or adversary—not on the board—has become very popular in
America since Morphy and Paulsen, in-1857 and 1858, made
chess a favorite game throughout the country. “To checkmate
means to baffle or obstruct.” (National Quarterly, December,
1860.)

Cheek has, in America, retained the old English meaning of a
door-post, as quoted in the Craven Glossary: “She threw up her
hands against the cheek of the door and prevented me from put-
ting her out.” (Rev. P. Cartwright, Autobiography, p. 188.)

Chills and Fever is the common expression in malarious regions
for fever and ague.

Chimley, for chimney, as used by Sir W. Scott: “A kirk with
a chimley in it was fitter for them” (Rob Roy, I., ch. 120), is very
common in all parts of the United States, though the fuller form,
chimbley, is perhaps even more general :

““Agin the chimdly crooknecks hung,
An’ in amongs ’em rusted :
The ole Queen’s arm that gran’ther Young
Fetched back from Concord busted.”
(J. R. Lowell. Courtin’.)

Chirp, to, frequently enlarged into chirrup, and considered a
mispronunciation of cheer up, but quoted as chirp, by Johnson,
is in both forms in common use in America. Insects are here
said to chirp, and the noun is substituted for the English erick.

Chist is the common New England pronunciation of chesé, as
kittle of kettle, and justified, as J. R. Lowell pleads, by the fact
that both Bishop Hall and Purchas in his “ Pilgrims” have chist,
as well as by the derivation of the word from the Latin cista
(German, Kiste). :

Chivalry isa term often applied to Southern gentry and their
peculiar social views. “The Chivalry of the South differs from
the Yankee precisely as the Cavalier differed from the Puritan.”
(Southern Literary Messenger, June, 1849.)
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 453

Chock, to, in the sense of to fill up, as used in Fuller’s
Worthies, continues to be used in America. “ What made the
trunk so awful heavy, I couldn’t see; but I found afterward she
had all her clothes and mine, and then she’d chocked in all ’round
with maple-sugar, and that’s as heavy as the ten commandments
to a horse-thief.” (Putnam’s Magazine, June, 1868.) Hence, also,
chockfull, of which Halliwell says: “ Chockfull is still in use in
various counties.” It is an open question, whether the term
derives its meaning from the old English chekkefulle, quite full,
or from the verb, to choke, or from filling the scales till they come
down with a shock. (Slang Dictionary, p. 100.) “The house was
chockfull, and when Forrest appeared, their shouts were terrific.”
(Philadelphia Ledger, January 21, 1851.)

Choose, to, is used by low-bred people, with the peculiar mean-
ing of to choose not to take what is offered. A dish offered at
table is declined with the words, “I don’t choose any.”

Chore, a task or small work of domestic nature, generally used
in the plural, is in all probability the old English char, from which
the modern charwoman is derived. J. R. Lowell states, however,
that chore occurs already in Ben Jonson, and humorously derives
it from the French jour, as a day’s work. Its origin is more likely
to be sought in the Anglo-Saxon caer, our word care, with the
French softening of the initial, especially as the gradual transi-
tion from caer to char and chore, can be distinctly traced. Shakes-
peare speaks of

“the maid that milks

And does the meanest chares”»—
(Antony and Cleopatra.)

while J. R. Lowell sings:

“T love to start out arter night’s begun,
An’ all the chores about the house are done.”
(Biglow Papers, II., p. 51.)

“As daylight began to glimmer, I crowed very loudly several
times, hoping that the old darkey who did the chores would
think it was morning, and get up to light the fires.” (Adlantic
Monthly, November, 1870.)

Chuckfull, an unwarranted but frequent mode of spelling chock-
full. “These prairies are nature’s banks, stuffed chuckfull of
454 AMERICANISMS.

cash, which any man can draw out if he will only present his
check. The funds are deposited to the credit of Labor, Pluck &
Co. It is the poor man’s savings’ bank.” (Putnam's Magazine,
December, 1868.)

Chunk, in the sense of a short, stout piece of wood, is not un-
known to English provincials, but chunky is probably a genuine
Americanism, first used by Dr. Kane, of North Pole celebrity.
“ A tolerable chunk of a pony,” means, in Southern and Western
parlance, a cob.

Circumstance is not unfrequently used half-humorously, and
almost always negatively, to indicate a matter of more or less
importance. “Yes, as you say, this fish is first-rate, but it ain’t a
circumstance to what can be done in the cooking way.” (W.S.
Mayo, Kaloolah, p. 37.) ,

-Claybank, a word not found in English dictionaries, is in
America often used to denote the color most common to a bank
of clay. “I mounted a claybank colored nag and rode to the
hunt.” (Putnam’s Magazine, February, 1855.)

Clean, used as an adverb for, entirely, is so far from being an
Americanism, that Shakespeare uses it continually, even saying
clean gone in the sense of, out of sight. “ The old mare, summon-
ing all her mettle, rose at the fence and went clean over it, nota
single horse daring to follow her.” (Rural Register, May, 1847.)

Clerk, in the North generally pronounced clurk, is in Virginia
and some parts of the South still called clark, as it was not only
sounded, but even written, at the time when that colony was
settled. Pepys writes, July 30, 1662: “So we got a dish of
steaks at the White Hart, while his clarkes were feasting of it in
the best room of the house.”

Clever, one of the most disputed words in our speech, seems to
have been undeservedly criticized, as its meaning varies almost
infinitely, with the locality in which it is used. Bailey says of
it: “ Clever is in all senses but a low word, scarcely ever used in
burlesque and conversation, and applied to anything a man likes,
without any settled meaning.” If Northern people among us,
therefore, choose to employ it in the sense of good-natured and
obliging, there seems to be no ground whatever for objection.
Even now this troublesome word, a favorite with our race wher-
ever they are, can neither be traced back to an undoubted deriva-

Pa
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 455

tion nor defined in its meaning beyond cavil. Used in Kngland,
generally, for good-looking, or handy and dexterous;. it means in
Norfolk, rather, honest and respectable, and sounds there like
claver. In some districts of Southern Wales it indicates a state
of good health; in a few southern counties perfect clearness and
completeness, and in other parts, as with us, courtesy and affa-
bility. The American pet-word, smart, has, however, largely
superseded it in our speech, and only in Virginia and some parts
of the South clever is still much used in its old English meaning
of skillful at work and talented in mind.

Climb, to, is occasionally used in the extraordinary sense of
climbing down, as in the account of the Rev. H. W. Beecher :—
“T partly climbed down, and partly clambered back again, satisfied
that it was easier to get myself in than to get the flowers out.”
(Star Papers, p. 41.)

Clip, to, in the sense of to give a blow; and the noun, a clip,
meaning a blow, must be looked upon as Americanisms, though
Bailey has a clop for a blow, and Halliwell (p. 255, No. 6) the
same. “He ran up to him, hit him a severe clip, and dashed
through the window.” (Police Gazette, November 17, 1860.)

Clothier, besides being the ordinary name of a tailor and dra-
per, is here also used to designate a person who makes and fulls
cloths, which is not done in England.

Coast, to, mean, in boys’ parlance, to slide down a frozen or.
snow-covered hill on a sled. The term, used in New England and
New York only, is not improbably derived from the French céle
of their Canadian neighbors.

Coincidence, although quoted by J. Angus as an Americanism,
is not unknown to English authors.

Collide, to, designates the sudden and violent meeting of two.
persons, trains, vessels, ete., in motion. Although the English
generally use to collision, as in “ Wave collisions wave ” (Royston
Pigott in Trans. Royal Microscop. Society, December, 1870, p.
298), the term is not, as has been sneeringly stated, the “ happy
result of frequent railway collisions,” but a good English word.
(Notes and Queries, March 28, 1868.)

Comical has in the South the peculiar meaning of strange, ex-
traordinary. “Dr. White, who discovered the Puncheon Run
Falls, said to a mountaineer that they were a great curiosity. ‘I
456 AMERICA NISMS.

don’t see nothing kewrus about’em,’ replied the man disdainfully,
‘when the water comes over the top, it is bound to run down to
the bottom, and der ain’t nothin’ kewrus or comical in that. Now,’
—adding meditatively—‘ if the water was to run up, you see, then
Pd allow it to be akewrosity’”” (E. A. Pollard, Southern Scenery.)

Company has recently acquired a new meaning in California,
where it represents five societies, respectively called “ Yung Loo,”
“Si Yap,’ ‘Sam Yap,” “Yan Wo,” and “Ning Yeung,” and
forming the connecting link between the Chinese immigrants and
their native land. “ Maintaining a sort of intelligence-office on a
large scale, they effect engagements for the Chinamen, look after
their interests here and at home, are their bankers and brokers,
and return their embalmed bodies to their families in China.
For these services they are paid by a percentage on wages re-
ceived, acting, in fact, as a sort of general assurance-office for the
benefit of their clients.” (Frank H. Norton, Our Labor System,
1871.)

Concern means here, more frequently than in England, what
Grose already gives as its signification, “a small estate ;” and then
is extended to all that belongs to a certain business without
régard to size: “ General Sherman having ordered a certain depot
to be discontinued, the removal of the large amount of stores pro-
duced delay; after several reports, he blurts out thus: Better
burn the whole concern down than go. on this way.” (Putnam’s
Magazine, January, 1870.)

Conduct, to, is in America frequently used willout the reflexive
pronoun, and the unpleasant form seems to creep into the pages
of English writers also. “Castor and Pollux in their famous Ar-
gonantic expedition conducted with great gallantry.” (Alden Brad-
ford, The Wonders of the Heavens.) “Mr. Schutt said to him,
How strangely you have conducted!” (Binghamton Republican,
January 17, 1871.)

Connection, in America, points out the distinction between
persons united by common descent, who are called * relations,”
while connections are related only by marriage. In England,
“relations” is the common designation of all; the beantiful
words, “kinsman and kinswoman,” are but rarely heard here, and
the latter especially, but very imperfectly represented by, female
relative. (R. G. White.) Jn this connection is a favorite phrase
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 457

of some American writers, which Fitz Greene Halleck advised Mr.
Gould, the author of Good English, to doom to what Sir W.
Scott’s daughter called, unquestionable fire.

Considerable, used as an adverb or noun, is an unwarrantable
abuse, but of common occurrence, even with careful writers. “That
was considerable of a battle, wasn’t it?” (Lucian Minor. Diary.
Atlantic Monthly, July, 1870.)

Constable, in America, designates no other officer but the city
or town official, whose duty it is to preserve peace, carry out the
orders of the sheriff, attend juries, etc.; while in England the
constables duties and powers extend over a whole district.

Contemplate, to, is constantly used here for the simpler word,
to propose, to intend, and, still worse, frequently enlarged into, to
have in contemplation. These are evidences of that “habitual
showiness in language, as in dress and manners, which denotes
lack of discipline or lack of refinement. Our American grandilo-
quence, the tendency to which is getting more and more sub-
dued, comes partly from youthfulness, partly from license, the
bastard of Liberty, and partly from the geographical and political
greatness of the country, which Coleridge says is to be ‘ England
in glorious magnification. ” (G. H. Calvert.)

Convenient has assumed a new meaning in the United States,
probably due to Irish influence. It is used to denote what is
near at hand, within easy reach; a farm will thus be advertised
as having “ wood and water convenient to the house.”

Corduroy, the name of a ribbed stuff, has in new clearings and
sparsely populated districts of the South given its name to a
rough kind of road, consisting of loose poles or logs laid across
the swamp, which resembles somewhat the ribbed appearance of
the velvet. “Here we made our first acquaintance with those .
formidable instruments of torture called corduroy-roads; the
jolting was terrific, but we were told it was the only road possible
in these low grounds.” (Letters from the South, p. 217.)

Cornwallis, the unfortunate commander of the British troops,
survives sadly in the memory of New England by the name of a
mock-muster held annually, to take the place of the old Guy
Fawkes procession, and to commemorate the surrender at York-
town. J. R. Lowell says: “It was a masquerade in which the
graye and suppressed humor, of which the Yankees are fuller

20
458 * AMERICANISMS.

than other people, burst through all restraints and disported
itself in all the wildest vagaries of fun.” “It allowed some vent
to those natural instincts which Puritanism had scotched but
not killed.”

“There is fun to a Cornwallis, I ain’t agoin’ to deny it.”
(Biglow Papers, I., p. 26.)
“ Recollect wut fun we hed, you ’n I an Ezzy Hollis,
Up there, to Waltham plain, ahavin’ the Cornwallis.”
(Biglow Papers.)

Corp takes in Pennsylvania, very frequently, the place of the
fuller form, corpse.

Corporosity, for the living body, belongs to the same part of the
country, and is still in common use. “His corporosity touches
the ground with his hands in a vain attempt to reach it.” (J.C.
Neal, Charcoal Sketches.)

Cotbetty, an American compound of the English cot, which
English glossaries quote as meaning an effeminate, troublesome
man, and the term Betty, used very much in the same sense, is
occasionally heard to denote a man who meddles with woman’s
special duties in a household.

Coverlid, instead of the legitimate English coverlet, is so gener-
ally used that it must be considered a genuine Americanism.
J. R. Lowell defends it on the ground that it “is nearer its French
original than the diminutive coverlet, into which it has been
ignorantly corrupted in politer speech”—its ancestor being couwvre-
lit, the cover for the bed.

Cow, heard as k-yow in the New England States, is the inher-
itance of early settlers from Essex, Norfolk, and Sussex, where the
same pronunciation is still prevalent among the laboring classes.

“It cannot be doubted, however, that the nasal twang of the early
Puritans, also, has left its indelible impress upon Yankee speech,
precisely as it is heard to this day in conventicle prayer-meetings
in Norwich and Boston, Colchester and Harwich. The word cow
was once made a shibboleth in the following manner: “During
the Kansas excitement, a stalwart but illiberal Missourian was
the owner of a ferry on the main-track of immigration. Dreading
the effect of an influx of New England innovators, he established
a test which was satisfactory to himself, though one cannot but
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 459

doubt its universal applicability. He kept tied by the horns to a
tree on the river-bank one of the ‘milky mothers of his herd,
and on the arrival of a customer, was wont to inquire, whether
‘he saw that thar brute,’ and what he ‘mought call her?’ Ifthe
applicant reckoned it was a cow, he could go on his way rejoicing ;
but should he guess it to be a keow, or in a moment of hapless
impudence asked the questioner if he ‘didn’t spose everybody
knew a keow, he must needs seek some other crossing-place, as
well as depart under a heavy weight of malediction.” (Overland
Monthly, February, 1870, p. 189.)

Cowcumber, also, is universal Yankee, and quite common all
over the United States—excused as “coming nearest, to the nasal
sound of the original concombre.” (J. R. Lowell.)

Cracker, meaning a small firework, has in America entirely
superseded the English squid, which is only heard in political
slang. It designates, also, a small hard biscuit, as is the case in
the North of England.

Cracklings, a favorite toothsome dish of the Southern States,
consisting of pieces of the rind of pork roasted, which are baked
into the bread of negroes, and make one of their greatest luxuries,
known as goody-bread.

Creature is frequently used in the South for an animal, espe-
cially a horse. Its more common form is erttier, with a nice dis-
tinction between the two, when applied to men, as explained by
General Squash of Connecticut in the Gouty Philosopher: “The
word creature,” said the General, “implies a certain amount of
goodness, beauty, respect, and love, as when we talk of God’s crea-
tures ; whereas critter is always associated with some idea of in-
feriority in the person so designated, and of good or even ill.
natured contempt on the part of the speaker. Thus when I tell
you that Mrs. or Miss A is a creature, you'll learn, if you do
not interrupt me, that I consider her lovely either in mind or
person or both. But were I to call her critter, and no more, you’d
be justified in believing that, in my opinion, she was either a slut,
a scold, a scandalmonger, a fool, or a flirt, and that I had no re-
spect for her. IfI said to you in the street: ‘Look at that lovely
creature!’ it would probably be to direct your attention to a fine
woman or a beautiful child. Butif I said: ‘Look at that pretty
critter’ the words might apply to a pet-poodle or a prancing

 
460 AMERICANISMS.

horse. Ours isa great country, sir, a very great country, but it
swarms with critters, as you’ll see if you travel much among us
and open your eyes as you go. They are the unwholesome growth
of our over-ripe civilization and of our too much liberty.” (Black-
wood, October, 1867.)

Creek, in New York and the Western States a small stream,
_ such as in New England is called a brook, and elsewhere a run or

branch. Its familiar pronunciation is erick, as it is written by
Captain John Smith and in the dedication of Fuller’s Holy Warre.
“Neare their habitation is little small wood or old trees on the
ground, by reason of their burning of them for fire. So that a
man may gallop a horse amongst these woods anyway, but where
the creekes or rivers shall hinder.” (Captain John Smith, Vir-
ginia, IL, p. 131.) “It was a dark and stormy night, when the
good Antony arrived at the creek (sagely denominated Haarlem
River), which separates the island of Manhattan from the main-
land.” (W. Irving, Knickerbocker History of New York.)

Cruel, used as in Hakluyt for great, is one of the intensive ex-
pressions much affected by uneducated Americans, but not an
Americanism. It was brought over from England in the early
part of the seventeenth century. Thus Pepys, in his Diary, July
31, 1662, writes: “ Met Captain Brown of the Rosebush, at which
he was cruel angry.” And again, February 21, 1666-7, he says:
“W. Batten denies all, but is erwed mad.”

Cry, to, had in former days, in the New England States, the
special meaning, to publish the banns of marriage in church.
“They shall be cried three times in church, before they can be
married.” (Laws of Connecticut.)

Curious, in the sense of nice, excellent, as used by New Eng-
land farmers, is not an Americanism, as it occurs continually in
old English writers, and has only been preserved here, while other
terms are substituted for it in England.

Curfew—the name and the ceremony—were both in use in
Pennsylvania (Northumberland County), in 1835, and perhaps
later.

“The shivering wretches at the curfew found,
Dejected, shrunk into their sordid beds.”’
(Thomson. Liberty, IV., 755.)

Curtitude is occasionally found for shortness. “German market
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 461

women, who, in skirts of convenient curtitude, carry their loads
in large, convenient baskets.” (S. S. Haldeman, Notes.)

Cute, instead of acute, has become almost a word of its own,
being stronger in its peculiar meaning than the fuller form, and
almost exclusively applied to Yankees. “What became of the
particularly *cwte Yankee child, who left his home and native
parish at the age of fifteen months, because he was given to un-
derstand that his parents intended to call him Caleb?” (N. Haw-
thorne.) The word is, however, not unknown in England also.
(Slang Dictionary, p. 115.)

D.

Daddock, an old English term, rarely heard abroad, even in pro-
vincial dialects, is quite common in the rural districts of the New
England States, and not unfrequent in the West, where the
great long trunks of fallen trees, slowly rotting away and turning
into mould, are thus called.

Daffa-down-dilly, a combination of “Sapharoun,” or Saffron-
lily with Asphodelus, the old English affodilly, which became,
on a mutual compromise, not rare in popular names, daffadown-
dilly, the old English enlargement of daffodill, and was thus used
by Spenser, in his “ Shepherd’s Callendar.” It has been revived
or maintained its vitality in Virginia.

“ Diaphenia, like the daffa-down-dilly,
White as the sun, fair as the lily,
Heigh ho! how I love thee.”
(Henry Constable.)
So also:
“ Daffa Down Dilly came up in the cold

Thro’ the brown mould.”
(Southern Magazine, January, 1871.)

Daft, from Chaucer’s daffe, a fool, and in Scottish and North of
England dialects meaning a lunatic, or one that has been befooled,
is likewise quite frequently heard in the South: “are you daft to
do such a thing?”

Dander, instead of dandruff, in the phrase, “to get one’s dan-
der up,” is supposed Iudicrously to substitute the dandruff for
the hair itself. (?) “He was as spunky as thunder, and when a
462 AMERICANISMS.

Quaker gets his dander up, it’s like a Northwester.” (Major
Jack Downing’s Letiers, p. 75.)

“ What will get your dander riz?”
(J. R. Lowell. Biglow Papers, I., p. 10.)

Dansy is used, in Pennsylvania, of persons who are failing from
old age. It is the same word which Grose quotes as dansy-héaded
in Norfolk and Suffolk, meaning giddy or thoughtless.

Dark Moon, the time between the old and the new moon, is
used in the West as in some parts of England.

Daze, an ancient form of dazzle, and used by Spenser, Drayton,
and others as a verb, is here often used as a noun, to represent a
state of utter bewilderment—“ She sat like one in a daze, as if
stunned by the strangeness of her surroundings.” (Putnam’s
Magazine, Jaguary, 1870.)

Deaf is frequently pronounced deef, a8 was done in olden times,
and still continues to be done in Westmoreland, Cumberland,
and other parts of England. In Scotland, soil and vegetables are
both called deaf, when they are sterile ; and thus in America, also,
nuts are said to be deaf when they are decayed or empty.

Dearborn is the name of a light four-wheeled carriage, like the
Brougham called after its inventor. “ At last the stage was ready
—a three-seated dearborn with one white and one brown horse.”
(Lippincot?’s Magazine, March, 1871, p. 245.)

Deck, the name of a pack of cards, repeatedly charged as an
Americanism, is so thoroughly English that it is used in Hoyle’s
famous Book of Games. It is, however, in the Western States
almost exclusively employed instead of pack, which is rarely heard
there.

Declension, very rarely used in England for the act of declining,
is not unfrequent here. “ He asked me to drive with him to-day,
but I was forced to send him a declension.” (Southern Literary
Messenger, July, 1859.)

Deed, to, meaning to transfer by deed, is a genuine American-
ism in its use asa verb. “I fear he has already deeded away all
his property, and his wife will have nothing when he dies.” This
is generally done by deed of trust, as the hypothecation of landed
property is uniformly called in the Middle and Southern
States.
OLD FRIENDS .WITH NEW FACES. 463

Deputize, to, in the sense of to appoint a deputy, is occasionally
heard, as it was in the days of Bailey, who mentions it as a term
just coming into fashion when he wrote his great work.

Desperate is, in like manner, used now and then for exceedingly.
“He was desperate glad to see you, I vow.” (W. G. Simms, The
Yemassee.) It is commonly pronounced desprat, or even desput.

Dew is the common pronunciation of do in New England, for
the Yankee, “innocently unconscious,” ignores all difference be-
tween oo and w in a number of words; and his great advocate, J.
R. Lowell, pleads with much force in his behalf, that in this he
only follows faithfully the example of the common people of Nor-
folk and Cambridge in England, who are descended from the
same stock with himself. Why he should distinguish, however,
between some words and others is not quite clear; but while he
says 200 for new, Joo for Jew, and stoo for stew, he never changes
few; he speaks of destitoot, institoot, and Toosday, but leaves
depute as it is.

Dickey, a gentleman’s shirt-collar in New England, means a
false shirt-front in England. It is said to have originated with
the students of Trinity College, Dublin, who at first styled it
“Tommy,” from roy, a section, which the servants changed into
“Dicky.” (Slang Dictionary, sub voce.) “My soul swells till it
almost tears the shirt of my buzzum, and even fractures my
dickey.” (J. C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches, IIL. p. 34.)

Dining-room servant, the name given especially in the South to
the English “butler,” in the North generally represented by the
“ parlor-maid.”

Dirt is in America generally used for soil, as rag is used for
any piece of linen or cotton. A Southern lady will order her ser-
vant to “fill a flower-pot with dirt and bring it to her.” An
unpaved road is carelessly called a dirt-road, and the foreigner is
apt to be surprised at hearing people speak of clean dirt. “We
walked on dirt-floors for carpets, sat on benches for chairs, ate on
puncheon tables, had forked sticks and butcher-knives for knives
and forks.” (Rey. P. Cartwright, Autodiography, p. 486.) “The
love of dirt is among the earliest passions.” (C. D. Warner, My
Summer in a Garden, 1871.)

Disremember, to, now entirely out of use in England, still sur-
vives in the South and West.
464 AMERICANISMS.

“ He fou’t us game, somehow, I disremember
Jest how the thing kem round.”
(F. B. Harte.)

Dodger has, besides the ordinary signification, the meaning of
unleavened corn-bread in Virginia and the West, though its more
frequent form is corndodger.

Dogs is the name still given to andirons in Virginia, and cur-
rent also in New England. “In Walter de Bibleworth I find
chiens glossed in the margin by andirons.” (J. R. Lowell.) “ Brai-
ley’s Graphical and Historical Illustrator says that some years
ago they dug up, ina Roman camp (in England) a pair of iron
dogs, so that they are a piece of ancient furniture” (dem). They
are also called jire-dogs, probably from a faint resemblance to dogs,
and the frequent occurrence of dogs’ heads on their front part. In
New England a thrifty housekeeper speaks of “going out to buy
a pair of dogs.”

Dominies—with a long 0, not déminies, as in Scotland, for
schoolmasters—is a title still used for their ministers by the so-
called Dutch Reformed Church in portions of New York and
New Jersey.

Dove, the old form of the past tense of dive, is still much used
by seamen, and in some parts of the United States by landsmen

also.
“Straight into the river Kivasind
Plunged as if he were an otter,
Dove as if he were a beaver.”
(H. W. Longfellow. Hiawatha, Canto VIL)

Down, to, in the sense of to humble, as m Sidney’s “to down
proud hearts,” is utterly forgotten in England, but well preserved
in America, “I drew my horsewhip and told the negro if he at-
tempted to close the gate, I would down him.” (Rev. P. Cart-
wright, Autobiography, p. 206.)

Dozy and dozied are said in Pennsylvania of timber beginning
to decay and unfit for use, while the decay is yet hardly percepti-
ble, but the timber already brittle. (8. 8. Haldeman.)

Dreadful belongs to the large class of words with strong mean-
ings, like awful, terrible, horrible, excessive, etc., which Americans
love unfortunately to use on all occasions for the sake of creating
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 465

a sensation, or at least attracting attention by the form, which
they cannot gain by the substance of what they have to say.

Dress las in America entirely superseded the word gown, as a
part of a lady’s costume; the latter term being but rarely heard,
except among very aged persons.

Driver, in like manner, is the universal name for the man who
drives the horses, whether the latter pull a plough or draw an
elegant carriage. The English coachman is comparatively un-
known.

Dud, in the singular, is an Americanism; the plural form being
at least known in England, though not much used. The latter
means, however, not only rags and old clothes, but all moveable
property. “The three (Railway) Commissioners, in whose ap-
pointment you had no voice, decide that you must get out, leave
your house, bundle out your duds, and be off.” (New York Tri-
bune, January 23,1871.) “Think of her? Ithink she is dressed
like a dud; can’t say how she would look in the costume of the
present century.” (Putnam’s Magazine, February, 1870.)

Dump, to, in the sense of unloading a cart by tilting it up, is
peculiar to this country. It is in all probability an imitative term,
made from the sound, the heavy thud or knock which that opera-
tion produces. “It is no joke to go on all day dumping loads of
dirt down that steep embankment, and each time you tilt your
cart to fancy mule and cart all going overboard.” (How to get
Rich, p.11%.) Open lots, where “rubbish may be shot,” as the
English say, are here called dumping-grounds..

Dutiable, liable to duty, a term which in the United States
never represents the tax levied on real estate or farmers’ stock.
The word, which came into use with the first tariff, has proved
eminently useful, and is universally adopted. “The following
articles shall be dutiable hereafter at the fixed rates.” (Act of
Congress, 1865.)

Dyspeptic, an unfortunately frequent word in American con-
versation, has long lost its special meaning, and is now used to
denote all the various forms of weakness of the digestive organs,
which lead the citizens of the republic to appreciate with special
bitterness the force of the old saying, that “God gave us meat,
but the Devil sent us cooks.”

20*
466 AMERICANISMS.

E.

Eat, to, is one of a class of verbs, which boundless license has
led to apply to persons, instead of, give to eat. A Western steam-
boat is thus said to be able “to eat four hundred passengers and
to sleep at least two hundred.” “Hoosier: Squire, what pay do
you give? Contractor: Ten bitsa day. Hoosier: Why, Squire,
I was told you’d give us two dollars a-day and eat us.” (Pichings
from the Picayune, p. 47.)

Zccentric has in Western parlance obtained a curious meaning,
which threatens to spread in spite of its absurdity. “I want my
land down to the eccentric,” said an illiterate man in Illinois, ob-
jecting to the reservation of mining rights under his purchase.

Edibles and Bibibles is a similar innovation, used for food and
drink. “The table was spread and loaded with edibles and bibi-
bles of every possible kind.” (Pittsburg Dispatch, August, 1860.)

Editorial, used instead of the English leader or leading article,
is in this sense a genuine Americanism. The term used ellipti-
cally for Editorial Article, arose from the custom of inserting in
each day’s paper only one or two articles, written by the editor
himself, while the others were furnished by contributors or irre-
sponsible sub-editors. It has, however, firmly established itself in
our speech, and found a companion of still worse character in the
. Local, which designates either the articles of local interest only, or
the reporter whose special duty it is to collect local news. In try-
ing to find an article in a newspaper, a man will therefore say:
“Tt is not an Hditorial ; you must look among the Locals.”

Liducational, often quoted as a new word, occurs in Burke, and
has only been revived in our day. Hducator, also, used more than
once-by English writers, has only recently obtained that currency
among us which it had never been able to secure before. As
there is need for a word which shall comprehend every kind of
person who devotes himself to the education of the young, from
the children’s governess to the renowned professor, the term will
probably become more and more popular.

gg, to, in Pennsylvania pronounced to agg, and all over the
country confounded with the verb, to edge, is used in America in
its ancient meaning of inciting and pushing forward, as well as in
the more recent sense of pelting with eggs. ‘The drede of God
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 467

is that we turne noghte agayne tille oure and yure thurghe any
ille eggyng.” (MS. Lnncoln, A. I., 17, fol. 196.) “The man, a
black abolitionist of the deepest dye, was egged out of town last
night, and will find it safer, we venture to say, not to show him-
self again.” (Kansas paper, 1860.)

Eimptyings, commonly pronounced and written emptin’s in New
England, means there the lees of beer, etc., and yeast; but even J.
R. Lowell, the master of Yankee speech, professes to be utterly at
a loss to divine its origin.

“ And it’s jest money throwed away to put the emptin’s in.”
(J. R. Lowell, Biglow Papers, IL. p. 11.)

End is in the same regions very generally pronounced eends.
“Stingy enough to skim his milk at both eends.”

Lngine, the common abbreviation of Fire-Engine, though gener-
ally pronounced tnjine (so as to rhyme with mine), has in popular
speech become almost hopelessly mixed up with Injin, the Indian,
and injens, little seed-onions. Even persons who speak of the full-
grown seed as onions, will call the small ones tnjens. J. R. Low-
ell says with humorous pathos, in his indefatigable efforts to justify
Yankeeisms: “In one of Dodsley’s Old Plays we have onions rhym-
ing with mintons—I have tears‘in my eyes while I record it.”
(Preface to Biglow Papers, p. 37.) “What do you call this
when ’tis bil’d and the skin’s tuk off ? what’s this without injens ?”
(J. O. Neal, Charcoal Sketches, Il., p. 42.)

Enthuse, to, in the sense of filling or being filled with enthusiasm,
is considered by R.G. White so exclusively a Southern word, that he
says he “never heard or saw it used, or heard of its use, by any
person born and bred North of the Potomac.” Since those words
were written, the word—bad as it is—has proved too useful to be
so strictly confined any longer, and found its way even to England.
“Tt seems that this State, so quickly enthused by the generous and
loyal cause of emancipation, has grown weary of virtuous effort,
and again stands still.” (Baltimore American.)

Esquire, a title in England still given only to certain classes of
men, and long reserved in the United States also to lawyers and
other privileged persons, is now with republican uniformity given
alike to the highest and the lowest, who does not boast of a mili-
tary or other title; the result being that it is strictly ee to the
two extremes of society.

,
468 AMERICANISMS.

Evening, in the South and West, takes the place of the after-
noon—the time between dinner and supper being evening, and
after supper night. Persons meeting at two or three o’clock,
wish each other “Good evening,” and speak of a “fine night,” or
promise to “come to-night,” although the sun may but just haye
sunk below the horizon.

F.

Factory- Cotton designates in America unbleached cotton goods
made at home, in contrast with those imported.

Fair, to, generally used in the form of to fair off, or to fair
up, is a Southern term denoting that the weather is clearing up
slowly.

Fall, for Autumn, by no means an Americanism, is 4 term
which had only become unfamiliar to English ears. It has been
used nearly by every writer of mark, and almost always in pic-
turesque contrast with the corresponding name of Spring, since
the green verdure which springs forth in the early season, falls
to the ground again in autumn.

“ A honey tongue and heart of gall,
Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.”
(Sir W. Raleigh.)
“ What crowd of patients the town-doctor kills,
Or how last fail he raised the weekly bills.”
(Dryden.)

Middleton also plays upon the words: “ May’st thou have a reason-
able good spring, for thou art like to have many dangerous foul
falls.” (Quoted by J. R. Lowell.) The beautiful word, thus
enjoying poetical honors and prose-dignity in every century, is a
word peculiarly dear to Americans, as the season itself is pecu-
liarly beautiful in their country. There is nothing’ to be said, on
the other hand, in excuse of the word fall as used to designate a
fall of rain. “He thought there would be a fall soon.” Falling
weather is, in this sense, almost universally used in the United
States to designate, if not absolute rain, any kind of damp,
misty, or drizzling weather.

Family. A man of family, in England, almost exclusively
denotes a man of good family; in America it means a man who
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 469

has a family—wife and children. “Has he any family?” means,
therefore, “Has he any children ?”

Fancy, denotes in America everything fantastical and unusual,
not only, as is the case in Macaulay’s “ fancy-prices” paid by the
Prussian king for his giant soldiers, but also things and Persone
more ornamental than useful. “ /ancy-men and fancy-women” are
spoken of as congregating at fashionable watering-places, and fancy-
stocks are such as exist only on paper. “For a few weeks Crystal-
palace stock was one of the most active fancies. No one denied
that it was very fanciful stock.” (Harper’s Monthly, November,
1853.) “ Near one of the busiest points of the city a little fancy-
store, in a modest wooden house, nestled between two pretentious
marble-fronts.” (Putnam’s Magazine, October, 1868.)

Favor, to, resumes frequently its ancient meaning, mentioned
by Grose when he says: “ Favor, to ease, to spare.” It is used of
horses and other animals, rarely of men, when they limp slightly,
sparing one foot. “The off horse favors his right foot.”

Fay, to, the ancient word, rarely used since Swift, and cur-
tailed from fadge, is still often heard in New England, with the
meaning of to fit. “That fays nicely.”

Feather, to, is in like manner still found in the same locality
to designate the rising of cream on the surface of a cup of tea or
coffee.

February loses, in the South, its first 7; and sounds Febuary, as
it does among illiterate people in England.

Freaze, or feeze, or even pheeze, to be in a state of excitement, a
very common expression in Virginia and the Southern States, is
not original in America. Nall’s Glossary of Yarmouth words
already contains a long note on the term, aid Chaucer has

* And thereat came a rage and such a vese
That it madd all the gates for to rese.”
(Knight’s Tale, MS.)

Wiclife also speaks of a placid pool of water that “ gaderid togider
having no jiyss.” (John V., v. 4.) It comes from the Anglo-
Saxon fysan, used to denote the rapid and noisy movement of
water.

Female is one of the unfortunate words which have of late
obtained very general currency among Americans, merely because
470 AMERICANISMS.

it may be used safely and conveniently for all members of the fair
sex indiscriminately, from the first lady in the land to the lowest
outcast. It was once before in general use—in the reigns of Eliza-
beth and James—as part of the affected language of the court,
and satirized unmercifully by the dramatists of that period.
Shakespeare uses it frequently and often with all respect. Hume,
we are told, calls Joan of Arc a female. Sir W. Scott says female
twice as often as woman. Few persons certainly can entirely dis-
sever the word from its instinctive association with-animal life,
and no idiom of our day and land is probably more offensive to
good taste. It was quite natural that the same tendency should
lead to the employment of the corresponding term male, and
hence the press—the New York Tribune leading—teems with
advertisements in which professors, servants, and errand-boys are
all promiscuously offered as “ Afale Help,” and governesses, com-
panions, and cooks as “ Female Help.” The last agitation in the
republic, in favor of extending the right of suffrage from the
negroes to women, has led to the introduction of the additional
fhorr or of an “ Advanced Female.”

Fetch, to, in the sense of performing, as in South’s: “He
fetches his blows quick and sure,” is still in use in the South.
“Since, with an arm no bigger than the round of a chair, you
fetched the old schoolmaster the famous lick, plump in the black of
his eye.” (Putnam’s Magazine, February, 1853.) But in the sense
of bringing, the word may be said to be almost unknown there:
on the other hand it is, curiously enough, used for bringing up:
“How you were the child of a missionary, and from your cradle
had been fetched up for the work.” (Zb., November, 1870.) The
very old participle, fotch, still continues in use among low people,
and is very general among the negroes of the South. “They are
almost all on ’em, sir, straight down from old Diomed, that old
master Hoomes had fotch out from England, across the water,
more than twenty years ago.” (J. P. Kennedy, Swallow Barn.)
Nor is the hybrid fotched wanting: “I was soon fotched up in
the victualling line.” (J.C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches.)

Fice or phyce, and an almost endless variety of spellings, desig-
nates very generally in the South a small worthless cur. “De
debbil’s in that ’ar fice, Jefferson would say a dozen times a day,
and shake his gray head doubtfully.” (Putnam’s Magazine, Au-

 
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. AVL

gust, 1868.) It is evidently the last small remnant of the old
English foisting cur, quoted as foisting hound in Wright’s Pro-
vincial Dialects. Nares gives nearly the whole process of gradual
corruption: foisting—foisty—foist—fyst—fyce, and Grose already
has it, fyst. Halliwell describes the foisting dog as a kind of
lap-dog, so called from its bad habits, which often have to serve
as an excuse for the sins of the owner. A fisting hound, also, is
mentioned as a kind of spaniel, in Harrison’s Hngland, p. 230.

Finding-store, the English ‘“ Grindery-warehouse,” in which
shoemakers’ tools are kept for sale, is considered an Americanism.

Finnikin, finniking, and even jfinnicky, are American corrup-
tions of finical in frequent use. “You are too finnicky to kill
yourself.” (Putnam’s Magazine, September, 1870.)

Fire, to, a term very generally used for to throw. “The boys
were firing stones at the house at a great rate, and, after a while,
the negroes began firing back with rocks, chunks, and broken
bricks.” (Charleston Courter, September 19, 1870.)

Fireworks is the quaint substitute which New Englanders not
unfrequently use for matches. “<‘ Wal,’ said our host, ‘ that’s easy
enough. Got any fireworks? ‘Fireworks? I queried back
again. Our friend answered, in seeming surprise: ‘No! Haint
none. Wait a minit! So he entered the house and speedily
returned with a box of matches.” (Putnam’s Magazine, Sep-
tember, 1854.)

Fish-skin, used in New England to clarify coffee. (J. R. Low-
ell, Glossary to Biglow Papers.)

Fisticate, to, severely censured as an American vulgarism, is
found in Captain John Smith’s Account of Virginia: “There are
so many fisticating tobacco-mungers in England.” (IL. p. 38.)

Fiz, to, may be safely called the Amaerican word of words, since
there is probably no action whatever, performed by mind or body,
which is not represented at some time or other by the universal
term. It has well been called the strongest evidence of that
national indolence which avoids the trouble of careful thought at
all hazards, and of that restless hurry which ever makes the word
welcome that comes up first and saves time. Whatever is to be
made, whatever needs repair, whatever requires arrangement—all
is fixed. The farmer fixes his gates, the mechanic his workbench,
the seamstress her sewing-machine, the fine lady her hair, and the
472 AMERICANISMS.

schoolboy his books. The minister forgets to fix his sermon in
time, the doctor to fiz his medicines, and the lawyer to fix his
brief. At public meetings it is fixed who are to be the candidates
for office; rules are fixed to govern an institution, and when the
arrangements are made, the people contentedly say: “ Now every-
thing is fixed nicely.” Americans must have had an early weak-
ness for the word, for already, in 1675, the Commissioners of the
United Colonies ordered “their arms well fied and fit for ser-
vice.” (Quoted by J. R. Lowell.) It is not to be wondered at,
after this, that Americans should be so continually in a fiz—an
expression which, in England only slang, is here used in serious
language. -
“ A poor woman and her orphan chicks,
Left without fixtures, in an awful fiz.”
(Planche’s Good Woman in the Woods.)

“Even the President will find himself 72 a@ fix sooner or later,
if he goes on alienating his friends by making injudicious ap-
pointments.” (New York Herald, April 2, 1871.) Fixings very
naturally abound, moreover, in American speech, from the “ Rail-
road Fixings, required for the equipment of the new branch
to Warrenton,” (Richmond Hzaminer, July 16, 1860), to. the
Chicken Fixings, the universal dish of the West and the South.
“An extraordinary sight were the countless waiters, held up to
the car-windows at Gordonsville by turbaned negro-women, filled
with coffee-cups, eggs, and the inevitable chicken-fixings, which
it was henceforth our fate to meet at every railroad-depot, till we
reached New Orleans.” (A Trip to the South.)

Flap-jacks, in England occasionally called slap-jacks, ave, in
the West, generally eaten together with chicken-fixings. The
term is used by Shakespeare, whose Prince is shipwrecked, and
falls among some honest fishermen, one of whom invites him
heartily to his house, and says: “Come, thou shalt go home, and
we'll have flesh for holidays, fish for fasting-days, and, moreo’er,
puddings and flap-jachs, and thou shalt be welcome.” (Pericles,
II. 7.) In New England flap-jacks are large pancakes, generally
eaten at supper.

Flashy is used in the mountain regions of Virginia for every-
thing that is not sweet and fruitful. “The peaches are flashy on!
account of the drought.” (1864.) '
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 473

Fleshy, disused in England, still continues to be heard con-
stantly in America, meaning stout, in the same sense in which it
was used by Ben. Jonson, and is quoted by Bailey. “You must
have recovered entirely; you look quite fleshy, now.”

flip, from the Swedish flepp, a driuk of brandy and sugar
mixed with beer, and heated by plunging into it a red-hot iron,
upon which it is handed round, foaming, was formerly a general
favorite in village bar-rooms and at the farm-house fireside. It
was considered as productive of sore ankles and shins, so that old
gentlemen in knee-breeches and long stockings would frequently
wear, handkerchiefs tied around their legs. A place called Por-
ter’s, near Cambridge, was a favorite resort of Harvard students,
who fully appreciated his excellent flip. There is a tradition of
a benign President who one day went to the tavern, ordered flip,
drank it, and said: “So, Mr. Porter, the young gentlemen come
to drink your flip, do they ?” “Yes, sir, sometimes.” “Ah, well,
I should think they would. Good-day, Mr. Porter!” and then
went quietly home, wisely making allowance for the existence of
a certain amount of human nature in ingenuous youths.

Flouring-mills, an American name for grist-mills.

Flunk, to, a verb denoting the backing out from fear; now
obsolete in England, and surviving only in the well-known
“flunky,” is still used in the West.

“ A keerless man in his talk was Jim,
And an awkward man in a row;
But he never flunked, and he never lied,
I reckon he never know’d how.”
(John Hay. Jim Bludsoe of the Prairie Beile.)

flutter-wheel, in the West, means a very small wheel, requir-
ing but little water, and often not moving steadily, but, as it
were, with a flutter.

ly, to, is used constantly, even in otherwise careful writers,
' instead of to flee, as si¢ takes the place of set, and lve of lay, in
conversation. ,

ogy, well known in England, and thus used quite recently,

“ Ay, though we be
Old fogies three,
We're not so dull’d as not to dine,
474, AMERICANISMS.

And not so old
As to be cold
To wit, to beauty, and to wine’—
(All the Year Round, 1868.)

means, in the United States, mainly an ultra-conservative in
politics. It occurs in Scotch as fogie, a dull, slow, old man, unable
or unwilling to reconcile himself to the ideas and manners of a
new generation; in English as fogey, a singular, old-fashioned
person—popularized by Thackeray. The origin of the word is
evidently fog, and fogy means a man befogged with regard to the
demands of the present time, whose intellect is, hence, foggy and
hazy, unable to see things as they really are.

Folks, used in England only provincially, is, in New England
especially, used very generally for’ people. Sidney said: “Dis-
courses of their own and other folks’ misfortunes,” and Bacon
speaks of “old folks and sick folks.” Lord Herbert of Chertbury
even has, “The Emperor’s folks.” In America, neighbors espe-
cially are folks:

“There’s punning Byles, provokes our smiles,
A man of stately parts ;
He visits folks to crack his jokes,

Which never mend their hearts—” ;
(Sam Kettel. Specimens of American Poetry, 1750.)

and in the sense of company :

“ When strawberries seemed like red heavens,
Terrapin stew a wild dream,
When my brain was at sixes and sevens,
If my mother had folks and ice-cream.” ....
(Fitzhugh Ludlow. Too Late.)

White folks have of late come into consideration, this being the
common name given the. whites by the negroes, though in the
South they are generally calling themselves now poor folks.
Even an adjective, folksy, has been made, which is used in Vir-
ginia and the South.

Foolery and fooling are both promiscuously used where a much
stronger term of condemnation ought to be employed, and even
the taking of life has more than once been called “ mere foolin’”
in the West.
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 4N5

“ An’ turnin’ quite faint in the midst of his fooleries,
Sneaks down-stairs to bolt the front door of the Tooleries.”
(J. R. Lowell. Of Louis Philippe, Biglow Papers, I., p. 58.)
“Perhaps foolin’ is nateral to some worfien, and there is no great
harm done ’cept to fools.” (F. B. Harte, Luck of Roaring Camp,
p. 102.)

Force is a common name for a gang of laborers, whether they
are Irishmen at work on a railway, or negroes employed on a
plantation. “The crop of Colonel Harris was of this description.
It far exceeded the ability of his force to pitch it in; but instead
of buying additional slaves for the purpose, he conceived the idea
of turning to account the lazy Choctaws by whom he was sur-
rounded.” (W. G. Simms, Oakatibbe.)

Forehanded, which means in England nothing more than
early, timely, has in America the additional meaning of well off,
comfortable in circumstances. “I'll work and board with you.
I know there is no need for it. Father is forehanded; he says I
can go to school, but I ain’t going to try it.” (Putnam’s Maga-
zine, January, 1870.) i

Fork, in the singular, is one of two roads into which the main
road divides at a place which is called the forks. A traveller
arriving in Albany and calling for a bootjack, astonished the ser-
vaut so much by the size of his foot, as to call forth the excla-
mation: “If you want them are boots off, you’ll have to go back
to the fork in the road to get them off.”

Fornent, the old Scotch word, has been carried by immigrants,
from southern Ireland especially, to Pennsylvania, and is there
quite common, though generally pronounced fernent and fernenst.
“He lives fernent the big house in the village.”

Freeze, to, is used in almost all parts of the country as an
extravagant term for wishing something ardently. “TI tell you I
froze for meat before the week was gone.” (A Ride with Kit
Carson.)

Freshet, is used very generally in the United States instead of
fresh, in the sense of an overflow. “We had another freshet in
the Noble Jeames yesterday, and fear the canal has been seriously
injured.” (Richmond Whig, October 21, 1867.) The word fresh
has, however, often to serve the two purposes of denoting an
inundation and a small tributary of alarger river. Milton already
476 AMERICANISMS.

uses it to denote a pool of fresh water, and so is quoted by Bailey,
while R. Beverley writes: “There are the Mawhborn Hills in the
freshes of James River, and the ridge of hills of Stafford County
in the freshes of Pawtomeck River.” (History of Virginia, p.110.)
Frump, to, quoted by Bailey as meaning to frizzle up the nose
as in contempt, and used so by Beaumont and Fletcher, has, like
so many old words, survived in New England, where people still
speak of a cross, ill-tempered person as “an old frump.” ;
Full, an old participle, is often heard in the South for filled,
and almost exclusively used by the negroes, who sometimes im-
prove it in their way by saying fudled.
“ Gen’el Jackson fin’ de trail,
Whay, my kingdom, fire away,
He full um tote (filled them fort) wid cotton bale,
Whaw, my kingdom, fire away.”
(Georgia Negro-Song.)

Furr, oddly used by Yankee and negro alike, is a remnant of:
olden times, for Sidney also uses it instead of far.

G.

Gab, and the gift of the gab, seem to be considered universally
genuine Americanisms. Originally gab meant only mouth, and
hence a clergyman at Paul’s Crosse, we are told, thought nothing
of bidding a noisy hearer to “hold his gab” or “shut up his god.”
(Slang Dictionary.) Chaucer, however, uses the verb already as
meaning to talk idly; and Grose actually explains “the gift of
the gab” as a “facility of speech.” It is in this sense that the
word is almost exclusively used in the United States, denoting
especially a great command of words without an over-abundance
of ideas. In the South the word is strengthened by being length-
ened into gabblement, but only in its lowest sense.

Gal, for girl, also is an inheritance derived from emigrants from
Essex, where it is still heard. A gal-boy is in New England used
occasionally for the more familiar tom-boy.

Gale is in New England and in the South not unfrequently
used to denote a state of pleasant excitement. “The children
were in such a gale, it took us nearly an hour to get them to bed,
and then they could not sleep for a long while” (A Summer in
the Country, p. 221.)
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. AY?

Gallantry, as shown to ladies, is a custom of which Americans
are justly proud, and hence probably the many forms under which
the word appears. “One day I took a solitary ride there, while
Oliver was gallantizing the ladies, a vocation for which his invin-
cible good-humor and unfailing vivacity eminently qualify him.”
(Letters from the South, IL, p. 174.) “More than half the
Lima beans, though on the most attractive sort of poles, which
budded like Aaron’s rod, went galivanting off to the neighboring
grape-trellis, with a disregard for the proprieties of life which is
a satire upon human nature.” (C. D. Warner, My Summer in a
Garden.) “ Gallivanting was never my forte, and I was quite
willing to be sent away whenever ladies came.” “ Gallavanting,
waiting upon the ladies, was as polite in expression as in action.”
(Slang Dictionary, sub voce.)

Gall, to, has in parts of the United States transferred its pe-
culiar meaning of excoriating, injuring a surface, to a noun, which
designates a certain class of low land, consisting of a treacherous
matted soil of yegetable fire, producing little that is worth the
trouble of harvesting it at the risk of life. In Florida such lands
are generally called Bay-Galls, which see.

Gallowses, for suspenders, is not unknown in England also.

Gambrel-roof, so called from its hipped form, which makes it
not unlike the hind-leg of a horse, called by farriers gambrel.

Gander-party is the modest name given occasionally in New
England to what is more familiarly called a “stag-party,” consist-
ing of men only. ,

Gap, from its denoting any breach of continuity, is in the
South generally applied to a pass in the mountains, through
which a river ora road runs. Rockfish Gap, Brown’s Gap, and
other Gaps in the Blue Ridge of Virginia became thus famous in
the late Civil War. ‘

Garrison, in the West, designates not only the military force
occupying a fort, bat quite as frequently the place thus held, and
even old forts and posts, long since abandoned, continue to be
known there as garrisons. “It was late at night when we re-
turned to the garrison, and the ominous silence, the absence of a
sentinel, and the strange appearance of everything around us, sent
a shudder through our hearts.” (Scenes in the Far West.)

Gas, for moonshine or idle boasting, is quite frequent.
478 AMERICANISMS.

Gaum, obsolete in England, is still used here to denote soiling.
“Don’t let the child gawm herself all over.”

Gavel, formerly used to denote a small heap of wheat, etc. not
tied up, as in Chapman’s line, “Their corn lies on the gavel heap,”
has found a new application in the amount of wheat, etc. cut by
the reaping-machine and shaken out by one motion.

Gee, to, the term employed in driving a wagon, has been trans-
ferred to other transactions also, and people say in Pennsylvania,
“That won’t gee,” when they wish to express that something will
not serve the purpose. (8. 8. Haldeman.)

Gentle, to, in the sense of Young’s line, “To gentle life’s de-
scent” (Might Thoughts), is still quite frequently heard in Amer-
ica, and received a new application when Mr. Rarey practised and
taught the art of gentling horses.

Gentleman and lady, as has already been stated, have in Amer-
ica no longer any distinctive meaning. The millionaire’s porter
is a gentleman, the schoolboy isa young gentleman, and the half-
witted negro is facetiously hailed as old gentleman. This abuse
has struck all travellers in the United States. “The Duke of
Saxe-Weimar was, in Alabama, asked the question: Are you the
man that wants to go to Selma? and upon assenting, he was
told: Then I’m the gentleman that is going to drive you. Pre;
cisely the same thing occurred to Sir Charles Lyell: “I asked
the landlord of the inn at Corning, who was very attentive to his
guests, to find my coachman. He immediately called out in his
bar-room, Where is the gentleman that brought this man here?
A few days before, a farmer in New York had styled my wife,
woman, though he called his own daughters ladies, and would, I
believe, have freely extended that title to their maid-servant.”
Under the head, “ Help Wanted,” a Philadelphia paper lately
published, “ Wanted. Two competent sales-ladies, at Newman’s,
48 North 8th Street” (Philadelphia Ledger, December 16, 1870),
and a distinguished writer says frankly: “ I admit that our abuse
of the word is villanous. I know of an orator who once said in
a public meeting, where bonnets predominated, that “ The ladies
were the last at the Cross and the first at the Tomb!” The vul-
garity of entering a traveller’s name on the register of the hotel,
as “ Mr. and lady,” is only surpassed by placing the same
words on visiting-cards.

 
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 479

Get, to, one of the convenient words of the language, which
Americans use, like fiz, as maids of all work, seems nevertheless
to be so well adapted to many purposes, that even English writers
and orators begin to use it in ways which formerly were made a
cause of grave reproach to our people. To speak of “ getting reli-
gion ” may not be exactly correct, and to “ get corrected,’ conveys
vo clear meaning, but to “get money ” has received the sanction
of the best writers. “The Yankee notion that the getting of
money is the chiefend of man.” (Atlantic Monthly, August,
1858.) To get on has become domesticated in English. The Earl
of Derby, delivering recently the prizes to the successful pupils of
Liverpool College, said, “ We are a little too apt to look upon
ourselves as mere machines for what is called getting on,” and in
another place, “ he had got as much as he or anybody belonging
to him.” (December, 1870.) Even the shortened form go¢ in-
stead of gotten, long made a special reproach and considered an
objectionable Americanism, has now its advocates in English.
Wordsworth says:

“But then he is a horse that thinks,

And when he thinks his horse is slack ;

Now, tho’ he knows poor Johnny well,

Yet, for his life, he cannot tell

What he has got upon his back ”—

(The Idiot Boy.)
and Lord Lytton goes so far as to use forgot in his last bril-
liant novel. To get up on one’s ear, is regular slang, meaning, to
rouse one’s self to a great effort:
“ They called me bully boy, altho’ I’ve seen nigh threescore years,

And said that I was lightning, when I got up on my ear.”
( Words and their Uses. Galveston News, May 4, 1871.)

Gird, to take a, has in the Northwest the peculiar meaning of
to make an effort: “I'd just like to take one gird at Globe City, and
if I couldn’t fetch settlers, ’d cry co-peevi (peccavi). Will you let
me try it?” (Putnam’s Magazine, November, 1858.)

Given name, represents mainly in New England, but quite fre-
quently throughout the United States, what in England is called
the Christian, or first name—a designation said to have originated
with the Puritans, who objected to the many saints’ names used as
Christian names.
480 AMERICANISMS.

Glade, the name given originally to a part of the water which
is not frozen over, though surrounded by ice—from the analogy to
the glade, an opening in the woods—has been subsequently applied
in New England to smooth ice also. In the South the term is
often used as a shorter substitute for everglades, the tracts of land
covered with water and grass, which are so called from Maryland
down to Florida.

Glass, to, used for to glaze, as was done in England in the times
of Boyle, who quotes it, continues thus to be employed in the
West and the South. “The windows were sashed and glassed,
and hung with the whitest curtains of cotton, with fringes fully a
foot deep.” (W. G. Simms, The Last Wager.)

Glaze, on the other hand, is in the East transferred from the
finish of pottery, etc., to the similar state of the ground after a
hoar-frost.

Glut, a large wooden wedge, has been preserved in New Eng-
land. It is, after all, but a special application of the general sense
of glut, which means the complete filling up of a passage, in this
case accomplished by the wedge.

Gondola, frequently corrupted into gundalo, is used in the New
England States and along the Atlantic Coast to designate a low,
flat-bottomed boat, in which produce is carried to market. The
use of the word for a peculiarly shaped railroad-car is not un-
known in England. J. R. Lowell says: “I find gundelo in Hak-
luyt and gundello in Booth’s Reprint of the Folio Shakespeare
of 1683.”

Goney, the old English term for a stupid fellow, is not unfte-
quently heard yet in the New England States, while gonzs is said to
be the Latinized form used in colleges. “A stupid fellow, a dolf,
a bootjack, an ignoramus is here called a gonus.” All freshmen
are gonuses. (The Darlmouth, Vol. IV., p. 116.)

_ Goodman and Goody, in the early days of New England settle-
ments titles of honor, signifying heads of a household, continue to
be used in more-remote parts of those States, and Goody Simpkins
may be heard, without the slightest intention to speak in any but
the most respectful way of Mrs. Simpkins. Goodzes, on the con-
trary, are, as in England, sweetmeats and nice things given to
children.

Graft, to, is one of the many words by which the Sons of Crispin
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 481

love to express the different modes of repairing boots. This term

is generally applied when new soles are added, and new leather is

sewed on all around; when a new bottom is made and the boots

are renewed half way up, itis called goosing boots, and foxing, when

a new foot is made to old “uppers.” The names are, however, not -
kept equally distinct in all the States.

Grass Widows are, in the United States, wives separated from
their husbands for a time only, and without incurring the slightest
reproach. The great familiarity with American society which the
English are so fond of assuming is shown in the veracious state-
ment that “during the gold fever in California it was common
in the United States for an adventurer to put both his wife (termed
in his absence a grass widow) and his children to school during
his absence.” (Slang Dictionary, p. 146.)

Grain is used in America, as corn is in England, to designate
the produce of all cereals, rye, wheat, oats, etc. and the papers
quote therefore daily an account of the Grain Market.

Grand, used indiscriminately for anything great or large, is, like
many similar ternis, grievously abused. Every army during the
late Civil War became a “ Grand Army ;” the Freemasons have
nothing but “grand turn-outs,” and when girls discuss an even-
ing party, each boasts of what a “grand time” she has had.

Graveyard is a word rarely used by Americans, who prefer the
more euphemious Cemetery. There is, perhaps, some excuse for
this custom, as they have wisely chosen the most beautiful spots
near their large cities, laid them out in shrubbery and forest, and
made them so attractive, that every visitor to a large town is
almost sure for his first. and main entertainment to be driven out
to. the “Cemetery.” The only well-known Graveyard in the
country is a melancholy place in the Mississippi River. “On
your right is a series of rocky bluffs, covered with a stunted
growth of trees, before you an expanse of water, ten miles long
and two wide, on your left an array of sand-bars and islands,
where lie imbedded the wrecks of some fifty steamboats, and in
the remote distance a belt of thickly wooded bottom land. This
is the famous Graveyard.” (C. Lanman, A Swimmer in the
Wilderness.)

Gravy, in New England used for any liquid accompanying cer-
tain dishes, as, the gravy of a pie, a pudding, ete.
482 AMERICANISMS.

Great is, in the South especially, almost constantly coupled
with big, and anything of considerable size is qualified as “a great
big thing.” In Pennyslvania the influence of uneducated Ger-
mans has corrupted the first word into grade, aided by the ten-
dency to assimilation before the initial d, and as such grade big
has been gravely quoted as meaning, “big by an additional grade
or degree,”—a solemn warning to superficial linguists.

Griddles are not only the utensils for baking cakes, but also
the cakes themselves. “Shovel-cakes are still to be had by a
hungry generation, and the griddles of Mrs. Durfee in the Tea-
House at the Glen, shall not want an historian as they have not
wanted troops of lovers.” (An Account of Newport, 1858.)

Grit and gritty are favorite terms, at the North especially, for
that quality which a grindstone should have in order to make it
serviceable: hardness and firmness combined. “ He has the true
grit,” is considered high praise, while Meta Lander complains
very justly that “womanly grit is not consistent with womanly
grace.”

“Thought I, my neighbor Buckingham
Hath somewhat in him gritty,
Some Pilgrim stuff, that hates all sham,
And he will print my détty.”
(J. R. Lowell. An Interview with Miles Standish.) «

Clear Grit is thus defined by a high authority: “ Clear Grit is
that sterling manhood and womanhood that is always true to its
own nature, and therefore in some sense to that highest nature in
whose image we are made, no matter what may befall; as a
diamond is a diamond all the same, you know, whether it blazes
on the brow of an emperor or is hid under the mountain peaks.”
(Rey. Robert Collyer.)

Guess. There is, probably, no word in the Dictionary that has
given more occasion to animated discussion than this. Quoted
almost by every writer in America as one of the most obtrusive
and repulsive Americanisms, considerable pains has been taken to
prove its English orthodoxy. There is no lack of evidence that
the word has been used in England from time immemorial, and
by the best writers, in precisely the same sense in which it is now
employed by Yankees. Selden, in one of his notes to Polyolbiay,
as quoted by J. R. Lowell, writes: “The first inventor of them (I
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 483

guess you dislike not the addition) was one Berthold Swartz.”
Spenser says, “ Amylia will be lov’d as I mote ghesse.” (Faéry
Queen, Bk. IL, ec. viii, v. 57.) “If I were, I might find more
cause, I guess, than your mistress has given your master here.”
(Vanburgh, The Mistake, Act I, sc. 1.) Chaucer sings:

“ Her yellow hair was braided in a tress,
Behind her back, a yard long, I guess.”
(Heroine.)

“He whose design it is to excel in English poetry would not, I
guess, think that way if it was to make his first essay in Latin
verse” (Locke), and Milton says: “ Already by thy reasoning this
I guess.” (Paradise Lost, VII, p. 85.) The only difference be-
tween the English and the American use of the word is, proba-
bly, that the former denotes a fair, candid gwess, while the
Yankee who guesses is apt to be quite sure of what he professes ,
to doubt. As he only calculates when he has already solved his
problem, so he also guesses when he has made sure of his fact.
“T guess I do,” is with him an expression of confident certainty.
_ He is, however, quite as prone to go to the other extreme and to
use the word without any other meaning than mere “thinking,”
as when he says: “I guess he is well,” or, “I guess I won’t go
to-day.”

Gumption, little more than a vulgarism or a cant word in Eng-
land, is in America used very freely for understanding and dis-
cernment, and considered much less objectionable on the score of
good taste. Burns wrote:

“Nor a’ the quacks with all their gumption
Will ever cure her.”
(Letter to John Goudie.)

O’Connell also tells how an Irish priest introduced the veto-
question toa rural meeting by saying: “ Now, ma boughall, you
haven’t got gumption, and you must, therefore, be guided by
those who have.” It is in this sense that it is constantly used
here. “T assure you he was not lacking in gumption ; what he
wants is tact.” (J. M. Buchauan, private letter.) The term is
evidently derived from the old verb to gawm, to understand,
which is still current in the North of England, and from which
484 AMERICANISMS.

the noun gumption has been obtained after the manner of similar
words—the p being inorganic, but never failing between the labial
and the dental. There is no excuse, as there is no need, for the
corruption rumgumption, common in England, where (in York-
shire) éven rumgumptious exists for pompous, or forward, which
is comparatively rare in America.
“They need not try thy jokes to fathom,
They want rumgumption.”
(Beattie.)
Gut, in the sense of a narrow inlet or strait, filled with salt-
water, is used here as in England, wherever its place has not been
usurped by the French bayou.

H.

Hack, in England generally used for a hired horse, denotes in
America mainly a hired carriage. ‘To call a short, hard, cut-
ting cough, a hacking cough, a term sometimes heard in the South
of England, is quite common here. ;

Haif-saved is a similar provincialism, found in certain localities
in both countries, and denoting a half-witted person.

Halves, in Pennsylvania corrupted into. havvers, is an exclama-
tion heard by the person who happens to witness the finding of
a valuable object, in order to claim half of the treasure-trove.
People also propose to “ go halves” when each is to pay half of the
expense, and land is let out “on halves,” when the owner and the
tenant share equally in the proceeds. The latter term, used by Ur-
quhartand Matthews in their Translation of Rabelais (Bk. IV,
23), is now obsolete in England, but still continues in use here.

Hand is made in America not only the representative of a per-
son’s ability to work, but even of his skill; and while the English
say, “he has a good hand on the violin” (Addison), it is here said,
“He ds a good hand at whistling.” “I have never seen a man who
was « better hand at cradling, but he knows nothing else.”
(Farmers’ Gazette, 1867.) :

Handkerchief has here, as in England, much to suffer from the
tendency to corrupt an absurd word (hand-cover-chief ), the mean-
ing of which is naturally hid to uneducated persons. This ill-
treatment is so general, and especially the pronunciation,
handkercher, so old and so constant, that serious doubts have
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 485

arisen as to the true origin of the word. The derivation from
couvre chef can, of course, not be denied, but it has been asked, if
there may not be here, as in many similar cases, a double deriva-
tion. Shakespeare certainly writes, “Good Tom Drumme, lend
me a handkercher” (All’s Well that Ends Well), and kercher occurs
already previously. In an official report on Bacon’s Rebellion,
dated July 13, 1705, we find: “Had Bacon in the paroxism of
phrentick fury but drawn his sword before the pacifick handker-
cher was shaken out of the window.” Pepys writes, September
2, 166%, “The king at this day having no handkerchers, and but
three bands to his neck ;” and three months later, December 12,
again, “ Here only, I saw a French lady in the pit, with a tunique
just like ours, only a handkercher about her neck.” There can
be no doubt that the word was, in the 17th century, written by
good authors exactly as it was pronounced, and thus imported
from England into Virginia, where it has maintained itself un-
changed to the present day. In Pennsylvania, hankitcher is
quoted by Dr. Elwyn, and hangcatcher by S. 8. Haldeman.

Handround, the name of an entertainment in the West, thus
described: “ We do dance, of course, but a handrownd, out here,
is where we don’t sit at table, but hand round the vittels. The
table can’t be set, you know, on ’count of its clutterin’ up the
dancin’ room.” (Putnam’s Magazine, December, 1868.)

Happen in, to, in the sense of to happen to come in, is a use
of the word not known abroad, but quite common here. “I hap-
pened in one fine day, and found them all fast asleep before ten
o'clock.” (J. P. Kennedy, Swallow Barn.)

Hard is a favorite word in the United States, applied univer-
. sally to things or persons, from “hard money,” in contrast with
paper-money, to “hard times,” for evil fortune. “Bob is what is
technically called a hard customer ; he drinks hard, he eats hard,
for he is often hard set to get anything to eat, and he sleeps hard,
for his bed is frequently a hard flag in the market.” (Pickings
from the Picayune.)

Hardwood comprises all woods of solid texture which decay
speedily ; elm, oak, ash, beech, basswood, and sugar-maple. Hard-
tack, sea-bread and army-bread alike. “Since the Rebellion broke
out, some luckless wight stationed thereabout, munching his pork
and hardtack, had named it the Parker House, in memory of
better days.” (Putnam’s Magazine, August, 1868.)
486 AMERICA NISMS.

Haul, to, weeds is common in many States instead of to pull up
weeds. To haul over the coals is not an Americanism ; it occurs
as early as the times of the Reformation in the title of a contro-
versial book, and in the modern sense of “to take to task.”
Jamieson traces it back to the ordeal by fire.

Haze, to, a term used on board ship and in public institutions
of learning, is quite common in the United States. “ Every shift-
ing of the studding-sails was only to haze the crew.” (Dana,
1840.) “The deeply-rooted custom of hazing the new cadets has
been successfully suppressed, and no instance of ill-treatment has
been brought to the knowledge of the superintendent.” (Official
Report of West Point Academy, 1870.)

Heap, once used in many parts of England to denote not only a
quantity, but also a number of animals or men, as in Hakluyt:
“Seeing such a heap of their enemies ready to devour them”
(quoted by J. R. Lowell), and in Chaucer’s well-known line,

“The wisdom of a heap of learned men ”
(The Prologue.)

is still universal in the West and South in the same sense. “I
saw a heap of old friends in town, but still felt sad at the many
changes that met my eye everywhere.” In like manner the old
use of a heap or an heap for a large quantity has come down to
us unchanged from Piers Ploughman, who says: “And other
names an heap.” “I began to feel myself mightily at home, and,
as Virginians say, felt a heap of regret at bidding the excellent
lady and her family good-by.” (Letters from the South, L, p. 30.)
Even the Indians have caught the infection, and we are told that
“an Indian is always a heap hungry or thirsty, a heap brave or
willing to do a thing.” (Life in the Far West, p.115.) “He isa
big man, heap big man.” (Speech of Hole-in-the-Sky at Washing-
tun, 1868.)

Hearn, the old adjective-participle for heard, is quite frequently
heard where old English most prevails, in New England and in
Virginia. “I have hearn master say so many a times.” (John
Randolph's Body-servant at the Funeral.)

“Tt’s thinkin’ everythin’ you ever knew,

Or ever hearn to make your feelin’s blue.”
(J. R. Lowell. Béiglow Papers, IL., p. 161.)
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 487

Heft, to, which in England means—true to its derivation from
heah, heave, heaved—to lift, is used in the United States in the
sense of trying the weight of a thing by raising it, and hence the
noun heft derives its meaning of weight, and, still more idiomat-
ically, the greater part of a thing.

“ He was tall, was my Jack,
And as strong as a tree,
Thar’s his gun on the rack,
Jest you heft it and see—
And ye come a-courtin’ his widder. Lord! where can the critter, Sal, be 2”
(Penelope. Overland Monthly, August, 1870.)

“ Constitoounts air hendy to help a man in,
But arterwards don’t weigh the heft of a pin.”
“ (J. R. Lowell. Béglow Papers, I., p. 151.)

“No, that won’t pay. We will be gone the heft of the after-
noon, I reckon.” (Lippincott’s Magazine, March, 1871, p. 284.)
“You see there’s such a heft of snow, and no path broke.” (E. S.
Phelps, 4 Woman’s Pulpit.) Even an adjective, hefty, has been
derived from the word in New England. “Then, it must be con-
fessed that he is, as a Yankee would say, a little hefty for the
ideal lover.” (New York Tribune, January 21, 1871.)

Heifer is not uncommon in the West for wife, and used with
all kindness and respect. “ Now, git out, I says, or the ol’ heifer
"ll show you whar the carpenter left a hole for you to mosey.” (Jn
the Backwoods, p. 71.)

Heir, to, instead of to inherit, is in use in New Jersey and
Pennsylvania. “ He heirs the property, and she heirs the farm.”
“ A little boy is now the sole survivor, and heirs an estate which,
a gentleman informs us, is worth some five or six thousand dol-
lars.” (New York Times, January 27, 1855.)

Help, often considered a genuine Americanism, is only an ex-
tension of the original word from an instrument to a person. Pe-
pys already writes, March 18, 1662: “What a help he was tous!”
and Mrs. Trollope fell in so readily with the use of the word, that
she wrote in 1832: “A black help ushered in a young man,” a
phrase probably quite unknown to Rochester, in New York, from
which place she dates her letter. The use of the word originated
in New England, where perfect social equality has prevailed from
the oldest times, while the “redemptioners” of New York and the
488 AMERICANISMS,

Middle States, and the “slaves ” of the South, divided society else-
where; nor has the term yet made its way into the interior of
Pennsylvania. (S. 8. Haldeman.) A variety is the hired man, a
term very generally used North and South. “The Irish girls have
found their way into the New England farmer’s kitchen,” complains
a laudator temporis acti, “and the Irish laborer has become the
annual hired man.” (Atlantic Monthly, August, 1858.)

Hendy is Yankee for handy. “ Hendy as a pocket in a shirt.”

Herbs is the term used for the English “simples,” which are so
unknown here, that nothing is more common than an utter ina-
bility of young readers to understand the allusion to a perfumed
garment, which is said to smell “like Bucklersbury in simple
time.” (Merry Wives of Windsor.) The herd doctor plays a prom-
inent part, in a country where no restraint whatever is placed
upon ignorant men who assume the functions of a physician, and
simple men who entrust their lives to such hands. The word
is, however, generally pronounced yerd or yard by the multitude.

Hide, to, in the sense of “ tanning one’s hide” by severe blows,
is as common here as in certain districts of England. J. R, Low-
ell thus refers to a habit of Louis Philippe’s, when a schoolmaster
in this country, “how “he often had héded young native Amerri-
kins.” (Biglow Papers, I., p. 57.)

Hity-tity, as the English hoity-toity is more frequently sounded
and written in America, is here also used ag a verb. “She expects
to be hitied-titied, that is, to be made much of.” (8. 8. Haldeman.)
The word arises from the obsolete English verb to hott, which
means to leap, to caper; if not from the noun hott, which Grose
quotes as meaning “an awkward boy.” The American verb-tran-
sitive implies the doing of that which will call forth the exclama-
tion, as the Greek éAéyy meant é Aéyezr, to say ¢, alas!

Hoarding means, in America only, accumulating—never an en-
closure, as in the English notice so often met on commons and
vacant spaces: “No bills may be stuck on this hoarding.” Fence
is substituted for the latter.

Hockey-stick, the stick with a “hook,” or curved bend at the end
farthest from the hand, and used in playing ball, is occasionally
written Hawkey-stick (J. R. Abbot, Caleb in Boston), and in the
South, as in England, replaced by bandy-stick.

Hog takes almost exclusively the place of the English swine,
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 489

which is rarely heard. “ Mean enough to steal acorns from a hog,”
is the Yankee’s extremity of meanness.

Hoist, to,—vulgarly called hyst,—means very often what an
Irishman might call an “elevation downwards,” a sudden, serious
fall. J.C. Neal thus makes a merry toper say: “I can’t see the
ground, and every dark night I am sure to get a hyst—either a
forrerd or a backerd hyst, or some kind of hyst, but more backerds
than forrerds.” (Charcoal Sketches, I., p. 74.)

Holden, the old participle, still survives in many parts of ihe
country. The Rev. P. Cartwright says in his Autobiography: “A
camp-meeting holden this year in the edge of Tennessee” (p. 144),
and the official report of the Methodist Episcopal Church North
(1870) says: “The first Methodist Conference holden in the West
was held in Kentucky in 1789.’ R. W. Emerson writes: “The
other element of friendship is tenderness. We are holden to men
by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by lucre,
by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every circumstance and badge
and trifle, but we can scarcely believe that so much character can
subsist in another as to draw us by love.” (Friendship, p. 187.)

Hollow, to, averb already in England from of old written in various
ways, occurs in America,in like manner, under the different forms
of hollow, halloo, and most commonly as holler. J. R. Lowell says:
“ Herrick writes hollow for halloo, and perhaps pronounced it (hor-
resco referens) holla, as the Yankees do. Why not, when it comes
from hola?” Shakespeare, it is well known, uses it—

“ And in his ear I'll hollow Mortimer,”
(. Henry TV.)

and Byron does not hesitate to say,
“To hollowing Hotspur and the sceptred sire.”

The Yankee pronunciation is introduced into the characteristic
account of a bluff old farmer, who said: “If a man professes to
serve the Lord, I like to see him do it when he measures onions
as well as when he hollers glory hallelujar.” “The more I hollered
the more the customers would come.” (J. C. Neal, Charcoal
Sketches, II., p. 157.)

Holpen, the old participle, like holden, is still often heard, espe-
cially in Kentucky, while in Virginia and by the negroes of the
South a mongrel form, holped, is made for the Preterite of I holp,
which there takes the place of I help.

21*
490 AMERICANISMS.

Holt is occasionally used here, as in England, as a noun, the
surd ¢ marking the noun as the sonant d marks the verb. (Com-
pare breath and breathe.) “Then let me have a holt of some of
the fellows that made it.” (J.C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches, IL, p. 28.)

Homely, in England used for homelike, here serves mainly to
express a want of comeliness. “ She is certainly very homely, but
so bright and cheerful as to appear positively lovely at times.”
(Home Journal, July, 1849.)

Honorable is, like Reverend, unfortunately more and more gene-
rally used without an article, in speaking of persons—a vice which
F. G. Halleck stigmatized as “denying the Hon. John Smith the
benefit of the definite article.” “Yesterday, Hon. R. T. W. Duke,
of Virginia, delivered his speech on the Enforcement Bill.” (Rich-
mond Lnquirer, April 2, 1871.)

Hood isin America not the monk’s hood nor that familiar to
Oxford and Cambridge, both of which are unknown here, but a
covering for the head, of bright-colored worsted, much worn by
the ladies on the way to the theatre.

Hop, in the sense of an informal dance, at which full-dress is
not expected, is a recent importation from England, where, in the
slang of the upper classes, this use of the word has long prevailed.

Horse-Milliner, sometimes objected to as an absurdity, has high
and ancient authority for its use. A newspaper recently observed
facetiously: “They call a harnessmaker a horse-milliner out in
Chicago.” The editor had evidently never read Motley’s admira-
ble work on the Rise of the Dutch Republic, or he would have
found the word quoted from a MS. of the sixteenth century. Sir
W. Scott, also, in his Heart of Mid-Lothian (ch. xii.), makes Bar-
toline Saddletree say: “ Whereas, in.my wretched occupation of a
saddler, horse-milliner, and harnessmaker.”

Hospital is used in the United. States to the exclusion of the
English term Spital, which is here unknown. The “ Spital Ser-
mon,” as the annual sermon preached before the Blue-coat School
in London is still called on the title-page, would be almost unin-
telligible to many readers in America.

Hot, an old preterite of the verb to hit, is still occasionally heard
in Virginia and the South. The negroes are apt to say, “He hot
me a great big blow.”

Housen, another old form brought to the South by the carly
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 491

English settlers, survives there and in New England alike. “No
one shall tarry at his (the Indian king’s) howsen longer than one
night.” Householdry is a new word attempted by a few ambitious
writers in the sense of “household:-employment ;” but

Housekeep, as a verb, bas firmly established itself in American
speech. “We went and hired (!) a house, determined never again
to board, but to housekeep, whatever might be the expense.”
(Southern Magazine, January, 1871.) The new word, to roomkeep,
arising from the exigency which forces impoverished Southern
families to content themselves with renting a few rooms and keep-
ing house in them, has not yet obtained currency.

Hove, the old preterite of “heave,” still continues in many parts
of the country. An old woman on the Isle of Shoals, complain-
ing how ill her house was built, said: “ Lor, ’twasn’t never built,
twas only hove together.” Fishermen along the coast of New
England, when trying the sailing capacities of a vessel im a heavy
sea, melt a quantity of lard in a frying-pan on the tiny stove in
the cabin, and if, in the act of plunging, “the fat is hove out of
the pan,” as they say, and the pan remains on the stove, she is
considered a first-rate sailer.

How do? or, How de? is the common eautnions in the South,
instead of “How do you do?”

Hub, in the sense of the nave of a wheel, is common to
America and England alike; and in this country, perhaps, most
familiar as the name claimed by Bostonians for their city: “The
Hub of the Universe.” But hub, as meaning a protuberance in the
road, or a projection on a mountain, is believed to be American only.

Hull is Yankee for whole, as

Hum is for home. “He aint to hum,” says the New Englander,
in his dialect, for “ He is not at home.”

Human, for human being, has been fiercely criticised as an
Americanism, and yet Chapman uses it habitually in his transla-
tion of Homer, and his example is followed by a host of English
writers. Americans, however, use it now more frequently than
formerly, perhaps for brevity’s sake. “I did not expect to meet a
human in such a place” (Hammond, Wild Western Scenes.)
“Parson Brownlow is just as fierce upon dogs, when they annoy
him, as he is upon humans, when they cross his path.” (Harper's
Magazine, January, 1868.)

.
492 AMERICANISMS.

Humbug, however successfully developed in this country, is not
a new term, but at least as old as Lord Chesterfield, who uses it
in his letters. Halliwell mentions the term, and explains it as

meaning a false alarm, » bugbear. The only native use is proba- ----

bly the name of a town in California, Humbug Flats, eminently
suggestive of the “’cuteness” of the first settlers.

Hunk, not unknown in the provinces abroad, means here a
large piece of bread and butter or cheese. It occurs occasionally
in the sense of a place of refuge, a homestead; and is used by
boys in play, when they have reached their “base;” they call it
“being honk.” This term is derived from the Dutch honk, a
place, a home, and has led to the political slang term of Old
Hunkers, which means persons clinging to their homestead,
and opposed to innovators. Hence, also, the familiar Hunky
Dory, a term originating among the Virginia mountaineers, who
used it te express very emphatically that they were “ well, and in
good spirits.” It is said that the poor little Japanese who had
become famous in England by his cry Olrite (all right), and de-
rived his name from it, here adopted this word as the most char-
acteristic of the American people, and used to ery, Hunky Dory!

Hunt, to, is in the South especially used for search: “ Have
you hunted through your drawers, Kitty? I have hunted all
over the house.” (Southern Literary Messenger, June, 1851.)

Husbandhood is « new word,. recently coined. “The man is
educated, not for husbandhood, but for manhood.” (Miss Anna
Dickinson, January, 1866.)

Hwish, an cxclamation used in parts of New England, to turn
men or cattle back. “In such expeditions I took my first lessons
in the ox-compelling art. The mysteries of ‘haw’ and ‘gee,’
of ‘hwo’ and ‘hwish’—the last an outlandish Vermontese bar-
barism, signifying ‘back !—were duly explained.” (Connecticut
Georgics.) The word is known in parts of Yorkshire.

Hyper, to, a New England word for to be busy. “I must
hyper about and git tea.” (J. R. Lowell.)

L

Icarian, as everything relating to Mr. Cabet’s socialistic system
is called, is a familiar term in America, where many efforts have
been made to carry out his views.
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 493

ik is a much abused word, being constantly substituted for
stamp, class, or society. “Men of that 72 are seldom good for
anything.” “We want to have nothing to do with Governor
Swann, and men of that 7%.” (Washington Chronicle, January
27, 1869.)

Lily, frequently charged upon American writers as an unpardon-

able sin, is used by some of the older English writers, though
sparingly. It has excited much controversy, and while there is
no well-founded objection to the use of the word, it has not been
sanctioned by the consent of the people. In Texas the word 2
has the curious signification of immoral, and “an til fellow,”
means a man of bad habits.
- Immediately, instead of as soon, is often met with; the press
and numerous writers using it in this sense. “I knew it dmme-
diately I saw him enter the room.” (New York Ledger, April 12,
1871.)

Inprove, to, was remarked upon as early as 1789, by Benjamin
Franklin, as an “old perversion of the word in New England,
when applied to persons.” We are told that it was thus used in
the Colonial Laws of New Haven, about the middle of the seven-
teenth century, when it was ordered to read “the Scriptures
and other good and profitable printed books in the English
tongue, by improving schoolmasters or other help.” Later it was
used in the sense of use or occupancy of houses, and it sounds
very odd to our ears to hear it said that “such a use of the word
was common at the beginning of the century, but we do not
remember to have seen or heard it in this sense for many years.”
(North American Review, January, 1847.) Now, the word is
employed in the same way when speaking of things, land, or men,
and the noun improvement means as much amelioration generally
as the stock, buildings, fences, and other additions to the value of
a farm or homestead. “I bought some stock and rented out the
improvement, with a view to have something to live on.” (Rev.
P. Cartwright, Autobiography, p. 246.)

In for into, is general throughout the country, but the latter is
gradually gaining ground.

Invards, © new application of the word inwards, is thus ex-
plained by R. G. White: “Now-a-days a man who used, in gen-
eral society, the simple English word (gut) for which some New
494, AMERICANISMS.

England females elegantly substitute in’ards, would shock many
of his hearers.” (Words and their Uses, p. 387.) “The inner
man ” is not much better.

Independent, applied to lifeless objects, as “an independent
fortune,” for one which makes the owner independent, is unwar-
rantable.

Interfere, to, is used in the North and West instead of troub-
ling and using ill. “ You’d better not inéerfere with my rousters,
they don’t like outsiders,—was the warning the captain gave
these roughs as they scrambled on deck.” (Wild Western Scenes,
p. 23.)

Interview, to. The verb has been called an Americanism, and
its origin ascribed to the brevity exacted by telegraphic commu,
nications; but it is as old as Hall’s Chronical, printed in 1542.
“Interviewing is nothing new; it existed in Cesar’s time; for
did not great Julius ask: Who is in the press that calls?” (Rich-
mond Dispatch, March 17, 1871.) “Everybody is interviewed
now-a-days; Emperor William on his throne, the murderer
Ruloff in his cell, and the man whose wife has just run away
from him—all fall into the hands of the merciless newspaper
reporter.” (New York Herald, April 13, 1871.)

Invite, instead of invitation, a corruption of uneducated men, |
is an imitation of English slang, which has recently crept into
our speech.

Zt, added as an expletive to verbs, is declared by Mr. Abbot in
his Grammar of Shakespeare to be “now only found in slang
phrases.” That may be so in England; in the United States
nothing is more common than this addition, and General Grant’s
phrase, “I propose to fight ¢¢ out on this line,” has rendered it
historical,

Item, though generally used in the sense of an article or sepa-
rate particular in an account, has in America the meaning of a
point of information for the press. “ Local” reporters are forever
in search of an item for their paper, and the New York Times
quotes one of them as saying, “The nfoment you get the tem
you want, give it to me and I'll rum to the office to have it
printed.”
 

OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 495

J.

Jab, to, to handle harshly, or even to strike and stab, is a
Western term. “The Missouri stoker pulls and jads his plutonic
monster as an irate driver would regulate his mule.” (On the
Plains. Putnam’s Magazine, September, 1868.)

Jacket is in America almost exclusively used for “roundabout.”

Jag, an old English word, long obsolete at home, ‘survives in
lower New Jersey especially, which was settled by Puritan immi-
grants from New England and Long Island, with a few English
quakers, and hence has preserved many words no longer known
in England. “ He had brought a jag of hay to town.”

Jaw, to, quoted by Todd and Halliwell in the sense of to scold,
is much used in the New England States.

“ But, neighbor, ef they prove their claim at law,
The best way is to settle, an’ not to jaw.”
(J. R. Lowell. Biglow Papers, IL, p. 61.)
It is, however, also used as a common slang term for talking
simply, as in the lines—
“The neighbors round the corners drawed,
And ca'mly drinked and jawed.”
(John Hay. The Mystery of Gilgal.)

Jeames is the universal pronunciation of James in Virginia, since
the time when English settlers brought it first with them from
home. Hence “the noble Jeames” is the facetious name of James
River, and the Thorn-apple is never called anything but Jimson
weed. The same tendency has led to the change of Jane into

Jean (from Genoa, French Genes), a twilled cotton-cloth ; the
term is commonly used in the plural in America.

Jew, to, colloquially known in England as meaning to cheat,
is here often used in the sense of haggling, bargaining. “Don’t
you think the old hunks wanted to 7ew me down to three thou-
sand dollars?” (California Flush Times.)

Jest and jist are favorite forms for “ just.”

Jine is in like manner substituted for “join,” especially in New
England, and has the fact in its favor that Dryden and Pope both
rhyme join and shine more than once, and that this pronunciation
of ot as ¢ was once orthodox in England.

Job, originally a cant word, has made good its place, first in
political language,and then in our speech generally. Nor has
496 AMERICANISMS.

England been able to prevent its introduction. “The House was
very temperate, to-day, in the way of legislation, and with an evi-
dent determination to pass no jobs, adjourned early.” (New York
Tribune, March 23, 1871.) Grose quotes the word as meaning, in
Norfolk, a piece of labor, undertaken at a stated price, and this
meaning it still preserves. In political phraseology, however, it
denotes almost always a good thing obtained by secret influence or
unfair means. “Two centuries ago a jod was declared to mean an
arranged robbery. What does it mean now?” (Slang Dictionary.)

Jole is the common way of writing—-according to the somnd—
the word jow/, and when applied to the: cheek of a pig, served up
with “turnip-greens,” forms the favorite dish of the Virginian.

Jumper, the characteristic name of a rude kind of sleigh, made
of two elastic poles on which a box is fastened, and much used in
the North and Northwest. “Here two voyageurs were waiting
for us with their jumpers, and, uninviting as the frail structures
looked at first sight, we soon found that they were quite com-
fortable, and admirably adapted to the mode of travelling in this
howling wilderness.” (4 Winter in Canada, p. 137.)

Junk is in New England constantly substituted for chunk, and
means “a fragment of any solid substance.” (J. R. Lowell, Glos-
sary to Biglow Papers.)

K.

Keener, a noun made from the adjective, is a Western term for
asharp man. “I tell you heis a keener, you can’t get on his blind
side.”

Keep, to, in the sense of to live, to have a place of business, is
common here, while in England it is only provincial and local, as
e.g. in Cambridge, where “to keep” means to lodge. Meeping-
room instead of drawing-room, almost universal in New England,
is in like manner found in Norfolk and Suffolk (England), proving
once more how many of the early settlers must have come from
the eastern counties of England.

Kellick or Killock is the peculiar name of a small anchor, men-
tioned by Forby, and still heard in some small seaports of Eng-
land, but quite common here in the Hastern States. «The hoat-
men occasionally dropped the kellick in the river-channel, and
plied the oyster-tongs.” (Connecticut Georgics.)
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 494

Kilter, quoted by Grose and by Brockett, and derived from the
Danish Avler, continues to be used in Pennsylvania as well as in
the New England States; the former preferring the form of Keléer.
It means order and good condition, and what is not in such a
state is said to be “out of Keller.”

“ But it’s all out of Killer (twas tu good to last.”)
(J. R. Lowell. Biglow Payers, I1., p. 144.)

It is probable that this is the origin of the term helter-skelter,
which Grose humorously explains as consisting of helter to hang,
and kelter, order, so that it literally means, hang order!

Key for Quay or Kay, is not an Americanism, although many
localities in the United States are so called, as the Sowth Keys in
Nansemond County, Virginia. (The Florida Keys are Spanish
Cayos.) Pepys writes, November 7, 1665, when the plague was
raging in London: “ Lord! to see how he (Carteret) wondered to
see the river so empty of boats, nobody working at the Custom-
House Keys.”

Killing-Time denotes, in the South, the season of the year when,
the first frosts having set in, hogs can be slaughtered—a time of
overflowing abundance and great rejoicing in former days.

Kinkie is the more common form here for kink, in the sense of
notion, idea, although kinky remains unchanged, and means eccen-
tric, fanciful.

“T love, I say, to start upon a tramp

To shake the kinkles out o’ back an’ legs.”
(J. R. Lowell. Diglow Papers, IL., p. 52.)

“Tt is said—and we are not prepared to deny it—that all the mem-
bers of the Randolph family have been more or less kinky.”
(Richmond Znguirer, June 17, 1847.)

Kiver for cover, common in New England and southward as
far as Pennsylvania, is merely old English preserved, being fre-
quently met with in the earlier dramatists. “I am a mere shell-
fish—an oyster with the kivers off.” (J. C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches.)
“Gill charges the Eastern counties of England with kiver for
cover.” (J. R. Lowell.) The word divered, on the other hand, is
frequently heard in the South also, precisely as the early English
settlers pronounced it and as the Cockney to this day sings: “I
have kivered my head with green baize.”
498 AMERICANISMS.

Knife, to, a newly-made verb, which has already found its way
back to England. It means, to cut as with a knife, to stab.

“the blast
That knifes your vitals in hurrying past.”
(Sleigh-Riding. Troy Whig, December, 1848.)

L.

Lamper-eel seems to be a favorite corruption of lamprey in
America as well as at home. “Mr. Van Buren hung on like a
lamper-eel to the tail of General Jackson’s horse.” (Major J.
Downing’s Letéers, p. 23.) The term shows once more how eagerly
the uneducated seize upon every opportunity to shape an unknown
word into a more familiar form. The Middle Latin dampreta, from
lambe petram (because the fish with its sucking mouth adhered to
stones), conveyed, of course, no meaning to them; hence already
in Anglo-Saxon the fish was called a mere-naedre, sea-adder, the
same name as that given to the eel—and hence the corruption.

Lane is in the South the common name given to all roads
which are enclosed on both sides by fences.

Lather, to, is used here as in some parts of England, in the
sense of to beat. It was originally to /eather, a term derived from
the leather belt worn by soldiers and policemen, which was often
used as a Weapon in street-rows, when firearms were forbidden.
(Slang Dictionary, p. 90.) “Tl leather you heartily.” (Grose.)
“Yow 'll get a mighty fine leathering, if you don’t make haste and
clear out.” (Harper’s Monthly, January, 1851.)

Lawyer is in America the uniform name of the person’ who in
England is called a solicitor, if attending to our legal business, and
a barrister, if appearing for us at court—the distinction not being
observed in this country.

Lay, to, instead of lie, although undoubtedly incorrect, if judged
by the usage established by the best writers of our day, may still
be excused on the plea that the older writers seem to have em-
ployed it unhesitatingly. Chaucer says in his well-known lines—

“Befell that in that season, on a day
At Southwark at the Tabart I did lay.”

“T used to /ay on the sofa in the stately hall, during the sultry
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 499

part of the day, and read a MS. work with wonderful gusto.”
(Letters from the South, I., p. 81.)
Laylock for lilac has the same authority for its use.

“ The cat-bird in the laylock bush is loud.”
(J. R. Lowell. Biglow Papers, IL., p. 157.)

Laze, to, instead of to idle and waste time, is used in this sense
by South, who says: “ He lay lazing and looking upon his couch.”
Lean-to, in New England generally pronounced linter, is not
unknown in England, but much more common in the Hastern
States of the Union. It designates a small addition to a house,
the roof of which leans to or against the main wall. “For a
kitchen I have nothing but a small lean-to with a shingle-roof,
through, which the rain kindly furnishes me all the water I need
for cooking.” (Mrs. Cleveland, A Summer in the West, p. 148.)
Leave, to, used as a neuter verb, without an object, is as common
as it is incorrect. R. G. White says indignantly: “To wind up a
story with, then he /eft, is as bad as to say, then he sloped—worse,
for sloped is recognized slang.” (Words and their Uses, p. 134.)
Lick, as a noun, means in the South and West a place where
rock-salt and salt-springs attract great numbers of buffalo and deer.
It is often called a Salt-Lick, and has, in return, given a name to
many localities. The Big Bone Lick in Kentucky is a place, which
having once been a favorite resort of deer, buffalo, and wild cattle,
presents now an incredible number of bones and whole skeletons;
among the latter are some of the wild bisons of former days, and
of mastodons. Lick has, moreover, from the verb, the meaning
of a piece or apart, as in the following sentence: “ The father
hunted ’possums, cultivated a little patch of corn, and did an
occasional lick of work for some well-to-do neighbor, taking his
pay in corn.” Big Licks mean, hence, vigorous efforts. As a verb,
to lick retains in full force its ancient meaning of to thrash, which
it had already under its quaint form of to lycke, in Thomas Har-
man’s Canting Dictionary, published under Queen Elizabeth, and
the first ever written. “’Tain’t no use to talk about honor with
them, Cap.; they hain’t got no such thing in ’em, and they won’t
show fair fight, anyway you can fix it. Don’t they kill and sculp
a white man whenar they get the better on him? The mean
varmints, they’ll never behave themselves until you give um
500 AMERICANISMS.

a clean out-and-out licking. They can’t understand white folks’
ways, and they won’t learn ’um, and ef you treat ’um decently,
they think you are afeard. You may depen’ on it, Cap., the only
way to treat Injuns is to thrash them well at first, and then the
balance will sorter take to you and behave themselves.” (Colonel
Marcy’s Laxpedition in the West.)

Lief, lever, and leves are all used here as in England collo-
quially.

Lieutenant is almost universally pronounced Jeftenant in the
United States, and the distinction between army and navy lieu-
tenants treated with republican indifference.

Inft takes here the place of the more usual Uiftyate in England.

Light-bread designates wheat-bread, in contradistinction from
corn-bread, which really is much heavier, while

Light-wood is so called from yielding a bright light, much used
where candles and oil are too expensive, and from kindling
readily. It consists generally of small chips of resinous pine
wood, technically called kindlings. “I have heard a piece of
pine forest called, The lightwood knot woods, i. ¢, the woods
where they get the pine-knots for kindlings.” (8. 8. Haldeman.)

Like instead of as, used mainly in the South, but not unknown
elsewhere, is almost exclusively an Americanism, being but rarely
heard in England. “JI did not feel dike saying another word, after
he had treated me so badly.” “Why can’t you come this evening
after meeting, lke you always do?” (E. Phelps, The Gates Ajar.)

Lily-pads is the curious name given to places where a number
of the leaves of the water-lily form, as it were, floating islands on
the surface of apond. “I have seen boys secure pickerel taking
their unwary siesta beneath the lily-pads too nigh the surface,
with a gun and small shot.” (J. R. Lowell, Biglow Papers, I, p.
30.)

Limb, instead of leg, one of the ludicrous evidences of the false
prudishness prevailing in certain classes of American society. R.
G. White, in his sharp, incisive way, says of people who use limd
for leg: “Perhaps these persons think that it is indelicate for
women to have legs, and that therefore they are concealed by
garments and should be concealed in speech. If so, heaven help
them!” (Words and their Uses.) This mock-modesty is carried
so far that we even find: “One of her larger limbs was fractured
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 501

in the attempt to rescue her from the prison-walls.” (Upham
Witchcraft, IL., p. 248.) The statements that Southern ladies at
table ask for a chicken limb, and that the principal of a fashiona-
ble boarding-school for girls in Baltimore had the limbs of her
pianos clad in muslin-trousers, are, we trust, what the French call
un peu plus beau que la véerité.

Limbo, much used in America, as in England, is not slang, as
often stated. The Catholic Prayer-Book says: “Christ descended
into Limbo.”

Lime-kill, for lime-kiln, very common in New England, has
Gayton’s authority in its favor, who so writes it in his “Festivous
Notes on Don Quixote.” (J. R. Lowell.)

Lives, another form under which, in the West especially, lief
and lieves appear. “Just as dives as not,” is a phrase occurring
in the Eastern States also—*< Well, captain, I’ll go with you, too,
I guess, if you jest as lives.” (Overland Monthly, October, 1870,
p. 343.)

Lt, the old preterite of light, much censured as an American-
ism, is used by Addison, who says: “I di¢ my pipe with paper,”
and actually occurs in a leader of the London Zimes, June 17,
1861.

Live,in the sense of quick, green, active, is rarely heard in
England, where guick takes its place mainly, but very common
in America. Jive oaks and live men, live hedges and live words,
are constantly quoted.. A new application of the term has been
recently made: “This is the first instance in which, within the
territory of the United States (Alaska, of course, excepted), live
glaciers have been found, though in the East as well as in the
West there are so many indications of glacial action. The glaciers
on Mount Shasta, now detected, have hitherto escaped notice.”
(King, Zuplorations in the Rocky Mountains, p. 157.)

Lopsided is, in Pennsylvania, the usual form of lab or lapsided,
written as it was used in England in old times. (Slang Diction-
ary, p. 173.) “He illustrates the lopsided consequences of giving
one leg more to do than another.” (J. C. Neal, Charcoal
Sketches.)

Log, to, as a verb, is used only in America, and means to get
out logs. From this verb are derived logging and the noun Jogger.
“These men were on their way to the upper portage, where the
502 AMERICANISMS.

logging was to commence.” “The poet must from time to time
travel the logger’s path and the Indian trail, to drink at some new
and more bracing fountain of the muses, far in the recesses of the
mountains.” (American Monthly, August, 1858.) The logging
camp isa close-built, snug log-hut, erected by lumbermen for their
residence during their winter work, and the place where the tim-
ber is felled and cut is called the logging-swamp, however dry it
may happen to be, because generally the finest logs are cut in
swamps.

Long, as an adverb, instead of “it is long,” is used in some
parts of America, especially in the Cumberland Valley, merging
into the meaning of the kindred word “to long.” “Don’t you
think long to be at home?” “A relic doubtless of English in the
Middle Ages, for to think long is still common in the Cumbrian
districts of England, supplying the missing link between the ad-
jectivelong and the verb long. We long for a thing, when we
think it is Jong before we attain it.” (Henry Reeves.)

Lope, the old participle of to leap, in the sense of a leap, a long -
step, is “often heard in the streets of London.” (Slang Diction-
ary, p. 173.)

“Up he lope and the window broke,
And he had thirty feet to fall.”
(Percy’s Relics.) ,

As a verb, to lope is very generally used in the West, and in this
sense generally looked upon as an abbreviation of to gallop. It
is far more likely, however, to be a remnant of the Dutch verb
lopen, which was once much used in England, and is referred to
in Beaumont and Fletcher’s line, “It goes.like a Dutch lopeman.”
The former derivation was evidently in F. B. Harte’s mind when
he wrote, “Horses are always ready saddled in Spanish ranchos,
and in half an hour from the time of our arrival, we were again
loping in the staring sunlight.” (Luck of Roaring Camp, p. 214.)
The noun Joper, used like loafer, would hardly admit such an
etymology: “ Nature never intended such a climate for lazy lopers ;
she never gin six months’ sunshine to be slept and smoked away.”
(Lbidem, p. 201.)

Lumber, in England only known as meaning useless and cum-
brous things, literally and figuratively, denotes in America also
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 503

timber cut and sawed for use. As the business of getting out
lumber is a very extensive one, the term is used ag a verb as well
as a noun, and has furnished the additional words, luwmbderer and
lumberman, for persons engaged in this business.

“In unploughed Maine, he sought the Zwmberers’ gang

Where from a hundred lakes young rivers sprang.”
(R. W. Emerson. Wood Notes.)

A lumber-wagon, consisting of a plain, square box on wheels, is
used by farmers everywhere to carry produce to market.

Lummoz, the odd provincial word of old England, is quite
common with us. “The Roman cart-horse,” says A.A. Bartlett
in a recent number of Old and New, “will seldom. weigh over a
thousand or eleven hundred pounds, but I would trust him to
keep on pulling long after your mere Jwmmozes had fallen in their
shafts.” (June, 1871.)

M.

Mad, in the sense of angry, and as a substitute for the English
wild, was denounced as a vile Americanism when W. Irving first
used it in one of his earlier works. Like many such terms, it is
excellent old English. Middleton has: “'They are mad; she
graced me with one private minute above their fortunes.” (Your
Five Gallants.) “Iwas mad at him.” (Old Plays, 2d ed., L., p.
65.) “And being exceedingly mad against them, I persecuted
them even unto strange cities.” (Acts xxvi.11.) “This made
him halfe madde to be the owner of such strange jewells.” (Cap-
tain John Smith, Virginia, L, p. 168.) Even the familiar phrase,
like mad, has old and high authority in its favor. Pepys, in his
Diary, writes, June 13, 1663: “Thence by coach with a mad
couchman, that drove like mad, and down bye-ways through
Bucklesbury home.” “Said I: ‘Sister, while I was preaching, did
you get mad? She answered: ‘Yes, very mad; I could have
cut your throat. But I am not mad now, and I love you, and
God has blessed me.’” (Rev. P. Cartwright, Autobiography,
p. 222.) The word is even used as a noun, meaning anger: “ The
Squire’s mad riz.” (New Hra, April, 1871.)

Madstone is the name of a round stone of the size of an egg,
of dark color, preserved in some families in the South, to which
the power is ascribed of curing persons bitten by mad dogs or
venomous serpents. It is placed upon the wound, from which it
504 AMERICANISMS.

draws much matter, and this process being repeated frequently,
extracts the venom—by faith.

Madam is the title given in many parts of the country, where old
English customs are still held in remembrance, in New England
and in Virginia for instance, to married ladies who have married
daughters of their own name. Besides, as the first President’s
wife was universally known as Lady Washington, ladies of old
age and high social position are often honored with the title of
Madam. Marm is the familiar corruption of the word, peculiar
to New England.

Magnetic, denounced by the Atheneum, with its usual tender-
ness for the United States, as a “ useless and objectionable Amer-

icanism,” is not only used by Donne—
“ She that had all magnetic force alone ”—

but has, since this was done, established itself in England also, as
a useful and legitimate part of the language.

Mail, to, applied to letters and newspapers, has in America
entirely usurped the place of the English, to post. In like man-
ner, the post-boy of England is here a mazi-rider, while the mail-
coach there re-appears here as a mati-stage.

Manor denotes in America a tract of land occupied by tenants,
and held by the owner in virtue of a grant from the former
sovereigns, who governed this country as colonies.

Mantle-place is the curious form which the English mantle-
ptece has assumed in some parts of the South. As the term origi-
nally meant a piece of mantle or cloak, hung over the chimney
to hide it by a kind of drapery (lambrequin), and only subse-
quently was applied to the whole framework itself, it conveyed no
very distinct idea to persons unfamiliar with such luxuries, and
hence the piece very naturally changed into a place. “ You have
a very singular ornament for your maztle-place.” (W. G. Simms,
The Last Wager.)

Marvel has, in like manner, usurped, first in pronunciation and
afterward even in writing, the place of marble, especially in the
play with “marbles,” so popular in the South, that men now
living can recollect having seen grave judges and renowned sena-
tors engage in it with much zest and pleasure. Even the great
Chief-Justice Marshall, of Virginia, is said to have enjoyed it up
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 505

to a good old age. A Kentucky divine is reported to have once
preached against this “frivolous and childish sport ” from the text,
“ Marvel not, brethren!” (1 John iii. 13.)

Mash, a corruption of marsh, is common in the South, where
the letter r is grievously ill-treated, being dropped where it ought
to be heard and tacked on to words that require no such help.
The Mash-market in Baltimore thus derives its name from the
fact that it was built upon low, marshy ground, where a very
humble class of people formerly resided.

Matter, in the sense of amount, extent, etc., is frequently heard
in the South and West. “I suppose the lad had been with us a
matter of six weeks, getting better, but so slowly that he had not,
at the end of that time, been able to leave the picket.” (W. G.
Simms, The Two Camps.)

Maying, a celebration of the return of spring, is little known
in America; the term survives, however, in Pennsylvania, in the
sense of having a picnic or a strolling after flowers. (S. 8. Hal-
deman.)

Maypole. “There was formerly in the centre square of the
village of Maytown, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, a pole like
a very tall mast, permanently erected, and called the maypole. It
had a vane on the top.” (8. 8. Haldeman.) Probably the only
instance of the existence of maypoles in the United States. ,

Meeching, more rarely miching, still survives here in the sense
in which it was used by Shakespeare (skulking), while in Eng-
land it has become obsolete.

“But I ain’t of the meechin’ kind, that sets and thinks for weeks,
The bottom’s out o’ th’ Universe, ’coz their own gillpot leaks.”
(J. R. Lowell. Biglow Papers, IL., p. 18.)

Middling, in the sense of tolerably well, is used from New
England southward as far as Pennsylvania. “How are your
folks? Only middling, thank you.” It is, of course, good old
English, mentioned in Bailey, and thus used by Dryden: “ Longi-
nus preferred the sublime genius that sometimes errs to the mid-
diing or indifferent one, which makes few faults but seldom rises to
any excellence.” The Scotch-Irish in the valley of the Alleghanies
have improved upon it, and speak of a man as middling smart.
“Mister Sawin, sir, you’re middlin’ well now, be ye?” (J. R.

22
506 AMERICANISMS.

Lowell, Biglow Papers, I., p. 27.) The plural, middiings, is used in
the South and West to denote the parts of the hogs between the
shoulders and the hams, which are cured separately, and quoted, as
pork in the market, under this name.

Million, a common corruption for melon, used in the South
by the whole black race and not a few whites, is not new. Pepys
in his Diary says, August 5, 1666, “We landed and walked to
Barne-elmes and bought a milion.”

Minced-pies represent in America the English Christmas-pies.
They continue to be popular in the South; in the North they,
as well as plum portidge, fell under the interdict of the
Puritans at Christmas times, though they allowed that they
might be lawfully and piously eaten in any month but December.
Hence the quaint complaint—

“ All.plums the prophets’ sons deny,
And spice broths are too hot;
Treason’s in a Deo pye,
And death within the pot.

Christmas, farewell! Thy days, I fear,
And merry days, are gone,
So they may keep feast all the year,
Our Saviour shall have none.”
(Needham. History of the Rebellion.)

Mind, to, is used in America very much as in Scotland, to de-
note remembering. “I minded me of my sins.” Wherever the
Scotch-Irish have settled in large numbers, the word is so used. “A
month’s mind,” is a,series of ecclesiastical services, especially relat-
ing to one subject, and also a stated prayer for the dead. In the
same manner to mind is used in the sense of to takecare. “ Nev-
er mind now; you ought to have minded the child better.” In
popular language the fuller form, to have a mind, is preferred.
“You can call me when you have a mind to.” (Lippincott’s Mag-
azine, March 27, 1871, p. 282.)

Misery, in the South, means simply pain. “I was suffering
with such a misery in my head, and nothing would do me any
good.” (Longstreet, Mush Times.) The word is a special favorite
with the negroes, to whose mind it represents any feeling which
they cannot definitely describe. As they are never perfectly well,
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 507

but only “jest tullable,” so they are ever ready to have “a misery
in the leg, the chest, or the throat.”

Mistress is in the South very frequently yet heard pronounced
fully, without the usual contraction into “ Missess.”

Mizzle, to, a term borrowed from English slang, is well known
in America. The term is a frequentative of mist, and originally
meant, in the forms of to mistle and then to mise (Bailey), to rain
in small drops. As the mizzle is apt to come after a rain, the dis-
appearance is transferred to persons who are said in like manner
to mizzle, and hence the play upon those words in Thomas Hood’s
lines:

“How monarchs die is easily explained,
And thus it might upon their tombs be chiselled :
As long as George IV. could reign, he reigned,

And then he mizeled.”
(On a Royal Demise.) °

“They say the treasurer has mezzled, and as there is a small sum
of a hundred thousand dollars missing, the presumption is not a
very violent one.” (New York Herald, June 17, 1857.)

Mobee or Mobby, declared by Bailey to be “a potable liquor
made of potato roots, used in America,” and afterward a kind of
wine made in the West Indies, is frequently applied in the South
_ to what in England would be simply called a “ punch.”

Molasses, universally substituted for syrup and treacle—the lat-
ter being almost unknown in America-—-is in the West often mis-
apprehended and treated as a plural. “Where did you get these
molasses? at the store?”

Monkey-spoon, is the name of a spoon, bearing the figure of an
ape or monkey, carved in solid silver on the extremity of the han-
dle, and given at the funerals of great people in the State of New
York to the pall-bearers. At the death of Philip Livingston in
February, 1719, we are told “a pipe of wine was spiced for the oc-
casion, and to each of the eight bearers, with a pair of gloves, a
mourning ring, scarf, and handkerchief, and a Monkey-spoon was
given.” (Old paper.)

Monstrous, for anything great or striking, was precisely so used
in Horace Walpole’s time, and is now revived again.

Most, instead of almost, is inexcusable, but so generally in use
that it has crept into the newspapers, and appears unblushingly
508 AMERICANISMS.

even in otherwise well-written articles. “ We have seen most every
kind of trickery and deception at election time, but in this, Tam-
many has surpassed all precedent.” (New York Zridune, March
30, 1870.)

Mought, the old preterite of may, obsolete in England, is fre-
quently heard in the South, where the negroes especially use it
almost exclusively. -Derived from the ancient verb mowe, the an-
cestor of may, and corresponding to the German mochte, it was
once correct, and hence Fairfax says—

“Yet mould with death, then chastise, tho’ he mought.”
In North Carolina “it mout be” is a standing phrase for perhaps.

Mud-lumps, is the technical name of the earliest appearance
of soft, spongy land at the mouth of the Mississippi, the evil genii
of the Passes, as they have been called, and the dread of the nayi-
gators. They are at first conical, not unlike miniature volcanoes,
and have little craters at the top, from which flows muddy water,
much salter and heavier than that of the Gulf. They have been
known to rise to the height of twenty feet, and to become several
hundred feet in circumference.

Muilling means, in the United States, bustling, stirring, with
the additional idea, at times, of its being done in an underhand
way. The metaphor is evidently derived from the mulling of
wine, which takes place “when wine is burnt and sweetened.”
(Hanmer.) “What a muilin’ there was among the lasses when
he came home from college, and appeared at church in all his
city splendor.” (Life in a Village, p. 117.)

Mum, a probable corruption of ma’am, is the common pronun-
ciation of the latter word in many parts of the Union, and often
written, as in the case of the famous Mum Bet. This was the
popular name of Elizabeth Freeman, a colored woman, born in
slavery in 1742, who heard, while waiting at table, the Bill of
Rights and the new Constitution of Massachusetts (1772) dis-
cussed. She thought she understood, from what she heard, that
all but “dumb beasts” had a right, under these laws, to claim
their personal liberty. She consulted an eminent lawyer, Judge
Sedgwick, who took her case up seriously and obtained her free-
dom, with wages for her services since she came ofage. This led,
as a matter of convenience, to the abolition of slavery in Massa-
chusetts, and made Mum Bet a historical personage.
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW. FACES. 509

Musical, in certain localities in New England, has the meaning
of humorous; and a damsel will say to her lover: “Git away,
you are so musical,” when she thinks he is becoming too pressing.

Muss, perhaps a corruption of mess, and meaning a difficulty, a
state of disorder, is very popular in all parts of the United
States, and has Shakespeare’s authority in its favor, who uses it in
Anthony and Cleopatra :

“ Of late, when I said: Ho!
Like boys into a muss, kings would strut forth
And cry : ‘Your will !”

“We have all been in such a muss, ever since you left us, that I
heartily wish we had gone too.” (J.’P. Kennedy.) The verb is,
in New England, often corrupted into, to mux. “Don’t mux up
my dress so, it’s all mashed already.” The same form occurs in
New Jersey, and has led to the question whether the word may
not come from the German “ Musz,” a hashed mixture of fruit, like
apple-butter. In the west of England muz means dirt, and this
meaning also is not unknown here.

N.

Naked possessor, is the odd title by which, in Texas and the
Southwestern States, the occupant of a farm is known, who can
show no title to his land.

Nasty, in England frequently meaning ill-tempered or cross-
grained (Slang Dictionary, p. 186), and in this sense admitted
into good society, denotes in America something disgusting in
point of smell, taste, or even moral character, and is not consid-
ered a proper word to be used in the presence of ladies.

Natural is used in two peculiar meanings in America. One is
derived from the association of what is natural with what is sav-
age, belonging to man’s lower nature, as suggested in the words,
“The natural man receiveth not the things of the spirit of God.”
(1 Corinthians ii, 14.) Hence it means, fierce, savage. “Ned
Hazard is a pretty hard horse to ride, too; only look at his eye,
how natural it is!” (J. P. Kennedy, Sinallow Barn.) The other
use of natural is the result of ignorance, when it is employed in-
stead of native. But this also has old English usage to excuse it,
for an old book, printed in 1536, has this title: “The Complaynt
510 AMERICANISMS.

of Roderyck More, somtyme a gray fryre, unto the parliament
howse of Ingland, his natural country.”

Neat, used formerly in England in the sense of free from
admixture, as in Chapman’s “ Our old wine neaé,” is in America
often employed as an adverb, with the same meaning: “I knew
the mixture to be good for the cholera, for I had tried it, though
I had never ventured to take it neat.” (Lippincott’s Magazine,
March, 1871, p. 245.)

Neither added to a negation, as is the frequent custom in the
South, has the authority of many old English writers for its use,
and has been preserved in its former meaning. “The Indians,
who have no pleasure in exercise and won’t be at the pains to fish
and hunt, and, indeed, not so well as they neither.” (R. B. Bever-
ley, History of Virginia, p. 18.)

Nightfall, used by Swift in the sense of at the close of the day,
and After Night, are both continued unchanged in Virginia and
the Southern States generally. The New England States, instead,
use nights for “of nights,” an adverb made after the model of the
German Nachts: “So thievish, they hev to take in their stone-
walls nights.” (J. R. Lowell.)

Nice and nicely, used with great freedom, both North and South,
has full authority for this in Grose’s statement: “Nice, clever,
agreeable, fine, applied to anything.” “Squire, how’s your wife?”
Thank ye, she’s doing nicely.” (Alice Cary.)

Nip, as derived from the German nippen or nipfen, to sip, is a
frequent word in America to denote a small drink. “ One of our
Western villages passed an ordinance forbidding taverns to sell
liquor on the Sabbath to any persons except travellers. The next
Sunday every man in town, who wanted a nip, was seen walking
around with a valise in one hand and two carpet-bags in the
other.” (Kditor’s Drawer. Harper's Magazine, May, 1855.)

Nohow, an American expletive, used even in careful writing.
“Well, I reckon a man never gets anything worth having without
a tussle for it, and as to secrets, I don’t believe in them nohow.”
This is but one of the many evidences our speech bears of loving
double negatives, in the same manner in which they were popular
with the English in the days of Shakespeare. Nohow is frequently
strengthened, in familiar language, by two additions: “ Nohow by
a long way,” and “ Nohow you can fix it.”
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 511

Nor, is in New England frequently substituted for the proper
word than. “ Better nor a thousand o’ ’em were killed ;” “ Better
nor fifty bushels of them potatoes was spoiled by the rain.”

Notch, a narrow passage through the mountains, as the famous
White Mountain Notch, is in the Catskill mountains represented
by Cove, and in the Southern States by Gap.

Notify, to, a verb in England only applied to things, the object
of information, is in the United States connected with persons, as
its direct object. Where the English, therefore, notify an order to
a person, the Americans notify the person of the order. “Upon
receipt of these papers, you will notify the agent of.the decision
of the Department.” (Hon. Hamilton Fish to Mr. Motley, 1869.)

Notion, in the sense of inclination, is an Americanism, and by
no means any longer confined to colloquial language. “I have a
notion to an egg” (Southern Literary Messenyer, August, 1849), is
of course incorrect, but such expressions are often heard in the
South. “She had a xotion I would propose as soon as she gave me
an opening, but there she was mistaken.” (Miss Evans, Beulah.)
The plural has acquired in New England a special popularity,
denoting every variety of small wares, which have come to be re-
garded so exclusively the specialty of those States that they are
advertised in shops and newspapers as “ Yankee Notions.” Even
a “dealer in notions” has become a regular mercantile term. The
word is not new, in either sense, for Fr. Bentley already says:
“He may coin new notions of his own.” (On Hreethinking, 1703.)
“Finally he swore that he would have nothing more to do with
such a squatting, bundling, questioning, swapping, pumpkin-
eating, molasses-daubing, shingle-splitting, cider-watering, horse-
jockeying, notion-peddling crew.” (W. Irving, Knickerbocker
History of New York.) .

O.
Obleeged, as Pope said :
“ Dreading e’en fools, by flatterers besieged,
And so obliging, that he ne’er obliged,”
and as Earl Russell has never ceased to say, is in like manner still
used by many a gentleman of the old school, especially in the
South, where quiet rural life and greater seclusion seem to have
secured an asylum to old words and old sounds, that have long
since disappeared everywhere else. The phrase, obliged to be, as
512 AMERICANISMS.

applied. to things, is however, of modern date and unpardonably
faulty. “ When he heard of Anthon’s ruin and our doubts about
it, he only said he knew it was obliged to be so, since no man ever
went on at a greater rate than Anthon had done.” (The Southern
Bride, p. 271.) The North has, on the other hand, the old term
obligement, which is still heard occasionally in New England.

Of, as inserted between verbs and their direct object, is very
frequent in all parts of the Union, and arose originally, no doubt,
from an instinctive perception of the verb asa noun. “The feel-
ing of tt is quite soft.” “He expects to be well paid for the letting
of it.”

Offai, in the English sense nothing but absolutely worthless
refuse, resumes in America, constantly and legitimately, its ancient
meaning, of those parts of a butchered animal which are small in
size, and not worth salting. Thus, in pork-packing, the liver and
the lights, the head, etc. are calied offal. In New Jersey the
word is quite frequently pronounced off-fall, and a plural off-fails is
used, which may possibly point out the true origin of the word.

Old Country, generally used with reference to England, not
unfrequently finds a wider application to all Europe, and natural-
ized citizens are thus represented as having returned to the Old
Country, whenever they visit their native land. ‘‘ When the tan-
dem was brought to the Mayov’s office, an ordinance was read from
an Old-Cowntry-looking, yellow book, made when New York was
not New York City.” (New York Tridune, February 15, 1871.)

Old Driver and Old Splitfoot are probably also reminiscences
of those early days, and continue to be courteous substitutes for
the name of the Evil One.

“ An’ make Ole Splitfoot winch an’ squirm for all he’s used to singeing.”
(J. R. Lowell. Biglow Papers, IL., p. 38.)

Omnibus retains in America very generally its full form, the
English ’bws being but rarely heard.

On seems to be a favorite preposition with Americans; at least
it is constantly found where other prepositions would seem to be-
more correct and appropriate. F. G. Halleck already condemned
this abuse, a result of the prevailing carelessness in the use of
words, and quoted the phrases: “Going to Europe on a steam-
boat; writing a letter on Chambers-street, and delivering it 0”
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 513

Fifth avenue; being mentioned on the Times newspaper; and
actually speaking of: Our Father which art on heaven.” Per-
sons are constantly heard to speak of friends whom they saw on
the street, and having come on the cars, while in the South
members are elected to sit on the Legislature. Hence the common
phrase of being on time, instead of in time; “The engine-driver had
been running extra risks, in order, as the Americans phrase it, to
make time, 80 as to be on time.” (W. F. Rae, Westward by Raii.)
The New England phrase: “I hearn him tell on it,” instead of
concerning it, has its precedent in the Hallamshire Glossary; but
“She never thought on it” (HE. 8. Phelps, A Woman’s Pulpit),
can hardly be excused. To be on tt, is a recent slang term, mean-
ing to be ready for a fight.

“At that he pranced around as if a bee were in his bonnet,
And, with hostile demonstrations, inquired if Iwas on it.”
(Words and their Uses, Galveston News, May 4, 1871.)

Once, at, is used in the United States, North and South, instead
of the English immediately. “I will send it back at once.” Un-
fortunately, it is rarely heard pronounced correctly, even educated
persons having a tendency to raise it to a superlative, and pro-
nounce it onst. Hence its peculiar spelling, resembling English
provincialisms. “Warn ye wunst, warn ye twyst, warn ye three
times.” (J. C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches.) The Chester Plays already
have at onst, and J. R. Lowell quotes it with this commentary:
“T am now inclined to consider it no corruption ‘at all, but only
an erratic and obsolete superlative, at onest.” This is proved by
the ¢wyst, quoted above, and the development of among into
amongst, amid into amidst, and between into betwixt.

Onhitch, to, is a quaint rural substitute for to fire, much used
in the New England States. It refers to the act of pulling the
trigger.

“So he onhitehed—Jerusalem! the middle of next year
Was right next door compared to where he kicked the crittur to.’’
(J. R. Lowell. Biglow Papers, II., p. 28.)

Onto, in England condemned as obsolete and incorrect, is much
affected by certain writers of the class of Mrs. Stowe. A reverend
Doctor of Divinity, in a learned essay on Christian Baptism,
says: “Pouring water onto the fists is the proper translation of.

22*
514 AMERICANISMS.

a phrase in the Greek usually translated, Pouring water upon
the hands.” (Christian Observer, June, 1849.)

Osculate, to, as a substitute for to kiss, an utterly unwarrant-
able vulgarism.

Ouch, an interjection quoted in ancient glossaries, still survives
in the Middle and some of the Southern States, as a cry uttered
by persons who are Be aden hurt. “ Ouch—my eye. How it
hurts! Don’t hit me again.” (J. C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches.)

Outcry is occasionally used in remote districts, instead of a
similar old term, at public cry, meaning at auction. “Tuesday,
May Ist, will be sold at public ouwtery.” The word is old Saxon,
and found in almost all the North Country glossaries.

Outen, a vulgarism known to America as well as to England.
“Oh, Simon! Myson Simon! To be overcome this way. A Suggs
to be humbugged! His own Jack to be taken owen his hand and
turned on him. Oh, that I should nae lived to see the day!”
(Stmon Suggs.)

Outside is, in conversation and in journalism, very often used
for beside, or except. “ Outside of the Secretary of War, no one
knew anything of the transaction.” (Philadelphia Ledger, De-
cember, 1870.)

Overly, a redundant term, meaning excessively. “He is awful
conceited, and not overly polite.” (Lippincott’s Magazine, March,
1871, p. 284.)

P.

Paddy, the East Indian word, is in the South also used to des-
ignate unhusked rice.

Paint, in the South and Southwest, is used for a spotted horse,
or wild animal. “He said it was a paint, but we found no spots
on the animal,” (G. W. Kendall. Santa Fé Expedition.)

Pair, as applied to stairs, in the sense of a flight of stairs, is
not peculiar to America. The expression is found in Haklnyt,
and still in use in Yorkshire.

Palatial, a favorite term with grandiloquent speakers and
Joutnaliste, who love to dwell on “palatial residences,” and even

“stores of palatial proportions.”

Pandowdy, a dish consisting of stewed apples, into which the

crust covering them has been stirred, and “bearing,” it has been

,
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 515

said, “to apple-pie the relation of the vulgar to the well-bred,”
is, no doubt, the descendant of Halliwell’s pandoudle. The word,
like the dish, is known only in New England.

Panis have almost entirely superseded pantaloons in American.
conversation, as the latter have taken the place of the English
“trousers.” The word is still objected to by critics. “Certainly
it is an astonishment to find the tailor’s English, rolling up his
pants, p. 401—in an imposing octavo volume by a University pro-
fessor.” (Criticism on Hartt’s Brazil, New York Tribune, October
11, 1870.) Thus it is, that the historic associations connected
with our words are gradually fading out of sight. How long shall
we be able to recognize in the poor remnant the peculiar garb of
the ancient pantaloon, who wore breeches and stockings of the
same stuff, and joined together as one garment, when he became
‘in Italian comedy the representative of the “Magnificent Vene-
tian,” after having been for centuries the patron-saint of Venice,
under the name of St. Pantaleone? What a gulf between the
haughty wavra Necy and the pants of our day!

Paring-shears, in the tailor’s language, are so called in contra-
distinction to cutting-shears, which were formerly used for “cut-
ting out” garments. <A literary tailor—not unknown to the
scientific world as a good entomologist—tells us that the term
“ Paring-shears originated in the fact that, forty years ago, nearly
everything that would bear it at all was made ‘raw-edged,’ and
required the edges to be pared, as the finishing touch to the gar-
ment.” (8. 8. Rathvon, Lancaster Intelligencer, April 24, 1871.)

Parlor is in America uniformly used for the English “draw-
ing-room.”

Parquet, the term which in Paris and on the Continent is called
the parterre, in Italian platea, and in Spanish patio, is probably in
the United States alone used for that part of the theatre which
was formerly known as the“ pit.” The term comes, of course, from
the French parquet, an inlaid floor, and has thus been applied to
the “floor” of the theatre. It is stated that the word “parquet
was first introduced at the opening of the Academy of Music in
the city of New York.”

Partake, to, is a verb much abused by journalists, who are not
content to limit it to its legitimate sense of sharing with others,
but use it vaguely for eating or enjoying. “The man who was
to be hanged about noon, partook of his solitary meal!”
516 AMERICANISMS.

Pavement denotes in the United States more frequently the
sidewalk than the paved street. This arises from the fact that, in
the countless new towns springing up every year in all the new
States, the sidewalks are generally first made, long before the roads
are macadamised or the streets paved,and hence they are first
spoken of as the pavement.

Peke, to, or to peak, is the old English word, used by many of
the poets for to see. “He’s going about all day peaking into every
hole, and never doing anything worth speaking of.” (W. G. Simms,
Sketches.) Shakespeare’s use of the word in the sense of looking
ill, has probably led to the employment of peaked or peakish for
the same purpose. The origin of the term must be sought in peak,
and growing into a peak or peaks suggests naturally the idea of
growing thin from illness. Peckish,on the contrary, derived from
the Gypsy word peck (meat), and quoted by Grose and all cant dic-
tionaries as meaning hungry, is the old English word surviving
in America; we have both the adjective, “I feel rather peckish
this morning” (Slang Dictionary, p. 173), and the noun, “keep
your pecker up” (Adventures of Verdant Green), in the same
sense.

Peert—frequently written peart, and in all probability a corrup-
tion of pert—is common in all parts of the Union. It is one of
the good old words, used once upon a time by English writers,
but now obsolete in England, while surviving vigorously in
America. “ You shall know them by their very gate ; they walk
so peartly about.” (Burroughs, On Hosea, p. 115: 1652.) “ust
rate, never felt pearter in my life. Tell ye what, that was a bust-
ing medicine.” (Lippincott’s Magazine, March, 1871, p. 246.)
“He observed that the master was looking peartish, and hoped he
had gotten over the neuralgia and the rheumatism; he himself
had been troubled with a dumb ager since last conference, but he
had learnt to rastle (wrestle) and pray.” (F. B. Harte, Luck of
Roaring Camp, p. 166.) Perk,.pronounced peerk, is probably but
another corruption of the same root.

Periodicals, in the plural, is a frequent but unwarranted use
of the term, since the latter is an adjective and not a noun.
Thus here, also, the language loses in correctness what it may
gain in brevity.

Permanent boarders, as persons are called who live for any
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 517

length of time in a boarding-house or hotel, are opposed to
transient guests, travellers who spend only a night or a few days
there, and both terms are thus used exclusively in amen The
same applies to

Permit, when it is used instead of leave to enter, or ticket of
admission to any place of public amusement.

Peruse, to, a term much affected by unrefined persons, who
invariably prefer a strange but high-sounding word to the more
familiar expression. Hence they peruse a book, where others mod-
estly “read” it, and do not “scan” but peruse a stranger’s features.
Still, there is good authority for this use of the word also, since
English writers of the seventeenth century employ it contin-
ually in this manner. “Monsieur Soubise having perused the
fleet, returned to the King and told him that nothing was ready.”
(MS. in Harleian Collection in British Museum, written before
1650.) “My children, have you so perused each other’s coun-
tenances that when you meet you may recognize each othér?
said Magdalen Graeme to Catharine Seaton and Roland Graeme.”
(Sir W. Scott.) Hence we need not wonder if a Virginia overseer
sent to examine some wood which his master wished to buy, re-
turned, saying he had “perused the wood carefully.” (Hugh
Blair Grigsby, 1870.)

Pesky and peskily are intensative expressions, implying annoy-
ance, and probably corruptions of “pestilent.” (Slang Dictionary,
p. 199.) “ Bill was up in his room playing Seven-Up, or Four-in-
Hand, or some of those pesky games.” (Wild Biil.)

Petroleum takes in America the place of “rock-oil” in Canada
and England, but, when used for domestic purposes, appears
almost universally as “ kerosene.”

Philology is often heard with a broad 7, as in psyche, and yet
no one says “physic,” with a long y; so unsettled is as yet the
pronunciation of foreign words among the masses.

Picra, an electuary in England, is in America the officinal pow-
der of aloes with canella, a cathartic, and often used to denote
anything mean and objectionable. “ Fips was tangled with some
old debts, as poor as picra, as they say in the country, and totally
without hitch or hold upon any actual capital, influence, or means
of any kind.” (Putnam’s Magazine, August, 1868.)

Pie takes here entirely the place of the English “tart,” in dishes
518 AMERICANISMS.

not made of meat, and is, especially in New England, so great a
favorite, that it appears almost on every table at breakfast, dinner,
and supper alike.

Piece, tn the sense of a while, a small distance, is provincial in
the north of England, and, with us,in Pennsylvania. “Go a piece
with me,” and, “Won’t you go along a piece farther?” are com-
mon expressions. The verb to piece means, in the same district,
to take an irregular snack between meals. A child, not showing
any appetite at dinner, is said to “have been a-piecing on it all the
morning.” (8. 8. Haldeman.)

Pierce, to, is very often, and the proper name Perce always,
pronounced as if it were written Perse. This, however, is not
incorrect ; at least it was the orthodox sound of the word in the
days of Spenser, who rhymes thus:

“ He red and measur’d many a sad verse,
That horrour gave the virgin’s hart to perse,
Hearing him those same bloody lines reherse.”
(Faéry Queen, Bk. III., Canto XIL, v. 36.)

Pike is quite common for “turnpike,” following the example
of English “van” and “bus,” and assumes, not unfrequently, a
figurative meaning. “Another champion walkist, Weston, the
democratic Governor of New Hampshire, on a radical Pike.”
(Philadelphia Age, March 17, 1871.)

Pillow-Slip and pillow-bier take in New England the place of
the English pillow-case.

Pint, instead of point, and even disappint, are quite common
in New England and in some of the Southern States, where the
old English pronunciation has been preserved.

Pip, to, originally the same as to peep, denotes the first chirping
or piping of young chickens, and hence is used to denote all very
small beginnings. “I suppose radicalism had just pipped.”
(Rev. P. Cartwright, Autobiography, p. 158.)

Pitcher, used for jug, is frequently adduced by Englishmen as
a test-word by which Americans are recognized abroad. “This
word is the best test, if indeed it is not the only test, of the
nationality of a cultivated man of English blood. .. . If a man
asks for the milk-jug, be sure that he is British bred; if for the
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 519

milk-pitcher, be equally sure that he is an American.” (R. G.
White, Words and their Uses, p. 84.)

Plain, instead of plainly, clearly, is very much used by Ameri-
cans. “These fellows are not smart; they cannot talk plain.”

Plankroad, a roadway formed of sawed deals or boards of con-
siderable thickness, laid even and close, crosswise, with much
yield in them, is a common contrivance in regions where timber
is abundant, and roads have to be made promptly and cheaply.
They require, however, constant repair, and are very injurious to
horses, whose knees they “ knock up” in a very short time.

Play-actor, a pleonasm used in some parts of the United States
by persons over-anxious to distinguish the common agent in any
great event from the actor on the stage. “Mrs. Cora Ritchie is
the first author who has led us behind the scenes, and allowed us
to judge of the true life of the play-actor, whom most of us only
know as he appears on the stage.” (Literary World, March 27,
1868.)

Pled, instead of pleaded, is stated by English authority to be
“sometimes used in Scotland, but never by good writers, who
remember that verbs derived from Latin or any foreign language
cannot have the strong inflection of Saxon verbs.” (Blackwood,
October, 1867.) The principle is true, no doubt, but language
acts frequently upon analogy and not upon principle. Hence
pled, used much in the United States, and langhed at by domes-
tic and foreign critics, has, nevertheless, good authority to adduce
in its behalf. If we turn to Lord Brougham’s dedication of the
Edinburgh Cyclopedia, edited by Sir D. Brewster in 1830, we find
in the last paragraph but one: “The inalienable right of
humanity has been pled,” and the same form is used by the
fastidious W. S. Landor, as it was by Spenser in his Faéry Queen,

“Many grave persons that against her pled.”

“What would be said by his old friends in Virginia, when it
reached their ears, that he had plead want of notice to get clear
of a debt, when everybody knew it was the same thing as if he
had got notice ?” (lush Times of Alabama, p. 217.)

Plow, the form under which plough constantly appears in
American school-books even, to the intense disgust of English
critics, is yet by no means an innovation, since it is rhymed with
520 AMERICANISMS.

“inow” by Chaucer and all the writers of the fourteenth cen-
tury. Robert of Gloucester, Wiclife, and all the earlier writers
wrote plow more frequently than any other form, and Chaucer
rhymes it thus:

“T have a wyfe, parde! as wel as thou,
Yet wolde I, for the oxen in my plow,
Taken upon me more than ynow.”
(Miller’s Prologue, v. 3518.)

Pluck, for courage, did not make its way into American speech
at least till Tom Brown’s School-Days made the term familiar
here. The American people seem to have been reluctant to accept
so vile a word, denoting the most worthless part of an animal’s
entrails, as the representative of what their fathers had called
courage or heartiness, from the cor, the heart of man.

Plug is used in the United States for two purposes unknown in
England. Dentists thus denote the foil or other matter with
which they fill up hollow teeth, and lovers of tobacco call thus
a flat-pressed cake of chewing-tobacco.

Plwm, in the New England States, serves as a generic name
for all berries, and thus is used for the brilliant berries of the
Diacena borealis, an elegant forest-plant bearing a few acid blue-
berries, the partridge-berries, the mountain-cranberries, and some
other species.

Plunder, the word which obtained a certain celebrity in Eng-
land by 8. Coleridge’s great outburst of wrath against it, has
since been proved to have been used by English writers precisely
in the same sense in which Americans employ it. Mr. Coleridge
said: “ An American, by his boasting of the superiority of Amer-
icans generally, but especially in their language, provoked me to
tell him, that, on that head, the least said the better, as the
Americans present the extraordinary anomaly of a people without
a language; that they had mistaken the English word for bag-
gage (which is called plunder in America), and had stolen it.”
(Recollections and Conversations.) The elder D’Israeli, on the
contrary, says, in his Curiosities of Literature, that plunder, in
the sense of “ baggage,” is an old word, long known and used in
England, and Fuller states that it was introduced at the same time
with the term Malignants. The fact is, that the term is a Dutch
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 521

or Flemish word, meaning, as Mr. Douce quotes, property of any
kind, and connected with the German “ Plunder.” The English
troops which fought under the banner of the great Swedish king,
Gustavus Adolphus, brought this word home with them, as they
brought “lifeguard” and “ gauntlet,’ and from that time it has
been in constant use in England. “ We had heard the steamboat-
gun the night before, or something like it, and that, you know, is
the signal to tell us when to look after our plunder.” (W. G.
Simms, The Last Wager.) “It is very rare here to see gentlemen-
travellers carry their plunder, except'in a small portmanteau fixed
to the saddle, as it is not customary to dress fine at the springs or
elsewhere.” (Letters from the South, I., p. 39.)

Poke, the oldest form of the French word poche, is still used by
the side of the modern “ pocket.” “To buy a pig in a poke,” is
often heard in England and in the United States, and shows how
old, obsolete words survive in proverbial sentences. “Put the
feathers in a poke,” is a familiar phrase to Southerners. That
poke should be used in the New England States for an ingenious
instrument of torture, put upon animals to keep them from jump-
ing fences, is natural enough, as the long pole pointing forward
suggests the meaning of the verb, to poke, but itis not quite so clear,
why a stupid person, a bore, should also be called a poke, unless it
be on the plea that “a slow poke” annoys us continually, as if we
were poked at by a thorn in the side. It is from the latter mean-
ing of the word that Americans have derived the peculiar phrase
of “poking fun,” either for one’s own delectation or at another
person’s expense. “Don’t you be poking fun at me now, Judge ;
this is too serious a matter.” (J. C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches, III.,
p. 24.) “It was often said of Mr. Lincoln that he liked nothing
so much as to poke fun at his advisers in the Cabinet, but those
who could appreciate him knew very well, what a depth of wisdom
and earnest will lay under the slight drapery of jest.” (Life of A.
Lincoln, p. 137.) A poke-bonnet, also, is familiar to American
eyes, worn generally by Quakers and Methodists, and so called bo-
cause its long, straight sides poke, as it were, into everybody’s face-

Poker, the old Danish name for the devil (pokker), retains its
use in America, though it is here employed in the sense of a hob-
goblin or any frightful object; hence also pokerish, a familiar
word applied to what is likely to excite fear.
522 AMERICANISMS.

Polliwig, the name of a tadpole, as used by Forby, and fre-
quently quoted, appears in America very generally as pollywog,
removing it thus farther from the presumed original, periwig, of
which Forby thought it was a corruption. It seems, however, to
be merely a word imitative of the wriggling motions of the
tadpole.

Polt, a blow, and polter, are still quite often heard in the South,
and lead us back to the days of the first English settlers in Vir-
ginia, who brought the words from their distant home, and be-
queathed them to their descéndants. In England both words are
obsolete. “He gave the stallion a tremendous polt on the head,
and thus forced him to let go his hold.” (Pennsylvania paper,
1867.) George Coleman already used polter in his day :

“Oh, whack! Cupid’s a mannikin,
Smack on my heart he hit me a polter.”
(The Review, Act IL, Scene 1.)

Pond, a sheet of water in the interior, smaller than a lake, but
frequently of considerable size, has taken the place of the Eng-
lish “mere,” which is almost unknown in the United States,
“ Here and there was a little lake—a yond—under the shadow of
the woods, yielding water-lilies in summer and ice for exportation
in winter.” (The Country near Salem, Massachusetts.) The Eng-
lish use pond only for a sheet of water confined by artificial banks.

Poor, in the sense of lean, occurs already in Middleton’s Plays,
and remains to this day a favorite term in the South, where poorly
also continues to be used in its early meaning of indifferently.
“ How is your father, to-day ? Thank you, but poorly ; he hada
bad night.”

Popular has, in the New England States, the curious meaning
of conceited, and J. R. Lowell quotes, therefore, the Yankee
phrase: “ Popular as a hen with one chicken.”

Potwalloper, a man, in England, who occupies a house, no mat-
ter how small, and boils a pot in it, thus qualifying himself for
voting, is in the United States, where voting depends on no such
trifling qualifications as property or intelligence, a scullion or a
slovenly person. The figure is apparently taken from the manner
in which such an unfortunate being would be apt to knock the
kitchen-pots about. The English term has its origin in wall,
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 523

from A. S. wealan (German wadlen) and up, in the sense of making
water, etc, “boil up,” as appears in the old English proverb,
quoted by Grose: “To scold like a wych waller,’ that is, like a
salt-boiler. The American meaning is connected with the use of
wallop in the sense of beating, striking. In Pennsylvania, pot-
wrestler is occasionally used for the same purpose.

Pounds are in America exclusively used in estimating the
weight of a person, ete., instead of thé English “stone,” which is
unknown here. “ He weighs at least two hundred pounds.”

Power and powerful, once peculiar to Irish phrases, have now
become not only English, but American also. “If you will follow
my advice, it will do you a power of good, and you may be sure
you will never repent it.” (Life of J. J. Astor, p. 59.) Powerful,
however, for “ powerfully,” is probably an American abuse of the
word. “I hated powerful bad to part with him.” (W. G. Simms,
The Lost Wager.)

Preach, as a noun, belongs to the same category; the extreme
desire to express much by the least possible exertion has led to
this shortening of the proper word—preaching. “He told us, if
we wanted to hear a regular preach, to stand fast.” (J. P. Ken-
nedy, Swallow Barn.)

Predicate, to, in the sense of basing an argument on certain
facts, is very common in conversation, and perhaps even more so
in fine writing. “You predicate an editorial on a wrong report.
of my speech in Brooklyn.” (Letter of a Member of Congress to
New York Tribune, February 1, 1871.) “I do not see how the
member from Illinois can predicate any such conclusion on what
Thave said.” (Speech of B. F. Butler, reported April 24, 1871.)
This is one of the words put under the ban in W. OC. Bryant’s
Codex Hxpurgatorius.

Present is, in the United States, placed on the back of letters
addressed ‘to persons living in the same place with the writer.
“You can direct your letters ‘at home,’ but ‘ presen?’ is the uni-
versally adopted term for the purpose in this country.” (Harper’s
Bazar, April, 1871.)

Preserves, instead of the English term, sweets, for fruits pre-
served in sugar, is one of the words that strike foreigners most
forcibly when they first enter American households. “ Here, too,
524 AMERICANISMS.

is honey fresh taken from the gwm, and here are various kinds of
preserves.” (P. H. Gosse, Letters from Alabama, p. 47.)

Progress, to, with the accent on the last syllable, is nothing but
an old form, fallen into disuse in the mother-country, and retained
in America. It was always thus used in Devonshire, from which
county came a great number of the early settlers of the colonies;
and hence Mr. Gifford, in his edition of Ford, acknowledges it “ag
one of the words lost to England, but which, having crossed the
Atlantic, have been retained by the English race in America.”
The word was at one time represented in England as a daring
Americanism; hence J. R. Lowell, after having quoted Ben Jonson
in the Alchemist, saying,

“Progress so from extreme unto extreme,”

adds facetiously: “Surely we may sleep in peace now, and our
_ English cousins will forgive us, since we have cleared ourselves
from any suspicion of being original in the matter.”

Proper and properly, in the sense of “ very” or “ very much,” are
colloquial in England as well as in America, although nothing can
be said in excuse for the tautology. Proper meant formerly
handsome, nice, and hence perhaps the familiar use of the word.
“That sugar is proper good, but it might be whiter.” “J tell you
it smarts properly, when you ain’t used to it.” (Pickings from
the Picayune, p. 119.)

Prox, meaning a list of candidates to be voted for on the day
of election, and proavy, the day itself, are provincialisms confined
to the two States of Connecticut and Rhode Island. For some
time, however, they have failed to make their appearance in the
newspapers, and are, probably, becoming obsolete.

Proven, instead of proved, originally a Scotticism, is used by
the best American writers. “The trials of the witches awaken,
by turns, pity, indignation, disgust, and dread—dread at the
thought of what the human mind can be brought to believe not
only probable, but proven.” (J. R. Lowell, Among my Books, p.
136.)

Pub. Func. for Public Functionary, has long ‘been a favorite
term in political slang. “The radical manipulators have acted in
good faith, but resident stevedores and professional office-holders,
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 525

pub. funcs., and political changelings, have lost their reward.”
(Tallahassee Floridian, March 21, 1871.)

Pucker, in the sense of, a state of apprehension, of anxiety, is
familiarly used here as in England. “I was in such a pucker, I
did not know what to do, for here were the guests, and nothing
had been prepared.” (W. Irving, Sketch Book.)

Pumpkin must have been a favorite dish with Americans, for
the first recorded verse written in this country, bearing the date
1630, a doggerel list of “ New England Annoyances,” has already
the following allusions to this preference:

“Tf fresh meat be wanting to fill up our dish,
We have carrots and pumpkins and turnips and fish ;
We have pumpkins at morning and pumpkins at noon,
If it was not for pumpkins we should be undone.”

Still worse is the explanation given in the Classical Dictionary :
“ Pompkin, a man or woman of Boston, America, from the num-
ber of pompkins raised and eaten by the people of that country.
Pompkins-hive, for Boston and its dependencies.” The old word
pompion has entirely disappeared here, although it was used by
the first settlers of Virginia: “In May also, amongst their corn,
they plant pumpeons” (Captain John Smith, Virginia, L., p. 127),
thus foreshadowing a custom which has never been abandoned to
the present day. The Huddites, as Bostonians dre apt to be called
now, from the fact that jealous rivals accuse them of cherishing
the belief that Boston is the Hub of the Universe, are said to
have derived, from their attachment to this vegetable, and the
esteem in which it is universally held among them, the phrase
some pumpkins, expressive of high appreciation. “ Franklin was
a poor printer-boy and Washington a land-surveyor, yet they
growed to be some pumpkins.” (Sam Slick.) “Your honor, al-
though it is I who say, who oughtn’t to say it, but I swow, my
son Fred is a fine fellow; you may axe every rouster on the levee,
and I’ll be hanged if they don’t tell you he is some pumpkins to
hum.” (Pickings from the Picayune, p. 237.) It is stated, how-
ever, by one high in authority among New Englanders, that this
explanation of the term is not the true one, although the latter
cannot well be stated, because it would offend ears polite. (J. H.
Trumbull.) Pwmpkin-shell was in olden times a term designating
526 AMERICANISMS.

the peculiar form of the vegetable, and is still quite frequently so
used in the New England States. “*‘ And shall not the youth’s hair
be cut?’ asked Peter Palfrey, looking with abhorrence at the love-
lock and long glossy curls of the young man. ‘Crop it forthwith,
and that in the true pumphin-shell style,’ answered the Captain.”
(N. Hawthorne, The May-Pole of Merry Mount.) By assimilation
the word is frequently corrupted into pungkin or pungk’n, the
common Yankee pronunciation, thus written by J. R. Lowell:

“ Lazy as the bream,
Whose only business is to head up-stream,
We call’em punkin-seed”—
(Biglow Papers, IIL., p. 38.)

while in Pennsylvania, and in the South even, they have a nursery-
rhyme, saying:
“ Peter, Peter, Punkin-eater,
Had a wife and couldn’t keep her;
He put her in a punkin-shell,
And then he kept her very well.”
(8S. S. Haldeman.)

Punk, a species of fungus or rotten wood, easily set on fire, is
rarely heard in England, but quite common here. “ Fire-making
is a simple process with mountaineers. Their bullet-pouches
always contain a “flint and steel, and sundry pieces of punk or
tinder, and pulling a handful of dry grass, which they screw into
a nest, they place the lighted punk in this, and closing the grass
over it, wave it in the air, when it soon ignites and readily kindles,
the dry sticks forming the foundation of the fire.” (Life in the
Far West.) ;

Punt, in England a flat-bottomed boat, used for a variety of
purposes, means in America, especially in the South, a small boat
made of a hollow tree.

Purchase, ordinarily used only to denote a mechanical hold or
advantage, applied in raising or moving heavy bodies, is in Amer-
ica made to denote any good hold. Even the splitting of a pump
was, in the Virginia papers, once ascribed to the “sun’s having
had such a purchase upon it.” (1859.)

Purgery is the name of the room in which the sugar-cane juice
is placed in hogsheads, and allowed to drain.of its molasses.
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 527

Q.

Qualify, to, is but rarely found in English writers in the sense
of to qualify one’s self, by taking an oath, furnishing security, or
complying with other conditions required before assuming an
office. In the United States this is the common form. Official
announcements of nominations made by the President run thus:
“ John Doe, Internal Revenue Collector, in place of Richard Roe,
having failed to qualify.” “On yesterday (sic) Mr. John Smith
assumed his new duties, having duly qualified the day before, and
his sureties being accepted.” (Washington Chronicle, March
17, 1865.)

Quarter-Dollar is in Pennsylvania the common appellation of
the coin elsewhere called a quarter of a dollar. (S. 8. Haldeman.)

Quarters, in the South, used to be the name of the buildings on
a farm inhabited by the negroes. “ We found the guarters to con-
sist of long rows of stone-cabins, each holding two families, with
small but sufficient gardens attached to each of them.” (Letters
from the South.)

Quates is a common name of the game of qguoits in Pennsyl-
vania.

Queer or quier, in old English a common prefix, meaning bad
or wicked, has now lost entirely its former signification, and
denotes what is odd, curious, or strange. It is a very popular word
in America, and generally coupled with odd terms, e. g., queer
stick, queer fish, etc. Thus it has always more or less of the ,
comic and ludicrous in it, while it never serves to express—as it
does in English—the sensation of sudden illness or serious injury.
A distinguished English practitioner, haying been invited by Mr.
Jefferson to fill a chair in the University of Virginia, met soon
after his arrival a countryman, who accosted him, inquiring his
name and profession, and then added: “ Look here, Doctor, you
haven’t by chance any salts about you? I feel sorter queer.”
The word had its origin in the German queer, which means
crooked, and thus came to be used at first as a cant word for a
crooked mind; it has, however, “become respectable since 1500.”
(Slang Dictionary.)

Quilting-frolic, also called quilting-bee, a meeting of ladies for
the purpose of making bed-quilts, generally from a charitable
528 AMERICANISMS.

motive, is one of the few rural amusements still found in New
England, but unfortunately confined to one sex.

Quit, to, in the sense of to leave off, is a favorite American
term, though not unknown to Ben Jonson and Henry More, who
both use it in precisely the same manner: “The old church con-
sidered actors, stage-players, choristers, and other gamesters and
frequenters of the theatre worthy of excommunication, unless
they quit.” (Southern Churchman, January 5, 1871.) In the
South the word is constantly beard as an order: “ Quit that, do
you hear?” “ Qud¢ teasing me, or I'll whip you.”

Quitch-grass presents, probably, a not unfrequent corruption
of “quick” and hence Tennyson even speaks of the “vicious
guitch,” but the further corruption into witch-grass, with a sly
allusion to its apparently bewitched vitality, which defies all
efforts at eradication, is purely American.

Quite used to mean in England nothing but wholly. In the
United States it soon lost its special meaning, and became a
general term for, very: “It is quite cold this morning.” This
vague meaning, the misapplication of a good word, we are told,
“has lately become very common in England, an eminent member
of Parliament declaring that an event had happened quite re-
cently, and another that guite a number of people assembled in
Trafalgar-square. Such phrases as guite warm, quite extraor-
dinary, are heard every day, and are sometimes inadvertently em-
ployed by writers of otherwise irreproachable English.” (Black-
wood, October, 1867.) The lament is instructive, since these
expressions appear to the American ear quite correct and “irre-
proachable,” showing how little we are generally aware of the
broad difference between home English and our English.

R.

Rag, in the sense of a piece of linen, has already been mentioned
as an evidence of the carelessness with which Americans use words
for a purpose for which they were never intended. A Southern
lady will gravely say, “Tie it up nicely in a clean rag and carry
it with my compliments to Mrs. A,” precisely as she will speak of
her boy’s having thrown a rock at a little bird, or order her ser-
vant to fill her jardiniére with “nice dirt.’ The slang use of
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 529

rags for bank-notes and paper-money prevails here as well as in
England.

Raise, to, is, in the West especially, often used in the sense of
to procure, to obtain. “ Meat has to be raised anyhow, or we’ll starve
before the week is out.” (Life in the Far West, p. 221.) To raise
a house is the term applied to the erection of the frame of a wooden
building, and has furnished the noun, a raising, often called a
raising-bee, When it is done by the help of friends and neighbors.
Raise, too, has in America almost superseded the two words em-
ployed in England, to grow crops on a farm, and to rear children
in a family. No one here says that he was “reared,” but that he
was raised in Pennsylvania, and a severe critic alludes sneeringly
to the attempts recently made to raise an American literature.
“You know I was raised, as they say in Virginia, among the
mountains of the North.” (Letters from the South, I., p. 85.)
But this use of the word is not an Americanism ; it is legitimate
English of the 17th century, at which time it was brought over
to Virginia. Mr. William Wirt used it in his sketches of Patrick
Henry, and was laughed at in the North and abroad. But if we
turn to Lord Herbert of Chertbury’s Memoirs, written about
1645, we find this sentence: “My grandfather’s power in the
county was so great, that divers ancestors of the better families
in Montgomeryshire were his servants, and raised by him.” J.
R. Bartlett says of the word: “ To raise is applied in the Southern
States to the breeding of negroes. It is also sometimes heard at
the North among the illiterate, as, I was raised in Connecticut.”
The sting of the sneer in the first part of the sentence is happily
removed by the Emancipation Act; the “illiterate” will be
pleased to count in their number a man like Horace Binney, who
said, in his eloquent remarks on John Sergeant before the Phila-
delphia bar (November, 1852): “It was the good fortune of Mr.
Sergeant and myself to have been raised under the eye of such a
man (Jared Ingersoll).”

Raising, for yeast, a favorite term in New England, is en-
dorsed by J. R. Lowell, because it was thus used by Gayton in his
Festivous Notes on Don Quixote, and because it is a literal
translation of the French levain, our leaven.

Rake, to, is almost always accompanied by up, and then
acquires in America a meaning directly opposite to that which it

23
530 AMERICANISMS,

has in England. There, to, rake up the fire, means to cover it.
with ashes; here we use to rake up in the sense of discovering,
bringing to light. “You ought not to rake up old stories, it
only makes bad blood.” (Daniel Webster in Faneuil Hall.)

fare, in the sense of underdone, is not considered in good
taste now in England, though Dryden speaks of new-laid eggs

“Turned by a gentle fire and roasted rare,”

but universal in America. “How do you like it? well done or
rare?” The word is not derived, as commonly stated, from the
same root as “raw” (Icelandic hrar), but from the old English
rear, of which already Grose says: “ Rear (corruptly pronounced
rare), early, soon. Meat under-roasted, boiled, or broiled, is said
to be rear or rare, from being taken too soon from the fire. Kent.”
Pegge makes precisely the same statement with regard to the

word, and quotes Middleton :
“and thy rear flesh
Tost all into poached eggs.”
(The World Lost at Tennis.)

this derivation is all the more probable, when we bear in mind
that in the South the verb to rear, used of horses, is pronounced
rare, and hence rare may well be called rear in New England.

Reckon, to, a term looked upon as the favorite of the South, as
“to calculate” is that of the North, in the endeavor to express
a conjecture or a conclusion. A Virginian, asked if he means to
go North in the summer, will promptly answer: “I reckon I
shall.” These are the very words quoted by Grose (p. 46) as used
in the North of England, and prove that the use of the term is
not new, but only revived after a long slumber. Still, it occurs also
in English authors of more recent date, e. g., “He was reckoned
fora madman.” (Godwin, Caleb Williams, IL, p.54.) It has the
same meaning in Holy Writ: “ Likewise reckon ye also yourselves
to be dead unto sin” (Romans yi. 11), and “For I reckon
that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy,” ete.
(Romans viii. 18), a use of the word by the apostle which
once led a pious but simple-minded preacher to tell his hearers
that “St. Paul was a great mathematician, because he reckoned 80
much.” The reck’ning of New England is the score at a public
house, or a private account run up with a dealer.
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES, 531

feeady, to, in the sense of setting to rights, is an old English
term surviving in our speech. Grose quotes: “ Ready, to ready
the hair, to comb it,” and speaks of a “ Readying comb, a wide-
toothed comb.” The word is often heard in America, but more
generally assumes the equally old form, to redd, of which Grose
says: “edd, to untangle or separate. South.” “To redd up a
room” is a marked provincialism in Pennsylvania, from whence
- it has passed into Ohio. It originated with the Scotch immigrants,
who settled those districts, and brought the word with them from
the borders, where the old proverb is current:

‘CA seamstress that sews and would make her work redde,
Must use a long needle and a short thread.”

In “Margaret Maitland,” we find “a well redd-up house” men-
tioned, and in Jane Eyre the words, “you are redd up and made
decent.”

Redemptioner used to be the name of a person, who engaged to
pay for his passage from Europe to this country by his services
here for a given time. “From these German paupers,” Bishop
Kip tells us, “many of the wealthy farming families, now living
in the Hudson River Counties, are descended; in an early day
they purchased the lands, which enriched their children. They
had often but one name, and took the name of the original pro-
prietor. Hans took the name of Morris, etc., and gave it to his
children ; hence there are in the State of New York many fami-
lies bearing ‘the names of the old landed proprietaries, which are
descended foi redemptioners, thus named after early settlers.”

Reliable, instead of trustworthy, is a malappropriation of a good
word, now as common in England as in the United States.

Rench, for rinse, is so old a mispronunciation, that we find already
in Lovelace renched for rinsed, and the same mistake is constantly
made abroad and with us. “ Wrench your mouth out,” said a
fashionable dentist one day toa lady. (Slang Dictionary, p. 213.)
The use of this form is so frequent, that an effort has actually been
made to trace rinse back to a Danish word renser, which was to
have furnished the modern rench. The derivation is improbable.

Rent is used in America for the English rental, which is almost
unknown here.

Reprint is said to be an Americanism as far as it denotes the
532 AMERICANISMS.

republication, here, of a work printed in a foreign country. It
certainly used to be a charming euphemism in olden days, when
the works of British authors were issued here without their sanc-
tion, and without giving them a fair compensation—a régime
happily unknown in our day.

Lesentment has in New England preserved the ancient meaning
given it by Barrow, Cudworth, Bull, and other writers of that
time. “A farmer in an interior town of New England, who had
recently lost his wife, called upon a lawyer in the place for advice
under his bereavement, remarking that he wished to make a
proper resentment on the occasion.” (North American Review,
1849.)

Retire, to, in the sense of going to bed, is a vulgar, but unfortu-
nately very common, euphemism.

Revamp, to, a verb derived from to vamp, which meant to put
new upper leather to shoes; this was lengthened into revamp, un-
der a vague sense of something being done over again, and finally
the new term was applied to other modes of repairing and refitting
generally. Hence Edgar Poe said of Bulwer, “ His Athens would
have received an Etonian prize, and has all the happy air of an
Etonian prize-essay revamped.”

fide, to, now limited in England to r¢ding on horseback, has
in the United States retained the more general meaning as applied
to any mode of conveyance. As the Bible says: “He made him
to ride in the chariot” (Genesis xlii. 43), we say of a person, that
“he rides in his carriage,” and we even “ ride in the cars.” “Out
of ride,” is said, in the South, of a river that is past fording on
horseback, and most streams there have a so-called riding rock at
or near a fording-place, which indicates to those familiar with its
appearance, whether the water is too high for crossing or not.

iffies, for ripples, is an odd corruption, applied in Pennsylva-.
nia to the rocky obstructions of the Susquehanna, with this effect,
that the more grievous obstructions are rifles, the slighter ones
ripples. (S. 8. Haldeman.)

Rifle, retains in some parts of the Union the meaning it has in
old English, viz., a whetstone for sharpening scythes, consisting
either of the stone itself or of a strip of wood covered with emery.
Its use is almost limited to the New England States and a few of
the Eastern counties of Virginia. “The best man goes foremost,
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 533

and the strong-backed scythemen, each with his rifle in his red,
right hand, girded low and tight, stepping wide and bending for-
ward, seem to gesture the falling grass into long, straight swathes.”
(Connecticut Georgtes.)

hight, in the sense of very, is frequently charged upon the
South as an unpardonable provincialism. Its use is as old as the
English language. In Halliwell’s edition of the “ Voiage and
Travaile of Sir John Maundeville,” page 96, we find—* And there
righte nighe is the tomb,” and so in, perhaps, fifty places in the
same book. The Psalms have: “I gat me to my Lord right hum-
bly ;” “I myself will awake right early ;” and Bailey already calls
this use of the word “obsolete” in his day. Even the phrase
right here, a favorite with American authors and editors, “turns
up passim in the Chester.and Coventry Plays.” (J. R. Lowell.)
Right away, another form for “straightway,” it may be recol-
lected, excited the wrath of Dickens on his first visit to Boston.
A waiter at the Tremont House asked him if he wanted dinner
right away, and the illustrious writer fancied it meant, in some
particular place, instead of, directly. Now the phrase is quite
common all over the United States, having long since ceased to be
a Boston provincialism, if it ever was one, and has recently made
its way to England also.

To-rights, with the adverbial s, which in England means ex-
cellent, very well, used to be employed in the United States instead
of directly, soon, as in Major Jack Downing’s Letters: “So to-
rights, the express got back and brought a letter.” (p.129.) This
use of the word has, however, become obsolete here as well as in
England, and the phrase is now used only in the sense of “ put-
ting to-rights,” setting things in order, though the verb is often
omitted. “Being thus completely’ settled, and, to use his own
word, to-rights, one would imagine that he would begin to enjoy
the comforts of his situation, to read newspapers, talk politics,
neglect his own business and attend to the affairs of the nation,
like a useful and patriotic citizen.” (W. Irving, Knickerbocker
History of New York.) “Jenny had gone over the+mountain,
before she had time to put things fo-rights, and she herself had
enough to do besides.” (Letters from the South, IL, p. 7.) Right-
off, not unknown to some of the best English writers, is a favorite
expression in the West, conveying promptness and energy happily
584 AMERICANISMS.

combined. A striking illustration of its use appears in the follow-
ing announcement: “ Mr. Forbes undertook to deliver a temper-
ance lecture in Cheyenne, but the people justly took it as a personal
insult, and shot him right-of.” (April 17, 18'71.)

Rile, to, is almost universally used for to roil or royl, which
originally meant to fender a liquid turbid, and then, as a figure
of speech, came to denote a stirring up of anger. “'Theré are
dregs enough within to royle and distemper the spirit.” (Gur-
nall, Christian in Armor, IIL, p. 296.) Riled, in the sense of
made angry, is used by Roger North, but written roiled.

“Here Brown come frowningly in, but smiled,
When he found his wife seemed nothing riled,
And begged his guest to be seated.”
(E. K. Yates. Mirth and Meter, 1855.)

The word, which has often been connected with the French verb
railler, to make fun of, has long been obsolete in England; but
being found useful, it is gradually making its way back again
from this country, where it has never ceased to be used. The ad-
jective rily is purely American; an ill-tempered, cross-grained
person is apt to be called “a rily fellow.”

Rising, in the sense of exceeding, is an Americanism derived
from the general meaning of the word, but still considered “low.”
“How much wheat did you raise this year? A litile rising of
five thousand bushels.” (Letters from the South, IL, p. 93.)

Ris, an intense vulgarism for the preterite, and, as riz for the
participle, a pronunciation peculiar to New England, must be
traced back to forms like risse and roze, used by Middleton and
Dryden. ‘I wish I had my big lamp here; it is a perfect prairie
on fire. I set it out once, the darkest night that ever came over,
and ‘all creation ris, thinking it was daylight.” (Pickings from
the Picayune.) Riz-cake, for risen cake, is common to all the
New England States. The humorist Mark Twain, having duly
admired the Venus of Milo, in the Louvre, naturally inquired,
according to American custom, what the statue cost, and ex-
claimed, when he. heard the enormous sum, “ Wal, stone gals
must have riz lately.”

Risibitities, in the plural form, are only heard in America. “I
had hard work to keep down my risibilities.” (Rev. P. Cartwright,
Autobiography, p. 142.)
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 535 *

Risky, an adjective, made from risk, and denoting what is haz-
ardous, is unexceptionable in meaning, whatever purists may think
of the form of the hybrid.

River is placed by Americans more generally after the name
than before, as in England. Thus they speak of Charles River in
Massachusetts, and of James River in Virginia.

Roach, to, denotes the trimming of a horse’s mane, which the
English commonly call “hogged.” “Look at the roached head
of that boy!” The figure is probably taken from the peculiar
curve or arch cut in some square sails, which, in nautical language,
is called a roach.

Rock, used in the South and certain parts of New England for
stone, has, at least, ancient authority for it. Halliwell quotes—

“The false fox came into our yard,
And there he made the geese afeard ;
The good wife came out in her smock,

And at the fox she threw her rock.”
(Reliquiae Antiquae.)

From this use of the noun an odd verb is derived, to rock, mean-
ing to throw stones at an object. “The boys cast rocks at the
poor little bird; till it was stone-dead.” “In the evening the house
was rocked, and he himself threatened with instant death, if he
did not leave the State within eight days.” (Evidence before Com-
mittee of Members of Congress, April, 1871.)

Rolling has in the West the peculiar meaning of undulating,
and hence rolling-lands are those which present to the eye a suc-
cession of elevations and depressions. Hence also the term Roll-
ing Prairies. “The country was what was termed rolling, from
some fancied resemblance to the ocean, when it is just undulating
with a long ground-swell.” (J. F. Cooper, Oak Openings.)

Rookery has obtained in California a new meaning, upon being
applied to the seals that congregate on its shores. “A man’s
social standing here depends, in a great measure, upon his knowl-
edge and judgment in selecting the seals to be killed from the
immense rookertes, killing and skinning them, and salting the
skins.” (Overland Monthly, October, 1870, p. 298.)

Room, to, is a verb not unknown to England, though more
generally used in America. In colleges, especially, the uniforn’
expression is, that “such and such a student rooms in No. 10.”
536 AMERICANISMS.

Rosum is a common corruption of rosin, which is almost uni-
versally pronounced 70s’m by the mass of the people. “In this
kind of weather you must tune yourself up and get roswmed—
tuned up to concert-pitch.” (J. C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches.)

Rough, denoting a rowdy, hardly known in England outside of
London and the small boroughs at election time, is a familiar
term in the large cities of the Union, and especially in Baltimore,
which formerly suffered under an unenviable notoriety on account
of its frequent and bloody rows. Mr. Forly in his notice of the
word slily insinuates that “it may have been transported to the
Western World many years ago with some East-Anglian thief”
From the same word is derived the familiar phrase, to rough it,
by no means a slang word. “ Woman, too, must rough it, but she
does not like to rowgh it, and she is hurt and demoralized, if the
roughing is too rough or too long continued.” (Mrs. Kirkland,
_A New Home.) “To learn to rough it is an educational phrase,
in the dialect of the new countries, which would be of great ser-
vice, adopted as a rule of government for the young in all.” (W.
G. Simms, Oakatibbe.) Roughness in South Carolina denotes
shucks or cornhusks, on account, probably, of the roughness of
the serrated. blades.

Roundabout is in America almost exclusively used for the short
“jacket” of the English, as worn by boys, sailors, and others.
“ Marion wore a close roundabout-jacket of coarse crimson cloth,
and upon his head was the same cap and silver crescent which
marked him as the recruiting officer in that region five years
before.” (B. F. Lossing, Francis Marion.)

Rubbers, for India-rubber overshoes, followed naturally after
India-rubber itself had been shortened into Rudder.

Rugged, in the sense of vigorous and robust, is probably an
Americanism. In other meanings it not unfrequently resumes
the old English form of ruggy, as in Chaucer’s line:

“With flotery berd and ruggy ashy heres.”

“It’s a mighty ruggy trail, Mister, up the Shasta Mountain, and I
wouldn’t much mind staying behind, if so be you'll let me”
(Scenes in the Far West, p. 119.)

~ Run, used in the South generally for a brook or small stream,
as in Bull Run, the scene of the first fight in the late Civil War,
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 5387

has good and old authority to sustain it. “I remember on the
road between Naples and Rome a rwn from a sulphurous spring.”
(Boswell, Corsica, p. 36,1768.) The same use is made of the word .
in Waymouth’s Voyage (1605), as quoted by J. R. Lowell. “The
towns, rivers, crossroads, and runs of Virginia became names that
thrilled the hearts of millions with triumph or agony.” (H. T.
Tuckerman.) The word is, of course, akin to the verb, to run,
and corresponds, in this sense, to the Scottish runnock, a drain or
small stream. This verb has acquired, of late, a peculiar and
forcible application to any kind of business, from a first-class
hotel to a petty grocery, which is said to be run, instead of man-
aged or kept.

Runt, rarely used in England except among farmers, butchers,
and like people, is in America very generally applied to cattle and
to men inferior in size. “Every family has its runt,” is a pro-
verbial saying, arising from the fact that in every litter of pigs
there is, almost invariably, one very diminutive in comparison
with the rest. It is said that during the war of 1812, a young
man, a member of a Kentucky family renowned for magnificent
proportions, and not unknown to fame, was sent with a cartel on
board a British man-of-war. The officers crowded around him,
admiring his great height and magnificent form, but were not a
little surprised at hearing him reply to their question, whether all
the members of his family were as gigantic as he, that he “had
the misfortune of being the run of the family.”

Rusties, in Pennsylvania and Ohio, the name given to the res-
tive movements of an unquiet horse, probably represents in a
slightly modified form the rwsty, which Halliwell states to mean,
restive and filthy. “It won’t do for us to cut up rusties here at
this time o’ night.” (J. C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches.)

8.

Sabbath is almost universally used in the United States for
Sunday, certainly in the New England States, where the latter is
rarely heard. The religious sentiment may account for the mis-
use of the word, for a misuse it is, since Sunday is the name of a
day, while Saddath is the name of an institution, and yet people
will speak of the fine weather they had “last Sabbath day.” The
same peculiarity marks the Scotchman in England, he, like the

* 23*
538 AMERICANISMS.

New Englander, having inherited the word from Puritan ances-
tors. The term Sabbaday, occasionally heard in rural districts of
. New England, is, of course, a corruption of Sabbath day, as in-
correct in form as in meaning. “ We’re goin’ sure enough, comin’
Sabbaday, and no mistake, Deacon.” (J. T. Trowbridge in Our
Young Folks.)

Safe, a box or cupboard in which provisions are kept, has
entirely superseded the English “larder,” which is rarely used
otherwise than figuratively.

Sag, to, frequently used in the figurative sense, is not, as Web-
ster states, “rare,” for Fuller has in his “ Worthies,” “That it may
not sag from the intention of the founders,” and Shakespeare,
“The heart I bear shall never sag with fear”’ From the lost
preterite of this verb, Z sog, is derived the adjective soggy, much
used in America to signify.a wet, marshy soil, that yields to the
foot. “We marched ten miles over a soggy wilderness.” (New
York Tribune.)

Sarcophagus almost universally serves in America to designate
the metallic burying-cases, which are largely used to transport
bodies from distant places to their last home, and presents a
striking instance of the preference given here to high-sounding
terms, however unmeaning or inappropriate they may be. The
restless American, who must needs be moving even-after death,
orders his body to be enclosed in a sarcophagus, which once
meant a stone eating up the body, and now represents a metal
preserving the body!

Saw-buck takes in New Jersey the place of the “ saw-horse” of
other States, while farther South it is called a “ wood-horse.”

Scaly, in the sense of shabby or mean, is quoted already by
Halliwell, and much used in the South. “We had a pretty scaly
time after the war.” (Reminiscences of the Confederacy, p. 224.)
“The scaliest trick they ever played wuz bringin’ on me hither.”
(J. R. Lowell, Biglow Papers, I., p. 99.) The term is said to have
been originally connected with the scales of the serpent in Para-
dise, though the derivation from scall (scab) is probably correct.

Scart, a not uncommon form of scared, has been inherited from
old English writers, though generally it is used by them with a
long a. “Oh! Don’t be scar¢ at me! Come up to my house and
see me. I will give you some peaches and make you happy.” (Elder
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 539

Kimball at Nauvoo, as quoted by W. H. Dixon.) The verb itself
is generally pronounced skeer, and often so written, and the noun,
a scare, isan Americanism. “N othing can exceed the grandeur
of the scene, when a large cavallada or drove of horses takes a
scare.” (G. W. Kendall, Santa Fé Expedition, I., p. 97.)

Scoot, to,—written skoot by J. R. Lowell in his Glossary to the
Biglow Papers, and skute by other writers—is evidently connected
with skate and skeet, and hence means, to move or run swiftly.
“An Iowa man, instead of going to the expense of a divorce,
gave his wife a dollar, and told her to scoot.” (Philadelphia Age,
February, 1871.) “Notwithstanding his convulsive efforts to
clutch the icy bricks, he skuted into the gutter.” (J.C. Neal,
Charcoal Sketches.) To skeete is used in the same manner and
thus interpreted: “ You must go, be off. Steet represents exactly
the classic abiit, excessit, evasit.” (8. 8. Haldeman.) In the
South the boys and all the negroes say skeating instead of skating,
which has evidently led to the formation of these two derivatives,
skeete and skute. They have the authority of Pepys for their
pronunciation, since in his Diary, December 1, 1662, he writes:
“To my Lord Sandwich’s to Mr. Moore, and then over the Parke,
where I first in my life, it being a great frost, did see people
sliding on their skeates.” (Charles IL, having, during his exile,
learned to skate in Holland, had, at the Restoration, introduced
the amusement in England.)

Score, to, is occasionally used in America in the peculiar sense
of scoring by criticism. “I would praise Mr. Cooper’s new work
as readily as any other man, but no fear of so irate a man would
deter me from scoring him when he merits such an application.”
(E. A. Poe, Criticism.)

Sceranny—the scrannel of Milton—is much used to denote
what is lean and thin, but is almost exclusively confined to
women, whose delicate frame, in this country, unfortunately
encourages the use of the word.

Scrawl, in New England only, means brushwood or broken
branches of a tree. It is evidently connected with “scroll.”

Screw, to, in the sense of being exactious, as quoted by Grose
with reference to a bargain, is in College-cant applied to profes-
sors who examine students with unusual rigor.
540 AMERICANISMS,

“Who would let a tutor knave
Screw him like a Guinea slave!”
(Hall. College Words.)

Scrimp, to, occasionally heard in England to denote that a
dress, etc., is made too short or tight, has furnished Americans
with an adjective and a noun. “That the amount at his dis-
posal might be as large as possible, he serimped his children and
his servants, in the minutest acts of expenditure.” (G. M. Beard,
M. D., Putnam's Magazine, November, 1868.) “Your dress is
too serimp ; I wouldn’t wear it again.” “Every lovely lady who
drives over from Lennox and returns, probably laughs at the
scrimpiness of the Shakeyr’s skirt just in the degree of the fullness
of her own. The larger the hoop the louder the laugh.” (Atlantic
Monthly, 1870.)

Seringe, to, probably merely a corruption of eringe, is pro-
vincial in England, and quite common in the New England
States,

“For the silver-spoon born in Democracy’s mouth
Is a kind of a seringe thet they hev to the South.”
‘ (J. R. Lowell. Biglow Papers, I., p. 51.)

Season is, in the South, often misused for “weather.” “This is
a good season for planting,” does not mean, this is the proper time,
but, this is favorable weather for planting tobacco. As the latter
is understood to be a shower, season often means a rain, or “spell”
of wet weather.

Seem, to, is one of the words which, as J. R. Lowell says, the
Yankee puts to an odd use: “I can’t seem to be suited,” or “I
couldn’t seem to know him.”

Seep, to, means in New England to run through fine pores or
any very small openings; it is evidently but an altered form of
sipe, as quoted by Grose with the same meaning.

Segar, a very general form of cigar, is not as correct as the
latter, which comes from the French cigarre or the Spanish
cigarro, both. of which terms come originally from the name of a
certain variety of tobacco grown in Cuba.

Settle, designates in New England the almost unfailing long
wooden seat which adorns the chimney-corner in country houses.
It is generally very high in the back and very narrow in the
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 541

seat, as far removed as possible from an easy lounge, and long
enough to hold six to eight persons.

‘Shackly for shaky, is quite common in the United States,
though only known as slang in England. “That’s rather a
shackly house, isn’t it ?”

Shakes are commonly fever and ague, from the manner in
which that disease is apt to shake the sufferer. “Have you had
the shakes again ?—No, this is not my day.”

‘Shanty, derived from the French chantier, and brought to the
United States by Canadian immigrants, who had heard it used
by voyageurs, is here almost exclusively used for the wooden
sheds inhabited by laborers on railways, and similar classes of men.
“ My house isa mere shanty, but a bower of roses.” (H. D. Thoreau.)

Shay, a corruption of chaise, does not mean a post-chaise, since
these are unknown in the United States, but a two-wheeled
vehicle drawn by one horse. O. W. Holmes has made the “One-
Horse Shay” famous by his popular poems, and the term is now
applied to anything small and insignificant.

Shet, the almost universal Yankee pronunciation of shut, is
warmly defended by. J. R. Lowell, who quotes in its behalf
Golden’s Ovid, and states that “Brampton Gurdon writes shef in
a letter to Winthrop,” showing that “our ancestors brought their
pronunciation with them from the Old Country, and have not
wantonly debased their mother-tongue. I need only cite the
words seriptur, Israll, athists and cherfulness from Governor
Bradford’s History. So the good men wrote them, and so the
good descendants of his fellow-exiles still pronounce them.”
(Preface to Biglow Papers, I, 32.) Precisely the same reasoning
applies with equal force to the peculiar words of the South,
fiercely denounced as Southern vulgarisms, while they were
carried there from the Old Country by men as worthy as the
Puritans, and preserved—not wantonly debased—by their descend-
ants, who revere their memory.

Shine, to, designates in the South and West a mode of still-
hunting by means of a pan with fire, which shines in the
eyes of the deer and holds it spell-bound. “It is related that
Daniel Boone, while fire-hunting, shined a pair of mild ‘blue
eyes which struck him as not belonging to the game he was
seeking. He lowered his rifle and made further examination,
542 AMERICANISMS.

when, to his surprise, he discovered a young girl who, with him-
self, was equally astonished at the adventure. Boone expressed
the most eloquent gratitude that he had not fired his weapon, and
waited upon the woodland nymph to her home; in time the
damsel became the wife of the most famous of backwoodsmen.”
(T. B. Thorpe.)

Shingle, in America a wooden tile, and also familiarly used for
a modest signboard, placed over an office, since, in the West
especially, a real shingle has often to answer the purpose. J. R.
Lowell speaks of a “wooden shingle, painted so like marble that
it sank in the water.” In Pennsylvania the word is often pro-
nounced shindle, partly, no doubt, under the influence of the
numerous Germans in that State, whose vernacular says Schindel
for shingle, but partly also because the word was often so written
by old English authors. In Holland’s Plinio we find: “Cornelius
Nepos writeth that the housen in Rome were no otherwise covered
over head but with shindles, untill the warre with King Pyrrhus.”
(Book xvi. ch. 10.)

Shinney, sounded and written as it appears in Halliwell’s
Dictionary, still serves to denote the game of that name, and the
peculiar, crooked stick with which it is played.

Shoat is the common form given to the word in New England
and Virginia, while elsewhere it is apt to appear as shoot and
shote—according to Webster, from the fact that the young pig
begins “shooting” up. It is the name of the pig between a
sucker and a porker, but also applied, in a rather contemptuous

manner, to young persons of pretentious manners. “ Long’s you «+

elect for Congressmen poor shotes that want to go.” (J. R. Lowell.)

Shoo! the common exclamation to drive fowls from gardens,
and hence generally coupled with jy, is more generally used in
America, where fences are of little avail, than in England. The
word is a simple, natural sound, and not derived from the Ger-
man “scheuchen,” which, on the contrary, is probably derived
from the common root of both words. “ Saying shoo, the farmer
would be surprised to hear that he was talking German, and so
would the fowls.” (A. L. Elwyn, M.D., Americanisms.) “ Shoo!
shoo! Get out! ’Long there with you!” (Aflantic Magazine,
March, 1870.)

Shorts, “the first remove above bran,” as Halliwell defines it,
OLD FRIENDS WITH-NEW FACES. 545

is in constant use in the South, where it designates the bran and
coarsest part of cornmeal, a favorite article of food for cattle.
“By and by a west-country wagoner chanced to come jingling
his bells that, way, and, stopping his wagon, unhooked his horses, -
gave them some shorts, sat himself down on the top of the
bank, and began to whistle: The batteaux-man robbed the old
woman’s henroost.” (Letters from the South, L., p. 72.)

Shotgun is used for a smooth-bored fowling-piece, to distinguish
it from a rifle.

Shut for shutter, and meaning also a small door, is an old
English term preserved in some parts of New England.

Sick, in England used only for sickness of the stomach, is in
America applied to indisposition of any kind, in the manner in
which, as Sir C. Lyell already noticed, it was used by Shakes-
peare and the authors of the Liturgy of the Established Church.
It is said that a Virginia lady in Europe, happening to be ill,
sent for an English physician, who, hearing from her servant
that she was sick, soon made his appearance with a stomach-
pump and other instruments of the kind. Evelyn writes, No-
vember 16, 1652: “ Visited Dean. Stewart, who had been sick
about two days.” Pepys also employs sick in the same general
sense (Diary, Vol. IIL, p. 264). It is curious to notice how sick-
ness of the stomach changed in England first into nausea, which
soon became vulgar and gave way to throwing up ; this also fell
in disfavor, and vomit was substituted, as it is used in the Bible;
in its turn this gave way to puking, when the great king, with
knee-buckles, silk-stockings, and gold-headed canes, also gave pukes
to high-bred matrons and fastidious belles, some fifty years ago.
This also was soon banished ; but as people might get rid of the
word but could not free themselves of the thing, they turned once
more to their first love, and sickness was restored to favor.

Sight, in the sense of a number, a great many, is provincial in
England, and in America serves the Northerner as heap serves the
Southerner. “ What a sight of people there was!” The verb to
sight means simply to choose one’s direction by the eye, and
watching carefully the landmarks. “ Having thus ventured into
the depths of the forest as far as we dared, observing our due line
of march by sighting at such trees as were in range of our course,
we stopped short in our track.” (Putnam’s Magazine, September,
1854.)
544 AMERICANISMS.

Sizzle, to, an old English word, quoted by Forby, but almost
forgotten in England, retains its vitality in some parts of the
United States, meaning to shrivel up with a hissing sound. “Some
pieces lay in the fire, half buried, and sizzling in the ashes.” (At-
lantic Monthly, August, 1858.)

Skin, to, in the sense of to extort, is probably an Americanism,
although the idea of ill-treating and pressing a man “to his skin,”
which has given rise to the meaning, is not unknown in English,
as is shown by the word “ skinflint.”

“©Old miser Dyser, skin a fly, Sir,
Sell the skin, and turn the money in,

as the boys used to rhyme about my old uncle Dyser.” (Putnam’s
Magazine, January, 1868.)

Slab-sided and slab-bridged, both terms applied to persons of un-
reliable character, are taken from the slabs, outside pieces of tim-
ber which occasionally serve to make country bridges, of peculiarly
unstable and unsafe character.

Slapjacks, in the North a kind of pancake, representing the
English “ flapjacks,” but in the West all kinds of griddle-cakes.
“ Well, I’d just as lief live on slapjacks a spell.” (Atlantic Month-
ly, March, 1870.)

Slashes are low grounds in the South and West, though open-
ings in the woods are also called by that name. As Henry Clay
was born in the slashes of Hanover, in Virginia, and in his youth
was often sent to carry mealbags to and from the mill, he was pop-
ularly known in after-life as the “ Millboy of the Slashes.” “I
have seen great numbers of quail, plover, and snipe, within a
couple or three hundred yards of the President’s mansion, and
they do say that deer abound in the slashes, as they are called,
about half a mile from the building.” (Letters from the South, IL,
p- 211.)

Slat, used in America as a noun, for a narrow piece of board
used to fasten together larger pieces, and as a verb in the sense
of doing anything with special violence, is probably a corruption
of the word sloaz, and intimately connected with slatfer. “If you
don’t come into the house this minute, I’ll sla¢ your head off.”
The word was originally confined to the language of fishermen on
the Hastern coast, who disengaged mackerel and other delicate-
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 545

-gilled fish by slatting them off the hook, but has long since ren-
dered service as a term expressive of anger.

Slazy, a modification of sleazy, and denoting the flimsy, unsub-
stantial character of certain materials, is the common pronuncia-
tion of the word with us, though much less frequently heard in
England.

Sleigh for sledge, denoting a vehicle on runners to carry passen-
gers or goods on snow and ice, is universal in America. In Eng-
land it is but just beginning to supersede sledge, which was here-
tofore almost exclusively used. “We have had hardly any
sleighing at all this winter, though snow fell in abundance,
but it never lay long enough to become firm.” (Boston Transcript,
March 7, 1867.) Hence also the word sleigh-ride for excursions
made in sleighs.

Slick, the popular form, shortened and modified in sound, of
sleek, has become almost exclusively popular, not in America
only, but also in England, where “Sam Slick” first made it known.
It is, however, by no means a new thing, but was already so used
in the West of England long ago (though not in Mr. Jenning’s
Glossaries), and is mentioned in Pegge’s Supplement to Grose as
prevalent in Kent. The presumption, moreover, is that sleek
was always pronounced slick, if we may judge from the older
poets. Chaucer has—

“Her flesh as tender as is a chicke,
With bent browes, smooth and slike.”
(Romaunt of the Rose.)

“ Slick’t all with sweet oil” is found in Chapman’s Odyssey, and
Beaumont and Fletcher say, “Who will our palfrey slick with
wisps of straw” (Knight of the Baring Pestle, Il, sc- 1), and so
does Ben Jonson show the early use of this form, both as an
adjective and as a verb. Americans, however, make a difference
between sleek, as meaning smooth and glossy, and slick in the
sense of easily, readily; in the latter sense the word seems to be
a genuine Americanism. Thus we say that “a man hasa slech and
glossy appearance,” and that “he goes slick about his business.”
The Yankee carries this meaning to an extreme, when he says
that “Down East an animal’s ear can be taken off so slick, that’
he does not know he is one ear short till he puts up his forefoot

to scratch it.”
546 AMERICANISMS.

Slim isin New England very frequently used in the sense. of
ordinary or even worthless—a meaning which it also has in some
of the Northern counties of England. “He is but a slim fellow,
I guess.” (Mrs. Stowe, Old Town Folks.)

Slip has acquired in America two peculiar meanings, which
are unknown in England. It means an opening between two
wharves or in a dock, and hence many localities in New York
bear that name, as Peck Sip, Coenties Slip, Burling Slip, ete. It
is also used, in New England only, to denote a narrow pew in a
church, somewhat resembling the sdip in the wharves on a small
scale. If the siip have a door it becomes a pew. As slip means
alsg a long narrow piece of paper, it is frequently used for a cutting
from a newspaper. “Send me the slip from the Herald and I will
return it promptly.”

Sliver is used as a verb and as a noun, meaning to cut or rend
lengthwise, and the small pieces thus obtained. The English
generally pronounce it with a long 7, while Americans always
give it a short 2, but the latter has the authority of Chaucer, who
rhymes sliver with “deliver,” and Shakespeare, who says—

“She that herself will sidver.”

Slops, with the early settlers of Virginia and the West, meant
tea and coffee, and in many parts of the country it retains this
signification to the present day. “ Slops,’”” says Wills De Hass,
“were tea and coffee, which, in the adage of the day, do not stick
to the ribs. A genuine backwoodsman would have considered
himself disgraced by showing a fondness for such slops. Indeed,
many of them have, to this day, very little respect for them.”
(History of Early Settlements, etc., p. 73.)

Smack, to, divides its two principal meanings curiously between
two different portions of the country. In New England to “ smack
a child” means to cover it with kisses and caresses; in Pennsyl-
vania the same phrase means to punish the child by slapping it
with the hand. In the latter sense the verb is used throughout
the South. “If you don’t behave yourself I'll smack you.” The
sharp, quick noise which the word suggests by an effort to imi-
tate it, has probably led, in America, to its use as an adverb also,
in the sense of suddenly. “He came smack against me, as I
turned the corner.”
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 547

Smart has as many meanings in America as in England, resem-
bling, in this respect, clever, the English sense of which it repre-
sents here. The smart man is quick and intelligent, but apt to
be suspected of taking advantage of his neighbors by these quali-
ties. The “smart business man” may be irreproachable in all
respects, but his smartness will always be looked upon with more
or less apprehension. The extreme of the quality conveyed by
the word is represented in the West by “a parcel of smart thieves,
who stole a felled walnut-tree in the night-time, by drawing the
log right slick out of the bark, and leaving the five watchmen,
who had engaged to protect it, sitting fast asleep astride on the
bark.” In the South and West smart is, besides, used in the sense
of great or considerable. “He has a smart chance of getting
himself into trouble if he keeps on talking that way.” (Rich-
mond Hzaminer, July 15, 1864.) “We had a smart shower this
morning, but it was not enough to lay the dust.” The phrase
“smart sprinkle” is used in Western slang to express a consider-
able quantity.

Smouch, to, obsolete in England, still survives in Pennsylvania,
where it means to salute, kiss. It is probably connected with
smack in the same sense, and imitative of the noise produced.

Smudge, which is used in England for an overwhelming smoke,
is in America specially applied to the smoke produced by combus-
tibles partly ignited, to drive away mosquitoes and flies, and to the
heap of combustibles themselves. In Canada and the Northern
States travellers, hunters, and lumberers make large smudges to
protect themselves against the clouds of insects that abound there,
and in the South, near country houses, similar smudges are set on
fire to protect the inmates against mosquitoes. “I was sitting
under the lee of a cedar-bark smudge, enjoying the fragrant smoke
that drove away the mosquitoes.” (Putnam's Magazine, July,
1870.)

Smut-mill or smut-machine, designates in the farmer’s language
a part of a flouring-mill which breaks and separates grains of
wheat infected with smut (Uredo segetum). The name has sub-
sequently been transferred to an abusive newspaper.

Snack, in the sense of share, and hence forming the phrase to
go snacks, is as common in America now as it was in England in
the days of Pope and Dryden, hoth of whom use it repeatedly.
548 AMERICANISMS.

The Rev. P. Cartwright speaks of a woman at a camp-meeting,
who, “in a state of semi-frenzy implored the Almighty not to let
her Sally go snacks with the devil.”

Snarl, in England used only for an entanglement of thread and
similar material, is in America applied to difficulties among men
also, and even an angry person is said “ to be in a snarl.” “ Again
we hear reports from Washington that the members of the Cabinet
have gotten into a snarl with each other or with the President.
These rumors arise periodically and amount to nothing.” (St.
Louis Democrat, February 19, 1871.)

Snew, the old preterite of to snow, and its companion snown,
the participle, are both still quite frequently heard in the United
States; sometimes affectedly, as in Major Jack Downing’s Letters:
“ First it blew, and then it szew, and finally it frizzed horrid ;” but
by the negroes in the South precisely as it was used by the first
English settlers. “ Yes, mas’ Bob, it snew sure all night long,
dat’s so.”

Snob has very curiously, in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania,
retained its old meaning, quoted by Halliwell, but long forgotten
everywhere else, of journeyman shoemaker. An acquaintance
will sometimes jeer one of the trade with the salutation: “ Wh’t,
snob !” whistling the first part of the address in imitation of the
Waxing process.

Snooze, as verb and as noun, rarely heard in England, is quite
common with us: “Lead him off to the lock-up and let him
snooze till he is quiet.” (J. R. Lowell, Biglow Papers, I, p. 57.)
Snoozy is hence frequently used for slightly drunk.

So is very often carelessly employed for as, and this abuse, for-
merly rare, threatens to become more general of late. “When
we got on a new suit thus manufactured, and sallied out into the
country, we thought ourselves so big as anybody.” (Rev. P. Cart-
wright, Autobiography, p. 26.)

Soak, to, in the sense of drain, which is obsolete in England,
is still used in America, especially as applied to bread, which is
said “to be well soaked,” if it is dry and thoroughly well baked.

Sobby, an adjective made from the verb to sod, after the anal-
ogy of soggy, and perhaps only an erroneous form of the latter,
represents the English sodded, and denotes land that is wet or
marshy, and hence unfit for cultivation. ‘Cranberries will grow
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 549

in sobby ground, where nothing else can be raised.” (Norfolk
Journal, June 27, 1859.) Occasionally the term is applied to
other articles; thus certain United States Records, concerning
the history of Georgia, saved from the wreck of a vessel bound to
Liverpool, were said to have been “sent in their wet and sobdy con-
dition to New York.” (North American Review, January, 184'7.)
Sad also is frequently used for sodden ; for instance, when speak-
ing of the bottom of a pie not properly baked.

Soft, rarely used in England for fool, is quite frequent in that
sense in America, representing the Scottish saft.

Some, as an adverb, and meaning much, or of some account, is
a modern perversion of the original meaning of the word, no
longer limited to the United States. “She is some now, that’s a
fact, and the biggest kind of a punkin’ at that.” (Blackwood,
July, 1848.) “I always thought he was some, but I am surprised
to see him where he is now.” (Southern Quarterly, 1853.)

Soon, instead of early, is used continually throughout the South.
“T shall be there soon in the morning, if you will promise to be
ready.”

Sot, instead of set, probably nothing more than a broader
sound of sat, and following in this the analogy of the modern got
for the ancient gat, which J. R. Lowell tells us the Yahkee fur-
ther degrades into gut, is used uniyersally North and South by
the illiterate. he analogy is still stronger in Virginia, where
the verb to sié is almost as-unknown as among cockneys, and
where, hence, the transition to sot must have been all the easier.
“Who so¢ you up, Master Frank, to tell me how to fodder that
’are creatur, when I as good as nursed you onmy knees?” (J. P.
Kennedy, Swallow Barn.)

“We wanted one that felt all Chief
From roots o’ hair to sole o’ stockin’,
Square-sot with thousan’-ton belief
In him and us, ef earth went rockin’.
(J. R. Lowell.)

”

Sots is the name of common yeast in Pennsylvania.

Souse, a mere modification of sauce, and often written sowce in
New England and Virginia, means in Pennsylvania more gen-
erally pigs’ feet.
550 AMERICANISMS.

Sparsely, for the obsolete sparsedly, is frequently said and writ-
ten, especially with reference to “sparsely populated districts.”
“The country between Richmond and Danville is but sparsely
settled, and only here and there a house is seen lording it over a
cluster of cabins, formerly the slaves’ quarters.” (New York
Tribune, April 26, 1871.)

Spell, a favorite expression in the United States for a little time
or a short turn. Thus the “ kink of laughter” is a “ spell of langh-
ter” in America. “We have had a wet spell of weather and the
roads are almost unfathomable.” (Hoffman, Winder in the West.)

“ He stood a spell on one foot fust,
Then stood a spell on tother,
An’ on which one he felt the wust
He couldn’t ha’ told yer nuther.”
(J. R. Lowell. The Courtin’.)

Spike-team is the American name for the English “ Unicorn :”
two horses preceded by a third.

Splendid, as applied to things not commonly associated in our
mind with “splendor,” as in speaking of “a splendid piece of
mutton,” is often objected to as an evidence of American grandi-
loquence. It sinks into utter insignificance by the side of splen-
didious, used by Drayton, the poet, in Queen Elizabeth’s time.
It was probably the Latin word splendidus he meant to employ,
but there it is in print, and splendiferous, frequently met with in
humorous English writings, is hardly worse.

Splurge, as noun and as verb, expressive of any violent, noisy
demonstration, and much used in the South and West, is proba-
bly only a modification of splairge, quoted by Halliwell in his
Archaic Dictionary, as a Northumbrian word with the same
meaning. It referred originally to the floundering about of a
great fish in the water, and the noise and splash it produced, and
thence came to mean making a great swagger of wealth and im-
portance. “Our would-be fashionables and shoddy aristocrats
are off to Newport or Saratoga, to make a great splurge.” (New
York. Herald, July, 1869.) The word is apparently connected
with the old English splorage, from Scottish splore, which means
a merry, riotous meeting. ,

Spree, a word traced back to a connection with French esprit,
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 551

and thus closely related to spry, cannot have come to us from
Louisiana, as is often stated, since it-is already quoted by Halli-
well as a provincialism. It was, on the contrary, brought here
from England, as Dr. Elwyn says, “with Tom and Jerry, and is
continued by the patrons of the firm.”

Spunk, in the sense of mettle, is so far from being an Ameri-
canism that it is, on the contrary, admitted into good company
in the north of England, and has been colloquially used from the
oldest times in Scotland. Burns speaks, therefore, of “ Erskine, a
spunkie Norland billie” (Cry and Prayer), as Sir A. Wylie already
said: “I did na think your Lordship was sic a spunkie.” The
adjective is used in America in precisely the same manner: “If
you were not a minister, I should say you was spunky.” (A
Woman’s Pulpit.)

Spurt, a perversion of spirit, and meaning a sudden, vigorous
effort, is even more frequently used here than in England, where
it is generally limited to accounts of various kinds of sport. It is
one of the oldest words of the language, and has ever since 1619,
when it first appears in print, retained the same meaning. “A
short spurt does not tire me; the length and hardness of the way
will at last tell me what leg I halt on.” (A. Tuckney, Sermon on
Balin of Gilead, p. 65.)

Squelch, to, expressive of the action of crushing anything soft,
inanimate or animate, is good old English, and, although obsolete
in the mother-country, in daily use in America. It had generally
a humorous meaning, as in the well-known lines—

“ He was the cream of Brecknock,
And flower of all the Welsh ;
But Saint George he did the dragon fell
And gave him a plaguey squelch,”
(St. George and the Dragon.)

Squiggle, to, for to sgwirm, to move about as eels and worms do,
is an Americanism, the uncouth word having in England a differ-
ent signification. It stands colloquially for the good old English
verb, to

Squirm, which is now little heard in England. “The gentle-
man is suddenly seized with the retrenchment gripes, and squirms
about like a long red worm ona pinhook.” (Speech of Mr. Pitt
552 ' AMERICANISMS.

in the Legislature of Missouri, 1867.) Grose already cites the
word as meaning to wriggle and twist about actively, but as
obsolete. It is well known that the same word is frequently sub-
stituted, in England as well as in the United States, for the verb
to swarm, when applied to sailors hastening up to man the yards,
or boys climbing up a tree without branches.

Staddle, the old English name of “the bottom of a corn-mow or
haystack,” as Grose says, is in America often applied to a young
tree or sapling, till it has reached a certain size—a meaning well
known to Bacon, but apparently obsolete in England. In the vast
salt-marshes on the Eastern coast, stout stakes are driven in, on
which the hayricks are set to raise them out of the reach of high
tides, and these stakes are called staddles.

“ Lonesome ez staddles on a mash without no hayricks on.”
(J. R. Lowell. Biglow Papers, I., p. 180.)

Stamp, to, commonly pronounced stomp, has, in the South espe-
cially, the meaning of being very angry, derived no doubt from the
violent stamping with the foot which so often accompanies ebulli-
tions of wrath. “The General jumps up and he stomps about a
spell, I tell you; he smashed down his pipe and it flew into more
than forty pieces.” (Major Jack Downing, Letters, p. 124.)

Stand, to, is used in Pennsylvania and some of the Western
States for the more usual to stand in, meaning to cost. “ This
horse stands me two hundred dollars at least.” (8. 8. Haldeman.)

Start, to, is a verb very much used in the United States, and
this popularity is explained thus by J. K. Paulding: “When folks
set out to go anywhere in this country, it is called s¢arting. Thus
they staré to the Westward; for our people are the most active in
the world, and do everything by a start. Other people set out, as
they term it, and will pause and ponder, ponder and pause, half a
life over a journey of twenty miles, while an American decides at
once upon going from the province of Maine to the banks of the
Missouri. We are young quails, and run from the nest with the
eggshells on our back.” (Letters from the South, L., p. 108.)

Starvation was at one time denounced as an Americanism, but
has been found to be an English word of considerable age, made
incorrectly with a Latin termination to a Saxon word, after the
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 553

analogy of “flirtation.” Its first use is attributed to Mr. Dundas,
afterward Lord Melville, in 1775, who, as Horace Walpole tells
us, received from his daring innovation the nickname of “ Starva-
tion Dundas.” To starve (German, sterben) was originally, and is
now in England, applied only to dying of hunger, in the sense in
which the trades-unions employ the grim word to clem; but in
America starvation is used to denote death from exposure and:
cold also.

Steale, pronounced stale, the stock or handle of a tool, is pro-
vincial in England, but in daily use among the farmers of New
England. The term is evidently the German Sétel.

Steep is not only used in its literal sense, but, by a kind of
bold hyperbole, applied to things generally. Men speak of “a
steep price for a farm,” and complain of “a steep tax to be paid.”
J. R. Lowell gives a happy example of the extravagance with
which such terms are used by country folks, even in their literal
meaning: “I once asked a stage-driver if the other side of a hill
was as steep as the one we were climbing? Steep! Chain-
lightnin’ couldn’t go down it without puttin’ the shoe on.”

Stent, more commonly pronounced and written stint, almost
forgotten in England, is still in daily use in the United States in
the same manner in which Shakespeare spoke of his “ stint of woe.”
The idea connected with the meaning of the term is evidently
not merely that of a task, but of that amount of work which,
when accomplished, will allow the worker to stint his efforts, that
is, to ceasé working. Swift, however, uses the word stin¢ as an
allowance or portion: “How much wine do you drink in a day?
My stint in company is a pint at noon.” Theodore Parker spoke
of “Little boys in the country working against time, with stents
to do.” (Oration on the Death of Daniel Webster.)

Stocking-feet, an expression long considered an Americanism
by English critics, who made much of the “Yankee walking in
his stocking-feet so as not to be heard.” But either the word was
long in use in Scotland also, or Mr. Thackeray had taken a fancy
to it, in spite of its pretended foreign origin, for he says in his
Newcomes: “Binnie found the Colonel] in his sitting-room ar-
ranged in what are called in Scotland his stocking-feet.” (I., ch.
8.)

Stone is occasionally used in America as an adverb to qualify

24 .
554 AMERICANISMS.

an adjective, after the manner of the German Stein in steinretch,
ete, probably an effect of the German, spoken so largely in the
interior of Pennsylvania, where this usage most prevails. “J
have heard the following story in the country: A young lady, who
was so refined that she avoided saying s¢one, spoke thus: I took
up a ground-seed (stone) and threw it at a he-biddy (cock) sitting
on a turn-about (grinding-stone) and killed him stone-dead.” (8.
8. Haldeman.) Stone-dead is, however, quoted by Britton.

Stop, to, is very generally used here for to stay, and, we are
told, now heard in England also, not only from illiterate people,
but from many also who would be very angry if they were con-
sidered so. “The diplomats, who on this occasion are wont to
greet our republican President in the splendor of their own court
costumes, stopped quietly at home, and the day wore on without
an incident.” (Richmond Dispatch, January 4, 1871.) “ Person-
al—General George W. Deitzler, of Lawrence, is stopping at the
Southern. Dr. Ernest Alexovitch, of Venice, Austria, is stopping
with Captain Frederick Fuchs.” (St. Louis Democrat, March
24, 1871.) .

Stories of a house are counted differently in America from the
English way: the story on the ground-floor is called the first, and
the next above it, the first in England, is here called the second,
and so on.

Stringy, in the sense of filamentous, consisting of long, thin
strings, has recently obtained a new meaning in the United
States, which is thus explained: “The excessive use of iron has
given us an architecture which is technically known as stringy,
like a man with a very large body on very thin legs.” (New
York Tribune, January 19, 1871.)

Stripper is not. only the person who strips, but in Pennsylvania
also a cow which is nearly dry, and has to be stripped of the little
milk she gives.

Stub, to, instead of to stump, is often heard when persons
strike their toes against a stone or a tree. The term is related to
the German stwbben, which has the same signification. Stubby,
however, is used in the familiar sense of short and thick-set,
mainly of persons.

Stud, in the very peculiar sense of stubbornness, was originally
used only of horses who refuse to go on, and is connected with
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 55d

the verb to stand. Afterward it was applied to persons also, who
were determined or obstinate:

“Here lies Thomas Dudley, the trusty old stud ;
A bargain’s a bargain and must be made good.”

(Governor Belcher’s Hpitaph on Governor Dudley. 17th century.)

Stumpy, very generally used like stubby, for a short and stout
person. “ Stumpy chaps, such as you, ain’t got no troubles in
this world.—That’s all you know about it; stwmpdes have troubles.”
(J. C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches.)

Suant or suent, by some traced back to the fuller form of pur-
suant, by others believed to come from the old French suiant, fol-
lowing, means even or uniform, and is much used by the farmers
of New England. It was carried there by their ancestors, and
Jennings tells us that they say swent in the West of England,
while Grose quotes in the Somersetshire dialect the phrase : “ Zow
the zeed zuant.” oe

Suicide is not unfrequently used as a verb. “John Pflug, of
Pekin, Illinois, swicided.from disgust at his name.” (St. Louis
Democrat, January, 1871.)

Suit, as applied to hair, is probably an Americanism. In the
South a lady is said to “possess a wonderfully fine sai¢ of hair.”
“You ought to have seen Cora, when she first appeared on
the stage. Pale as death, and evidently very nervous, her beanti-
ful fine features, radiant with intelligence and enthusiasm, almost
shone in their brightness, relieved as they were by a back-ground
formed of the most magnificent suit of hair ever seen flowing
down woman’s fair shoulders.” (Richmond Lnguirer, November
19, 1858.)

Summons, to, the old verb used by Swift, but long since
regarded as obsolete in England, continues in use in the New
England States. “It can’t be that he really had youswmmonsed
before the squire, Zek; what did he mean?” (Judd’s Margaret,
ed. 1871.)

Sundown, found in early English writers, and sawnup, formed
analogously, but probably a genuine Americanism, are both in
constant use in New England and the Far West. “At sundown
a drove of mustangs paid us a flying visit.” (G. W. Kendall,
Santa Fé Expedition, I, p. 88.) “I had walked fourteen miles
556 AMERICANISMS.

since sunup, and felt ready for the fried chicken and hominy
which are the regular breakfast of South Carolina planters.”
(Letter in New York Tribune, March 14, 1870.) “Mam’s
going to Brown’s store at swnwp, and I spose I’ve got to pack her
and baby again.” (I. B. Harte, Luck of Roaring Camp, p. 202.)

Supper is almost universally used for tea in the United States.
“The meal which we are accustomed to call tea,” says an English
traveller, “is by Americans universally, I believe, called supper,
and it is the final meal, there being only three in the day.” (P.
H. Gosse, Letters from Alabama, p. 68.)

Suspenders is the American substitute for the English “ braces,”
and sometimes viewed as a delicate way to avoid the objectionable
term “ gallowses.” ;

Suspicion, to, instead of to suspect, used by South, but long
since obsolete in England, is still a favorite in Southern States,
especially among the negroes, to whom the curtailed ’spect is not
expressive enough for their strong feelings. “Then the sergeant
suspicioned me, for he turned on me and growled out, By God, I
believe ye are a Yank!” (Weld Bill.)

Swad, an old English word for a lump or mags of earth, etc.,
survives in New England, as in the mother-country, as a collo-
quial or cant word only. “Such a swad of people as came to
see the show! I never seen in all my life the like on it!” (Our
Young Folks, December, 1869.)

Swale, in the sense of a tract of low, generally swampy, land, is,
in like manner, an old word preserved in the remoter districts
of New England and some parts of the Far West. “ Branching’
from the Colorado, near the mouth, it glides easily down across
the desert, through a swale a quarter of a mile wide.” (T. F.
Meagher, Colorado, etc.)

Swash, in the Southern and especially the Gulf States, desig-
nates a narrow channel of water between sandbanks, or near the
shore. “It is said they took refuge in the swash behind the
house, and thus escaped into the bayon, although others maintain
that they only hid in the loft, while the officers were searching
the lower story.” (New Orleans Bec, May 17, 1869.)

Swinger is, in the West, the name given to the middle horses in
a team of six. “Each wagon is usually drawn by three span of
mules, of which the lighter and forward are leaders, the next pair
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 557

swingers, and. the rear, or heaviest pair, wheelers.” (A Trip to the
West, p. 18'7.)

Swingeing, often written swindging, is one of the good old Eng-
lish words which tenaciously cling to the soil, and sound like
echoes from a far-off age. In Virginia and most parts of the
South, white and black boys have for more than two centuries
called a large snake or other formidable creature a swindger, or
“a swinging big snake.” ‘The word, rarely if ever heard in the
North, is duly laid down by Bailey, and applied by Milton in
precisely the same sense to a dragon, who,

“ wroth to see his kingdom fail,
Swindges the scaly horrour of his folded tail.”
(Christmas Hymn, St. VIII.)

“There will be a swingeing supper by-and-by.” (Putnam’s Maga-
zine, January, 1868.)

Swingle-tree is rarely heard in the United States; an erroneous
connection with the “double-tree,” used in some cases, having led
to the altered form of single-tree, which is nearly universal.

Th

Tackey, in the Southern States a common designation of an
unkempt and uncouth-looking horse, is transferred to men also
of neglected and forlorn appearance. “I rode along on my poor
tackey, deep in thought, when I was suddenly recalled to the
realities of life by a loud voice calling out to me: Halloa! stran-
ger, what may you be after in my potato-patch ?” (Lucian Minor,
New England Revisited.)

Take, to, a newspaper, says the American, where the English-
man would say, to dake in a paper.

Talented, » form perhaps first used in America, was strongly
criticised and opposed by Coleridge, with many other apparent or
genuine Americanisms. The term is, however, not objectionable
in its mode of formation, eminently useful in designating persons
who are endowed with talents, as “ spirited and gifted” are made
to serve for similar purposes, and has made its way so successfully
in England, that it may be found now in her best and most fas-
tidious writers. The “vile and barbarous vocable,” as Cole-
558 AMERICANISMS,

ridge called it, has thus established its claims and justified its
authors.

Tall, like steep, is in America very frequently used in the sense
of considerable, exceedingly, Western speech delighting in deriv-
ing such expressions from the prominent features of the landscape
in the West. “My friend, said the agent to the Indian, when he
had finished his harangue, that is pretty ¢add talk, but you had bet-
ter take what the Great Father in Washington sends you, and be
content.” (Official Report to Chief of Indian Bureau, 1868.) The
facility with which such words spread to regions where they are
not indigenous, and hence often most ludicrously misapplied, may
be seen in the phrase, “ This is what I call ¢al/ fishing, anyhow.”
(Newfoundland Fisheries, 1870.)

Tarrify, to, has been for many generations a common expres-
sion in the South, for any undue pressure exercised by the powers
that be. The word is generally referred back to a vulgar corrup-
tion of torrified, from the Latin torrere, to roast, and this presump-
tion is strengthened by the fact that the word is so used and
written in an anonymous “ Tour through North and South Caro-
lina,” published some years before the Revolution. A recent
writer humorously alludes to the enormous tax on cotton and to-
bacco, which “tarrifies,” if it does not “roast” the unfortunate
planters of the South, and suggests that, if the word was not so old,
it might very well be the result of being ¢arif-ied, since the Tariff
has become a synonym of misery.

Tavern takes here almost universally the place of the English
inn. In England the “ tavern” furnishes entertainment and
liquor, but provides no lodgings.

Tease, to, has taken in America the place of the English verb,
to chaff, and its derivatives, which are rarely heard in this coun-
try, although so elegant and pure a writer as W. S. Landor uses
them more than once.

Techy, instead of touchy, is neither a new form nor limited to
the New England States. Shakespeare already has ¢etchy twice,
and Ray mentions fechy as a “ North Country word.”

Teeter, to,an American form of the English verb, to tilter, with
its literal meaning, to seesaw, to move up and down on opposite
ends of a plank, as children do; and, to be in a more or less painfal
state of suspense. “Because we want to watch the money-market,
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 559

so many are teetering on the beam of speculation. Now gold goes
up and they go down. Now stock goes down and they go up.
Thus they teeter day after day, and when they tumble headlong in
the crowd, they cannot see where the joke comes in.” (Zhe Comic
Side of Life.)

Telegram, a much-discussed word, is an undoubted American-
ism, used first by the editor of the Albany Journal, April 6, 1852,
and formed after the analogy of “epigram,” and “ monogram,” to
distinguish the result of the process of telegraphing from the in-
strument. The term commended itself so strongly by its brevity
that it soon supplanted its predecessor, “telegraphic dispatch,”
and a year or so later appeared in English journals also, which
claimed it as an invention of their own. (Wotes and Queries, No-
vember 21, 1852.) For some reason or other, however, the word
has never become popular, and is still more or less confined to
cases where brevity is of importance. Even the verb, to telegraph,
is frequently forced to give way to the shorter, to wire, as a late
telegram by Atlantic Cable from the British Premier to the Com-
missioner of Internal Revenue of the United States said: “Cadle
how match-tax works.”

Temper is used by Americans in the majority of cases to denote
passion, while in England it expresses, on the contrary, the con-
trol of passion. “Hook was nearly engaged in a duel,” says his
English biographer, “in which transaction, from first to last, he
showed equal ¢emper and spirit.” This is also the meaning attached.
to its derivatives, temperate and temperance, in this country, but
temper itself is rarely used thus: “It was the only time when I
saw Mr. Lincoln really show temper; he seemed to have been
literally worn out by insatiate petitioners and troublesome coun-
sellors, and when the old lady declined leaving the room he spoke
with serious anger.” (A Visit to Washington, 1864.)

Tenement-houses are large buildings, erected generally in a very
imperfect manner, for the purpose of being rented out in single
rooms to poor families, thus producing very high rent and en-
riching the owner at the expense of the ill-lodged tenants.

Threap, to, meaning to argue, to contend, is quoted by Halli-
well and by Ray among North Country words, but rarely heard in

. England, while it is still in daily use in Central Pennsylvania.
“Tt’s not for a man with a woman to ¢hreapan.” (Percy’s Rel-
560 AMERICANISMS.

iques.) “I said to him, Come, let us threap and argue, but he,
without saying another word, struck me over the head and
knocked me down.” (Harrisburgh Jowrnal, January 17, 1851.)

Timber means in America not only the wood and the trees, but
the whole forest—wooded land in contrast to open land. Itisa
remarkable feature of American landscape, that large parts of the
country which were once covered with forests are now utterly bare ;
and in a late official report it was stated, that “Maine, in 1870,
was bereft of almost her entire growth of old trees, New York
was an extensive importer of timber from Canada and the West,
and, as for the whole Union, it was believed that at the present
rate of consumption the timber now growing will be all cut and
marketed within fifteen or twenty years.”

Tin, instead of tin-cup, is by no means American slang. Halli-
well quotes it and English writers continually use it, Dickens
speaking even of “a dinner-¢i7.”

To, instead of at, is one of the most distinctive features of the
Yankee lingo, as J. R. Lowell calls the dialect. “Now, I say,
ef you don’t bring the fashion-book, when you come home at
Thanksgivin’, yowll see what you'll git. You know we have
sech lots of company ¢w our house, and I’ve got to be dressed,
said a coarse, red-haired girl, who rejoiced in the mellifluons ap-
pellation of Serepty Hepzibah Smoot.” (Putnam’s Magazine,
January, 1870.) It is thus written ¢w, because an additional
peculiarity of the Yankee dialect requires that it and foo should
alike be pronounced ¢6, as in ¢owch, when not emphatic, while
both sound like ¢w in ¢mault, when emphatic. “There is such a
thing as bein’ tz,” says the New Englander, with special satisfac-
tion at never being found guilty of the crime. This confusion be-
tween ¢o and too appears not so blameable, when it is borne in
mind that formerly both words were written simply to. To hum,
instead of, at home, is never heard outside of New England, but in
daily use there. ven educated people are apt to say ¢o home, as
in the line praising a Governor, because

“ He stays to his home an’ looks after his folks.”
(J. R. Lowell. Biglow Papers, I., p. 34.)

Equally remarkable is the American use of to as a kind of exple- .
tive, the infinitive of the verb that might follow it being univer-
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 561

sally omitted. “I meant to ask him ¢o,” means, to ask him to
do what we are discussing. “ Would you like to?” “I told him
I did not want ¢o,” are phrases continually meeting the eye in
reading works written by Northern authors. Even Mrs. H. B.
Stowe, in her great work Uncle Tom, and in other writings, uses
this phrase incessantly, and although perhaps not exactly a model
of composition, her authority is of some weight, as she puts it into
the mouth of educated as well-as of illiterate people.

Tole, to, also written toll, and probably identical with the latter
verb, is used in America to express the alluring of animals. “ His’
son was found ¢oling and coaxing the hogs to a gap.” “We went
down the bay, and saw plenty of ducks, but as we had no skiff
and no means to tole them on, we did not get a shot.” (Baltimore
American, 1867.)

Tongue, instead of pole of wagon, is probably an Americanism,
derived from an instinctive comparison with the tongue of a
buckle, or a tongue of land stretching out, long and narrow, into
the water.

Top, to, in the sense of snuffing a candle, is limited to Penn-
sylvania, where it is found in daily use.

Town is in New England very generally used for township,
which, Miss Leslie tells us, explains Jonathan’s difficulty, who

“Said he could not see the town,
There were so many houses.”

Ii sounds odd, at first, to hear New Englanders speak of farms
they own in Newton Town, or of the fine crops made in the whole
Town.

Training and training-day are two old-fashioned terms, refer-
ring to the former usage of “training the militia” at certain sea-
sons of the year, when they met on training-days to be reviewed.
A militia-man, called out to do active service, is apt to be called a
trainer—all these terms being derived from the process of ¢rain-
ing soldiers, as the modern “drill” used to be called.

Transpire, to, instead of, to happen, is unfortunately no longer
slang, but has become a word in daily use with persons who ought
not to be- guilty of such bad usage. The original meaning of the
word seems to have entirely disappeared, and whatever “happens”

24*
562 AMERICANISMS.

is now-a-days, in American newspapers especially, represented as
having transpired. “ After 12 o’clock last night it transpired that
the Massachusetts delegation had voted unanimously in caucus to
present the name of General Butler for Vice-President.” (New
York Times, 1869.) John Randolph, of Virginia, had a very
tender ear for good English, and when one day a Member of Con-
gress used the word transpire repeatedly, and always in the sense
of occurring or taking place, he bore it for a time, but finally lost
all patience: “‘ May I interrupt the gentleman a moment?’ he
asked. ‘Certainly, said the speaker. ‘ Well,’ said Randolph, ‘if
you use the word ¢ranspire once more, I shall expire.’” In spite of
such warning, and although whatever happens openly, in honest
daylight, ought not to be slandered by being said to have ¢ran-
spired, the term is applied to every act and occurrence. “Our
readers will recall the details of a horrible and unprovoked mur-
der which ¢ranspired near Brighton, in the square before the rail-
road depot, and in presence of several hundred persons.” (Alton
Telegraph, January 30, 1871.)

Trash, in its vagueness and comprehensiveness of meaning, is
a popular word with Americans, who apply it to persons and
things alike, to express their worthlessness. It is also used, as an
expressive term, of the leaves, sticks, and compact foam which
accumulate by the side of a stream. In Louisiana, when the cane
has been cut for the mill and stripped of its abundant leaves, the
unripe joints are cut off, and with the leaves and canetons spread
out upon the ground, so as to cover the roots with a thick mat of
slowly-decaying vegetation. This trash, as it is called, isin spring,
when no more frost is to be apprehended, removed and ploughed
in by careful planters, while less prudent men simply burn it.

Trig, in the sense of trim, neat, but rarely heard in England,
survives with many similar terms in Virginia, and the States that
owe their existence to the Old Dominion. It is related to (rich,
in the sense of “tricked out,” decorated. “This was a negro-boy
equipped for service on horseback. He was rather more frig in
appearance than I was accustomed to see the servants.” (J. P.
Kennedy, Swallow Barn.)

Turnpike, instead of turnpike-road, is universally used in the
United States. In New England the word-is pronounced tunpike,
hence the play upon the word in the lines—
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 563

“Ef your soul
Don’t sneak through shunpikes so’s to save the toll.”
(J. R. Lowell. Biglow Papers, I., p. 52.)

U.

Ugly, originally applied to want of beauty, has been almost
entirely superseded by the word plain, as comely is nearly un-
known in America, and its place supplied by pretty, handsome,
or good-looking. Ugly, in the Northern States, means almost
exclusively, ill-tempered, and is so constantly applied to disposi-
tion, that it is a common phrase to hear a girl represented as
“being quite good-looking, but ugly.” This use of the word is
not new, but has come to be considered colloquial only, if not
real cant, in England. ‘Governor Andros was inclined to be
ugly, but they understood him, and, pretending indifference,
secured a passport from him to visit the upper waters of the
Hudson.” (Harly Voyages to New Netherlands.) HH. Reeves
states that “a British traveller, walking one day in the suburbs
of Boston, saw a woman out on a doorstep whipping a screaming
child. Good woman, said he, why do you whip the boy so
severely? She answered, Because he is so wly! The English-
man walked on and then put down in his journal: Mem.
American mothers are so cruel as to whip their children because
they are not handsome.” ‘The same term is applied to animals:
“Squire Stebbin owned a bull that came from the same stock,
and he turned out so dreadful wgly that he had to be killed for
beef.” (Putnam’s Magazine, March, 1855.)

Uncle was, in the South, the universal term by which a
colored man was addressed.

Underhew, as applied to timber, in Pennsylvania, denotes a
piece of timber which should be square to come up to measure,
but which has been hewn in such a manner that, while it looks
full size, it really does not hold the requisite number of cubic
feet. (S. 8S. Haldeman.)

- Up, to, as a verb, is a familiar but quite common expression in
the South. “And then he wps and tells me all.” (J. C. Neal,
Charcoal Sketches.)

Use, to, is in like manner an elliptic expression, common in

the Southern States. “The sheep wsed in that field,’ means
18
564 AMERICANISMS.

“used to graze” there. “A boy generally found no difficulty,
before he was twelve years old, to learn to discover where deer
used, and. to notice the signs.” (Wills De Hass, History of Early
Settlements, p. 22'7.)

Vv.

Varmin, as all wild animals are called in hunter’s phrase,
whether they are hunted for sport, for profit, or for extermination,
is considered a corrupt pronunciation of Vermin. This can apply,
however, only to the strengthening ¢ which is commonly added,
since the a in the first syllable is simply a remnant of its former
sound, when er was in England almost uniformly pronounced ar,
and as it still is in Derby, clerk, and sergeant. “ Would you have
me suffer myself to be bullied all day by a varmint?” (W. Irving,
Astoria, I., p. 260.) “Yow re not going to get “possum from top
of tree at one jump, I know. He come down-stairs presently.
Terrible varmint for grabbing—his tail as good as his hand.”
(J. P. Kennedy, Swallow Barn.) “Oh, Land of Goshen, what
are you prying and peeping into the varmin?’s hole; it is nothing
but a bumble-bee, and the fish are come down to the sea and
every man and boy in the place is after them.” (4A Visit to Man-
asquam.) P. H. Gosse gives a ludicrous account of the nice dis-
tinction which Americans, with all their apparent looseness of
language, know how to apply, when it seems necessary: “I inad-
vertently spoke of it (a ’possum) as ‘a singular creature,’ but
creature or rather critéer is much too honorable a term for such
an animal, being appropriated to cattle. A *possum, sir, is not a
critter but a varmint.” (Letters from Alabama, p. 234.)

Ventilate, to, as applied to persons, is a most objectionable
abuse of the picturesque word, which has forced its way irresisti-
bly from the French into German and English. “In another
article our correspondent promises to venttla/e the President and
his policy, and we promise our readers a rich treat.” (New York
Herald, July 27, 1868.)

Vest is in America almost universally used for the English,
waistcoat, while the latter is very appropriately applied to a gar-
ment worn immediately on the body, as a flannel-weistcoat. Sir
C. Lyell, during his first visit to the United States, wrote home
that “the American citizen deigns not to appear in public unless
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 565

dressed in full evening costume of costly black broadcloth, with
what he calls a vest of black satin.”

Vige, a most violent and unwarrantable corruption of voyage,
in constant use in New England, has been shown by J. R. Lowell
to be of great antiquity. He quotes from Peel’s Sir Clymon and
Sir Clamydes: “And afterwards having met our vige,” while
Chaucer writes at least viage, as it is written in Spanish.

Voyageur, a French word, perfectly naturalized in the United
States, and used to designate Canadian boatmen and travelling
fur-traders, on the upper Mississippi and in the great Northwest,
was first used by Mr. Irving in his Astoria (I. p. 20) in 1847.

WwW.

Waggon, to, or, as it is almost universally written in the
United States, to wagon, is constantly used instead of to carry
or to transport. “The goods will have to’ be wagoned a long
way, sir.” -

Wain, the old and obsolete form of wagon, is still in daily use in
some parts of the United States, e. g., in the peninsula east of the
Chesapeake, one of the first parts of Virginia and of North America
that were colonized, the earliest settlements made there dating
back to a few years after the foundation of Jamestown.

Wallop, to, or Wallup, in the sense of beating violently; an
English pronunciation of old date, is frequently heard in familiar
style in America also. The word seems to be intimately connected
with wallup, in the literal sense of “walling (boiling) up,” as
used in potwalloper, and in Joel Barlow’s lines on Hasty Pudding :
“Then puffs and wallops, rises to the brim.” The process of boil-
ing up may have been transferred to the hot, hasty character of
persons, as we also say that an irate man “boiled over.” “ All I
know was walloped into me. I took larnin’ through the skin.”
(J. C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches. )

Warn, to, in the sense of to notify, has occasionally been con-
sidered an Americanism, but the warning given by English serv-
ants would seem to show that it is used thus in England also. It
is, besides, employed in the same meaning by Pecock (J. R. Lowell)
and other old English writers, and repeatedly by Dickens.

Weddiner, a term derived from wedding, as the English “ meet-
566 AMERICANISMS.

iner” is derived from “ meeting,” designates in Virginia the per-
sons in attendance on the bridegroom. It is, of course, not a new
word, having been handed down to the present generation from
the time of the first settlers, and occurs, among others, in a poem
in the Cumberland dialect, by John Stagg:
“The priest was ready within,

The weddiners just took gluts apiece,

While he his brick was lattin’.”

Well is used by Americans with peculiar fondness to begin
almost every sentence, but especially an answer to a question.
This custom seems to have originated in New England, where it
is still most generally prevailing, in order to gain time before re-
plying, as the Yankee is commonly accused of answering only by
a new question. He, therefore, dwells upon the well, perhaps even
repeats it, and, as J. R. Lowell quaintly remarks, gives it “a variety
of shades of meaning, conveyed by the difference of intonation,
and by prolonging or abbreviating, which I should vainly attempt
to describe. A friend of mine told me that once he heard five
different wells, like pioneers, precede the answer to an inquiry
about the price of land.”

Whip, to, in the sense of beating, surpassing others, is an
Americanism, and the slang phrase, “That whips all creation,”
commonly credited to Kentuckians, is characteristic of this use of
the word. “He Oh Bee me at leaping, but I reckon I can whip
him at running.” (8.8. Haldeman.)

Whitpotting, a term used in Nantucket and a few other places
on the Eastern coast for visiting among relations and friends, is
derived from the old English festival of Mothering-Sunday in
Mid-Lent, when the servants and young people in England were
allowed to go home, and when—especially in West England—the
white-pot, a dish resembling hasty pudding, formed a staple dish.

Whittle, to, designating what is, abroad, considered the favorite
and life-long occupation of the American, is probably derived
from the Scottish whitéle, a claspknife, as used by Burns:

“Gudeman, quoth he, put up your whitile,
Tm no designed to try its mettle.”
(Death and Dr. Hornbook.)

Dryden also speaks of “a butcher’s whittle,” meaning his little
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. ; 567

knife, the term being a diminutive, and the root whet. That the
word is by no means American in its meaning—whatever may
be said of the practice of whittling sticks, tables, and furniture
generally—may be seen from the fact that Horace Walpole wrote
to Horace Mann, after the battle of Rocoux, October 14, 1746:
“Then we have whittled down our loss extremely.”

“Whop, to, instead of whip, is universal in the South among
the blacks and many whites. “Dis yere my boy, Miss, I wants
him ter come ter school, an ef he don’t *have hisself, hopes you'll
whop him. You hears dat ’are now? Ef yer don’t mind de
teacher, I’se gwine whop yer, ’sides de whopping she'll gib yer.”
(Sketches in Color, Putnam’s Magazine, January, 1870.) The
word is an old English cant term, a corruption of whip, and was
often written whap ; hence comes the term whopper, mentioned
by Pegge asa “thumper, anything uncommonly large. North,”
and representing in our day mainly a big lie (Slang Dictionary,
p. 270). “If Colfax had not told such a whopper in his defini-
tion, it would have been the champion joke of the season.” (Ma-
con Telegraph, April 1, 1871.)

Wicket is, in Maine and the timber regions of the Northwest,
the name of a shed or “camp” made of boughs, to shelter the
lumbermen at night and in bad weather.

Wilt, to, is applied in America to flowers and plants which
begin to lose their freshness, and to become flaccid when exposed
to the heat on a dry day.

“ Tediously pass the hours,
And vegetation w7lis with blistered roots.”
(W. D. Gallagher.)

J. R. Lowell commends the word as useful to fill the gap between
drooping and withering, the previous and the succeeding stage,
and thinks the “imaginative phrase, he wilted right down, like,
he caved right in, a true Americanism.” Artemus Ward punned
upon the word atrociously. “I said to her, Wilt thou? and
she wilted.” Its better use is beautifully illustrated in the
lines—
“We never thought to see her droop her fair and noble head,

Till she lay stretched before our eyes, wélted and cold and dead.”
(J. R. Lowell. The Morning Glory.)
568 AMERICANISMS.

Witness, to, frequently substituted for the simpler to see, is
another evidence of the American tendency to grandiloquence.
“T never witnessed a more splendid sight in all my life.” (Balti-
more Sun, April 17, 1871.)

Wolfish, in the sense of very hungry, is a strong and picturesque
Western term. ‘“ When we reached camp my half-breed said he
was wolfish hungry, but as we had nothing whatever to eat, and
even the parfleche failed to give us any comfort, he buckled his
belt tighter and lay down to sleep.” (T. Winthrop, The Canoe and
the Saddle, 1863.)

Workhouse, generally associated in our mind with paupers, has
recently obtained a new and ‘nobler meaning in Boston, where a
workhouse has been established for weak girls, which is in reality
a horticultural school or hospital. Weak girls attend here to
learn ostensibly how to cultivate flowers, but in reality to ac-
custom them gradually to such hard work as will restore them to
health. When new-comers first attempt work, they can with
difficulty endure it two hours a day. After a short time they
are able to spend eight hours in work, their health, appetite,
and strength increasing in corresponding proportions. All the
flowers that can be raised are quickly bought up, and, although |
this was not the primary object of the institution, it is “ making
money.”

Worryment, made after the manner of “ wonderment,” and
similar factitions words, can hardly be said to be in use, as it does
not occur outside of certain works, the humor of which has to
be sought for largely in bad spelling and unusual words.

Wrathy, a familiar substitute for wroth, is not unfrequently
heard in the West. “The general was as wrathy as thunder, and
when he gets his dander up it’s no joke.” (Major Jack Downing’s
Letters, p. 34.)

Xe

Yallo is the almost uniform pronunciation of yellow as far
South as Virginia, and to the West. In New England it appears
as yellers, and then often denotes a peculiar disease of peach-
trees which makes their leaves turn yellow.

Yammer, used to express a whine or a whimper in Pennsyl-
vania, owes its origin enideealy to the influence of German in
OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES. 569

that State, as it reproduces, almost unchanged, the German word
Jammer in one of its meanings.

You is curiously enough in the South almost invariably ac-
companied by the word all, and a person meeting a bachelor
friend, will not hesitate to ask him, “ How are you all?” Yourn,
instead of yours, retaining the old adjective termination which is
concealed in mine and thine (my-en, thy-en), is frequently en-
larged in the South-into you-wns, and followed up with the same
addition in other pronouns.

“J have heern the tale a thousand ways,
But never could git through the maze,
That hangs around that queer day’s doin’s :
But Pll tell the yarn to you-uns.”
(John Hay. The Mystery of Gilgal.)

A story is told of a soldier in the late Civil War, who had
been captured by Sheridan in his charge through Roclkfish
Gap, on the raid down to the White House, and who, sent back to
Winchester, reported thus: “We didn’t know yvuu-wns was
around us all, and we-wns reckoned we was all safe, till you-wns
came ridin’ down like mad through the gap and scooped up we-
uns jest like so many herrin’.” These terms, and you-ens and
us-ens, are but extensions of the English vulgarism, which says
yourn, hisn, hern, in Berkshire not only, where it seems to be
most prevalent, but in other parts of England also. A Berkshire
ditty runs thus:
“But tother young maiden looked sly at me,
And from her seat she ris’n2—
Let’s you and I go our own way
And we'll let she go shis’n.”

This is more than a precedent for J. R. Lowell’s—

“She thought no voice had such a swing
Ez hiz’n in the choir ;
My! when he made Ole Hundred ring
She know’d the Lord ‘was nigher.”
(The Courtin’.)

Even a reverend minister of the Hardshell Baptists, we are told,
may use the words: “ He had laid sixpence on the desk, and, after
570 AMERICANISMS.

the manner of those people, bet us that no one in the congrega-
tion could tell him where his text was found. Brother, said an
old man present, it’s a small bet, but I never let them pass; and
then referred to the passage correctly and sat down. The money’s
yourn, said the preacher, and then began his sermon.” (Putnam’s
Magazine, February, 1855.
AL,

CANT AND SLANG.
CANT AND SLANG.

 

‘No expression can become a vulgarism which has nota broad founda-
. The language of the vulgar hath its source in physics, in known, com-
bended, and operative things.”

(Walter Savage Landor.)

"HE number of really new American words is but very small,
[many of these even will, no doubt, upon more careful investi-
ion, be found to be mere imitations of well-known terms. After
human nature differs very little wherever society is well
anized, and what may appear original for a time, in the efforts
eform, or in startling innovations, is speedily discovered to be
a repetition of former experiments. New habits and new
ipations do not always call for new terms, since they bear
erally sufficient resemblance to others of well-known char-
ir, to allow of old names receiving a new application. It is
7 where special importance is attached to a custom, as in the
: of “ Forefathers’ Day ;” where a casual word happens to strike
fancy of the people with such force as to make a word popular,
“boost ;” or where the usefulness and power of a modified
a makes itself felt at once, as in “ mailable,” that really new
ds establish their claim to be considered essential parts of the
ruage. Some of these even disappear again after a short period
isefulness ; such are especially the names of political parties
fractions of parties, which are manufactured at nearly every
tion, certainly whenever a change in politiés takes place, and
forgotten again when a new emergency produces new names.
ir number ee legion; their interest often merely local, and
tys only ephemeral; so that it has been deemed better to
t them here altogether. They have been quite as numerous
iurope, and quite as fleeting. But for the help afforded by
574 : AMERICANISMS. &

the charming Memoirs of the Duke of Guise, few but the most
ardent students of history would, for instance, know of the exist-
ence of “ Beggars,” as the revolters of Flanders were called in his
time, while those of Guienne took the name of “ Eaters,” those
of Normandy that of “Bare Feet,” and those of Beausse and
Boulogne that of “ Woollen Pattens.” These names convey to us
‘no more meaning than will after a few years those of Barnburners
and Old Hunkers, Copperheads and Butternuts, Scallawags and
Carpetbaggers, which in their time stirred up the passions of a
great nation, and were in everybody’s mouth and on every page
of the public journals.

It has, also, been thought unnecessary to repeat here those col-
loquial or genuine cant and slang terms, which either owe their
origin to a foreign tongue or belong to a special department of
social life, such as religious or political institutions, railways or
counting-rooms, or hunting or fishing pursuits. These have
already been mentioned in their proper connection.

Attention has, on the other hand, been bestowed upon the cant
and slang terms which are not simply importations from England ;
the latter being introduced only when they have been modified in
some essential point as to form or meaning. American cant and
slang have some peculiarities unknown to the Old World. The
women even contribute to it largely, availing themselves of the
national gallantry extended to their sex on all occasions, for the
purpose of indulging to the utmost in unbridled license of expres-
sion, both in public and in private. There is as much truth as
wit in the conundrum: Wherein do the women of the day re-
semble St. Paul? In that they speak after the manner of men.

Then the Great West contributes its characteristic features,
demanding from its popular speakers free manners and bold words,
and, conscious of its political importance and exhaustless resources,
caring ag little for the canons of verbal criticism as for the dic-
tates of European Jawgivers. Its speech is impregnated with the
racy flavor of the backwoods and the prairie, and reflects in form
and intonation the primitive life in the settler’s log cabin. Its
vast extent, the boundless plains and gigantic rivers, and all the
matchless features of Nature on the largest scale ever beheld by
man, impress upon language also a certain freedom from restraint
and a certain tendency to employ vast terms and large-sounding
CANT AND SLANG. 575

cases, Which give an air of unconscious grandiloquence and
iuine slang even to ordinary conversation.

Che most fertile source of cant and slang, however, is, beyond
ibt, the low-toned newspaper, written for the masses, which,
tead of being a monitor and an instrument of improvement in
: hands of great men, has become a flatterer of the populace,
1a panderer to their lowest vices. The common tendency to
ng which characterizes the American people, the colloquial
legancies that mark our conversation, and the downright vul-
tities which deface so much of our literature, are all, more or
3, due to the pernicious influence of the low-toned party news-
yer of the day. Thanks to this influence, any sudden excite-
nt, political event, or popular literary production, originates
1 sets a-going a number of slang words, vulgar at first, and
acted by the few who are careful of the people’s English, but
n adopted as semi-respectable by the force of habit and the
tate indolence of the American in such matters. How truly
3 it said by Grose, as far back as 1785, that “those burlesque
‘ases, quaint allusions, and nicknames for persons, things, and
ces, which from long, uninterrupted usage, are made classical
prescription,” form an essential part of the English language.
glishmen have always been distinguished by their fondness for
gar equivalents, and their descendants on this continent have
forgotten the customs of their fathers. They constantly coin
v words, and give new force to half-obsolete terms; and as Mr.
ckle often used to say, “many of these words are but serving
ir appresticeship, and will eventually become the active
ngth of our language.” America has sent a fair supply of cant
ns to the home-country, and they have been welcomed and
dily adopted by English politicians and English merchants
ecially, while at home they spread witn a rapidity heretofore
sown in the history of language—thanks to the fact that there
10 country where reading is so universal and newspapers are
aumerous. The gradual growth of such terms has been well
cribed. “These vulgarisms and corruptions of language do
come at once into general use; they creep in stealthily ; they
m spring from ignorance or caprice; then they do some ser-
3in an humble way, in the market or the courts, ministering
she wants of the poor and the ignorant; then they attract the
576 AMERICANISMS.

favor of the press in its least authoritative form, and finally, partly
by assumption and partly from necessity, they come to be acknow-
ledged as good citizens and freeholders of the realm.”

Among the fertile sources of slang, sound must not be forgotten,
which contributes a large number of words, although etymology
is but too apt to overlook its productive powers. - Nothing pleases
ignorant persons so much as high-sounding terms, “full of fury,”
and hence they delight in words melodious to their ear, like
“rumbumptious, slantindicular, splendiferous, rambustious, and
ferricadouzer.” (Slang Dictionary.) Thus Americans have in-
vented “catawampiously, karnuption and conniption-fits,” and
love to devise new terms like “skeet, skoot, and skit,” to represent,
by the mere sound, brisk action and energetic movement. It is
this same love of sound which leads to the marked preference of
Western people for high-flown, intense, or grandiloquent expres-
sions. “The Western man,” says a recent writer on the subject,
“touches the high keys of conversation when he speaks of con-
diments, instead of sugar and cream, in his coffee, and uses
propelling for walking. He says his neighbor speaks judgmatic-
ally ; he talks of going out as prospecting ; when he wishes to
know what he has to pay, he asks, What’s the damage? or, not
so charitably, What’s the swindle? He talks of your plunder,
and his betéerments on his farm. He speaks soberly of dwild-
ing a pair of shoes, and says of an old goose, We biled it, and
biled it, but it was tougher than the wrath of God.” (Henry
Reeves.) Nothing is more amusing than to listen toa group of
hunters or Western backwoodsmen, as they lie around the fire,
smoking their short pipes and talking quietly in a tone and a
style which, to the person unaccustomed to their speech, sounds
like the height of extravagance and absurdity. Thus a literary
tailor relates of his wandering associates, that “One would
declare that for thirty days, in the city of London, he had not
seen a ‘patch’ of blue sky big enough to ‘seat a pair of breeches
of the Jack of Clubs’ Another would aver that he knew a res-
taurant in some town, where he could get coffee strong enough to
“bear an iron wedge.” A third, in discussing the social qualities
of his landlady, would allege that she could ‘talk off the ears of
a cast-iron dog,’ whilst still another declared he knew an Irish-
man who lay six weeks speechless in the month of August, over-

1 1 A Pe ER Wh, eee Sees eel
CANT AND SLANG. 577

A.

About, in newspaper-slang and the pages of careless writers, is
ed in the sense of “here and there.” “In last night’s row,
Yr. was badly beaten abowt the head and face ;” and with an
tensifying addition, “It is fair to infer that, distributing his
tentions, he had been, as usual, about in spots.”

About right, are called those things and acts which are judged
be very nearly right. “Well, that’ll be about right, I reckon,
it [ think you might have done better, Pete.” (J. P. Kennedy,
orseshoe Robinson.)

Above one’s bend means, above one’s power of bending all his
rength toa certain purpose. “It would be above my bend to
tempt telling you all we saw among the Redskins.” (J. F.
voper, The Oak Openings.) J. R. Lowell calls attention to Ham-
?s expression, “To the top of my dent.” In the South the
irase is apt to expand into “above my huckleberry.”
Absquatulate, to, to run away, with the more or less forcible
ea of running away in disgrace—-a fictitious word, considered
England an Americanism, and perhaps made from the Latin
and the American squat, which was first used by “Nimrod
ildfire,” a Kentucky character, in a play called “The Ken-
ckian,” by Bernard, and acted by Mr. Hackett, in 1833.
Africanize, to, in the sense of placing under the control of
ricans, is a cant term which has of late acquired very general
d very melancholy currency, since several of the Southern
ates have been literally Africanized.
Afterclap vepresents in Pennsylvania and the Western States
additional and generally unjust demand beyond the agreement
bargain originally made. “None of your afterclaps!” In
otch the same word means “ evil consequences.”

Agur-forty, a curious corruption, showing the almost irrepress-
e tendency of the uneducated to give some intelligible and sug-
stive form to terms which they do not comprehend. It is the
ua fortis of medicine. “Your Honor needn’t say another
rd; I knock under; this man’s whiskey ain’t Red Hye, it ain’t
iain Lightnin’ either, it’s regular Agur-forty, and there isn’t a
in living can stand a glass and keep his senses.” (New Orleans
cayune. Police Reports, December 25, 1867.)

Airly, for early, is New England slang, though not unknown

25

 
578 AMERICANISMS.

in Pennsylvania, and derived from its orthodox sound in the 17th
century. It is well represented in J. R. Lowell’s line: “A man
must get up airly, if he wants to take in God.”

All any more, or simply ail, is a Pennsylvania yulgarism, the
latter form probably derived from the German alle, which is famil-
iarly used in the sense of “gone.” “Die Suppe ist alle,” means,
“the soup is (all) gone.” Thus the waiter at a hotel will say,
“The pies are all any more, Sir,” meaning that there are no more.

All-fired, meaning excessively, in the highest degree, is suspect-
ed by J. R. Bartlett to be a corruption of hell-fired, which is very
likely. “That’s an adl-fired lie, cried the Kentucky man, drawing
his bowie-knife from behind him, and you'll have to swallow every
word of it, or your soul will see daylight pretty quick.” (Western
Scenes, 1839, p. 147.)

All sorts of suggests the idea of persons or things which are
nothing particularly, but of that indifferent nature which may be
anything and everything. The phrase is confined to the South
and.West, where it is very popular. “ He was all sorts of a man
to most people, but if you knew him better, you could not help
liking him.” (Eulogy in House of Delegates of Virginia, January
1%, 1849.)

Along, to get, is the Atnatiean substitute for the English phrase
to geton. Mrs. Trollope already noticed it as a peculiarity of our
speech. “Well, Sir, how are you getting along? were Mr. Web-
ster’s avords, as the little fellow ran up to him, hugging his knees
and looking up into his face.” (A Visit to Marshfield, 1851.)

Alpaca, a well-known material, is extensively corrupted by
traders, who call it Alla Packa and Alley Packa, confounding it
apparently with “ Ali Pacha,” as pronounced by them.

Among the missing, to be, or to be found, isa common slang
phrase to denote simply to be absent. “I tell you what, Jake,
if this goes on, I'll be among the missing before sundown; it ain’t
human nature to stand bein’ fired at by them varmin, and not to
havea crack at ’em in return.” (Across the Great Desert, 1869.)

Animules is, in California and the Southwestern Territories, a
favorite substitute for animals, with a sly pun upon mules.

Antt, the professional term for a bet placed anti, or in opposi-
tion to the dealer’s bet, in playing the Southern game of cards
called Poker, has been transferred to other transactions also, and
CANT AND SLANG. 579

to anti means to bet or risk generally. “ What will you anti he
won’t be re-elected ? ”

Antony Over, a game of ball played by two parties of boys, on
opposite sides of a schoolhouse, over which the ball is thrown.
Used in Pennsylvania. Antony is merely a proper name, pressed
into the service here, as Reynard, Robin, and others are for the
same purpose, and Over requires no explanation. (8. 8. Haldeman.)

Anything else is often added with not, to any assertion which
in the speaker’s mind requires strengthening, and if the latter
be strongly negative, is changed into nothing else. “He’s a brick,
I swear, and nothing else.” (Pickings from the Picayune, p. 156.)
The same result is obtained by adding

Anyhow or anyhow you can fix it. “Iam going to try, any-
how.” “TI don’t see how you can convince me of that, anyhow you
can fix tt.”

Ary, for ever a, is common in New England, as in England.
(Slang Dictionary, p. 68.) “Take ary one on ’em you like.” The
older form was airy, and in Tom Jones it is even written arrow:
“And yet I warrants me, there is xarrow a one of all these officer-
fellows but looks up himself as good as arrow a squire of five
hundred pounds a year.”

As I can, following generally a phrase like I don’t know, is
frequently heard in the rural districts of New England, where it
represents the cautious hesitation by which the Yankee thinks
it prudent to qualify every promise or assertion. The particle as
is substituted for but, and already N. 8. Dodge has remarked the
resemblance of this class of phrases to the Spanish “ Quien sabe ?”
“A traveller,” he adds, “passing a few weeks at Mount Desert,
Maine, asked the innkeeper if he could change a hundred-dollar
note? Putting his hand in his pocket and taking out his
wallet, the latter replied: I don’t know I can and‘I don’t know
as I can.”

Asininity, an asinine stupidity. “The editor is not asked to
restrain his loquacity, but to let it be truthful... even if ne
should have to avoid asininities like his Daiicicile verburnum.
(S. 8. Haldeman, Notes on Willson’s Readers, 1864, § 126.)

Assentatious, ready and willing to-assent to all that is said—
made from assentation. “One who listens well, a respectable,
assentatious stranger.” (J. P. Kennedy, Swallow Barn.)
580 AMERICANISMS.

Assign, to, is in the South used by illiterate persons and by an
astounding number of men who ought to know better, instead of
sign. “I will assigi the paper, sir, as soon as you bring it to me,
and then you can have it recorded in Court.” (Southern Literary
Messenger, September, 1849.) The word is a striking illustration
of the force with which analogy fashions words that are not under-
stood by the speaker. Ignorant persons derive from the frequent
use of words like assent, assert, approve, ascribe, etc., a vague
conception of a peculiar force adhering to the initial a, and thus
add it where it is superfluous and incongruous.

Ater, for after, is a corruption which the New Englander has
inherited from his Puritan ancestors, while the Virginian, with
his apparent inability to pronounce the r where it ought to be
heard, and to omit it where it is not in place, says more frequently
arter ory even arfter. While the latter, even in the pulpit, is
occasionally heard to speak of “us poo motals,” and orders the
servant to “shet the doo,” he calls his uncle’s wife Arnt Mariar,
and asks her “when she goes back to Starnton.”

Avalanche, a corruption of ambulance, was already before the
late Civil War much used in Texas and the outlying territories,
but is said to have caused no small merriment in the Confederate
Camp, when Prince Polignac was sent to hold an obscure com-
mand in the Southwest, and once showed very great excitement
upon being informed by a sergeant that the “avalanche was just
coming down the hill as fast as fury.”

B.

Back, to, down, or to back out, ave both Western phrases, quite
picturesque in form and suggestive in meaning. The metaphor
may have been taken from the stable—as is maintained by En-
glish writers—but corresponds so evidently to the opposite phrase
of going ahead, that the sea appears far more likely to have been
the birthplace of the phrase. “It is not expected now that the
Democrats will back out from their position, as the Radicals can ho
longer command the two-thirds which enabled them last session
to enforce the previous question.” (New York Herald, December
10, 1870.) “He was one of those men who never dack down, even
when they know they are clearly in the wrong: their pride is sure
to be too strong for their judgment.” (New Eclectic, March, 1870.)
CANT AND SLANG. 581

Bald-face, one of the many slang terms under which bad
whiskey passes in the West.

Bald-headed, to go it, is a very peculiar but not unfrequent
phrase in New England, suggestive of the eagerness with which
men rush to do a thing without taking time to cover their head.
«“ Whenever he had made up his mind to do a thing he went at it
bald-headed.” (Our Young Folks, 1869.) To snatch bald-headed,
on the other hand means to defeat a person in a street-fight :

“The crowd then gaye a specimen of calumny broke loose,

And said I'd snatched him bald-headed, and likewise cooked his goose.”
( Words and their Uses. Galveston News, May 4, 1871.)

Bamsquabbled, first used in the “Legend of the American
War,” and expressing discomfiture, is an evidently manufactured
word, and but rarely heard except in humorous writings.

Bango, an onomatopoetic term, imitative of the sound which calls
forth the exclamation. Confined to the negroes in all the States.

Bar represents in the West almost uniformly the dear, and re-
appears in Bar-meat. Another dar is the verb made from the
noun, a dar, in the sense of drinking-shop, used in the West.
“ He bars too much, and won’t stand it long.” (Western Scenes,
1839, p. 771.)

Barberize, to, is a word fortunately confined to barbers, whose
occupation it is intended to express.

Beast is in Virginia and some of the Southern States used for
a horse, as it was the custom with Englishmen at the time when
the Old Dominion was settled, and when the translators of the
Bible wrote, “ A certain Samaritan set him on his own east.”
(Luke x. 34.) “Entertainment for man and Jeas?,” is a com-
mon inscription over the doors of village taverns.

Bellmare, a horse chosen to lead a “ caravan” or drove of mules
in the Southwest. “Why the gray mare should be the better
horse in the estimation of mules I cannot say, but such is cer-
tainly the fact. Though very cautious animals, when relying
solely upon their own judgment, they would appear to have a
consciousness of their inferiority, which induces them to entertain
a great regard for the sagacity of the horse, and especially for that
ofa white mare. The wily Californians, taking advantage of this
amiable weakness, employ a steady, old, white mare of known
gentleness and good character, to act asa kind of mother and

y
582 AMERICANISMS.

guide to each drove of unruly mules.” (A Ride with Kit Carson.)
This is the familiar deldmare, who in her turn gives, in slang lan-
guage, her name to the leader of political parties. ‘Mr. Hastman
will probably be the dedimare of the scalawags in the approaching
session.” (Houston Telegraph, 1869.)

Begin is frequently used, accompanied by noZ, to express a very
emphatic negation. A caterpillar being about to be consigned to a
small box, not wide enough to receive the body, nor even the
smallest part, a servant exclaimed indignantly, “Law, sir! he
wouldn’t begin to go in.” (Gosse, Letters from Alabama, p. 293.)

Bender, in the sense of a spree, a course of drinking, is the
facetious name given to the arm, which becomes a bender from
being so frequently bent or “ crooked” to lift the glass to the mouth.
The word originated with the Scotch, among whom it designated
the hard drinker as well as the drinking. “Most of the owners
of these names had been tempted by the festivities of the day to
go on a regular dender, and had to pay the penalty for their New
Year’s frojic by appearing this morning in the police-court.”
(Richmond Dispatch, January 3, 1864.) Allan Ramsay already
sang—

“Now lend your lugs, ye denders fine
Wha ken the benefit of wine.”

Bet, you-—a new-asseveration, which has arisen in the Southwest,
but shows a decided tendency to make its way upward. It means,
You may bet on what I say. “We will be all right if Lower
Georgia will do her duty as we do up here. We're all going to
turn out in the upper country. Did you see all them that passed
through the cars just now? Well, there’s eighteen of them ne-
groes, and we’re going to take them all down to vote the Demo-
cratic ticket, and they’ll vote it too, you det.” (Correspondence
New York Tribune, December, 18'70.)

Bettermost, a cumulative superlative after the model of many
a similar form in Shakespeare, but not found in English writers.
Common in New England. “I stopped the dettermost part of the
time with my cousin, the deacon.” (Mrs. Stowe.)

Betweenity, the state of being undecided, of halting between
two opinions, a favorite slang term with so-called humorous
writers. “Like the fabled coffin of Mohammed, he is always in a
CANT AND SLANG. 583 «

state of detweenity.” (J. C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches, L., p. 217.)
“Betweenity is stillin daily usein Pennsylvania.” (8.8. Haldeman.)

B’hoys, the name of young men in the city of New York who
fill the streets with their noise, are prominent at the polls and at
fires, and drive fast on Sundays on favorite roads leading out of
town, often with their gals by their side. “The O’hoy is fast
disappearing from among us, and the day is not far off, we appre-
hend, when the Bowery will know him no more.” (New York
Home Journal, June 17, 1868.)

Big Dog of the Tanyard is the name often given to an over-
bearing person who will allow no one else to speak or to differ
from his views. The bold figure of speech is derived from the
fact that tanyards are generally guarded by fierce bulldogs.

Big Figure, to do, or to go the big figure, denotes in the South
mainly the venturing upon a great undertaking, the metaphor
being taken from the game of poker, where players are said to go
a certain figure. Hence also the phrase, “to go the whole figure.”
“When I saw that, I thouwht I might as well go the big figure,
you see, and so I grabbed the bag; but mischief would have it,
that just then the policeman grabbed me and took me to the ca-
boose.” (Pickings from the Picayune, p. 226.)

Biling (instead of dotting), the whole kit and biling, an expres-
sive phrase, heard in the West, to designate the totality of per-
sons or things. “At one time there was good reason to fear that
the whole kit and biling, as our men invariably called our traps,
would be swept away, but by a great effort they kept the boat
upright, and, although thoroughly drenched, we saved every-
thing.” (A Trip to the Rocky Mountains, 1869.)

Bimeby, the popular contraction of by-and-by in New England,
inherited, in all probability, from early settlers, who brought the
word over from Somersetshire,where Halliwell quotes it as prevalent.

- “When Ma bimeby upon ’em slips;
Huldy sot pale ez ashes.”
(J. R. Lowell. Courtin’.)

Bit, a, in the sense of a little while. “If you'll wait a dit, Pl
go with you.”

Blazes, generally preceded by “like,” is a euphemistic form for
the lower regions. The term is as familiar to English ears as to
ours, except, perhaps, in its occasional meaning of the Evil One.
584 AMERICANISMS.

“He looked, upon my word, like Old Blazes himself, with his
clothing all on fire, and rage and despair in his face.” (Southern
Literary Messenger, June, 1849.)

Bloomer, the name of a lady, Mrs. Bloomer, who proposed to the
ladies a costume which she herself wore, consisting of a very short
dress with long and wide trousers, and a broad-brimmed hat. The
costume, as well as the wearer of the costume, is called a Bloomer.

Blow, to, in the sense of boasting, is probably an Americanism.
“You need not dlow so, my friend, I don’t believe a word of what
you say.” Hence also the noun dlower, a braggart, with special
reference to his success in imitating Baron Munchausen.

Blowth. Myr. Wright, in his Dictionary of Obsolete and Pro-
vineial English, explains it as meaning a blossom. With us a
single blossom is a blow, while dlowth means the blossoming in
general. <A farmer. would say that there was a good dlowth on the
fruit-trees. The word retreats farther inland, and away from the
railroads, year by year. (J. R. Lowell.) A dlow-ouwt is here, as in
England, a great demonstration; a bléw-up, a severe scolding.
“Te has a prompt alacrity at a dlow-owt, and has been skyed in a
blow-up, two varieties of blow which frequently follow each other
so closely as to be taken for cause and effect.” (J. C. Neal, Char-
coal Sketches.) The term dlow-up is stated to be, in England,
“now a recognized, respectable phrase.” (Slang Dictionary, p. 77.)
The American, fond of doing everything with unusual energy,
likes to blow-up sky-high, an addition which makes it more pro-
bable that the phrase is originally a nautical one, and really
borrowed from the dlowing-up of a vessel, much as the meaning of
the words must have evaporated before it reached the present stage.

Boat, in New England frequently pronounced ddat, is one of a
whole class of words with oa or 0, which, in many parts of the
Union, are pronounced with utter recklessness, now with an open
and now with a close 0. The Yankee is apt to*make oa always
short; the Southerner does the same with oo, and speaks of a
root and a boot. The extreme license in this matter is faithfully
portrayed in O. W. Holmes’ hwnorous lines:

“Learning condemns beyond the reach of hope,
The careless lips that speak of sodp for soap ;
The edict, exiles from her fair abode
The clownish voice that utter rodd for rdad,
CANT AND SLANG. 585

Legs stern to him who calls his cddt a codt,

And steers his 06a, believing it to be a bodt.

She pardoned one, our classic city’s boast,

Who said at Cambridge mést instead of mést,
But knit her brows and stamped her angry foot,

To hear a teacher call a 760¢ a rodt.
(Urania, 1846.)

Boatable, capable of being navigated by boats, originated in
America, but proved so useful that it has found its way into
English dictionaries. “The river is not doatable for several
months in the summer.” (HE. A. Pollard, Virginia, 1870.)

Bob, to, around, to make frequent calls upon a number of
friends, is probably as much English slang as American. “ Bod-
bing around” is, however, a favorite expression in the United States.

Body, in the sense of person, often. cited as American slang,
may be slang, but has a good warrant in old English authors.
Shakespeare says: “ Unworthy dody that I am;” and Hooker has,
“A wise dbody’s part it were to put out this fire.” After that there
seems to be no particular vulgarism in saying, “ What can a body
do under such circumstances but He still and wait?”

Boggle, to, meaning to embarrass, is often used in the State of
New York: “His affairs were found to be woefully deggled, and
his creditors have little chance to recover anything.” (Rochester
Democrat, 1870.) ,

Bolt, to, for to rush, to escape, has made its way upward again,
after having for generations served asa mere slang word, and is
now nearly as respectable as when Dryden wrote: “I have reflected
on those who, from time to time, have shot into the world, some
bolting out on the stage with vast applause, and others hissed off.”
“Several of our contemporaries have announced it as a well-estab-
lished fact, that Carl Schurz has dolfed from the Republican party.
We have the very best authority for denying the report.” (St.
Louis Democrat, April 3, 1871.)

Bones, one of the instruments used with great effect by so-called
negro-minstrels, resembling castanets, but made of real bones.
“To make no bones” of a man or a thing is old English slang, oc-
curring already in Cotgrave; it originated with people living on
the coast, who, eating fish in haste, say that they “make no bones.”

Boohoo, to, 2 verb made from the noise which it represents, and.
coined by the witty Judge Haliburton, who, though not an Ameri-

25*
586 AMERICANISMS.

can, is the father of a number of Americanisms. It is meant t
express blubbering aloud, and answers the purpose. “When h
heard that he was to be left behind, what do you think he did
He boohooed aloud, till we could bear it no longer.” (Sketches
p. 182.)

Boost, to, in the sense of pushing or lifting one up a tree or :
fence. J. R. Lowell uses it thus:

“ Whereas ole Abram ’d sink afore he’d let a darkie d00st him.”
(Biglow Papers, II., 106.)

A negro-preacher in South Carolina made the following applica
tion of the word: “For, my bredderen, little Zaccheus was bounc
to see the Lord for once, dough he had to climb up de tree to di
it. And how did he get up der tree? Ah, how did he get up de
tree, my bredderen? Did he wait for some lazy nigger to brin;
him a ladder? Ah, no, my bredderen. Did he wait to be boosted
Ah, no, my bredderen. Nota doost!/ He climbed right straigh
up der tree hisself, like de possum, by his own hands and feet anc
de grace of God!” (T. A. Richards, Rice-Mields of the South.)

Both alike, a pleonasm arising from ignorance, but quite fre
quent in all the States.

Break-Bone Fever is the very expressive though vulgar nami
of a disease which, in the West Indies, is known as the Dengue
from a misapprehension of the English cant-term “ Dand:
Fever,” which the Spaniards corrupted into Dengue. The rheu
matism which causes the affection produces intense pain in al
the bones of the body, and utterly exhausts the patient’s strength
so that he literally feels as if “all his bones were broken,” anc
hence the name.

Brickley, in the sense of britéle, is neither slang nor to be con
demned as a corruption. From the German brechlich and thi
Scottish drickle the word could be legitimately derived, anc
T. Moore’s “drickle earthen pots” are but a step behind thi
“brickly ware,” which is met with in Southern writers. Britil
itself is curiously enough in Pennsylvania used when speaking of
the weather, as a substitute for “fickle.” “We have had bricki
weather of late.” (8. 8. Haldeman.)

Britches is the almost universal pronunciation of breéche:
among the mass of the people.
CANT AND SLANG. 587

Brown, to, is occasionally met with in the sense of to under-
stand, and as such quoted as “American Slang” in the Slang
Dictionary (p. 86). Its use is very rare, but the meaning is evi-
dently connected with the familiar slang phrase, to do a thing
brown, the figure being taken from the process of roasting, which
is well done when the meat is well “browned.”

Buck-party, like stag-party, denotes a company without ladies.

Bulger, from to bulge (French bouger), to swell out, is hence
literally a saedl, but in the United States generally “designates
anything very large. “ That’s a bulger of a story.”

Bung-town, an imaginary town in New England, so called from
the slang term to bung, meaning to lie. Hence, Bung-town Cop-
per is a favorite name of the spurious English half-penny, which
has no currency in the country. “These flowers wouldn’t fetch
a bung-town copper.” (Judd, Margaret, p. 19.) It is said that
such a coin was really once made—a counterfeit, of course—in a
town then bearing the name of Bung-town, but since known as
Rehoboth, in Massachusetts. -

Bunk, connected with the Swedish word Bunke, and denoting
a tub or a wooden case in taverns, which serves as a seat by day
and as a bed at night; is thus derived in the same manner as the
Scottish bunker, but in its shortened form peculiar to the United
States. With their usual license, Americans use the term as a
verb also, and sailors, especially, speak of bunking, when they
go to their dunks to sleep. “I was too tired to work any more,
and went to my dunk to sleep, but found it full of water.”
(J. H. Mayo, Kaloolah.)

Burglarize, to, a term creeping into journalism. “The Yan-
keeisms donated, collided, and burglarized, have been badly used
up by an English magazine-writer.” (Southern Magazine, April,
1871.) The word has a dangerous rival in the shorter durgle.

Bursted, a false participle from burst, is often used in the
South to give emphasis to the word. “What has become of
Dick Farish? He has durséed all to pieces.” The more familiar
slang phrase is to dust, and hence duster, in the sense of a reck-
less spree or frolic.

Buzzard is the half-facetious half-contemptuous term applied
in several mechanical professions to a badly-spoiled piece of work.
“Said the venerable Mr. G. to one of his jours: Sir, I pronounce
588 AMERICANISMS.

that job an unmitigated buzzard; and, sir, promptly responded
the jour, I pronounce it cut a buzzard, and, therefore, nothing
else could be made of it.” (Lancaster Intelligencer, May 6, 1871.)

By and again, instead of now and then, is peculiar to the South.

C.

Cabbage-head, a slang term for a fool, is used here as in Eng-
land, where it is commonly explained as meaning “a soft-headed
person.”

“For take my word for’t, when all’s come an’ past,
The cabbage-heads ’\\ cair the day at last ;
Th’ aint been a meetin’ since the world begun,
But they made (raw or bil’d ones) ten to one.”
(J. R. Lowell. Biglow Papers, IL., p. 228.)

Cabbage designates in America as well as in Europe not only
the well-known vegetable, but also the pieces of cloth purloined
by dishonest tailors. They claim a noble ancestry for the
usage, and state that it originated with no less a person than
Sir Anthony Ashley. It is true that the latter was the first to in-
troduce the cultivation of the close-hearted cabbage into Eugland,
and thus rendered his native country independent of Holland,
from which heretofore the supply had been imported. It appears,
however, that this “planter of cabbages” was also accused of
having secured much loot during a command he held at Cadiz
(also called Cales), in Spain, and especially by appropriating the
jewels which a great lady had entrusted to his honor. Hence the
well-known pun, that “Sir Anthony Ashley got more by Cales
than by kale.” On his monument at Wimborne, St. Giles, in
Dorsetshire, England, a head of cabbage is sculptured, and the
craft of tailors look back upon him as the author of the popular
term. A somewhat ludicrous companion to the tailor’s cabbage in
America, is his cold-slaw, as he terms the smaller pieces of mate-
rial which his skilful crooking enables him to save for his own
use. ‘The term is chosen in allusion to the fact that cold-slaw
consists of finely-cut cabbage, thus representing the small rem-
nants, which in other countries are known as “ carpet-rags.”

Caboodle, probably an enlargement of the word doodle, means,
like the latter, crowd, “The whole caboodle came out and fell
CANT AND SLANG. 589

upon me, till I “was as soft as a squash, and then they took me up
for fighting.” (New Orleans Picayune, February 23, 1858.)

Calibogus, quoted already by Grose asan “ American beverage,”
is a mixture of rum and spruce-beer; the term is evidently made
from bogus, a drink made of rum and ale. It is not unlikely that
the French word bagasse, the refuse of sugar-cane, may be the
common ancestor of this word as well as of the bogus, that is
generally traced back toa Mr. Borghese; while the first part is the
same used in Calithump, Gallinipper, and similar words. ‘The
latter term, often written

Callithump, seems, in like manner, to be of American origin.
It represents the French charivart, the German Katzenmusik, and
cannot be better described than in Butler’s words:

“ One might distinguish different noise
Of horns and pans, and dogs and boys,
And kettle-drums, whose sullen dub
Sounds like the hooping of a tub.”
(Hudibras, II., ¢. 2, v. 587.)

Camfire is the vulgar pronunciation of camphor, and not un-
frequently found written as it is sonnded.

Canacks, Canucks, and even K’nucks, are slang terms by which
the Canadians are known in the United States and among them-
selves.

Can’t come it, expressive of inability to do a thing, with a cer-
tain air of defiance inherent in the phrase. It may be noticed here
that cannot (in one word) is universal in the Union, while in Eng-
land can not (in two words) are used exclusively.

Cantankerous, in the sense of malicious and contentious, is used
in America as in England, where even Mr. Thackeray speaks of
“a cantankerous humor.” The word was at one time regarded as
an American corruption of contentious, but more careful investi-
gations have traced it back to an Anglo-Norman word contek,
cited by Bailey as “conzeke, contentious, Spenserian,” by the side
of “old English contekors, quarrelsome persons.” Halliwell has
“contankerous, quarrelsome, West of England.”

Carlicues, frequently written curlicwes, and evidently derived
from curl and curly, designates fantastic ornaments worn on a
person or used in architecture. The second part of the word has
590 AMERICANISMS.

been explained as queue, cue, so that it would literally mean cur,
queues, as vignette means little vine; but cues may be a mei
fanciful termination, such as is often added to words of this clas
“ Architects have a wonderful predilection for all manner of curds
cues and breaks in your roof.” (Home Journal, July 24, 1858.)

Carry on, to, to riot or frolic, is perhaps a phrase borrowed fro1
a nautical term to carry on sail. The verb, as well as the nou
made from it, carryings-on, is found in old English authors, an
Butler has even the modern Yankee pronunciation already in hi
line—

“To which these car7’ings-on did tend.”

“Such carryings-on, as the old Christmas-frolicking is called i:
Virginia, might be a heresy in Puritan eyes, but were entered int
with such heartiness and simplicity by old and young, that I fel
twenty years younger as I found myself playing blindman’s-buf
with half a dozen rosy children.” (J. P. Kennedy.)

Case, a, designating persons objectionable for some reason o:
other, has its origin probably in the newspaper reports, where thes
are mentioned as “a case” of drunkenness, etc. # He is a case, :
tell you, and no mistake.”

Cashunk, with a very slight and indistinct sound of the firs
syllable, is an exclamation, imitative of a sudden noise, lik«
thump, largely used in New England and the South and West.
A purely onomatopoetic word, without original meaning, it ha
hence but a very uncertain form, and reappears, a very Proteus
in an almost endless variety of sounds and spellings. New Eng.
land has keshonk and keshwosh, the West, kerchug, kewosh, and
cashwash. Keswollop and kewhollux, known in England, are rare
in America.

Catawampous, or catawamptious, a word enlarged in the West
from catamount. This animal had already furnished the huntei
with the expressive phrase, “he dropped on hin like a catamouni
on a coon,” and hence, no doubt, the further development of the
word. “He was catawamptiously chawed up,” was said of ¢
political character, who had been fiercely attacked by a host of
adversaries in the Legislature of Missouri; and even orators of
greater pretension, addressing a body of national representatives
have not disdained to use the phrase. To chaw up, for demolish
CANT AND SLANG. 591

is also used without such energetic qualification, and occasionally
applied to one’s own words, for the common term to eat. “I'll
make you chaw up them words as quick as lightning, an’ you
don’t stop instanly.” (Longstreet, Georgia Scenes.)

Choke off, to, has of late become a favorite slang phrase of
politicians to denote the forcible ending of a debate. The phrase
is said to be worthily derived from the process of choking a bull-
dog, who can by no other means be induced to let go his hold ;
and as the opposition is apt to try and make up by pertinacity
what it lacks in power, the same means are sometimes used to
enforce. silence. “As usual, the call for the previous question
was heard on the other side, and the members who had hoped to
be heard on the momentous question were choked off by Republi-
can courtesy.” (Baltimore Sun, March 9, 1870.)

Cider appears frequently in political slang, and especially in
the popular phrase, All talk and no cider, which is but another
version of Vox et praeterea nihil. Itis stated to have originated
at a party in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, which had assembled
to drink a barrel of superior cider; but politics being introduced,
speeches were made, and discussion ensued, till some malcontents
withdrew on the plea that it was a trap into which they had been
lured, politics and not pleasure being the purpose of the meeting,
or, as they called it, AW talk and no cider!

Clean, in the phrase the clean thing, means the right, proper
course to pursue. Bailey already quotes clean in such combina-
tion as meaning, “ pure, free from moral impurity, guiltless,” and
this it still represents. “It would have been the clean thing to
say at once that no debate would be allowed, instead of profess-
ing a readiness to go into debate, and then to refuse discussion.”
(Washington Pafriot, April 3, 1871.)

Clear, to clear out, a phrase probably derived from Western
usage, in speaking of the trees which have to be cleared out in
order to afford room for a settlement, is now generally used for
to disappear, go away. “ You'll have to clear out, and that pretty
quick, or I'll be after you with a sharp stick.” (Harper's Monthly,
August, 1861.)

Cocked hat, to knock into, a favorite phrase, denoting more or
less complete destruction, from the habit which reckless rowdies
have to knock the hats of unoffending persons into a shapeless
492 AMERICANISMS.

mass, which is-sneeringly called a “cocked hat,” a process n.
unfrequently seen even in the Gold-Room of New York. “A
though it took little more ¢o knock, Fort Sumter into a cocked ha
yet as the walls fell, and the bricks got pounded into dust, thc
covered the lower casemates with such a mass of débris as mi
terially increased their strength.” (E. A. Pollard, The Lo
Cause.)

Come, to, serves for a number of slang phrases, most of whic
are, however, of English origin, and present no peculiarity c
meaning connecting them with this country. To come off and |
come to time, are both derived from the slang of the ring and tl
cockpit. To come down, in commercial parlance, means to reduc
prices, and such an abatement is soberly announced in the new
papers asa “Tremendous Coming Down.” To come over or con
at over a person, means to get the better of a person by superiorit
of argument, while to come around him, means to persuade hii
by coaxing or wheedling. Colonel Ethan Allen, when a prisone
in England, asked for leave to send a letter to the “ Iustriou
Continental Congress,” and was told that it had been sent t
Lord North instead. “This,” says Allen, “gave me inward satis
faction, though I carefully concealed it with a pretended reseni
ment, for I found I had come Yankee over him, and that the lett«
had gone to the identical person I had designed it for.”

Come-outers, is not only the name of a religious sect, numerot
in New England, but a cant term for all who are said to hay
come out from some organized society. Thus it was recently sai
that “Brigham Young keeps up his ‘religion,’ with its many 1
volting and ridiculous absurdities, by sheer force of personal wil
Up to the present time, the Mormon perverts had nowhere {
go, nobody to sympathize with them, and no social status. Wit
plenty of ‘Gentiles’ to keep them in countenance, trade wit
them, pray with them, protect them, the come-owters will increa:
rapidly.” (New York Zridune, May 2, 1871.)

Concerned, in New England always pronounced consarned, is
popular euphemism for “damned.” “ That’s a concerned ugly fi
and how we'll ever get out of it is more than I know.” (Souther
Literary Messenger, March, 1851.)

Condeript is of the same manufacture, limited to Kentuck
and meaning, thrown into fits.
CANT AND SLANG. 593

Contraptions, a purely fictitious word, denoting new and pecu-
liar things. “For my part, I can’t say as how I see what’s to be
the end of all them new-fangled contraptions.” (J. C. Neal, Char-
coal Sketches.)

Cord, in the West, designates any large quantity, and not only a
cord of wood. “There is a whole cord of fixings in the kitchen.”

Cowlick, a peculiar arrangement of the hair, which to fanciful
men suggests the smooth and glossy appearance of a place licked
by acow. “If it becomes distinctly apparent that the interests of
the government will be subserved by our ministers combing their
hair behind their ears, tousling it in picturesque dishevelment
about the temples, or indulging the vain ostentation of a cowlick,
we shall then ponder the matter with deliberation.” (New York
Tribune, February 15, 1871.)

Crack up, to, is old English, though now vulgar slang. It is
generally used in the phrase, such and such a thing is not what it
was cracked up to be, meaning, what it was boastfully represented
to be.

Crook, to, viz., the elbow, is one of the many slang terms for
drinking. Crook is, however, a far more important word in the
noble art of tailoring. There, we are told by a master of the craft,
“erook occupies the same position that a boss does to any other
mechanical calling. But the term of crook has, more directly, re-
ference to a garment cutter, than to an employer, or a mere con-
ductor of the tailoring business. ‘There is a unity, an individual-
ity, and a dignity about the name of crook, which the tailor claims
as peculiarly his own, and with this term is associated a distinctive
meaning.” (S. 8. Rathvon, Lancaster Jntelligencer, May 6, 1871.)

Crooked as a Virginia fence, denotes matters or persons which
it is difficult to keep straight. The Virginia fence, also known as
“snake fence,” forms a zigzag of rails, which follow the inequali-
ties of the soil, and hence is apt to be exceedingly crooked in
every aspect.

Crowd is a common term used to denote a company, of what-
ever size it may happen to be, frequently heard in the South and
West. “Was there any one in the crowd last night, I knew?”
“When I entered the church, there were very few people there yet,
and not one Methodist in the crowd as far asI could judge.” (Rev.
P. Cartwright, Autobiography, p. 321.)
594 AMERICANISMS. .

Cut, to, enters, like go and come, into a number of slang phrases,
the majority of which are, however, well-known English. Only
a few have an American flavor about them, though often quite
unsavory. To ext dirt, for running away in haste, is evidently
taken from the fondness of Americans for fast driving. “Now
you cut dirt,and don’t let me see you here again for a coon’s age,
you hear!” (Western Scenes.) To cut a swathe, in the sense
of cutting a dash, is evidently Western, and taken from the ambi-
tion of powerful, well-trained mowers to cut the widest swathe.
To cut one’s stick, used in England instead of to leave, has
been enlarged in its meaning by American vigor of speech, and
here often means to die. “I’m blowed if he cut stick.” (N. Haw-
thorne.)

D.

Daddyism, a recent word made to represent the respect paid to
good family and honorable descent. “An Eastern man commend-
ing the services of a young Philadelphian toa Chicago tradesman,
said: ‘He comes of a very good family; his grandfather was a
distinguished man. ‘Was he? replied the man of Chicago.
‘That’s of no account with us. There’s less daddyism here than
in any part of the United States. What’s he himself?” (Kate
Field, Harper’s Bazar, August, 1871.)

Darky, a former name of the freedman, in picturesque allusion
to his color, and quite as familiar to Englishmen as to Americans.
His recent fate has been such as to show one of the most
remarkable fulfillments of men’s wishes ever known to history.
Not twenty years ago, a favorite negro-minstrel’s song ran thus:

“TJ wish de legislatur’ would set dis darkie free,
Oh! what a happy place den de darkie land would be ;
We'd have a darkie parliament
An’ darkie codes of law,
An’ darkie judges on the bench,
Darkie barristers and av,”

and to-day the darkie’s wishes are fulfilled to the letter.

Darn and darnation, said to be American inventions, and with
their superfluous 7 betraying Southern manufacture, belong to
that painfully numerous class of half-veiled blasphemies which
CANT AND SLANG. 595

abound in all parts of the United States and in all classes of
society. The honest damn is rarely heard, it is true, but, “ fearful
of committing an open profanity, yet nibbling slyly at the sin,”
men indulge in countless hypocritical evasions. Darn, durn, and
dang, all but thinly disguised damns, appear far more vulgar than
the open oath. It has been well said, that such slang terms are
but a “whipping the devil round the stump,” by persons who
desire to enjoy the sweets of wickedness and yet to escape the
penalty. The devil is in like manner concealed behind the dewce
(stated by Junius and others to be from deus), and the dickens,
Old Nick, Old Harry, Old Scratch, and Old Splitfoot. The Yan-
kee is peculiarly fertile in variations on the name of God, and
gives a striking proof of his ingenuity in inventing new forms
for the forbidden Z swear. He has his by Gorram, by Goldam,
and by Goshdang, by the side of the English oath by Golly,
which occurs as early as 1743. “The first person consulted a
gentleman-farmer, and declared that he never read anything so
good in his life. “‘ By Golly, says he, ‘he ’as mauled the par-
sons.’” (Five Arguments against Tythes. London, W. Warren.)
It is popular also among the negroes in the South, like the
mysterious by Gum. “In the United States,” says a recent writer
in England, “small boys are permitted by their guardians to say
Goldam to anything, but they are on no account allowed the pro-
fanity of G—d—g anything. An effective ejaculation and moral
waste-pipe for interior passion or wrath is seen in the exclamation,
By the Ever-Iiving Jumping Moses—a harmless phrase, that for
its length expends a considerable quantity of fiery anger.” (Slang
Dictionary, p. 92.) He has, in like manner, his I swan, I swad,
LI swow, J swamp, and I vum, for I swear, and I vow, and a num-
ber of other slang make-shifts for oaths, and sham exclamations
for passion and temper. The old Puritan laws of New England,
which made swearing not only a sin, but a crime against the com-
monwealth, have evidently left their marks on the expletives of the
present generation even. Men seem still to remember the day
when “Joseph Shorthose, for profane swearing, was sentenced to
have his tongue fixed in a cleft stick, and so to continue for the
space of half an hour.” (Hutchinson, History of Massachusetts,
p. 436.) It is a grave question whether this impression, surviving
after so many generations, has a beneficial effect, in driving the
596 AMERICANISMS.

descendants of the virtuous old settlers to such shifts to find sub-
stitutes for the objectionable words. In form, they are a disgrace
to our speech ; in sentiment, hardly an evidence of greater freedom
from national profanity.

Darsent, a vile corruption of dare not (dares not) in all persons
of the verb. The term has evidently originated in the South,
perhaps with the negroes, who are fond of saying, “I dares
not.”

Dead, added to other adverbs in the sense of wéterly, is so very
common in England, from dead beat to dead alive, that it cannot be
looked upon as an Americanism, except in its universal popular-
ity. Even H. W. Longfellow, in his translation of Dante, where
the poet describes his weariness of climbing, and says that but for
the shortness of one ascent he had well-nigh overcome, “7o saret
ben vinto,” renders it thus: “I would be dead beat.” Among
new combinations for which the United States may, perhaps, be
credited, is the phrase dead broke, for utterly ruined.

Dear me, also, is a purely English phrase, recently traced back
to enthusiastic travellers who tried to imitate the Italian Dio mio!
and thus produced the peculiar ejaculation. (?)

Death is dragged in by slang to denote the last extremity in
everything. Zo be death on anything means to be completely
master of it, or at least a capital hand at it, like the quack who
advertises in the daily papers that his “Ready Relief is death on
all pulmonary diseases,” as it very likely is. It may, however,
also mean to love passionately, in which sense it is used in Sam
Slick: “Your friend Silas ¢s death on sherry and gin-slings, and
Sally on lace, and old Aunt Thankful goes the whole figure for
furs.” To dress to death suggests clothes cut in the very extreme
of splendor or fashion, perhaps because they are intended to be

~killing. “The next day I met Davis and Nye, my two chums on
board the Little Rhody, dressed to death and trunk empty, as
they said of themselves.” (Newfoundland Fisheries, 1869.) Tio
dress up drunk, and to dress to kill, appear, after that, but attenu-
ated versions.

Dicker, to, in the sense of bartering or chaffering, is a genuine
Americanism, though the word itself may be easily traced back
to the French diz, ten, and the old English noun dicker, derived
from it, and also representing the number of zen.
CANT AND SLANG. 597

“When selfish thrift and party held the scales,
For peddling dicker, not for honest sales,
Whom shall we strike?”
(J. G. Whittier. The Panorama.)

Dig, in college slang, represents a hard-working student, who
is supposed to dig deep into his books, as opposed to the superfi-
cial reader.

Dike, denoting a man in full dress, or merely the dress, is a peculiar
American cant term, as yet unexplained. To be out on a dike is
said of persons, mainly young men, who are dressed more care-
fully than usual, in order to pay visits or to attend a party. It is
not unlikely that the term is merely a corruption of the obsolete
dight, which meant decked owt, and is in this sense used by many
old English writers.

Ding and dinged belong both to the class of faintly-disguised
oaths, and are peculiar to the South.

Docious and docity, pronounced dossity, are substitutes for
docile and docility, in daily use in the South; the latter generally
qualified by a negative, as, he has no docity, in which sense it is
not unknown in England also.

Dod, for God, common especially in New England and the South,
and generally used in connection with some equally vulgar form,
as, Dodrot or Dodfetched.

Dog plays a very prominent part in American slang, from the
verb to dog, in the sense of following a person like a bloodhound,
to doggery, a grogshop; but almost all the phrases in which the
word appears have been imported from England. Sick as a dog
is not as common here as abroad, the phrase being replaced by
sick as a cat, while to “vomit as a cat” is said to have as little
reference to the animal as dog-cheap has (Latham, Hnglish Lan-
guage), but to mean throwing up like a cataract, which, if true,
would be quite American in its proportions. Doggone or doggoned
is also, in all probability, original with us, and mainly used in
the South. “Tl be doggone if you ever pick a pound of cot-
ton.” (Putnam’s Magazine, July, 1868.) In California it is grace-
fully embellished by an addition, being expanded into doggon’d
cuss.

Doin’, instead of doing, is universal in most of the New England
States to denote the state of the roads. How are the roads? is
598 AMERICANISMS.

the question in Virginia and the Southern States generally; while
in New York it is, How is travelling? in Massachusetts and
Connecticut, How is the going? In the West the word doing is
generally used in the plural, and qualified by an adjective, as in
the case of great doings, which denotes high feasting or solemn
ceremonies. “ Hard doings when it comes to that—seeing a horse’s
tail eaten up by the mules, in the days of strait.” (Life in the Far
West.)

Done, instead of did, is one of the most common vulgarisms of the
United States. “Who now done that?” But the main peculiarity
of the word is its constant addition to every other verb used in
the past tense, not only by the negroes of the South universally,
but also by all but the best-educated whites. “I done do
all you said I must do.” “He done gone long ago.” “When I
awoke in the morning, refreshed and re-invigorated, I asked for my
friend. ‘He done come down early,’ was the laughing reply of
Jupiter, who had burnished my boots till they shone as bright as
his ebony face.” (Letters from the South.) To be done means,
here as in England, to be cheated; but done is, in this sense also,
used instead of did in both countries. “I done him,” meaning I
cheated him, or I paid him out. (Slang Dictionary, p. 121.)

Do tell, a cant phrase of New England, which occupies there
the ground held in the South by, You don’t say so, and expres-
sive of surprise and wonder. An account of anything remarkable
that has happened is received by the astonished Yankee with an
emphatic Do tell! and if this should tempt the inexperienced
narrator to repeat the story, he will be instantly rewarded by a
second do tell. Do, as a noun, flourishes in America as well as in
England, and even enjoys a far more extended usefulness here.
“There is a do for you,” means, there is noise and confusion
enough for you. “ Well, I must make a do of potatoes for supper,
with a bit of pie and a mouthful of cake.” (Atlantic Magazine,
March, 1870.) Nor is the familiar phrase to do brown unknown
in the Union, where meat is but rarely roasted on the spit, but
generally cooked, and then simply drowned before the fire.

“ And some of the greenhorns
Resolved upon flight,
And vamosed the ranch
In a desperate plight;
CANT AND SLANG. 599

* While those who succeeded
In reaching the town,
Confessed they were done
Most exceedingly brown.”
(Harper's Monthly, January, 1854.)
Thus the old phrase has safely passed down through a hundred
generations, from Piers the Plowman, who is the first writer
known to have used it, to the miners in California.

Donock or donnock, used to denote a stone, by J. R. Bartlett
cited as almost peculiar to Arkansas, occurs throughout the
Southwest, and is probably nothing more than a corruption of
doughnut, humorously applied to a “ rock.”

“Then shape me out two little donocks,
Place one at my head and my toe,
And do not forget to scratch on it
The name of Old Rosin the Bow.”
(Song of Old Rosin the Bow (alias Beau).)

It is not altogether out of question, however, that the word may
have come down to us from the Gaelic doirneag, Irish doirneog, a
stone of convenient size for throwing.

Don’t,-quite admissible, it seems, into good society, since the
best of our writers employ it unhesitatingly, is still objectionable
slang when connected with the third person, thus changing does
into do. “He don’t tell the truth.” As the New Englander in-
variably says doos for does, he is not so likely to commit this
blunder. -

Doted is, in the South and West, not limited to persons who
are in their dotage, but applied also to lifeless things. Thus,
doted wood is rotten wood, and doted things are spoiled. .

Drab-colored gentlemen are Quakers,.in vulgar parlance, here as
in England.

Drat, a corruption—if such it can be called—of Dodrot, takes,
in the United States, the place of the English Draddit, which is
but rarely heard here. The latter is cited by Grose as “a vulgar
exclamation, an abbreviation of God radbit it, a foolish evasion of
an oath.” From drat Americans have derived the epithet dratted.
“This is a dratted piece of business, and I wish we were safely
out of it? (Judge Longstreet, Georgia Scenes.)

Draw a straight furrow, to, a figure evidently taken from rural
pursuits, means to walk in paths of rectitude and live uprightly.
600 AMERICANISMS.

“ Governor B. is a sensible man,
He stays to his home and looks arter his folks,
He draws his furrows as straight as he can.”
(J. R. Lowell. Biglow Papers.)

Drink, in Western slang, is often used to designate a river or
a pond, and the Mississippi thus appears quite frequently as the
Big Drink. It is curious to notice the similar use made of the
word by Shakespeare, when he says of Ophelia—

“Till that her garments, heavy with her drinke,
Puld the poor wretch...
To muddy death.”

Drudge, another name for raw whiskey, originating in the
Eastern States. “I doubt whether the word drudge is thirty
years old.” (8. 8. Haldeman.)

Drunk, used as a noun, takes in the West frequently the place
of spree or debauch. “It seems that Gamble went on a drunk
last Monday evening and was arrested.” (Philadelphia Inquirer,
July 6, 1871.

Dubersome has been made in America from the English cor-
ruption duberous, used instead of dubious. It expresses, how-
ever, not the doubtful fact, but only the uncertain state of mind.
“He was a dudersome man, who always meant well, but always
hesitated between two opinions.” (Mrs. H. B. Stowe.)

Dumfoundered, the Scottish form, is, in America, generally pre-
ferred to the English form dumfounded.

Dunnow2z, (aa not know as) I know, says J. R. Lowell, “is the
nearest your true Yankee ever comes to acknowledging ignorance.”

% E.

Even wmost, for even almost, but meaning nothing more than
almost, is a cant word peculiar to New England. “I thought I’d
cen amost drop down dead on the spot, when Martha come in.”
(Putnam’s Magazine, June, 1869.)

Elephant, to see the, a slang term taken from wandering me-
nageries, in which the elephant generally closes the exhibition, as
the most attractive feature of the show. Hence the phrase
means to have seen all and to know everything, and is now as
current in England as in America.
CANT AND SLANG. 601

Everlasting, instead of very, exceeding. “ What an everlasting
yreat city this is!” (Mark Twain.)

Expect, to, is ludicrously used with the past tense, and yet count-
less well-educated people, who employ it so, appear utterly uncon-
scious of the incompatibility, and say, “I expect it was really so.”

Lye, all in your—-a phrase expressive of utter unbelief in an ac-
count related by another. “That’s all in your eye, I don’t believe
there’s an Indian within a hundred miles of camp.” (Western
Scenes.)

F.

Face the music, to, a slang phrase, derived, according to J. F.
Cooper, from the stage, and used by actors in the green-room,
when they are nervously preparing to go on the boards and liter-
ally face the music. Another explanation traces it back to militia
musters, where every man is expected to appear fully equipped and
armed, when in rank and file, facing the music. The meaning of
the phrase is, generally, to show one’s hand, though it is often
used as a summons to pay the bill. “ Rabelais’ unpleasant ‘ quar-
ter’ is by our more picturesque people called facing the music.”
(J. F. Cooper.)

Fair shake, a local vulgarism in some parts of New England
for a fair trade.

Fair off, to, is said in the South when fair weather sets in and
the sky is clearing. “I think it'll fair off before morning.”

Farziner, a violent corruption of as far as I know, throughout
New England ané in parts of New York, but confined to the
most ignorant classes, and rapidly disappearing. ;

Fellow-countrymen, a word often heard in public addresses,
is only an apparent pleonasm, since in England, for instance, the
term countryman ipdicates merely the common native land, but
by no means social fellowship, while the republican equality
which prevails in the United States, creates a new bond between
all citizens, and makes them literally fellow-countrymen.

Few, a, in slang means a little. “Were you alarmed? No,
but I was astonished a few.” It is in this case synonymous with
rather, which is used more frequently in the South. J. R. Lowell,
in his enthusiastic attempts to vindicate Yankeeisms, traces a few
back to the French un peu. (Preface to Biglow Papers, xxiv.)

26
602 AMERICANISMS.

Found, instead of fined, is an unpardonable blunder, and not
mere slang.

First-rate, like first-class, 1s borrowed from mercantile pursuits,
where goods and ships are rated and valued accordingly. In the
United States first-rate alone is used by the mass of the people,
and with unbounded license, even where no rating is possible. A
man, asked how he feels, is quite ready to reply, “ Oh, first-rate!”
The Rey. P. Cartwright wrote: “The man had a first-rate wife
and several interesting daughters, and, I will not forget to say, had
some three hundred dollars hoarded up.” (Autobiography, p. 251.)
J. R. Lowell informs us that the Yankee increases the efficacy of
the phrase by saying, “first-rate and ahalf.”” In the West a new
form has been given to the phrase, by substituting szvathe for rate.
“She was a first-swathe gal, if ever there was one in our village,
and the way she made the money fly, when she came to town to
shop!” (Western Scenes.)

Fits, by their suddenness and painful violence, seem to have
been regarded as a welcome slang term to form several expressions.
By fits and starts means, of course, only by short and sudden
intervals, as a fit is often used to express simply a short space of
time. But ¢o give one fits, or, as emphatic Yankees say, to give
one very particular fits, suggests such ‘severe punishment as will
produce fits. “The man ran after the thievish Indian, and the
corporal cried out to him to give him fits if he caught him; they
seemed to be bent upon making an end, once for all, to the petty
thefts by which we had been annoyed in camp.” (G. W. Kendall,
Santa Fé Expedition.)

Flambustious, a fictitious word made from flam, a lie, denotes
something great and showy. “ We will have a flambustious time.”
(Putnam’s Magazine, January, 1868.)

Flat, to, in the West, means to jilt, and is probably derived
from another slang phrase, to feel flat, denoting the depression
which is apt to follow such a disappointment. “Not to hurt a
gentleman’s feelings and to make him feel flat afore the country.”
(J. C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches.) The same word enters into the
phrase flat broke, meaning the same as “dead broke,” from the
idea of being so broken as to lie flat on the ground; while ¢o flat
out means simply to fail, or in other words not to stand.

Flummuz, to, a slang term used in England in the sense of to
CANT AND SLANG. 603

hinder, to perplex, denotes in America the giving up of a purpose,
and even to die. “ We regularly flummuxed, and after that dared
not say a word to our Mexican guards.” (Life of General Hous-
fon.) In Arkansas the term is supplied by one of still more ex-
traordinary form: a person who is “played out,” as is said élse-
where, is there reported to be filipfloppussed. (Chicago Evening
Post, February 27, 1871.) This quaint word is probably derived
from the (English) slang term to flop down, which means, to
fall suddenly, to collapse, both in the literal and the figurative sense
of the phrase.

Flunky, in college parlance, means the man who backs out from
recitation or examination for fear of failure; while in the slang
of Wall-street it denotes the unlucky outsider who ventures to
speculate in stocks without the necessary knowledge of monetary
matters.

Fly, instead of flee, is so common as hardly to be observed in
sxonversation, and even in the pulpit the warning is frequently
eard: “ ly from temptation.” To fly around is a familiar ex-
wession for making haste and being quick at some pressing
work.

For short, a cant phrase, meaning “for brevity’s sake,” often
rery curiously misapplied, as in the lines, “ My little gal’s name
8 Helen, but we call her Heelen for short.” (Washington Watch-
nan, 1870.)

Fouty is used in Pennsylvania for trifling—the term being
wobably derived from the obsolete English word fouwter, a despi-
‘able fellow, so quoted by Brockett.

Frills denotes, in California and the West generally, any as-
umption of style: “I can’t bear his talk, it’s all frills.” (Sacra-
nento paper, 1870.)

Funk, to, and to funkify, the former of which means in Eng-
and to be in great fear, are both in America used to express
vacking out from great fear, very much in the same way as to
lunk. The metaphor is taken from the meaning of “smoking
rut,” which is given to funking in the North of England—funk
ing a provincial name for a small, smoking fire, etymologically
onnected with the German Junke.

Furr is the Yankee’s pronunciation of far.
604 AMERICANISMS.

G.
Galoot, a Southwestern expression of unknown parentage:

“ “Tl hold her nozzle agin the bank,
Till the last galoot’s ashore.”
(John Hay. Jim Bludsoe of the Prairie Belle.)

Gambolling, a common corruption of gambling, as gamboller is
of gambler. “No honest people wear beard onto their upper lip ;
I would not be surprised if he wasn’t a gamboller.” (Lippincott’s
Magazine, March, 1871, p. 286.)

Gauley, by, a Yankee oath.

Gawnicus, a fictitious word, manufactured in New England,
and denoting a dolt—possibly an enlargement of gawk.

Gimbal-jawed, often corrupted into gimber-jawed, is used to
denote a person whose lower jaw is apparently out of joint, pro-
jecting beyond the upper, and moving with unusual freedom.
The phrase is taken from gimdal, a mechanical contrivance to
secure free motion in suspension, such as supports a chronometer
on board ship. .

Git, and git owt, is the uniform pronunciation of get among the
people of the West. In California, near the town of Henroost
Camp, is another settlement called Git up and Git.

Go, to, furnishes almost as many slang phrases as to do, but
few of these also can claim an American origin. Among the
latter is to go by, which utterly puzzles foreigners at first. In
travelling through Virginia and most of the Southern States,
nothing is more common than to be asked by the hospitable
planters to go by and dine, or spend the night with them. Abroad
the invitation would be taken literally to mean, not to stop, but
to go by or on. In the South it means to leave the public road,
go into the plantation, and take the road by the owner’s house.
Neighbors, therefore, coming from church together, will stop at
their gates and invite each other to “go dy and stop for dinner.”
Of all phrases formed by the aid of this verb none is perhaps more
universally known than the American’s watchword: Go ahead! Its
origin is stated thus: David Crockett, a man of great originality
and vigor of mind, was sent in 1830 from the young State -of
Kentucky to Washington as a member of Congress. Among his
CANT AND SLANG. 605

secentric sayings, for which he had already then become famous,
was that of, “Be sure yow’re right and then go ahead,” which,
with the aid of, “I leave this motto when I’m dead,” was con-
verted into a distich, of which he was probably not the author.
This caused, however, the phrase go ahead to become extremely
popular, and it soon spread abroad, becoming at once the repre-
sentative of American nationality and of every kind of bold prog-
ress. Thus a Parisian candidate for the National Assembly, in
the month of Apri], 1871, said in a card addressed to the voters,
“ Citoyens, je suis le représentant du go ahead.” It soon became,
moreover, the basis of new words, and thus were manufactured
gouheaditiveness, first used August 4, 1860, and goaheadifying,
used February 16, 1861, both made by N. P. Willis, and goahead-
ness, first printed in a Liverpool paper in 1862. One of the most
recent slang phrases made by the aid of go has become surpris-
ingly popular, and made its way into the pages of careful writers
even. This is going back on somebody, which means to abandon
him, to disappoint his just expectations. Ata public dinner in
New York, it is stated, “General Howard, being called on for a
toast, took a glass of water in his hand and said: Gentlemen,
I am from the State of Maine. I don’t go back on my State. I
give you, gentlemen, the Maine Law, the true beverage of the
soldier.” (August, 1865.)

“ Of all sharp cuts the sharpest,
Of all mean turns the meanest,
Vilest of all vile jobs,

Worse than the Cowboy pillagers
Are these Dobbs’ Ferry villagers,
A going back on Dobbs!

*t wouldn’t be more anom’lous,
If Rome went back on Rom’lus !”

(Dobbs His Ferry. Putnam’s Magazine, January, 1868.)

To go and to go it is common gamblers’ slang, as much English as
American ; to go it strong is probably strong American. But to
go through a man is new; it means to overhaul him, and either
to strip him literally of all his valuables, or to expose his political
treachery, or any other weakness of which he may be guilty.
“He was garroted, and the two robbers went through him be-
fore the police could reach the spot.” (Baltimore Sun, November
606 AMERICANISMS.

13, 1869.) “It wasa grand sight to see Farnsworth go through
him; he did not leave him a single leg to stand upon.” (Jdidem,
April, 1871.) To go the whole hog is a slang phrase, well known
in England and exceedingly popularin the West, which has sorely
puzzled antiquarians. Some seek its source in the fact that in
vernacular English hog was for many centuries the name of a
piece of money; first of a shilling or six pence, as Halliwell
states, and now of a five shilling-piece in England, but only of.a
shilling in Ireland. Itis but fair to presume that one gambler
would go, as their slang suggests, a shilling, another half a crown,
and a third would say, “Tl go the whole hog,” the whole piece
of five shillings. Another explanation is suggested by the fact
that the collections of coin-dealers contain numbers of large silver
coins, on which the figure of a hog was stamped. These coins
were frequently crossed deeply on the reverse for the convenience
of breaking them into two or four pieces (fourth thing=farthing)
should the bargain require it, and the* parties have no small
change. Persons who were willing to spend the whole coin would
very naturally ‘say, “Tl go the whole hog.” Hither of these
derivations is more probable than the suggestion made recently
that hog might be, not the name of the animal, but an abbrevia-
tion of the Jewish word hoger, a ducat. “I told him that if he
wanted to try politics, he might just as well go the whole hog and
run for Congress, instead of peddling small-wares, and trying to be
sent to the Legislature.” (New York Ledger, July, 1870.) To go
the whole animal isa frequent substitute in the West, while in
the West Indies the phrase is changed into going the whole dog.
Go, as a noun, has the meaning of strength or capacity, as in
England. “I don’t believe you have go enough in you to make
much of a tyrant.” (Putnam's Magazine, September, 1870.)
Goner is the slang term for a ruined person, a politician, a mer-
chant, or even “an official who is gone, done for, finished.” “Those
who acted with us in 1869, and who have since gone off, will not
return at the call of a convention, be it called Conservative,
Democrat, or Republican. The few who have departed are goners.
The clover was not luxuriant on our side of the fence, whilst it
stood rank and inviting, in the way of Federal offices, on the
other.” (Fredericksburg Herald, December 29, 1870.) In the
West, where the picturesque element always prevails over classic
CANT AND SLANG. 607

simplicity, goner is deemed too tame, and improved into gone goose,
gone gander, or gone coon. Western mountaineers say ofsan invalid
hunter, who can no longer “hunt for meat,” that he is a gone
beaver.

Gonof, a corruption of the old English gnof’ (by Dickens re-
vived as gonoph), denotes a bungler at cheating. The idea is
probably that he is gone off the right way, and thus has failed to
accomplish his end. The term itself is as old as Chaucer, and in
the reign of Edward VI. some insurgents had a song—

“The country gnogfes, Hob, Dick, and Hick,
With clubbes and clouted shoon,
Shall fill up Dussin Dale
With slaughtered bodies soone.”
! (Slang Dictionary, p. 145.)

Gosh, by, a euphemistic oath.

Gotham and Gothamites are cant terms applied to the city of
New York and its inhabitants, with a sly satirical acknowledgment
of their superior wisdom. English readers know the renown of
the town of Gotham in Northamptonshire, England, whose wise
men attempted to hedge in the cuckoo. At Court Hill, in the
parish of Gotham, a bush still bears the name of Cuckoo Bush,
and more than one pleasant volume has been written on the
blunders of the good people of the borough. Hence a Gothamite,
in England, means a simple fellow. In America, W. Irving first
applied the epithet to the Empire City, which has never been able
to shake it off.

Gownd, a common corruption of gown, from a false analogy
with ground, pound, sound, etc. In like manner the verb to foal,
has, in Virginia and the South generally, a preterite, foalded,
whence a gentleman who had remarked to a friend that his mare
had foalded that morning, was told that it would have been more
correct to say, she had unfolded.

Grandacious and grandiferous, mere fictitious words, which
have no real existence in the language.

Gum, by, and Gummy, are again euphemistic oaths, mainly
heard in the New England States.

Gwine, instead of going, is the uniform pronunciation of the
negroes in the South. “I ain’t a gwine do no such thing!”
608 AMERICANISMS.

H.
°

Hadv’t ought, an utterly inexcusable combination of the two
verbs, standing for “ought not to have,” is, nevertheless, common
in all parts of the Union among the uneducated. “You hadn’t
ought say a word about it, mister, and it wouldn’t have been no
difference to me after all.” (Zhe Land We Love, January, 1870.)
Frequently the term is embellished by an addition, and appears in
full vulgarity as hadn’t oughter, the appendix being a faint echo
of the ¢o which is apt to follow the ill-treated verb.

Haines, my name is, a slang phrase used to express, I must be
off, lam going at once—originated in an incident in the life of
President Jefferson, and is still in use.

Hain’t, instead of have not, common throughout New England.

Hard row to hoe, a very expressive figure of speech, taken from
the cultivation of Indian corn, in which every row of plants has
to be hoed or worked more than once. “ You'll find courting
Sallie a pretty hard row to hoe, and when you have got her, it’s
likely you’ll wish you had never taken the job.” (The Hunter and
the Squatter, p. 217.) To hoe one’s own row is an admonition,
equal to minding one’sown business. “Now that I have hoed my
own row and rumor gives me a false condition, they deluge me
with congratulations.” (Prentice Mulford, San Francisco Chron-
tele, 1871.)

Hard-up, » nautical term expressive of distress, has found its
way through English sailors to this country, and fairly divides
popular favor with hard-run and hard-pushed, which have very
nearly the same meaning of trouble and poverty. “This anxiety
of the pedigreeless, traditiopless, Mushroom, Abolition, Yankee,
Shoddy party, shows conclusively that they are hard-up for politi-
cal capital.” (New York Herald, 1865.)

Hems is frequently said and written for hames, in Pennsyl-
vania. (8. 8. Haldeman.)

Here is in the South pronounced like hyar, like many words of
similar formation, and those with a in the first syllable, which
obtain an additional y (yerb, year, cyard, cyare, etc.)

High Dutchers, a cant term for skates, the blade of which is
curled up high in front; while skates without such ornamental
projections are known as dumps.
CANT AND SLANG. 609

Hitch, originally meaning a substantial obstacle and its effects
upon the gait of persons, is in America constantly applied to dif-
ficulties in business matters. “He has gota hitch in his gait.”
“Tam afraid the silence of the officer in command shows that
there is a hiéch in the matter, and that the expedition has not been
as successful as was hoped.” (Official Report, 1869.) Hitching
horses has suggested many a slang phrase, of which some
have already been mentioned in connection with the word hoss.
The process itself is commonly called hitching to. “Over we
went, safe and sound, geared up, hitched to, and started on
through the mud.” (Rey. P. Cartwright, Autobiography, p. 337.)
“I was much amused at the lordly air with which the fat driver
ordered his assistants to Aitch up quickly.” (Letters from the
South, IL, 117.)

Hog-tight and horse-tight fences are such as will not let hogs
pass nor horses trespass. Used throughout the South.

Hold on, in the sense of stop! is the result of German influ-
ence, Halt an! being the corresponding phrase used in Penn-
sylvania and some of the Western States by the numerous Ger-
man settlers there. It is quite probable that the same term
may also have been familiar in the great seaport towns, where
the nautical phrase to hold on was apt to be heard from
sailors.

Holloo or hollow, to, before one is out of the woods, meaning to
boast. of an escape before the danger is over, is much used in
America. A curious paraphrase of the slang phrase occurs in the
Preface to Morris’ Harthly Paradise—

“ Yet, fellows, must I warn you not to shout,
Ere we have left the troublous wood behind.”

To beat all hollow, an old English phrase, may be derived from
the idea of beating so as to leave the victim literally hollow, with-
out strength, as Webster suggests; but there is at least as strong
probability that it may have been originally wholly, which was
afterward corrupted into hollow. Some old writers spell the
word regularly hole or holly. “Yes, boys, and I beat black David
Copeland all hollow—beat him blacker than he is—killed two birds
to his one.” (John Randolph of Virginia.)
26*
610 AMERICANISMS.

“Tn physic we have Francis and McNeven,
Famed for long heads, short lectures, and long bills,
And Quackenboss and others, who from heaven
Were rained upon us in a shower of pills.
They beat the deathless Aisculapius hollow
And make a starveling druggist of Apollo.”
(Halleck. Fancy.)

Hopping mad, a slang phrase suggestive of the effect violent
anger produces on weak-minded persons.

Hot, a vicious preterite of hit, is very frequently heard both in
New England and some of the Southern States. “He hot me
a big lick.” “He hot out right and left.”

House is, when coupled with another word, very generally con-
tracted into ’us, as is done in some parts of England, from whence
the custom, no doubt, was imported into the Old Colony. Our
house becomes thus owr ’ws, and meeting-house, meetin’us.

How is the imperious way of the New Englander to ask for a
repetition of what he has failed to understand—or more likely
of what he wishes to hear once more before he is called upon to
give an answer. How come, pronounced short, like hucum, is, on
the other hand, a purely Southern phrase, meaning, How came that.
about? It is almost entirely confined to the negroes and the so-
called Mean Whites, but was, in all probability, brought over as a
provincialism by the first English settlers.

Humbly, derived from the characteristic Yankee phrase to hum,
for at home, is used in New England instead of “homely,” the 4
being inorganic, and produced by the meeting of m and J, as in
chimbley and similar words. Whole is in the same manner pro-
nounced Aull, and produces the adverb hully.

Hungry as a graven image is a phrase a to New Eng-
land, and very graphic.

Hurry up the cakes, to, a slang phrase, originating in the
great partiality Americans have for hot cakes at breakfast, which,
in order to be satisfactory, must be brought to the table as soon
as they are baked. Hence the phrase means, Be quick about it
—be alive! In the West, on the contrary, they have a phrase,
Don’t hurry, Hopkins! meaning the same, but used ironically in
speaking to persons who are very slow in their work, or in meet-
ing an obligation. “It originated from the case of one Hopkins,
CANT AND SLANG. 611

who, having given one of his creditors a promissory note in
regular form, added to it this extraordinary memorandum: It is
expressly agreed, that the said Hopkins is not to be hurried in
paying the abovenote.” (Uneda, Notes and Queries, March 13,
1858.) The term hurryment, often used in the South, has no
real existence in the language.

Hush up takes in America the place of simple Hush! whenever
the vulgar but energetic Shut up/ is not preferred.

I.

Idea, in the phrase I have no idea, means simply knowledge.
It is unfortunately a favorite reply in the South, where, unlike
the Yankee’s strong reluctance to admit any ignorance on his
part, a candid avowal of utter absence of knowledge is promptly
made, to save trouble.

Ingens or Ingins, a frequent vulgarism for Indian, quite com-
mon throughout the country. “They are mighty rough on
strangers, and they worship an Jngin baby.” (F. B. Harte, Luck
of Roaring Camp, p. 16.)

Inheaven, to,a badly-made and unmeaning word, manufactured
by “ Boston Transcendentalists,” and unfortunately often used by
careless writers in the sense of to lift us up to heaven. “Such
music is well calculated to inheaven us; there isa spiritual power
in it which well-tuned hearts cannot resist.” (Boston Transcript,
August 4, 1859.)

J.

Jam up, from the verb to jam, denotes a high degree of perfec-
tion.

Jamboree, a row, a disturbance, may possibly come from the
same root; itis genuine American slang. “ When all are assem-
bled, we shall have a regular jamboree.” (Putnam’s Magazine.
January, 18—.)

Jerusalem! a favorite New England exclamation, more correct
than the corresponding old English term Jerry-usalem! In the
West it is, as usual, improved to suit the louder taste of the peo-
ple, and becomes Jewhtllikin. “Now they are coming to the
rich licks! Jewhillikin! There goes a drove of them! All stool-
pigeons, every one of them!” (Zhe Country Merchant, p. 221.)
612 AMERICANISMS.

Jenooary is the way the New Englander loves to pronounce
January. Hence the startling simile of J. R. Lowell: “Cold as
the north side of a Jenooary gravestone by starlight.”

Jessie, to give, in the sense of giving a man a thrashing, is,
perhaps, derived from the English slang phrase, unknown here,
to give a man gas, through the (slang) adjective gassy. In the
United States the popular phrase is made stronger by giving par-
ticular Jessie, or even d— particular Jessie, according to the
greater or lesser violence of the speaker’s feelings. “The old
general turned round and said: Well, gentlemen, I think we
have given them very particular Jessie on this field.” (Campaign
with General Price, p. 27, 1867.)

Jingo, by,,a favorite oath imported from England, where, Hal-
liwell says, it was derived from Saint Gingoulph. Americans, in
their desire to civilize and, perhaps, to annex Japan, have recently
discovered that the Japanese Gingo, the name of a tree planted
near almost all the temples in Japan and China, and hence a
synonym of Deity, is the true ancestor of the odd-sounding phrase !

Jumping furnishes a number of slang phrases. To jump at a
thing, means to seize it with eagerness. “When I offered him
that, his whole face brightened wonderfully, and he jumped at
the offer with a delight which proved to me how much I had been
wanting in caution.” (Judge Longstreet, Georgia Scenes.) ‘To
jump with means to accord, to agree with others. “On the
whole, it jumped with his desires, and the matter was clinched.”
(J. C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches.) From the jump is constantly
used as a more energetic expression than the prosy, from, the first.
“T knew how it would come from the jump, for in the man’s face
was written rascal, as clear as I have ever seen the letters.” (Wild
Bill.)

K.

Ketchup, a common mode of writing catsup, in imitation of the
sound. .

Killing is used less frequently in America as a slang term—
whatever statisticians may say of the frequency of the act—than
to kill. “When he came down after breakfast, to go over to the
Judge’s and to press his suit, he was dressed to kill.” (The Coun-
try Merchant.) To kill is, moreover, frequently used to convey
CANT AND SLANG. 613

the idea of defeat. A political measure, being unsuccessful, is
said to have been killed in Congress, and to kill a bill means to
prevent its being taken into consideration.

Kind and kinder (instead of kind of) are both English slang
as well as American, but the combination of kinder sorter may
safely be claimed as a native phrase. “When I saw the red devil,
Thad kinder sorter a presentiment that we were in a bad box, but
I didn’t want to kick up a row before the persimmons were ripe.”
(Skelches of Indian Warfare, p. 118.)

Kiss-curl, a name for the little curls on ladies’ temples, also
known as “ beau-catchers.”

Knock about, to, is a favorite phrase applied to persons who have
no regular business, and are said contemptuously “to be knock-
ing about in spots,” or “promiscuously.” “TI have been knocking
about all day,” may, however, also be said complacently, in the
sense of having been busy stirring about all day long.

L.

La, for Lord! is generally pronounced Jaw, and often so written.
Even laws and lawks are heard in these contemptible efforts to
avoid the charge of profanity, and yet to yield to the temptation.
It avails little to say that Za! may as justly be derived from the
old English word that meant look, as Americans are apt to say,
“Look a-here!” or “Look a-there!” Few who cry Za/ would
think or are likely to know much of etymology.

Lap-tea isthe quaint name given in New England to tea-parties
where the guests sit in each other’s laps for want of room. °

Law, to, and to go to lawing, Western expressions for the more
ceremonious expression, to go to Jaw. “If I can’t make anything
out of him by dawing, Vl have to try what virtue there is in a
Derringer.” (Trial of Mrs. Fair, April, 1871.)

Let on, to, a phrase not unknown to English Slang Dictionaries,
but far more common in America, means to betray a knowledge
of something, without reference to enjoined secrecy. “I saw Mr.
— at the meeting, but I never de¢ on that I knew he was present.”
(Dean Ramsay’s Reminiscenses.) Burns forms his own preterite:

“TJ never loot on that I ken’d it or car’d,
But thought I might hae waur offers.”
614 AMERICANISMS.
4

“ Although the visitors, the gentlemanly keeper, and the prison-
chaplain, all tried in every conceivable way to induce him to make
a confession, he would never Je¢ on how the murder was commit-
ted, and all agree that Ruloff is the greatest mystery of the age.”
(Binghamton Journal, April, 1871.) Let out, to, in the sense
of giving an account of an event, or making an explanation, is
Western slang. “You bile the pot, and when I have had a smoke
Tl let out, but not afore.” (Western Scenes.) To let up, on the
other hand, is a phrase borrowed from the ring, and denotes a re-
lief, as when the money-market is reported to have experienced
a let-up, or when the poor stokers on board a river-steamer com-
plain of being kept at work near the fires “for fourteen hours in
a stretch, without more Jef-wp than to have a drink.” To let her
rip, a phrase borrowed from Western steamboats, which, when
racing down the river, are very apt to be allowed to rip them-
selves open upon snags and sawyers rather than to disappoint the
ambitious pilot, has entered into common life as an expression of
indifference or despair. “Cuthbert Bede” suggested the humorous
explanation that Rip was the American way of reading the letters
R. I. P. (Reguiescat In Pace) on a tombstone, taking them to be
one word, and commenting upon it thus: “ Rip! well, he was an.
old Rip, and no mistake!” “As to the Constitution, I would Jet
her rip any time rather than that one citizen of these United
States should not feel safe in my State, because of his color or
his political convictions.” (Congressional Globe, January 1%,
1871.) A recent substitute for the phrase is Let her slide, an ex-
pression so old in English speech that it has been traced back to
the earliest times. Shakespeare, in Taming the Shrew, has the
energetic words, “ Let the world slide ;” Lord-Walter, in Chaucer's
Clerke’s Tale, was so fond of hawking, that he “well-nigh Je¢ all
other cures slide ;” and Dorigen, in the Franklin's Tale, gives a
mourner the good advice—

“But natheless she must a time abide ;
And with good hope must let her sorrow slide ;”

and yet the phrase was hailed as a new invention of marvellous
force, when General Banks of Massachusetts, in his exuberant clo-
quence, said at the beginning of the late Civil War, “ Zet the
CANT AND SLANG. 615

Union side!” The phrase was soon after repeated in the United
States Senate, when the orator said, “If California is going to
cost the Union so much, it would be better to le¢ California
slide.”

Level, a term probably borrowed from the diggings for precious
metals, has of late entered into a number of slang expressions.
When two persons are bargaining with each other, the seller is apt
to say that he “ will make an offer on a droad level,” to imply that
he proposes to offer his property at the lowest price possible. A
Western man, making fair promises, says earnestly, “ Mister, I'll
do my level best;” and if he wishes to bestow great praise on a
friend, he says of him that “his head is devel,” meaning that he is
a man of eminent good, practical sense; “well-balanced,” as it
would be called from a different standpoint. The origin of the
phrase is seen in the words of a dying miner: “Now, pardner,
I feel that I can’t drift no further on this devel, and I guess I’ve
got to go down lower.” (Overland Monthly, March, 1871.)

Lift, on the, represents in the United States the English phrase,
on the twig, not in the sense of dying, but of being ready to
move to some other place. “J can conceive but of one exten-
uation; Bolus was on the lift for Texas, and the desire was
natural to qualify himself for citizenship.” (Flush Times of Ala-
bama.)

Linkhorn is the eorruption of Lincoln, and,e. g., regularly ap-
plied to Linkhorn County in Pennsylvania, which had been named
after the unfortunate President.

Linkister is the common pronunciation of a New England cant
term, linguister, which the Yankees employ to designate talkative
persons and all who possess the “gift of the gab”in a special
degree.

Lockrums, a slang term apparently made after the analogy of
“tantrums,” means, odd notions, eccentric or unpopular views.
“Td say to the members, Don’t come down here to Halifax with
your lockrums about politics!” (Sam Slick, The Clockmaker, p.
204.)

*Long on, a slang phrase much in use in the New England
States, meaning “occasioned by,” is traced back by J. R. Lowell
to Middleton, but seems to have disappeared from English every-
where else. “ Who’s this long on?” means, Who did this?
616 AMERICANISMS. *

“The darkest, strangest mystery,
I ever read, or heern, or see,
Is ‘long of a drink at Taggart’s Hall,
Tom Taggart’s at Gilgal.”
(John Hay, The Mystery of Gilgal.)

Looseness, a favorite Western term, to express, in a faint man-
ner, the ideal freedom from all restraint. “He went at it with a
perfect looseness, and didn’t he make the chips fly!” (Western
Scenes.) The energetic term has found its way, long since, to the
Eastern cities. “The perfect looseness with which books not on
the invoice were sold, was illustrated by the sale of a volume of
Anthon’s series.” (New York Lapress, September, 1855.)

Lord a mussy or Luddy Mussy, for Lord have mercy! are ejac-
ulations heard with almost equal frequency in New England and
in the South, where they are much affected by the negroes. “ Lud
a mussy, Mas Bob, is dat you? whar on arth is you gwine to ?”

Lowbelia, a corruption of Lobelia (Lobelia inflata), much used
by so-called herb-doctors, obtained that name from these ignorant
quacks, and their still more ignorant dupes, while another plant
of the same family (Lobelia cardinalis), of much greater size, be-
came accordingly known as “ Highbelia.”

M.

Maam, in the combination of school-ma’am, and denoting a
female teacher, used to be exclusively heard in New England ; but
since that estimable class of instructors has been so largely rep-
resented in the Southern States by enthusiasts who devote them-
selves to the teaching of the children of the freedmen, the term
is as familiar in the South as in its native land. With those who
do not appreciate her self-sacrificing zeal, the school-ma’am is apt
to be rather the Yankee ma’am or marm.

Mammozed means, in Southern and Western slang, to be se-
riously injured. The origin of the term is not very clear—if it
ever had a legitimate pedigree outside of Shakespeare’s mum-
mocked. “He was right smartly mammozed, and at first we
thought he was done for, but the damage wasn’t very great, after
all.” (With the Comanches, 1867.)

Maul and wedges, the woodchopper’s tools, are often used to
denote the whole of a man’s possessions, his movables. “He
CANT AND SLANG. 617

went across-lots, maul and wedges, and we never seen nor hearn
of him sence.” ( Western Scenes.) The maul is the large “ mallet,”
also used for driving in stakes.

Mean Whites were, in the days of slavery, the white citizens of
the South who had no slaves to work for them, and yet deemed
themselves too good to work themselves. Ignorant and intem-
perate as a class, and imbued with that pride which is the greatest
hindrance to culture, they were a cancer in the body politic of
many of the Southern States, and are now (1871) a serious obsta-
cle to their regeneration. A more contemptuous term is poor
white folks, or even poor white trash.

Marblehead turkeys, in the slang of Massachusetts denoting
codfish.

Mercy’s sake alive, a most emphatic ejaculation, descended from
the imperative summons in great danger: For Mercy’s sake, be
alive! Mercy is, especially with the negroes, always pronounced
mussy.

Missing, to be found, denotes, in Western parlance, to be ab-
‘sent, or to run, away. “I tell you this was a poser; the young
lawyer was struck dumb, and presently was found missing.” (Rev.
P. Cartwright, Autobiography, p. 194.)

Miscellaneous imbecility, a political slang phrase, is said to have
originated ‘with a Western general, dining at the Tremont House
in Chicago, in 1863. He was criticising other Federal generals
who were politicians, and, in order to express his utter disregard
for their capacity in the army as well as in civil life, he denounced
them as “men of miscellaneous imbecility.”

Mistake, and no, one of the most popular phrases in all parts
of the United States, to clinch a matter. “That’s so, and no
mistake.” “TY’ll pay you Monday, and no mistake.”

Moke, possibly a remnant of the obsolete moky, which is related
to “murky,” is used in New York to designate an old fogy or any
old person, disrespectfully spoken to. A hackdriver is thus rep-
resented to reply to a stranger who had upbraided him for his
violent language, “See here, my lively moe, said he, you sling
on too much style.” (Galveston News, May 4, 1871.) In the
Northwest the term is generally applied to negroes, with whom
the original “murky” may be associated in some minds. “The
young mokes, who had often denounced Mr. Ham for having in-
618 AMERICANISMS.

curred the displeasure of his aged sire, in consequence of which
their heads were covered with tufts of hair.” (Dubuque Herald,
18771.)

Momicks, is, in Pennsylvania, the curious slang term for a bad
carver. It arose, in all probability, from a suggestion that such a
person was apt to mommoz the joints placed before him.

Much, to be, means, to be valuable in some capacity. “He is
not much of a lawyer,” he is not a very_good lawyer. “That was
not much of a speech.” “Is he much of a speaker?” Much of a
muchness is used here, as in England, instead of, nearly the same
thing.

Muckrakes, a slang term in politics for persons who “fish in
troubled waters,” from the idea of their raking up the muck to |
see what valuable waifs and strays they may find in it. Theterm
is generally used in the form of muckrakes and placemongers.

Musicianer, long considered pure slang, has recently been
raised in public estimation by J. R. Lowell’s statement that it oc-
curs in an extract made by Collier asearly as 1642, while the great
English scholar, Mr. Wright, cites it as a Norfolk word. Hence-
forth New Englanders may with impunity enjoy their msician-
ers at their militia musters.

Mudsill, originally denoting the timber laid down to form a
foundation for a railway-track, was subsequently applied to the
lowest class of society, and has since become a favorite term with
speakers who prefer energy to elegance. “I say that labor is not
the mudsill of society, and I thank God that the old colonial aris-
tocracy of Virginia, which despised mechanical and manual labor,
is nearly run out.” (H.A. Wise, Richmond Hnguirer, May, 1858.)

Music is in many parts of the Union used as a synonym for
fun or frolic, and hence, perhaps, musical means, in New England
at least, humorous, funny. “Jake is not without his vein of fun,
music they call it down here, and his eye sparkles with delight at
the humor of others as well as at his own wit.” (Letters from the
South.) “1 can’t say it’s musical.” (O. W. Holmes.)

Mung, the old preterite of the old English verb to ming (from
which our modern mingle), seems to have been brought to this
country, with many kindred forms, by the earliest settlers, and has
been preserved here in its purity and power. dA/ung news means
confused news; statements which seem contradictory are, in like
CANT AND SLANG. 619

manner, called mung. The original meaning of mingling is re-
tained in the Scottish noun mung, which means a porridge of two
kinds of meal.

N.

Nary, the contracted form of “ne’er a one,” dating back to the
days when ¢ and « were used in speaking and writing as synonyms,
in the same way as words like clerk, sergeant, and Derby, are still
almost universally pronounced clark, sargeant, and Darby. (To
the last day of their lives, great’ Americans even, like Chief-Jus-
tice Marshall, pronounced Berkeley, Barkeley—as it was written
in early colonial records—and Perkins, Parkins.) The next step
was probably the form narra one or narra simply (Slang Dic-
tionary, p. 186), as used by Sir W. Scott, whose (English) land-
lord of the town of Darlington says of the Highlanders, “They
are all gentlemen, though they ha’ narra shirt to their back.”
(Rob Roy, I., c.7.) The modern tendency is to couple nary with
every noun in the language, as in the familiar phrase, “nary red
cent,” meaning, not a single red cent, and “ nary president appeared
at the meeting.” The word is, however, still in the slang state. ~

Nation, possibly a euphemistic and modest abbreviation of dam-
niléon, is quite well known in provincial dialects in England, but
probably less so in thiscountry. Its meaning is simply, extremely,
an emphatic “very.” In Yankee Doodle it is used thus:

“ And every time they shoot it off
It takes a horn of powder,
And makes a noise like father’s gun,

Only a nation louder.”
(Yankee Doodle.)

Needcessity, a corruption of necessity, is continually heard in
the South and often so written, from a desire to give the familiar
meaning of need to the foreign word. “But it was a needcessity
to keep in till the sounds died off pretty much, so as not to give
them any scare this side, till they had dashed pretty far ahead
on the other.” (W. G. Simms, Wigwam and Cabin.)

Nigh unto and nigh wpon are both used for the simpler
nearly, from no other reason apparently than to be more grandi-
loquent. “I was nigh unto givin’ out.”

Nimshi, is the Connecticut term for nincompoop.
620 AMERICANISMS.

Nip and tuck expresses the closeness of a race, or of competi-
tion in any enterprise. “It was nip and tuck all along, who was
to win her.” (Putnam’s Magazine, January, 1869.)

Nose to the grindstone, a very expressive phrase, denoting the
ill-treatment received at the hands of a successful adversary who
takes full advantage of his triumph. “At all events he had his
nose to the grindstone, an operation which should make men
keen.” (J. OC. Neal, Charcoal Sketches.)

Nothing else and nothing to nobody are both Southern phrases,
the first a mere expletive, added to any statement or assertion
which it is desired to render emphatic; the latter expressing
defiant indifference to the opinion of others. “If he chooses to
make a fool of hisself and marry the widow, why, that’s nothing
to nobody, and he oughtn’t to be pestered.” (Flush Times of Ala-
bana.)

Nowhere, to be, denotes utter failure or complete ignorance.
“Where was Flora? Flora! why, she was nowhere—came in
last but one.” (Spirit of the Times, 1859.) “When he began to
ask me questions about surgery, I was just nowhere, and I can’t
tell, to save my life, what I said to him.” (De Bow’s Magazine,
July, 1868.)

’Nuity, a word believed by some writers to be derived from annu-
ity, and by others to he an absurd form of knew, is thus explained:
“Tom had what the Capemen call ’nwity, which means what the
rest of Americans call go-aheaditiveness—a barbarous word,
which no nation could coin, that did not find it easier to coin
money than words.” (Charles Nordhoff.)

Nurly, a vulgar corruption of gnarly, and thus applied to per-
sons, Who are said to be nurly when they are ill-tempered and
cross-grained.

Nutmegs, when made of wood, as were those immortalized by
Sam Slick, have become so familiar to the public mind, that they
have passed into a slang term for any cunning deception. Not
only is Connecticut called the Nutmeg State—although a factious
native says the true reason is “because you will have to look for
a grater,”—but in the pressand in Congress wooden nutmegs have
to answer for forged telegrams, political tricks, and falsified elec-
tion-returns. “I leave the honorable gentleman from Massachu-
setts to his wooden nutmegs and silver spoons; he will receive
CANT AND SLANG. 621

his deserts before the people are done with ‘him.” (Congressional
Globe, March, 1871.)

O.

Obscute and obscutely, fictitious words, manufactured in New
England to express indirectness, and characteristic of the makers
of wooden oats and nutmegs.

Obtusity, an unnecessary substitute for odtuseness, is peculiar
to the New England States.

Odd, when applied to persons, has apparently a tendency to
unite with odd epithets, such as odd-fish or odd-stick. “What an
odd-fish the old man is, sure enough, but mighty good, and as pious
a soul as ever lived.” (Southern Quarterly Review, October, 1848.)

Offish, an adjective made from off, and quite suggestive of its
meaning as reserved, shy, is mainly used in the North. When
the reserve is attributed to pride, the epithet is changed into
uppish. “TY don’t like him; to me he looks rather uppish.”

Oldermost, made after the model of furthermost and hindermost,
is quite common in the West, where it takes the place of oldest.
“Where is your oldermost child, said the man to the unfortunate
father?” (Rev. P. Cartwright, Autobiography.)

Once and again frequently takes, in the South, the place of
once ina while. Generally, however, it is correctly used, mean-
ing again and again. “I have told you, once and again, not to
do that.” “TI have seen that man, once and’ again, riding by the
gate, but I don’t know who he is.” (H. C. Pate, Vademeewm. )

On end, or, as Yankees prefer to sound it, on eend, denotes such
a state of excitement from wonder or from anger that the hairs
stand at an end, and this is transferred to the person himself. “TI
wuz all on cend at seein’ her thar.” (Our Young Folks, 1868.)

Onplush, a corruption of nonplus, and of late a favorite term
with Southern legislators, who, fresh from rural pursuits, bring
the language of the stable and the cornfield to the Halls of As-
sembly.

Ornery;is not only a corruption but a higher degree of ordi-
nary, for which it is largely used in the West andthe South. It
conveys generally an idea of ee “That ar Black Bess is
the ornarest animule I ever see.” (Overland Monthly, January,
622 AMERICANISMS.

1870.) “ Coparisoned to me, I know few people that arn’t ornery
as to brains.” (J. C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches.)

Opinuated, for opinionated, is frequently heard in the South,
especially as used by the negroes. “That mule is mighty opin-
wated.” :

Outquash, to, a more energetic than elegant term, used in the
South to denote the peculiar process of law called guashing an
indictment, in its full force. ‘Those were quashing times, and
they were the outquashingest set of fellows ever known. In one
court, forthcoming bonds to the amount of some hundred thousand
dollars, were quashed, because the execution was written State of
Mississippi, instead of The State of Mississippi—the constitution
requiring the style of process to be, The State of Mississippi—an
outquashing process, which vindicated the constitution at the ex-
pense of foreign creditors.” (Flush Times of Alabama.)

Owdacious, for audacious, is often written as it is pronounced
by illiterate people. “ 'That’s an owdacious and willful lie.”

P.

Palmateer, to, frequently called and written parmateer, owes its
origin evidently to parliamentary, a word unknown in its precise
meaning to the illiterate, and hence easily corrupted in form and
in application. It was formerly often heard in the State of Rhode
Island for “electioneering,” but has almost disappeared.

Pardner, is the popular form under which partner appears in
colloquial intercourse. It has made its way to California, and is
at the mines considered so correct that to say partner excites un-
pleasant attention.

Patent-outside, in newspaper “cant, is the name of an outside
of a newspaper printed and purchased from a firm, which fur-
nishes it with the paper required for the whole edition. The
firm not only makes its own selections, but has the right to pub-
lish therein a certain amount of advertising, which is also se-
lected without consulting the country journalist. A Republican
editor may thus be surprised by finding his first or fourth page
taken up with elaborate and extended eulogies on his Democratic
rival. “The editor who surrenders control of one-half of his
paper to some manufacturer of patent-outsides, may make a slight
CANT AND SLANG. 623

reduction in his current expenses, but in the end he will lose
poth money and influence.” (Lancaster Intelligencer, April 3,
1871.)

Peatime, the season of pease, is of sufficient importance in the
New England States to give a number of phrases to their speech.
The last of peatime, represents the era in a man’s life when he is
in great trouble, perhaps at his wit’s ends; and peatime is over,
when no chance remains. “ People that can’t see that peatime is
past.” (J. R. Lowell, Biglow Papers, IL, p. 11.)

Passenger, to wake up the wrong,—a phrase derived from the
frequent mistakes made in waking up passengers who were to
start early in the morning,—means to be mistaken in a man, to
“catch a Tartar.” “When General Farnsworth had gotten so
far, General Butler’s face began to show evident signs of distress ;
he had clearly found out that in making the attack he had waked
up the wrong passenger.” (Chicago Evening Post, April 21,
1871.)

Peg, to rise a, or to take one down a peg, is old English, revived
in America as a slang phrase. It originated in the days of St. Dun-
stan, who, having found that quarrels often arose in taverns from
disputes among the topers as to their share of liquor, served in a
common measure, advised King Edward to order gold or silver pegs
to be fastened to the pot, so that every man should exactly know
how “deep he might drink.” (Hook, Lives of the Archbishops of
Canterbury.) Now the peg of the alepot is the rung in the ladder
of social rank.

“To rise a peg an’ jine the crowd that went for reconstruction.”
(J. R. Lowell, Biglow Papers, II., p. 99.)

Persuasion has recently been sadly perverted from its legitimate
purpose of denoting private persuasion in arguing or religious
belief, publicly avowed. It is one of the most recent. slang terms
introduced into the language, and forced to take the place of
almost every other designation of class, rank, or occupation. ‘The
New York Herald speaks thus of “passengers being mainly of the
female persuasion,” and another paper in Washington said: “ Mr.
Harper (a speaker at a public meeting) complained of the absence
of public reporters, when a gentleman of that perswasion was
actually taking notes of what he said.” The Southern papers
624 AMERIC ANISMS.

especially are fond of designating the freedmen on every occasion
as “gentlemen of the Fifteenth Amendment persuasion,” and a
lady proposing to lecture in New Orleans on Women’s Rights,
was announced as “ Mrs. Oates, of the Advanced Female persua-
sion.” ;

Philadelphia Lawyer,as smart as a, is a common phrase abroad
as well as at home, to express supreme acuteness in legal matters
and others. It is said that-early in the history of the Republic,
British sailors learnt to appreciate the shrewdness of members of
the Philadelphia bar in helping them out of their difficulties, and
that through their reports the reputation of these gentlemen
spread far and wide. “You would beat a Philadelphia lawyer,
wife, with your smartness and your gab.” (very-Day Tales, I.
p. 54.)

Pinch, ina, represents, in Western parlance, to be in straits for
money, or embarrassed in any way. On a@ pinch means in an
emergency. “I could lend you a hundred dollars on a pinch, but:
farther than that I could not possibly go.” (Southern Literary
Messenger, July, 1860.) ‘‘He said he did not know what he
might be able to do upon a pinch, but for the present he was
unable to help you.”

Pineblank is the popular pronunciation of pointblank. “His
temper was sharp and high, but steady; as it never fell into
feebleness, so it never rose into rage; the percisely and pineblank
tone of feeling, ever present, kept him too well balanced for that.”
(General Ogle, A Character.)

Pitch it strong, to, a Western phrase, descriptive of an energetic
effort, perhaps beyond the strict limits of truth in telling a story.
“Tt seems to me, stranger, you pitch it rayther strong, but I
donow, thar mout be a God after all.” (Sacramento paper, July,
1870.) “ Pitching it strong is the most obvious characteristic of
American humor.” (North British Review, November, 1860.)
To pitch tn, a term constantly used in the Western settlements,
when they speak of going to work with a special effort, is, like the
former phrase, graphically descriptive of American superabundant
energy, Which star¢s an enterprise, pitches into it with a will, and
rushes it through in less than no time. “ Grace Greenwood, sup-
posed to be buried somewhere in the West, recently gave signs of
remaining vitality by pitching into a younger pseudonyme, the
CANT AND SLANG. 625

sparkling and saucy Gail Hamilton.” (Lippincott’s Magazine,
July, 1869.)

Pizarro, a quaint corruption of piazza, peculiar to New Eng-
land.

Played out, a slang term taken from the gambler’s language,
has of late become very popular, and is applied to anything which
has come to a more or less disastrous end. “General Butler is
about played out, said a Western man to me after the disgraceful
scene between Butler and Farnsworth.” (Correspondence New
York Herald, April, 1871.) “The Crimea got played out, and we
turned it into Fort Sumter.” (Genial Showman.)

Politicate, to, denotes the profession of but too large a number
of Americans who, without the slightest qualification, and for the
sole purpose of avoiding work, make politics their trade.

Prehaps, for perhaps, is not merely the result of carelessness,
but has acquired a mysterious power of being more emphatic than
the correct form—a peculiarity which it shares with percisely,
which is also considered stronger than precisely. “ Prehaps, young
man, you did not understand me, but I rather guess you did, and °
if you didn’t I'll make you aware of my meaning in mighty quick
time.” (Western Scenes.)

Pretty, as a noun, is in slang made to represent anything that
isto be considered pretty. “The girls wouldn’t let the boys go
up with them in the gallery, while they were having their pretties
taken.” (Western newspaper, 1870.)

Puke, as a noun, and in the sehseof a low, contemptible fellow,
is unenviable American slang.

Pull foot, to, means, in Western slang, to make great haste.
“Tlook’d up; it was another shower, by gosh. I pwils foot for
dear life.” (Sam Slick in England.) To pull up, a metaphor
derived from the pull on the reins in making horses stop, means to
stop. “ Driver, when will you pull up? Idon’t pull up at no
tavern till I gets home.” (‘4 Trip through Virginia, 1868.) To
pull wool over the eyes, as is done to make sheep go into the water
or into the pen where they are to be shorn, means proverbially to
try and blind a person’s judgment. “He tried hard to pull the
wool over my eyes, but I was on my guard, for, you know, Fore-
warned, forearmed.” (Southern Literary Messenger, June, 1851.)

Put, to, seems to be a favorite term with the New Englander,

av
626 AMERICANISMS.

if we may judge from the frequency with which he uses it, and
the variety of meanings which it is made to assume. One of the
most frequent purposes for which it is used by him, is to express
goingaway. The Yankee says, “ Now, put /” for, Now, begone! and
with him the word has wandered to the West, where it is now uni-
versally heard instead of Go! Whatever he finds will not remain
as he has “fixed” it, he says will “not stay put,” and if he sends
a messenger, he recommends to him to be quick, by saying: “ Now,
be sure and put owt!” “I knew there was no time to lose, if his
life was to be saved; so I pud owt as fast as I could, and luckily
met the doctor about halfway to his house.” (Our Young Folks,
1868.) To put in, means to put tn a word, and thus to interrupt,
but the addition is not considered necessary. “ By this time Stan-
ton put in and stopped whatever more Robert had to say.” (W.G.
Simms, Zhe Snake of the Cabin.) To put ahead on somebody,
is a slang term of recent origin, and used by combative persons,
who convey by it their purpose of annihilating their adversary.

“But all his jargon was surpassed, in wild absurdity,
By threats, profanely emphasized, to put a head on me!
No son of Belial, said I, that miracle can do!
Whereat he fell upon me with blows and curses, too;
But failed to work that miracle—if such was his design—
Instead of putting on a head, he strove to smite off mine.”
(Words and Their Uses. Galveston News, May 4, 1871.)

To put through, means: To carry out successfully. “That bill
can never be put through, unless it is modified in every section.”
(Congressional Globe, April, 1871.) In such cases the figure is,
of course, taken from the process of carrying a bill through the
necessary readings to its final adoption.

R.

, the pronunciation of 7, defective in all Americans, is especi-
ally charged upon Southerners as a mark of imperfect enunciation
and neglected education. It cannot be denied, that if the trne,
rolling sound of the 7, as affected by Englishmen, is rarely heard
in the United States, from the national habit of speaking leisurely
and even lazily, the South is guilty of frequently dropping the
troublesome letter entirely from the roll of sounds. Even clergy-
CANT AND SLANG. 627

men and public speakers are apt to forget the duty they owe this
ill-treated letter. One reverend reader has been-accused of pro-
nouncing doorposts as if it was dawposts, while the firstborn
always appeared in the disguise of fustborn. Another had the
habit of pronouncing hearts as haats, and the Lord appeared
always as the Lawd. But it ought to be borne in mind that
similar differences exist in England. In Dorsetshire the sports-
man hears of nothing but parrteridges and, in the shop, of shirrts,
while the gamekeepers of Suffolk are only acquainted with pat-
tridges, the parish-clerks speak of? chutch- -potches, and the
laundresses get up shutts. (Dr. Donaldson.) The sins of the
present generation ought, therefore, to be laid, in part at least,
upon the shoulders of the guilty forefathers, the first English
settlers, many of whom came from Suffolk and the districts
belonging to the East-Anglians, and, no doubt, brought over
with them this disregard for the letter 7.

Raise, to, in Western slang, means to obtain something, with-
out distinction as to the manner by which this is accomplished.
The backwoodsman .raises meat by shooting game, the frontiers-
man raises hair by killing Indians; and the drunkard raises a
racket by making a disturbance at the grogshop. The most
violent kind of row is called raising Cain, a fearfully suggestive
word. “ Thinks I, may be, old fellow, your gun has bust or you’ve
pawned it for rum and can’t raise skins enough to redeem it, and
you want mine, and perhaps you'll get it.” (W. 8. Mayo, Kaloolah.).
“T made a raise of a horse and a saw, after being a wood-piler’s
apprentice for a while.” (J. C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches.) “They
had an almighty row in the Legislature that day, and some out-
siderg having come in, armed to the teeth, there was a smart
chance of a big fight; but Mike, who generally is ready enough
to raise Cain whenever he is in liquor, happened to be sober, for a
wonder, and General Hollins at last succeeded in restoring order.”
(Leavenworth paper, August, 1867.)

Rale, is the common sound of veal with the illiterate through-
out the country, as rare is for rear. “Beat you the rale gum and
hickory.” (J. C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches.)

Rantankerous, probably derived from the old English rantan,
a row, a drunken frolic, means given to quarrelling. “ On the
rantan,” drunk. (Household Words, No. 183.) “He was a regular

e
623 AMERICANISMS.

rantankerous fellow, with whom nobody could get on. I say:
Peace be to his ashes! as there certainly will be peace, now that
he is dead.” (Judge Longstreet, Sketches.)

Red, a, does not mean a Red Republican, as in England, but “a
ved cent,” the smallest coin of the United States. “ He isn’t worth
a red.”

fetiracy, in the sense of retirement, as well as, still worse, in
the sense of a competency on which a man may retire, is irredeem-
able slang, although used by many American writers. “Yes, Mr.
Speaker, ’d a powerful sight sooner go into retiracy among the
wild, red aborigines of our wooden country, nor consent to this
bill.” (Carlton, New Purchase.) “When Mr. Watson found he
had a sufficient retiracy, he gave up his lucrative business, and
devoted himself to horticultural pursuits.’ (New Haven Palla-
dium, 1860.)

tide and tie, to, is the curious phrase by which, in Maryland
and in the South, the arrangement is designated, according to
which tio travellers, having but one horse between them, will
alternately ride and walk.

Right of, is more of an American slang term than right away,
which was once .considered a provincialism, belonging exclusively
to Massachusetts and Virginia. It means, immediately. A Federal
colonel, Fisk, during the late Civil War, tried to stop the habit of
swearing in his regiment, and induced the men, by his influence,
to covenant, that he should be made to do all the swearing, and
they would abstain hereafter. The thousand men rose like one,
and pledged themselves. The colonel became a brigadier-general,
and one fine day heard a mule-driver swear fearfully at his
animals; recognizing in him one of his own men, he asked him
if he did not remember the covenant entered into at Benton
Barracks, St. Louis, that he should do all the swearing for his old
regiment? “To be sure I do, general,” was the answer, “ but then
you were not there to do it, and it had to be done right off.”

Lip out, to, an energetic slang phrase, rarely ever used except
with the addition of an oath. “With that, he ripped out a most
fearful oath, and, running up to the second mate, knocked him
down and stabbed him twice with the marlin-spike in his hand.” |
(W. 8. Mayo.)

Robustious, instead of robust, used by persons who love to be
CANT AND SLANG. 629

emphatic, even at the cost of vulgarity. “A pair of spanking
bays flanked the pole, and a strapping, rodustious, fellow with
immense whiskers rode on the box.” (Putnam’s Magazine, Sep-
tember, 1853.)

Rope in, to, in the sense of gathering in, enlisting, is a bold
metaphor derived from the common practice of gathering the cut
hay of a meadow by means of a long rope, drawn by a horse, which
ropes in the whole of a so-called windrow. Passing into slang,
the term has subsequently acquired the unpleasant meaning of
catching or cheating, probably from the idea that the rope was
not seen by the dupes. “ll lay bank, if you must have a game,
but I’ll make one condition: no roping in! I won’t have it.”
(Georgia Scenes, ed. 1849.)

Rubbishy, an adjective made from rubbish, unknown to the
Dictionaries. “Foot by foot the historic but useless old fortifica-
tions of Quebec are steadily disappearing. It was the reconstruc-
tion of St. John’s Gate a few years ago, and now it is St. Louis,
all the rudbishy old walls encumbering the approaches to which
are now to be swept away in pursuance of an order from Eng-
land.” (New ra, April, 1871.)

Fuinatious, an enlarged and intensified form of ruinous, fre-
quently used in the West and South.

Run into the ground, to, means, in Western parlance, literally
to force beavers, and all burrowing animals, to seek refuge in their
holes underground; but the phrase has long since been adopted,
in all parts of the Union, as a metaphor, expressive of constant
and close persecution, ending in destruction. “The temperance
question is likely to be run tnto the ground, sooner or later, but
only to be replaced by some other question of the same kind, which
will be taken up, in its turn, to answer the purposes of politicians.”
(Springfield Republican, July, 1861.)

Rushers, in California and all the gold-bearing districts of the
West, is the comprehensive name of persons going to the mines.

8.

Sanctimoniouslyfied, a horrible barbarism, is nevertheless re-
ported by J. R. Bartlett as an American slang term, and its use
proved by David Crockett, who wrote that he recollected “a
sanctimoniouslyfied fellow, who made his negroes whistle while
680 AMERICANISMS,

they were picking cherries for fear they should eat some.” (Zour
Down East.)

Savagerous, like ruinatious, used in the South to give still
greater force to savage. “The most savagerous painter you ever
saw in your life.” (W. G. Simms.)

Save one’s bacon, to, a slang phrase very frequently heard in
spite of its objectionable character—for acon does not mean
smoked meat in this case—suggests a lucky escape from danger.
“ But virtue, if nothing more and no sooner, is its own reward,
and in time to save its bacon.” (N.P. Willis, Dashes at Life, IIL,
p. 90.)

Saw, ag a noun and verb, is much used in the United States to
designate a joke, and the process of playing a so-called practical
joke upon others. In New Orleans this is called “running a saw,”
and if the joke is very serious and perhaps even dangerous, it be-
comes a vertical saw.

Scott, Great! a curious euphemistic oath, in which the name
of a well-known general is substituted for the original word, prob-
ably merely because of its monosyllabic form. “Great Scott !
T’d rather give my name to a horticultural triumph like that
there, than be Senator.” (Lippincott’s Magazine, March, 1871,
p- 289.)

Seat, to, means in tailors’ cant, to give employment to “jours,”
as the wandering members of that craft are called, who work by
the day. When an employer has sufficient work for half a dozen
or more laborers in his occupation, he says he “can seat half a
dozen jours.” The phrase probably originated in the fact that a
generation ago all, or nearly all, master-tailors kept a “back-shop”
of their own, and literally did seat their jours. It is altogether
different now, as the trade is almost wholly supplied by what was
then called “piece-masters,” that is, operatives who take their
work home and make it in their own houses.

Seed and seen, are both used for saw among the illiterate—a
vulgarism which is probably as common to England as to America.

Semt-occasionally, for occasionally simply, which apparently
did not express the meaning with suflicient clearness for emphatic
speakers. “ We see such really well-dressed men semi-occasionally
in good society, but they are rare, our men on the whole prefer-
ring a more flashy style, and paying less attention to what is
CANT AND SLANG. 631

appropriate than to what is fashionable.” (New York Mirror,
January, 1854.)

Sense, to, instead of to comprehend, is a very brief term, popu-
lar in New England. “I can’t say as I sense that.”

Settle one’s hash, to, a picturesque phrase expressive of such man-
ner of acting as will finally silence an opponent and make an end
to his hostility. “If you don’t vamos this instant, V’ll setéle your
hash with this here toothpick in a minit.” (Life in Mississippi,
p. 114.)

Shad-eaters, is the slang term very generally applied to members
of the Legislature of the State of Connecticut-—from an imagi-
nary fondness for the excellent shad caught in those rivers.

Shake, a fair, is a good bargain, from the very simple process
by which a measure, “well shaken down,” suggests the fairness
of the bargain. To be no great shakes, is a favorite phrase with
Americans, borrowed from their English cousins, among whom it
has risen high enough to be admitted even into Lord Byron’s let-
ters. Yo shake a stick at, denotes, for some mysterious reason, the
utmost ability to count or to comprehend numbers. “Tve been
licked fifty times, and got more black eyes and bloody noses than
you could shake a stick at.” (J.C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches.)

Sharpshin, a slang term, denoting the smallest quantity. “This
inconsiderable claim—for it is not the value of a sharpshin.”
(J. P. Kennedy, Swallow Barn.) The sharp stick plays, in West-
ern slang, a prominent part, and is especially used in the phrase :
“to be after a man with @ sharp stick.” “If you stay much
longer, the old man will be after you with @ sharp stick, and I
don’t know what you’ll.do to keep him from killing you.” ( West-
ern Scenes.) “We are pleased to see that the New York Tribune
is still after Senators Carpenter, Conkling, and others, with a very
sharp stick, for their ridiculous course in the arrest and imprison-
ment of the Tribune correspondents, for daring to be true to
themselves and to the profession of which they are honorable
members and martyrs.” (‘Prenton State Sentinel, May 26, 1871.)

Shenannigan, probably a purely fictitious word (though a Dutch
origin has been claimed for it), frequently heard in the South and
West, and denoting groundless bragging for the purpose of getting
the better of another. “ Shenannigan means any kind of chaff,
foolery, nonsense, advanced to cover some little scheme or game.”
6382 AMERICANISMS.

Hence Miss Vinnie Ream, the artist, whose skill was said to have
been largely measured by her personal charms, was recently
admonished by a writer in the Chicago Hvening Post to “go to
work and try better next time, instead of fooling members of
Congress by a pair of black eyes and a mass of beautiful curls.
No shenannigan, Vinnie!” (January, 1871.)

Shin, to, applied to efforts to ascend a tree, means that the per-
son who does it, tries to climb up by the aid of feet and hands
only, which is apt to endanger the safety of hisshins. In financial
slang, Americans use the verb fo shin simply, where the English
use to break shins, to denote a desperate effort to procure money
in an emergency by running about to friends and acquaintances.

Shine, to take a, means the same as to take a fancy to a person.
“My gracious! it’s a scorpion thet’s took a shine to play with ’t.”
(J. R. Lowell, Biglow Papers, I, p. 23.) To take the shine off, a
metaphor taken from the meaning of shine as synonymous to gloss
or beauty, means to excel or surpass another, not only in appearance
but in any point. “If that does not take the shine off her alto-
gether, I don’t know her wits as well as I thought I did.” (J. C.
Neal, Charcoal Sketches.) Shine has also become, in the large
cities, the slang term used by bootblacks, when they offer to “ black
your boots, sir?” pledging themselves, laconically, to make them
shine. Fence the Quaker’s lament upon his first visit to New
York—

“ As I left the cars, an imp with smutty face,

Said : Shine ?—Nay, I'll not shine, I said, except with inward grace.

Is inward grace a liquid or a paste ? asked this young Turk,

Hi, Daddy! What is inward grace? How does the old thing work?”
Words and Their Uses. Galveston News, May 4, 1871.)

Shoemake, the vulgar but very common pronunciation of the
name of the swmach-tree, which every now and then even creeps
into print. .

Short metre has, in the New England States, where everybody
is presumed to be familiar with psalm-singing, the peculiar mean-
ing of quickly, in great haste.

“This goin’ where glory waits ye, hain’t one agreeable feature,
And if it warn’t for wakin’ snakes, I'd be home again short metre.”
(J. R. Lowell. Biglow Papers, 1.)
CANT AND SLANG. . 633

Shot in the neck, one of the numerous expressions for being
drunk, which abound in the Union. “Your Honor, T found this
man dead drunk in the gutter on the Place d’Armes, and when I
tried to help him up he offered to fight me, saying that he was
not drunk, but only shd¢ in the neck.” (New Orleans Picayune,
March 17, 1870.)

Shut to, to, instead of ¢o shut, furnishes another evidence of the
influence which a large German @opulation is apt to exercise, in
limited localities, on the speech of the majority. The phrase is
evidently derived from the German zwmachen, to close, and quite
common in gome parts of Pennsylvania, where people do not say,
“Close the door,” but “ Shut the door to.” To shut up means, as
has already been stated, to hush up, to be silent. To get shut of
anybody, in the sense of to get rid of him, is not an Americanism,
but an old phrase familiar to the North Briton, and preserved in
some parts of the United States, which were mainly settled by
immigrants of that race. Thus Chester County in Pennsylvania
was settled mainly by Quakers from the North of England, and
nothing is more common there than to hear men speak of “ getting
shut of a farm or a house,” when they have disposed of the one or
the other. A widow, importyned by aman whom she did not much,
care for, though her worldly substance was too considerable to be
neglected, married him, as she said, “to get shu¢ of the man.”
(Dr. A. L. Elwyn.) The word shzt is, in its applications to slang,
almost uniformly pronounced shef, a sound which it receives in
the South, and especially from the negroes, under all circum-
stances. 2

Skary, or skeary, is a corruption of the new adjective scary,
made’ from the verb to scare, and meaning easily intimidated.
The transition is seen in the following phrase:—“ Instead of
skeering them away, my style of doing it would almost coax them
to come and be took up.” (J. C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches.) “You
don’t say youre skeery? Well, I declare, that beats all creation !”
(The Honeymoon, p. 187.)

Skesicks, skeezicks, and a number of similar slang terms, ap-
parently made at random as a mere expression of contempt, but,
in reality, variations upon the Dutch word, for vagabond, an idle,
unprofitable person, is used very frequently to denote a good-
for-nothing. “Thar ain’t nobody but him within ten miles of the
OBL AMERICANISMS.

shanty, and that ’ar d—d old skeezicks knows it.” (F. B. Harte,
Luck of Réaring Camp, p. 43.)

Skunner, a strange corruption of scorner, frequent in Pennsyl-
vania, and generally used not for the person who scorns, but for
the dislike which he feels.

Slang whanger, derived from slang and to whang, to beat, is
said to be not unknown as a provincial word in England, and was
actually used more than once by T. Hood, though it attracted
much attention abroad, when W. Irving first used it in his early
writings to designate a noisy politician. “He is nothing but a
miserable slang whanger, to whom nobody listens,-;when he ad-
dresses the house.” (New York Lvening Mail, May 17, 1870.)
“To use the favorite word of slang whangers.” (J. C. Neal, Char-
coal Sketches, 1865.) Odder still is

Slantendicular, a word evidently made up from the verb to
slant and the latter part of the word perpendicular, and now well
known in English High Life below Stairs. “No, stop, I'l get at
him as it were slantendicularly round a corner.” (Sam Slick.)

Slink, occurs but rarely, and means a sneaking fellow; it is
evidently a derivative of sly.

Slope, to, in the sense of disappearing from sight as if gliding

“down a slope, and apparently connected in the mind of Americans
with the idea underlying expressions like, “ going down South,”
is probably an Americanism. The same general idea, however, is
felt in Tennyson’s famous lines—

“Many a night, from yonder ivied casement, as I went to rest,
Did I look on great Orion, sloping slowly to the West.”
: (Locksley Hall.)

The term came first into use here, when the new State of Texas
offered a ready asylum to unfortunate speculators, dishonest
creditors, gnd even escaped criminals, so that the words Gone To
Texas (G. T. T.) meant to be gone to the American Alsatia, and
the act of going so far “down South,” became known as sloping.
It implied, virtually, that the sloper had cheated his creditors,
plundered a bank, or robbed his employers. The precise meaning
of the word has been elucidated in the statement that “a mean
fellow does not slope, he sneaks or slinks away; but the scoundrel,
bold and unabashed, when defeated, slopes to parts unknown.” It
CANT AND SLANG. 635

is not unlikely, mogeover, that the signification of the popular
word is instinctively connected with the idea of eloping.

Slosh around, to, ~« Western slang phrase, taking its force from
the colloquial term slosh or slush (sludge in old English), denoting
the unpleasant and unhealthy state of the roads, when deep snow
is beginning to yield to a thaw. To slosh arownd means to go
about, frequenting grogshops, in a half-muddled state. “Tim isw’t
good for much now; all the good he ever had in him is fast ooz-
ing out; since he’s taken to sloshing about, he hasn’t done a lick,
and isn’t worth a red cent.” (Flush Times of Alabama.)

Snacked, for drunk, used in the South—probably the same as
the more familiar snapped.

Sniptious and resniptious, two Western terms for smart and
finical. Snippy has very nearly the same meaning, and has, no
doubt, furnished the two enlarged forms.

Snore, I, belongs to the numerous class of thinly-veiled oaths,
peculiar to New England.

Sockdolager, said to be a corruption of doxology, and to have
thence derived the meaning of a final argument or a conclusive
evidence, which closes a debate as decisively as the singing of the
doxology ends religious service, has gradually enlarged its useful-
ness far beyond the original limits. It now denotes anything
conclusive, from a word that closes a debate to a blow that finishes
a fight. “The Radicals evidently consider the Kuklux Bill a
sockdolager, after which the South will have nothing more to say,
but to knock under and obey.” (Memphis Avalanche, April 24,
1871.) Sockdolager means also a double hook, the two parts of
which close with a spring as soon as the fish bites, as if in grim
expression of the unavoidable result.

Soft sawder, a corruption of solder, which is generally pro-
nounced sodder, the Scots especially always absorbing the 7, and
soft corn, are the two American terms for that kind @f flattery
which in English slang appears as sof¢-soap. In this country all
three terms are, moreover, freely used as verbs. “Nor can’t be
hired to fool ye an’ soft-soap ye at the caucus.” (J. R. Lowell,
Bigiow Papers, I1., p. 118.) “I don’t like to be left alone with a
gal; it’s plaguy apt to set mea soft sawdertn’ and a courtin’.”
(Sam Slick in England, p. 19.) Mr. Johnston, in his notes on
America, says happily, “ Soft sawder, we presume, is the proper
636 AMERICANISMS.

American equivalent for the stinging sobriquet with which Per-
sius stigmatized some Chatfield—some supple Attorney-General of
his day: Palpo, quem ducit hiantem ecretata ambitio.”

Solemncoly, a half-humorous half-ignorant corruption of
melancholy, is a slang term still much used even by persons who
are fully aware of the absurdity of thus coupling solemn and
choly for the sake of making a new word. “The solemncoly man,
Mem., the man that stays so long and is always so hard to go.”
(J. C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches.)

Sossle, to, or to sozzle, is an American verb made from the ob-
solete English verb ¢o soss, used by Swift in the sense of sitting
in a lazy, careless manner. To sozzle means to lounge about, but
is used also of water which is splashed or spilt for want of
attention.

Spill, to, used of persons instead of things, is American slang
now, though it was thus used by Chaucer—-

“To chese whether she would have him save or spill.”
(Wife of Bathe’s Tate.)

“The member from Austin was badly spzdled in the debate, ang
won’t be apt to be heard again this session.” (Texas paper, June,
1868.)

Spruce, as referring to neatness of apparel, with an insinuation
that it is smarter than usual, is, in like manner, often censured
as slang, while it has the authority of Evelyn in its favor, who
writes, January 18, 1645: “Those of Amboise on the Loire in
France are something of this invention, but nothing so spruce.”

Spots, in, one of the suggestive and graphic phrases which the
West originates every now and then for a shortlived popularity,
means occasionally, or here and there. The phrase, “ He is clever
in spots,@gives a man credit for fragmentary ability, and when a
poor hunter comes to a town or a digging, where lodgings are
scarce and high, he is quite ready to “sleep in spots,” 7. ¢., wher-
ever he can find a sheltered place.

Spread, to, meaning to enlarge one’s self and one’s power or
territory, is American. “ England was not to be allowed to take
Cuba or hold Oregon, because we, the people of the United States,
had spread, were spread, and intended to spread, and should
CANT AND SLANG. 637

spread, and go on to spread.” (Speech of Hon. Mr. Baker, of
Hilinois, in Congress, 1845.)

Spunk, made from punk, a word considered extremely vulgar
slang in England, and denounced as such in Todd, is, in the
United States, also considered a slang word, but looked upon with
far more indulgence. Spunk means “touchwood” in English, and
hence its figurative meaning, sanctioned by no less an authority
than Sir Walter Scott: “He showed muckle more spunk too, than
I thought had been in him; I thought he wad hae sent iron
through the vagabond.” (Antiquary.) “That boy of yours is a
spunky chap, but you'll have to put a bit into his mouth or he’ll
give you a heap of trouble.” (J. P. Kennedy.)

Square, either as an adjective qualifying a noun, as “a sguare
trade,” or as a phrase, on the square, refers to the open, fair char-
acter of a transaction. In either case the metaphor is borrowed
from the Masonic emblem, the square being the symbol of even-
ness and rectitude. Thus all squares is used in the Pickwick
Papers, p. 434. “It ain’t no syware game. They’ve jest put up
the keerds on the chap from the start.” (F. B. Harte, Preface to
Luck of Roaring Camp, p. 1.) “Can you give us a square
meal?” “This is all a fair, sguare, bona fide (fide to be pro-
nounced as a monosyllable) business ‘enterprise, is it?” (Put-
nam’s Magazine, August, 1868.)

Sqush, to, is genuine, unmeaning slang, the word being made
simply to imitate the sound produced by crushing a soft substance,
like squelch. “The next time I meet the critter, I'll take my
stick and kill it. Pl sgush it with my foot.” (J. C. Neal, Charcoal
Sketches.)

Steboy or seboy, often written St, boy ! ! a favorite term to set
dogs at other animals, the origin of which is shown in the last
form.

Stevedore, to, shortened into steve occasionally, is constantly
heard on wharves and in warehouses. “Sugar... not stevedored.”
(U. 8. Congress, 1862.) “ All hainds were called aboard to steeve.”
(R. H. Dana, 1840.) “Hach morning we brought off as many
hides as we could s¢eeve in the course of the day.” (Ibidem.)

Streaked or streaky, well known to English low life, are favor-
ite words with Western men, to whom “to feel streaked,” con-
veys the utmost apprehension of which they are capable. New
638 AMERICANISMS.

Englanders, also, have inherited the word and the idea from the
early settlers ;. hence—

“ But when it comes to bein’ killed, I tell ye I felt streaked
The first time ever I found out wy baggonets were peaked.”
(J. R. Lowell, Biglow Papers, 1., p. 17.)

“Stranger, yon needn’t look amused; it’s no joke, I tell ye, to
have a dozen red devils arter you in a hurry to raise your hair,
and aman needn’t be ashamed to feel streaky, when his mule’s
about giving out and the Ingins begin to yell like a pack of coy-
otes.” (Wild Western Scenes.) From this meaning of fear the
verb to streak obtains probably its meaning of running to escape
from some danger. Americans prefer generally the fuller phrase,
to make streaks, which means the same as to make tracks, while
English slang is content with the simple term, to streak. “I
streaked it for Washington, and it was well-nigh upon midnight,
when I reached the White House.” (Major Downing’s Letters, p. 91.)

Stuck, to be, means, in slang phraseology, to be taken in by false
pretences. “Did he buy the horse? Yes, and he was dreadfully
stuck: the horse wasn’t worth twenty dollars.” (New Orleans
Picayune, January 28, 1870.)

Stucked, a most emphatic participle of to stick, is heard with
surprising frequency in the West, furnishing a double-dyed slang
term, as stuck already has the slang meaning of being taken in or
cheated. The literal meaning will be seen in this phrase: “ Te
lived just long enough to send his respects to his wife, and tell his
son to be a good boy, and then he died just like a stucked hog”
(Putnam’s Magazine, December, 1869), while the metaphor is
used thus: “ When Thomas came down the river, he looked de-
moralized, and to all our questions about his luck, he had only
one answer: Lam stucked, awfully stucked, and what’s to become
of the store is more than I can tell.” (The Country Merchant,
p. 258.) Steck wp, algo, is used in slang as a substitute for proud
or conceited : “ He had, as a new-comer, perhaps fairly earned the
reputation of being stuck up.” (IF. B. Harte, Luck of Roaring
Camp, p. 74.)

Subside, to, as applied to persons, is a modern slang term, ex-
pressive of their giving up, or at least, becoming silent. “'There-
upon the doughty General swbsided, but it would be a great mis-
CANT AND SLANG. 639

ake to suppose that he will remain silent. He will bottle up his
wrath, having had some experience in the line of bottling: up
luring the war, and pour out his vials upon General Farnsworth’s
read, whenever the occasion offers.” (Cincinnati Commercial,
April, 1871.)

Suck in, as a noun and asa verb, is a graphic Western phrase to
axpress deception of a more or less violent character.. The figure
is taken from the quicksands found on the banks of some of the
Southwestern rivers especially, which literally sack in men and cat-
tle. “Speculating in landis all very well, and great fortunes can be
made and have been made in that line. But, Colonel, mind my
word, there’s a heap of sucking-in going on there, and my opinion
is, you had better not venture too far at first.” ( Western Scenes.)

Sure, a8 a mere affirmative expletive, serves many purposes in
American conversation. Oonstantly used instead of the adverb
surely, it is often strengthened by strange additions. “Do you
mean so, sure?” “I met him and he payed me all he owed. You
don’t say so? Sure enough.” (J. C. Neal, Charcoal Sketches.)
“Tf you do so, V’ll never say another word to you, and you'll be
sorry for it, as swre as you are born.” (Putnam’s Magazine, June,
1852.) This latter phrase takes the place of the English “as
sure as a gun,” which is rarely heard in this country.

Suze, corruption of sirs, peculiar to New England, and as
J. R. Bartlett states, frequently embellished by an additional law.
“ Law, suzz, what do you mean ?”

Swan or swon, and swow or swown, euphemistic oaths of the
New Englander, are substitutes for “swear;” “I swan to man”
being considered particularly strong. J swow is used by J. R.
Lowell.

T.

T, to suit to a, is an American phrase as well as English—
arising probably from the 7’ square of the carpenters, by which
the accuracy of their work is tested.

“ An John P.
Robinson, he
Sez this is his view o’ the thing to a 7.”
(J. RB. Lowell, Biglow Papers, L., p. 35.)
Tack, to, is the familiar abbreviation of attack in the South.
640 AMERICANISMS.

Take, to, furnishes a number of slang and colloquial expressions,
most of which have been mentioned in connection with the noun
which is added to fake. To take it, is a very frequent substitute
for I surmise: “ You are all aware, I fake it, that this is a most
important question, and one that cannot be shirked any longer.”
(Speech of Colonel Forney in Washington, April, 1871.) To take
on, in the sense of grieving, or fretting at a misfortune, is com-
mon throughout the United States, but of ancient use in Eng-
land, and by no means an American phrase. “Alas, good soul,
she cries and fakes on.” (Beaumont and Fletcher, Scornful
Lady.) To take up, besides being applied to land, which is taken
up, when it is brought under cultivation, also refers to horses
and cattle, when they are taken from pasture to be made use-
ful for riding, milking, ete. “Horses ought not to be taken up
before their third year, and then only to be gentled.” (Rural
Register.) To take to do, in New England only, means to take to
task, to reprove. “When she returned she was seriously fak:en to
do for staying out so long.” (OurYoung Folks. 1869.)

Talk turkey, to, means to talk in‘a silly, foolish way, from the
extremely ludicrous way in which the wild turkey during pairing-
time gobbles while strutting about on a branch, with eyes closed,
and feathers spread out wide. “When you tell me that you ain’t
afraid of a Redskin, and that you had just as lieves meet one of
them bloody Ingins on the perairy as a perairy wolf, and knock
him down, I calls that talking turkey, and no mistake.” (W. G.
Simms.) ,

Tanglefoot, one of the many popular names given in the West
to bad liquor, which picturesquely describes the effect it has on
the walk of the consumer.

’Tarnal and ’tarnation, corruptions of eternal and damnation,
both heard occasionally in England, used jocularly, while ¢arnal is
nearly confined to the New England States, are favorite phrases
with those who wish to be energetic without becoming profane.
The antiquity of tarnation is proved by the lines—

“ Poor honest John! ’tis plaih he knowes
But liddle of live’s range,
Or he'd aknow’d, gals oft, at fust
Have ways tarnation strange.”
(John Noakes and Mary Styles.)
CANT AND SLANG. 641

Teetotal and its various derivatives, though of English manu-
facture, have acquired new and superior force in America with
the growth of the agitation in favor of Total Abstinence. The
word, formed by a duplication of the initial ¢ of total for the sake
of greater emphasis and force, had been in existence in Preston,
England, and in many other localities, for several generations.
When a proposal was made to change the Temperance movement
into a new agitation in favor of excluding all intoxicating liquors,
a working-man in Preston, of the name of Richard Turner, ap-
plied to the plan the familiar term ¢eefotal. As he had a habit of
stammeting, and thus found difficulty in uttering the word, the
attention of the public was specially directed toward the curious
word, and thus it became, in course of time, the watchword of
millions of men, and, as Tectotalism, the name of one of the great-
est moral movements of the age. In the United States it is, how-
ever, far more frequently used in the sense of altogether or thor-
oughly, than with reference to the Temperance question. “There
you are out, Sir, ¢eetotally out, wofully out, Sir.” (Western Scenes.)
“Things were’nt going on right, so I pretty nearly gave myself
up teetotally to the good of the republic.” (J. 0. Neal, Charcoal
Sketches.) In the West an effort is sometimes made to increase
the force of the strange word, by enlarging it into ¢eetotactously.

Teil, I can’t, meaning Jam unable to inform you, is universal
in America, but not peculiar to this country. J. R. Lowell
already calls attention to the fact that the phrase is explained by
Dyce in a note to Middleton by the gloss, I could not say. To
tell is, moreover, in the South, continually substituted for to say.
“Tell the gentleman good-bye now.”

Tend, to, in the sense of attending, as in Shakespeare’s “He
tends upon my father,” is rarely if ever heard now in England,
while in the New England States it is almost universal, and in
certain combinations, as “tending bar” and “tending store,” quite
common in all parts of the Union. “Will you ¢end baby while I
rundown and open the door to father ?” (Atlantic Monthly, De-
cember, 1869.) “He wanted to write up books, to ¢end store, or
do anything to make an honest living.” (The Young Merchant,
p. 271.)

There, or rather thar, as it is more generally pronounced,
means, in Western parlance, either the consent given to a proposi-

41
642 AMERICANISMS.

tion, or the familiarity with the subject in question. “ Want me
to liquor, stranger? Iam thar!” (F. B. Harte, Luck of Roaring
Camp.) “If you talk about hunting for meat, I am ‘here ; if
you want me to follow a trail, lam there, and, by Jingo, if you
want me to snuff you out as you are, Iam there too.” (Wild Bill.)

Thousand of brick, a, is a very forcible expression, conveying
the most cordial approbation of a person who in England would
have to be contented with being called “a brick.” ‘“ When it
came to the breakdown, Your Honor, he kicked up a row like a
drove of contrary mules, and when we wanted to turn him out,
he fell upon us like a thousand of bricks, and threatened to make
minced meat of the police and every one of us.” (Police Report.
New Orleans Picayune, April 27, 1860.)

Thundering, an English slang term for very great, excessive, is
very common especially in New England, where J. R. Lowell
says, it is “a euphemism for the profane English devilish, per-
haps derived from the belief common formerly, that thunder was
caused by the prince of the air, for some of whose accomplish-
ments, see Cotton Mather.” (Glossary to Biglow Papers.)

Tickler has, in America, two special meanings: it denotes a
small flask for holding liquor, and also a book in which merchants
enter the names of those debtors whose memory has to be “ tick-
led” in order to make them pay their dues. In one of the side-
streets of New York the following advertisement used to hang
over the door of a large and imposing building: “ Pocket-pistols
charged, and ticklers supplied, on Saturday night up to 12 o’clock,
for use next day.” In the South the phrase, to “take a tickler,” is
often used as an invitation to “join in a drink.”

Tie to, to, has in the West the figurative meaning of to rely,
and hence a reliable man is qualified as a man it will do to tie to.
To ¢ie up, on the other hand, is used with reference to boats,
which are secured at the landing. Flatboats and steamboats alike,
are said, on the Mississippi, to tie wp. “The Crevasse was so
threatening, and the current of the river changing so continually,
that the larger steamers even did not venture below, but tied up
above Helena, till there was not room for another boat.” (New
Orleans Bee, June 30, 1861.)

Tiger, the slang term for a peculiar howl or yell, which is given
after the usual cheers, and by an excited fancy has been compared
CANT AND SLANG. 643

to the howl of a tiger. It is of purely American origin, and
common on occasions of great excitement and wild enthusiasm.
“Gentlemen, I'call for nine cheers and a tiger in honor of our
guests.” (New York Herald, November 17, 1870.)

Time, to have a good, is also a thorough Americanism, a great
favorite, especially with young ladies, and hence abounding in the
works of Mrs. Stowe, the Misses Wetherell, and their professional
sisters. There is, however, good authority for this phrase also,
though perhaps in a slightly modified’ sense, in old English
authors: Swift has in his Journal to Stella: “I hope Mrs. Wells
has had a good time.” (February 14, 1710-11.) “What kind of a
time did you have at your uncle’s? Oh! we had a delightful
time.” (The Wide Wide World, II.)

Tom Dog, made after the manner of Tom Cat, belongs to the
West exclusively.

Tomfoolery, for foolish trifling, is quite common throughout the
country. It is, of course, derived from the English term Tom
Fool, as in

“ Red and Yellow
Tom Fool's colors.”

(Proverd.)
“ None of your fomfoolery, Bob; you keep quiet and we’ll settle
it all.”

Tormented, another New England euphemism for the stronger
term denoting eternal torment. “Not a tormented cent.” (J. R.
Lowell.)

Tote, to, a verb which of all colloquial Americanisms has proba-
bly excited the most general interest and led to innumerable
disquisitions, remains still unexplained as far as its first origin is
concerned. It is universally used in the South to denote the
carrying something weighty by personal effort and unaided by
any convenience. The strangest of all explanations is probably
that given by the learned Noah Webster in his admirable Dic-
tionary. He says of the word, “said to be of African origin.” This
suggestion has nothing in its favor except the simple fact, that
the negroes never use any other word for carrying. It is almost
as improbable, that the word should have been derived from the
old English word to tote, which was used to express the process
of summing up the ¢ofal amount, and which is still in use in
644 AMERICANISMS.

Lincolnshire, where people say, “ Come, ¢o¢e it up and tell me what
is the whole amount.” (Notes and Queries, 1853.) Chaucer also
uses the word in this sense. It seems far more probable, that the
word should owe its present use to the fact, that when Virginia
was settled, and the term, to fo¢e, was brought to this country, the
English emigrants were familiar with it from two entirely differ-
ent sources. One was the Anglo-Saxon verb, to¢ian, to lift up, to
elevate. (“ Totodun ut tha heafdu: eminebant capita, Past. 16, 5.
Bosworth, Anglo-Sazon Dictionary, and English Dictionary, p.
226.) This old Saxon word, used in its primitive sense, still sur-
vived in the provinces, and was carried by persons, accustomed to
its sound and use, to America, where it has never ceased to be
used. At the same time, Englishmen were all more or less familiar
with the word ¢o/t, the name of a writ, by which the proceedings

-on a writ of right are removed (carried) from the Court Baron
into the County Court, the precept of the sheriff being, “quia ¢ollit
atque eximit causam e curia baronum” (3 C., Blackstone, Commen-
taries, p. 34.) Blount’s Law Dictionary (1691), states that the
familiar term ¢ol¢, was derived from the Latin verb folle, to lift or
remove. In the colonies this word and the Anglo-Saxon tote com-
bined to express the process of removing corporeal things as well
as incorporeal, and being short and easy of pronunciation, the
negroes especially readily seized upon it, to denote the lifting a
thing with a view of carrying it from one place to another. That
the word is by no means unknown in England may be seen from
the fact‘that already Piers Plowman says in his Crede: “Then
toted I into a taverne and there I espyede two frere Carmes” (Hd.
1553, B. III.) ; and that the handle of a carpenter’s plane is to this
day called a tote in England, evidently from the Anglo-Saxon
verb mentioned above.

Touch: of the liver, a euphemism for more serious affections.
“The Sulphur Springs, where Iam now (White Sulphur), are much
resorted to by persons who haye a touch of the liver, as it is
called, or who are afflicted with bilious complaints of any kind.”
(Letters from the South, I, p. 155.)

Tracks, to follow in one’s, means to follow him so immediately
and closely as to step into his footmarks. The phrase, of West-
ern origin, is quite common in New England, and compared by
J. R. Lowell, with his touching tenderness for all his native expres-
CANT AND SLANG. 645

sions. to the Latin e vestigio and the Norman-French chezlespas,
both of which have the same meaning, although in no way con-
nected with the modern form. “She is an excellent woman, and
if you follow close in her tracks, you may be sure to do what is
right.” (Our Young Folks, 187%)

Trampoose, to, an enlargement of the English “to tramp,’ is a
genuine Americanism, and means, to wander about listlessly.
“J felt as lonely as a catamount, and as dull as a bachelor beaver,
so I trampousses off to the stable.” (Sam Slick in England.)
« The sergeant has successfully trampoosed this, the whole South,
with the Stars and Stripes fluttering in the breeze, but, beyond
the mere bravado of having done so. it is hard to tell what good
he or his friends can imagine to have been accomplished by the
exploit.” (Cincinnati Commereia?, September, 1866.)

Trash a trail, to, means, in Western parlance, to conceal the
traces of your march. The phrase has its literal meaning, when
it denotes the taking to the water, or covering up footmarks in
some cunning way, to mislead pursuers: but it is almost as fre-
quently employed in a figurative meaning, when speaking of the
efforts made to conceal acts that could hereafter be used as evi-
dence against a man’s political integrity or financial prudence.
“What we admire most in Carl Schurz’s movement, is, that he
comes out boldly and takes no pains to frash his trail. We
admire plain dealings.” (St. Louis Republican, April, 1871.)

Try it on, to, instead of the simple ¢o ¢ry, is of tourse taken
from tailors’ slang, and hence frequently coupled with the per-
sonal pronoun. “ You needn’t ¢ry ’¢ on me, [have heard all that
before.” “You must find somebody else to try-t¢ on, I haye cut
my wisdom teeth long ago.” (New Orleans Bee, July 31, 1870.)

Tuk is a common corruption of took.

Turkey, as poor as Job’s, a phrase, not a genuine Americanism,
but intensified, in American fashion, by some energetic addition ;
for instance, “ As poor as Job’s turkey, that had but one feather
in its tail,” or, “ As poor as Job’s turkey, that had to lean against
afence to gobble.” (Once a Week, May, 1871.)

Twistical, denotes in slang that which has a moral fwis?, and is
hence unfair, and not straightforward. “I wouldn’t go deep into
that matter, Sam is rayther ¢wistical, and it’s pretty hard, I hearn
tell, to get along with him smoothly.” (New Englander, June, 1870.)
646 AMERICANISMS.

Uz.

Uncultivatable, but for its inconvenient length, has noth-
ing objectionable in form or @neaning. “The land around
the Light isa perfect desert of loose sand, and perfectly wacuilti-
vatable, except in one or two of the hollows.” (Putnam’s Maga-
zine, September, 1870.) Equally unsupported is

UOniversanimous, apparently an effort to make unanimous more
comprehensive, is perhaps nothing more than a facetious fabrica-
tion of J. R. Lowell, who says, “They are wniversanimous, both
‘as to its rusticity and its capacity of rising to the level of more
elevated sentiments.” (Biglow Papers, II., p. 36.)

Upper Crust, Upper Ten Thousand, and Uppertendom, with
a host of similar crudities, owe their origin to the unfortunate
taste of a writer of great ability and well-earned popularity,
N. P. Willis. A brother poet criticises him thus—

“Gad, what a polish wppertendom gives

This polisher of adjectives ;

This man who chokes the English worse than Thuggists,

And turns the trade to trunkmakers or druggists.”

(Duganne. Parnassus in Pillory.)

“What the Upper Ten Thousand will do until Paris is once more
at peace and able to resume the sceptre of fashion, is a question
which deeply agitates the most profound minds of our society.”
(New York Herald, March 14, 1871.)

Usable, one of the latest manufactures, but already making its
way into the daily journals. “Government lands at one dollar
per acre. Land scrip wsadble by pre-emptors. For sale by G. F.
Lewis, Cleveland, Ohio.” (New York Tribune, May 1, 1871.)

Used to be, and even used to could, are frequently heard in the
United States, as they occur, though rarely, in provincial dialects
in England. The former is even used as an adverb, instead

of formerly.

“But maugre all the croaking

Of the Raven, and the joking
Of the verdant little fellow of the wsed to be review,
The people, in derision
Of their impudent decision,
Have declared, without division, that the mystery will do.”
(Hartford Columbian, 1849.)
CANT AND SLANG. 64%

Vv.

V is pronounced w in words like vinegar, veil, veal, etc., in the
neighborhood of Burlington in New Jersey and Marblehead in
Massachusetts, precisely as it is done by the cockneys of London.

Virginia Fence, to make a, means to walk like a drunken man,
in humorous allusion to the zigzag shape of a snake-fence.
Virginia Reel, on the contrary, is the name given to the old
English country dance, throughout the United States, as for some
time in Virginia alone of all the Colonies the national dance was
permitted, and from thence made its way to other parts of the
country. “The dancing wound up, as usual, with a genuine Vir-
ginia Reel, which lasted far into the small hours, and enlisted the
energies of old and young alike.” (America by Ratl and River.)

Vum, I, instead of Z vow, a favorite oath in disguise, in New
England.

Ww.

Walking-papers is a cant term denoting letters of dismissal, as
if in derisive allusion to the liberty granted to an official to walk
out of office and whithersoever he likes. “Jt was said, yesterday,
that a number of town officials, as well as many of the officers of
the former District, had already received their walking-papers,
but the announcement is premature.” (Washington Patriot,
April 21, 1871.)

War’t, like hain’t, is, in New England especially, used indiffer-
ently for was not and were not.

Ways is used constantly, and throughout the United States, for
the singular, to denote a short distance. “ Won’t you go a little ways
further?” “We had only proceeded a litéle ways down the road,
when we noticed a large crowd of men running all in one direc-
tion.” (J. P. Kennedy.) There is no two ways about it, an ener-
getic assertion of being certain beyond doubt. “TI tell you, gen-
eral, we'll have to fight our way out, and that at once, there is 20
two ways about it; for if we don’t do it pretty quickly, we shall
be surrounded on all sides, and have to go up, sure enough.”
(Campaign with General Price, p. 119.)

Whapper or whopper, a slang term not unknown to England
in the sense of a big lie, is much used in the West to designate
G48 AMERICANISMS.

anything unusually large or remarkable. At times it is exchanged
for the adjective whapping, which has the same signification.
“Once, however, my spear entered the back of a whapper, and my
determination to keep hold was nearly the cause of my being
drowned. It must have been a thrilling, yet a ridiculous sight to
see me astraddle of the sturgeon, and passing down the river like
lightning.” (C. Lanman, A Summer in the Wilderness.)

Whipping the cat, an old English phrase used only by tailors
and carpenters, has maintained its existence in New England,
Pennsylvania, and a few other States, where it denotes the annual
visit of a tailor to repair the clothes of a household. It is said to

‘have originated in a very rough practical joke, which bears the
sume name in Hampshire, England, and of which, it is surmised,
the tailor may have been the victim. (J. R. Lowell.) The simple
tailors of former days liked thus to go from house to house in the
rural districts, providing the families with clothing. The chief
romance for the happy “Schneider” was in the abundant and
wholesome cheer of the farmer who employed him, and as his
annual visits fell in the pudding and sausage season, he was
usually crammed with that kind of “ vegetables,” as he facetiously
called them, to his heart’s content. Tre only objection made to
catwhipping, was that it afforded no opportunity to “cabbage,”
and in former days this was a serious grievance. The introduc-
tion of large manufacturing establishments, low-priced ready-
made clothing, and the advent of the sewing-machine, have now
nearly made an end to this itinerant occupation. The terms
catwhipper and catwhipping were often facetiously, and sometimes
very irreverently, applied to other itinerant professions: even
“gchoolmasters”—there were no “ teachers,” much less “ educators,”
in those benighted days—were called catwhippers, when they
boarded, as was quite usual, in turns with the parents of their
scholars. Itinerating preachers also were, by the initiated, in-
cluded in this category.

Whipstitch, every, a phrase of the Far West, expressive of what
is done continually. “The laborers are off every whipstitch.”
(Overland Magazine, March, 1869.)

White frost, a common expression for hoar frost, in the South
and West.

Whole-footed, whole-hearted, and whole-souled, are popular cant
CANT AND SLANG. 649

terms, used with a profusion and want of discrimination which
has utterly destroyed their original meaning. Any devising man,
who invites a crowd to “drinks all around” is instantly praised
as a “ whole-footed man,” and the calculating speculator, who gives
a piece of land for a church with a view to the enhanced value of
the adjoining lots, which he retains, appears in the newspapers as
“a noble, whole-souled gentleman, whose liberality will earn him
the thanks of his countrymen and the gratitude of coming genera-
tions.” (Philadelphia Age, January 14, 1851.)

Winter-kill, to, a verb made for the sake of brevity and conve-
nience, means, to be killed by the frosts of winter. “Our clover
was completely winter-killed.” “Who would go to the Northwest,
with its terrible frosts and short summers, when in Virginia all
kind of stock can stay out during the whole year without shelter,
and such a thing as winter-killed crops are utterly unknown ?”
(Richmond Whig, August 11, 1863.)

Wonst, a slang term for once (compare German etnst).

Wrath, like all, a strong but suggestive phrase, frequently heard
in the South and the West, and expressive of great emphasis.
“When we went down to the beach, the waves came tumbling up
like all wrath, and the sight of our little bay, usually so quiet and
peaceful, was grand beyond description.” (4 Summer in Florida,
p. 47.)

Y.

Yank, used as a noun and a verb, denotes the action of violently
jerking or twitching a person or a thing, and in figurative mean-
ing, a great effort of mind. An attempt has been made to find in
the slang term an allusion to the energy and ingenuity with which:
the Yank, as the Yankee is often called by the vulgar, overcomes
all difficulties. “He yanked and yanked, but the sapling wouldn’t
come, and thar he was caught in his own trap.” (A Visit to Nan-
tucket, 1867.) Yankee used to be also the name of a New England
drink, made of whiskey and molasses, but the term has nearly fallen
into disuse.

“ You fine Miss Boston Lady gay,
For this your speech I thank ye,
Call on me, when you come this way,
And take a dram of Yankee.”
(Fessenden, Yankee Doodle, B.)

28
650 AMERICANISMS.

Young America, a cant term, when used to denote the supposed
characteristics of the generation of Americans now growing up,
as when the popular writer, J. G. Holland, says: “ What we call
Young America is made up of about equal parts of irreverence,
conceit, and that moral quality familiarly known as brass.”

Z.

Zit, to, a verb evidently made in imitation of the sound which
it describes—the peculiar hissing of bullets when striking water—
is frequently heard in the West. “It was the hottest bath I ever
took. For about two minutes the bullets zztted and skipped on
the water; I thought I was hit again and again, but the rebel
sharpshooters were bothered by the splash we made.” (Wild
Bill.)
ALY,

NEW FORMS AND NICKNAMES
NEW FORMS AND NICKNAMES.

SEVERE critics are apt to place among the slang terms of
America the large number of new forms, which have been made
here from well-known words, and are gradually gaining ground,
as they become popular with journalists, and thus familiar to a
large class of intelligent persons. Grammatically, they are abomi-
nations, and esthetically, not one of them, perhaps, can be justi-
fied. The pure well of English undefiled ought not to be con-
taminated by such misshapen forms, and their influence is dis-
astrous in the extreme, by removing all landmarks in language,
and accustoming the ear to the utmost license in the use of words.
With all this, they are apparently suited to supply a want; at least
they are largely‘ employed, easily understood, and have, almost in-
variably, the one great merit of brevity. This is the feature which
has led to their creation in the first place: they are, to a large ex-
tent, the offspring of the telegraph-wire and the cable. The heavy
expense incurred by private correspondents, and still more by great
companies, such as the leading daily papers of London or New
York, and especially the “ Associated Press” of the United States,
engendered promptly a tendency to shorten messages, and devel-
oped great ingenuity in accomplishing this purpose. The last-
named company, for instance, at once adopted certain well-known,
abbreviations: this evening and this morning, became sevening
and smorning ; fob, meant free on board, and swells, as well as;
New York and New Orleans appeared simply as York and Or-
leans ; Rio de Janeiro as Rio; Buenos Ayres as Bayres, and San
Francisco as Frisco. Then came less pardonable forms, such as
sleeting, conflagrating, incendiaried, and interviewed, and finally
a whole class of violent contractions, derived from well-known
and well-formed words, like burgled, injuncted, and excurted. It
654 AMERICANISMS.

is this class of words which contains the most objectionable and
most dangerous terms, attractive as they have proved by their
novelty and their brevity. They led to the use of other terms
for which no such excuse could be made, and as their number
daily increases, they threaten to corrupt American English to a
mournful extent. The absence of sound criticism, and the little
respect paid to the authority of good writers and sound teachers,
favor the contamination, and, unless the good sense of the people,
and the conscience of editors and writers for the press, come to the
rescue, serious danger may be apprehended.

Among these new-fangled terms we find complected, in the sense
of having a certain complexion. “The woman had evidently had
chills recently; she was feeble and emaciated, and complected as I
have never seen any one out of malarious regions.” (Cincinnati
Commercial, June 9, 1868.) The noun eruption has, in like man-
ner, suffered violent curtailment in order to furnish a new verb, to
erupt. “This person had, at the peak and tip of a gigantic vol-
cano of infuriated scolding against everything whatever, erupted
in a final blaze of fury.” (Putnam’s Magazine, September, 1870.)
Old English writers, howéver, have erupt quite frequently.
Excursion has been forced to produce to excurt. “President
Grant has once more exewrted from Washington ; ‘he has gone on
a visit to Mr. Cameron’s home, but will be hack in time for the
Cabinet-meeting on Monday.” (Washington Chronicle, April 17,
1870.) An amusing evidence of the utter insecurity which such
license creates in the use of the most familiar words, has been
furnished by the fate of the word resurrection. A verb was ap-
parently required, and forthwith two were manufactured to meet
the demand, which now compete with each other for the suprem-
acy; but, whichever may prove victorious, the language will be
seriously damaged by its admission. “The invention described in
yesterday’s Times, and displayed on Saturday in Newark, by which
a person who may happen to be buried alive, is enabled to resur-
rect himself from the grave, may lead some people to fancy there
is actual danger of their being buried alive.” (New York Times,
quoted by R. G. White, Words and their Uses, p. 229.) “Mr. But-
Jer said, he had long since learned the wisdom of the maxim, de:
mortuis nil nist bonum, and if Admiral Porter only lay still in his
grave, if his friends did not reswrrect him to offend the nostrils
NEW FORMS AND NICKNAMES. 655

of the House, he (Mr. Butler) would not have said a word about
him.” (New York Tribune, February 7, 1871.) Then there arose
a formidable rival to this “amazing formation,” as R. G. White
justly calls it, and being a little more imposing and grandiloquent,
now threatens to supersede the shorter term. “ Body-snatching
continues to be a business in Cincinnati. The leading gentleman
of the resurrectionizing profession is one Cunningham, who, with
two assistants, dug up the subjects and carried them to the medi-
cal schools in an’express-wagon.” (Cincinnati Commercial, Feb-
ruary 6, 1871.) In like manner the burglar’s occupation has been
designated as burglarizing ; when caught he is custodized, and the
news of his capture is promptly itemized by the penny-a-liner.
“The frequency with which resolutions axe spoken of in news-
papers and public reports, has led, in the same way, to the for-
mation of a new verb to take the place of resolve. “I tell you,
gentlemen, you may keep this up as long as you choose, but when
you have done resoluting, you will only have lost your time, be-
cause we of the majority won’t stand it.’ (Savannah Republican,
March 13, 1860.) E
“You may resoloot till the cows come home,
But ef one of you teches the boy.

He’ll rastle his bones to-night in hell.”
, (John Hay, Banty Tim.)

Another class of such words is the offspring of the agitation of
so-called Women’s Rights, and pretends to furnish terms for the
many new professions to which women claim admission. A
couple of ladies having established their “Exchange Office” in
that quiet and respectable neighborhood so eminently suited for
persons of their sex, called Wall-street, they were at once spoken
of in the New York papers as bankeresses or brokeresses. Fortu-
nately, the word seemed to please the public as little as the new
occupation, and neither term has been adopted. Docéoresses,
however, abound in the land, to the utmost disgust of Miss Mary
Walker, the most notorious of the class, who, like all her learned
“sisters,” claims the right to be called Doctor. “Miss A , the
young and attractive doctoress, who yesterday appeared in Court
to testify in the great will-case, made a most pleasing impression
upon the bar and the jury, by her clear, intelligent answer, and
her simple, modest behavior while in the witness-stand.” (Phil-

 
656 AMERICANISMS.

adelphia Inquirer, 1868.) Since Miss Hosmer began her brilliant
career, the word Sculptoress has become familiar to American ears.
“We all remember the time when the old doctor’s charming
daughter uncoupled the cars as the train ran over the mill-dam,
and imperilled the lives of nearly a hundred passengers, who were
left on the track at the mercy of the approaching mail-train. The
young sculptoress was hardly aware of the frightful responsibility
she incurred by her thoughtless prank.” (Boston Bee, March 23,
1855.) Even the grave and mysterious masons have seen their
sacred precincts invaded by the enemy. “ We are now informed of
the great secret of Miss Vinnie Ream’s grand success as a scwlpt-
oress. It appears that she 38 a mason, or a masoness, aS you
please. She belongs to a Female Lodge, which has some sort of
connection with Male Lodges—a very mysterious and recondite
connection, no doubt, only we don’t know what it is. The statutes
of the old, original order forbid the initiation of women most
emphatically, but there used to be a sort of branch kind, called
the Daughters of Jerusalem. However, Miss V. Ream has taken
eight degrees in something or other, and is very high in the mys-
teries. This accounts for the elegance, beauty, and generally fine
mason-work of the Lincoln statue.” (New York Tribune, Feb-
ruary 2, 1871.) A different formation is attempted in the follow-
ing notice: “ Mrs. E. Tupper Wilkes, the Minnesota clergywoman,
has a salary of $2000 a year, and is to get more.” (Chicago Tribune,
February 17, 1871.) An effort was made to vindicate the honor
of the sex by having Chairwomen to preside over Women’s Rights
meetings, but Irish sympathizers would appeal to the chairwoman
so persistently, that the association became offensive, and the new
title was abandoned.

Perhaps the worst ofall these malformations, and perhaps, for that
very reason, the most numerous and most popular of all, is the
class of new notns made promiscuously from French and Latin,
German and Saxon words, by the simple addition of the termina-
tion ist. This produces naturally most shocking hybrids, but
the gain of time and exertion seems to be deemed ample com-
pensation for the barbarous character of the process. Thus we
find the following advertisement: “A nurseryman wanted, who
is a thorough master of his business; one who understands taking
care of a greenhouse and plants preferred; must be complete
NEW FORMS AND NICKNAMES. 65"

master in propagating evergreens and deciduous trees and shrubs

also a good fruitist.” (New York Tribune, February 16, 1871.
An excellent and generally very carefully-written journal, Apple
ton’s Weekly Journal, speaks-nevértheless of the great painter
A. B. Durand, as a distinguished landscapist (May 7, 1870), thu:
proving the extreme danger with which license in speech i:
fraught. Absurd grandiloquence is quaintly illustrated in a notice
under the startling title “Thanatopsis,” and beginning with th
sentence: “It is very seldom that the odttwarist is called upon tc
speak with honest truthfulness of departed humbleness.” (Mrs
Van Lew, Postmaster of Richmond, Virginia, in Richmond Dis.
patch, April 27,1871.) Another distinguished speaker at public
meetings, held to advocate the rights of the downtrodden sex
Mrs. Isabella Beecher Hooker, is thus described: “Every one
admires her and her course; she never oversteps the line of strict
propriety: whether on the platform or off it, she is modest anc
sensible, and she has done more to commend the new doctrines of
‘the female suffragists than a dozen of her associates. The only
wonder is, that she can associate with the Woodhulls and Claf.
lins.” (Néw York Tribune, March 20, 18%1.) A term which ha:
become very popular with the steadily-increasing interest in the
culture of vines throughout the United States is one of the worst
manufactures of this kind ; it is used thus: “ This year a Frencl
winemaker and vineyardist came from Kentucky to cultivate the
Great Mustang grape of Texas.” (American Wines, p. 613.:
There is but one newly-made term of this class that falls perhaps
even more painfully upon the ear, and yet it also is found daily
more frequently: “A Wisconsin walkist has done one hundred
miles within twenty-four hours, and his name is Simmons.” (St.
Louis Democrat, January 4, 1871.) It is not to be wondered at,
that-as soon as the door is once opened to such abominations, by
those who ought to be the guardians of the purity of the language,
a whole host of similar terms should rush in and try to make a
lodgment, for nothing thrives like weeds, in language as well as in
nature. Hence, no sooner had men’s ears become somewhat ac.
customed to hear a pedestrian called a walkist, than the man whose
rifle brought down the largest amount of game became known as a
famous shootist, the Nilsson was praised in numerous journals as
one of the greatest singists that had ever come to America, and the
658 ~ AMERICANISMS.

man of violence, who had heretofore been denounced as a murderer,
now appeared before the charitable jury as a modest stabdist, or,
at worst, called a formidable strikist.

Among the familiar terms peculiar to our American speech, we
must, finally, not forget the names which are given to several of the
States of the Union, and of the principal cities, from some striking
peculiarity in their appearance, or from remarkable incidents con-
nected with their history. The following are the most common:

Arkansas is called the Bear State, although within its limits
and throughout the West the name is pronounced Bar State. The
epithet was bestowed in days when bears abounded in that part
of the Union.

California enjoys the same title, but in this instance it is a
grizzly bear which gives the name, and reappears in the coat of
arms of the State, where the huge and formidable animal is seen
standing on a railway track, thus graphically symbolizing the
marvellous growth of a State which, thirty years ago, was a wilder-
ness, and now is behind no other part of the Union in wealth and
culture.

Connecticut enjoys quite a number of sobriquets by which
it is popularly known. Sometimes it is called the Blue Law
State, from the unenyiable fame acquired by the first regulations
of the government of New Haven Plantation, known as the Blue
Laws. The valuable quarries of freestone, to which the State is
largely indebted for its revenne, have procured for it the name of
the Freestone State, while at other times it appears as the Vutmeg
State, from the famous speculation in wooden spices, immortal-
ized by Sam Slick, or, as a factious native prefers to explain it,
“because you will have to look for a grater!”

Delaware is known as the Blue Hen, from the unenviable
notoriety which one of her sons, Captain Caldwell, acquired in
the War of the Revolution for his fondness of cockfighting. For-
tunately he was, at the same time, renowned for his spirit and
undaunted gallantry, as well as for admirable skill in drilling his
men, so that the latter became known in the army as his “game-
cocks.” He held the peculiar notion that no cock could be true
game.that did not come from a blue hen, and this led to the sub-
stitution of Blue Hen Chickens for the former term of Game-
cocks. As the whole regiment in which he served became famous
NEW FORMS AND NICKNAMES. 659

through him, all the men from Delaware were surnamed thus, and
finally the epithet was transferred to the State from which they
came.

Florida is the Gulf State, although Arkansas, Louisiana, Mis-
sissippi, and Texas share with it the common name of Gulf States.

Georgia, one of the most thriving States of the Union, and
beyond comparison the most enterprising and energetic Southern
State, little deserves the name of Cracker State, by which it is
occasionally designated, from the Crackers, the lowest and most
ignorant of its citizens before the abolition of slavery.

Iilinois is known as the Sucker State, because its inhabitants
are known throughout the Union as suckers. "The origin of the
odd term is said to be this: “The Western prairies are, in many
places, full of holes made by the crawfish, which descends to the
water beneath. In early times, when travellers wended their way
over these immense plains, they very prudently provided them-
selves with a long hollow reed, and when thirsty, thrust it into
these natural Artesian wells, and thus easily supplied their longings.
The crawfish-well generally contains pure water, and the manner
in which the traveller drew forth the refreshing element gave
him the name of Sucker.” (Providence Journal.) A more pleas-
ing and more appropriate name, under which Illinois is equally
well known, is that of the Prairie State.

Indiana is the Hoosier State. “The citizens of this State,
known as Hoosiers, who gave the State its namie, are proverbially
inquisitive. They are said to have got their nickname, because
they could not pass a house without pulling the latchstring and
crying out, Who’s here?” (W. Ferguson, America by River
and by Rail, p. 338.) Another version derives the name from the
word husher, denoting a man of superior strength and skill, who
could hush or overcome every adversary, and hence an equivalent
for the modern “ bully.”

Jowa has adopted the name of a famous Indian chief, who was
long the terror of all settlers within her boundary lines, and
hence is known as the Hawkeye State.

Kansas is often called the Garden State, from the beautiful
appearance of rolling prairies and vast cultivated fields which
abound in that fertile region. It appears occasionally as Sqwatter
State, from the pertinacity with which squatter-sovereignty was

3
660 AMERICANISMS.

discussed there, and settlers poured in by the two contending
parties.

Kentucky shares with Arkansas the name of the Bear State,
and for the same reason; but it is also known as the Corn-Cracker,
that being a common epithet given to the inhabitants.

Louisiana is known as the Pelican State, the bird being fre-
quent on its shores, and hence chosen as its emblem in its coat of
arms. It also appears as the Creole State, on account of the large
number of its inhabitants who are descendants of the original
French and Spanish settlers.

Massachusetts, known as the Colony of Massachusetts Bay
before the formation of the present Union, still continues to be
called the Bay State.

Maine obtains its name as the Pine-Tree State from the exten-
sive pine-forests which cover its central and northern parts, while
the occupation they afford to a large number of inhabitants, en-
gaged in felling and rafting the trees, and in converting them into
shingles, boards, and the like, has made it also known as the Lum-
ber State. :

Maryland bears the proud title of Old-Line State from the Old-
Line regiments which she contributed to the Continental Army
in the War of the Revolution—the only State that had regular
troops of “ the line.”

Michigan appears as Wolverine State, from the number of
wolverines (literally, little wolves) which used to abound in the
peninsula, and gave the inhabitants their name of Wolverines, by
which they are still generally known. Michigan, surrounded by
the four magnificent lakes (Superior, Michigan, Huron, and Erie),
derives from this position also the name of Lake State.

Minnesota is known as the New England of the West, on account
of the number of New England people to be found there.

Mississippi is occasionally spoken of humorously as the Mud-
cat State, the inhabitants being quite generally known as Mud-cats,
a name given to the large catfish abounding in the swamps and the
mud of the rivers.

Missourt owes its name of Buillion State to one of her most
distinguished sons, Col. Thomas H. Benton, who, as a statesman,
was a staunch advocate of gold and silver currency, and became
himself known in Congress and among the people as Old Bullion.

x
NEW FORMS AND NICKNAMES. 661

New Hampshire, originally so called by the early settlers, who
wished to perpetuate the memory of the county from which
many had emigrated, is now known as the Granite State, its
mountains being largely composed of that material.

New York, once known as New Amsterdam, under Dutch rule,
then assuming its present name as an English colony, assumes in
the Union the proud title of Hmpire State, as surpassing all others
in wealth and population, and thus forming an Empire of its own.
The motto, “ Excelsior,” upon its coat of arms has made it also
known as the Lzcelsior State.

North Carolina, producing from her immense pine-forests large
quantities of valuable products, derives from one of them the
name of the Turpentine State.

Ohio owes to the Buck-Hye, one of the most beautiful trees of
America, and poetically so called from the resemblance its chest-
nut-like fruit bears to a deer’s eye, the name of Buckeye State,
as its inhabitants also are familiarly known as Buckeyes.

Pennsylvania is proud of the name of the Keystone State,
derived from the fact of its being the central State at the time
when the Union was formed. The names of the States, arranged
in the form of an arch, according to their ‘geographical position,
leave Pennsylvania in the centre, where the keystone would be
placed. The great importance of the State, due to its extent,
wealth, and immense manufacturing interests, make the name
quite appropriate also in a higher sense of the word, and Penn-
sylvania is not loth to claim the full meaning.
| Rhode Island, the smallest State in the Union, is therefore af-

fectionately called Little Rhody. 2

South Carolina is indebted for her name as Palmetto State
to the valuable tree growing abundantly on its shores, and hence
furnishing the emblem in her coat of arms. A palmetto is
carefully kept growing in the streets of Charleston, and the Pal-
metto Flag earned a sad distinction in the late Civil War by its
ill-fated connection with Fort Sumter.

Texas, once a province of Mexico, then an independent repub-
lic, bore a single star in its coat of-arms, and being for a time
left to struggle unaided against the whole power of her formidable
-enemy, became then honorably known as the Lone Star State—
a name which she has ever since retained.

+

e
662 AMERICANISMS.

Vermont is generally, by simple translation of the original
name given by the French settlers, called the Green Mountain
State, the principal ridge of mountains within its boundaries
being known by that name.

Virginia retains to this day her name of the Old Dominion,
honorably earned in times of great peril by her loyalty to her
legitimate sovereign, Charles IT.

Wisconsin, abounding during early days in badgers, has ever
since retained the name of Badger State.

Among the names given to the prominent cities of the United
States, the following are most familiar:

Baltimore, in Maryland, appears as the Monumental City, b av-
ing had, for a long time, alone monuments in her squares before
other towns had followed the example, and boasting still of the
oldest and largest monument erected in honor of Washington.
(Richmond, in Virginia, has, however, recently finished the
finest monument found in this country, an equestrian statue of
General Washington, surrounded by a number of colossal statues.)

Boston, in Massachusetts, rejoices in a number of nicknames.
Now she is called the Classic City, in appreciation of the high
culture of her inhabitants, whose proverbial modesty, however,
has claimed for their native town the name of the Athens of
America. The sarcastic Virginia statesman, John Randolph,
hearing Daniel Webster use this term, remarked: “Boston may
be.the Athens of America, but it has never been my good fortune
to meet with any of the Athenians.” Less appreciative outsiders
indulge in calling it the City of Notions, the latter furnishing the
staple of the native trade in mercantile goods as well as in mat-
ters of mind and thought; while one of her own most gifted
sons, the poet Holmes, nicknamed her, good-naturedly, the Hud
of the Universe, a term which has become by far the most pop-
ular of all her names. An older designation, Trimountain City,
has been almost entirely lost, although the three mountains upon
which the city ig built, and which gave rise to the epithet, still
survive in Tremont-street and Tremont House.

Brooklyn, in New York, a city of marvellous growth, and
NEW FORMS AND NICKNAMES. 663

‘

promising soon to have half a million inhabitants, enjoys the
enviable name of City of Churches, which it well deserves, on
account of the unusual number and superior beauty of its
churches. =

Buffalo, in New York, derives, from its vast commerce on the
great lakes, the name of Queen City of the Lakes.

Chicago, in Illinois, famous for the number and beauty of its
gardens, is hence known everywhere as the Garden City, while

Cincinnati, in Ohio, unparalleled in rapidity of growth and
extent of wealth, is called the Queen City.

Cleveland, in Ohio, is known as the Forest City, her streets
being bordered by beautiful forest-trees—in the same manner in
which Portland, in Maine, also has earned this name by her
stately elms and numerous shade-trees.

Detroit, in Michigan, translates the French name given by the
early settlers, into City of the Straits, in allusion to the Strait
connecting Lake St. Clair with Lake Erie, on which the city is
situated.

Duluth, one of the youngest cities of the Union, claims, accord-
ing to Bayard Taylor’s experiences, the remarkable name of Zenith
City of the Unsalted Seas !

Galena, in Illinois, owing its first name to the galena, a species
of lead ore found in abundance in the neighborhood, is indebted
to its remarkably quick growth for the familiar name of Crescent
City of. the Northwest.

Hannibal, in Missouri, is known as the Bluff’ City, being built
on high bluffs overhanging the river.

Hartford, in Connecticut, derives the name of Charter Oak City,
from a large oak-tree, now no longer in existence, in the cavity
of which the Charter of the Colony of Connecticut was concealed
by the Legislature when King James II. in 1686, sent over Sir
‘Edmund Andros to resume the charters granted to the colonies.

Indianapolis, in Indian a, has the perfectly modern title of Rai-
Road City, being the central point from which radiate an unusual
number of railways.

Keokuk, in Iowa, situated at the foot of the Lower Rapids of
the Mississippi River, is hence poetically called Gate City, since
here opens to navigation the largest river of the Union.

Louisville, in Kentucky, is in like manner called Walls City,
664 AMERICANISMS.

because it lies at the head of the Louisville Falls of the Ohio
River.

Lowell, in Massachusetts, famous for its immense cotton factories,
which it owes to the carefully-improved water-power of the Paw-
tucket Falls in the Merrimac River, ishence known as Spindle City.

Montpelier, in Vermont, derives its name of Green Mountain
City, from the name of the State, of which it is the capital.

Nashville, in Tennessee, situated on an elevation of 460 feet
above the sea, deserves its descriptive name, City of Rocks.

New Haven, in Connecticut, is known throughout the United
States'as Hl City, from the number and magnificent size of the
elm-trees that adorn the public squares and most of the principal
streets.

New Orleans, situated on a bend of the Mississippi River,
which assumes the form of a crescent, is hence called Crescent
City, a name now no longer appropriate, as the buildings have
long since extended far beyond the original half-moon.

New York, the largest city in the Union, is not inaptly called

Empire City, in appreciation of its size, wealth, and political in-
‘fluence. W. Irving, in his Salmagundi, is said to have been the
first to apply to the true metropolis of the United States the de-
rogatory name of Gotham, in allusion to the town of Gotham,
in Northamptonshire, England, as famous there as Abdera was
once in Greece, and noted for the lack of wisdom manifested by
its citizens on many occasions.

Philadelphia, in Pennsylvania, owes to the meaning of its Greek
name, the epithet, City of Brotherly Love, while the religious as-
sociations of its founder, W. Penn, and the number of Quakers
still residing there, have procured for it the additional name,
Quaker City.

Pittsburg, in Pennsylvania, derives, from its enormous iron
manufactories, the name of Jron City, by which it is universally
known.

Rochester, in New York, rejoices in the double name of Flour
City and Flower City, being as famous for her love of flowers and
unrivalled nursery-trade, as for the peculiarly fine flour made in
her numerous mills, for which the rich valley of the Genesee
furnishes the grain, while the falls of the river supply the water-
power.
*

NEW FORMS AND NICKNAMES. 665

‘Savannah, in Georgia, is the third city claiming the name of
Garden City, in virtue of the numerous and beautiful parks with
which it-is adorned.

Springfield, in Ilinois, in like manner derives from the count-
less gardens, in which most of the houses are embowered, and
from the beauty of its surroundings, the name of Flower City.

Saint Louis, in Missouri, is known as Mound City, being built
upon numerous mounds, believed to have been burial-places of the
former owners of the soil, the Indians.

San Francisco, in California, the youngest among American
cities of that size, finds compensation for the curt way in which it
is treated by Western men, who call it simply Frisco, in the high-
sounding name, Golden City, under which it is elsewhere known.
: Washington, the capital of the Union, still deserves ‘the hollow-
sounding title, City of Magnificent Distances, as the superb pub-
lic buildings and stately private residences in which the city
abounds, are still separated from each other by wide, waste tracts,
or clusters of wretched hovels. “Washington is also known as
Federal City, from its metropolitan character in the Union.

We append a list of the noms de plume, under which some of
the principal American writers are even better known than by
their own, while in the case of some others, not included here, the
real name is more frequently mentioned.

Carl Benson, Mr. Charles Astor Bristed.

Josh Billings, Mr. Henry G. Shaw.

Hans Breitmann, Mr. Charles G. Leland.

Ned Buntline, Mr. E. Z. C. Judson.

Philander Q. K. Doesticks, Mr. Mortimer Thompson,Fanny Fern’s
son-in-law.

Major Jack Downing, Mr. Seba Smith.

Fanny Fern, Mrs. Sarah P. Parton.

Fanny Forrester, Mrs. Adoniram Judson (née Emily
Chudbuck, 1817-1854).

Frank Forrester, Mr. Henry William Herbert.

Grace Greenwood, Mrs. Sarah Jane Lippincott (née
: . Clarke).
666
Gail Hamilton,

Marion Harland,

Irenzeus,

Orpheus C. Kerr, (pronounced Office
Seeker,)

Ike Marvel,

Petroleum V. Nasby,

Oliver Optic,

U. Donough Outis, (pronounced You
don’ know who’t is,)

Peter Parley,

Mrs. Partington,

K. N. Pepper, (pronounced Cayenne
Pepper)

Kate Putnam,*

Sparrowgrass,

Talvj,

Dick Tinto,
Timothy Titcombe,
Artemus Ward,
Christian Reid,
Mark Twain

<

AMERICANISMS.,

Miss Mary Abigail Dodge (of Hamil-
ton, Massachusetts). ;

Mrs. Virginia Terhune.

Rev. 8. I. Prime.

Mr. R. H. Newalls.

Mr. Donald G. Mitchell.
Mr. D. R. Locke.

Mr. W. T. Adams.

Mr. Richard Grant White.

Mr. Samuel G. Goodrich. (1'793-1860.)
Mr. B. P. Shillaber.
Mr. James M. Morris.

Miss Kate Putnam Osgood.

Mr. F. 8. Cozzens.

Mrs. (Theresa Albertine Zouisa von
Jacob) Robinson.

Mr. Frank B. Goodrich.

Dr. J. G. Holland.

Mr. Charles F. Brown.

Miss Fanny Fischer..

Mr. Samuel Clemens.
  
  
 
 
   
 
  

 

 
    
  
 

 
  

    

A. PAGE
PAGE | All Hallow’s Eve........ ARS | APIO: ccciwes exmeewxins
BRNOS1 vec cecmaonesees 342 | Alligator gar............ 383 | Arrow-root....
Abergoins «++. 430] Allow, to......00........ 433 wood
Aboard....... . 3842] All quiet on the Potomac 286 | Arroyo............ ‘
i get -. 842] All sorts of.............. SYS) Aryoccs see
ape ... 842] Allspice, Carolina....... 413) AST Can wos. seseascs ig
thorgies «+» 430 Allapaca and Alpaca.... 578} Asininity 579
About East . .. 164| Almighty ....00.0 0.0.22. 215 | Assentatious. ...... 239, 579
rig! ght.. bstasatae .. BVT Aaiahte DOW AR axcaesccsy 295 | Assign and sign, to. .... 580
Above Ho hend sevens BYE | Alonsenelscceni vans ae SIO }AR as ited nwniinns on 435, 42
ee crain we . 303 | Along, to get.. ves... B18 | Ater, arter

  
  
 
 
  
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
    
  
   
  
   

:. YT | Alter, to.. . 433 | Athens of America
. 430 | Alum root. 398 | Atlantic States....
Amalgamat 3} Atole..........

Abs fiatalate, to.
Academy.........
Accommodate, to.
Account, no. .
Accountabilit
Acknowledge the co
Across lots.

‘Adam
Admire, to.
Adobe

   

 

Advanced Fema:

 

   
   
  
 

 

 

 
   
 

Adventurer...
Advocate, to..
Afeared ........ . 4 384
ALOTE: sicieihscsecsceiese . 482 Raima to go the whole. 606
Aforehand.. ‘) 432 | Animnles .2.........-066 678) | Back... .sswxasoes caveats 437
Africanize, to. ip SOUT | STAD 255 socsaya ennvaisls. apeveuzeeioiasd 573 country ........... 163
Afterclap..... .. 577 | Anti-rent troubles ...... 147 down, to..... a.... 580
After night....... .. 432 | Antony over ........... 57 out, io is sieanisna ve vere 580
Again, once and.. . 513 | Anxious bench... gy BOE Oras rseveseraiecete 580
Aggravate, to . . 482 mourner. sat Be and orth ich eevee 437
‘Aguardiente. . . 183 | Anyhow................. 79 | Backbone .............. 267
Ague, aguy.. . 482 you can fix it... 57 | Backwoods ............. 163
du mb.. Anything else, not...... 579 | Backwoods country .... 163
APACIO s ccos cnr ineaes seer 13 preacher.., 234
Apishamore. ae Bacon and greens....... 397
Apple bug.. Bacon, to save one’s .... 630
butter... Bad sccxt cs. ceemaeneenress 43}
jack, John........ Bad lands...
JOOS Soicinininieiaiteci aid 84 | Badger State
-pie order, in..... 416 | Bag, to ....
sauce........ 143, 415 | Bagasse
slump......-.---- 415 | Baggage agent ....
toddy wee. 415 GAT 5, seg ausircaegsners 357
worm. 416 check ......... 358,
Applicant.. 438 ssmasher ....... 358
Appomattox.. .. 63} Bag: geging . j scaletarave Biase vayarees 438
Apportion, to. .. 254 | Bail one’s own boat, to . ae
Apportionment .. .. 254] Balance.. 311
Appreciate, to . -... 434] Bald Eagle.
Approbate, to ........... 1%5 | Baldface aie avers, 108)
Argufy, to..... - 239, 434 Baldheaded, to ‘Bo It ia. BOT
IAT IE 02 via acttescesstennesie’ stead 837 | Balk, to .. «+ 222
Arkansas toripicls oa: O22 | Bales exes 438
Armory...... +) 435 | Balsam ae 419
Around... -. 435 Pop! lar . 419
to . 685 | Baltimore Oriole 374

 

 

Arpent ..... “TT -¥9! Bamboo briars.......... 410
668 INDEX.

    
  
 
  
   
   
  

     
   
 
 
 
   

 

  
     
   
 
      
   
 
    
 
 
    
   
 
 

  
    
 
   
 

 

   
  
   
 

  
  

 

 

 

 

 

PAGE| - PAGE
Bamboozle. to .......... A388 | Be@ vse. ticiiaaee' ene sigan 189 | Blanket,Mackinaw...... 194
ee ene: batiding 190 to wear the... . 194
Band, to........ chopping . 190 | Blather, blatherskite ... 443
Banded Garfish. UMs ..... 205 } Blauser
Bango wees csaenses ab unter ...... 204 | Blauvelt ........
forddfamver eave: aay husking.. 190 | Blaze, to..........
j é line vetsess 204 | Blazes ............
Bank, shaving .. quilting. 191 | Blazing stars -. 406
Bankbill ... 2.0.2 : raising 190 | Bleeding Kansas........ 282
» Banker ........... stone . 190 | Blickie.............. 88, 443
Bankeress ........ tree. 205 | Blind, to go it.......... 828
Bannock.... Beef waed, 440) poker .. 828
Banquette Beer Blizzard... 443
Banter iscseressinrsoscaistons Begin .....
Baptiat, Hard Shell. 241 | Behead, to..
, Primitive 241 | Bellmare........
, Soft Shell 241 | Bellowses.......
Bar and bear 581 | Belly-guts.....
Bat ccciass.ive 316 | Belongings .....
Barberry ..... -. 420 | Belt, wampum.. Sis
Barkeeper .......... ». 316 Belt, LOressicttine ered wists
Bar, to tend......... ga MEE || PRRs cxdaiewinte Face simaicn up
Barbecue............ .. 70 | Bench, anxious..... -- 2384] Blowth.. 2... 04. 02cacoes 584
Barberize, to........ .. 581 | Bend, ‘above one’s....... 577 | Bluebacks..... «. 4%, 291
Barfoot <i, vosscave sears 207 | Bender....... .... .. 582] Blucts..., ... - 405
Bark a squirrel, £Oncs au 197 | Bermuda vine........... 412 | Blue Bellies... ++ 280
Batk, tO. svocersaenaesae 185 | Berth ........ 5 wee 859 Curls’... - 406
aD sae wrong tree, Best room .............. 93 Grass... -- 407
Stith a8 49. 186 | Bet, you... arouse $92 | HOW States... ce cneene B58
Barm, aaa Miao thesvnwe BOC CR edge srersicsaere x meee 441 Laws . : 272
Barnyards ..........2... Betterments........ Lights... eee 2B
Barraclade ....... ‘ Bettermost.. a BORO. scxaxaaseces 407
Barracooda . enn
Barranca.. Bibiok nein ie, REEL Statandea Arai
Barraque.. ‘
Barrens...... bis iaiais ace
Barren Grounds.,....... 179 | Biz............
Reindeer ..............5 179 Biz. Bone Lick y 663
Base ball........ 00.2... 438 | Big bugs................ 392 | Blummacbee, Blummic. 86
Basket-meeting .... 191, 236 dog of the tanyard.. 583 | Board on,............... 362
Based, 60th cre oancawe wae 883 figure, to go the .... 583 | Boarder, permanent.....
Striped. ce cies cane 3883 OMe ip. te secon nate 371 * transient .
woo mecting . on LOB d. 3 O8 Gicwr cecum ocnee
Bastile..,.......... . ++ 283 | Bilberry ..0........20... 408 to bail one’s own.. 343
Batteau ..... 3 Bile and boil 583 Bosal Kepeeeneral ake 585
Battercake ¥ Biled shirt .... , 442 | Bob ......... ne
Batteries, floating ...... 343 | Bill, to foot a.. .. 810 Bob around, to.
Battery soins wie macau 334 | Bill-fish...... .. 882 | Bobbery .....
Batture ..........-.0000. 97 | Bimeby.. .. 583 | Bobolink...
Bay....... --- 103, 439 | Bindery. . .. 442} Bob Ruly.. ... .
DEITY. ssinstevsssregertcarardin ge 403 | Bindweed . 404 | Bobwhite
TD scorns asc 440 black 404 | Bockey
Bweet ......cecceeee 422 rough 404 | Bodette .....
PAGO siinee vss toviowebes 97 | Birch... 103 | Bodewash
Bay State............... 660 | Birches .... 103 | Bodok.........
PAG TOS tos ia si oxscccisiomaenarnin O58 | Birdle oss cxoncwsae ave Ad | BODY se0ee
Bazar .... 440 | Birds’ Eye Limestone... 424 | Boggle, to
Best Oi cmedescemtss ee wane 440 maple ....... 419 | Bogue ..................
Bead, to draw a. 196 | Biscuit 44 Bogus. wai so
Bear a hand, to. .... 843 | Bit, a Bohea Tea
i .. 407 Jong 45 Bolt, to,.....
meat ...... -. 202 | Bittersweet Bombazine Rips.
State . 658 | Black Code Bombproof. .
Beast ... .. 581 [7 fish. Bonepits... 3e
Beat, to. 440 Bones..-..... .. 685
all hollow, to . 440 to make no
the Dutch, to . 83 Boneset...... 206
Bonnet, poke
Bonny clabb 444
Bony Fish 383 ©
5 Boohoo .. .. 585
to work like a... 208 | Blades... Book, to. «» 445
Becaise and because.... 440 | Blanket.... Bookstore see. 445
DCU cxcusays ic texews 171 LOOME say ne ye nuscesesees 369
   
  
   
  
   
 
   
 
 
  
 
 
 
   
  
   
   
 

Boonder........
Boost, to......
Boosy, boozy.
Bouguet......
Border Ruffian ..

Bounty-jampel
Boquet river.
Rouben. ciatiptt
Bowdark..........
Bower, right and le
Bowery
Bowie-knife.....
Bowman's Root.
Box Elder....... - 1
BOY 5js0ici2teases 445
Boys " BUG isa tessa 280
pekee oy aSisiesrraibadsisetieet ee
rakes, Cypress.........
Branch......... ssssee>- 446
Brandywine............. 446
PABD 5 isis cise sewareroee v0 446
Brash iC@....cc cscs anes +e 446
Brash isc ccinsmarniens vawne, 446
Brave . 36
Bravely ..... - 446
Bread- oe - 899
Breadstuff .... sees 447
Break, to... .......-.06 447
Break-bone Fever....... 586
Break down ............ 447
Up, tO........60-- 188
Bream ....... eee e eee 381
Bretheren......... ..... 224
Bretsel.... - 144
Brevet Hell... « 284
Brewis..... - 7
Brickley .......... - 586

Bricks, a thousand.
Brief

Briers, sensitive
Beings 60 scsecgeasavine sy
Britches au. pissebesi

 

Broadbill

Broadhorn™

Brokeress

Broncho .

Brooklyn

Broom-corn......

Brother Jonathan .

Brown, to do..... _
bread .. - 447
stone... . 447
Thrush. - 376

Bubbler....,... - 883

Buck, to.. + 827
ague. - 208

- beer. « 142

eye. « 422
fever - 208
fly... . 209
negro + 209
ALLY... 22.55 - 587

earty as a.. 5. 208
Buckeye State..... . 661

Buckshot war.

 

of the woods.
Bullion State

Bummer

Bumper

Bumpus

BOM eicinsa sisi

Bunch-grass.

Buncombe.. 2
Bundle, to.. . 440
Bungtown... 587
Bunk........ . 587
Bunker 67, 112
PRUT GY, 3 RI Su. eeslevs Sucaesbieae 380
Bureau. . 111, 448
BOPP A ics sisencrapacied ces esis 383
Burgaloo ................ 09
Burglarize.. 587, 655
Burgled.. alas Cais 653
Burr-Oak.. 47
BUI’ «05 seacccccs 120
Burrowing Owl.... 718
Bursted and burst... 587

Bury the hatchet, to.. a
Bus 89,

Butternut...
Button-bush....2...2...,

wood
Buzzard........
By and again

Caballada...........
Cabbage.......
Cabbage-head.
Cabinet......
Cable, to. ...
Caboodle, to. ots
CADOORGS scissccsseracess essa sieves

   

Cache

   

 

   
  
  
   

669
PAGE
CANO aw secsic oi seen wees 34 106
Cain, to raise............ 323
Cakes, to hurry up the... 610
Calabash ............... 120
CRSDO08E aes che exc aee 135
Calas s i534 a5 sien. sisisiscersisi 107
Calculate, to............. 418
Calf-kill. . w. 413
Calibogns.. 589
Calico... T1, 384
CAN setters sinsorsiasine sieiate « ce 235
providential.. 236
Callithuamp 589
Calumet... ..
Camfire.......
ATID. af ic snatsccrare weve ietins
half-faced
loggin

 
 
  
  
  
  

Canacks, Canu cks,
BUNUCK Ss 555 caiects, sions 589

 

 

  

 
   
  
  
    
   
  
    
  

birch
to paddle one’s
OWD.......... 24, 348
Cant, to..... -- 449
Cantaloupe.............. 410
Cantankerous 589
Can’t come it............ 589
Cantico........... eee eee 45
Canvass, t0............-- 270 «
Canvas-back.... 280
es Cafion. 123
Capeiacc damtisen 203
Cape May Goodies 386
Capital, political. 266
COpper nea veces es 319
Captain. . 3859
Caption..... . 449
Eaptivale, to.. a
ee: 105, ibe
CALI bOUW.; ex 5cnexseressins
Carlicues, curlicues. 589
Carolina pink....... 399
Carpet-bagger. 288
weed.. 404
Carry... - 104
t - 449
Carryall. 107
Carry on, 590
Cane piige on. 590
Casa....... 125
Case.
Cashaw ...
Cashunk....
Cassareep .......-.-
Castafiag......-.-- =
Casten......--
Castor Tree....- 208
Cat, sick as a@..... 597
whipping the. 648
Catalpa . .......-. 57
Catamount.......- 368
Catawamptiously.. 590
Catawba grape...- 56
Cath. ccoc0i08 SaaS 372
670 INDEX.

   
  
   
   
  

     
  
   
   
 
   
  
  
  
   
  
     
 
 
    
  
  
  

 
 
   
   
  
  

 

 

 

   
 
 
  
 
 
 
  

   
 
  
    
  

 

 

   
  
  
   
  
 

°
PAGE PAGE
CAL Ch, LO viomrircareedevore Chist and Chest ........ 452 aye sigistieanse Havejerotaiwiaes 384
Catch’ UD ss sajvveausa sais des une 5 en ots so
Catercornered........... Chivalry ..
Cathshis,<csicicincsaccaa ass Chock, to
Cateups is: sinc aacicacoascars ‘ta TD ccate ne ti
Cab sic:5 saincisem aire eteniee 9 Chogsett....... “66 | Cochranites......... "1.
CALEY: saison tansaean, aioe Choke off, to.. .. 591 | Cockarouse.............
Catwhipper x Aatatauccaaie Chokeberry .. SSengisis 403 | Cocked hat, to knock
WATCHES! tmjtex in saotaate Chomp, to.............. 451 | INO Byvissvasedaniin 591
Caution, to be a . ee Choose, to.. .... 453 | Coco grass reas 408
Cavallard .....0.. 0. - Chopping-bee. . 190 | Coffee tree. 416
Cavern Limestone ...... Chore........ . 453 | Coffin boat.... 334
Caveson acsasaenses aves Chouse, to... 300 | Cohog, Quahau, san 30
Cavort, to. ‘ Chowder,...... ‘ Cohosh ........... vee BT
Cedar...... .. 844 | Coincidence .. 455
black EES ENS .. 242 | Cold i alae » 207
red... BOD 2555 ween .. 382 slaw . 85
swamp. “* 387 | Collide, to 1... .2.2002222 455
cemelery: -lot. Ghadke, venedle Y £. 370 | Colored man » 115, et
Census.. DE ssacors ss aeace -. 453 people... 3 ». 2BL
Cent ..... Chuck-Will’s-Widow.... 375 | Come around, to. -. 592
Eoueenl UNDE: 55 asawewe 26, 188, 454 down, to. 592
Sone ‘ Chunky ............ seees 454 AM; 10.96.21. 592
fb « MOP ee xaseeer Chunk yards.. + 26 out, to. + 231
Chain “chained} light Church ............ : 931 | Comeonters..12111! . 592
MING. oes on os ara 17, 451 to join the...... 231 | Come over, to.......... 592
i we. 451 membership . 231 the gum game, to 209
: GUN EC esi s,s ccin sre « . 104 up to the scratch, 318
Chalk, Ae : Mbue ters ave ive 318 | Cider, all talk and n Comical, i445 ccs. « 455
to come up to... 818 | Circle........ . 245 | Common doings .
Champ, to.............. 451 | Circulate, t Company ......
Champlain.............. 96 | Circumstance . Compass-plan
Chances. 2 w20i sergesenis 451 | Cisco, Siskovit ...... EDU eat
Change, to meet with a . 231 | City of Brotherly Love. Concern .
base, to........ 286 Magnificent Dis- Concemed -
Chaparral ..... 2 . 6 Condeript.
Chaperon, ti Conduct, to
Charm ..... Conducta ..
Charter Oak City Conductor
Chatters, Captain Conepate.
Chaw, to.. Conestoga h
Chaw’ up, to f Conferee. .
WROD Carian sotind bisscaieas aie 40! Congress.....
Cla: Congressional .......... 252
Congressman ...........
Coniacker. .
Cheesebox....... ...... 335 Conk .....
Chequerberry . are Sass 402 Connecticu
CHORE sssexowscans ree e4 8 409 Connection ....
Chew, to. “3 451 as happy asa.. '%0, 345 int
Chewink...............- 377 | Clapboard es 192] COMED sanveccesaees
Chicke.. . . ‘T1] Clape....... i Conniption ...
Chickabiddy « soo 380 | Classic ae . 662 | Considerable. .
Chickadee...... i9, 877 | Claybank .. . 454 | Constable..... eas
Chickahominy.......... 42/ Clean ....... . 591 | Constitutionality .
Chickaree....... -+. 869! Clean thing ............. 591 | Contemplate, to...
Chickasaw Plum. . 57 ticket . . 269 | Continental.....
Chickberry ....... ... 402 | Clear out, to . 591 | Continentaler ...

472 the track. .. 860 | Continental Damn
-.. 412) Clearing ...,.... -. 188 | Contraband.......
. 264] Clearweed . .. 406 | Contraptions ca
394 | Clergywoman ........... 656 | Convenient.......... ... 457
Child, this ..... NE sata, saceistein . 803, 454 | Conviction, struck under 231
coe Hee wescetersaie’s BOR WO lh rsiscstnes arsjstauetaratans Cookey 83
ey, chimley..
Chimisal Hee waves aiaveseinra 120
Chinch
opm eee
inquapin .
ono

Chicken-fixings

    
       
  
 
  

  

 

    
 
  

     

Chipmunk ..
Chipper built
Chirp, chirrup, to... Clockmuth Coenties’ slip.

 

 

Chisel, to........-..000. 297 ' Clothier............... a Coot, poor............ 2. 209
 

Copper................4.
Sopparkally, ‘

Copperhead.
pel berry...

 

ae ae 2 ca
Corlaer, Lake. ~
COM cin ssia amon sacar

  

Cornel tree

 

aod
Corp and Corpse.. ......
Gorparaslty: erased oiea oy ta
a ite) at
Cot-betty.. 5
Cotton........ aisicinte aleve dreze

 

 

      
    
  
   

 

41
Cough, hacking « 484
Council-fire ...... - 86
Counterbrand, to. .» 211
County......... «+ 238
Coup....... - 108
Court House 252
Courtland,...........-.. 29
love.....
Coverclip. “384
Coverlid.. 458
Cow.. 458
Cow-berry 402
bird. 875
catche: 357
cumher . 459
ass 408
ick. . 593
pea..... - 401
Cowpen bird...,........ 375
Coyote..... ied
to..
Grab, grass...
Cracker. .
Crackers. . 1... ..esseeeeee 250
State . avéar Ol
Cracklings......

 

- Crack up, TOisekeag sso

INDEX.

 

 

   

PAGE
Crampbark.............. 401
Cranberry....... ....... 401
Crawfish, cray-fish, to. . 262
Crease, to........ 0.0... 197
Creature, critter.........
Creek, ctick...... . 80, 460

‘ay. sites 180
Creepy cys scccrsanae vane a. 380
Creole........ 17

French. 112, 118

State... 660
Creosote plant... 410
Crescent City 664

of the West. 663
CYEVERR Gs 5 cusaatimamees 98
Crispin. . x

Criss Cross.
Critter, creature
Croaker....

Crook..

    
  
    
  
  
    
 
 
    
 
 

Cruise, to goon a. 344

Cruller.......... 83

Cry, to...... 460

Cucumber-tree 422

Cudweed...... 406

Cuffy.. ... 152

Curfew 460

Curious. . 460

Curled Maple. .. 419

Curtitude . 239, 460

Cuss......... wees 214

maean. 214

Cussedness.. 214

Custodize, to. 655,

Cut capers, to. .. 824
didoes, to........... 324
dirt, to... 222, 594
GLASS eeeaactnans teas 408
shines, LOdvetanice ai. 3.
stick, to.......... 594
BWA, to.. wee. 594
UP, tO... . ee 324

"CMe se nic caeane 461

CULOCS «ss cscemsieciccre ess

Cymblins

Cypress..........

brakes

Daddock.

Daddyism

Daffa-dow

Daft......

Dahloneg:

Damage

Dander

Dansy

 

 

Deacon.......
Deacon off, to.
a calf,

,
broke
Deadening .

Deadfall.
Deadhead. aicearcoys

” to dress tri cae:

Decapitate, LOnwamaesie. sa 2
eck

Deed tO x cserecits vars sieswiacsd
DBEY scecwaen s2KhRdnmins

Define, to...
Delegate .......
Demoralize, to.
Denomination. .
Department ....
Departmental
Depot.........

Devil-fish .
Devil's bit. .
Devil’s darning- needle..

    
   
   
   
 

Dew and do, to.......... 463

Dewberr y. eae
Dickens. .

 
  

 

vee the’ Enahen to...
Hoe COs ohh the taissss

Ding, to

Dining-room servant...
Dip tobacco, to
Dipper.
Dipsy ...
DIEU. instore ies 3 rarartianoreiatn

 

GOP Bia voie 5 Sscssr ans ssttnoring 222
Disfellowship, to ....... 238
Disremember, to........ 463
District

Due ia : ‘ auiteremnsenets :
Divide..

Docious
Docity.
Doctores

  
  

   
    
672

   
     
   
    

 
 

Doggery........ 21%, 313, ‘ot
DOP ONG: .c25 cscs er 2 cane
Dog village. . OL
Dozwood seisupacaaure « 423
Doin’ and doing. . 597
Doings, great...... . 593
Doings, hard..... - 598
Domestics...... - 802
Dominies... . 464
Donate, to...... . 175
Donation-party. . 236
Done and did. . 598
Donock..... 84, 599
Don’t..... 599
Doolittle... . 112
Dooteroomus. 296
OEE, oc sices 599
Do tell!....
Doughfaces.
nut..
Dove.......
DOWD: £05.55 sswesaniv se

Drains

  
 
     

 

Dees no griocn kant 'g

to death, to.

to kill, to...

up drunk, to.. 596
Drink..... Pie see 600
Driver sceiciswis ys = 465
Driving the nail 198
Droger.... 8s

Drop, to

Dycd in the wool
Dyspeptic

 

 
 
    
     

INDEX.
E.
PAGE
Mba 1O ieises acs en wears oe o6 291
Ear..... 39, 44
smu . 547
roasting... . 39
Harth-nut .-.......... 67, 401
East, the E
about 1
Eastern States
Eat, to.....
Eccentric...
Edibles and bibibles,
Editorial ...........
Educational

   

Educator.....
Eel-grass...

      
  
   
  
 
 
 
 
    
 
  
 

  

 

 

Enthuse, to. . .. 467
E Pluribus Unum. 257
Erupt, to....... 654
Escrod ..... 340
Esquimaux. 18
Esquipongol 37
Esquire. . 467
Essence-ped. 54
Estamia.... 128
Eternal... 215
Euchre, to
Evening..
Everglades . 479
Everlasting. 215, 406, 601
Excelsior State.......... 661
Excurt, to 5
Executive 52
Expect, to.... .. i
Experience............. 231
falling....... 235
jerking sieges 235
religion, to.. 231
whirling. oes 285
HIS PPCSE-COD 0 ondine anne B57
Eye, all in your..... seeee 601
Byes skinned............ 199
BE.
Face the music, to. ..... 601
Factory cotton.......... 468
Pair Off, tO. 6. cccsecsceviass 468
shake
5 es to.
Wallcen scisive
Polls CIty ss canes
Falling exercise......... 235
weather...... .. 463

 

 

Family
Fancy..

Fandan; ZO.
Farallon
Fare, to settle the

Farmer

Fatticows, fetticus.. ....

Favor, to
Fay, to...

Feaze, feeze,

‘Febuary and
Federal City

Federals, Feds. i
REO ZE scceses sinssissestion Scien 3 46
Fellow countrymen
Fellowship, to

Female

Ti

snake
to sit on the

iding ..

 

ebruary...

Virginia..........

Festival

Fieldhand, .
Fieldmartin..

Fighting Joe.
Fight the fire, t

Figure Four

Filibuster.

Fillipine. ....
Finding-store ..
Finikin, finicky. ‘

Fip
Fire, to

to build a

do:

Fireman...
Firewater
Fireworks
First chop

to

zs

 
   
 
 
 
  

 

 

 

Fits and starts, Disses

Fits, to
Fivesho

Fizzle

give

LER vivian denen

  

 

   

 

 

     
EIR FE

 

   
 
 
  
 
  
  
  

PAGE:
Mlak68): 25s: seencae eas ea 335
Flambuetious. . . 602
Flank,
Flapjacks
Flashy
Flat, to

Flats
Fleabane vocseccne ve os wes
Miles hrs ac ve. c5 were 473
Picker. -eicsiases seawvas 379
Flintcorn ........ ...-.. 39
WDD ssstenseeiarssa eiciadsjesese iain 473
Flipflopussed .......... 603
Floater .......... 262
343

Floating battery.
Flock

 

 

Pout City viscera 5 664
Flouring mill | oo. 473
Flower City. 664, 665
Flummadaddle... -. 338

 

 

 

  
  
  

Hiummus, to.. 602
Fiunk, to . 473
Flunkey .. 603
Flutterwheel. «. 473
Fly and flee, to 473, 603
around, to .. .. 603
Hessian 392
off the handle, to ... 195
white man’s... ..... 2
eae HISD scrssiarnsawes
Fodder....... ....
Bogy; O10 scicisisn secs vie
Foalded and foaled! 77:
BOK G ssiyer cas veeia sayaymera
FOlKS yy cies ax vensiuaronae 44
‘Folke, white............ 4%4
Folles avoines .... ..... 409
Foolery... 474

Fooling.

 

  

 

Foolfis) 385
Foot a bill, to. 310
to pull 625
Force .... - 495
For certain .......... .. 451
Forefather’s Day... 275, 573
Forehanded 47
Forest City
For Webs eveuxsaswe aa 32!
porgel and forgotten ..
out, to
Fornent.....
For short..........00 000
Forty ‘leven .
Fotch, fotched.. 471
Found and fined ........ 602
missing, to be... 617
TE canines seitaaaeae 603
Fox, to. atewigins 481
Arel mteohe mums 412
BYAPC .. 6... eee ee 412
PATI epee os Sacuessisiars 245
Fractional Currency .... 291
Freedman
Free labor .
NONE stein che cece

 

 

 

INDEX.
’ PAGE
FYGG 60 occ ccsues 1%8, 277
BOUIN peo eves avs 178
stone peaches ..... 421
State........ 658
Freeda, 00 5 cscs 215, 475
Fresh, ‘freshet 2/2... 476
Brijoles.. leita GbR caine 122
Frills . 602
Frisco .
Frog
Frolic, ¢
Frost tis
SVDIGE sc. scoreredroeratives 648
WOE ocousdanioterks 406
ee
ERAMUD) cos deena, (ia Sarttie 4
Full, hulled, and filled... 476
Fun, to poke Fhe, watesisareioned 521
Funeral........0..0000.. 238
none of your... 239
Funeralize, to .......... 239
Funk, to..... 50%

Punkify, to.
Furr and far

Fyke

Gab, Gob

  
 
 
   
   

Gallantize, to .
Gallantry ....
Gallinipper.
Gallivai to.
Gallowses ....
Galoot.-..s0.ces08
suletieey, Yankee .
Gamiollie and gambling
Gambrel roof......
Gander, gone .

    
 
 
  
  

party
Gansevoort
eae
Gar

 

Garden cay aon

Garrison
Garrote...
Gas .....
to..

GAL sais sesnsn oS TH TRALEE
GAC Cities scceseerecett
Gauley, by....-....---++
TAT a ccave. stars niatdnaieceodieutasie
Gavel. ..
Gawnicus.
Gee, to
General Assembly
Court

Gentle, to.....-.........
Gentleman. .
Georgiana
Gerrimander, to

 

 

603
Furrow,to draw a Seah 7
8

 
  
 

338
604.
477

 

673

PAGE

Get upon one’s ear, to .. 479
religion, to..... 230, 479
Gigging. mypitianaivtees: sie: 8S aia 339
Gimbal. JAWOG 55 apse eg 604
GHB ONG eae satis ates aus dene 156
Gird, to take al... 7 479
Girdle, WO iii seins oes one 185
Git and POG cise 5 <cepatenceieiass 604
Give Jessie, to.......... 612

  

 

  

 

 

 

Given name . 479
Glade....... 480
Glass, to. 480
GIBZe? cies iawn: camry nets 480
Glut ..
Go
on a cruise, to
ahead, to .......
Goaheadifying aia
Goaheaditive............
Goaheaditiveness. é
Go back on, to.....
by, to.. 2 -te2
Wy tQease diacistscee So 605
‘baldheadea, to.... 207
Wie tv ety cziasais 328
str 605
Go off half Cocke “to... 197
on lays, t - +. 803
one beten tos... 5. 829
the big figure, to... 583

the whole animal, to. 606
dog, to.... 606
hog, to.. c

  

Goldam, by..

    
    
  
   
 
 
  

Golden City .. 665
ye .. - B8L
Golly, by. .. 595
Gondola. ... 480
Gone, to be. 606
beaver. - 208
coon ... 51, 208
gander . 607
goose . 607
pose oposite. i : ys
oney, gon '
Gonokt © 607
Goober ........ 400
Goodman
Goods
Goody.....
Goose, to .....
gone ..
Gopher........
Gorram, by.. .. 5
Gosh by epee 595, 607
Goshdang, by .. 59
Got or gotten.... -. 47
Gotham..... 607, 664
Gothamite. .. 60
Gouge, to. 218, 298
Governor...... a » 258
Government... - 252
Governmental... «. 262
Gownd or gown......... 607
674 INDEX.

    

       
     
 
 
  

 
   

 
   

  
  

   

 
  

   
  
   
  
  
 

 

     
  
  
 
  
  

   
     
 
  
   
  

 

     
 
  
 
 

   
   
   
 

 

 

PAGE PAGE PAGE

Grad Os sicceneinsiierraccen 861, 482 | Gut............6 wees 97, 483 | Heir, to .......... ccc ceee 487

480 i i Helderberg War. 167
Hell-bender .... 389

EVEL severe 378

gate .. 80

Grandacious. .. Help, male and female... 487

Grandiferous.. Helter-Skelter........... 1. 497

Granite State.. Hiems and Hames.... ... 608

Grant, to...... Henbiddy........... .... 380

Grants, land. Hendy and handy.... ... 488

Grapevine land 407 2 | Henclam wx 16

Grass and hay, between. pa Hacking cough.......... 484 | Henhawk....

GRRE OG cise isin Sea NORE 377 | Hackmaback.. .... 57] Herb-doctor

Grass widow .-«. 481 | Hadn’t.........

Graveyard. «-. 481 oughter.

Gravy .. 481 | Hail from, to..

Gray ia ... 841 | Haines ....

Greased lightning....... 359 | Hain’t

Qren ser csi canswccwccenssie 1 Haigua.. cine

Greasewood.... 121 | Hair, snit of.............

Great big.. to raise, to lift..... 36 | Hessian-fly. .

Rait . Tae ic erterancnavitaraaieeinet 385 | Hickory.. -

West... Half-cocked, to go off.. 197 armchair 58
Greenbacks . at Half horse, half alligator. 347 Catholic .. -. 58
Green Mountain City.... 664 | Half SAVEd..... cscs eee 484 Old ocucsexens any 58

State... 662 Halibut, holibut......... shirt.... wee 58

River axareae .. 200 | Halves, havvers trousers........ 58
Greens......... .. 897 | Hammocks, hommocks.. 178 Unionist........ 283

bacon and. ae BOF | MONG ic scwaeee ves ore aces 484 | Hicksite... ............. 242
Greensauce.... . 897 | Handkerchief. . Hides (Os ccsigey sce aieaeectesc 488
Griddles. . 2 ae Handround.............. High? for. siete usiess BRD:
Gridiron... Ilandle, to fly off the .... 195 | Highhelia. 616

and doughboys. ae Handsomely... Asien .. 341 | High Hole. 879

Griffin. . 107 | Hand trunk.. -. 358 Dutcher 608

Grind a 260 | Hangbird. . .. 374] Highfaluting. 271

Grit. . 482 | Happen in, to . 485 | Higher Law. 253

clea 482 | Happify, to... 239 | Hind-sight. 196

Gritty... 482 Hap yas a 345 | Hitch...... 609

Grizzly .. 1, 202 | Har 485 to, to 609
bear. 202 405 up, to 609
meat.. 202 383 | Hity-tity. . 488

Grocery .... 302 304 | Hoarding -. 488

Groceries,. . . 802 608 | Hoary ‘litmouse... .. 3iT

Groggery... . 315 304 | Hobble, to............... 13

Gropel. sixcsueouns . 884 .. 241] Hobble-bush. .. eeeg AES

Groundhog....... . 370 -. 485 | Hockey-stick............ 4838

meade - 869 . 608 | Hoecake . .. 40
NUE sass swe . 401 802 | Hog.......... ane
puppies .. 358 485 and hominy........
squirrel .... . 869 | Harlem.......... 5 ale, tightand horse ight 609

Grouse........... . 371 | Hash, to settle one’s .... 631 to go the whole..... 606

pinnated .. . 878 | Hasty Pudding....... . 40 wallows..... 3s

Grubley ......... . 887] Hatchet, to bury the..... 86} Hoist, hyst, to..

Guano,... ...... . 72 to dig up the... 36 Holden and held. .

Gubernatorial... « 252 to throw the.... 385] Hold on, to. a3

Guess, tO......... . 482] Hate out, to ........ . 190 over, to...

Guinea grass... . 408 | Haul w eeds, Oss scan 486 | Holibut...... te Bi
keet.... . 879 | Havvers, halves. . . 484] Holloo, hollow, to... ‘489, 609
negro. .... -». 11%] Hawkeye State....... : 659 | Hollow, to beat all... . ° 6u9

Gulch 123 | Hawkins’ whetstone .... 216] Holpen and helped.. .... 489

Gulf States ant ene Hay, between grass and. 208! Holt............ -. 490

Gum....... wl Darrackie. ses seca vee 88} Homely ...... -. 490

Gum, by.. "tor Haze, tOsciesciciccss 486 | Homestead Act. -. 1%

Gumbo “ : Hiead, to puton a. 626 | Hominy, homony. ig, ZA:

Gum game....... i THEW Dyenaieccng aya snaceienesns . 486 beater - &

Gummy ...... . 6 Hearn and heard... . 486 | Hommocks... 1 2

Gum sucking. .-. 420 | Ilearty as a buck... - 208} Honey......... -» 205

Gum tree..... 204, 209 | cath Hen......... . 3878 fugle, to «. 205

Gumption.. ... 483 | Heathen Chinee.... » 155 locust... .. 417

Gunboat........ .. 843 | Hebiddy........ «. 880 suckle. . we. 414

Gundalo, gondola . 480 | Heel, to.. +. 209) Honorable... 258, 490

Gunstick........ ‘) 532 | Heft). » ABT} HOOd. 2. eee eee eee ee 490

Gunter,.... . 307 Hefty. .. 487} Hoodlebug...... ........ 393

GUT iscsi, sokaawa tees gastos BOD LALO CT  vecsscssiny gears aanccees 487' Hoolikan..........-...68 386
    
  
    

Hoople ice si 0scssiiecenne
oa State.

Hopping mad.

 

392

eucker.. - 387

FLOURC isis aie . 221

one. . 221

foot.. 390

milliner 490

nettle 406

sense 221

this. 221

Hospital. 490

Hoss, liv: 221

this. 221

Hot and hi 610

House, the 252

Householdr. 490

Housekeep, t 491

Housen and houses ..... 490

Hove and heaved........ 491
LOW? co oes. 2 ncrem yond ance 5

Ilow come ?
llow de?...

 

  
  

BD eur tetrs ons srerasrenye aay 4
of the Universe 491, 662
Hubbites .......... 02. 525
Huckleberry ............ 403
above pri
simmon. 50
pasture . * 403
Hugging frame.......... 351
Hull and whole 1.1212... 491
Hum and home ......... 491
AMON ec cveessasorecees 491
Humbitdes ca ccccsevsnaee 37
Humbly and homely .... 619
Humbug..........-.. 005 A
Hummer.

 

Humming-bird.
Une ‘yas a graven range t
Hunky-dory..
Hunt, to
for meat, to..
skins, LO xtecers 3
Hunting ohitrt aeeuaiest eae
Hurlgate .. x
Hurricane. . :
Hurry, Hopkins ! don’t.
up the cakes |
PAPAS.

  

   
   

 

 
  

Hush up! 611

Husking... 45

bee... 190

Hwish!.. 492

Hyper, to ...... 492

Hyst, hoist, tO avacaecaan 489
L

   
 
 
 

TOR os 3 series 4, vtec
Idaho :
Idea, I have no .
re (oil), to strike...

imbecillty. mieeellaneaws a 7

 

INDEX.

 
   
   
     
    
  
  

Immediately ........... 493
Improve, to . 240, 498
Improvement. : 240, 493
Improver . we. 169
In and into. . 493
In’ards..... 493
jnagPendent 494
Indian . 21
65
38
415
25
25
25
25
415
at
‘ 26
orchards . 27
physic . 398
reserves. . 27
TICe 2.55 409
sign.... 199
summer.. 27
tobacco .. 415
turnip.... 399
Infare........ 236
Inheaven, to.... 611
Ingens, Inguns.. 611
Injine......... 611
Injuncted ... 653
Inner man .. 494
Institution........ - 279
Interfere, to....... 494
Intervale.......... 176
Interview, to........ 494
TnVit@nssee wavwerens ~. 494
Irish potato............. 400
Tron-Clad Oath.......... 287
Trou City..... 02... eee. 664
TEON.AWEEO) osrcssesinseieie sig one 404
Island 5
Tb isscies 4

 

 

 
   

  
 
  

dag ..... 495
Jamboree ........... 611
PAM UP: ssvaicnes sects cecions 611
Jamestown weed....... 404
Jaw, tO wscamarsexresers 495
Jayhawker...........+-- 282
Jeames and pe baat 495
Jcan and Jane . vee. 495
DED wycsere pave cress 250
Jeff. Davis’ Box. ...... 28.
612

Jenooary and Janu as

Jerked meat . 73
Jerks ........ » 235
Jersey tea ....... 396

lightning. 415
Jerusaleml....... 611
Jessie, to give .......... 612

 

 

  
 
  
 
   

 

675

GE

Jest, dist, an Jet Mfieidiac’ 495
VOW tO some wantin. scimers 495
Jewhiliticen 1. ! 611
Dy CO sc iccsarnssiiie sew irene 349
Jigger.... . . B38, 394
Jim Crow. -.. 153
Jimson ..... « 404
dine and join . oe. 495
dingo, by..... «.. 612
TOD ietirae asics 90, 495
Jobn Chinaman......... 155
DOI: curacemew en erese 296
Jobnny....... . 155, 280
CBC) cic ssssecreies 40
Reb...... 280

fom a church, to. 231
tidhana tasasssere tatauele 496
Tonia, Brother....... 251
Jonakin.......... 40
Jornada 127
Joss house 155
sticks.... 155,
Judge of electio 273
the Plain 120
Judiciary, the.. 252
Jump, to...... 170
at, to. 612

from the 612

with, to 612
Jumper....... 496
June Rise. 181
JUD K coy seeacaxnagarieeee 496

K.

Kaatskill ........... 2... 80
Kamas Root... 399
Kanaka........ B
Katoose scat . 145
Katydia 390
ISOC) cssscaes'sis 345
boat 337
Keeler vos ics 345
Keel over, to............ 345
UP 5 CO sis eiscescitrnnaerane 345
Keeliub.... ....... ... . 845
WCCO? sc casas oeteainss 496
Keep, to......... 496 |
Keeping room. 496
379

  
 
 

   
    
 
 

   
   

Kerswosh..

Ketchup an

Key and quay..

Keystone State . 661
Kibblings...... 340
BAG, tO. sje seewersiere onal 319
Kid 3 conte vecigucceeswcars 340
Killdee, kill deer........ 378
FRED: cn amigacenaes 21
Killing ...........---0006 612
Killing time..... 497
Killock, Killick. 496
Kills......-...- 80
Killy-fish.... 20
Killy, Barred. 67
Kilter.. 497
Kind, kinder. . 673
Kinderhook.......-.....+ 81
676

 
  
  

PAGE
Kinqings si ccave cnaeens 500
Kinder sorter .. 613
King-Bird.. vase BUD

fish 884, 385
BID G scenes ciciaseioiese Bee 97
Kinni-kinnick........... 36
Kiskitomas ............. 59
Kiss Cnrl...... 613
Kit and biling.... 583
Kiver and cover. .. 497
Kivered...,........ sion AO
Knickerbocker.......... 82
FED LCs tO sisiana savracieiorancans,
BNO sewn sisigeraineonesctaiine's
KnODby vv ceaescaacajasy ss
Knock about, to.........

down, to......... 320

into a cocked hat,
wae 591

 

0.
Knuckle-duster.

  
 
 

Koolslaa. 85
Kootoo, t 156
Kooyah...... 63
Kriss Kingla 145
Kruller.... 83
Ka-klux. 289
KNEE acssiccaist aaron gids 290

*

L.

La, laws, lawks!........ 613
Labrador tea............. 39
Ladies’ tresses ..........

Lake Champlain
DAW iiss vas csiniyseire
States ssvcencaseaws
Tam, Oise sas
Lambaste, to....
Lambs’ Quarter.

 

 
 
 

LAM PCreed a cssa-s-ssseeiginioigis
Land grabbers...
STAUB css warerarsiorea
of Steady Habits.
Office...... 06. 169, 174
surveyor........... 172
warrants........... 174
Landscapist............. 657
TL Os cs saecaist aisha StS Veadiet 498
Laptea........ . cece eee « 613
DADE AE sins stoscin sisiasscasaianenatoceie 130
BAvraps Use sseeetesnie-sieraioues 2
TGA BRO: oie. nsussseniodsaionugieresbiere
Latanier
Lather, to
Latter ‘Day Saints........ 243
Laurel . 414
Lave!..
Law, to.

 

Lawing, to go to.........
Lawrence
pases nists

and lie
lock.
out, t
Laze, to...

  

INDEX.

Lean-to, linter
Leaves t0cc asses... cedsas
Left bower
TGCS cca im nin gece saree
Legislature. .
Lengthily.... 0.0.0.2...
DON SUAVE cwccpawiccasa. Bier
Let her up, to

slide, to ........
Leh Ons, £05 c.sra: ess ss assscinicins

on a broad.
Prairie .

Leverworscht .
Levy...
Lick...
Lie, to.....
Lieutenant....
Hees lieves

DADS tO ore: eacsen ave

ON The arse ndireeeieia a

Ligat bread... 02s!

WOO" teaeeexe gains
Lightning Express. .... 359
Like and as............. 500
GANS, PAB ars: <.a.siisierejeievocaio's 500
Limb and leg............ 500

  
 
  
    
  

Lin euleler, linkister.

Liquor, t esata aversion 215.
Lit and lighted enn 501
Little Mac...............
PHA escassceisnne sear
ROY’ sicipareare-aiye
DIC savacaemeaicnsae oor
oak
DOBBS csironessoreans
Liven up, to.......-.....
Liver, touch of the......
Lives, lieves............. 501
TANTO asain is Biissese BG iidiaie o'a18 124
Lak, CO's asso ssciass eeeieernie sere 142
TU OBLON os ssnirscerada lend tatsscnsiussens 141
Loaferishly.............5 141
TODD: cess aurecaesee 259
Lobletiy Bayeicseciernnses 414
sapiiandcipwancvacesws ves 466
feos tOvncnguscienencae 174
HOCAhONisscimeiacasr rea 115

Lock, stock, and barrel. 196
Lockrums 615
Locust

Logging camp

 

Logrolling

  
 
 
  

 
  
 
 
    
     
 
 
   
     
 
  

PAULO Gsincaascntnis 397
shanks.... ....... 380
L005 tO sive aes, ascii 327

Loon’s leg, straight as a. 209
Looseness 616

Lowbcelia. .
Lowdowne
Loyal

wagon...........
Lumberer.....
Lynch Law....
Llama water

 

ie Chief s.¢- 202%
Magnet AC icrdariomanecausy
Maguey. . die, Scena
Mal ogany .
Mail, to...

. ¢car..
Mailable ..
S26 jcsisie siz ssosiszrcimstciaceia
Make money, to
Mammoxed
Mammy...........
Mananosay
Mandrake.........
Mango fs
Mango humming-bird.
Manifest Destiny é
Manitou

  
   
  

 

 

  

Manor.......

aes

Maracock .

Maroon, to.. 153
Marblehead 617

 
PAGE
Mar aia SL iacahaceuara reeves 3 242
Marsh hen . ae
Marvel, to...

 
   
    
   
  
   
  
 
   
 
 
 
 
   
  
   
 
 
   

 

Mas Bob.........
Mash and marsh.

market .. 505

teicces . 396
Masoness..... 656
Masterly Inactivit 278
Mass meeting.. 270
Matter........... 505
Manl and wedges -. 616
Maumer .........-.. «. 152
Manvaises Terres....... 180
Maverick ........ «. 21
May, Cape . 103

apple. . 400

GH 60
Maying .. .. 505
Maypole ..... -. 505
Mean whites. -- 617
Meat... - 202

bear 202

deer fi ae

rizzly.

sheep ais 202

to raise... 167
Mechoacan.....
Medium..... i ares’
Mceching. ............. 505
Meet with a change, to ..231
Mecting ........ -.....- 23!

basket ..
house...

Melon patch...

Menhaden....--.-
Merchandise, to..

Mercy’s sake alive .. 617
MOBY sc. carenumgec ¢ vay DOE
Mesilla. . .. 124
Mesquite... ae 121
Message . - 265
Metate. . or 44
MGtile.. 2.205 + 107
Metsel soup........ 143
Michili-Mackinaw. .. 194
Michigan ... ...-......+
Middling.
Midget
Mileage. ......

construc

  

Milk ranch 12
Miller Boy of the Blanes 248

 
  
  
   

  

 

Millerites . . 242
Million and melon - . 506
Mills, flouring...... 473
Minced pie.. 506
Mind, to a asses DOD:
to havea......... 506
Minister....... 257, 382
ink, wee BIO
Mint drops. 291
julep . 316
COMrrcie siete s 395
Miscegenation. + 288
Miscegenationist....... 289

Miscclianeous imbecility 617
MAB CRY cycrcucuays 5 nioraysiateising 2 506
Missing, to be among the aT
Missionate, to 176
Missi- -pezhew a
Mississippi............--

 

| Molasses...

 

INDEX.

Missouri
Mistrese........
Mistake, and no.
Mittens, .......,
Mixed ticket .
Mizzie, to.

Mobee, mobby.
Moccasin

 
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
  
 

Mock auction...
Mocker ........

nut.....
Mocking bird ..
Mocuck ........
Moke....

Momicks. ee
Moneyed institution. .
Monitor ............
Monkey spoon..
Monroe Doctrine.
Monte ncseccans
Month’s mind, a..
Monumental City.
Moon, dark... ...
Moonack.... ..
Moon eye...
Moonglade ...
Moose.... .---..-
te tee

 

ing
Mosey, to
Mosquito ....
bar.

e
Moss, long or Span sh.
Bunkers .. ..
Mossybank .
Most....
MOths aps sa 24 oncans

Mottes. .2 came ieee os
Mought and might.
Mound GUY os.ik vee
Mountain, over the.
Mountaineer.......
Mourner, anxious.
Moving Day ‘
Much, not..
Muchness . . 3
Muck rakes ....
Mudcat State.
Mud hen.....
lumps
poke..
pout..
sill....
turtle .
wall...
Mulada...

Mule-deer .

Muley-saw . .
Mulling .....--..
Mum and Ma’am.
Mum Bet.......
Maommachog .
Mung..... .-
Mush. 213
MUSIC his cn sxaniend cance

 

  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
  
 
  
  

 

O77
PAGE
Music, to face the ....... 601
Musical .. anaes SOD.

   
 
 
  
  
  
  
 
    
 
  
  
 
  
 
 

box.
Musicianer...
Musk..
Muskee
Muskelunge.
Musk melon.
Ox.

rat...
Muslin ....

 

Musquash ...... 5B,

root .

Mustee. 2 Seid

NBR OG rein ars, a vincerenvere

dass au

ary...
‘Nation.

Naked possessor.
Name, given .....
Nasty .....
Natural...

of the woods
shot in the
Needcessity...
NERD sa js:e:6 scerjeoncets

Pp
New Amsterdam
England States. .

of the West 6

Nigh unto....
upon.
Night, after.
fall...
Nimshi....
Nine-bark.
killer..

Nip

and tuck...
Nocake .....
Nohow..
Noodlehead
Noodlejees
Noodle sow

  
   
   
  
 
 
 
 
“678

  
  

Nurly and gnarly..

 
 
   
   
   
  
 

Nutmegs, wooden. 620
Nutmeg State ..0000.0, 658
oO.
Oak-barrens........5..05 179
Oak-openings - 178
Obituarist. . 657
Obleeged.. 511
Obligement... 512
Obscute...... 621
Obscutely. . 621
Obtusity . . 621
Ocelot ... ye)
Octaroon. 115
Odd fish... . 621

stick. » 621

O’er the mountain.
or

ae 28
Old Bullion..

    
    
 

colony... 256

countr yo. 512

dads. ...... - 250
; 5

    
  

squaw....
splitfoot. 595
WAV OSs. inascwaiaasssars 381

Oldermost..

Olycocks... 83
Omnibus... 512
Ose: oss 512

board..... «.. 862
Once and again 518, 621
On end....... weav USL
Once, at 513
On hand. 302
Ovhitch, 513
On it, tobe... 513

 

 

   
   
   
 
 
 
 
   
  
  
  

 

 

INDEX.
PAGE
Onplush and nonplus... 621
On the coast............ 341
time...
to....
One horse.
Opinriated and opinion- a
Groin, 48
Orate, to. 1%
Oregon gi 56
Orignal. 53
Oriole. 374
Orleans . 653
Ornery an 621
Ortolan, American 372
Oxage orange. 110
Osculate, to 514
Oswego-tea. 60
Onlachan. 386
Ouch..... 514
Outcry... 514
Outen.......... 514
pabanal, to. » 622
Outside....... . 514
Outsiders, .. 261
Out West...... 165
Overcup oak... 417
OVETIY. 5:5 2:5, peini2 . 514
Overslaugh, to.......... 81
Owdacious and audacious i
Oyster ASD. wo. cece cee
plant.. 410
tongs 340
, vegetable 410
P.
PEAS cr ercasarnavarciaithvigien ak '6
OBER epic ncaenun

Pal ss ces coe seians
Palace-car
Palatial...
Paleface. .
Palmateer..
Palmetto.......

Papaw.......
Pappoose
Pardner and partner....
POeghenciccvsecer ox
Paring shears...........
Parish saa WE

Parlor....

PATQUebiscisisestasicvcscosaniwste
Partake, to.. ‘

Partridge

 

 

berry
Passenger, to wake up

    
 

the wrong......-. - 623
Patent outside. 622
Patroon...... 167
Patroonship 167
Pavement.. 516
Pawnhost...... - 143

 

 
    
   
    
  
 
 
    
   
  

PAY, tO sississicisaineiesies sae
Paystreak . 285
Peabody.......

 

Peart, peert 516
Peatime, the last of, 623
Pecan nut. 416

tree 416
Peculiar ins’ 277
Pecker... . 516
Peckish.. . 516
Peewee.. 372
PREG tO rs coreaiaicts niajetdacenies 386
Pelage. occ set ese 111
Pelican State............ 660
Pemmican.. 43
Pencil-fish. . . 880
Pennyroyal .. - 406
Peon....... 118
Peonage.... 118
Pepperidge..... 419
Perairie and prairie. .... 99

Percisely and precisely.. 625
Periauger . 137

Periodicals.

OD ccsisieneares vessel 5
Permanent boarder. 5
Permit.......... 517
Perry, Captain. 250
Persimmon....... 50

* Peeteacc cscs 50

Persuasion.... .......... 623
Peruse, to . 517

eskily..... - 17

esky...... . 517
Peter Funk . 299
Petroleum. . . 517
eee oF . 137
Pewcart.. - 233
Pewed.. « 233
Pewit..... 3876
Pheasant........... 372
Pheeze, feeze, to........ 469
Philadelphia lawyer ..... 624
Philology. Cy ete 51

Phoebe-bird..

 

    
 
 

Phyce, fyce <
Picacho....0 0000000022 124
Pleaynne ss scscnsovees
Pickaninnyeiioc se acscsxes 117
Pickerel- Nese - 405
Picket-wire.. 109

Pickings ....

Picra..... 517
Pie.. 517
Piece, a 518
Pieoke... 399
Pierce, to 51S
1eza. . 186
Pigeonber - 405
ig-fish.. - 384
DUD ca csaveiaranas cavngeer 417
YOKGssxases oh acess 830)
  
  
  
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
  
  
  

 

 

 

   
 
  
  
 
  
  
  
 
  
  
 
 
  
 
 
  
  
  

 

PAGE
PICS cc autasaenemywoiemer 518
Piles: as ecicen ais 304
Pilgrim Fathers. . 275
Pillow-bier... 518

slip... 518
Pinch, on a.. 624
bug. 393
Piocher.... 262
Pinders.. 401
Pine-barrens.. 179
-blank and ‘point-
DARE. seston: can 624
straw... - 422
tags.. - 423
Pineries....... . 129
Pinetree State. . 660
Piney-woods... . 179
Pink-root.. - 399
stern... oi. oss . 834
Pinkster, pinxter . 86
PINKY viewed sa eos . 8
Pingl@vas v.43 200 0 - 207
Pifion, pinion... 122, 423
Pint and point. -. 518
Pioneer 3 . 162
Pip, to..... . 518
Pipe-laying.. . 261
Pipsissewa. . . 60
Pirogue.. . 137
Pits... csccen . 8%
Pitch in, to.. .. 824
into, to bras O20
it strong, to.. 324, 624
Pitcher el,
Pitihaya ... .......
Pizarro and piazza
PAC Cle cacumiwswenarny commie 12
Plain.. ‘i
eople.
pane
Plank......
roa
Plant, to
Plantation.
Planter......
Planter, old.
Platform...
Playa...
Play actor eaainn 46
‘possum, to
Played out. ....

AAD eevee

Pled and plead

Plenrisy-root.
Plow and plough
Pluck
Plug..

Plum... ccs...

Plunb centre..

Plunder.....

POCAROD si siccnicnsser sare sons

po

‘oggy...

Poke ....
LO wcsar teases os ¥ 521
berry.... 405
bonnet. 521
juice.. 405
weed.. 405
tun, to 521

Pokeloken .............. 20

Poker .... 328, 521

Pokerish........ issn

Political capital

 

INDEX.

Poiliwig. mee

  

Pomme blanche .. .....
des prairies. ....

 

 

ROOY csciscere

Poorly ....
Popcorn ...
Poplar... .
Popular......

Porg:

Portage...
*Possum..
Posted up,
Potato, Irish
sweet, or Caro-
lina 4
Potatoes, small.
Pottybaker ....
Potwalloper.
Potwrestler.....
Poughkeepsie.
Pounds.......
Poverty grass.....
Power, powerful

 

 
    
 
  
 
 
 
 
  
  
 

 

Pow-wow ...
Praatje, prawehey . saystated 83
Prairie .... 99
i -. 100
scov OL
100, 378
-..- 100
99, 535
wee 99
99
squirrel.... . 99
trembling. . 99
water ...... 125
wolf .. 102
State.. 659
Prairillon.. 99

Prayerfully.
Preach.
Precinct ....
Predicate, to
Preémpt, to.....
Preémption law

rights .
Prehaps and perhaps. e
Present
Preserves...

 

 

 

 
 
  
  
 
 

 

Presidency...

Presidential.

Presidio ...

Prestige . se

PYObE Yi: ssieassioweon ‘ 625
primary meeting.. 266
PLIMING 22 25:93:06.0 © 196
Primitive Baphibte 241
Professor . 231
Progress, to . 524
Promenade, t mais. aenen LTT,

 

  
 
 

Eeneno i.
Proper..

Properly ..
Pro prietary. ets
Prospect, t0.......-. ...
Protracted mieeting:
Providential call.

       
  
     
  
 
 
 
 
  
  

 

Puccoon.. .
Pucker....
Pudding
Pintado ..
Una Vida.

 
 

  
   
    
  
  
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
  
  

 

shell . 525
Pumpkins, some. » 525
Puncheons. awe xe AOR
Punch... 157, 526
Pauses <2 sawienee satee ae 157
Punkinseed. 526
Punt... .ieawe seisie ws ee teen 526
Purger ye 520
Puritans 242

Pushed, hard.
PUG TL wrassersies

o stay 526
Diy SCO ssoszue, cre Gas 26
on a head, to. 526
out, to. 5265
through, to. 626
Putten ii csc ndeane 445
Putto . . 109
Putty ro 398
PY lisaras esis 89
Q.
Quadroon ..........
Quahaug, cohog..
Quakers ........00 eens
Qualify, to..

Quarter- ‘dollar .
section. -
Quarters.........-
Quates and quoits .
Queen City.
of the e Lakes.
Queer

Quilting-bee..
frolic. .

Quit, to........

Quitch grass..

 

it . :
Quok- ckoreé, set... + 815

RaccOOD...ccsceessereaess
Racket, to raise @.......
Radical, ....0-csuees sires

 
680 INDEX.

    

Ricebitd ws cssnenveres sax

Rice, Indian a
wild

Richweed.

Right away ..
Boneh, 5
Deke

CG rc er ease
Rake up, to... war BQS to. eciviices
Rale and real..
Ranchman... ai LOO RAL 5 3s akg aes RRO
Rancho....... i
Rantapkerous.

  

- 103 Rip, Jet her..
. 245 OIE, We mccemasse
. 530 | Ris, riz, and risen...
319 | Risibilities..........

Rattlesnake...
Rawcourens.
Ready, to....
Ready, John
Real estate. .

 
  
   
 
 
  
 

 
  
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

       
 
 

   
   
 
 
 
 
  
 
   
  
 
 
    
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
     
   
  

Rear, to.....
Rearhors ‘se, ringtailed ........
Rebel. . 280 | Roasting ears..... ‘
Rebs... 23 | Ro
Reboso........ 133 | Robes, pack of
Reception... 98 | Robin
Reckon, to.. 530 | Robustious
Reck’nin’....... . 530 | Rock
Reconstruction 287
CONG. <issisieininiet 266
Geiss aca ates rans 628
ear.. 46 | Rokage
bud.. 414 | Roll out, to..
eye.. 215 | Rolling.
horse... 383
root... 396 | Rookery 535
skin... . 22 Room, to. .. AS
Reddy, to..... 531 | Roomkeep, to........... 491
Redemptioner 531 | Roosevelt........... ... 19
Redistrict, to.. . 255 | Rooster........ 0. 262, 380
Reedbird...... stent OL ANCOR cciesiaissacisene 380
Reliable... .. 898
Religion . 398
to experience... 231 Bowman's. . . 898
tOPeticsws =e esx 230 bread...... 399
Remembrance....... ae -
Rench and rinse, to. 4 PIWK see eacsde sons
Renewedly.... ... 2 PIB Yanconcenieta
TRON bs. scsi sai .$38l |) || puttyscnserecnes
Reprint... 2 tei
Resentment. 399
Reservation, reserve. 27, 401

 
 
  
 
   
 

Resolute, to. ...
Restitutionis
Resurrect, to.....
Resurrection e, te
Retiracy.. Rosum and ros
Retire, to.. ms 32 | Rotgut.
Revamp, to.. 32 | Rough......-

 
 

  

 

Reyvival......
Revolver. .. ... = Bx Tone te
Riate —_asateng eacnes 31 | Roundabout

 
 
 
 
 

 

  
   
   
  

ROUBORS assay icieieng/tvareualarerssaie
Roustabout
ROMG 4 scxcceweest seemaes 35
Itow, to hoe one’s own
up, t
Salt R
Rowdy....
Rubbed
Rubbers 36
Rubbishy . 529
ease pe if
ugged, ru, 536
Ru irenies ee . 84
OD cciaysinis - 215
bud 215
hole . 216
suckers .. 216
Ramgumption 483
Rumpus 322
Run, to

 

har

e into the ground, to 629
one’s face, to ...303, 325

.-. 176

Rusty Dab... i
Rye mush.......... eyateasie

 

Sabbaday .............6. 537
Sabbath 2008
Sachem

    
 
 
 
       
    

Sage TOs ccisvewaceseen

Sagnicht aravavonspesite

Sagamity eeeioaries ee a.
Sagamon i tedvosaet 31
Sage Heny.cces 379

tea....... 395
SAlMtPesios ancsrsersine -. 243

Salamander safe .. .

Sales-lady...........

Salt grass ..........
Nay.......ee

rairies

iver, torow up ... 346
water tailor ........ 3

vegetables.... 69

Sam, Uncle

to stand...

Sample-room......
Sanctimoniouslyfied

 

 

Sandcherry........ 417
Sandilea .. -. B94
Sandhiller 45, 179
Sandhopper, 394
Sandy Hook. 81
Sang esses ax 15€
Savg-Run ... 156
Santa Fe tea .. 396

Klaus .. 94

Sapsucker iccsyecss. css se 379
 
  
  
   
  
  
  
 
  
 
 
  
     
     
 
 
 
  
 
 
  
 
 
 

PAGE
Sap- SOLAR ccinen sew sinnnis 418
Saratoga-trunk. . 858
Sarcophagus . . 538
*Sarves... 206
Sage.... 396
apple.. 143
reen.. 397
ong... 397
man... 396
short . 397
BOB scene cee reese s 395
GAS BALT AG co dts oh 08 25 cients 395
Sassy . 398
AMG os siaii-o52 crssedest ctexe SP alos 396
RS ULL CY. - aciesnsratetocaiasagere: oi lsaeheta 396
AU Bis iro spasicinseld ose: b:6 sitions 103
Savagerous........+--.6. 630
Savanna. se» 127
SAVe; Oise cceicinsrisavaie anaes 202
one’s bacon, to.... 630
SAW DUC sscasscisiva « sealersienore 538
vertical........0..66 630
WHO bins ais sare sisigecreajese 378
SAWYCIS: occa. ss dossiuiive 351
Scallawag.... ........-. 288
Scale, to. 244
Scales.

Scaly
Scalp
to
Scare....
Scart and

ae atin be ” arioin acteidiabsiss
Scott, Grea

SCAN: serra a decane

 

sce ciecnnn nf BRIS Si thStePORNG 313
Scratched ticket......... 269
Beraw.... ..ccceeeseeees 539
Screamer............. 66 224
SCLE Wy. FO n. siveisieeiere veimaee 539
Scrimp, LOR seies wlkeerets 540
Scrimpiness............. 540
Scringe, to. .....-...05- 540
CLOG yi scccisipssiate\sanioiainraes dacs 340
Scrub oak........--.--++ 41s
Sculduggery.. 261
Sculprotess. . 636
Scup; tOsccea vo ornsnesass 87
BENUeraOne: grape...... 50
Sei bass: scace vunannes 383

devil 38
Island cotton
robin
Seal, to.
Season
Seat, to
BOathing cisie caynavarvasie'e
Seboy,
Sece é, O
Secesh
Secession .
Secretary ........-.--05-
Section... 172, 254
Section: aii vis: LD
Sectionalism..........- 172

 

INDEX.

TE EOues. xu shcrais oe 328
SOGM, 10° ween eicc ter sia
Seed and saw
Seedtick.
CGD an Whe uci sisi: oanenescte
SOSA eet. sc sccrircaneieuscen is
Selectman. 1. osavetelene a
Self-made man.......... 249
Semi-occasionally.......
BOMALES sn.ci esac naysieneene 252

Sense, to
NOTA DC ia icsiupartacens ana. 133
SCIONS... scisiesenusissacres
Service-berry............
Session...............++- 258

one’s hash, t0......
UP), LOdcwwegasaay-c
Setups tO. s.¢-vemsarase va
Setting poles............
Berea

   
   
  
 
  
  
   
  
  
  
  
 
   
  
  

Shaking HOU ew we yes ess
Shanghai, LO ereraaiereraegsrs
Shan

Shanty. .
Shark, to...
Sharp’ shin
DUAVCL. 4.0.0 osins.amuanctthwe aie
Shay, one horse.........
Shebang..............06
Shecoonery.. siete
She-corn...
Shedder.....
Sheepherder..........--.
Sheepmeat.............+
Sheepshead. .
Shellbark..iccs:c00ci00 00
Shenannigan .... ......
Shenkbeer .............-
Sherry cobbler
Sherry wallies
Shet and shut, to..

off, to take the...

SHAT). 5 50:3 sisters sinc at

Shingle.... .. 512
Shinner.... .. 805
Shinney.. .... 542
Shinplaster. . 296, 310
Shirt, biled,. w.. 195
Schnaps saa ararav esnyo8 143
SHOGA Yamin sain tarnamnns’ 298

 

 
 
  
   
 
 
  
 
  
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
    

 

681
PAGE
Shocmake and sumac... 632
ShOOsr sions tasecncs DID
Shoot
Shooting-iron............
Shootist. .
Shop..
Short iz
Short metre 332
for sauce.......... 397
Shorts 42
Shot. 5
in the neck......... 633

shock.

Silk g

Signal, to .
Sing-sing ..
Singist..
Sinkholes. .
SULCO e065 es
Sisal hemp......
Siskowit, Cisco.

Sizzle, to..
Skary, skear: ‘y
Skeat and skat
Skedaddle, to.
Skeete, to
Skesicks.
Skin, to

blackbird.

 

 

  

cabbage .. were A

TOA we ksrsgerestorsrais 55

let every one skin —

his own

Slabbridged.......
Slabsided .. ...-..,.-55- 4
Slackwater navigation... 341
Slangwhanger......... 634 |
Slantendicular........... 634 |
Slapjacks.........-.---.. 544
Slashes .... 249, 544
BMatisccacngssccide Saaienw 544
GIASY. 0.0 cece eee eee ee eee 544
Sleeper.......-. ceeeeeee 336
Sleeping car...........+- 359
   
 

Sates iueinaT teaeed F 3

 
  
 
   

   

Snew and snowed
ues MEE

 

 

INDEX.

Sor

Sorsie polbng. Sta me
tuggin

Sorter-kinder. . e

Sossle, sozzle, to

Sot and set

 
  
   

 

 
 
   

 

 

on the  Bo0Ke 267
Soundness.. 3 5
Sour on, to. 20.
Sourcrout.... 0070 85, 143
Souse, sowce............ 549
South; the insjsans sewaceraive 234

|. Southron.... |) -. 24

  
 

South Sea tea...
sorerelenty, popular

 

DEN) vse car oxesteeinnret 90
Spanish bayonet ....... 411
Spank, tOsaeswas ci darncitic
Spanking. .. 5
Sparsely...

Spell.......
Spiceberry ..

out
Spike- tae Saeladcraduee Saray 550
SPI tOnssuneaen acadeias 636
Spindle Clty risisinies vee so 664
Spiritualist. . cccccs sence 245
Spit-curl
Splendid 5!
Split-bottom chair....... 58
Split-ticket.............. 270
DSDIUT SE a sscrainccpmierncsctes 550
Spoils, to the victors be-

JONG thes esse enaeus ae es 265
Spondulics ‘
ee
Spots, UM scscers sees

Spont, to go up the..
Spread, to apenas suse als

Taclevent seni
Spreaderstick..... ..... 351

Spring house. .

keeper. .

Spruce, be.......
black.

 
 
 
 

purt
Speyten Duyvel
Squally
Sanit.

Squelch, to : 7

  

Squcteague.,.. 5
Squiggle, to . 551
Squirm,. LOisicoes 551
Squirrel, to barka ...... 197
Sqush, to........... «+ 637
BEADDISE sccicsia; gacincrcusacers 658

Stick, a crooked

Stoneites...
Stoolpigeon. .

  
 
   

Streaks, to imake
Strike, to
Striker..

 

  
  
   
  
    
    

PAGE
Staddle ....ccseasneasces 552
Stake .....-..6 184
Stakes, to move. 184
to pull up 184
to stick 184
Stake rope... 130
Stamp, to , 552
Stamped . 131
Stamps ... . 296
Stand, to ....... . 522
Stars and Bars.... -. 258
Stars and Stripes... .... 258
Star-spangled Banner... 258
Start; tO.cccccsewweme, eee
Starvation. errr
State ......
bouts
ghte.
Stated preacher
BAAR Y 4 coc aseccuteyie 236
Staten Island ........... 79
Stateroom ....-......... 359
aey DUE Oui sie sectiesmciene 626
syaeraaaSissd ole Pamsterarar ae 553
Btombast” sip aseanes 347
Steep wscsiaevia ssncicionss 553
Steeple. .. 233
SHOCV Os AO cs wrssececconnecsisn 637
Stent, stint ........ 2... 553
Stevedore, to........... 637
Stickchimney. 193

an odd.... . 621
Sticker. ..... - 270
sail T PSUANE x - 340

on . 380
Stim, aeuicesen: BSB
Stin tone dite: eeanhy

   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 

  
 

 
   
 
   
 
 
INDEX. BR3

    
  
  
    
  

  
   
   
    

  

 

 

   
  
    
   
   
   
   
 
  

 

 
   
  

     
  
 
 
    
  

 

 

     
 
   

  
  

PAGE PAGE
Stringy Swindle, what's the, denis 576 Terawachy Boies ‘87
oe bass acts Swine stone............. 424 | Term,............... 264
Stripper ......... . 52, 5 Swinger. . oe Terrapin 11 ae
Struc wade conviction: 231 Swinging . 51 | Territory... .......... 233
Stub, 60.....c00s cere eves 554 | Swing clear, to......... 348 | Tertulia.. wae 188
Stuck, ao De wastes - 638 Swingle tail, weiss’ sone 348 Tesquite .. eye 125
Stucked and stuck . 638 PCO: gessecmacunnes 557 | Teter ..... 'ST7, 558
Stu 554 | Switch .... .., 862 | Texas. ...... we 138
Stutfening and stuffing .. aie gwow, 1. +.. 595 | There, tobe ..2.. 22.222) 641
tat ees eeesecees * camore ........,...... 413 | Thimbleberr anys sep 408
Stuffing the ballot-box.. 272 = This child, chile |... ..7) ot
Stump.. ........... + 1 87 OSB cease weed ace 2
Oc sdiscaissats T Thistle-root
speaker Thomasites 24:
gpeec T, tosuit toa........... 629 | Thousand of bricks, ,313, 642
to whi Taboo, to ............... 5 | Thrasher............05.. 376
roun neon ae the needle ... 197
Stumper.......... Vhreap, tO .............. BE
Stumpy ......... Thr eerard monte
Stuyvesant,..... Through, to go .
Suant, suent to pu ut. 6
Subside, LO? csieniayne Throw the hatchet, to... 35
Succotash.. ...... Thrush, brown.......... : 376
Suck in, to........ Thundering sible ha wavs 642
Sucker State... Mek ebasicsa- wensacenagioga 269
Suffragist ....... Pichler iscsssrscuace . 642
Sugar, to.......... Tie, to ride and 642
bush to, to..... 642
Tamar 5 MUD: tOlieins ges-ceceimrecn 349
Tammany... a 29 | Tiger, the 328, 642
Hall. 29 cag? — 12
Tanglewood... AIA | TB EDy oxesesevaenadvay x 377
Tapis, on the.. . 108 | Timber........ -- 185, 560
Tar and feather, to. . 194 | Timbers, cross........... 185
off, to Tarboggin. 21 | Time, a good. ... 642
Suicide, to... 2.2.2: se "Tarnal. . 640 On..... - 513
Suit of hair. é *Tarnation . 640 to mak . bE
toa T, Ss i . 558} Timothy .. . 409
Sulphtrs..cecces seas cease 2 vel . 45 | Tin and -. 560
Sum of tobacco ... 348 | Tinaja 128, 134
Sumac, poison...,...... 25 B . 68, 382 | Tincla . 835
“Summarize, to... ‘ .818, 558 | Tinker. . 384
Summons, to.. Tea ae Tipsinah 62
Sundown.... , 396} To and at. 560
fish . 896 | Toadfish . 287
ep. . 896 Tobacco-box.. vie OB
Supale . 896 | Tobacco-root...., «ee 62
Sa ed ‘ . 895 sums of. .. 64
Supper...... . 896 to chew.. 63
supple Jack. .. avon AIS . 895 | to ap: 63
UFO snsiraiciarsaun pn aietyraastagais gage isayhieieue 395 | Tole, toll, to. 56L
furehes PaLrly: .czeasvrss 23 " 396 | Tomahawk 34
Surveyor................ 264] — gpice...... 395 35
Suspenders .. vex oovee B06] BEOLE occ. a --. 895 ents be tee ” 169
Suspicion, to............ 556|'Team........... 2281, 222 | Tomato, tomat.. | 64
Suzz and Sirs........... cat .. 221] Tomcod..... . 68
Swad............... 556, 595 | Teapomp...... 84 | Tomdog.. 643
Swale ..... 414 | Tomfoolery. . 643
Swamp, I...... 588 | Tongue........ 561
Swamp Angel . «» 117) Techy........... 558 | Toothache grass. 409
Swamped........... -. 421 | Teetocaciously.. 640 | Top, to........ 561
Swamper......... .. .. 421] Teetotal......... . 640 | To rights.... 533
Swamp magnolia........ 422 | Teetsook.... . 105 | Tormented .. 648
Swan, I......... 3 Teeter ........ . 558 | Tortilla..... . 14, 138
Swanga-Buckra. Telegram ..... 559 | Tortle..... .. 387
Swankey........ ane Telescope, to 361 | Tote, to 643
Swap, to.. saceieet ae Tell, to.... ... 641 | Toteteicsyscas 38
BWASD ics, see.csxaesnve 6 do..... 641 | Touch of the liver 644
Swathe...............6+- 94. T can't 641 | Towhee ......... 3i7
Sweepings.... .......05 Temper ..... 559 | Towhead 2. 225
Sweet bay.....-sssse--+- Tenpins .... 318 | Town..... 254, 561
Busia long pte a 318 lot..... -. 182
‘short Tend, to........ 641 ship. 254
BWELIS wins aeinnnamicnass nnn Pouchent house..... ... 559 | Track..... seashore twee si 360

 

 

 
684 INDEX.

  
  

   
    
    
  
   
   
  

       
 

   
   
  

 

 

   

   
 
    
  
   
  

 

 
 
   
   

 

 

  
  

 

 

      
  

PAGE PAGE
Track, in one’s...... ... 360 | Uncultivatable....... ... 646 | Walnut..............
inside... -. 860 Undergroan d:faly Wampum...............
off the. . 359 WEY sepsis tesa iis 362 belt
on the.. . 860 | Underhew...... 563 | Wangan.................
sprinkler. ers . 859 | Under par.. .. 803 | Wan’t and was not.
to follow in one’s. 644 | Union...... .. 250 | Wapiti..... ....--....
to clear the....... 360 men. . 280 | Wapatoo..
Tracks, to make.. 360 League, 1) 989 | War Horse.
ssh 801 -Prayer- Meetings... 246 ath ..
. 199 | United States. .......... 250 ower. ene
to trash a. . 645 | Universanimonus. .. 646 | Warn, to..... zea
Training......... . 561] Up, to............ . 563 Warpath, on the........ 36
dog... . 561] Up a tree, to be - 49 Warrants, Land. vee. 194
Trampoose, to, . 645 country ...... .. 163 | Water dogs Laie ead Beets 388
Transient boarders...... 517 Green River.. .. 200 lot. 183
Transpire, to..... é jib, to..... .. 349 to..... 359
Trapper ........ Upland cotton. . -» 411 prairie... 125
Trash Upper Crust... - 646 puppies. 388
Travee. Tendo: 646 witches. 378
Treat, to.. Ten Tho 646 | Wax, Sons of. 313
Tree, to.... Uppish..... 646 | Ways, a little 647
to be up a Upset-price 299 no two G47
to bark sable. 64) | Weakfish .. 68
wrong.......- Use, to..... 563 in the 5 267
cranberry ... 401 | Used to be..... .. 646 | Weather, falling.. 468
primrose. Used to could........... 646 | Weddiner............,.. 601
sugar . Wedges,to knock out the 320
Trembling Prai mauland....... 616
Vv. Weed asiccsicnsrces : 6
Trigger eye. Well.....
Trimontain Veeheriwacsuss ey gs exsices West, the.......
Trot out, to. Vamose, to Wet Diggings. .
Truck........ Vaquero Whale, to... Sg
patch Variety-store. Whaler.................. ‘
joor,. .. Varmint Whapper, Whopper..... 647
Trust, deed of.. + Vaudoux ; Whapping eiessiei oh penile 64
Try it om, to........ te VC OEY sa cick insiocares mcvviaisior® Whart-boat
Tuckahoe..... seen eeees Vegetables, salt-water .. 69 | Wharves
mcket....... Vegetable oyster E
Tuk and took.. Vendue........ . Wheelhorse. .
Tuck, nip and.. Ventilate, to . . 564 Whiggigain ..

We... -.. ss eee eee saw. «BOO Whips 00. pe sarcacceniernss 5
Tulip-tree.. Vest...... . 564 Whip ‘the devil round the
Tumblebug . Vettikost skein chs . 88] stump, to............. 1
Tuna...... Vice-President... . 252 | Whipping the cat
Tunkers.. Vige and voyage... . 565 | Whipstick, every ..
Tupelo... + Vigilance- -Comiittee.... 219 | Whip-poor-will ..-:
Turkey...........2. 25+ 88 | Vigilantes.... ....... . 219 | Whirling exercise.......

as poor asdob’s.. 645 |-Vines...... . 413 | Whiskey plant..........
eae Rin a a acboonko - sid pa ee : or root
tenets seen es irginia creeper... sie war ..
Marblehead ...... 617 . fons De 193, 647 Whistle-wing .. of
Never SAY .4¢ <..6 203 fence, crooked White folks. .
to talk BE Sundae none 593 AROSE: sain: sieisraiaieonsye
Tumer........---+. tt fence, to make a 593 House ........... 268
Fest.... a8 Vocate, to Man’s Flly........ 393
; Persidiess tenes Voyage... ...... Mean ............ 17
Turnout. . Se deeeaea Voyageur. Mountains....... 14
Turnpike... 0... lees 562 | ‘Vnim, I......... veeee 595, 647 Trash......... 008 45
Turpentine State........ 661 wood
Turtle, mud............. 388 Whiting ...........
snapping........ 388 W. Whitpotting
Twinberry........ peeeeee 402 Whittle, to......... ie
Twistical............. woe 645 Whole footed... 31.2... 648
t ei hearted. +s. 649
souled . . 649
team.. - 221
Whop, to .... . 567
Whortleberry . 403
Wicket .. . 567
3 Wigwam. - 29
2, Wild bear........ 410
Sam ee Wall-rock............4.5 424 cat money......... 297
Sam! gerib.... .... 263 | Wallop, to.............. 565 CHELEY sascas nasa 417

 

 
Wild Bag

rice
Will; tossciweaies waver
Winterkill, to.
Wind up, to..
Wiped out..
Wire, to.. seahorses
pulling. . yeicvesessherainicie

working..........
Witch grass
Witness. to..
Wolfish.. atatacereiie
Wolverine State...
Wonst and once.
Wood-up, to........
Woodbine........... ae
Woodchuck.............
Wooden Hates a

  
        
 

Nat
Wooding mien:

 

 

INDEX.

PAGE
Wood meetings......... 244
Workhouse sc 33 sa 3s cacus 568
Worryment............. 5

Worth shucks, not
Wrath, like all.........!
Wrathy TUNE ss tats audlons

Yankee, galvanized.....
Yankeedom.............
Yankee Doodle.
ma’am
notions .
Yarb tg herb..

 

 

 

685

PAGE

Yellowbird . inieisiose OED
Yellow hammer.. denauseeensted

a America.....
ibs eon ‘i

Yourn . wickas

You-uns

 

Zambo..

Zenith City:
Lily. tO ssa es caenes
Zombi.....

 
A Monument of Modern Scholarshid.

——— oo >—____

Sotuett’s Bialogues of Plato.

THE DIALOGUES OF PLATO.

Translated into English, with Analysis and Introductions, by B. JowErr
M.A., Master of Baliol College, Oxford, and / :
Regius Professor of Greek.

Four Volumes. Crown 8vo, $12.00 per set, in Cloth, or

ONE-HALF THE PRICE OF THE ENGLISH EDITION.
—_—_—_4@——___

CRITICAL ESTIMATES.

From the New York Tribune.

The peculiar distinction of Professor Jowett 1s his eminence as a scholar, especially in
* the language and literature of ancient Greece. Of this the impress is stamped on the pages
of the great work before us. With no parade of learning, there is perpetual evidence of
profound mastery of the subject; the ease and grace with which the matter is handled
comes from knowledge that is an habitual possession of the mind, and not prepared for
the occasion ; while the idiomatic force and precision of the style shows an intimate acquaint-
ance with the resources of the English tongue. The pleasant flow of the language makes
the reading of the translation a constant enjoyment. We do not know the theory on which
it is founded, or if it is founded on any theory at all; but it is certain that, apart from the
nature of the topics under discussion, and the local coloring and environment of the scene,
there is little to remind us that it is not an original production in the vernacular. Vor
aught that is here indicated to the contrary, the bees that settled on Plato’s lips might
as well have swarmed from an English as an Attic hive.

From Blackwood’s Magazine.

This work by Professor Jowett is one of the most splendid and valuable gifts to Litera-
ture and Philosophy that have for a long time been offered. Its first or most obvious ex-
-cellence is the perfect ease and grace of the translation, which is thoroughly English, and
yet entirely exempt from any phrase or feature at variance with the Hellenic character.
Very few translations, other than the Bible, read like an original; but this is one of them.
It has other and more recondite excellences. It is the work, almost the life-labor, we
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his execution of the task is itself the means of concealing the diligence, industry, and abi-
lity with which philological and interpretative difficulties must have been solved or over-

come.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Estimate of Plato.

Of Plato I hesitate to speak, lest there should be no end. You find in him that which
you have already found in Homer, now ripened into thought—the poet converted into
a philosopher, with loftier strains of musical wisdom than Homer reached ; as if Homer
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contains the future, as he came out of the past. In Plato you explore modern Europe in
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Nothing has escaped him. Every new crop in the fertile harvest of reform, every fresh sug-
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done to the man of the world, pitiless exposure of pedants, and the supremacy of truth
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The INTRODUCTION is devoted to the consideration of preliminary matters, such as
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theories as to the source and standard of our knowledge of divine things, Rationalism,
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EXODUS... .». Chap. I-X1X. THE Eprror. 3
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WR sajajahaerd ane Maveranaieieseyereainenes Chap. XX. to the End, and

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GENESIS.—Translated and edited by
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VII. ~

CORINTHIANS.—Translated and edi-
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GALATIANS, EPHESIANS, PHIL-
IPPIANS, AND COLOSSIANS.—
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Ix.

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the late Dr. John Lillie.

X.

THE EPISTLES GENERAL OF
JAMES, PETER, JOHN, AND
JUDE.—Translated and edited by J.
Isidor Mombert.

General Editor, Dr. PHILIP SCHAFF, Reformed.

 

 

 

   
  

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TAYLER LEWIS, LL.D. Dutch Reformed | C. P. WING, D.D.,_ - - Presbyterian
Rev. CHARLES F. SCHAFFER, - Lutheran | GEORGE E. DAY, D.D., Congregational
R. D. HITCHCOCK, D.D., - - Presbyterian | Rev. P. H.STEENSTRA,- - - - E iscopal
E. HARWOOD, D.D., - - Episcopal | A. GOSMAN, D.D., - - - - - Presbyterian
H. B. HACKETT, D.D. - + Baptist | CHARLES A. AIKEN, D.D., _- Presbyterian
ON LILLIE, D,D., - Presbyterian | M.B. RIDDLE, D.D., + - +» Drtch Refonned
E.R. CRAVEN, D.D., Presbyterian | Prof. WILLIAM WELLS, - - - - Methodist
Rev. C. R. ASBURY, - Episcopal | T. J. CONANT,D.D, - + - + + - Baptist

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