HOW 
 WORDS GROW
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 ^'-
 
 HANDY INFORMATION SERIES. 
 
 Uniform l8mo. Cloth. 
 
 FACTS I OUGHT TO KNOW ABOUT THE GOV- 
 ERNMENT OF MY COUNTRY. By William H. 
 Bartlett. 
 
 HANDY DICTIONARY OF PROSE QUOTATIONS. 
 Edited by George W. Powers. 
 
 HANDY DICTIONARY OF POETICAL QUOTA- 
 TIONS. Edited by George W. Powers. 
 
 IMPORTANT EVENTS. A Book of Dates. Edited 
 by George W. Powers. 
 
 THE MISTAKES WE MAKE. A Practical Manual 
 of Corrections. Edited by Nathan Haskell Dole. 
 
 WHO'S THE AUTHOR? A Guide to the Notable 
 Works in American Literature. By Louis Harman 
 Peet. 
 
 SHAKSPERIAN SYNOPSES. Outlines or Arguments 
 of all the Plays of Shakspere. By J. Walker 
 McSpadden. 
 
 WORD COINAGE. By Leon Mead 
 
 PUBLISHED BY 
 
 THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.
 
 CROWELL'S HANDY IXFOKALATION SERIES 
 
 now WORDS GROW 
 
 A BRIEF STUDY OF LITEEARY STYLE, 
 SLANG, AXD PROVINCIALISMS 
 
 BY 
 
 LEON MEAD 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 
 
 PUBLISHERS
 
 COPYBIGHT, 1902 AND 1907, 
 
 By LEON MEAD. 
 
 Published October, 1902.
 
 " Wheyi the mint of the United States coins dollars it 
 takes old coins, or bars, or metal fresh from the mine, 
 gives the right stamp, which is nothing but a guarantee 
 of lueight and fineness, and sends the coin out to serve the 
 people. The mint does not create. Man is not a crea- 
 tor. When men have need of a new 2vord, to name a 
 new commoditii, an act, or principle, they draw upon the 
 resources of their ancient speech, recast or restarnp some 
 old ivord, give it a new birth, and send it forth upon its 
 mission. 
 
 '^ Such new words, or fresh coinages, have a birthday, 
 a birthplace, and a birthright ; like other children of 
 men, they grow up iveak or strong, they migrate, some- 
 times over luide areas ; occasionally they marry and 
 have offspring ; in the struggle of life they wear off, like 
 coins ; and sooner or later they are melted down or die. 
 It is this biographical or human element in words and 
 phrases which constitutes their unfailing interest, and 
 this interest appeals alike to plain people and the greatest 
 students. The reason is obvious. Words are the mirror 
 of the people that coin them, and they reflect the mind of 
 the people rather better perhaps than architecture and 
 other visible monuments, which perish or vanish.^' — 
 From an Address by Mr. C. W. Ernst before the 
 Bostonian Society, 1896.
 
 PEEFACE. 
 
 Aware that mauy persons, glancing at the 
 cover, but not wasting their precious time in 
 reading this book, may misjudge it from its title 
 as having a meretricious design, the author has- 
 tens to assure all possible readers that no new 
 words have been made expressly for it. The 
 title, too, is a somewhat awkward compound, but 
 there seems to be no other term so availal)le for 
 my present purpose. 
 
 While it is realized that the fertile soil of the 
 subject has scarcely more than been scratched, 
 there is some consolation in the fact that all the 
 data could not be compressed within the limits of 
 these pages. Since the first draft of this book 
 was finished a work has appeared, bearing the 
 title of Sematics: Studies in the Science of Mean- 
 ing, from the learned pen of Michel Breal, Pro- 
 fessor of Comparative Grammar at the College de 
 France, an admirable translation of which has 
 been made bv Mrs. Henrv Cust, and for which
 
 VI . PREFACE. 
 
 J. P. Postgate, Professor of Comparative Philol- 
 ogy at University College, London, has written a 
 notable preface. 
 
 This work, whose timely appearance after more 
 than thirty years of research is in itself an event, 
 gives weighty emphasis to the manifold uncertain- 
 ties of etymology and to the need of more psycho- 
 logic analysis in the study of words. Professor 
 Breal doubtless has blazed the way for future 
 explorers in the wilderness of philology. He gets 
 the term sematics from the verb semaino, to 
 *' signify," in opposition to phonetics, the science 
 of sounds. Professor Postgate proposes *' to call 
 the expression of a single idea or notion a rheme, 
 from rema, 'a thing said,' and to distinguish the 
 expressions of qualifications and connections of 
 such rhemes by calling them epirrhemes, though, 
 as a general term, rheme may serve for both. If 
 these terms be approved of, I should propose to 
 call our science Rhematology, or the study of 
 rhemes." The terms proposed by these two 
 scholars have about equal chances of a long and 
 useful career, but in any event they are of far 
 less importance than the promising field of in- 
 quiry they represent. 
 
 A few years ago the present writer began a 
 magazine article on Word-Coinage, with no in-
 
 TREFACE. Vll 
 
 teution of extending it into a series for publication 
 in book form. But, like a snowball rolled in its 
 own cohesive substance, the work grew until it 
 reached dimensions sufficiently large for a vol- 
 ume. The task was a practical and compara- 
 tively simple one. It did not require the lin- 
 guistic attainments of a Cardinal Mezzofanti. 
 Perseverance and patience were necessary, and 
 correspondence with many authors, some of whom, 
 let it be confidentially whispered, feel their 
 mental oats as much as do horses the earth- 
 grown variety. These worthies do not hesitate 
 to concoct a lingo, conveniently called and some- 
 times by mere courtesy accepted, by critics as 
 dialect ; but in the matter of new words they 
 deny all responsibility. To coin words is a sin, 
 say some of them ; jothers call the act a crime, 
 and many who have been culprits in this direc- 
 tion would forget the fact. 
 
 Yet the evidences of their beneficence, in a few 
 cases, their enterprise in others, their rashness in 
 still others, abound in their published works, and 
 if I were sure of living three or four hundred 
 years on this footstool of the Almighty, I should 
 like no better job than going through their books 
 and finding their verbal oflTspring and colloca- 
 tions ; but not flattering myself that I shall be
 
 Vlll PREFACE. 
 
 any phenomenon of longevity, this method is, of 
 course, not feasible. 
 
 Fortunately, all authors are not reticent on this 
 subject, and what they have been so kind as to 
 give me is transcribed for the reader in a popular 
 way, and without pretensions to vast learning. 
 At the outset, however, I do not wish to be mis- 
 understood. Personally, I am not in sympathy 
 with the practice of any writer who coins voca- 
 bles merely to exploit his cleverness. Promis- 
 cuous verbal ^ inventions which have no rea- 
 son d'etre are usually as short-lived as they are 
 detestable. The English language, however, 
 though it now contains many thousands of more 
 words than any other one language on the globe, 
 and a host of words that could well be spared, 
 has by no means reached its limits of normal 
 growth and expansion. 
 
 AVhile we have a superabundance of synonyms, 
 we doubtless lack words that express the finest 
 nuances of meaning, such as the French language 
 possesses. These words will creep into our speech 
 in time and become an integral and ornate part 
 of it; in many cases they will be assimilated 
 
 1 Throughout this book "verbal" is used chiefly in 
 its secondary sense, as having to do with written as well 
 as oral words.
 
 PREFACE. IX 
 
 from the French, German, and other living lan- 
 guages, and the rest will be sul)stantially our own 
 mintage, though largely based, I hope, on vigor- 
 ous Anglo-Saxon roots. 
 
 Leading up to the subject proper are three 
 chapters which may be deemed essential stepping- 
 stones to a correct understanding of a coined 
 word. And following the chapters dealing with 
 neologisms are certain considerations on slang, 
 provincialisms, etc., w^hich are more closely allied 
 to the general theme than might be casually 
 supposed.
 
 COXTE^S^TS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 Preface v 
 
 I. Introduction 1 
 
 II. AVoRDS AND Literary Style .... 19 
 
 III. Fof^TER Word.-?, Yari.\nt.>^, and By-prod- 
 
 rcTS • 53 
 
 IV. The Conscious Invention of Words . 66 
 Y. Neologisms by Lrtng American Au- 
 thors 78 
 
 VI. Xeologisms {Continued) 95 
 
 VII. Neologisms " ........ 110 
 
 VIII. Neologisms " 126 
 
 IX. Neologisms " 141 
 
 X. Slang 161 
 
 XI. PRO^^NCTALLSMS and Americanese . . 192 
 
 XII. Some Verbal Curios 211 
 
 XIII. Language and Cultuhe 220 
 
 XIV. Co^-CLUSION 251 
 
 Index 269 
 
 xi
 
 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 It has been stated that there are three thou- 
 sand English words not to be found in any 
 dictionary. My own investigations would lead 
 to the inference that there are at least thrice 
 that many. Science constantly requires new 
 words to designate and describe her new dis- 
 coveries, appliances, and processes ; hence it may 
 be said that the vocabularies of all civilized 
 nations are increasing — chiefly in technical words, 
 which the work of the chemist, the electrician, 
 the machinist, etc., renders necessary. 
 
 It is said that the late John W. Keeley, of 
 undesirable fame in connection ^vith the myth of 
 perpetual motion, invented some fifteen hundred 
 spurious and pseudo-scientific words and terms, 
 which, in a layman's ears, had a plausible sound. 
 How thankful we should be that these mongrel 
 words are not likely to become "naturalized," 
 as Lord Chesterfield once said of other words. 
 
 1
 
 I WORD-COINAC4E. 
 
 Americans have enough of a difficult task in 
 memorizing the fairly or wholly legitimate coin- 
 ages that science, art, fashion, new ideas, names 
 of men, foreign intercourse, national movements, 
 Orientalisms, and slang press upon them. 
 
 Some of the most facile as well as boldest 
 writers in the guild of American letters to-day 
 have never coined any words. They do not 
 believe in such expedients. They say that the 
 English language of 8hakes})eare, Burke, Washing- 
 ton Irving, and Kuskin is good enough for them. 
 
 This is the purist's ix>int of view, and purists 
 have a {perfect right to their opinions. But 
 supjx)se all men assumed this inflexil)le attitude ; 
 then, indeed, our language would be at a stand- 
 still ; it would become a stagnant reservoir. 
 
 As a matter of fi\ct, Shakespeare coined many 
 words, and things of this kind probably may be 
 traced to the other three men just cited, as they 
 certainly can be to hundreds of great writers. 
 The derivative "Gothamite" was first employed 
 by Irving in the Salmagundi paj>ers ; and Burke 
 anglicized at least one French word, to say 
 nothing of some of his slovenly comix)unds. 
 
 There is a fjishion in words as in dress and 
 other things. Certain words come curiously into 
 vogue, we know not just how, and are |X)pular 
 for a time until their very triteness ^ drives them 
 into the obsolete list. In the course of two or 
 three generations many of them are revived. 
 
 ^ "Words wear theinsolves out by overuse." — 
 Brtuider Matthews.
 
 INTRODUCTION. 6 
 
 Pope has stated the case better than any one 
 else in the familiar lines : 
 
 " In words as in fashions the same rule cloth hold, 
 Alike fantastic if too new or old; 
 Be not the tii*st by whom the new is tried, 
 Nor yet the last to lay the old aside." 
 
 This dictum may influence the judicious and 
 conservative jugglers of our mother-tongue. 
 When society takes up an expressive slang word 
 you will find your fashionable author doing like- 
 wise, without bothering about its antecedents or 
 jx^digree. Doctor Murray, in an address in 
 I^ndon before the I^hilological Society, not long 
 ago, said : 
 
 " Words were constantly cropping up in Eliza- 
 l)ethan times of which notliing was known, of 
 which nothing cognate could be found in any 
 foreign language. x\fter the discovery of San- 
 scrit it was fondly sup|X)sed that Aryan roots 
 existed (if they could be found) for all words, 
 but that was certainly not true of all Eng- 
 lish words. There were cases in which the 
 closest and most immediate inquiry could not dis- 
 cover the origin of modern words. For ex- 
 ample, the word 'dude' suddenly appeared in 
 America, and, though investigation was made 
 within a few weeks of the recognition of the 
 word, no one could say how it originated. It 
 came epidemically, so to speak, and it has 
 remained." 
 
 Contrary to this opinion, both the Century and
 
 4 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 Standard Dictionaries ascribe a London origin to 
 the word, which they identify with the "aesthetic 
 movement," the "lily in the hand" idiocy, in the 
 early eighties of the last centnry. Recently 
 Professor Walter W. Skeat undertook to trace 
 " dude " back to some German dialect. He 
 found in Low German, dudeldop, dudendop, or 
 dudelkop, a simpleton or sleepyhead, and then 
 in East Frisian, duddig, stupid, and duddigheid 
 and dudden and duddern, to be drowsy, and in 
 Dutch, dodderig. He assumes the root to be 
 Tod, the English "death," and cites many Eng- 
 lish words, in common use and in dialect, as 
 connected with that root — dother, dote, doddy, 
 doddle, dawdle, duddle, all haying the sense of 
 stupidity or slowness. "Neither," adds the 
 learned Professor, "should we miss the vSwedish 
 dialect, dodolga or dodolja, of which the exact 
 sense is dawdler." In Grimm's Deutsche 
 Mythologie another Englishman has found the 
 word dod, meaning coxcomb. Thus a word less 
 than twenty years old may proye a yery will-o'- 
 the-wisp to such philologists as Professor William 
 D\yight Whitney, Dr. G. P. G. Scott, Professor F. 
 A. March, Jr., and Professor Edward S. Sheldon. 
 But the scales of reasonable presumption are 
 tipped in fayor of Dr. Murray's theory, and the 
 common impression among most people on both 
 sides of the Atlantic is that the word "dude" is 
 essentially American. 
 
 Nothing better illustrates the capriciousness in 
 public taste than the shiftings of meaning in
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 words by use. It is said that the slang word 
 "spread" originated at Cambridge University. 
 It did not imply a profuse feast, however, but a 
 |X)or one, spread over the table to make a show. 
 Such changes of signification come under the 
 head of what Profeesm' Breal calls the pejorative 
 tendency of words. The Anglo-Saxon saelig, 
 answering to the E«^ish silly, meant originally 
 "happy, tranquil, inoffensive." One meaning 
 of smart (Schmerz in German; has become 
 synonymous with "sprightly, lively, pretty." 
 "Brave" once meant "regret," "admirable" 
 meant "surprising," "imp" meant "island," "to 
 be amused" meant "to be occupied," "novelist" 
 meant an "innovator," "pomp" meant a "pro- 
 cession," and so on. 
 
 Meanings alter even in scientific words. 
 Hydrogen was named from the Greek hudor, 
 water, and gennao, to generate. Oxygen is just 
 as essential in the formation of water as is 
 hydrogen ; for the composition of water is H^,0 
 — two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. 
 Hydrogen is an essential part of all acids, and, 
 strictly speaking, therefore, should be called 
 oxygen. 
 
 Oxygen was named by Lavoisieur, the founder 
 of modern chemistry, in 1776, from oxus, mean- 
 ing sharp, and gennao, because he supposed that 
 oxygen was an essential part of every acid ; 
 hence the name "acid (sharp or sour) maker." 
 The German word for oxygen is Sctuersfoff, 
 meaning an acid or sour substance — oxygen
 
 6 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 Since the time of Lavoisieur, who was a victim 
 of the French Revolution, having been guillo- 
 tined in 1794, science has demonstrated that 
 many acids may exist without oxygen in their 
 composition, e. g,, hydrochloric, hydrobromic, 
 hydrofluoric, etc. Tomlinson says : " The word 
 oxygen is too deeply rooted in scientific nomen- 
 clature to be safely removed ; but it may be 
 taken as a remarkable instance of an abiding 
 word which changed its original meaning within 
 comparatively a short period after its introduction." 
 
 The standard quality of many words has 
 always been disputed by certain critics, who 
 object to their admission into the language as 
 being without proper authority. Such words as 
 "forestall," "fain," "scathe," "askance," "em- 
 bellish," and "dapper" were objected to in 
 Spenser's day, but they somehow gained a foot- 
 ing and have kept it. A number of Chaucer's 
 words, viz., "transcend," "bland," "sphere," 
 "blithe," "franchise," "carve," "anthem," were 
 considered obsolete in the seventeenth century, 
 but one by one they were revived and are in the 
 best of standing at the present day. Also in 
 that epoch critics rejected as obsolete the words 
 "plumage," "tapestry," "tissue," "ledge," 
 "trenchant," "resource," "villainy," "strath," 
 "thrill," "grisly," "yelp," "kirtle," "dovetail" 
 — all of which are now indispensable. The 
 word " encyclopedia " was unknown to Bacon, 
 so he used the clumsy term "circle learning." 
 
 Fulke branded as inadmissible the words
 
 INTRODUCTION. 7 
 
 '' neophyte," "homicide," ''scandal," "destruc- 
 tion," "tunic," "despicable," "rational." In 
 Hevlin's Observations on V Estrancje s History 
 of Charles 11. (published in 1658j the follow- 
 ing words were censured : " Oblique," " radiant," 
 "adoption," "caress," "amphibious," "hori- 
 zontal," "concede," "articulate," "destination," 
 "ocular," "compensate," "complicated," "ad- 
 ventitious." 
 
 The Kev. Dr. Burro wes (afterward Dean of 
 Cork), in an "Essay on the Style of Doctor 
 Johnson," published in the first volume of the 
 Transactions of the Royal Irish Society (1787), 
 complains of certain words like "resuscita- 
 tion," "orbity," "volant," "fatuity," "divari- 
 cate," "asinine," "narcotic," "vulnerary," "em- 
 pireumatic," "papilionaceous," and many others 
 of the same stamp which "abound in and dis- 
 grace" the pages of Johnson's dictionary — not- 
 withstanding the compiler's claim that he has 
 rarely admitted into it any word not author- 
 ized by former writers. And Burrowes asks 
 where authorities are to be sought for these 
 words as well as " for ' obtund,' ' disruption,' 
 'sensory,' or 'panoply,' all occurring in the 
 short compass of a single essay in the Rambler f 
 or for 'cremation,' 'horticulture,' 'germination,' 
 and ' decussation,' within a few pages of his Life 
 of Browne f They may be found, perhaps, in 
 the works of former writers, but they make no 
 part of the English language. They are the 
 illegitimate offspring of learning by vanity."
 
 8 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 To this John Wilson Croker, in his edition of 
 Boswell's Life of Johnson, answers that by refer- 
 ring to Johnson's own dictionary Dr. Burrowes 
 would " have found good authorities for almost 
 every one of them ; for instance, for ' resuscita- 
 tion,' Milton and Bacon are quoted ; for ' volant,' 
 Milton and Phillips; for 'fatuity,' Browne; for 
 'germination,' Bacon, and so on. But although 
 these authorities which Dr. Burrowes might have 
 found in the dictionary are a sufficient answer to 
 his question, let it be observed that many of 
 these words were in use in more familiar authors 
 than Johnson chose to quote, and that the 
 majority of them are now become familiar, which 
 is sufficient proof that the English language has 
 not considered them as illegitimate." 
 
 Boswell himself naively says : " Johnson 
 assured me that he had not taken upon himself 
 to add more than four or five words to the Eng- 
 lish language, of his own formation ; and he 
 was very much offended at the general license, 
 by no means modestly taken in his time, not 
 only to coin new words, but to use words in 
 senses quite different from their established 
 meaning, and those frequently very fantastical." 
 
 In his great undertaking Johnson was beset 
 by many difficulties which do not hamper the 
 lexicographer of to-day. For one thing, ety- 
 mology in a scientific sense was as yet non- 
 existent, and so was archaeology — a science 
 which, though less than one hundred years old, 
 has thrown so much light on the study of Ian-
 
 INTRODUCTION. 9 
 
 guages. To show his not too exalted opinion of 
 his task he defined a lexicographer to l^e "a 
 harmless drudge " in his dictionary. For a long 
 time he shared the common illusion that by 
 making a catalogue of its words a language 
 might be fixed for good and all. But when his 
 completed work appeared he explained very 
 sensibly in his preface the vanity of any such 
 expectation. He said it would be absurd to 
 imagine that a language should remain un- 
 altered which repeats all human thoughts and 
 feelings that in themselves were constantly 
 changing. And in another place he declared : 
 " I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget 
 that words are the daughters of earth, and that 
 things are the sons of heaven." 
 
 In his very readable Biography of Samuel 
 Johnson Leslie Stephen remarks : " To collect 
 all the words in the language, to define their 
 meanings as accurately as might be, to give the 
 obvious or whimsical guesses at etymology sug- 
 gested by previous writers, and to append a good 
 collection of illustrative passages was the sum of 
 his aml)ition. Any systematic training of the 
 historical processes by which a particular lan- 
 guage had been developed was unknown, and of 
 course the result could not be anticipated. The 
 work, indeed, required a keen logical faculty of 
 definition and wide reading of the English 
 literature of the two preceding centuries ; but 
 it could of course give no play for the higher 
 faculties on points of scientific investigation. A
 
 10 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 dictionary iu Johnson's sense was the highest 
 kind of work to which a journeyman could be 
 set, but it was still work for a journeyman, not 
 for an artist. He was not adding to literature, 
 but providing a useful implement for future men 
 of letters." 
 
 Home Tooke, than whom there has been no 
 closer student of the English language, called 
 Johnson's dictionary a disgrace to the English 
 people. It was far from that, but it may be 
 said that the facilities for making acceptable 
 dictionaries have vastly improved since John- 
 son's day. Whether the wisest methods have 
 kept pace with these facilities is another story. 
 
 The member of a New York publishing house 
 which has brought out a large dictionary informed 
 me that no word was included in its vocabulary 
 that has not received the sanction of literary 
 usage, that being taken as the essential guarantee 
 for its inclusion in the work. He has no knowl- 
 edge of any newly coined words inserted in it, 
 though a very large number of words are to be 
 found there that are not to be found in any other 
 dictionary, such as tabloid, filofloss, etc. But 
 we should not place implicit confidence in that 
 commercial spirit of our age which bases the 
 value of a dictionary on the fact that it contains 
 fifty thousand more words than any other ever 
 issued in the English language. The question 
 should be, Are they fit words? for on this point 
 alone is to be decided the real merit of any dic- 
 tionary.
 
 INTRODUCTION. 1 1 
 
 From now onward into the indefinite future 
 all consciously evolved words should be known 
 in a more intimate and personal way — that is, we 
 should know who are their authors and when and 
 in what circumstances they are born. This must 
 prove an attractive line of work for students of 
 sematics. And here arise the questions, What 
 constitutes a new word ? and how is it formed ? 
 
 Compounds are generally recognized as stand- 
 ing in the same position as new words. Breal 
 makes a new acceptation equivalent to a new 
 word. This author also calls attention to the 
 well-attested but/somewhat surprising fact that 
 modern language!r*have borrowed the suffixes 
 most frequently in use. "Thus, Greek has 
 helped us to form words in -ism, such as optim- 
 ism, socialism ; in -isf, such as artist, florist ; in 
 ise (or ize), such as authorize, fertilize. German 
 has furnished the suffix -ard, as in the French 
 vantard, bavard, the English dastard, coward, 
 bastard; Italian, the suffix -esque, as in gigan- 
 tesque, romanesque, pictures que^ 
 
 There are hundreds of prefixes and suffixes, 
 and all have a more or less definite trend 
 of meaning in themselves. Some are intensive, 
 others negative ; some show quality and relation ; 
 others have little apparent effect on the significa- 
 tion, but they lack the marrow and sinew of root 
 words. They are the extremities of the verbal 
 body ; not its heart and vital organs. 
 
 Within itself the English language no longer 
 has, as aforetime, the resources out of which new
 
 12 WOED-COINAGE. 
 
 words may be formed. For this reason foreign 
 words are impressed into service and often receive 
 such Saxon prefixes as he, un, mis, under, over, 
 after, out; or such Saxon formative suffixes as 
 ness, dam, hood, ship, less, Jul, some, ish. French 
 prefixes (some of them more remotely Latin) also 
 are used, as en, dis, re, inter, trans, or French 
 formative suffixes, as ance, aye, ment, enj, ity, let, 
 ess, able, eons, ative, etc. Separate particles like 
 up, off, by, to, etc., assist in the patchwork, but 
 the making of words wholly out of Anglo-Saxon 
 material in these days is quite an unheard-of 
 thing. It would not be an impossible feat by 
 any means, but we English-speaking people have 
 been taking academic terms from the Latin, 
 Greek, and other languages for so many years 
 that it has become a silly habit. Inherent Anglo- 
 Saxon elements, therefore, compose but scantily 
 our neologisms, and more's the pity. 
 
 Frequent are adverbial formations with prepo- 
 sitions like 2)ro and con. Un is important Mt may 
 be prefixed to most English adjectives, to\fenote 
 the absence of the quality designated by the 
 adjective, as unmindful, untaught, unicept, etc., and 
 to a limited class of nouns and verbs. In the 
 case of a few nouns, "un" expresses "the absence 
 or the contrary of that which the noun signifies, 
 as imbelief, undress, unrest, and the like" ; in the 
 case of certain verbs it expresses "the contrary, 
 and not the sinrple negative, of the action indi- 
 cated by the verb// 
 
 The preposition under, as a prefix has numer-
 
 INTRODUCTION. 13 
 
 ous figurative uses. Be is an inseparable parti- 
 cle in the composition of words denoting return, 
 repetition, iteration. The termination of most of 
 the early Anglo-Saxon infinitives was an or ian, 
 heon, to be, become, being one of the few exce|> 
 tions. These verbs were formed from nouns, 
 sometimes from adjectives, and at a later period 
 were compounded, as utrjan, to go out, from ut, 
 out, and fjan, to go. Though the Anglo-Saxon 
 has no future tense, this missing form was some- 
 times eked out by the use of the auxiliaries xc'dle 
 and sceal as in English, to express the future, 
 " but generally, not without the idea of volition, 
 or of necessity, which pro^^erly belongs to those 
 words " (Professor Samuel M. Shute). 
 
 The principal Anglo-Saxon prefixes were em- 
 ployed as follows : Un-, not ; n-, not ; mis-, un- 
 like, defective, erroneous ; wan-, wanting ; to-, to ; 
 for-, negation, and sometimes intensity ; wi er-, 
 against ; and-, again-t ; ge- has a collective sense : 
 be-, sometimes privative, sometimes intensive ; ed-, 
 again ; sin-, always ; sam-, naif ; aeg- has an inde- 
 terminate sense. 
 
 For the most part the following nominal suf- 
 fixes denote persons : -a, -ere, -end, -e, -el, -ol, -1, 
 -ing, -ling (diminutives), -en, -estre. 
 
 Suffixes denoting state, condition, etc., include : 
 -dom, -had, scipe, lac, -a, -u, -least ; -ung, -ing ; 
 -nes, -u, -eo, -o, -els, -ed, -m, -ot, -d, -t, -raden. 
 
 Adjective suflfixes are : -e, -ig, -lie, -isc, -sum, 
 -ol, -en, -baere, -cund, -iht, -weard, -feald, -leas, 
 -wis, -ern, -tyme.
 
 14 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 Adverbial suffixes : -e, -lice, -urn, -on, -es ; 
 -unga, -inga ; -an, -der ; -on, -an, -r, -ra, -e. 
 
 I append some of the more melodious old A^i- 
 glo-Saxon adjectives : 
 
 Arful — respectable ; favorable. 
 
 Breme, bryme — renowned. 
 
 Dyrne — bidden. 
 
 Ece — eternal. 
 
 Elfscine — elf-beautiful ; handsome. 
 
 Ging — young ; tender. 
 
 Grimlic — sharp ; severe. 
 
 Hador — serene ; clear. 
 
 Hal, hael — whole ; sound ; safe. 
 
 Halig — holy. 
 
 Sarlie — painful ; sorrowful. 
 
 Imvidda — deceitful ; wicked. 
 
 Modig — proud ; irritable. 
 
 Rof — famous. 
 
 Ruli — rough ; hairy. 
 
 Seine — splendid. 
 
 Sel — good ; excellent. 
 
 Smylt — serene ; gentle. 
 
 Wae — infirm ; frail. 
 
 Weor — bad ; miserable. 
 
 There is plenty of justification for new words 
 of the right sort. They all have to pass through 
 a probationary period. '• Thinkers and philoso- 
 phers," says Breal, " have the privilege of creat- 
 ing new words which arrest attention by their 
 amplitude and by the learned aspect of their 
 structure. These words pass into the vocabulary 
 of criticism and so gain currency among artists ;
 
 INTRODUCTION. 15 
 
 but once admitted into the studio of the painter 
 or sculptor, they speedily come forth in order to 
 spread through the world of industry and com- 
 merce, which makes use of them without measure 
 or scruple. So that in a comparatively short 
 time the vocabulary of metaphysics is helping to 
 nourish the language of advertisement." 
 
 To trace the lineage of many words is simply 
 impossible. They are of the parvenue class, 
 without ancestry, though they have as near rela- 
 tives in the dictionary as first cousins. If words 
 could write their autobiographies, what a world 
 of secrets they might reveal ! What a flood of 
 interest they might turn on human emotion, pride, 
 selfishness, nobility, and all the rest of it ! 
 
 One day the question asked itself in my mind : 
 "How many of the leading American authors 
 have invented one or more words ? " The query 
 haunted me with such persistence that I finally 
 decided to learn from, the authors themselves how 
 far they had ventured in word-coinage. Certain 
 American writers are not mentioned in these 
 pages because their responses were too personal 
 or too unworthy of them. Some well-known 
 devotees of letters have wholly mistaken the spirit 
 of my inquiries and dismissed the subject as 
 beneath their notice ; but it is well worth their 
 attention as it is mine, and, luckily for my inves- 
 tigation, people are represented here whose 
 authority cannot be questioned, though it should 
 be frankly stated that the preponderance of 
 opinion is against the promiscuous coining of
 
 16 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 words. The couvictions they have expressed in 
 this matter should have weight with all tyros iu 
 literature and serve to warn those who have 
 passed through their novitiate against the 
 practice. 
 
 It is quite out of the question for any one 
 person to keep track of the new words, that, like 
 miniature meteors, flash across the horizon of 
 letters. Many a verbal variant serves its pur- 
 pose for some special use, but is not adopted into 
 general usage. Its j ustification is imbedded, so to 
 speak, iu some definitive connection \^dth other 
 words for that one occasion. It provides a norm 
 of meaning better than any combination of words 
 could present. Alexander and C?esar knew that 
 twelve feet of sand turns the salt water of the sea 
 into clear fresh water. So we should learn that 
 words, new and old, filtered through the minds 
 of many diverse personalities, at last attain to 
 their highest degree of purity. 
 
 In closing this chapter I ^vish to quote two or 
 three paragraphs from an article in the Pall Mall 
 Marjazine by the English critic, William Archer, 
 on "The American Language." Mr. Archer 
 says : " As American life is far more fertile of new 
 conditions than ours, the tendency towards neolo- 
 gism cannot but be stronger in America than in 
 England. America has enormously enriched the 
 language, not only with new^ words, but (since 
 the American mind is, on the whole, quicker and 
 wittier than the English) with apt and luminous 
 colloquial metaphors."
 
 INTRODUCTION. ] 7 
 
 Again he says: "America doubles and trebles 
 the number of points at which the English lan- 
 guage comes in touch with nature and life, and 
 is thM:fif^re a great source of strength and vital- 
 ity. \The literary language, to be sure, rejects a 
 great deal more than it absorbs ; and even in the 
 vernacular, words and expressions are always 
 dying out and being replaced by others which 
 are somehow better adapted to the changing con- 
 ditionsl^ But though an expression has not, in 
 the long run, proved itself fitted to survive, it 
 does not follow that it has not done good service 
 in its time. Certain it is that the common speech 
 of the Anglo-Saxon race throughout the world is 
 exceedingly supple, well nourished, and rich in 
 forcible and graphic idioms ; and a great part of 
 this wealth it owes to America. Let the purists 
 who sneer at Americanisms think how much 
 poorer the English language would be to-day if 
 North America had become a French or Spanish 
 instead of an English continent. 
 
 "I am far from advocating a breaking down 
 of the barrier between literary and vernacular 
 speech. It should be a porous, permeable bul- 
 wark, allowing of free filtration ; but it should 
 be none the less distinct and clearly recognized. 
 Xor do I recommend an indiscriminate hospitality 
 to all the linguistic inspirations of the American 
 fancy. All I say is that neologisms should be 
 judged on their merits, and not rejected with 
 contumely for no better reason than that they are 
 new and (presumably) American."
 
 18 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 All this is so conspicuously true, and comes so 
 unexpectedly from an authoritative English 
 writer, that it deserves the widest publicity in 
 this country. Many scholars do not generally 
 approve of neologisms, though they cannot tell 
 how language is to grow or ever has grown with- 
 out them ; for every word must have been a 
 neologism originally, even the verb to be.\^\nng, 
 as we shall see, has played a remarkable part in 
 the enrichment of our Indo-European vocabu- 
 
 QWhat we call "pure English" now is a very 
 composite photograph, made up of the lines and 
 outlines of thousands of linguistic faces^nd I do 
 not see where the dissecting knife would stop if 
 with it we endeavored to anatomize this infinitely 
 compound structure.
 
 CHAPTER 11. 
 
 WORDS AND LITERARY STYLE. 
 
 Oh, list, ye decadents of lyric skill : 
 
 Dip froni your hearts the ruddy drops of thought, 
 
 And with them life's blank pages bravely fill 
 
 In words of rare mosaic beauty wrought ; 
 
 Nor think yourselves immortal masters till 
 
 Your Art with Gods own messages is fraught. 
 
 Men of genius have been guilty of some queer 
 word-coinages. Keats coined the impossible word 
 yearnful; but this was not his gravest offense. 
 The Quarterly Review of September, 1818, gave 
 a harsh notice of John Keats' Endymion, which 
 had appeared a few months previously. This 
 periodical often has been blamed for causing the 
 early death of Keats — with how much truth I 
 know not. That portion of the criticism which 
 it seems pertinent to quote here is as follows : 
 
 " We now present some of the new words with 
 which, in imitation of Mr. Leigh Hunt, he adorns 
 our language : 
 
 "We are told that turtles passion their voices, 
 that an arbor is nested, and a lady's locks are 
 gordianed up; and, to supply the place of the 
 nouns thus verbalized, Mr. Keats, with great 
 
 19
 
 20 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 fecundity, spawns new ones, such as men-slugs and 
 human serpentry, the honey-feel of bliss, wives 
 prepare needments, and so forth. Then he has 
 formed new verbs by the process of cutting off 
 their natural tails, the adverbs, and affixing them 
 to their foreheads. Thus, the wine out-sparkled, 
 the multitude up-followed, and night up-took; the 
 wind up-blou's, and the hours are down-sunken. 
 But if he sinks some adverbs in the verbs, he 
 compensates the language with adverbs and 
 adjectives, which he separates from the parent 
 stock. Thus a lady whispers jittntingly and close, 
 makes hushing sighs, and steers her skiff into a 
 ripply cove, a shower falls refreshfully, and a vul- 
 ture has a spjreaded tail." 
 
 It is easy to believe how a delicately balanced 
 and sensitive nature like that of Keats could 
 have been hurt by so critical a cudgeling. (Still 
 more mawkish and violent strictures on his 
 work appeared in Blackwood's Magazine.) But 
 his name was writ in something less subject to 
 evaporation than water, despite the phraseology 
 of his self-made epitaph.' The mystery is that, 
 with so subtle a sense of lyric form, so exquisite 
 an apprehension of and delight in the beautiful, 
 he ever should have bodied forth his sublimated 
 thoughts in any words less nobly chosen than the 
 ones in his "Ode to a Grecian Urn" or those in 
 " The Eve of St. Agnes." 
 
 Perhaps Keats suffered from the defects of his 
 qualities, as what poet does not? In the white 
 
 ^ " Here Hes one whose name was writ in water."
 
 WORDS AXD LITERARY STYLE. 
 
 21 
 
 heat of compositiou a great deal of intellectual 
 power goes to waste in the groping for rhymes. In 
 fixed forms of versification the free flow of inspira- 
 tion must necessarily be weakened, so that in most 
 poets we find three or more commonplace lines to 
 one of great strength or consummate beauty. 
 
 The late Eugene Field once told me he had at 
 times some parrot and monkey struggles with the 
 reluctant muse. There were days, he said, when 
 she was out of sorts and ol:)Stiuate, and then the 
 mischievous rhymes tried their best to elude his 
 pen. In these emergencies he resorted to the 
 primitive method of audibly repeating the alpha- 
 bet of monosyllables for some rhyming word that 
 would fit and meet the nice requirements of syn- 
 tax and prosody. For instance, if he desired a 
 word rhyming with the termination at, he would 
 commence with the first rhyming word bat, and 
 proceed thus : brat, cat, chat, fat, hat, mat, 
 pat, rat, slat, that, and so on. And thus he 
 maundered among the plaguey rhymes until he 
 made them tally in sound and sense. 
 
 It was rather difficult to credit this confession, 
 and I intimated that he must be springing some 
 occult joke on me ; thereupon he solemnly pro- 
 tested that this system of capturing recalcitrant 
 rhymes was a common expedient of his. Well, 
 training does much for poets, as for everybody 
 else, and it may be confidently stated that Mr. 
 Field eventually brought his capricious muse to 
 terms and obliged her to capitulate; for what- 
 ever may be its other deficiencies, his later metri-
 
 22 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 cal work betrays none of those stilted, strained, 
 mechanical devices which would indicate that he 
 persisted iu that crude, school-boy method of com- 
 position. 
 
 Now, in free verse the obstacles to w^hich I 
 have referred are largely removed : the poet may 
 fairly reflect the glow of his soul, instead of garn- 
 ering the mere ashes of his dreams. This 
 accounts for the supreme power of the Psalms of 
 David, the songs of Solomon, the best lines of 
 Walt Whitman. Yet it is not every poet who 
 dares to break away from the trammels of pros- 
 ody. Genius is an emanation from the divine 
 and may make its own rules, in a large measure. 
 It can play truant from the rhetorical orbit with 
 more or less impunity. It can be so tempera- 
 mental as to set at defiance all accepted standards. 
 But no man of moderate gifts in poesy can be an 
 outlaw with safety. If he can say nothing worth 
 saying in the established forms of his art, is it 
 probable that he will be any more successful in 
 some hybrid stanza of his own invention ? 
 
 In the professional career of the late lamented 
 Richard Hovey is to be noted a poet's heroic 
 struggle between the influences of formalism and 
 Walt Whitmanesque freedom. This struggle re- 
 sulted in Mr. Hovey's compromising with both 
 of these influences. In his last great poem, 
 Taliesin, which he designates as a masque, more 
 than thirty different verse forms are employed, 
 though not all with equal charm or effect. His 
 Greek Ionics and Alcaics are beautifully wrought,
 
 WORDS AND LITERARY STYLE. 23 
 
 but in this particular poem the nine-accent iambics 
 seem to be the most powerfully employed of all 
 his meters. 
 
 His purpose, of course, in using so many lyric 
 forms and varied rhythms was to provide the most 
 appropriate metrical medium for his thought. 
 He aimed to be unconventional, and much may 
 be said in defense of free and of even irregular 
 verse forms. He was no more the slave of rules 
 than is the bird ; hence he achieved naturalness 
 by methods which a fainter-hearted singer would 
 not have touched. But Mr. Hovey was in no 
 sense a revolutionist in thought or sentiment. 
 He was reconciled to his own microcosm. It 
 was he who wrote not long before his young and 
 manly soul was taken away from this earth : 
 
 My soul melts like snow in the waters of thy joy ; 
 Thy love is like a white silence ; 
 The joy of death is in my soul. 
 
 I have mentioned Whitman. Ah, there was a 
 magician with words ! And when you heard 
 him speak, you at once realized the atmosphere 
 of one to whom the higher mysteries had been 
 revealed, whatever might have been his other 
 experiences. Upon one occasion we were talk- 
 ing, he and I, about various studies to which a 
 writer should devote himself " Rhetoric," said 
 he, "is all well enough, but beware lest the 
 rules dwarf you into a mere nonentity. A man 
 who feels the message of life and has something 
 to say will find a way of his own to say it. I
 
 24 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 hate to see a chubby, rosy-cheeked boy, all mirth 
 and animatiou, pressed hard against the grind- 
 stone of etiquette until he enters a parlor with as 
 much austere dignity as his great grandfather, 
 and says, very primly, 'Of whom were you 
 speaking, mam-ma?' Such a boy, to my mind, 
 is positiyely nauseating. God allows men to be 
 boys first, so that they can kick around and cut 
 up all sorts of monkey shines. And when they 
 are compelled by their parents to be so sadly 
 polite, it takes away all their charm and ginger. 
 It is just so with a writer, who, a slave to 
 rhetoric and such things, is afraid to say that his 
 soul is his own." 
 
 But it should not be imagined that Whitman 
 had no respect for the right word or for sincere 
 and vivid art. Says one of his most loyal dis- 
 ciples, Horace L. Traubel, editor of The Conserva- 
 tor: "■ Whitman rebelled against old artistic 
 forms, not because he was averse to form, but 
 because he desired free volition and plenty of 
 room. As to form in tlie abstract, his was most 
 unmistakable and inexorable." 
 
 Another enthusiastic admirer of the "good 
 gray poet" says that in the absolute use of words 
 Whitman has few equals. You must go else- 
 where if you want poetic tidbits. What appears 
 in Whitman to be colossal egotism, as Bayard 
 Taylor called it, is merely the expression of the 
 universal man, as applicable to others as to him- 
 self; or, if you please, it is an egotism so vast 
 that it merges into otherhood. William Dean
 
 WORDS AND LITERARY STYLE. ZO 
 
 Howells called him "the apostle of the rough 
 aud imcuuth." The answer to this may be found 
 in John Burroughs' book on Whitman, as where 
 he says : " We owe much to Emerson. But 
 Emerson was much more a made man than was 
 Whitman — much more the result of secondary 
 forces, the college, the church, and of Xew Eng- 
 land social and literary culture." 
 
 In another place this same clear-sighted lover 
 and interpreter of nature says : " Xo man ever 
 searched more diligently for the right word — for 
 just the right word — than did Whitman. He 
 would wait for days and weeks for the one ulti- 
 mate epithet. How long he pressed the language 
 for some word or phrase that would express the 
 evening call of the robin, and died without the 
 sight. . . . His matchless phrases seem like 
 chance hits, so much so that some critics have 
 wondered how he happened to stumble upon them. 
 His verse is not dressed up, because it has so few 
 of the artificial adjuncts of poetry — no finery or 
 stuck-on ornament — nothing obtrusively beauti- 
 ful or poetic ; and because it bears itself with the 
 freedom and nonchalance of a man in his every- 
 day attire. 
 
 "But it is always in a measure misleading to 
 compare language with dress, to say that a poet 
 clothes his thought, etc. The language is the 
 thought ; it is an incarnation, not an outside tailor- 
 ing. To improve the expression is to improve 
 the thought. In the most vital writing the 
 thought is nude : the mind of the reader touches
 
 26 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 something alive and real. When we begin to 
 hear the rustle of a pompous vocabulary, when 
 the man begins to dress his commonplace ideas up 
 in fine phrases, we have enough of him. Indeed, 
 it is only the mechanical writer who may be said 
 to clothe his ideas with words ; the real poet 
 thinks through words." 
 
 To have a complete grasp of the meaning of 
 the foregoing paragraph is to know what true 
 poetry is and how to judge it. To be sure, we 
 are not all elemental in what our minds put forth. 
 Our intellectual palates differ, and it is a wise 
 dispensation that we are not all alike. The 
 hardy man of the mountain best relishes coarse, 
 substantial fare ; the lazy epicure craves food that 
 is highly seasoned with condiments and currie. 
 One man's meat is another man's poison; one 
 man's honey is another man's gall. The words 
 of some poems fall upon our consciousness like 
 the manna that descended upon the Israelites, 
 "in which were all manner of tastes ; and every 
 one found in it what his palate was chiefly pleased 
 with. If he desired fat in it, he had it. In it 
 young men tasted bread ; the old men honey ; and 
 the children oil." 
 
 If we concede that great poets and great ora- 
 tors are born, not made, it is nevertheless wide 
 of the truth to say that by the mere force of un- 
 taught nature a man can write a good poem or 
 make a good speech. AYhile the power of ex- 
 pression is a gift, supreme proficiency in literary 
 composition, however rich and varied may be
 
 WORDS AND LITERARY STYLE. 27 
 
 one's endowments, can be gained only by strenu- 
 ous and long-continued work. The study of 
 manuals of composition and of formal treatises 
 on the art of writing is an important aid to 
 methodical knowledge ; but it is absurd to believe 
 that rhetorical rules alone will suffice to teach a 
 man a flawless style. He may cultivate his sen- 
 sibilities and strengthen his mental faculties l)y 
 discipline ; but he cannot quicken the flow of his 
 own ideas by the servile imitation of formulas. 
 In trying to be natural we often end in being 
 unique; but some men could have a magnetic 
 literary style no more than a magnetic personal- 
 ity. It is not in them. 
 
 It is a pathetic thing that many people are 
 absolutely incapable of telling a good from a bad 
 poem. Everything that has jingle and rhyme is 
 a poem to them. They have no sense of metrical 
 form, are mentally color-blind to the dazzling 
 hues of words, and alike are deaf to lyric harmo- 
 nies, just as many poor mortals cannot tell one 
 tune from another. But more unfortunate than 
 aught else, they are too obtuse to feel the impas- 
 sioned throb of inspiration.^ They are like 
 Wordsworth's Peter Bell: 
 
 ^ "Fair are the flowers and the children, but their 
 subtle suggestion is fairer, 
 
 Kare is the rosehurst of dawn, but the secret that 
 clasps it is rarer ; 
 
 Sweet the exultance of song, but the strain that pre- 
 cedes it is sweeter, 
 
 And never was poem yet writ, hut the meaning out- 
 mastered the meter," — Eichard Realf.
 
 28 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 A primrose by a river's brim, 
 A yellow primrose was to him, 
 And it was nothing more. 
 
 What a miraculous contrast to this kind of 
 opacity is the poet's own spiritual apprehension, 
 as voiced in his immortal ode : 
 
 Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting ; 
 The soul that rises with us, our life's Star, 
 Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
 And cometh from afar. 
 
 A good illustration of the vast difference be- 
 tween the mental attitude of the great artist 
 toward nature and life and that of the feckless, 
 narrow, matter-of-fact mind, occurs in W. W. 
 Story's two poems, Padre Bandelli and Leonardo 
 Da Vinci, which I heartily commend to the 
 reader. 
 
 There are those who say that to be sure of 
 heaven we must take heaven with us when we 
 die. In an analogous way, what we get out of 
 certain authors depends largely upon what we 
 bring to them. There are things in the writings 
 of Dante, Shakespeare, and Browning that prob- 
 ably no one comprehends, though, in a way, they 
 may be apprehended. From the world of ideals 
 many people seem to be barred congenitally. 
 And yet how often w^e meet men and women of 
 sciolistic culture who pretend to be idealists ! If 
 you have lived In the Forest of Arden, like 
 Hamilton W. Mabie and Rosalind, you already 
 know the untold value of insight — not only to
 
 WORDS AND LITERARY STYLE. 29 
 
 those who produce works of art and literature, 
 but to all who would truly understand and enjoy 
 them. 
 
 The average writer soon learns his limitations. 
 The more he goes in for exquisite literary analy- 
 sis, the better he knows that — 
 
 . . . There are some thoughts beyond the reach 
 Of our imperfect speech. 
 
 Because they hover but vaguely in the back- 
 ground of the mind. He perceives that they are 
 well worth an arduous pursuit, but they elude 
 capture ; they are too volatile to hold in solution 
 of language. ]Marie Bashkirtseff confided to her 
 Diary : " If I took heed I could write very cor- 
 rectly ; but it seems to me that certain incoherent 
 thoughts require a perfect artlessness of ex- 
 pression." 
 
 To drift on the current of fancy may be all 
 right, when judgment is at the helm. ]\[auy 
 writers depend upon the inspiration of the mom- 
 ent and make the best of it. They bring to bear 
 upon very poor material sometimes the wizardry 
 of words, the little touches, which transform it 
 into a thing of beauty. Sitting down on one 
 occasion to write a poem, without a definite topic 
 in his mind, Robert Burns began thus : 
 
 Which way the subject theme may gang, 
 Let time or chance determine ; 
 Perhaps it may turn out a sang — 
 Or probably a sermon.
 
 30 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 But the Promethean triumphs of mountain- 
 minded genius ! Jean Paul says somewhere that 
 the conceptions of the greatest works of genius 
 came to their authors like a flash. Of course, all 
 the details were not rounded out in one swift 
 revelation, but a series of pictures were grouped 
 together in the mind by those rapid combinations 
 of which only the imagination is capable. It is 
 probable that the Iliad and Odyssey, the Divina 
 Commedia, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Faust, 
 and a few other powerful creations, so called, 
 were conceived in this way. The theme or 
 motif of each may be stated in a single sentence. 
 Why then is it illogical to say that the con- 
 ceptions of such works came in the form of mere 
 titles or names ? 
 
 Rather difierent considerations from those sub- 
 mitted earlier in this chapter in relation to 
 poetry attach themselves to a survey of the 
 methods and style of our best prose writers. 
 When a young writer takes a dislike to using 
 big, ungainly words, it ought to be, if it isn't, a 
 sign that he is beginning to form a proper style 
 of his own. In our callow years we shoot wide 
 of the mark in trying to convey our ideas — if in- 
 deed we have any worth writing out. Close 
 thinking is neither a trait nor a habit of young 
 minds. During the period of adolescence we are 
 what Doctor Johnson called faint thinkers. It 
 is next to impossible to develop our mental nega- 
 tives into faithful verbal pictures. We commit 
 heterophemy {see p. 71 j over and over again.
 
 WORDS AND LITERARY STYLE. 31 
 
 The logical faculty veers with every wind of 
 argument that touches it, and is like a fledgling 
 bird that on first trying its wings flutters breath- 
 lessly to the ground. Here and there some pre- 
 cocious lad like Pope lisps in numbers and the 
 numbers come, but even such exceptions may 
 not be taken very seriously. Premature genius, 
 like premature fruit, soon decays and dies. 
 
 Even the ripest scholarship may not insure to 
 a person a literary style at once clear like 
 Macaulay's and distinguished like John Morley's. 
 Kearly every vestige of the once voluminous 
 works of Varro, the most learned of the Romans, 
 perished because they were destitute of art. 
 The Greeks were the makers of style in writing. 
 The art of putting things so that the words for 
 which they stand will impress, persuade, and 
 convince is the secret of style, so far as it can be 
 defined in a nutshell. Style *is a means and not 
 an end. Some women have the knack of lend- 
 ing charm to their attire, though it be very 
 simple, by the way they carry themselves. 
 They know how to wear their clothes. A few 
 feminine touches will work magic in the general 
 effect of the most common raiment. On the 
 other hand, how many women do we see who 
 have a dowdy or slovenly or bizarre appearance, 
 no matter how costly and elaborate may be their 
 costume. There is a vulgarity in the superflui- 
 ties of dress and ornament which reflects on the 
 good taste of the wearer. 
 
 So it is in writing. The shoddy phrase.
 
 32 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 monger soon makes himself ridiculous to all 
 sensible readers. The lettered snob, the intel- 
 lectual dandy, soon betrays himself; his mimic 
 fire gives one the chills ; his headlong fluency 
 leads him into ludicrous pitfalls. The cheap, 
 third-rate quidnunc always tries to hide his de- 
 fects or lack of thought l^ehind a showy screen of 
 alien, perhaps effete, words that only befog his 
 own fat wits. 
 
 The late Stephen Crane's first literary success 
 was paradoxical in that he graphically described 
 scenes of war and carnage in which he had had 
 no personal experience. The Red Badge of 
 Courage won plaudits from veterans in military 
 technique for its accuracy of description, which goes 
 to prove that the clairvoyance of the imagination 
 is sometimes a very good substitute for the actual 
 experience of an author. The later stories of 
 Mr. Crane showed that he was getting back to 
 nature and to the memories of his boyhood — a 
 fine symptom. As a war correspondent in the 
 field his work was handicapped by facts and 
 lacked that quality of spontaneity and perspective 
 whicli made his fiction so delightful. He had a 
 remarkable metonymic gift, as eftective in its 
 way as the archaic talent of Stanley J. AVeyman. 
 Mr. Crane employed this gift with less felicity in 
 his verse, where it usually makes the most dis- 
 tinguished showing, than in his prose. In fact, 
 ^Ir. Crane's genius was not strictly of a })oetic 
 order. In striving for strength he evolved hy- 
 brid and amorphous meters destitute of rhythm
 
 WORDS AND LITERARY STYLE. 33 
 
 and melody. lu other words, he did not have 
 the poet's ear for music. Yet he left some of 
 the most drastic and picturesque prose that was 
 penned during the last decade of the last 
 century. 
 
 Dr. AV. Kobertson Nicoll says: "When the 
 word or phrase comes along, undelaying, and fit, 
 it is best. In the language of the really great 
 writer, there are no synonyms." At the first 
 blush this seems a rather extravagant statement. 
 Let us see if it is. Perhaps no two words have 
 exactly the same meaning, but many have a simi- 
 lar meaning. If this be true, then synonyms are 
 not identical, but approximate. They seem, how- 
 ever, such close equivalents of each other that 
 they are familiarly used in an interchangeable 
 manner ; but we often see how the faulty use of 
 synonyms leads to violations of precision. Loose 
 diction is full of pleonasms and often goes arm in 
 arm with a strutting, thrasonical, and pavonine 
 style. 
 
 The great number of so-called synonyms in the 
 English language is due to its formation. Nor- 
 man-French words were superimposed upon the 
 Anglo-Saxon speech, with the result that there 
 are many words of primitive English and Korman 
 origin now in the language which exist side by 
 side and express very similar ideas. It is because 
 of this fact probably that so many persons think 
 we have an embarrassment of synonyms.^ 
 
 ^ " An analogous difference appears in comparing the 
 synonyms in two languages : clergyman and ecclesias-
 
 34 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 De Mille's definitiou, it seems to me, comes 
 nearest to being satisfactory : " Synonymous words 
 may be said to be similar as to their general 
 meaning, but dissimilar as to their specific mean- 
 ing." It should be remembered that language is 
 sometimes used to disguise or to conceal thought. 
 Likewise is it an approved canon that an essential 
 aim of art is to conceal art, and this aim has been 
 carried to such perfection in literature as to create 
 many an illusion of a writer's freshness of impres- 
 sions and spontaneity. 
 
 In his very instructive book, Evenj-Day Eng- 
 lish, Richard Grant White says : " It is true, in 
 a certain sense, with but few exceptions, words 
 have but one meaning ; that is, the radical and 
 essential meaning of the word exists so as to be 
 perceivable, and so as to be a constant guide to 
 its right use. At the same time most words, if 
 not indeed all, are used with such a degree of 
 vagueness, small though it be, such a lack of per- 
 fect consent and identical apprehension among all 
 the users, that possibly no word has exactly the 
 same meaning to any two persons." George Eliot 
 
 tiqiie^ God and Dieu^ liebe and amour, brio and brilliant, 
 girl and jeune fille, do not respectively mean the same 
 things, though we transhite one by the other. The two 
 words of each couple represent two different objects and 
 are ditferently understood by the two peoples. Their 
 sense is the same in the rough ; the details of their 
 meanings are different and untranslatable in the absence 
 of simitar objects and emotions in the two cases." — H, 
 Taine.
 
 WORDS AND LITERARY STYLE. 35 
 
 says in Middlemarcli : "The meaning we attach 
 to words depends on our feeling." 
 
 Professor Whitney mentions as a reason in 
 favor of the adoption of a certain word (reliable) 
 its "enrichment of the language by a synonym 
 which may yet be made to distinguish a valual)le 
 shade of meaning." 
 
 The popular meaning of a word may not at all 
 include its literary content. It takes on and 
 loses values according to the individuality of the 
 writer.^ Used subjectively, it may be scarcely 
 more distinct than a haze-veiled mountain ; while 
 in an objective form it may help to paint a grand 
 picture or appeal to some salient emotion. 
 
 But if the great writer needs no synonyms, 
 which I am inclined to doubt, he sometimes, espe- 
 cially if he be a scientist or a philosopher, comes 
 to a gap which he cannot fill with technical nicety 
 l)y any known word in his language. It is then 
 he must call upon his invention to frame a word 
 to serve his purpose, one, of course, formed on a 
 reasonably good analogy. Thus Comte invented 
 the word altruism ; Professor Huxley the word 
 agnostic (see p. 67), Dr. James McCosh the word 
 miriagnostic (see p. 67 ), Dr. Andrew T. Sill the 
 word osteojyath, coined on the analogy of homeo- 
 path, etc. — one who practises osteopathy,- which 
 refers nearly all diseases and their treatment to 
 
 ^ " We all imbue words with meanings of our own. " 
 — .John Burroughs. 
 
 2 This comparatively new school of doctors adminis- 
 tei^^ no druo-s.
 
 36 WORD-COTNAGE. 
 
 the bones ; and ^lax Nordau the words 7:>Z?(si- 
 ology, the science of wealth, and macrohiotij, the 
 science of old age. Even Eugene Field's words 
 defining the various phases of book mania may 
 be included in this category : Biblloparanoiacs, 
 or such as seek merely the name of being book- 
 lovers ; bibliophrodisiacs, such as imagine they 
 love books; bibliocranks, such as have a madness 
 in a certain line and tolerate no other line ; biblio- 
 maniac, a well-rounded, symmetrical, and hope- 
 lessly incurable collector. The last is not a 
 coinage of Mr. Field's, however : it was used 
 fifty years ago by F. Somner Merryweather, an 
 English writer. 
 
 The word truthful at one time gave offense to 
 philologists in England, because it was said to be 
 an Americanism. In commenting on this word 
 William Archer rightly urges that "it is not 
 only a vast improvement on the stilted 'vera- 
 cious,' but one of the prettiest and most thor- 
 oughly English words in the dictionary." 
 
 Richard Grant White was not opposed to new 
 words that are perfectly eligible and necessary. 
 His opinion, as expressed in the introduction to 
 his book. Words and Their Uses, was this: "New 
 words, when they are needed and are rightly 
 formed, and so clearly discriminated that they 
 have a meaning peculiarly their own, enrich a 
 language ; while the use of one word to mean 
 many things, more or less unlike, is the sign of 
 poverty in speech, and the source of ambiguity, 
 the mother of confusion. For these reasons the
 
 WORDS AND LITERARY STYLE. 37 
 
 objection on the part of a writer upon language 
 to a word or a phrase should not be that it is 
 new, but that it is inconsistent with reason, in- 
 congruous in itself, or opposed to the genius of 
 the tongue into which it has been introduced. 
 Something must and surely will be sacrificed in 
 language to convenience ; but too much may be 
 sacrificed to brevity. A periphrasis which is 
 clear and forcible is not to l)e abandoned for a 
 shorter phrase, or even a single word, which is 
 ambiguous, barbarous, grotesque, or illogical. 
 Unless much is at stake, it is always better to go 
 clean and dry-shod a little way about than to 
 soil our feet by taking a short cut." 
 
 The pedantic prejudices of purists seldom 
 either kill or exile new words that are cordially 
 accepted by the people. " Only a dead lan- 
 guage," says Brander Matthews, " can get along 
 without neologisms, without a steady stream of 
 new words, new uses, new phrases, new idioms. 
 In Latin it may be proper enough for us to set 
 up a Ciceronian standard and to reject any usage 
 not warranted by the masterly orator ; but in 
 English it is absurd to set up any merely per- 
 sonal standard and to reject any term or any 
 idiom because it was unknown to Chaucer, or to 
 Shakespeare, to Addison or to Franklin, to 
 Thackeray or to Hawthorne." 
 
 In his essay on " Mirabeau and the French 
 Revolution," Macaulay mentions "conservative" 
 as "the new cant word." That was in 1832. 
 Since then the word has become strongly rooted
 
 38 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 in the language. Oliver Goldsmith, in The 
 Vicar of Wakefield, introduced the word " fudge," 
 which survives to this day, and so far as I know 
 is in good repute. Rudyard Kipling coined the 
 word curtiosity, which means the asking of " ever 
 so many questions." It may perish with the 
 book in which it appeared, or it may reach a 
 venerable age like fudge — who knows? We 
 have many examples of the paronym — a word 
 that exactly represents a word in another lan- 
 guage, differing from it only in some slight 
 modification. Thus nerve is a paronym of 
 Latin nervus ; muscle, of museulus ; canal,- of 
 canalis. In some writers we perceive a grab for 
 tropology — that is, changing the original import 
 of a word. Kipling has a bold and, for the most 
 part, happy faculty in this way. 
 
 To have the mind steeped in an atmosphere for 
 literary purposes is to have it also thoroughly 
 stored, if need be, with archaic words and terms. 
 For three or four years Thomas Moore pored 
 over books of travel in the Orient before writing 
 Lalla Rool-h. When the poem appeared, nearly 
 everybody inferred that the author must have 
 lived in the Valley of Cashmere. Gustave 
 Flaubert went to Tunis, and then to the ruins of 
 Carthage, where he remained for a long time, in 
 order to gather local color and terminology for 
 his masterpiece, Salammbo. By the way, for pen- 
 ning Madame Bovary, Flaubert was brought 
 before the Tribune Correctionnelle de Paris in 
 1857. It was claimed by V Avocat Imperial that
 
 WORDS AND LITERARY STYLE. 39 
 
 Christian morality condemns realistic literature 
 — not because it paints the passions, like hate, 
 vengeance, and love — but because it paints them 
 without restraint, without limit. Art without 
 law or principle is not art. It is like a beautiful 
 woman who indelicately exposes her person. To 
 impose upon art the single rule of pul)lic decency 
 is not to reduce it to extreme dependence, but to 
 honor it. M. Lenard, in defense, said that the 
 book was in the interests of morals and religion, 
 as it pictured the end of the woman who com- 
 mitted suicide. He insisted that the book was 
 realistic, because it was not the gross materiality 
 of things which it advanced, but the human sen- 
 timent — what the soul perceives through the 
 senses. The proceedings against the author fell 
 to the ground. The pleadings and arguments 
 were published and bristle with French casuis- 
 try. Many novelists and dramatists make close- 
 range studies of localities, as did Flaubert, before 
 laying their scenes and choosing their personages 
 — Kipling, for instance. Without these precau- 
 tions and this preparation their work would be 
 full of anachronisms, which would be detected at 
 once by the alert and exacting public. 
 
 Unity in variety ^ was the old Greek motto as 
 
 1 " The perfect writer will express himself as Junius 
 when in the Junius frame of mind ; when he feels as 
 Lamb felt, will use a like familiar speech, and will 
 fall into the ruggedness of Carlyle when in Carlylean 
 mood. Now he will be rhythmical and now irregular ; 
 here his language will he plain and there ornate ; some- 
 times his sentences will be balanced and at other times
 
 40 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 applied to style. By way of giving a fillip to 
 his diction, Laurence Sterne would insert a 
 quaint epigram now and then. One of these — 
 viz., " The Lord tempers the wind to the shorn 
 lamb," most people familiarly quote as coming 
 from the Bible. But it is found in that model for 
 all literary workers, A Sentimental Journey. It 
 was on account of this picturesque saying that 
 Tom Appleton once playfully recommended that 
 the Corporation of Boston should, for the sake 
 of improving the climate there, place a shorn 
 lamb at the northeast corner of the Common. 
 
 The manner of writing obviously enough de- 
 pends upon the manner of thinking. Clearly to 
 understand the subject in hand is the first require- 
 ment ; but I do not purpose to thresh over the 
 principles of style, wliich have been so ably treated 
 by Buffon, Herbert Spencer, and others. Mr. 
 Spencer shows that the more energy is required 
 to get the writer's meaning from his words, the 
 less will be left for the thought, and that the 
 
 unsymmetrical ; for a while there will be considerable 
 sameness, and again great variety. His mode of ex- 
 pression naturally responding to his state of feeling, 
 there will flow from his pen a composition changing to 
 the same degree that the aspects of the subject change. 
 . And while his work presents to the reader 
 that variety needful to prevent continuous exertion of 
 the faculties, it will also answer to the description of all 
 highly organized products, both of man and of nature ; 
 it will be not a series of like parts simply placed in 
 juxtaposition, but one whole made up of unlike parts 
 that are mutually dependent." — From Herbert Spen- 
 cer's essay on "The Philosophy of Style."
 
 WORDS AND LITERARY STYLE. 41 
 
 writer therefore should aim to economize the 
 reader's energy by making the expression as 
 transparent as possible. To convey thought and 
 not mere words is the purpose of writing, though 
 mental development, to say nothing of literature, 
 could not go far without language. Such models 
 as Bacon, Macaulay, and Addison are worth 
 giving many days and nights to ; but these 
 authors had their intellectual failings. Richard 
 Grant White has toppled over some of the popu- 
 lar notions as to the elegant English of Addison ; 
 and Bacon and Macaulay are not beyond just 
 criticism. 
 
 Professor Huxley's suggestions as to style are 
 excellent. "The business of a young writer," 
 he declares, " is not to ape Addison or De Foe, 
 l:>ut to make his style himself as they made their 
 styles themselves. They were great thinkers, in 
 the first place, because by dint of learning and 
 thinking they had acquired clear and vivid con- 
 ceptions about one or other of the many aspects 
 of men and things. In the second place, because 
 they took infinite pains to embody those concep 
 tious in language exactly adapted to convey them 
 to other minds. In the third place, because they 
 possessed that purely artistic sense of rhythm and 
 proportion which enabled them to add grace to 
 force, and, while loyal to truth, made exactness 
 subservient to beauty. If there is any merit in 
 my English now, it is due to the fact that I have 
 by degrees become awake to the importance of
 
 42 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 the three conditions of good writing which I have 
 mentioned." 
 
 The constructive powers of the mind are pecu- 
 liarly affected by words, which actually suggest 
 ideas, and they in turn, by association, suggest 
 others. John Dryden was frank enough to ac- 
 knowledge that a rhyme had often helped him to 
 an idea. Whole systems of philosophy have been 
 built upon a few words — employed in an arbitrary 
 or dogmatic sense. 
 
 Read Holy Writ if you would gain mental 
 as well as moral and spiritual stimulus, and 
 remember that words, though they should be the 
 natural imprints of thought, are really much 
 more than any one thing or any hundred things 
 to which they have been likened. To one man 
 they may be the manna of culture ; to another an 
 exhilarating draught of ideas ; to still another 
 fuel to the flame of his emotions. They may be 
 the coin from the die or the coin from the hand. 
 They may be as though machine-made or a 
 natural product like an apple or a daisy, but 
 above all tlieij are vital, living things. And ap- 
 preciating this all-important truth, men of genius 
 will use them as such and embody their concep- 
 tions in words that breathe not less than their 
 thoughts. 
 
 The present writer is convinced that hitherto 
 the intellectual and psychologic aspects of lan- 
 guage, especially of English, have been too much 
 neglected for the mechanical side, including 
 grammar and rhetoric.
 
 WORDS AND LITERARY STYLE. 43 
 
 Professors Greenough and Kittredge, in their 
 recent book entitled Wordi and their Ways in 
 English Speech, insist, with excellent arguments, 
 that language is poetry, because it is metaphori- 
 cal and imaginative. Is this not virtually imply- 
 ing that language is psychologic? Certainly they 
 have made a psychologic study of the English 
 language in this extremely valuable work. In 
 several places they speak of what was Jelt to be 
 the sense and meaning of certain words at cer- 
 tain epochs. But they say this : "It is, of course, 
 absurd to ascribe feeling to language, except in 
 a metaphorical way. Fortunately, however, the 
 vague syntax of composition allows the German 
 word (Sprachgefuhl, or 'speech-feeling') to mean 
 a 'feeling for speech ' as well as 'feeling 0/ speech,' 
 and by-and-by we shall either adopt the term as an 
 English word, or the feeling itself will accept 
 some other suitable phrase to express the idea, 
 for the Sprachgefuhl is a very real thing in a 
 long-cultivated language like our own. It affects 
 every word that we utter, though we may think 
 that we are speaking as the whim of the moment 
 dictates ; and thus it is the strongest and most 
 
 pervasive of all conservative forces 
 
 Men of genius may take great liberties with their 
 mother tongue without offence ; but let them once 
 run counter to its characteristic tendencies, let 
 them violate the English Sprachgefuhl, and their 
 mannerism becomes, as it were, a foreign lan- 
 guage. They are not writing English, but — say 
 Carlylese."
 
 44 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 The principle unclerlyiug all human speech is 
 suggested by the obvious imitation which ac- 
 companies all natural signs. But language is 
 not purely conventional, as has been wrongly 
 inferred from the fact that a tacit convention 
 between the speaker and the hearer is necessary 
 to the adoption of a common language. Apart 
 from its uses, language itself, in its complete 
 articulated structure, is one of the grandest tri- 
 umphs of imaginative reason.^ At the very 
 dawn of recorded history it came full-panoplied 
 in the glorious strength of its maturity. Yet its 
 inventors were not scientifically conscious of its 
 mode of formation, or of the elementary articu- 
 lations of sounds of which its words were com- 
 posed. Kot less surprising is the fact that, 
 though the parts of speech (of the Greek tongue) 
 had been distinguished, the principles of ety- 
 mology were not clearly discerned, nor was the 
 relation among its cognate tongues discovered, 
 during the whole period of its greatest vitality 
 and polish. It was not until the eighteenth cen- 
 tury that the brilliant scholar, Sir William 
 Jones, gave the impulse which produced the 
 modern school of comparative philology. INIuch 
 credit is also due to Carl Brugmann and his col- 
 leagues for tracing the Indo-European languages 
 to a common source. 
 
 The processes of linguistic growth often seem 
 to be merely mechanical, but they are reallj 
 under a purposeful influence from the moment 
 ^ James G. Murphy, The Human Mind, p. 275.
 
 WORDS AND LITERARY STYLE. 45 
 
 they enter into the final stage of conscious con- 
 struction. It is true, the consciously evolved 
 word rarely belongs to popular literature, but to 
 the nomenclature of science. Yet these arbitra- 
 rily formed words do not always and of necessity 
 remain learned. If there be need of them 
 among a majority of the people, they will become 
 popular. But they are subject to alterations of 
 meaning quite as much as the words whose origin 
 cannot be traced. And many words, figurative 
 at first, gradually take on a variety of secondary 
 meanings and are raised to a generic sense, 
 including a number of specific senses ; slang terms 
 go through many extensions and changes of 
 meaning before they are lifted to the dignity of 
 legitimate words, and many are abandoned to 
 their fate as without the rcbust quality necessary 
 to their preservation. Placing new meanings on 
 old words therefore involves as much conscious 
 eflTort as coining new ones, and this work helps 
 to keep our language aligned to the spirit of our 
 national literature. 
 
 The psychologic method of developing language 
 is steadily taking the place of the old desiccated 
 formulas of grammar, just as the real logic of to- 
 day has sprung from the ancient dust of formal 
 logic. It is studied with reference to its dynamic 
 functions rather than to its artificial patchwork. 
 Its growth even has been recognized as similar to 
 the process known as the evolutionary hypothesis 
 in biology, wherein the animal is conceived as 
 evolving by successive difterentiatious out of a
 
 46 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 single drop of jelly-like protoplasm ; and at least 
 by one college professor (Dr. Fred Newton Scott) 
 it has been treated in terms of pathology, in a 
 striking paper entitled Diseases of English Prose. 
 We speak of writers like Henry Van Dyke and 
 Edith Wharton as having great powers of visual- 
 ization ; of putting words together in such vivid 
 form that we see all they wish us to see and from 
 their own psychic viewpoint. The following pas- 
 sage from the preface in H. Taine's work, On 
 InteUigence, is full of suggestion to those who are 
 interested in this phase of the subject : " History 
 is applied psychology. . . . The historian 
 notes the total transformations presented by a 
 particular human molecule or group of human 
 molecules ; and, to explain these transformations, 
 writes the psychology of the molecule or group ; 
 Carlyle has written that of Cromwell : Sainte- 
 Beuve that of Port Royal ; Stendhal has made 
 twenty attempts on that of the Italians ; M. 
 Renan has given us that of the Semitic race. 
 Every perspicacious and philosophical historian 
 labors at that of a man, an epoch, a people, a 
 race : the researches of linguists, mythologists, 
 and ethnographers have no other aim ; the task 
 is invariably the description of a human mind or 
 of the characteristics common to a group of minds ; 
 and what historians do with respect to the past, 
 the great novelists and dramatists do with the 
 present." 
 
 In her beautiful psychologic study of "The 
 Metaphor," Miss Gertrude Buck, an instructor in
 
 WORDS AND LITERARY STYLE. 47 
 
 English in Vassar College, has written a mono- 
 graph that deserves an abiding appreciation. 
 She takes issue with many authorities, from Aris- 
 totle to Spencer, as to the two principal forms of 
 metaphor, and her discussion of these mooted 
 questions is both thorough and convincing. In 
 one passage she sums up thus : " Specialization in 
 language follows at some distance specialization 
 of thought ; and the recognition of any expression 
 once simple as metaphorical marks the social de- 
 mand for a division of labor on the part of lan- 
 guage which shall make it adequate to the grow- 
 ing diflerentiation of thought it represents. If a 
 definition be required, radical metaphor arises 
 when a thought has outgrown its form of expres- 
 sion. It is the bursting of a double branching 
 significance from the single sheath of language 
 once adequate to contain it." Miss Buck in- 
 dulges in the term inetaphoraphohia — as " only the 
 logical consequence of the faith that metaphor 
 arises from the desire of the writer to produce a 
 certain efifect upon the reader." A little before 
 that, in dealing with the poetic metaphor, she 
 argues sagely that ''a. piece of writing which 
 seeks only to lay bare the writer's thought ; with 
 no reference at all to the capacity or interests of 
 the reader, is condemned as bad art ; and no less 
 is the work found wanting which looks only to its 
 effect on the reader, little caring to be true to the 
 vision of him who writes. And of this last sort 
 must be the metaphor which is made for the sake 
 of pleasing the reader, if no real sight of the
 
 48 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 writer lies behind." Then she clearly traces the 
 metaphor process on its way to plain statement, 
 where it is sure to land sooner or later, and finally 
 reaches the conclusion that there is " no limit to 
 the new situations of which our expanding uni- 
 verse and our expanding selves are capable. 
 Metaphor, while a stage in the perceptive process 
 which must always be superseded by plain state- 
 ment, must as certainly recur in a new perceptive 
 process, though one metaphor may die into ab- 
 stract speech, another rises out of the very exten- 
 sion and complication of experience which the 
 former process of growth and death has afforded. 
 To paraphrase Swinburne's assertion,^ 'metaphors 
 perish, but metaphor shall endure.' " 
 
 AYe are now beginning to see that " words are 
 the soul's ambassadors," as Howell phrases it. 
 Benjamin Ide Wheeler says that "language is 
 art's most supple, most familiar clay." From 
 a psychologic point of view this definition is too 
 restricted. I prefer Madame Swetchine's : " There 
 are words which are worth as much as the best 
 actions, for they contain the germ of them all." 
 Or this one of Joubert's : " Words become 
 luminous when the finger of the poet touches 
 them with his phosphorus." Whipple, who said : 
 " Nothing is rarer than the use of a word in its 
 exact meaning," was one of the comparatively 
 few Americans of his time who understood that 
 the most precious element in language is its liu- 
 
 ^ " Men perish, but man shall endure; lives die, but 
 the life is not dead." — Hymn of Man.
 
 WORDS AND LITERARY STYLE. 49 
 
 inanity and humanistic purpose. When we speak 
 of language as merely plastic, as capable of 
 being molded and twisted and distorted, we are 
 viewing but a small segment of it. 
 
 The Bible has this pretty Eastern simile : " A 
 word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures 
 of silver," but no attempt is made here to tell 
 what a word actually is. Of the power and effect 
 of a word Walter Savage Landor speaks in this 
 wise : " On a winged word hath hung the destiny 
 of nations." Words that bubble from a heart 
 full of joyance or that are gasped in anguish ; 
 words that thrill one's whole being with love or 
 courage, or crush the spirit with grief; words 
 that come flame-plumed from the furnace of the 
 brain — are these forever to be treated as the 
 swaddlings or garments of thought? Perhaps 
 when thought is like a mummy its most befitting 
 garb is verbal cerements ; but when it is alive, 
 let us look elsewhere than to our wardrobes for 
 comparisons. 
 
 A frequent verbal mesalliance is that of a feeble 
 noun and a strong adjective, which reminds me of 
 something to be said anent the latter. If the nine 
 parts of English speech were conscious of fatigue, 
 like human beings, there can be no doubt that 
 the poor adjective, overworked at all hours of the 
 day and night, with no vacations or holidays or 
 rest even on Sundays, would feel a degree of las- 
 situde bordering on coma. It certainly would be 
 in no proper state to l)e drawn upon for all kinds 
 of haphazard, extravagant, ludicrous, bitter, in
 
 50 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 short, universal, service, which now, as a helpless, 
 inanimate symbol, it performs through the instru- 
 mentality of its perfervid users. 
 
 We do not have to dip into grammar very far 
 to prove that the adjective is an important flictor 
 of language. It is so volatile an ingredient, 
 however, and so readily mixes, whether with oil 
 or water, or both, that even literary chemists often 
 make strange and absurd compounds by a too 
 liberal use of it. Like wax, many adjectives 
 solidify just under their melting-point. 
 
 The writers of epic and heroic poetry — the 
 real classicists — have never overworked the ad- 
 jective, because their narratives demanded the 
 use of the verb and the adverb, and the concrete 
 suggestions of names and places and men and 
 things, all belonging to the noun department. 
 Nor do the great essayists bury their thoughts 
 under piled-up cairns of adjectives. Going back 
 no further than to Emerson, listen to this stroke 
 of his mental bell : " All things are moral, and 
 in their boundless changes have an unceasing ref- 
 erence to spiritual nature. Therefore is nature 
 glorious with form, color, and motion, so that 
 every globe in the remotest heaven, every chemi- 
 cal change of vegetation, from the first principle 
 of growth in the eye of a leaf to the tropi- 
 cal forest and antediluvian coal mine, every 
 animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, 
 shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right 
 and wTong and echo the Ten Commandments. 
 Therefore is nature ever the ally of religion ;
 
 WORDS AND LITERARY STYLE. 51 
 
 lends all her pomp and riches to the religious 
 sentiment." 
 
 This is selected at random from Emerson's 
 essay on " Nature," and the purpose of the quota- 
 tion is to suggest how sparingly Emerson uses 
 the adjective. And you will find in reading 
 Emerson that he exercises a patrician regard for 
 the yalue of words in his use of the adjective. 
 
 One of the outlaws to be considered in this 
 connection is the cheap novelist. The untrained 
 scribbler glibly makes use of the adjective as 
 though his point of view must be accepted if he 
 trains enough of this sort of ordnance on the ob- 
 ject of his praise or scorn. As to the newspaper 
 use of words, unsurveyed miles are left for im- 
 provement, especially as concerns the employment 
 of the adjective. 
 
 A common fault is the use of the superlative 
 degree for everything, so that force is altogether 
 lost by reason of the instinctive discount of the 
 printed statement by the reader. Discrimination 
 in the use of the adjective implies a careful study 
 of words, which not unjustly may be called one 
 of the neglected American virtues. *'It is gen- 
 eral culture above all, it is the constant submis- 
 sion of a teachable, apprehensive mind to the 
 influence of minds of the highest class, in daily 
 life and in books that brings out upon language 
 its daintiest bloom and its richest fruitasre." 
 (White.) 
 
 The wilding words of the rural districts have 
 a charm of their own which no scholastic burnish-
 
 52 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 ing could improve in luster. Tliey are the corn- 
 fed words, as oue might say. Those words which 
 belong to the cliches of criticism pall on us at 
 times ; we are cloyed by those symbols of the 
 prescieuse which exist to-day, as in Moliere's 
 time. Who does not like language that smacks 
 of the soil, that has the spicy odor of native 
 herbs? Dr. Felix Adler said in a lecture on 
 Kipling : " With his grip on words whose roots 
 smell of the earth from which he has dug them, 
 he believes the whole white race to be the chosen 
 instruments of God to carry Western ideas to en- 
 lighten the East." 
 
 To the extent that we realize its primary and 
 historical sense, substantiate its past worth and 
 anew in our turn further it, what we may, on its 
 course of development, are we entitled to the use 
 of a word. If the word of a writer be a mere 
 conventional counter, then the whole writing 
 composed of such counters is of like character. 
 
 We are known as thoroughly by the words we 
 use as by the company we keep, and it should be 
 the lofty aim of every man of letters to pass each 
 word along — enhanced in meaning — with some- 
 wliat of the aroma of his own intellectual nature, 
 as the poet Virgil was said to touch upon no sub- 
 ject but to adorn it.
 
 CHAPTER HI. 
 
 FOSTER WORDS, VARIANTS, AND BY-PRODUCTS. 
 
 CNoAH Webster, in the preface to his Diction- 
 ary (edition of 1828), mentions the number of 
 -words in the English language as being between 
 70,000 and 80^000. About three times that 
 number have crept into the language within the 
 last sixty years, some of them for only an ephem- 
 eral existence, while others, once classed as slang 
 or vulgarisms, are to-day permanent adjuncts of 
 it. Probably less than 20 per cent, of these 
 words were consciously evolved. They came 
 spontaneously and without premeditation. 
 
 Though the mint of language is not all out- 
 doors, learned academies have often tried and 
 generally foiled to coin new words. For instance, 
 a Committee of the French Academy has in 
 charge the compilation of the Academy Diction- 
 ary. An interesting account of the proceedings 
 of that Committee, which has so long been the 
 butt of humorists, was given recently in the Echo 
 de Paris. 
 
 " The Committee consists of six members, and 
 meets once a week. At each meeting ^I. Gaston 
 Boissier calls upon his brother academicians to 
 
 5.S
 
 54 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 read out the defiuitious which they have under- 
 taken to draw up. The reading done, M. Bois- 
 sier adjourns to a desk on which an ohl Littre is 
 lying. He reads a few words with Littre' s defi- 
 nitions, and asks who will undertake to compose 
 a new definition. 
 
 "As a rule, each member of the Committee 
 tries to pass the duty on to some one else. M. 
 Gerard draws attention to the competence of M. 
 Brunetiere ; ]M. Mezieres insists eloquently on the 
 competence of M. Lavedam. 
 
 " When the words have been assigned, and the 
 meeting is on the point of adjourning, some one 
 timidly proposes the adoption of a new word. 
 There is a storm — a perfect babel of tongues. 
 The new word is almost invariably rejected ; and 
 then the members of the Committee go home." 
 
 In the order of heirship, sovereignty has been 
 recognized as a Law of the Unavoidable ; and I 
 think this law applies to language. Considered 
 as a unit of a community, a man is subject to 
 certain unavoidable laws. As a unit of lan- 
 guage, so is a word. Though perfectly free as 
 an individual, a man is bound to live in subjec- 
 tion as a member of a community. A word is 
 likewise conditioned. Formalities to which he 
 has never consented and from which he cannot 
 escape govern all the acts of a man's life. Simi- 
 lar formalities control words. 
 
 The principle of sovereignty is the outgrowth 
 of this aggregate of necessities which compel the 
 submission of man. Still the parallel holds good
 
 FOSTER WORDS, VARIANTS, BY-PRODUCTS. 55 
 
 as to a word. By applying this principle to the 
 life of nations we derive its succession, a princi- 
 ple which governs men and societies, a law 
 belonging to the moral world and therefore 
 beyond the control of man. Is this not true of 
 lano;uao"e ? When this law is misunderstood and 
 transgressed, anarchy and misfortune follow, both 
 in society and in language. 
 
 Occasion is the factor that guarantees the stamp 
 of popular validity to new words. The late war 
 in South Africa brought to the surface such ex- 
 pressive words as : Berg, a mountain ; biltong, dried 
 meat ; commando, a Boer army ; commandeer, to 
 requisition ; donga, a water hole ; dorp, a village ; 
 drift, a ford ; fontein, a spring ; Hi]), a stone ; 
 kloof, a ravine ; Jcopje, a hillock ; kraal, a native 
 village ; laager, a camp ; mealie.% Indian corn ; 
 nek, a saddle connecting two hills ; pan, a sheet 
 of water ; pont, a ferry ; poort, a pass between 
 mountains ; shdt, a dry ditch ; spruit, a small 
 stream ; taal, the Boer language ; trek, to march ; 
 Uitlander, a non-burgher ; veldt, the prairie ; vlei, 
 a small lake ; zarj), policeman. 
 
 In New England, many years ago, the Dutch 
 word "boer" was translated boor, and accepted 
 in the modern English sense. ]\Irs. Schuyler 
 Van Rensselaer says : " These Xew World terms, 
 indeed, are parallel in spirit to one that is still 
 commonly used in the Old and the New World 
 both, and in New York as well as New England. 
 When, to mark his dullness or awkwardness, we 
 call a man a ' Dutchman,' we fancv that we are
 
 56 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 referring to German traits, although with an 
 incorrect word. But we are really echoing the 
 jealousy, masked as contempt, that England long 
 ago developed for her great rival, Holland." 
 
 The adoption of the foregoing Boer words 
 means nothing more than assimilating them, but 
 the anglicizing or adapting of foreign words 
 usually involves a more or less conscious per- 
 formance. The same may be said of variants 
 formed from proper names or of words suggested 
 by events, etc., at least when the principle of 
 analogy is employed. Thus the word " bogus," 
 meaning counterfeit or false, and once regarded 
 as a slang word, has a somewhat peculiar origin. 
 A man named Borghese, more than half a cen- 
 tury ago, made himself notorious by drawing 
 bills on fictitious banks. His name was com- 
 monly called Bogus, and his bills, as well as 
 others of a similar character, were universally 
 styled bogus currency. Coco is Spanish for bogie, 
 and it is said the cocoanut was thus named from 
 its resemblance to a distorted human face. 
 
 The word "silhouette" originated from the 
 niggardliness of a French IMinister of Finance 
 named M. Silhouette (1709-67). Under his rule 
 the meanest tricks were practised for the sake of 
 economy, and the courtiers of Louis XV. had 
 their portraits painted in black, with profile view, 
 claiming that the policies of Etienne de Silhouette 
 had left them so poor that they could not afford 
 anything more costly. In Elizabethan times it 
 was in hats that gentlemen found most scope for
 
 FOSTER WORDS, VARIANTS, BY-PRODUCTS. 57 
 
 the di8i)lay of their taste. It was said that the 
 block of a man's head altered faster than the felt 
 maker could fit him, wherefore the English were 
 called iu scorn " Blockheads." 
 
 Many other historical examples of derivation 
 might be given, but two or three more will suf- 
 fice. In Greece votes were inscribed on oyster- 
 shells (ostmca), and it was by these votes that an 
 objectionable person might be banished from the 
 country or "ostracized." To the practice of 
 writing on wood is directly due the word " book " 
 among the English. Both the Saxons and 
 Danes used beechwood for the purpose, boc being 
 the Saxon, and bog the Danish, name for it. 
 We come by our word library and the French 
 get their word livre for book in this way : the 
 thin peel found m trees between the wood and 
 bark was called liber by the Romans, and in time 
 all their books, however written, were so named. 
 Our word "volume" comes from volumen, the 
 name given by the Romans to the substance 
 which they rolled up as they wrote on it. 
 
 The development of family names is in itself 
 an intensely interesting subject. Natural objects, 
 desirable personal qualities, and even physical in- 
 firmities among the Romans, have supplied sug- 
 gestions for given names and surnames. Vari- 
 ous races and languages have recruited the 
 common English names and patronymics. A 
 large number of our family names have come 
 from occupations and trades. Some of them de- 
 fine themselves, as Potter, Porter, Cooper, Chand-
 
 58 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 ler, Butcher, Cook, Miller, Weaver, Draper, 
 Tanner, Mason, Baker, Spinner, Smith, Carpen- 
 ter, Sadler, Tailor, Gardener, and Farmer. 
 
 Others represent foreign tones. Gow is Irish, 
 and Gowan is Scotch, for Smith. Backer, 
 Baecker, and Becker are German. Baker, 
 Boulanger, and Bullinger are French for the 
 same. Still others preserve the old English suf- 
 fixes, such as Webster for Weaver, Baxter for 
 Bakester and Baker, Bagster for bagman, and 
 Brewster for Brewer. 
 
 Many names of extinct trades have been trans- 
 mitted — e. g., Spicer, Palmer, Loriner, Har- 
 per, Heckler, Arkwright, Arrowsmith, Fletcher, 
 Barker, Stover, Archer, Forester, Fowler, Fal- 
 coner, and Venner. Mediaeval offices and occu- 
 pations are represented in Beadle, Bailey, Con- 
 stable, Marshall, Burgess, Reeve, Sheriff, Elder, 
 Priest, Monk, Bishop, Judge, Chevalier, Earl, 
 Baron, Duke, Prince, King, Lord, Scrivener, 
 Scribner, Castelan, and Castle. 
 
 Primitive family names were formed by adding 
 the Saxon word son to the father's — e. g., Wil- 
 liam, Williamson. Tlie Irish prefix 0' originally 
 meant grandson, and may be found in many 
 names such as O'Conor, O'Neal, O'Donnell, and 
 O'Brien. The Scotch used 3Iac, as Macready 
 and Macaulay ; and this is often abridged, as in 
 McNabb, IMcGregor, Mc Andrews. The old Nor- 
 man prefix, Fifz, which signifies son, is shown in 
 Fitzhugh, Fitzherbert, and Fitz-George. Ben in 
 Arabic, Sen in Scandinavian, kui in Frisian, and
 
 FOSTER WORDS, VARIANTS, BY-PRODUCTS. 59 
 
 vitch iu Russian are illustrated by Beu-Ezra, 
 Ericssen, Watkin, and Ivanovitch. The Frisians 
 were so tenacious of old customs that, until 
 adopted by a decree of Napoleon Bonaparte in 
 1811, surnames among them were unusual. 
 " Previously, a few of the old families had borne 
 the names of their estates, but the given name 
 was repeated over and over in families with 
 slight variations in spelling " (E. F. Watrous ). 
 
 The next step in the modernizing process was 
 to combine son with the trade-name — e. g., Smith- 
 son, McGowan, Fitzroy. This practice gave rise 
 to such tautology as McAnderson, Fitz-Robinson, 
 and McPherson. Names fi-om places are rela- 
 tively modern. The poorer classes adopted them 
 without a connecting particle. But the wealthy 
 used "of,'' or its equivalents, "a," "ap,'' "c?e," 
 "iw?," '"ra?i," "(/?," "fk" "dej;' " du;' and 
 "do.'' Instances are: "Carroll of Carrolton," 
 '^ Apphilips," "Delancy," "YonGlahn," "Van 
 Antwerp," " Vanderhoven," etc. 
 
 The " late " gold discoveries at Cape Nome, in 
 Alaska, gave prominence, in that region, to the 
 word tundra, which is Russian and means low 
 and marshy land. A well-informed Western 
 man, who has investigated the matter, says : 
 " Tundra differs from 'steppes' in this, that tun- 
 dra is used to describe the low, flat, and ordinar- 
 ily valueless land between two streams and is 
 common along the coasts of Siberia and on the 
 American side of the Behring Straits, all of which 
 is tundra. Steppes originally meant a sandy
 
 60 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 desert, but, by long custom, it has come to mean 
 grassy plains as well." 
 
 From Hensleigh Wedgwood's book, Some Dis- 
 puted Etymologies, is to be derived some interest- 
 ing lore ^ about words. He says, for instance, 
 that " bully " — a favorite term among small boys 
 and used by them, as by Shakespeare, in the 
 sense of excellent, as " O sweet bully Bottom," 
 "bully knight," and "bully Sir John" — seems 
 to be traced to the middle high German bnole, a 
 brother, spouse, dear friend, or something much 
 beloved. From this it may be seen how first de- 
 scriptive of boon companions, then of those who 
 drank in taverns, and finally of those whose 
 carousels and excesses made them brawlers, it 
 came to mean, as a noun, a wrangling, intimidat- 
 ing fellow. It is worth while remembering that 
 the word "filibuster," used so often in American 
 politics, is a corruption of freebooter, introduced 
 by the old English pirates. 
 
 " Cad," meaning one who excites contempt or 
 disgust bv his speech or actions, is related to the 
 Lincolnshire word cad, which stands simply for 
 carrion, a cad crow being a carrion crow. The 
 Italian carogna, signifying both carrion and a 
 
 ' The student is also referred to the following works, 
 in which are answered hundreds of desiderata on this 
 subject: Murray's Oxford Dictionary, vols, i.-iv., for 
 the biography of hosts of neoloo;isras ; A. S. Palma, 
 Folk-Efymology, London, 1882 ; T. L. O. Davies, Svjj- 
 plejyirnfary English Glossary. London, 1881 ; Barriere 
 and Leland, Dictionary of Slanq^ 2 vols., London; 
 J. Maitland, American Slang Dictionary^ Chicago, 1881.
 
 FOSTER WORDS, VARIANTS, BY-PRODUCTS. 61 
 
 jade, and the Dutch Schebn, a carcass or a pesti- 
 lent fellow, are analogues. Cad has nothing in 
 common, except the sound, with the Scotch word 
 cadie or caddy, now being popularized with the 
 game of golf 
 
 While l)reakfast has a perfectly obvious signifi- 
 cance, luncheon and dinner, so far as their ety- 
 mology is concerned, are shrouded in doubt. The 
 Saxon infinitive scencan, to drink, gave rise to 
 the substantive skinker, or one who pours out 
 drink. In default of an equivalent term the 
 German word Kellner, or cellarer, is used to a 
 certain extent in the United States. From 
 scencan are said to have descended both nuncheon, 
 said of a drink set forth for workmen and others 
 during the afternoon, and luncheon, usually 
 meaning a simple meal. Just at present fashion- 
 able society uses, in the same sense, the word 
 snack, signifying what can be snatched ^^^thout 
 any especial preparation. This term hails from 
 England. 
 
 Now as to dinner : we know better what it 
 means than what it is derived from. The first 
 meal of the day, taken immediately after return- 
 ing from mass, was known formerly as disner among 
 the French. Students of language conjecture 
 that it originated from the same source as dejeu- 
 ner, or breakfast, namely in the Latin verb 
 jejunare, to ])e hungry, from which we have the 
 modern word "jejune," or starved, generally used 
 metaphorically. 
 
 A negro on the witness-stand not long since
 
 62 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 used the word snitch aud was asked what it 
 meaut. This was his amusing reply : " Why, all 
 the damage suit lawyers have snitches. A snitch 
 is a fellow that watches for people to get hurt, 
 and calls on 'em as soon as he can and makes a 
 contract to sue the company for damages." 
 
 The recent "unpleasantness" in the Philip- 
 pines gaye some of our American volunteers a 
 chance to study the native dialect. Newspaper 
 correspondents have cited some of the pet words 
 of the Filipino vernacular. Among them is 
 hiking, applied to any swift and fatiguing travel ; 
 while a hiker is a man of nimble and enduring 
 powers. "Cold feet" is an expression often 
 heard in ^Manila. Its plain Anglo-Saxon syn- 
 onym is cowardice. " Coffee coolers " were those 
 who managed to get detached from their regi- 
 ments in the field and assigned to more or less 
 easy and much safer berths in Manila. A 
 "coffee cooler" was supposed to be unable to 
 swallow his boiling hot coffee on the morning of 
 battle. A Filipino who followed the cause of 
 the revolution was known as a googoo. " Chow- 
 chow," meaning to eat, eating, or food, was a 
 word brought to the Philippines by the Chinese, 
 with their pidgin English. J/e.r, referring to the 
 Mexican dollar, the former standard of money in 
 these islands, is now typical Philippine slang. 
 
 A noun of strictly native invention is bom-bom. 
 Native imitation would be perhaps the more accu- 
 rate term. " A cannon," wrote H. Irving Hancock, 
 " on being discharged, gives forth an angry roar
 
 FOSTER WORDS, VARIANTS, BY-PRODUCTS. 63 
 
 of ' Imjiii ! ' 111 a second or two the shell ex- 
 l)lo(les with a fainter * bom ! ' Coupling cause 
 and effect gave us bom-bom. If a native desires 
 to explain that a big fight is on, he plaintively 
 says, 'Mucho bom-bom.' " This reminds me of 
 " Et pom-pom-pom-Xapoleon," the refrain of a 
 satirical ballad which privately went the rounds 
 in France just after Bonaparte became emperor. 
 
 In connection \nth the recently besieged em- 
 bassies in Pekin came the word " legationers," 
 and had the Chinese imbroglio continued, there 
 doubtless would have been driven to our shores 
 an immense immigration of strange words. One 
 despatch from the scene of war stated that 
 the "Chinese concealed on the banks of the 
 Pei Ho are snijiing.^' In the sense of guerilla 
 warfare sniping is a veritable acquisition to a 
 sound vocabulary, in the opinion of an inland 
 editor. 
 
 The new words and phrases called forth by 
 exciting events serve for a day, and to-morrow 
 pass into the banal, the outworn, some of them 
 perhaps to be revived under happier auspices. 
 Kow and then a phrase like Grover Cleveland's 
 "innocuous desuetude" wins wide recognition 
 and has the clinging qualities of a burdock. In 
 truth, we constantly use phrases without a 
 thought of their origin. We speak of the wife 
 as "the better half" without knowing we are 
 quoting no less a personage than Sir Philip 
 Sidney ; or we repeat something from ]Mrs. Grundy 
 without suspecting that this garrulous dame her-
 
 64 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 self was brought into existence by Thomas Mor- 
 ton, a playwright who lived until 1888. 
 
 The word " boycott " originated in this way : 
 Lord Erne, an Irish land-owner, had for his agent 
 Captain Boycott, of Lough Mask, Connemara, 
 who treated the tenants with such severity that 
 they petitioned for his removal. As Lord Erne 
 ignored their complaints, they and their sympa- 
 thizers retaliated in the autumn of 1880 by refus- 
 ing to work for Boycott and preventing any one else 
 from doing so. The agent would have been ruined 
 had not certain Ulster men, protected by an armed 
 force, come to his relief and husbanded the crops. 
 Boycott, meaning " a combination that refuses to 
 hold any relations, either public or private, busi- 
 ness or social, with any person or persons on 
 account of political or other differences," was first 
 used by the Irish Land Leaguers, and the word 
 thence passed into popular use. 
 
 London recently brought out the name " Hooli- 
 ganism," to indicate the character and doings of 
 bands of hoodlums that infest her streets and 
 commit all kinds of misdemeanors. A similar 
 class in New York a few years ago suggested 
 the expression "gang rule." 
 
 We are almost daily threatened with words 
 which, it is to be feared, the mightiest Thor of 
 criticism cannot hurl back to their own sphere 
 with a thunderbolt of discrimination, if they once 
 get a popular headway. They are mainly freak 
 verbs, which are always being formed out of 
 proper names. Lieutenant Hobson's osculatory
 
 FOSTER WORDS, VARIANTS, BY-PRODUCTS. 65 
 
 exploits, after his iDdisputa])Iy brave act in sink- 
 ing the Merrimac, inspired such monstrosities as 
 hobsonize, hohsonization, etc. But as the thrilling 
 occurrences and the popular heroes of them pass 
 into history, most of these e])ithets are ostracized 
 and disappear into the Valhalla of language. 
 
 The negroes of our Southern states are ever 
 ready with impromptu expletives, and negro chil- 
 dren are known to have a facility of expression 
 and a gift for imitation far in excess of the chil- 
 dren of the unlettered whites. Justly has it been 
 said (D. F. St. Clair) that the negro got this lin- 
 guistic gift from slavery. " The most of this class 
 of whites were cut off from intimate intercourse 
 with the dominant class, and in Xorth Carolina 
 and Tennessee fully a fourth of the white popula- 
 tion is inherently illiterate." 
 
 But while the negro may have more of the 
 gift of imitation and linguistic facility, he has not 
 initiative and great patience ; and if one will 
 study the vernacular of the backwoods people, he 
 will discover that they have originated ten words 
 to the negro's one.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE CONSCIOUS INVENTION OF WORDS. 
 
 By the simple method of transposition some 
 patient person has worked out twenty-six different 
 readings of one line from Gray's well-known 
 Elegy— 
 
 The plowman homeward plods his wearj^ way — 
 
 yet he claims the sense is not affected. Per- 
 haps not to the casual eye ; but any change of 
 grannnatical construction makes some intellectual 
 difference of meaning, however trifling, for it 
 brings the image or impression to the perception 
 in a different form. 
 
 But a new word in a sentence usually affects 
 its sense much more than could a mere transposi- 
 tion of old ones. And the first question an 
 author who is tempted to perpetrate in print a 
 word of his own sliould ask himself is this : Does 
 it have "all the conditions of wordship"? — the 
 quoted phrase being Richard Grant White's. 
 The purpose here is to deal with words that are 
 conscious inventions, and to use such illustrations 
 as have come to the present writer's knowledge. 
 
 In a newspaper interview, not long ago, Rev. 
 66
 
 THE CONSCIOUS INVP]NTION OF WORDS. 67 
 
 R. 8. Macarthur called attention to a new word 
 which he thinks describes the condition of many 
 men. The word is mirlagnostic. " It is a word 
 we greatly need," said Dr. Macarthur. " Many 
 men are neither agnostics nor gnostics. In the 
 early history of Christianity — in the third cen- 
 tury, I think — there was a sect called ' Gnostics.' 
 Professor Huxley gave us the word agnostic. 
 He coined that word because he said that in a 
 number of clubs to which he belonged the men 
 used titles of various kinds, but he said that he 
 himself was without 'a rag of a title,' and so he 
 coined the word agnostic, as the opposite of 
 * gnostic ' of the early Christian centuries. Joseph 
 Cook reached the conclusion that we needed a 
 new word, because, he said, many men were not 
 agnostics, and neither did they claim to be gnos- 
 tics. He asked the late Dr. McCosh if he could 
 coin a word that would express the attitude of 
 the large majority of men on religious topics. 
 Dr. McCosh thought a moment and said, ' Let me 
 rummage a little.' In the Greek lexicon he 
 found the word myrias — numberless ; and in 
 the Latin, mira — wonders. 'Now,' he said, 
 all you want to do is to add 'gnostic,' and they 
 did so, and made miriagnostic ; and that is one 
 of the best additions to linguistic science that we 
 have had in many a day. Now, as for myself, I 
 am only a miriagnostic. I usually find that men 
 who call themselves agnostics are nothing more 
 nor less than miriagnostics." 
 
 Rev. Robert S. Macarthur, l)v the wav, coined
 
 68 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 the word Messian — one who believes in the 
 Messiah — the Anointed One. It is not yet in 
 the dictionaries, but he thinks it ought to be. 
 He says the orthodox Jew is a Messian. 
 
 Rev. Anselm Kroll, of La Crosse, Wis., is 
 sponsor for the word eutmj^elia (directly from the 
 Greek), meaning what Mr. Kipling calls clean 
 mirth, a jest without a jeer, laughter without 
 scorn, wit without malice, a joke without offense 
 to one's neighbor. The learned clergyman has 
 quoted many authorities to define and distin- 
 guish it. Some one has deduced the following 
 bit of bantering philosophy : " What a lovely 
 world it will be when its clever folk cease to 
 strive to be satirical or sarcastic, and resolve to 
 be eutrapeloitsJ' 
 
 The following examples are more exegetical 
 and will give a clearer idea of what is meant by 
 conscious invention than a whole volume of dis- 
 quisition. 
 
 Professor J. H. Hyslop, who holds the chair of 
 Logic at Columbia University, has coined a few 
 words and invested one or two others with an en- 
 tirely new meaning, so that it amounts to coinage. 
 
 First, he coined the word conferentia in logic, 
 for the purpose of having a word to contrast with 
 differentia, and to avoid the equivocal use of the 
 term "genus." Conferentia he uses to denote the 
 common qualities of any class of objects. 
 
 Second, he coined, so far as he knows, the term 
 coiitravevi^ioih as a better term for what is usually 
 called contraposition in logic.
 
 THE CONSCIOUS INVENTION OF WORDS. 69 
 
 Third, the word velleity is an unusual word 
 for the lowest kind of desire, but he ado})ted it 
 from the Latin Velleitas, to denote that kind of 
 freedom which is expressed by the idea of alter- 
 native choice, and in distinction to freedom as 
 exemption from external restraint on the one 
 hand, and freedom from mere causation without 
 alternative choice, on the other. 
 
 Fourth, in his Ethics he coined the word vnir- 
 olism, to denote that theory of volition that 
 denies alternative choice but does not make voli- 
 tion the effect of external causes. 
 
 Fifth, in his recent book on Democracy he 
 coined the word kakidocracy, as the proper oppo- 
 site of aristocracy, and intended it to express that 
 view of politics opposing- aristocracy, which meant 
 unconsciously to defend the government ])y the 
 worst classes instead of the ])est. 
 
 Professor Hyslop does not know of any other 
 words that have been coined by himself, though 
 he has several in his mind that he intends to coin 
 in the publication of some future work. 
 
 Professor Simon N. Patten, of the University 
 of Pennsylvania, invented a new word which 
 appears on page 166 of his Development of E)ir/- 
 lish Thought. The word "introspection" has 
 been in use for the knowledge of psychology we ob- 
 tain by studying our own mental states, but there 
 was no word to indicate the knowledge of psychic 
 phenomena we obtain by observing others. Need- 
 ing such a word. Professor Patten employed the 
 word altrospection, to mean the knowledge of
 
 70 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 psychology we can obtain by observing the im- 
 pressions that excite other people to mental ac- 
 tivity, as judged by their reactions against their 
 impressions. 
 
 The work done by the committee of the Asso- 
 ciation of American Agricultural Colleges and 
 Experiment Stations has made necessary new 
 technical words. Agronomij, zooteclimj, and agro- 
 techny are terms used to denote divisions of the 
 general subject of agriculture. Agronomy covers 
 the general subject of plant production ; zootechny, 
 animal production; and agrotechny, agricultural 
 technology. The first two terms are adapted 
 from the German ; the third is perhaps original 
 with Mr. A. C. True, of the United States 
 Department of Agriculture, and his colleagues. 
 
 But the most interesting process of conscious 
 invention was furnished to me by Dr. Persifor 
 Frazer, of Philadel})hia, who is known to the 
 world in the triumvirate capacity of geologist, 
 chemist, and expert in disputed documents. In 
 the Bulletin of the Society of American Authors 
 for July and August, 1900, I published a letter 
 inviting all members of the society to give me 
 defiuite information as to their word-coinages. At 
 the first note of this call Dr. Frazer stepped for- 
 ward, somewhat regretful, but unabashed. He 
 entirely agrees with most people as to the pre- 
 sumptuous atrocity of word-coining, the only ex- 
 cuse for which, he thinks, is the appearance of a. 
 new idea, simple or generic, without a name. 
 
 He assumes, at the outset, that I have no
 
 THE CONSCIOUS INVENTION OF WORDS. 71 
 
 objection to the introduction of a new word for 
 an entirely new invention, such as that ])v which 
 the human articulate speech may be conveyed for 
 long distances over wire ; or even to a neologism 
 like Holoproda apertura (Cope) by the discoverer 
 of the fossil remains of that interesting genus. 
 He fancies that I may have in mind such inven- 
 tions as heterophemy, of the late Richard Grant 
 White, meaning the saymg of something different 
 from that which it was one's intention to say. 
 
 Seven years ago Dr. Frazer endeavored to sum 
 up the results of studies relating to the general 
 su])ject of documents which had occupied his 
 leisure for many years. His belief was, and is, 
 that this subject is susceptible of isolation fi'om 
 all others, and of reasonable classification into 
 various parts. The general and subordinate 
 ideas he wished to indicate were as follows : (A) 
 The investigation of all the means by which 
 thoughts are given permanent form and conveyed 
 from one person to another. This, of course, 
 excludes the temporary employment of the senses 
 through a conventional use of successive sounds, 
 signs, touches, tastes, or odors ; all of which are 
 evanescent. 
 
 The general subject he wished to divide into : 
 (Al) The chemical and physical characteristics 
 of the materials and tools used in thus conveying 
 thought ; ( A2) the features in the formation of 
 the symbols used which are distinctive, and the 
 separation of them from any other — even similar 
 — symbols ; (Ao) the distinguishing features of
 
 72 ^ WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 simulation, fraud, or forgery of the symbols men- 
 tioned in A2. 
 
 Now, to carry through a work on this plan 
 when one is obliged to repeat all the preceding defi- 
 nitions, or use for the idea the empirical charac- 
 ters, Al, A2, etc., did not seem to Dr. Frazer 
 desirable. After much deliberation, and with 
 great reluctance, he determined to find an appro- 
 priate term for A, A2, and A3. Al needed 
 none. He received a number of answers from 
 literary and scientific friends to his requests for 
 counsel and guidance. It may as well be pre- 
 mised that " graphology " was inadmissible, be- 
 cause it had been preempted for the charlatanry 
 of character-reading in hand-writing. 
 
 It will be noted that none of his correspond- 
 ents quoted further on comprehended that his 
 attempt was to arrive at a generalization. He 
 pleads, in extenuation of his coined words, hihlio- 
 tics for A ; grammctpheuy for A2 ; and plasso- 
 pheny for A3 — the necessity that an algebraist 
 has for representing a definite quantity by a 
 letter. His publisher dared not print the real 
 name of the book in his advertisement, but he is 
 bolder now. The third edition came out recently. 
 The second edition was printed in Paris, and the 
 editor hid the real title away in diamond type in 
 the preface. 
 
 Dr. Frazer submitted to several philological 
 friends the following list of prepared words, from 
 the Greek, merely to facilitate him in obtaining 
 their opinions :
 
 THE CONSCIOUS INVENTION OF WORDS. 
 
 Grapho — I write. 
 Ph ilosoph ia — study. 
 Anatome — dissection. 
 Eredna — research. 
 Mendo — I reveal. 
 
 The 
 
 demonstration 
 
 of the essence 
 
 of a 
 
 handwriting. 
 
 Fraudulent handwritin,o^- 
 
 Skopeo — I look. 
 Phainomia — (cause to) 
 
 appear. 
 Plasso — I feign. 
 Plasma — forgery. ^ 
 Grajjhilosophij. 
 PhilosograpJvj. 
 Graphanatomy. 
 Erunography. 
 Graphoscopy. 
 ScopograpjJiy. 
 GrapJiopjhe)iy. 
 ^ Phenography. 
 ( Plassography. 
 Forgery — \ Plasmographij. 
 
 Demonstration of fraud — plassopheny. 
 Revelation of forgery — plassmenyma. 
 Below are some of the answers received by 
 Dr. Frazer, which I use Avith his kind permis- 
 sion ; also that of Dr. Furness. The two other 
 quoted correspondents are dead. 
 
 "222 West AVashixgton .Square. 
 
 " Dear Frazer : 
 
 " I've broken both my head and my jaw over your 
 prolilem, and my feeble conclusions are as follows : 
 
 " First, I have persuaded myself that diplo- 
 matics pretty nearly about covers your ground or 
 can be made to cover it . . . 
 
 " Secondly, the main objection to any of these 
 words in your list is their strangeness — and this 
 1 Also foundation.
 
 74 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 will vanish very soon after you have begun to 
 use it, both to yourself and especially to your 
 readers, who will be unconscious of the pangs 
 which you have suffered in word-birth. 
 
 " Thirdly, in almost all these Greek words I 
 would have the termination ia, so as to throw the 
 accent as much as possible on the second word of 
 the combination — e. g., ' Plassography ' would 
 almost inevitably be pronounced ' plassog^raphy,' 
 and the ' graphy ' would be obliterated, but would 
 be retained in ' plassogra'phia.' Comjjvenez f 
 
 " Fourthly, the combinations with ' plasso ' are 
 so unusual, not to say far-fetched, that I would 
 eschew its pedantic apearance, and, with a spirit 
 of 'russet yeas and honest kersey noes,' would 
 use no other than plain ' forgery ' and ' forgery- 
 demonstration ' and 'forgery-revelation.' You'll 
 say they are uncouth, horrible. I'll retort so's 
 the Greek — every whit as bad — even worse. I 
 fall back on your getting used to anything. 
 
 " Your ' graphology '' is this minute received. 
 'Tis no better nor worse than the rest. It really 
 tells nothing to the uninstructed mind, ^vhich must 
 in any case wait for your definition. There would 
 be more likelihood, I think, of a general under- 
 standing of such a word as graphopsychohgy 
 (which ain't so bad), and die Seele is as good as 
 das Wesen. There, dear lad, I've done my little 
 all for you and my ])rain is as dry as ' the remain- 
 der biscuit after a voyage.' 
 
 " Yours ever, 
 [Signed] " H. H. F.
 
 THE CONSCIOUS IXVENTIOX OF WORDS. iO 
 
 " P. S. — My first aud last word is : force diplo- 
 viatics into your service." 
 
 To which Dr. Frazer adds : " The objection to 
 Dr. Horace Howard Furuess's advice is that 
 diplomatics is already married." 
 
 Another letter (from the late Daniel G. Brin- 
 ton) to Dr. Frazer : 
 
 '•2041 Chestnut St., April 15, 1804. 
 
 "Dear Dr. Frazer : 
 
 " After reflecting what I could add to the in- 
 closed list with reference to forged or counter- 
 feited writing, the most appropriate term which 
 occurs to me is pseudaleor/mphy, from Greek, 
 pseudaleos, 'counterfeit,' 'forged,' 'falsified.' "We 
 might consider grajjliopjlaxi/ or (jraphopla><vr, but 
 these are less desirable. Taking the above then, 
 a pseudaleograph would be the forged or imitated 
 wntiug which is the object of your study, and an 
 'Essay on Pseudaleographs' is, as I understand 
 it, the paper which you are preparing. 
 
 "Trusting the suggestion will not be wholly 
 useless to you, I remain, 
 
 " Yours verv trulv, 
 
 [Signed]'" D. G. Brintox." 
 
 Here follow three short communications fi'om 
 the late E. D. Cope, the celebrated geologist : 
 '^ Philadelphia, April 4, 1894. 
 
 " Dear Frazer : 
 
 "I still think that plassophanij is as good a word 
 as you can get, but here is another nearly like
 
 76 _ WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 the one you suggest. Menusis is, according to 
 ray lexicon, the word for which you give menuma ; 
 hence you can write plassomenysis, or short, for 
 euphony, plasmenysis ; jjlassecjjhany would be 
 very exact. 
 
 [Signed] " Edward D. Cope." 
 
 " Philadelphia, April 4, 1894. 
 
 " Dear Frazer : 
 
 " Congratulat'iones erumpnnt ! Hobscohlum ele- 
 phandrbio ! The word I wrote was plassecphany. 
 If I wrote anything or now write anything con- 
 trary to the Postal Laws, please send this back 
 and I will write a better one. Your word is as 
 good as your bond. . . . 
 
 - E. D. C." 
 "Philadelphia, April G, 1894. 
 
 "De.\r Frazer: 
 
 " The name proposed is good, provided you 
 spell it with two s's — plassphenology. It is ellip- 
 tical, as the full form would be plassophenology. 
 I am not sure whether the omission of the o would 
 be looked on with favor by a strict construction- 
 ist. I would put the *o' in, as a matter of taste. 
 Logy is of doul)tful application in such a case. 
 I prefer plassophany. 
 
 - E. D. C." 
 
 It should be conceded that Dr. Frazer has 
 been quite frank with me, furnishing me am- 
 munition to use against his act from our highly 
 esteemed Shakespearean (Horace Howard Fur-
 
 THE CONSCIOUS INVENTION OF WORDS. / i 
 
 ness). But it is plainly to be seen from the fore- 
 going letters that, though the erudite writers gave 
 some very interesting suggestions, they misunder- 
 stood what Dr. Frazer wanted the words to ex- 
 press. No words were used by him but the three 
 mentioned — to represent ideas A, A2, and A3 ; 
 so that a part of the title-page of Dr. Frazer's 
 book, printed according to his coinages, stands 
 thus : 
 
 A MANUAL 
 
 OF THE 
 
 STUDY OF DOCUMENTS 
 
 (Bibnofics) 
 
 TO ESTABLISH THE IXDIYIDUAL CHAR- 
 ACTER OF HANDWRITING 
 
 (Grammapheny) 
 
 INCLUDING 
 
 SEVERAL METHODS OF RESEARCH 
 
 {^Plassophejiy ) 
 
 ETC., ETC.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 
 
 Though Edmund Clarence Stedman lias in- 
 vented several words, and in some cases given a 
 new meaning, for the purposes of literature, to 
 strictly scientific terms, yet at the moment of his 
 writing to me on the subject he had a distinct 
 recollection of only one of his coinages — viz., 
 lyronym, an assumed name under which a poet 
 may write. This occurs on page 100 of Victor^- 
 ian Poets — "A wide leap, indeed, from IMatthew 
 Arnold to ' Barry Cornwall,' under which familiar 
 and musical lyronym Bryan AValler Proctor has 
 had more singers of his songs than students of his 
 graver pages." 
 
 Thomas Wentworth Higginson is not conscious 
 of having produced more than one new word; 
 that is the verb to densen. This was used in the 
 form of the participle densening, in an essay called 
 "April Days," appearing first in the Atlantic 
 Monthly, April, 1861, and then reprinted in his 
 Outdoor Papers (1863), where the passage ap- 
 pears (p. 238) : " As the spring comes on and 
 the densening outlines of the elm give daily a new 
 design for a Grecian urn." It seemed to him 
 
 78
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 79 
 
 that there was previously uo word to describe the 
 steadv filling out of the delicate outlines of an 
 American elm in spring. He remembers writing 
 an especial appeal to Mr. George Nicholls, then 
 proof-reader of the Atlantic, and strongly oi> 
 posed to all verbal irregularities ; and he let 
 the innovation pass. 
 
 Colonel Higginson does not justify this act, nor 
 is he inclined to think that he would now do such 
 a thing, but it then seemed to him justifia])le. 
 He knows of no other author who has used the 
 word, though his sentence is quoted as authority 
 for it in the Century Dictionary. 
 
 Thomas Dunn English, author of the world- 
 famous song of " Ben Bolt," says he has always 
 found that the number . of words in our language 
 was sufficient to supply his needs, except in one 
 instance, where he did coin a word. That was 
 metropoliarchii. His use of it was in an oration 
 delivered on the Fourth of July, 1898, before the 
 ^Nlayor and Common Council of Newark, N. J., 
 in which occurs the following sentence : " Now, 
 under the mask of a republic, they [the French 
 people] form a metropoliarchy governed by the 
 bourgeoisie, who use the mob to erect or pull down 
 dynasties, change or modify forms of government, 
 and do what best suits their profit." 
 
 Ernest Ingersoll's word quotated, to designate a 
 paragraph marked as quoted by the use of quota- 
 tion marks, is a good one. His feeling is that you 
 quote the man or the language or thought by the 
 mere fact of giving it ; but the act of using the
 
 80 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 typographical signs " " is quotatiug, aud such a 
 paragraph is quotated. This, I believe, is a use- 
 ful distinction. There ought to be also a single 
 word to express the idea of a quotation within a 
 quotation. 
 
 The only word Captain Alfred T. Mahau can 
 be said to have coined is sea power, which is 
 rather a phrase than a word. It was born of 
 his preference for the English "sea" over the 
 Latin adjective " maritime," though he recognized 
 the incongruity of marrying ''sea" to the Latin 
 word "power." There was, however, no handy 
 equivalent, and the Germans have been puzzled 
 to find one in their tongue. Afterward Cap- 
 tain Mahan retained the expression because he 
 thought its very roughness over "maritime 
 power " would arrest and fix attention and so give 
 vogue, at which he aimed. The result has justi- 
 fied the expedient. 
 
 He used once by chance the word ereuflcs.'< — 
 "dull, weary, eventless month." The word 
 slipped without premeditation off his pen. He 
 immediately thought it without authority and 
 found it not in Worcester. Nevertheless he stuck 
 to it. "Moneyless," "shameless," "heartless," are 
 its analogies, and its only recognized equivalent, 
 uneventful, is a stupidity. First full is afiixed- 
 and then un prefixed to neutralize it. Eventless 
 strikes Captain ^lahan as briefer, stronger, and 
 much more significant. In speaking of eccentric 
 — for military operations — he uses excentric, as 
 the secondary meaning is now most common. He
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 81 
 
 doesn't kuow that he originated this, or, if he did 
 not, where he got it. 
 
 Thus far the ordinary American language has 
 been more than sufficient to let out the ideas 
 of Professor Henry Van Dyke, according to his 
 own deposition. He cannot remember inventing 
 any words since babyhood ; and those which were 
 coined in that overproductive period have gone 
 out of use and out of memory. But stay : there 
 was once a little river that could not be described 
 by any other adjective than ivater-fally, and a 
 bird whose song seemed to him wild-flowery. The 
 proof-reader objected to both of these words, but 
 Dr. Van Dyke withstood him. Once he preached 
 a sermon on politethics, as distinguished from 
 " politics." He concludes : " But 'tis a rare sub- 
 ject, and the word stands small chance of living 
 unless the thing becomes common." 
 
 I am indebted to Edgar Fawcett for some im- 
 portant suggestions. Though he has been living 
 in Loudon for several years, most of his books — 
 in fact, nearly all — are stored away in New York. 
 Therefore he could not refer to them, and there- 
 fore his account of his coinages is not so com- 
 plete as it would have been had all his writings 
 been accessible to him. And here I may say 
 parenthetically that the plan of this book was 
 determined chiefly by the fact that a surprisingly 
 large number of the first books of our authors 
 are out of print and not to be had for love or 
 money. In these very volumes are buried many 
 a verbal experiment which I am not rash enough
 
 82 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 to affirm was the means of placing them on the 
 shelves of oblivion. On the contrary, I am will- 
 ing to believe that such tentative efforts were 
 more or less valuable, but unappreciated. So in 
 such cases the memory of the author is my main- 
 stay. If he chooses to forget, as some authors 
 do, all that was contained in their first books, 
 there is slight hope of rescuing from limbo any 
 of his youthful or earlier neologisms. But per- 
 haps this is as it should be. 
 
 Mr. Fawcett says that our language is greatly 
 in need of neologic stinndation ; the greater num- 
 ber of immigrants the better, though there 
 should certainly be a kind of philological Castle 
 Garden or quarantine where they should be 
 forced to wait until their health and respectability 
 are both proved. Mr. Fawcett recently coined 
 the phrase " to hermetize one's self," used, as you 
 see, in the Greek middle sense; also eongeniah 
 as a substantive, just as we use intimates. This 
 fills a want, I should say. So does " viewpoint," 
 now used often for point of view, though, unless 
 he is very much mistaken, Mr. Fawcett was 
 the first to employ it. In the same way he now 
 employs watchpoint He also recommends 
 "guide," in the sense of aid — why not? "Help 
 me with your g^iide," has a perfectly legitimate 
 sound. " Guidance," though a euphonious word, 
 is not a monosyllable, and the language in mono- 
 syllables is almost jntiably poor. Mr. Fawcett 
 writes : "I think every writer ought to have on 
 his conscience the coining of at least five good
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 83 
 
 ones (mouosyllables) each year. Then, too, the 
 word 'spirit' — to spirit a man — that is, to give 
 hini courage, zeal, etc. ; also the verb to Jin ; 
 ' watch how the fish fins the sea ' — just as we say 
 that a bird wings the air — another good mono- 
 syllable gained, I think ; but I must pause here, 
 for lack both of time and material." 
 
 Professor Richard Burton, who is in the Eng- 
 lish Chair at the University of Minnesota, says 
 people accuse him of word-coinages, and generally 
 he finds they are talking about existing words or 
 those they are ignorant of. He believes, how- 
 ever, that in a few cases this may be true. 
 
 In his Dog Literature he speaks of cynophiles 
 (dog-lovers), and doesn't find it in the diction- 
 aries. In a paper on Robert Louis Stevenson, in 
 his recently published volume of essays. Lit- 
 erary Likings, he speaks of Stevenson's having 
 a "hang for spiritual things" — meaning a nat- 
 ural inclination or bias for them. This is a col- 
 loquial expression in New England, but I don't 
 find it illustrated in the dictionaries, though it 
 may l^e. 
 
 In this same work Professor Burton speaks of 
 summer clouds heading up in a thunder-storm. 
 This use of the verb to head up was familiar to 
 him from boyhood, it being often used, ])oth in 
 oral speech and writing, by his fi^»ther, the late 
 Rev. D. X. J. Burton, of the Park Church, 
 Hartford. It is diflferent from the head-up of 
 the dictionaries in the sense of " heading up " — 
 i. p., closing up — of a barrel. It means rather
 
 84 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 to "converge in" or "come to a culmination in." 
 There is another example in Literary Likings. 
 The author says : " Contemporary criticism pro- 
 verbially walks in Blind Man's AlleyJ' If that 
 figure and phrase has ever been used before, he is 
 unaware of it. 
 
 Though to Helen's Babies John Habberton 
 owes his first fame as an author, he has since 
 written much stronger and better books. ]\Ir. 
 Habberton says he has tried to recall some words 
 that were really of his own making, but his trou- 
 ble has been that every time he succeeded, as he 
 supposed, in making an expressive word, some 
 other man had thought out the same word — and 
 a long time before Habberton. For instance, he 
 used " asiotic," instead of asinine, and as a milder 
 form of idiotic. It "caught on" nicely, but he 
 is glad he did not preempt a claim to it, for he 
 afterward found it had been in use for years in 
 a New England family. Then, trying to difter- 
 entiate small children of certain families, as re- 
 garded by their parents and by other people, he 
 called them angels and impgeh — but, alas ! a wise 
 old physician had got ahead of him. 
 
 The contributions of Professor George Hempl, 
 of the University of ^Michigan, in the way of new 
 words are, as will be seen, somewhat technical. 
 In most cases it is rather a new meaning than a 
 new word out and out Of the latter there are 
 only vivic, sonoric, sonorant 
 
 Vivic (pronounced viv'ik) : Vivic words are 
 those that designate the more definite concepts —
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 85 
 
 that is, stand for objects (substantives), qualities 
 (adjectives), or phenomena (verbs). They are 
 contrasted with anemic words. 
 
 Anemic (pronounced a-nem^ik) : Anemic words 
 are those that — (1) indicate the more or less vague 
 relations (of position, time, quantity, etc.) existing 
 l)etween more definite concepts, and are thus C(jn- 
 j unctions, prepositions, copulative verbs, auxiliary 
 verbs, numerals, the indefinite article, etc. ; or 
 (2) simply refer to concepts that (a), as psycho- 
 logic subjects, have become more or less vague 
 in the mind, being personal, reflexive, relative, 
 and weak demonstrative pronouns, relative and 
 weak demonstrative adverbs, possessive and weak 
 demonstrative adjectives, and the definite article, 
 or (b) have not yet assumed definiteness, being 
 indefinite and interrogative words. Anemic words 
 are the opposite of vivic words. 
 
 Delta : The delta designates the pharynx, the 
 mouth passage, and the nasal passages collectively. 
 The German term is Ansatzrohr ; there had thus 
 far been no term in English, but Lloyd {Journal 
 of Anatomy and Phi/siologi/, 31, p. 233) has since 
 suggested stoma. 
 
 Transferred stress : The stress placed upon a 
 new psychologic predicate when repeating a sen- 
 tence that has not been understood or has been 
 misunderstood. When one has said, " We were 
 not there,'' and has been misunderstood, he may 
 repeat and tran&fer the stress to the word not ; 
 " We were not there." 
 
 Displaced stress : The new stress employed in
 
 86 WOKD-COINAGE. 
 
 repetition or iu uttering phrases that are fre- 
 quently used or readily anticipated, though there 
 is no new psychologic predicate : '' I guess so," for 
 " I guess so " ; *' I reckon 6o," heard in the South, 
 for "I reckon so" ; ''after all," for "after a//" ; 
 "excuse 7?ie," for ''excuse me." 
 
 Conglomeration : Conglomeration is the forma- 
 tion of a word by the growing together of words 
 that chance often to stand in juxtaposition ; for ex- 
 ample, nevertheless. 
 
 Conglomerate : Formed by conglomeration. 
 
 Half- Gothic : A mediaeval book hand that 
 possesses some of the characteristics of the strict 
 Gothic hand, but is more unconstrained. 
 
 Italian Half -Gothic: The handsome black 
 form that the Italian minuscule had assumed by 
 the end of the fourteenth century. A modern 
 imitation of the early type is called " Tudor 
 Black." 
 
 Sonoric (pronounced so-nor'ik) : Sonoric syl- 
 lables are such as are due to the prominence of 
 sonority in one of their sounds. The German 
 term is Schallsilbe. 
 
 Dynamic : Dynamic syllables are such as are 
 due to new breath impulses. The German term 
 is Drucksilbe. 
 
 Sonorant: Short for sonorous consonant — that 
 is, a nasal or liquid. 
 
 Resonant : A term used to include yowels and 
 the corresponding yoiceless sounds sometimes para- 
 doxically called "yoiceless yowels." 
 
 For fuller information as to these words of
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 87 
 
 Professor Hempl's I refer the reader to his 
 German Orthography and Phonology. 
 
 Charles Major recalls but one coined word of 
 his own — ■feminology (bottom p. 18 of WJien 
 Knighthood was in Floicer). It may be defined 
 as the science of the feminine — especially woman. 
 Owing to the peculiar nature of the subject, this 
 great science probably will never be brought with- 
 in the category of the "exact" ; but ]\Ir. Major 
 declares that he has, in his life, known many men 
 who would profit greatly by a careful study of it. 
 His belief is that if a man of brains thoroughly 
 understands a woman, and has even a rudiment- 
 ary knowledge of the underlying principles of 
 feminology, he may live happily with her — and 
 that, after all, is the great business of life. 
 
 Rev. Augustus H. Strong, of the Rochester 
 Theological Seminary, is no coiner of words and 
 could give me nothing original. But he expressed 
 a wish to see the word " cussedness " in my list, 
 and suggested that if I should write to E. Benja- 
 min Andrews, Chancellor of the University of 
 Nebraska, for his definition of the word ja^m. I 
 might secure a treasure. I did so, and Dr. An- 
 drews sent me the following definition : " Pass a 
 circular saw revolving five hundred times a second 
 through a keg of teupeuny nails. That is 
 jasmy 
 
 Charles Battell Loomis says his word-coinage 
 mint never did a very rushing business. He is a 
 believer in new words, if they are built u]i logic- 
 ally, and he likes to handle the bright, glistening
 
 88 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 words of others; but, as before stated, there 
 seems never to have been any occasion for night 
 work at his particular mint, and the only word 
 that he recalls having put into circulation was 
 irreluctant, which won the indorsement of so nice 
 a handler of words as Henry Austin Clapp, the 
 Shakespearean scholar. The line in which it 
 occurs was in some blank verse that appeared in 
 the Cosmopolitan : 
 
 " And whi therefrom the irreluctant check," 
 
 is the quotation, he thinks, though he insists that 
 he is never good at quoting. Anyway, irreluc- 
 tant, in the sense of not reluctant, seems to me a 
 good word and a word of pleasing sound, and 
 stamping it with the date of 1900, Mr. Loomis 
 bids it good speed. He warns me against coun- 
 terfeit words. There are, he says, some very 
 passable ones in circulation, but when they are 
 discovered they will be withdra^^^l. The public 
 will not be deceived long. Words that are built 
 up illogically do not have the proper ring nor 
 will they stand the acid of time. 
 
 Mrs. Caroline A. Mason is unable to recall 
 more than two words worth mentioning for which 
 she is responsible — viz. : Broodle, meaning to cud- 
 dle and soothe a little child, and f rater nia, as the 
 name of a cooperative colony, like Mr. Howells' 
 Altruria. 
 
 Professor W. G. Sumner says the only word 
 which he has coined is societolor/j/. He coined 
 this in an effort to get a concrete term for the
 
 Nf:OLOC!ISMR BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 81) 
 
 Science of Society, and to escape from the vague- 
 uess and ambiguity of sociology. 
 
 Clinton Scollard fears his adventures in word- 
 coining are very few, if any. Indeed, at the 
 time he replied to my letter he could not recall 
 that he could claim to have fathered any word, 
 unless it be to make an occasional noun into a 
 verb, which is not, as he hints, entirely foreign to 
 my purpose. 
 
 He remembers his use of unurns was once com- 
 mented upon as unique, but it may be that the 
 writer was mistaken in so characterizing it. The 
 word occurs in the lines : 
 
 '•The tinv king cup that upon the floor 
 Of emerald meads unurns its ample gold.'' 
 
 — Masque of March. 
 
 He has never come upon war-farer ^ in the dic- 
 tionaries, l)ut thinks very likely it has been used : 
 
 " And none of the bold war-farers, though 
 The flower of the land was there."' 
 
 — Tallefer the Tnnivere. 
 
 Mr. Scollard cannot place moany, save in 
 
 "So upon a morning moany — " 
 
 — The Bells of Fossombroue. 
 
 yet he is sure others have written of *' moany 
 mornings," lured by the alliteration. 
 
 Edgar Saltus really cannot recall all his coin- 
 ages. There are scores of them, though, for he 
 always felt that an author has a right to give 
 1 War-farer is in some dictionaries.
 
 90 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 alms to the dictionary. But such as he has manu- 
 factured have always been made with a view to 
 brevity. The most recent which he recalls are 
 monopolian and automobilicalhj, and he signs him- 
 self, " Neologisticallij Yours." 
 
 Gertrude Atherton believes she has been guilty 
 of some coinages, but candidly doubts if they 
 have enriched the English language. One of 
 them is littleist, as a more exact description of 
 the would-be realist. Another is United States- 
 man, in lieu of American — the latter being a 
 descriptive term to which all North and South 
 Americans have an equal right. Still another is 
 2)olanc, in place of icy, cold. This word, how- 
 ever, may be found in some dictionaries. Mrs. 
 Atherton recalls dubbing the " Theater of Arts 
 and Letters," which had a brief existence in New 
 York a few years ago, " The Home for Incurable 
 Amateurs," but she rightly supposes that this is 
 not quite germane. 
 
 Lloyd Mifflin kindly mailed to me a marked 
 copy of his book of sonnets, At the Gates of Song, 
 wherein, as well as in his other books, I find sev- 
 eral pleasing and instructive examples. In verse 
 one must avoid the startling and unusual in lan- 
 guage, but Mifflin's dread that he has sinned in 
 using a word here and there better omitted is 
 more the result of a most refined sensitiveness 
 than because there is any practical reason for such 
 a dread. One often needs a new word to convey 
 his idea in verse, and, finding the language fur- 
 nishes none, he is then tempted to coin it.
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 91 
 
 "And in the honeysuckle rasped the wren." 
 
 This Hue is from one of his sonnets, and the word 
 rasped is here used to give the sense of harsh 
 scolding which the wren sometimes indulges in. 
 
 " And from Apollvon's form malfulgence dread 
 Fell on the hosts." 
 
 The italicized word means a baleful light — a bad 
 brightness. 
 
 "Xo lathe-turned limbs, the work of joj^/'s, has won 
 This eminence."' 
 
 The word jours in the sonnet " To the Sculptor 
 of Ladro," on page 44 in At the Gates of Song, 
 is a localism. The masons often speak of a jur/ 
 meaning an inferior workman, one who has not 
 learned his trade. Probal)ly it may have come 
 from the French, a day laborer, unskilled. It is 
 used in half contempt, and in such a sense Mif- 
 flin has ventured to use it. He confesses that he 
 has never seen it written in verse. 
 
 Needing a caption for one of his sonnets, — in 
 praise of the horse Pherenicus, — Mifiiin coined 
 the word Hippopcean, song in praise of a horse, 
 one might say. This sonnet appears in his vol- 
 ume entitled Selections from Bion, Moschus, and 
 Bacchylides, Rendered into English Sonnets, and 
 the caption stands : Pherenicus — a Hippopcean. 
 The poet is constrained to tell me that he is still 
 in doubt whether to like it or not. Such a word 
 is needed, however. 
 
 ^ Possibly a contraction of journeyman.
 
 92 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 Another coined word of Mifflin's is used in a 
 sonnet from one of the odes of Bacchylides — his 
 '' Fragment on Peace," and one of his most beau- 
 tiful things. The usual translation from the 
 Greek is "in handles of the shield," etc. Now 
 this word handles does not give the idea of the 
 shield's construction. A handle generally is a 
 projection. Mifflin used the word hand-holds. 
 This is from a localism current among workmen 
 in Columbia, Pa., where the poet lives, and it is 
 familiar in other places. They say: "Give me 
 a han'-holt and Pll help you lift it" — that is, 
 give me a place to catch hold of, not necessarily 
 a projection, but used in case of a long log, e. g., 
 or a sack of wheat. To put such a coined word 
 into the version of a Greek ode seems rather 
 bold, but its appropriateness, I think, is proved 
 by the fact that his manuscript passed through 
 a very critical proof-reader's hands and without 
 comment upon this word or compound. This is 
 its justification. Such a word is needed. To say 
 the " handles of a shield " is too preposterous ; 
 yet where is there a word for it? If hand-hold 
 has been used in a literary way, Mifllin does not 
 know of it. The lines in which the word occurs 
 are as follows : 
 
 " In hand-holds of the shield, the spider lies 
 And weaves her weh ; spear-points that overcame 
 The warrior in the battle's red retreats, 
 And two-edged swords, all rust and rest from war." 
 
 A new word rouses many readers' ire, but it is 
 less likely to do so when an adequate amount of
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 93 
 
 the context is given. Therefore it is but fair to 
 all coDcerned to quote the whole line in which 
 it occurs, as otherwise such words generally 
 seem repellent. An expression little known, but 
 a necessary one for the poet, is summer colt. 
 Mifflin tells me an amusing story of one of the 
 best proof-readers in America, a Yale man, I 
 believe, who had no conception of the meaning 
 of summer colt and thought it a colt born in the 
 summer, Webster defines it as " the undulating 
 state of the air near the surface of the ground 
 when heated." 
 
 From a poem called " Syrinx and Pan " iNIif- 
 flin makes this novel use of a word dear to Ten- 
 nyson : 
 
 " When this keen nose, whose scent ne'er failed me 
 yet, 
 Sniffed in the hose a Xaiad," etc. 
 
 From bocage, Fr. ; or it might be bosk, from Gk. 
 Booky, bosket. 
 
 " And on the mullein's tip-most top 
 The thistle finch perched." 
 
 In this passage, from The Slopes of Helicon 
 and Other Poems, the obvious sense is that of 
 the bird being at the extremest point. ^Mifflin 
 uses aureole as a \evh, fulgence as a noun, "fanged 
 my hand," said of an adder, unthoughfed and 
 winiched — i. e., unhonored. He also speaks of 
 faunian — like a faun's nature. It might mean 
 libidinous, in the sense of having no moral re-
 
 94 WORD-COIXAGE, 
 
 sponsibility. A faun's nature was a step above 
 a satyr's. In the lines, 
 
 "From the dim sea's unknowable extreme.''^ ■ 
 
 "Some peak unscalable of high achieve." 
 
 Mifflin has used words something in the manner 
 in which Shakespeare used words. I mean the 
 manner is his. To recapitulate a little : Jours 
 (pronounced jurs) are unskilled day laborers who 
 yet profess to know a trade, ^yood-butcher is 
 used contemptuously by skilled carpenters when 
 they speak of a man who works at carpentering, 
 but who has never learned the trade. Other 
 people might call him a botch. But "jours" 
 has not always this bad sense. It is sometimes 
 said without opprobrious intention, being a local 
 slang word in Columbia, Pa. 
 
 If all my correspondents had been as conscien- 
 tious and explicit as Lloyd Mifflin, who has been 
 likened to Landor, ^latthew Arnold, and Shelley 
 for the exquisite and noble perfection of his art, 
 this collection would have been greatly enhanced 
 as a treasure-trove.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 NEOLOGISMS. — ( Continued.) 
 
 The only word the late Professor John Fiske 
 remembered coining is a very technical one, 
 namely, deanthropomorphization ; which is duly 
 defined in the Century Dictionary as follows : 
 " The art of freeing from anthropomorphic attri- 
 butes or conceptions — e. g. : ' There is one con- 
 tinuous process (of knowing) which (if I may be 
 allowed to invent a rather formidable word in 
 imitation of Coleridge) is best described as a con- 
 tinuous process of deanthropomorphization, or the 
 stripping off of the anthropomorphic attributes 
 with which primeval philosophy the unknown 
 Power is manifested in phenomena.' " — J. Fiske, 
 Cosmic Philosophij, i., 176. 
 
 Thomas Bailey Aldrich does not think he has 
 ever invented a word, unless it is the word cris|> 
 ino-, in these lines from a lyric called "Mem- 
 ory" 
 
 "The wind came briskly up this 
 
 way 
 
 J 1 
 
 Crisping the brook beside the road. 
 
 He may have used many words in an uncon- 
 ventional sense, but I refer the reader to his works 
 for such instances. For centuries crisp has been 
 
 95
 
 96 WORD-COIXAGE. 
 
 used as a verb. Speuser speaks of '' her yellow 
 locks crisped like goldeu wire." This is a liue 
 from TenDyson : 
 
 "To watch the crisping ripples on the beach." 
 
 And IMaurice Hewlett, in his great romance, 
 Richard Yea and Kay, has this phrase on 
 page 251 : " crisping and uncrisping her little 
 hands." 
 
 W. J. Henderson, musical critic of the New 
 York Ti)neSj thinks there should be a word to 
 designate that part of a discussion or sermon or 
 essay in which the propositions are made ; and 
 he is willing to father the word propository. It 
 would give us an antithetic term to " expository." 
 As it is, we are forced to use propositional, which 
 is awkward at times. If we may say '* exposit- 
 ory," why not " propository " ? It is legitimately 
 derived and satisfies the demands of purity and 
 precision in diction. 
 
 Henry E. Krehbiel, musical critic of the Xew 
 York Tribune, says that though he may have in- 
 dulged in the questionable privilege of coining 
 words, it has never been done consciously and he 
 could not make a list from his books if he tried. 
 He remembers but one word of his own, and that 
 he has used in lectures, but not in print — isomodal, 
 as referring to the distribution of musical modes 
 throughout the world. He fancies it is correctly 
 made, but he does not aim at such things. 
 
 Another famous musical critic, James G. Hu- 
 ueker, once perpetrated vividity, an insane and
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LlViyO AMERICAN AUTHORS. 97 
 
 Lewis Carroll-like combinatiou of "avidity" and 
 "vivid," but he protests that this doesn't count, 
 nor does it, in view of the fact that others have 
 used the word and it is in the dictionaries. Mr. 
 Huneker urged me to try his friend Vance 
 Thompson, who " has a genius for verbal orches- 
 trations." 
 
 I already had heard from Mr. Thompson. 
 He says that every one is guilty of "coining" 
 now and then. When one's thought does not fit 
 into any of the familiar forms, it is quite natural 
 that one should filch a matrix from the Greek, 
 German, or French and make it serve. Probably 
 he has done as much of this as any one — and he 
 is not at all proud of it. He would be very 
 sorry, indeed, to have his philological sins posted 
 on the door of the Town Hall. The words that 
 create themselves, as it were, and slip into the 
 language are different. They deserve abundant 
 welcome. There has been a tremendous influx 
 of good, sound words from the ranches, the rail- 
 ways, the mines, the slums, but it would be hard 
 to say who coined them. They are not English ; 
 they are not quite American ; they are the raw 
 stuff out of which the American language is being 
 made. Thompson says he would gladly send me 
 a list of the coinages for which he may be justly 
 held guilty, — they might serve as horrible exam- 
 ples, — but none of them comes to his pen and the 
 task of disinterring them is one to shudder at. 
 
 Vance Thompson is really a high priest of ne- 
 ology. "Every age," he says, "must curl its
 
 98 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 metaphors afresh. Out of the old symbols the 
 color fades day by day, and it is the poet's busi- 
 ness to create new ones." Could I get at all 
 his work and were I to repeat some of his impro- 
 visations in language I should forever be un- 
 shriven of the angels. He gives the world noth- 
 ing that is slovenly or ramshackle, however. 
 The chief of the United States Secret Service says 
 that the best counterfeiters are always men of fine 
 education, with technical skill to match their 
 brains. This is usually true of verbal inventors, 
 and is applicable to Thompson. In French Por- 
 traits, Thompson's pet word is " vagrora," though 
 he did not evolve it. He also speaks of " savor- 
 some French words," " He made autolatnj a re- 
 ligion," and several times rouses "sib" from its 
 long sleep in the dictionaries. 
 
 I must perforce refer in these chapters to cer- 
 tain authors who, though they may not have pro- 
 duced a new word, either have tried to do so or 
 are not opposed to words simply because they are 
 new. For instance, Donald G. Mitchell (Ik 
 Marvel), though he recalls none of his " possible 
 offenses" in the line of new coinage of words, 
 does not doubt he has committed such — and 
 would do so again, if only, without sacrifice of 
 meaning, a short word were to supplant a long 
 one, or a single word stand for a double one. 
 Yet he has a large horror of these new coinages 
 which spring from scholastic bounce or pedagogic 
 conceit. 
 
 Robert J. Burdette has made a little studv of
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 99 
 
 coined words himself, always with disappoiuting 
 results. He says, after discovering them, he 
 always runs across them somewhere about one 
 hundred years l)efore the birth of the inventor. 
 He once coined a name, away back in 1876, for 
 one of his humorous characters — Bilderback. 
 He put the Bilderback family in jocose print for 
 several years. One night, about 1887, he lec- 
 tured in Salem, X. J., and told one of his Bil- 
 derback stories. The audience was convulsed 
 with more mirth than the story called for. After 
 the lecture he was introduced to about a dozen 
 Bilderbacks, who enjoyed his story more than 
 any one else. 
 
 F. Marion Crawford, in his delightful novel- 
 ette, A Rose of Yesterday — isn't it? — puts the 
 word jukes into the mouth of a boy, and says the 
 lad never heard the word, and that it was what 
 the Germans call a "nature word." But Bur- 
 dette says it was an expletive of his when he was 
 a bov — it was common enough in Illinois back in 
 the fifties of the last century, and he used it in 
 print twelve years ago in Claymont Sketches. 
 Burdette's idea is that new words are invented 
 or coined out of old material, but that it is a dif- 
 ficult thing to discover the inventor. He says, 
 " the new word usually grows like Topsy," who 
 claimed she never was born. All the genial 
 humorist's efforts at coining words, he jauntily 
 admits, have turned out to l)e merely bits of car- 
 penter and joiner work. He fears his excellent 
 memory has invented most of his new words.
 
 100 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 John Burroughs reports that he has never 
 coined a word, at least he does not recall one. 
 He has found the existing vocabulary quite suffi- 
 cient for his purpose. Several years ago he 
 thought he had made a new word in " anthropo- 
 centric," man as the center, but found later that 
 the word had been used by others. 
 
 Some years ago Kev. Josiah Strong made an 
 exception to his life-long rule to avoid coining 
 new words by evolving the word "expellent," 
 which he used in Our Country, in the chapter on 
 ''Immigration." Having discussed the attract- 
 ive influences of the United States, he turned 
 to the expellent influences of Europe. The word 
 did not appear in any dictionary which was at 
 hand, and he supposed it was his own coinage — 
 justified by the lack of any word to express his 
 idea. He found it, however, included in the 
 Century Dictionary, so that even this word 
 affords no exception. 
 
 R. K. Munkittrick does not know that he ever 
 coined a word — that is, invented one. But he 
 has made such combinations as grieflet, to rhyme 
 with handkerchieflet ; also soblet, to rhyme with 
 goblet and corn-coblet, and he once spoke of 
 something or other, I have forgotten just what, 
 as being the summer of our disconcircustent. He 
 has called the Harpers' place "the Harperion 
 Spring," and has sung of the time when the 
 Houghtons will cease from Mifflin, etc. He once 
 wrote a story called The Harrhhoffer, in which 
 he introduced such things as the shampoodle, the
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 101 
 
 kanga-rooster, the ipecactus tree, the vamoose,^ the 
 baked verbena, the rediugote, the puccoon, etc. 
 Also in A Day in Waxland, the icax dollphin, 
 the icax tapir, the icax minster palace, and so 
 on, until the story comes to a waxed end. These 
 stories are pulilished by the Harpers in a book 
 called The Moon Prince and Other Xabobs. The 
 author mentions the Cape Codger and the corifty 
 u'hifty in a book bearing the curious title, The 
 Slambangaree and Other Stories, published by 
 R. H. Russell. 
 
 James Whitcomb Riley coined what the small 
 boy would call a " corker " in " The Baggedy 
 Man." Other surprises of this kind may be 
 found iu Riley's dialect poems. 
 
 Mrs. M. K. Van Rensellaer avows that she 
 has not contributed to the language any coined 
 words. She did use walking-side for sidewalk, in 
 the Goede Vromv, because it was a family joke 
 originating ui some childish error, but she thinks 
 it is hardly woith being erected into word-coinage. 
 
 It has always been the aim of ]Molly Elliot 
 Seawell not to coin words in writing. Having 
 had the advantages of a good early training in 
 the English classics, she soon found out that 
 there was a good plain English word for all the 
 ideas she had or was likely to have, and she has 
 made it her business to try and find out that 
 word. 
 
 ^ This brings to mind Uncle Eben Holden's strange 
 wild creature of the Xorthem woods, which he called 
 the sivift.
 
 102 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 In writing dialect, though, as in her Virginia 
 stories, this author has, in order to make it true 
 to life, had her negroes coin words. As the 
 reader knows, perhaps, the negroes, except the 
 illiterate ones of the backwoods, are unique, if 
 not admirable, word-coiners. They love to use 
 long words, and they introduce a word wonder- 
 fully like the one they are after, and in the same 
 sense, so that it conveys a perfectly good mean- 
 ing. Mrs. Seawell hardly knows whether all the 
 words she puts into the mouths of her negroes 
 are of her own invention or recollections of her 
 childhood on an old estate in Virginia. Some are 
 her own — reckelsome, for reckless ; furgitious, for 
 forgetful ; discumfusin', for confusing, etc. These 
 may be found in her novels, such as Children of 
 Destiny, etc. In them she has strictly followed 
 the negro manner of making the sense right, and 
 the sound approximately so. 
 
 Miss Ruth Putnam thinks it may be that she 
 does coin words in conversation — as, for instance, 
 insinuendo, she believes she coined. But she 
 would carefully weed out such individualities 
 from printed works, as she does not think words 
 should be treated lightly. 
 
 Professor Curtis Hidden Page scarcely imag- 
 ines he has anything to contribute to my investi- 
 gation, unless it be the term do^et-verse, made on 
 the model of *' closet-drama." He gives the fol- 
 lowing for what they may be worth : soul-drama, as 
 a term to designate the highest form of psychologic 
 drama, such as Browning's ; and Helen, the
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 103 
 
 world-beauty, possibly suggested by an unconscious 
 thought of Goethe', U-eatment of Helen and so of 
 the German compounds in Welt. 
 
 The veteran poet, Joel Benton, does not re- 
 member all his verbal coinages. He has the 
 impression that he was the lirst person to use 
 hypethral in the sense (adjectively) of out-of- 
 doors, as hypethral writings. Soon after doing 
 so he found Lowell doing the same thing. Ben- 
 ton also has spoken of dendral growths — meaning 
 woody growths. Lately he used the word poet- 
 hood—'' in his early poethood, " as one might say 
 "in his early priesthood." 
 
 In reference to hypethral and dendral, Benton 
 asked Richard Grant AYhite what he thought of 
 them. The latter said : " Dendral, whether in 
 the dictionaries or not, is all right. I shouldn't 
 hesitate a moment about using it. As to hype- 
 thral, in the sense named, I must think a while." 
 
 But Benton never saw the eminent scholar 
 afterward. And what Lowell did seems to Ben- 
 ton as authoritative as what White might have 
 thought. Probably most poets would accept den- 
 dral without a murmur of dissent. 
 
 Professor Henry A. Beers affirms that there 
 are no serious word-coinages in his published 
 works. On page 192 of his Ways of Yale he 
 proposed the adjective (jemmy (from The Gem, 
 Phila., 1842), as descriptive of the style of the 
 old annuals. On page 36 of the same book he 
 ventures the noun chumlock, for the relations of
 
 104 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 college chums or room-mates, on the analogy of 
 wedlock. 
 
 On page 174 of the same book he uses the 
 word spJiinxy — dealing in riddles, which is, so far 
 as he knows, original. Somewhere he has em- 
 ployed a verl) of his own invention — troll — to 
 ride on a trolley car, but I cannot refer to the 
 passage. 
 
 In his Suburban Pastoral, page 3, Professor 
 Beers uses the expression " nepotic suggestions," 
 of a man who looks as if he had a number of 
 uncles. Webster gives nepotic, though with a 
 different meaning. These are all playful sug- 
 gestions, not seriously proposed mintages. Ad- 
 jectives such as sandal-woody and tube-rosey, for an 
 .Oriental-looking young woman ; or " Tulking- 
 horny existence," from Lawyer Tulkinghorn, in 
 Dickens' Bleak House, the professor has fre- 
 quently hit upon for the nonce ; but their employ- 
 ment is too special for extended connections. 
 
 In his day Rupert Hughes has coined numer- 
 ous words — that is, he has lifted them from the 
 Greek and Latin to our language ; but the fact 
 that he can remember scarcely any of them shows, 
 he argues, how little weight they must have had. 
 He had no time to hunt for any and could re- 
 member only three : anecdotage, of the reminis- 
 cence period of old age (he would not swear that 
 it is original with him) ; dlalectophobia and dia- 
 lectophobes, of the enmity and enemies to the use 
 of dialect, and viceversation, a pedantic form of 
 topsy-turvyism. Hughes insists that these are
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 105 
 
 merely whimsical and of uo earthly use. He asks 
 if I have seen C. C. Converse's word fJion in the 
 Standard Dictionary. Yes, and there's a useful 
 coinage ! Here is the definition : 
 
 "A pronoun of the third person, common 
 gender, a contracted and solidified form of that 
 one, proposed in 1858 as a substitute in cases 
 where the use of a restrictive pronoun involves 
 either inaccuracy or obscurity, or its non-employ- 
 ment necessitates awkward repetition. Examples : 
 ' If Harry or his wife comes, I will be on hand to 
 meet thon' (/. e., that one who comes). 'Each 
 pupil must learn thon's lesson (z. e., his or her 
 own).' " 
 
 The only word to which ]\lrs. Theodosia Pick- 
 ering Garrison lays the slightest claim in the 
 matter of coinage is infurled, and her only reason 
 for supposing it to be a new word, or rather a 
 condonation of old ones, is because she is unable 
 to find it in the dictionaries she has at hand. 
 She uses it in some verses entitled a " Ballade of 
 Books," in the follo^^ing sense : 
 
 ' ' Let it be worth great sums or naught, 
 In paper bound, or calf infurled. ' ' 
 
 Alfred Ayres, so far as he can discover, has 
 used four words not found in the dictionaries, and 
 they are: tonist, precisionist, slap-dasher, and 
 sivosh. 
 
 Marion Harland recalls but two words coined 
 by herself. One, which has passed into general
 
 106 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 use, is betiveenitie>i — denoting the gaps between 
 stated tasks which may be utilized by the eco- 
 nomical housewife. The other, chivy, was freely 
 applied during the Civil War to an indefinable 
 reckless slouch of appearance and manner char- 
 acteristic of so-called chivalric, original seces- 
 sionists. 
 
 Rev. Charles Frederick Goss, author of The 
 Redemption of David Corson, once published a 
 little volume called The Philopolid, or city-lover, 
 a word of Dr. Goss' coinage. This is the single 
 word he has coined in all his life, and he believes 
 it will have a mission. Some such word seemed 
 to be needed to express the growing consciousness 
 of our relationship to the city of our birth or 
 adoption. He writes: "I shall be very happy 
 and grateful to have you incorporate it in your 
 volume and thus give it a wider circulation." 
 
 Mrs. Ruth McEnery Stuart has made only 
 an occasional playful turn by which a word has 
 gained a sort of freshness, or accent, perhaps, 
 such as unpretty for not pretty, altitadinous for 
 altitudinal ; unless so light a thing as procrastina- 
 tive, meaning the slow, always procrastinating 
 native, otherwise the tinkering mountaineer, be 
 included. 
 
 William O. Stoddard, the beloved writer of 
 books for juvenile readers, to the very suggestion 
 of word-coinage answers, no, sir! but with a 
 sly twinkle in his eye ; and a liberal pinch of salt 
 (Attic preferred) should be taken with his remark 
 that he wishes to be considered as resenting the
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 107 
 
 implied imputation, and that he would not be 
 guilty of such a thing. He will not drag me 
 into a dispute by saying that there are too many 
 words already and that neither he nor I can 
 know them all as it is, let alone piling on more. 
 
 In Stoddard's own words : " Those ridiculous 
 monsters, the dictionaries, make a nefarious liv- 
 ing out of the existing })ernicious overplus of 
 verbiage. Every hundred-foot skeleton they dig 
 up is a word-breeder. So are what they call the 
 sciences and the newly invented stars. Greek 
 has become a bankrupt nomenclatologicalidic 
 mine. So is the shattered tongue of the ancient 
 Romans, if such a people ever did really exist, 
 which I doubt. I hate Csesar, anyway, for hav- 
 ing been the first to set agoing the practice of 
 European touristing. He did France, Germany, 
 Switzerland, Belgium, etc., and came to grief 
 among the British watering-places. I'm glad he 
 did, and that they killed him for it when he 
 came home to blow about his tour. I wish you 
 all success in your undertaking, but in my opin- 
 ion the list of new-born words you speak of are 
 but as Chinese children — only a few of them are 
 worth keeping. You may drown the others." 
 
 Edward Everett Hale would have said off- 
 hand that he had never made up any words, but 
 his wife told him he had made up a good many. 
 There are more than a million words of all sorts 
 in the standard edition of his works. He called 
 George III. a Brummagem Louis XIV., " but," 
 he avers, "Brummagem is no word."
 
 108 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 Dr. Hale's opiuion is offset by the dictiouaries, 
 which give brummagem both as a uoun and au 
 adjective. The word bears evidence of being a 
 corruption of Birmingham. As a noun, it means 
 one of the cheap imitations made at Birming- 
 ham ; hence an imitation — sham. As an adjec- 
 tive, in usage, it means cheap and showy ; spu- 
 rious; bogus; specially made at Birmingham, 
 England. In a book called The Art of Conver- 
 sation, "brummagen" should have been "brum- 
 magem." 
 
 Dr. Hale was on Funk and Wagnall's Com- 
 mittee of Revision when they made the Standard 
 Dictionary. His duty, with the others, was to 
 decide as to new words. He writes: "I con- 
 demned 95 per cent, of those submitted by the 
 workmen on the dictionary. But the firm wanted 
 to put in all the words they could. So they put 
 in all we condemned — with some sort of printer's 
 mark which meant, ' condemned by the commit- 
 tee of revision.'" Dr. Hale thinks one might 
 make a good list of new words by going over this 
 dictionary and noting the words so condemned. 
 
 A Harvard professor relates to me a diverting 
 anecdote, which goes to show that the making 
 of dictionaries is not altogether ' free from queer 
 processes of induction. About ten years ago the 
 professor sent to a New York firm then compil- 
 ing a new dictionary the word repolonization (in 
 reference to Poland), which had been used by one 
 of his friends. He received the following reply : 
 
 ''You sent to us a word for our new^ diction-
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHOKS. 109 
 
 ary. The word is not to be found in any book 
 in the Astor Library. In what sense do you use 
 it? I derive it from the following : prefix re: 
 pola, -o/.o?, a pole, and >t^oj. I wash — to rewash 
 the poles of an electric battery." 
 
 This etymology, however, was not published.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 NEOLOGISMS. — (^Continued.) 
 
 It might be supposed that in the Southland, 
 where nature is prodigal with her perfumes and 
 colors, where people express themselves with 
 warmth and enthusiasm, many new words would 
 spring into existence. But in this respect the 
 tendencies are rather conservative than otherwise. 
 Those are old Southern principles, sah. Southern 
 principles ! Yet the Southern writers have done 
 their share, not only in naturalizing foreign words, 
 particularly from the French, but in handing 
 down autochthonous verbal forms. 
 
 In order to facilitate my research and corres- 
 pondence among Louisiana authors I enlisted the 
 cooperation of my friend, i\Iiss Helen Pitkin, of 
 New Orleans, formerly the editor of the Woman's 
 Department of the Times-Democrat in that historic 
 city. Miss Pitkin, en passant, is one of the noted 
 beauties of the South, and among her kinsfolk of 
 the past were those two widely different personal- 
 ities, Lord Byron and Margaret Fuller. Her 
 own work, both in poetry and prose, bespeaks rare 
 gifts of mind and is redolent with the charm of a 
 beautiful soul, 
 no
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. Ill 
 
 Like marble melting into mi.st 
 
 is a line from one of her poems which will haunt 
 my mind forever. 
 
 Professor William B. Smith, of Tulane Uni- 
 versity, has made a few real additions — not mere 
 ghost-words — to the English language. Such are 
 homeoidal (included in the Standard Dictionary), 
 like-shaped, like-constituted throughout ; said of 
 any geometrical extent any part of which may be 
 moved (or thought as moved) freely in any way, 
 without any distortion, throughout the whole. 
 For example, a straight line, a circle, a plane, 
 a sphere-surface, our Euclidian Space — all are 
 homeoidal. 
 
 HoineoidaUiii, — the Gernmn zummmen-hangend, 
 usually rendered connected, — said of a surface or 
 higher spatial extent, to indicate how, in what de- 
 gree, it hangs together — how many cross-cuts may 
 be made from point to point of its border without 
 its falling into two distinct pieces. 
 
 Compendence, compendency — property of being 
 compendent. 
 
 Elbert Hubl:)ard, the presiding genius of the 
 Roycroft Shop at East Aurora, X. Y., is straight- 
 forward about the matter. He says that beyond 
 a doubt he has coined about 400 words. He 
 has kept no track of them and made no note of 
 them, however, and to hunt them up would take 
 about a month's steady reading. Here is one of 
 his words : Bomeikitis, the habit of reading news- 
 paper clippings about yourself; obviously sug-
 
 112 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 gested by the surname of Henry Romeike, the 
 founder of the first newspaper-cutting bureau. 
 
 When that intellectual Nimrod, Louis M. El- 
 shemus, fails to find in the Black Forest of litera- 
 ture verbal game that satisfies his mental taste, 
 he bags it on his own preserves, so to speak. 
 Elshemus, who is a record-breaking sonneteer as 
 well as a successful painter, had what he calls the 
 "grievous fault" to coin words when he was 
 younger. On publishing his writings these verbal 
 novelties were tabooed, as by that time he had be- 
 come aware that it is best to use pure simple 
 English. 
 
 However, a few words which he left as they 
 were coined by him are in his published volumes. 
 One of them is fidmant. This he contracted from 
 "fulminant," in order to have a w^ord which 
 would express better what he wished to depict ; 
 also for euphony's sake. It appears in his Lady 
 Vere and Other Narratives — viz. : 
 
 " Then Kalph stared out o'er bay 
 And distant banks of cloud, fulmant in foam, 
 Trembling aslow, like Arctic bears aplay 
 Upon some floe in turquoise stretch of sea. " 
 
 The crisp elisions and frugal economies of expres- 
 sion in the foregoing extract are quite character- 
 istic of Elshemus and are not unlike some of 
 Bloodgood H. Cutter's immensely aboriginal lines. 
 Desiring a word to give the peculiar state of 
 the aforementioned cloud-banks on a June day, 
 Elshemus sought in vain for an Anglo-Saxon root
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 113 
 
 that would be harmonious with the word " foam," 
 which he was obliged to preserve as the most im- 
 portant word — since to the poet those cloud-l)anks 
 seemed to send up foam out of their ])ulk. There- 
 fore the Latin word for thunder was resorted to, 
 and he invented a verb from falmen to suit his 
 purpose. Also fulmant', with the accent on the 
 last syllable, is intentional, so as to give the slow, 
 tumbling movement of those clouds adequate ex- 
 pression. 
 
 According to Elshemus, if any one watches such 
 cloud-banks with their foam-crests, and listens 
 long enough, he will hear in his mind's ear a faint 
 thunder, " which, of course, is caused by the im- 
 agination." However, he says, this is easily 
 accounted for, "since the foam above the clouds 
 seems to be puffed upward as though like the 
 clouds above, an explosion of powder." This is 
 too deep for me, but I hope it is clear to the 
 reader. 
 
 The following are "actual creations" of Elshe- 
 mus' s. While listening to birds he tries to invent 
 a word to express the manner of their singing. 
 In the volume previously quoted, in a sonnet, 
 " The Nighthawk," two verbs appear which con- 
 vey as clearly as is possible to the author the way 
 the male and the female exchange thoughts : 
 
 " ... Then flies the nighthawk high, 
 "With eves intent on prey in nooks and trees ; 
 "While shrill creheoking as he wheels at ease, 
 His mate joins ! When they meet, pujiute they 
 cry —
 
 114 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 Then o'er the dusk-tinged trees they wing around, 
 While wood-birds flute and sing with heavenly 
 sound ! ' ' 
 
 Another is iu his *' Sougs of Spring " — viz. : 
 
 "The red-black marsh-bird, sweet bree-reelng 
 In joy, then swaj^ing — swiftly fleeing." 
 
 Again, in the same volume : 
 
 " The rippling 2;;'i^^gr-/ri^^er chirp . . ." — 
 
 this of a bird, hid in the leafy trees, he could not 
 see. He might have other examples in his manu- 
 script of past years, but as he has written so much, 
 his memory fails to recall more. How these an- 
 alytic morsels would delight Sainte-Beuve, were 
 he living, or Edgar Allen Poe, w ho, along these 
 lines, might think it worth while to embellish his 
 essay on " The Philosophy of Poetry " ! 
 
 Ah, but Frances Aymar Matthews could not 
 remember all her own coinages, nor was there a 
 book of hers in the house. To coin words has 
 ever been an impulse with her, when she could 
 not think immediately of just what she wanted, as 
 also to coin aphorisms, mottoes, headlines, etc. 
 So my request struck a friendly chord. 
 
 The very first word jNIiss ^Matthews can remem- 
 ber inventing is the word dependable, when she 
 was about fourteen or fifteen, for its use in, if 
 she remembers aright, a story. The New^ York 
 Evening Post (again, if she is not mistaken) took 
 her to task for both invention and use ; so 
 did a number of other papers, reviewers, and lit-
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 115 
 
 erary people ; but she .still finds it representing 
 just what she needed and has often seen it used 
 since. In writing of Jane Eyre she has said : 
 " Almost every woman novelist since the appear- 
 ance of that book by ' Currer Bell ' has been 
 Bronteized by its marvelous influence." 
 
 She has used the word episodic (as have others), 
 finding it stronger and better than the three or 
 four words necessary in its stead. In her play, 
 " Aaron Burr," the hero says : " Even so, sir. It 
 is not untrue that when a woman has locked and 
 bolted, even barred, the door against the one 
 who knocks outside, she still will hie her to the 
 window to perceive if he tardies on the steps." 
 Tardies seemed to Miss Matthews to express ex- 
 actly the situation, which neither lingering, nor 
 tarrying, nor stopping conveys. In some essay of 
 hers is to be found, " the defeminization of women 
 is almost surely succeeded by the effeminization 
 of men," or, as she wrote it in French, " Plus les 
 femmes se defeminisent, jylus les homines se femin- 
 issentJ' This, I believe, crossed the Atlantic and 
 has appeared in various places in French print. 
 The dei'iator is a word she coined to portray, in a 
 single term, if possible, a certain type of man, not 
 criminal, sinner, nor culprit, but yet one who de- 
 viated ; perhaps not without his attractions, but 
 lacking in the Anglo-Saxon stability. The man 
 in question was a Latin. 
 
 In her play, "Joan D'Arc," Nicholas I'Oysel- 
 eur, the villain of history and play ])oth, says of 
 Joan : "Aye, and she doth roijal it here in camp,
 
 116 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 as 'twere a court and she the queen of it." lu 
 au essay Miss Matthews recalls this : " Innocent'wa 
 is a cloak uot infrequently employed by the most 
 Kusee woman." And in a paper on Admiral 
 Dewey she says : " Between sunrise and high 
 noon the man of Manila deprovincialized the most 
 provincial country on the globe," etc. I should 
 not cry, " hold, enough ! " to the pleasing caus- 
 eries of the author, but her memory will not help 
 her further. 
 
 Professor L. H. Bailey, who has the chair of 
 Agriculture at Cornell, sent me a list of new 
 words which he has made in his various publica- 
 tions. These include : 
 
 Cuttacje — the practice or process of multiplying 
 plants by means of cuttings, or the state or con- 
 dition of being propagated. Equivalent to the 
 French houturage. 
 
 Graftage — the process or operation of grafting 
 or budding, or the state or condition of being 
 grafted or budded. Equivalent to the French 
 greffage. 
 
 Layerage — the operation or process of making 
 a layer, or the state or condition of being layered. 
 Equivalent to the French marcoUage. 
 
 Seedage — the process or operation of propagat- 
 ing by seeds or spores, or the state or condition of 
 being propagated by seeds or spores. 
 
 Inter-tillage. — This term Professor Bailey pro- 
 posed in a foot-note on page 69 of Roberts' Fertil- 
 ity of the Land, as follows : " Intercultural tillage 
 is a term proposed by Sturtevant to designate till-
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 117 
 
 age between plants in distinction to that which is 
 performed only when the ground is bare of plants 
 (as in sowed crops). ... As tillage is a 
 better word than culture to designate the stirring 
 of the land, inter-tillage has been used in this 
 book to designate tillage between the plants — that 
 is, ordinary cultivating, hoeing, and the like." 
 
 Three new words were proposed in his Survival 
 of the Unlike, and are defined as follows : 
 
 Cenfrogenesis — a term to designate the rotate 
 or peripheral type of form assumed by members 
 of the plant creation. 
 
 Dipleurogenesis — a term proposed to designate 
 the two-sided or dimeric type of form assumed 
 by the members of the animal creation. 
 
 Pseud-annual — (that is false annual) a herba- 
 ceous plant which carries itself over winter (or 
 the inactive season) by means of bull:»s, tubers, 
 and the like. 
 
 Landscape-horticulture — the operations and 
 manual appliances employed in embellishing 
 grounds — the industrial phase of landscape-gar- 
 dening. 
 
 Other coinages from Bailey's Survival of the 
 Unlike are : 
 
 Communalintensity — an expression to designate 
 the fact of the rapid spread of insects and fungi 
 consequent upon the greater number and extent 
 of host-plants. 
 
 Cultural degeneracy — used to denote the common 
 assumption that plants become weakened in con- 
 stitution or virility bv cultivation.
 
 118 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 Varietal difference — a formula to express the 
 fact that unlike constitutious may be character- 
 istic of horticultural varieties. 
 
 Plur-annual — a plaut which is annual ouly be- 
 cause it is killed by the closing of the season (as 
 by frost) ; in distinction to one which dies at the 
 close of the season because of natural ripeness or 
 maturity. This word has been used by French 
 writers, but was first used in English, so far as I 
 can learn, by Professor Bailey. 
 
 I see that "olericulture" is in the Century and 
 the Standard Dictionary. It was made by the late 
 Dr. E. Louis Sturtevant. He also made uuci- 
 culture (nut culture), but I have not been able 
 to find out when or where. " Bush-fruits " might 
 be mentioned. It has been long in use in Eng- 
 land, but was introduced into American writing 
 by Professor Bailey in his Principlps of Fruit 
 Growing. Professor Card has written a book on 
 Bush Fruits, comprising small fruits excepting 
 the strawberry. "Stercology" was invented by 
 Dr. ]M. jVI. Rodgers, in Genesee Farmer, August, 
 1847, and used in his Scientific Agriculture, 1848. 
 It is the science of enriching the soil. It has 
 never been used by any other author, I believe, 
 but Professor Bailey is tempted to take it up, 
 he says. " Offscape " was used by landscape- 
 gardening writers in England a century ago. 
 Professor Bailey is now using it to designate that 
 part of the landscape which lies beyond one's own 
 area. 
 
 Ingersoll Lock wood, a New York philologist,
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMKRICAN AUTHORS. 119 
 
 has been for several years collecting newly coined 
 words, with the intention of publishing a list 
 some day. He has about 1500, he tells me, but 
 they are from all languages, picked up here and 
 there. In some cases he may have the author. 
 Several are his own coining ; and many were 
 coined at his request by learned friends. His 
 scheme is as follows : 
 
 1. He collects words that are coined to piece 
 out our language, as to preche, to state a thing 
 with precision. 
 
 2. He collects words which serve to remedy a 
 detect in our language — e. g., lii>lazy,^ a disinclina- 
 tion to put thoughts into words. 
 
 3. He collects from other languages words 
 which tend to add strength to ours, sometimes 
 taking them as they stand ; sometimes slightly 
 changing the spelling, abolishing the accents, and 
 pronouncing the word more Angliorum — e. g.j 
 "lese-majeste" Tpronounced lees-majesty); "tro- 
 cha," a line of defenses subdividing a country ; 
 " full-throated," with unhampered inclinations, 
 from the French a pleine gorge, as " She gave 
 full-throated utterance to her thoughts." 
 
 4. He builds useful words from the Latin 
 or Greek, as auto-drome, a motor truck ; auto- 
 tijped, said of a letter written on a type-writer 
 by the sender himself ; that is, not dictated ; logo- 
 log, a word made up of several words, as De\dl- 
 may-care, a never-to-be-forgotten look, etc. 
 
 5. He deems a word unknown to the language 
 
 1 Found ill tlie dictionaries.
 
 120 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 if not found included in the latest editions of the 
 Standard Dictionary. But he has very few new 
 w^ords by Americans. To quote from one of his 
 letters : " Englishmen are the great word-makers, 
 and good ones they make, too. They surge up 
 against a blank wall in the language and forth- 
 with build a ladder to clamber over. You can't 
 suppress them. They are thinkers ; we — no ! 
 We are plunged into a slough of vanity thick- 
 ened with love of lucre. Your American authors, 
 for the most part, are not authors, but merely 
 relationists (see p. 157). Any fool can write a 
 story, but put thought into it — Jiic labor, hoc 
 opus esty 
 
 It may be inferred from this that Ingersoll 
 Lockwood is a man of robust opinions, and I may 
 add that he is quite as distinguished and Titanic 
 in mind as in person. His brother. Colonel 
 Henry C. Lockwood, who received the surrender 
 of Fort Fisher, and who, up to the time of his 
 illness, a few years ago, was a prominent member 
 of the New York bar, has written much, chiefly 
 on politics and history. He doubts if he ever 
 coined any words in his two principal works. 
 In The Abolition of the Presidency he did incor- 
 porate coined words in use with us. For example, 
 the word claneocracy, and he was rapped over the 
 knuckles by the London Spectator for using so 
 mongrel an expression — half English, half Greek. 
 In his Constitutional History of France he used 
 "disgruntled" and " plebisitary," then in no dic- 
 tionary that he knew of His adjective for
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 121 
 
 plebiscite he had uever heard. It may be found 
 in dictionaries of more recent date. 
 
 In writing his France, Colonel Lockwood had 
 several disputes about words with his publisher. 
 It was insisted that he should write plebiscit, or 
 plebisitum, instead of plebiscite, because the last 
 could not be found in the English dictionaries. 
 He prevailed after a struggle. Then came the 
 same contest over a long list of words which he 
 wanted to print \nthout italics, as if they were 
 English words. Some of them, at least, appear 
 now in the public press as he has them in his 
 France — viz. : 
 
 Proletariat. Faubourg. Cure. 
 
 Dossier. Quartier. Intendant. 
 
 Bourgeoisie. Octroi. vSalon. 
 
 Petite Noblesse. Canton. Bordereau. 
 
 Commune. Coulisse-ier. 
 
 All these words had a technical meaning, and 
 could be only clumsily translated. Colonel Lock- 
 wood writes : " It may not be within the scope 
 of your inquiry, but you would be surprised 
 possibly at the number of English words which 
 have recently passed into French. The Germans 
 are trying to force out French words from their 
 language. Macmillan's for December (1898) 
 has an article entitled, ' The Madness of ]Mr. 
 Kipling.' It is claimed that he has bred a kind 
 of collector mania, a craving for strange ^ words. 
 
 ^Sajs Brander Matthews: "Mr. Kipling's earliest 
 tales are some of them almost incomprehensible to readers
 
 122 WORD'COINAGE. 
 
 If he discovers a new terra — a technical terra for 
 choice — he is happy as any entomologist with a 
 new beetle and as eager to exploit it. This 
 pedantry of technical terras seeras to grow on him, 
 and the craze for symbolism." 
 
 I wrote to Archibald Lampman, the Canadian 
 poet, not knowing of his death, which had occurred 
 a few days before. Duncan Campbell Scott, him- 
 self a distinguished poet and the editor of Lami> 
 man's collected works, kindly answered the letter, 
 and his reply is in its way valuable testimony. 
 Mr. Scott writes : " Mr. Lampman was careful 
 in his use of language, and, as I have said, I 
 cannot recall any inventions of his. ... I 
 might draw your attention to the word clarid, 
 w^hich appears in one of ray own poems — mean- 
 ing clear, and formed in the same way as fervid. 
 I do not recall any others now, but I have used a 
 good many words partially obsolete which are full 
 of color and which are highly expressive. A few 
 might be mentioned : sowage, pomace, braird, 
 quern, undern, crescive, antres, aura, alula.'' 
 
 Though some of her English friends have ob- 
 jected to her use of certain words (in things she 
 has written) as not being in the dictionary, Eliza- 
 beth Robins has never failed to lay the blame on 
 the dictionary and to insist that the words were 
 "good American." It is true, her countrymen 
 may not uphold her here, but in that case it is to 
 them I would have to apply. 
 
 unacquainted with the vocabulary of the competition 
 wallah."
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 123 
 
 Frederick Jesiip Stirasou remembers no word 
 of his own invemiou in his published works, 
 though there may be some. He used the word 
 "savour" in the sense of an active verb, "to 
 taste slowly and with gusto," which was criticized 
 by Professor Hill, of Harvard, but is found in 
 that sense in the larger dictionaries. There are 
 also many archaic words at the beginning of 
 Kirig Xoanett, and possibly all through that 
 book, belongiug to natural objects, some of which 
 have passed out of use except locally, and some of 
 which were always local to Devoushire, Virginia, 
 or Massachusetts. 
 
 Professor George Trumbull Ladd has never 
 indulged himself much in attempts at making 
 new vrords. He thinks, however, that he was the 
 first to use the word sermonetfe (twenty or more 
 vears ago) ; and he was among the first to use 
 the words {deate and ideatia and the adjective 
 " affective " as the correlate of intellectual and 
 voluntary, for the total feeling aspect of con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 The examples of Ernest Thompson Seton's ver- 
 bal experiments thus far are as follows : 
 
 "I took pleasure in the shattermeiii of that 
 theoiy, and flew in and out among the ticic/r/enj'' — 
 that is, corral of shrubberv. 
 
 " r/?n7(fH/ of interest "—from The Trail of the 
 Sandhill Stag. 
 
 " He laid the rifle down reviihedy 
 
 " Hunter-bride.''' 
 
 Robert Burns Wilson does not think he has
 
 124 
 
 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 beeu much of a word-coiner, though sometimes 
 tempted in that direction. He used the word lui- 
 impressioned in " The Shadows of the Trees " — 
 title poem in his latest volume of verse ; also the 
 word miirth, in the sense of a rich overgrowth, is 
 perhaps unusual. It occurs in a poem, " On San 
 Juan Hill," published in the ^ew York Sidi : 
 
 "The tufted murth of the patient earth 
 And the mystery of the trees." 
 
 He recalls nothing more, unless it be the word 
 brit, which he has used in an unpublished 
 poem : 
 
 " Far from the brit and jungles of the world " — 
 
 meaning grating harshness. The word is in the 
 dictionaries as the name of a small fish, but fishes 
 suffer from all sorts of names that may, or may 
 not, mean something. 
 
 A few days after ]Mark Twain's return from a 
 long absence abroad (October, 1900) he wrote me 
 that he was too rushed to make a very coherent 
 reply to my inquiries. So far as he could re- 
 member then he has coined no words that have 
 achieved the distinction of incorporation into the 
 English language. He thinks he may have 
 given currency to some that were already in use, 
 particularly in the Western mines, liut of this he 
 is not sure. 
 
 I think it is safe to say that ^lark Twain has 
 not only popularized words and phrases which
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 125 
 
 might have died but for his tonic treatment of 
 them, but has coined others which have become 
 familiar, at least in our vernacular. The same 
 may be said of Bret Harte. The one favorite word 
 with him seems to me to be the old stand-by " per- 
 functory." This he uses on high days and holi- 
 days, but it is, to be sure, good English, with an 
 ancient enough ancestry. The " newcomers " he 
 immortalizes in the direct discourse of his 
 characters.
 
 CHAPTER VIIL 
 
 NEOLOGISMS. — ( Continued.) 
 
 Mr. C. W. Ernst says he has been thought, 
 erroueously, to have introduced the word "in- 
 tern," meaning to confine, especially a prisoner. 
 When he used the word in 1877 it was not new, 
 as the Oxford Dictionary shows. Mr. Ernst 
 thinks words are not apt to be coined save when 
 fitted or adapted to a new contrivance, thing, 
 notion. Even the term elevator, called lift in 
 England, came after we had the thing, and the 
 first passenger elevator was that in the American 
 House, Boston, 1866. 
 
 Mr. Ernst is by no means wrong in thinking 
 that we have hardly made a beginning in the 
 study of the language we speak. Yet that lan- 
 guage shows better what we are than do all our 
 historians combined. " Yesterday," writes ]\Ir. 
 Ernst, " I wasted time in running down two 
 words : ' Wild-cat ' banking, occasioned by a 
 Michigan statute, and used in the United States 
 Senate by Benton in 1838 ; bubble is the fashion- 
 able slang for riding in an automobile. I marvel 
 that people do not gather the speech of the multi- 
 tude. I am amazed that no American ever pro- 
 duced a dictionary of place names." 
 126
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVINIt AMKRICAN AUTHORS. 127 
 
 As might have been expected, Boston, one of 
 the cradles of American culture, " the Hub of the 
 universe," " the modern Athens," and so on, has 
 criven to the world numerous words. Mr. Ernst 
 has made an exhaustive list of them. On the 
 subject of " Words Coined in Boston " he read 
 two papers before the Bostonian Societv, one in 
 May, 1896, the other in May, 1899. 'To give 
 the gist of his interesting discoveries may prove 
 a pardonable digression. From these addresses 
 I learn that the earliest printed instance of the 
 term "selectmen" probablv occurs in the Boston 
 Records of March 4 and 28, 1642. 
 
 This author has it that the Tudor period of 
 Boston English was Boston's golden age in every- 
 thing ; while the best coinages of the eighteenth 
 century refer to traffic, finance, and politics. He 
 finds the word coaster to be apparently the ear- 
 liest Americanism. In state documents of 1633 
 it is used "in the sense of idler, grouping the 
 coaster with tobacco-takers and fowlers. The 
 word now denotes sliding down-hill, and is used 
 by all bicycle riders." 
 
 " Sleigh," plainly due to Dutch influence, was 
 in use a hundred years ago, but whether it got 
 into the American vocabulary by way of Ply- 
 mouth or N^ew York has not been clearly deter- 
 mined. The term is said to occur in a New York 
 law of 1699, while Mr. Ernst's earliest citations 
 are Sewell in 1703, and Madame Knisfht in 
 1704. 
 
 The word "rum," first used in the Massachu-
 
 128 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 setts Records of May 6, 1657, has become uni- 
 versal. It may be the old gypsy word, brought 
 to Boston '' by the university men, and popularly 
 applied to the 'strong water' the Boston men 
 made of West India material, the home supply 
 of corn being limited. A true Boston word, now 
 a good Americanism, is ' lumber.' " 
 
 That the real-estate term ''lot" originated in 
 Boston is not clear, but the Town Records of 1636 
 show that " lot " is an abbreviation of allotment. 
 The word " schooner " was born in Gloucester, 
 but Boston gave "packet" its American mean- 
 ing. The fact that Boston always excelled in 
 leather and leather workers may be the reason, 
 says j\Ir. Ernst, why Boston forestalled other towns 
 in applying the word "harness" to almost any 
 kind of horse tackling. "Phaeton" also looks 
 like a Boston coinage. It appeared in the Boston 
 Gazette of May 26, 1760. The Boston word 
 "express," originally local, and denoting a sys- 
 tematic package service, has become a true 
 Americanism. The term came up in 1840 ; the 
 service itself, about a century ago. 
 
 Boston invented paper money in 1690, and 
 fifty years later William Douglass was writing 
 about "depreciating" and "fluctuating" values 
 and " promoters " of bubbles. " The popular 
 word for paper money was * currency,' duly en- 
 tered as an American coinage in Johnson's Dic- 
 tionary of 1775, and unduly neglected by our 
 own lexicographers." The financial agitation of 
 Boston also brought forth the term caucus, de-
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 129 
 
 rived from calkers. Adopted as a political word 
 about 1760, it has become a part of the English 
 lauguaofe wherever spoken. A few years later 
 the word electioneering was common, but it may 
 have come from England. Obviously American is 
 " unconstitutional," meaning illegal or not binding. 
 "It occurs, with unconstitutionality, in a report 
 submitted to the Boston Town Meeting on De- 
 cember 27, 1782, but may be found earlier." 
 Another Boston coinage is immigrant, and its 
 story is told in the preface to Jeremy Belknap's 
 History of Xeic Hampshire, vol. iii., dated April 
 23, 1792. "It was an immigrant," says Ernst, 
 "the identical Jean Baptiste Julien that did not 
 invent julienne soup, who introduced here the 
 word 'restorator,' on July 12, 1793, which re- 
 mains as a sporadic folk-word, while society pat- 
 ronizes restaurants." 
 
 Advice and consent, we are told, is much more 
 than a phrase ; for it denotes a great political 
 principle, reinforcing the new meaning given to 
 the word " commonwealth " in America, and run- 
 ning like a golden thread through our national 
 history. It is found in the Boston Town Kecords 
 as early as 1636, and "the men with whom we 
 associate the delightful and telling phrase are 
 John Adams, Increase blather, and the great 
 John Winthrop." In Winthrop's journal, No- 
 vember 28, 1635, the word boss was used in the 
 following way : " Here arrived a small Norsey 
 (North Sea) bark, of twenty-five tons, sent by the 
 Lords Say, etc., with one Gardner, an expert en-
 
 130 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 giueer or work boss, and provisions of all sorts, to 
 begin a fort at the mouth of the Connecticut." 
 This word comes from the Dutch, and Winthrop 
 probably had heard it from some of his Puritan 
 brethren who had lived in Holland. Americans 
 now have a proper horror of it in its political 
 sense. 
 
 " Help, meaning household or outside assistance 
 hired in all sorts of ways, occurs as early as 
 1645 in the Massachusetts Records. The term 
 was needed to discriminate between mere servants, 
 who were not free, and the free person who sold 
 time or talent for a consideration. . . . The 
 term occurs in the Town Records of 1747, and is 
 apt to be misunderstood until one knows the pre- 
 cise meaning of service and apprentice prior to the 
 Revolution. Servant was synonymous with slave ; 
 help meant a person with full civil and social 
 rights." 
 
 Boston also gave to mankind " store," and by 
 1753 the term had passed into the statutes, with 
 a meaning distinct from "shop." In 1751 the 
 Boston Evening Post advertised "a large assort- 
 ment of brass kettles." Ten years prior the terra 
 had been sortment. A prototype of the much 
 talked about New York commuter of to-day lived 
 in Boston one hundred years ago. When turn- 
 pikes became popular in Massachusetts, it was 
 customary to commute tolls, and the modern com- 
 mutation ticket is merely a modified survival of 
 •stage-coach days. The farm wagon originated in 
 Pennsylvania ; so did the prairie schooner. (Per-
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 131 
 
 haps the reader is familiar with Thomas Bu- 
 chanan Read's poem, " The Waggoner of the 
 AUeghauies.") 
 
 The word "factory," denoting an establishment 
 for the wholesale manufacture of goods, was in 
 use a number of years before the outbreak of the 
 Revolution. " Democrat, as an American party 
 name, did not originate in Boston. It was started 
 4 July, 1793, at Philadelphia, by Citizen Genet, 
 and was for years a term of reproach. Jefferson 
 disliked it. Yet the name stuck, and Boston led 
 in accepting it. We had a newspaper called 
 the Democrat, which first appeared 4 January, 
 1804." 
 
 Ernst ventures to hold that tannery and bind- 
 ery are Boston coinages. "Bindery appears to be 
 due to Isaiah Thomas, who used it in 1810. He 
 would be apt to coin the term, which has gone 
 hence, not only to England, but to Germany as 
 well. Sugary is a good Americanism (place for 
 boiling maple-sugar), and we might coin printery, 
 bookery, on the precedent of butchery, fishery, 
 tannery, hatchery, snugoferv, and the London 
 Yankery." 
 
 To the best of Ernst's knowledge and belief the 
 following are Boston words : Real estate as a 
 business term (it is a law term in England) ; 
 team, meaning horse and wagon ; teamster ; 
 " corder, about 1655, meaning an ofhcer that 
 measured wood for fuel, and long extinct ; dock- 
 age, 1673, recalling the fact, generally forgotten, 
 that Boston had a dock system before London " ;
 
 132 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 fireward, 1711, still in use, and denoting "the 
 fire police rather than the firemen who work the 
 engines; blanks, in the sense of blank forms" 
 (1724) ; transients, said of persons accommodated 
 in hotels (about 1709); block, " denoting a group 
 of houses or stores," became common at the be- 
 ginning of the nineteenth century ; limbs, applied 
 to both legs and arms, a term well chosen to de- 
 note four extremities with one word (1738) ; 
 goodies, used by Mrs. Mecom in a letter (1766) ; 
 dressmaker, in 1810 or earlier, and abutter, "a 
 true Boston term, familiar to real-estate dealers. 
 In assessing taxes Boston officials 
 always used their 'will and doom,' and in due 
 course coined the verb, which is still in use. 
 Hence the dooming-board. The word doom is 
 sometimes associated with gloom, but is simply a 
 variation of the word deem, and means opinion 
 or judgment. AVhen taxable property is not re- 
 ported to the assessors, they exercise their doom 
 or judgment." 
 
 It is claimed that Mr. Louis Prang, an honored 
 Bostonian, coined the word chromo in 1864. 
 Another distinctly Boston gift to our vernacular 
 is the telephone call, hello, which came in 1878, 
 and has gone all over the world. The late C. E. 
 Pratt, member of the Common Council of Boston, 
 in 1879, proposed bicycler, objecting to the Eng- 
 lish bicyclist, which he put alongside of walkist, 
 etc. " The term was immediately accepted, and 
 is interesting for the reason that its origin is a 
 matter of record."
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 133 
 
 And, finally, there is Boston brown bread. 
 Here Ernst gets really eloquent. He exclaims : 
 " I know very well what brown bread in England 
 meant. Shakespeare knew brown bread ; he did 
 not know our brown bread." It appears that 
 permission was granted Nathaniel Thwing — he 
 had been at Louisberg and was familiarly called 
 ]\Xajor — "to sell a six-j^enny loaf of his brown 
 bread, weighing eleven ounces, provided it did 
 not contain exceeding 'one-fifth part Indian 
 meal.' " This was probably in January, 1747. 
 Boston brown bread originated in his bakery, 
 which was in or near Post Office Square. The 
 standard was changed in 1764, and the mixture 
 was allowed to contain not exceeding 50 per cent, 
 of Indian meal. Our amiable author remarks : 
 ''It is safe to keep January — , 1747, as the birth- 
 day of Boston brown bread, and to believe that 
 we added so much to our national diet and dic- 
 tionary." 
 
 Another beloved comestible, Boston baked 
 beans, is not mentioned l^y the authority I have 
 quoted so profusely. But the New York Sun, 
 one of the most flourishing of our American word- 
 mints, in a funny leading article on " The Science 
 of Beans," has provided some new nomenclature 
 for them. Thus : " A cyamologist or cyamologer 
 is a man versed in cyamology, which is the science 
 of beans. Take one Greek bean, kyamos, and the 
 Greek Jogia, a speaking, and you have cyamology, 
 a speaking concerning beans. Take cyamology 
 and graft on the ' ist ' or ' er ' to express the
 
 134 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 agent, and you have cyamologist or cyaraologer. 
 Cyamology is a member of the okl familiar 
 'logia' or 'logy' clan, and denotes a justly ven- 
 erated branch of science." After quoting imagin- 
 ary authorities for the use of these, the " editor- 
 ial " mentions cyamomi/stical and cyamomy sties as 
 rare (they are, rather) and adds this facetious 
 trio: 
 
 Cyamophilist — " fond of beans ; a lover of 
 beans." 
 
 Cyamophagist — " a bean eater, a native of Bos- 
 ton, U. S. A." 
 
 Cyamophagy—'^ the eating of beans." 
 
 I am not sure that many of the suggestions in 
 this book have not more psychologic than philo- 
 logic value. Certain it is that a marvelous ad- 
 vance will be made during this century in the 
 study of psychology in all its relations. On this 
 point Professor Elmer Gates has contributed a 
 memorable opinion : 
 
 " Men trained in the art of more skilfully using 
 or utilizing the mental functions will, in at least 
 one institution already founded, devote their lives 
 to scientific research in such a way as to achieve 
 a greater number of discoveries than would be 
 possible to minds that are not thus psychologically 
 trained. It is the mind that must make all dis- 
 coveries and inventions, and more and moi'e, as 
 the century grows older, will investigators be spe- 
 cially trained in the art of ap})lying the mental 
 processes to the development of special sciences 
 and arts. Hitherto the direct training of the
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 135 
 
 miud fiictor of making discoveries has been al- 
 most totally neglected ; investigators have gone 
 on blindly and haphazardly, violating almost 
 every environmental, bodily, and psychologic con- 
 dition of success. Hereafter these conditions will 
 be scientifically regulated, and men who have 
 devoted years to the attainment of special kinds 
 of intellectual, emotional, and conative skill will 
 carry on systematic lines of investigation for the 
 sake of ascertaining the truth. This factor is 
 applicable, of course, not only to electricity, but 
 to all sciences ; nevertheless electricity is the first 
 scientific department organized on this plan. 
 Mentators who have learned how to carry on the 
 intellective processes of imaging, conceptuating, 
 idealizing, thinking, reasoning, and introspecting 
 with greater ease, accuracy, and at a greatly aug- 
 mented speed, and who have at their command 
 all the proved data of a science and all needed 
 experimental facilities, will be able to make 
 more numerous discoveries and inventions than 
 otherwise." 
 
 Many people are becoming deeply absorbed in 
 mental and psychical science, and for this reason 
 I give the terms invented and proposed by that 
 remarkable English investigator, the late F. W. 
 H. Myers, one of the founders and perhaps the 
 strongest pillar of the Society for Psychical Re- 
 search. 
 
 In 1882 Mr. Myers first suggested the terms 
 telepathy and fehesthesia, and it has become pos- 
 sible to discriminate between these two words
 
 136 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 somewhat more sharply now than formerly. 
 " Telepathy may still be defined as ' the communi- 
 cation of impressions of any kind from one mind 
 to another, independently of the recognized channels 
 of sense.' The distance between agent and percip- 
 ient which the derivation of the word ' feeling at 
 a distance' implies need, in fact, only be such 
 that no known operation of the senses can bridge 
 it. Telepathy may thus exist between two men 
 in the same room as truly as between one man in 
 England and another in Australia, or between one 
 still livins: on earth and another man long since 
 departed. Telsesthesia — perception at a distance — 
 may conveniently be interpreted in a similar way, 
 as implying any direct sensation or perception of 
 objects or conditions independently of the recog- 
 nized channels of sense, and also under such circum- 
 stances that no known mind external to the per- 
 cipient's can be suggested as the source of the 
 knowledge thus gained." 
 
 " Telergy — a name for a hypothetical force or 
 mode of action, concerned with the conveyance 
 of telepathic impressions, and perhaps with other 
 supernormal operation. 
 
 ^^Supernormal — of a faculty or phenomenon 
 which goes beyond the level of ordinary exper- 
 ience, in the direction of evolution, or as pertain- 
 ing to a transcendental world. The word super- 
 natural is open to grave objections ; it assumes 
 that there is something outside nature, and it 
 has become associated with arbitrary interference 
 with law. Now, there is no reason to suppose
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 137 
 
 that the psychical phenomena with which we deal 
 are less a part of nature or less subject to fixed 
 and definite law than any other phenomena. 
 Some of them appear to indicate a higher evolu- 
 tionary level than the mass of men have vet 
 attained, and some of them appear to be governed 
 by laws of such a kind that they may hold good 
 in a transcendental world as in the world of sense. 
 In either case they are al:)0ve the norm of man 
 rather than outside his nature. 
 
 " Cosmopathic — open to the access of super- 
 normal knowledge or emotion, apparently from 
 the transcendental world, but whose precise source 
 we have no means of defining. 
 
 " Dextro-cerehral (opposed to sinistro-cerebral, 
 also a coinage of ]Mr. Myers') — of left-handed 
 persons, as employing preferentially the right 
 hemisphere of the brain. 
 
 " Enteiicephalic — On the analogy of entoptic ; 
 of sensations, etc., which have their origin within 
 the brain, not in the external world. 
 
 ^' Panmnesia — would imply a potential recollec- 
 tion of all impressions. 
 
 " Hi/perpromefJua — Supernormal power of fore- 
 sight ; attributed to the subliminal self as a hy- 
 pothesis by which to explain premonitions without 
 assuming either that the future scene is shown to 
 the percipient by any mind external to his own, 
 or that circumstances which we regard as future 
 are in any sense already existent." 
 
 To illusions accompanying the departure of 
 sleep, as when a dream-figure persists for a few
 
 138 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 moments into waking life, he has given the name 
 hypnopompic. 
 
 "■ Metliedic — Of communications between one 
 stratum of man's intelligence and another; as 
 when he writes messages whose origin is in his 
 own subliminal self. Some word is needed to ex- 
 press this novel conception ; and Plato's use of 
 tj.zOz^t?, participation (Farm. 132 D), suggests 
 ' methectic ' as the most appropriate term of Greek 
 origin. 
 
 " Preversion — a tendency to characteristics as- 
 sumed to lie at a further point of the evolutionary 
 progress of a species than has yet been reached ; 
 opposed to reversion. 
 
 " Promnesia — The paradoxical sensation of 
 recollecting a scene which is only now occurring 
 for the first time ; the sense of the dejdru. The 
 term jmramnesia, which is sometimes given to this 
 sensation, should, I think, cover all forms of 
 erroneous memory, and cannot without confusion 
 be used to express specifically this one anomalous 
 sensation. 
 
 " Betrocoguitiou — knowledge of the past, super- 
 normally acquired." 
 
 Finally he suggested the word ])an(v-'^thesia, "to 
 express the undiflTerentiated sensory capacity of 
 the supposed primal germ." 
 
 In his glossary ]Mr. ]Myers explains some words 
 and phrases in themselves not new, but used in 
 the studies of the society with some special signifi- 
 cance. They are too numerous, however, even to 
 summarize here.
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 139 
 
 Dr. James Braid, a Scotchman by birth, but 
 for many years a surgeon in Manchester, England, 
 was the^ rediscoverer of the subjective origin of 
 hvpnotic phenomena, and invented a terminology 
 which is closely followed, with two or three excep- 
 tions, at the present day. Among these terms 
 are : 
 
 Neurypnology, the rationale or doctrine of ner- 
 vous sleep. 
 
 Neuro-hypnotism, or nervous sleep, a peculiar 
 condition of the nervous system produced by arti- 
 ficial contrivance. 
 
 Then, suppressing the prefix " neuro," for the 
 sake of brevity, Dr. Braid evolved such terms as 
 hypnotic, hypnotize, hypnotism, dehypnotize, etc., 
 which have superseded largely in popular and 
 almost wholly in scientific usage the terms "mes- 
 meric sleep " and " mesmerism," originated by 
 Friedrich Anton Mesmer, 
 
 Other terms, like mono-ideology, monoideism, 
 psycho-physiology, etc., invented by Dr. Braid, 
 have not fared so well. Indeed, his enterprise in 
 this direction was prejudicial to his career. Ex- 
 cept by a curious and withal skeptical public, 
 nearly all his theories were ignored during his 
 lifetime, his death occurring in 1860 ; but his 
 terms — that is to say, some of them — were gradu- 
 ally adopted and his researches recognized, though 
 in no such degree as they deserve to be or will be 
 some day. 
 
 To return to our less abstruse American 
 authors : Octave Thanet, in a short story, uses the
 
 140 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 colloquial term 2:)ernicketty, which I take to mean 
 a fussy kind of worrimeut. 
 
 The mountain of Frederick Remington's mind 
 labored and brought forth the compound " bull- 
 dogged^' — of a man's hands gripping a carbine 
 barrel. 
 
 Sarah Guernsey Bradley's clever pen is re- 
 sponsible for this : " the weii'dities of this naughty 
 world." 
 
 Professor Burton makes laud a noun, — *' worthy 
 of laud," — as it was used in Elizabethan times, 
 and I am glad to see it given this twist again. 
 
 But I despair of being able to mention all the 
 "fresh arrivals." They are coming in on new 
 trains of thought almost daily. I doubt not that 
 while this tome is in press a dozen or more new 
 terms will be hatched which I shall wish were in- 
 cluded here. 
 
 J
 
 CHAPTER LX. 
 
 NEOLOGISMS. — {Continued.) 
 
 Professor Thomas J. Allen advocates the 
 adoption of such a means of improving our lan- 
 guage as will give future generations the benefit 
 of the united efforts of the best living authorities 
 on language, and he would gladly support any 
 movement that might lead toward that end. If 
 the expression be allowed, he favors respectalile 
 counterfeiting, in the hope that it may lead to the 
 establishment of a mint. But he is not a counter- 
 feiter. He knows that we need more word-cur- 
 rency, but he does not wish to assume the respon- 
 sibility of coining. He is averse to "free and 
 unlimited coinage." He believes in a siugle 
 standard — constituted authority. 
 
 Edward Payson Jackson made a rather neat 
 word in Filipina, to designate a Filipino woman. 
 
 Dr. Van Dyke, in Fisherman's Luck, devotes a 
 light and airy chapter to the subject of Talka- 
 bilitij. 
 
 Professor John Duncan Quackenbos, in Hypno- 
 tism in Mental and Moral Culture, introduces a 
 fearsome word denoting a parlous thing. It is 
 opsomania, which, alas ! works its ravages among 
 
 141
 
 142 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 the young and fair. It gives tiiem " indigestion, 
 mental indolence, chronic gastric catarrh, and, 
 most to be deplored, a fetid breath, which renders 
 the possessor positively odious." " The breath 
 of a healthy girl of twenty," moralizes Professor 
 Quackenbos, " should be pure and sweet as a May 
 breeze," but opsomania " transforms it into a 
 nauseous blast." In his review of the book 
 William S. Walsh comments in these words on 
 this fashionable malady : " It is the commonest 
 of all complaints among the girls of the period. 
 The girls themselves call it a sweet tooth, or, 
 rather, a sweet tooth is that form of the complaint 
 which mostly attacks the girls. In a general way 
 Dr. Quackenbos defines opsomania as a mania for 
 articles of food, particularly delicatessen and con- 
 fectionery. He treats opsomania precisely as he 
 would treat dipsomania (the drink habit), ormor- 
 phinomania (the morphine habit), or the cigarette 
 habit, which has so far escaped the adventitious 
 horror of being christened by any portentous 
 Latin name." 
 
 ]Max O'Rell says: "Thanks to the tact, the 
 brilliancy, and the high intellectual attainments 
 of American women, one can causer in America, 
 and the vocabulary of the language used in the 
 United States ought to ])e richer by one word, a 
 good equivalent for this French verb which must 
 be imperfectly translated by 'to talk' or 'to 
 chat' ; for causer means to chat with wit, humor, 
 brilliancy, and great refinement." 
 
 In a sermon. Rev. George F. Pentecost used
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 143 
 
 the word togetherness, as of Christians in wor- 
 ship. 
 
 A friend of mine, a literary woman, wrote me 
 in this playful vein: "I am getting copyosis, a 
 mental disease, caused ]iy trying to adopt the 
 style of such as I am familiar with, in order to 
 have a little diversity." 
 
 Mrs. Mary L. I). Ferris coined the word 
 loanor, one who loans ; but she says she has been 
 rebuked for so doing and is sorry. To me it 
 seems quite as eligible as many other words 
 formed with that suffix. 
 
 Kate Jordan Vermilye is sorry, too, but be- 
 cause she cannot mention having coined a word. 
 She did want to use the word ivhetherinc) to ex- 
 press the doubtful murmur or questioning sound 
 of the sea, but it was not permitted by the pub- 
 lisher. This word is already in existence, though 
 with a different meaning from that proposed by 
 Mrs. Vermilye. 
 
 Isabel Gordon Curtis, the editor of Good House- 
 keeping, writes : " I should like to contribute one 
 late addition to your newly coined words, only it 
 comes from an uneducated little newsboy instead 
 of a famous writer. The youngster was waking 
 the early Sunday slumbers of our neighborhood 
 by a cry : ' Hur-r-r-ruld, Wur-r-ld, Sun, Jour-r-r- 
 nul, all the New Yor-r-rk Sunday pa-per-r-rs.' 
 'Bring me a Herald' shouted the man across the 
 street. 'Haven't got one,' cried the youngster. 
 'I've got all the rest. D'ye want one of 'em?' 
 'No, I don't. I want the Herald. You've just
 
 144 AVORD-COINAGE. 
 
 been hollering Herald.'' 'Well, 'twas a inisholler, 
 I guess. I'm all out of Heralds.'' Misholler is 
 not a bad word at all." 
 
 Caroline K. Duer, describing a game of polo, 
 in one of her scherzo stories has this phrase : 
 " Men were shouting and ponies' quick little feet 
 thtid-thudding.'' 
 
 A certain writer who is not ashamed to bring 
 to market his own verbal produce uses this itali- 
 cized word in one of his rococo musical criticisms : 
 " One might call him Professor, but it would 
 ambiguify his dignity with that of hypnotists, 
 chiropodists, barbers, and other wearers of the 
 word." Needless to say, this is stodgy, if not 
 faulty. 
 
 There have been suggested a number of words 
 which fastidious philologers insist are more ele- 
 gant and concise than "horseless carriage." It 
 is hoped that something more appropriate and 
 less of a mouthful than automobile will be de- 
 vised. 
 
 The heteroclitic and gauche word ergograph 
 sounds rather funny when literally translated, as 
 "thereforegraph." It is a machine invented by 
 Professor A. ^losso, of Italy, for the purpose of 
 determining the stored-up nervous energy of 
 school-children. 
 
 A resident of Brooklyn, over the initials 
 S. B. K., recently addressed a communication to 
 the New York Times, of the following import: 
 " When a married gentleman at home says cas- 
 ually that he is pleased^ with his new typewriter,
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 145 
 
 his wife is a little curious to know the gram- 
 matical gender of the new article — whether it be 
 feminine or neuter, she or it. I think if the 
 Times will lead in calling the instrument a fijjjo- 
 fjrapli, the operator a typogmpher, and the prod- 
 uct of the operation, for which there is no single 
 word, a typogramy this nomenclature would be 
 adopted. This is not a bad suggestion ; for it 
 meets an awkward deficiency in our language. 
 
 It is a good sign to see such writers as Sir 
 Robert Hart using "'diet " in place of dictum, as 
 we mav say " best " instead of behest. The more 
 superfluous syllables we get rid of, without the 
 slightest injury to the meaning, the better it will 
 be for our loggy language. 
 
 Brander Matthews can only say that to the best 
 of his recollection and intention he has never in- 
 vented a new word ; but that he is not very 
 violently opposed to decent neologisms is attested 
 by the quotation (on p. 37) from one of his articles 
 in The Bookman. 
 
 Mere declaimers, though they may imply a 
 prejudice against neologism, are not necessarily 
 ex parte arguments against word-coinage. Pro- 
 fessor Charles E. Xorton is not aware that he has 
 ever coined a word. With rare insight he ob- 
 serves that words deliberately coined are seldom 
 of worth, except as mere names, and have no life 
 of their own. The words which live are rarely 
 the conscious creation of any man. 
 
 The effort of Thomas Nelson Page has been not 
 so much to invent new words, as to put into his 
 10
 
 146 WORD-COIXAGE. 
 
 books the words which, though uuusiial in our 
 cities at present, are iu current use in the okl part 
 of Virginia. He is convinced that these words 
 are good old English, and they serve the double 
 purpose of showing the origin of the life he 
 describes and of expressing his ideas very vigor- 
 ously. 
 
 Elizabeth P. Train regrets that it is not her 
 good fortune to be possessed of sufficient original- 
 ity to supplement any existing need in our lan- 
 guage by words of her own coinage. 
 
 General Charles King begs leave to say that 
 to the best of his knowledge and belief he never 
 coined any more words than he has money. 
 There is a chance here for a waggish query, but 
 I refrain. 
 
 Lilian Bell, autlior of The Indinct of Siep- 
 faiherhood, etc., cannot discover that she ever 
 coined a word in anything she has written. She 
 is quite satisfied to use " the few feeble words of 
 English " at her tongue's end, but to group old 
 words in sucli a way that her phrases will stick 
 in peoples' minds and the words will seem new. 
 Had I asked her for coined phrases, she might 
 have told me that, so fiir as she knows, the terms, 
 now passed into current use, of flos.v/-f/irI, girl- 
 baehelor, man under thirty-five, and the like, were 
 original with her. But she never coins words. 
 
 Professor Barret Wendell really does not 
 know whether he ever coined a word or not. If 
 so, he says the fact is not to his credit. The lan- 
 guage affords full scope for any ideas he ever had. 
 
 I
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 147 
 
 Hamilton W. ^Mabie, while very much inter- 
 ested in my endeavor to make a collection of 
 word-coinages, fears he never had either the orig- 
 inality or the audacity to coin words, and he re- 
 calls no such coinages in his books. 
 
 William Dean Howells states that if he has 
 coined any words, he knows not what or where 
 thev are. How al)out Altriiria, Mr. Howells? 
 (See p. 260.; 
 
 Richard Henry Stoddard declares that if he 
 has ever coined a word, he has forgotten that 
 felony against our good old mother tongue, which 
 has more tokens than he has any occasion to cir- 
 culate. He does not think he could " shove the 
 queer " if he wanted to. Honest money or none 
 for him. 
 
 George W. Cable seems to be in doubt. He 
 has no idea how many word-coinages he has 
 made, nor what they are, nor in what circum- 
 stances they originated. 
 
 Henry James is afraid he is wholly unable to 
 aid me in collecting words either of his own in- 
 vention or of any one's else. He has attempted 
 to write only in a language already existing, 
 and has found that a literary task abundantly, 
 and superabundantly, difficult by itself Compli- 
 cated further by extemporized and imported sub- 
 stances, it would, he fancies, have got the better 
 of him altogether. In short, 'he has never had 
 anything to say to which some word or other al- 
 ready forming a part of human speech has not had 
 to his sense somethino- to contri]:)ute of its own.
 
 148 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 Frank R. Stockton does not remember that 
 any words of his invention have appeared in his 
 works. Certainly he hopes that this is the case. 
 
 It seems to F. Marion Crawford that a book on 
 word-coinage should be at once interesting to the 
 public and useful to writers. Nevertheless he 
 fails to see how to answer my questions. He has 
 always tried to avoid coining words in his writ- 
 ings, while seeking old ones in all good authors, 
 in the hope of finding useful expressions having 
 good authority. If any one will point out to him 
 his word-coinages, he will be glad to help me — 
 and himself — with any explanation or excuse he 
 can find. 
 
 Edward S. Van Zile has never been fortunate 
 enough to add a new word to our language. Our 
 tongue, destined to subdue all tongues, has not 
 suffered, he remarks, from his inability to add to 
 its riches. After all, do library-made words ever 
 come into the world in possession of the germ of 
 immortality, asks Mr. Van Zile, and he con- 
 tinues : " If I were searching for New Anglo- 
 Saxon words I'd go to the street urchin, not to the 
 professional writer. It is not the overeducated 
 oyster that begets the pearl." 
 
 Bliss Perry, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, has 
 tried to discover some of his word-coinages for my 
 benefit, but without success. Perhaps some years 
 spent in teaching rhetoric makes one quite too shy 
 of neologisms. 
 
 Professor George E. Woodberry cannot say 
 that he regrets not having any words of his own
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 149 
 
 coinage to seud me ; l)ut so far as he knows there 
 is none. 
 
 William H. Rideing believes he can acquit 
 himself of transgressions of this kind, having 
 found a normal vocabulary sufficient for his needs, 
 but the subject, he admits, is an interesting one. 
 
 The negro poet, Paul Laurence Dunl)ar, 
 modestly assures me that he would not dare to 
 take any liberties with the English language. 
 In dialect — well, they all say that is a different 
 thing, and so it is in many a volume. 
 
 Kate Douglass Wiggin says she has a particu- 
 larly bad memory, but she does not think she 
 ever coined a word in her life. 
 
 Professor Charles H. Moore believes he has 
 not invented any words ; though he should have 
 no objection to word-coinage if a purpose could l^e 
 served better so than other\vise. 
 
 General Lew Wallace has no recollection of 
 coining any word. Daniel G. Gilman, late Presi- 
 dent of Johns Hopkins L'niversity. has no word 
 to father, and President Eliot, of Harvard, most 
 emphatically pleads " not guilty." 
 
 Mrs. Amelia E. Barr advised me to compile a 
 list of Anglo-Saxon words and let neologisms go 
 to grass. But several manuals of Anglo-Saxon 
 serve very well. 
 
 Mrs. M. E. W. Sherwood has never to her 
 knowledge coined a word. She has found our 
 nol)le English tongue copious enough. 
 
 J. W. De Forest wished he could help me, but 
 remembered no word-coinages of his own. He
 
 150 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 had but two of his works within reach, and they 
 seemed to be without noticeable linguistic novel- 
 ties. 
 
 Vida D. Scudder is not aware, so far as her 
 memory serves her, of having coined any words 
 that appear in her published works. 
 
 It would be impossible for F. Hopkinson Smith 
 to send a list of his word-coinages without more 
 research than he could give to it. And even if 
 he had the time to make such a search, he might 
 not find a single worthy example. 
 
 Theodore Roosevelt has no knowledge of any 
 word-coinages of his own. He is sure he remem- 
 bers none. 
 
 Mrs. Burton Harrison really has no idea that 
 she ever attempted to coin a word. She has been, 
 always, an ardent disciple of English undefiled, 
 and any possible lapses from it have been her mis- 
 fortune, not her fault. She is kind enough to add 
 that she will look with interest for the results of 
 my research. 
 
 Margaret Beland doubts if she can lay claim 
 to the production of a new word. So far as she 
 can recall she has not coined any word which 
 would express any particular idea of her own. 
 She thinks a book upon this subject would be im- 
 mensely interesting and of great philologic value. 
 
 In what little he has written for publication 
 Professor Lewis E. Gates has tried not to do any 
 counterfeiting. He has contented himself with 
 the current coin of the realm of letters. 
 
 Never having been consciously a coiner of words,
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 151 
 
 the late Charles Dudley Warner did not see how 
 he could help me in my inquiry. 
 
 Lilian Whiting does not believe she ever 
 coined a word, but adds, " I wish I had." This 
 phrase is strictly feminine and simply delicious. 
 
 Goldwin Smith, of Toronto, Canada, is not con- 
 scious that he has invented any new words ; but 
 one sometimes does it unintentionally, as by coin- 
 ing a verb from some already existing noun, or by 
 turning an adjective like brusque into a verb — 
 brusqued, etc. 
 
 Charles G. D. Roberts doubtless has coined 
 some words in his time,, but if so, he does not re- 
 member the "delinquency." He is not at all 
 sure that a search through all his books would re- 
 veal enough of them to be worthy the scantiest 
 paragraph. For so small a return, he is sure, I 
 would not condemn him to such a familiarity ^vith 
 his own works as this would entail. Senously, if 
 he were at all given to word-coinage, — which he 
 is not, being rather a purist, — he should take 
 pleasure in complying \dth my request, but he 
 has in vain racked his brain for an instance in 
 point. 
 
 Gilbert Parker, now a member of the English 
 House of Commons, feels the responsibility of his 
 own " sins " in the direction of word-coinage. It 
 is probable that he has been guilty, but he be- 
 lieves he has also had the good taste not to be 
 proud of his inventions and to have forgotten them 
 with becoming haste. He finds himself unable to 
 resurrect these monuments of literarv ambition,
 
 152 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 though wishing me all success in the under- 
 taking. 
 
 Charles Barnard can only say that he has not 
 knowingly been guilty of the "offense of word- 
 coining. He has always found the English lan- 
 guage quite sufficient for all his purposes. He 
 has, on the other hand, assisted at the quiet extinc- 
 tion of several useless words of a technical nature. 
 In his work on the Century Dictionary he sup- 
 pressed a number of words that now have no use 
 and are disappearing. There are, however, a 
 great number of new and useful words that have 
 not exactly been coined, but have been evolved 
 naturally out of the necessity for new terms to de- 
 scribe new things. There are many of these 
 really good words now in daily use in the arts and 
 trades, and my correspondent thinks that a series 
 of essays on such words would be well worth 
 doing. 
 
 Margaret Sutton Briscoe has contributed no 
 words of her own that she knows of to the lan- 
 guage. She is not, in fact, in much sympathy with 
 that practice, valuable as it has often proved. If 
 she has ever coined words in her waiting, it has 
 been done unconsciously. There seems to her 
 something artificial in the conscious effort unless 
 some new form of expression cryingly demands a 
 new word ; then, she thinks, it should rather creep 
 by proper usage into the language. 
 
 Viola Roseboro chooses out of courtesy to re- 
 gard it as a compliment to be considered among 
 possible word-coiners, but is rather grieved, she
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 153 
 
 finds, at iiot being able to produce one little word 
 of her own coinage ; and yet she thinks she has 
 been right in always regarding herself as too 
 small a person to take such creation upon her- 
 self. 
 
 Winston Churchill, the author of those much 
 discussed novels, Richard Carvel and The Crisis, 
 with rather unnecessary modesty regrets to say 
 that, in the limited course of his compositions, he 
 has never coined any original words, nor does he 
 feel that he has advanced far enough in his pro- 
 fession to give any views of value on the subject. 
 
 Robert Barr, who has the good fortune to be a 
 Scotchman, a Canadian, and an American rolled 
 into one, writes jocularly from England, asking 
 why he should coin words when there are thou- 
 sands now in the language which he doesn't know 
 the meaning of and which he can't spell. The 
 man who would coin a word would coin a lead 
 dollar, he asserts. He also says that if Kipling, 
 Mark Twain, Saltus, Hawthorne, Stedman, and 
 numerous others have confessed to me that they 
 have committed this crime, then it is my duty 
 not to write a book on it, but to inform the police 
 and get this notorious gang of counterfeiters 
 placed where they belong. The only man who 
 has a right to coin a word, in Barr's opinion, is the 
 inventor who makes a machine which comes into 
 the world without a name, and therefore needs one. 
 Tesla and Edison have the right to construct new 
 words ; Kipling and Ho wells have not. When I 
 land these men in Sing Sing, Barr wants me to
 
 154 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 let him know, and he will come over and "do 
 time" with them ; for if he does not invent words, 
 he says he has committed other misdemeanors 
 which entitle him to put on the same picturesque 
 costume that they will wear, and — well, they are 
 all excellent company, in jail or out. 
 
 Mary E. Wilkins is sorry, but she cannot re- 
 member coining any words, and is so very busy 
 that she is unable to look through all her pub- 
 lished works and to make the necessary notes. 
 
 Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spotford does not think 
 she has ever coined a word. If she has, it has 
 been unconsciously and ignorantly. She may 
 have used somie archaic words, clinging to the 
 memory from readings in early English, but no 
 more than most writers have done, she hopes. 
 
 Edith M. Thomas, while appreciative of the 
 honor the inquiry implies, is not, she believes, able 
 t(3 add any word curios to this collection, and, in- 
 deed, if she had ventured upon any verbal inven- 
 tion in "the small plot of literature " in which she 
 works, they would scarcely deserve perpetuation. 
 
 Save where there has been no escape from dia- 
 lect, Owen Wister believes he never stepped out- 
 side the printed dictionary. He hopes not. My 
 question about coining words made him open 
 Worcester's Unabridged — it happened to open at 
 page 1179, where he found raip, raivel, rakee, 
 rakeshame, rakesfale, rakevein, ralliance, rahpite, 
 and ramadan, and as he had never heard of any 
 of them before, he turned for consolation to 
 another page. It happened to be 166, where
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 155 
 
 there struck his eye boxen, boyar, boyan, boy- 
 blind, boyism, boyn, boyship, brabble, braccate, 
 brack, bracky, bracteolate, and brad, to say nothing 
 ofbrachygraphy, bracJujstockJirone, and some others, 
 — some forty words on the first two pages he 
 tried, — and all entirely unknown to him until 
 that moment. Further experiments brought rev- 
 elations equally humiliating. So, it will be seen, 
 the English language is not only enough for 
 Owen Wister, but a good deal too much, and he 
 will not attempt to add to it at present. 
 
 A portion of this correspondence was published 
 in the Chautauqaan, and later, in the February 
 (1900) number of that magazine, appeared a let- 
 ter from Mr. Wister, as follows : 
 
 "Editor Chautauquan : 
 
 "Dear Sir: In an article on the coinage 
 of words recently published by you a writer 
 (Ingersoll Lockwood) says, among other things, 
 this: [Here Mr. Wister quotes what Ingersoll 
 Lockwood says on page 120 of this book about 
 Englishmen being the great word-makers, etc.] 
 
 "To these observations I shall offer no com- 
 ments of my own ; my being an American writer 
 might impair their value. But as your journal 
 is devoted to education, let me quote Professor 
 Adams S. Hill, of Harvard University, in his 
 book entitled The Foundations of Rhetoric, paire 
 30: 
 
 "'A writer of established reputation may suc- 
 ceed, now and then, in calling back words from
 
 156 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 the grave ; but even the greatest have failed in 
 the attempt. A writer of established repiitatiou 
 may, by adopting a provincial or a vulgar word 
 as his own, help to make it good English ; but 
 great authors are not those who are most swift to 
 coin words themselves, or to use those which lack 
 the stamp of authority. " The two most copious 
 and fluent of our prose writers, Johnson and Ma- 
 caulay, may be cited on this head," says a recent 
 writer (John Earle, English Prose, London, Smith, 
 Elder and Co., 1890), "for the first hardly ever 
 coined a word ; the second, never. They had not 
 the temptation ; their tenacious memories were 
 ever ready with a supply of old and appropriate 
 words, which were, therefore, the best, because 
 their associations were established in them." 
 
 " ' If there were words enough in the language 
 to supply the needs of ^lacaulay, there are surely 
 enough for ordinary writers. For them the only 
 safe rule is to use no word that is not accepted as 
 good English by the best judges. This rule is 
 well expressed by Pope (see p. 3). In our day 
 obsolete or obsolescent words are less tempting 
 than new-fangled expressions. For one devotee of 
 old English who insists on writing " agone " for 
 "ago" or "gone," or "inwit" for "conscience," 
 or on publishing a "foreword" instead of a 
 "preface," there are hundreds of ready writers 
 who try their hands at the manufacture of new 
 words, or who snap up the manufactures of others. 
 Those who know least of English as it is are pre-
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 157 
 
 cisely those who are most ready to disfigure their 
 sentences with English as it is not.' 
 
 "In closing, allow me to congratulate your con- 
 tributor (Ingersoll Lock wood ) upon his use of the 
 word 'relationist.' On page 1209 of Worcester's 
 Unabridged I find that it has hitherto meant 
 relative." 
 
 The late William Preston Johnston, son of the 
 Confederate General, Albert Sidney Johnston, and 
 President of Tulane University of Louisiana, had 
 a reverence for the English speech, and always 
 did what he could to stand up for its purity. He 
 was well aware that language is fluent, moving 
 ever with the restless tide of human thought, and 
 hence he could not set himself up to be what is 
 called a purist, resisting every novelty of speech 
 or new coinage of words adapted to new modifica- 
 tions of thought and condition. But he did not 
 regard them as part of the speech of the people on 
 the mere dictum of bold innovators or ingenious 
 word-coiners, whether they represented newspapers 
 or dictionaries. For his own part, he never con- 
 sciously coined a word, unless in nonsense verses, 
 and he found the English language sufficient for 
 all the best thinking he could do. It seemed to 
 him that most of the so-called word-coinages that 
 he saw were merely counters or crude counter- 
 feits. He did not deny, however, the right of 
 any individual to utter them any more than he 
 did the right to talk slang or thieves' Latin, for 
 that matter. To him it was all a question of
 
 158 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 taste — of the sense of duty that one feels in up- 
 holding the dignity of the mother tongue. 
 
 The late Professor Moses Coit Tyler did not re- 
 member that in serious writing and for publica- 
 tion he ever coined a word, but he did remember 
 a number of instances where he was strongly 
 tempted to do so, and when he resisted long 
 enough he always found out that the English lan- 
 guage was already copiously provided for the ex- 
 pression of any idea or shade of an idea that he 
 had to communicate. In other words, he did not 
 favor the free and umlimited coinage of words 
 (for the uses of oral or printed discourse) any 
 more than he did of silver, or potatoes, or cedar 
 posts. Conservatism in language is a great vir- 
 tue. Our language, being a living one, he 
 thought would grow fast enough without any one's 
 conscious effort thereto. 
 
 So far as he knows, George Gary Eggleston has 
 never " sinned against the English language " by 
 adding words of his own to it. He has always 
 found its vocabulary adequate to the expression 
 of every thought that his mind has been able to 
 conceive. He has used dialect forms, of course, 
 in writing dialect stories. Inasmuch as we have 
 in English a vocabulary three or four times as 
 great as that of any other language, Eggleston 
 has never felt it incumbent upon him to add any- 
 thing to the list of words permitted in order 
 to write English. If, in any moment of inadvert- 
 ence, he has used in his writings a word not 
 found in the dictionaries, or if he has used a word
 
 NEOLOGISMS BY LIVING AMERICAN AUTHORS. 159 
 
 iu a sense not recognized by the dictionaries 
 of the English language, he has only to beg 
 the pardon of the English language, which is the 
 one thing he has studied most diligently and 
 which he respects most of all things in the 
 world. 
 
 Other letters of the same or of similar import 
 might be mentioned, but enough is as good as 
 a feast. We have here many a hint of author- 
 doxy, if the levity may be permitted, and some 
 good words are cached in this volume for those 
 who wish to use them. There are others which 
 would need an apology, were they not worthless 
 on their face. 
 
 It is not easy to classify those authors who 
 seem to be " on the fence," irresolute, and uncer- 
 tain which side to take or what to think ; or, if 
 they have well-riveted ideas on the subject, they 
 seem to fear that they will be compromised some- 
 how by letting them out. No small number of 
 others are disinclined to rummage through their 
 published works (and who could blame them ? ) 
 for their coinages, as though ashamed to uncover 
 them to the glare of posterity. I think those 
 belonging to this class might better have dis- 
 avowed in toto their offenses, for so they appear 
 to regard them, judging from the sheepish phrase- 
 ology of their admissions. 
 
 Still others perhaps reserve the right to exploit 
 their verbal confections in their own way at some 
 future time, should there be any glory attached to 
 their excavations by virtue of the possible public
 
 160 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 scramble for such relics. At all events, they are 
 laid away in our literary catacombs, and it is not 
 my ambition to exhume them after the method of 
 the body snatcher.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 SLANG. 
 
 There is slang and slang. 
 
 (Let us first have Webster's definition. 
 
 ^Slang — a new word that has no just reason 
 for existence ; a popular but unauthorized word, 
 phrase, or mode of expression ; the jargon of some 
 particular calling or class in societQ' 
 
 Recording to this, all words and expressions not 
 approved by the lexicographers are slang. They 
 cease to be such only when, by reason of long- 
 continued popularity and general usage, they 
 are deemed worthy of a place in the dictionarv^ 
 
 "The definition of words," says Hannah ^fore, 
 " is often involved in their etymology," and for this 
 reason slang has to serve an apprenticeship, so to 
 speak, before it is raised, if at all, to the dignity of 
 a generic meaning. It is held on probation until 
 it either wins its brevet of literary acceptance 
 pr dies of atrophy, as languages themselves die. 
 We often know what a slang word signifies, with- 
 ^ out knowing anything at all about its pedigree or 
 genealog^ (Lideed, nine times out of ten it is 
 a bastard oryhalf-breed, and often not even that. 
 It comes into the -svorld without formal birth, and 
 11 ifil
 
 162 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 in this, as in other respects, it differs from the con- 
 sciously evolved word, which has Greek or Latin 
 or other linguistic ancestors. Words which are 
 the product of the study and the laboratory have 
 the advantage of noble blood to start with ; while 
 the pariah word shuffles along through the alleys 
 of the slums, unable to tell who its father was^ 
 Nor would its father, if it had one, care to own iL 
 
 Yet the English language is steadily enriched 
 by words and phrases selected from this jargon of 
 particular callings or classes in society. It em- 
 bodies particularly the judgments of human na- 
 ture as it exists to-day, and is so articulated as 
 to conform best to the cast of the average modern 
 mind. It is sui generis, and it is as genuine as the 
 mushroom, which it resembles in the quickness 
 and mystery of its growth. It may seem some- 
 times to be a counterfeit, but is never a conscious 
 counterfeit; that is to say, it is not consciously 
 evolved according to philologic formulas, and 
 therefore its similarity to some other word is 
 purely accidental. 
 
 We may say that intuitive reason plays its 
 part as much as ever it did in the drama of 
 language; only slang is the venting, the make- 
 shift, of the unlettered masses. To say that no 
 principle of analogy, of onomatopoeia, or of meta- 
 phor enters into this kind of speech is to deny 
 that the people have intelligence ; whereas among 
 them is the most mother wit, the best common 
 sense, and from their loins spring the greatest men 
 of genius.
 
 SLANG. 
 
 163 
 
 When authoritative writers begin to use a slang 
 phrase or idiom then there is promise that it 
 will gain admission into the next dictionary. 
 Bartlett says: "Slang terms will remain in use 
 only so long as they may be useful in eollo<iuial 
 language. They may then be supplanted by 
 others* more expressive, and sink into oblivion." 
 'But a certain percentage of them become engrafted 
 on our language, and the slang of fifty years ago 
 m^^ be elegant usage to-day. 
 
 Slang is a necessity — to Wall street, to fashion- 
 alSe clubs, to the college youth, to pugilists, 
 to thieves, to the police, to the factory, to politi- 
 cians, to sportsmen, to the stage, to sailors, to 
 soldiers, to shopkeepers, and what not. A large 
 proportion of the population uses it, and in many 
 cases it is terse and decidedly effective. Some 
 very curious metaphors have been welded into 
 and become a part of our Americanese. It seems 
 to be the tendency of the illiterate masses to settle 
 all things, great and small, by an epigram or an 
 epithet. Hence it is out of the question for purists 
 to abolish slang^ But before going further into 
 the general subject let us ascertain what the 
 character of current American slang is by citing 
 various examples of it. 
 
 Though it is condemned as a vulgar colloquial- 
 ism by those who would keep the "well of Eng- 
 lish pure and undefiled," the term "hustler" is 
 singularly descriptive and understood by every- 
 body. He is a product of our bustling, rushing, 
 competitive American life. No other word ex-
 
 164 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 presses quite so comprehensively this energetic 
 human unit, and the word doubtless has come to 
 stay. It has an excuse for living in that it can 
 boast of blood relations in the dictionary. 
 
 That densely thronged neighborhood lying be- 
 tween the Bowery and the East River, known as 
 the Eas^t Side, in New^ jidvJsjjer-haps the inott 
 prolific breede r of s lang in t his country. There 
 toil and hao:o;le and exist " all sorts and conditions 
 
 Bo 
 
 of men " ; there one hears a Babel of tongues, 
 and out of this polyglot of Polak, Yiddish, Italian, 
 Syrian, French, German, and so on come many 
 of the verbal suggestions which rapidly gain cur- 
 rency, and through the lips of the American 
 street Arab receive such twists and modifications 
 as are necessary to mold them into the semblance 
 of English. Of the terms you hear in this squalid 
 region, as you may hear them elsewhere, a partial 
 list follows, with their meanings : 
 
 " In the push," synonymous with " in the swim," 
 which latter phrase, by the way, is society 
 slang. 
 
 " Long green " — green bills or greenbacks. 
 
 *'A wad," "a bundle," and "a bunch" — all 
 mean rolls of green bills, hence "a thick wad." 
 
 " To brace" is to borrow. 
 
 " To touch " sometimes means to steal and some- 
 times to borrow. 
 
 " To swipe " is to steal. 
 
 "To pinch" means to steal; also to arrest 
 a person. 
 
 " On your uppers " is to have no money.
 
 SLANG. 165 
 
 "To throw a front" or "bluff" meaus to look 
 well and prosperous with no money in your 
 pocket or within your control. 
 
 "To spar for meals" means to struggle for 
 life. 
 
 "To look for trouble" means wanting to 
 fight. 
 
 " Dead easy " and " to walk down Easy street" 
 are to do anything easily. 
 
 "To win hands down" means an easy victory. 
 
 "To growl" is to threaten, and do no more. 
 
 "To turn down" and "to call down" mean to 
 repulse, to suppress, to put a stop to. 
 
 " To throw down " means to do a mean trick. 
 
 "Lost in the shuffle" means sunk out of sight. 
 
 "A cop" is a policeman, equivalent to the 
 English " bobby," which ls occasionally heard. 
 
 " A scrapper " is a man who fights. 
 
 "A farmer" is a general slang term for any 
 man who does not know much, coming, of course, 
 from the cockney contempt of the country and the 
 countryman. 
 
 "A gilley" is synonymous with "farmer." 
 
 "A yap" and "a jay" are synonymous with 
 "farmer" and "gilley." 
 
 "A con" is an abbreviation of confidence maa 
 
 "A mug" is any kind of a citizen, but usually 
 has a more or less contemptuous meaning. 
 
 "A lush" is one who drinks. 
 
 "A chink" is a Chinaman. 
 
 "A guiney," also "a dago," is an Italian. 
 
 "A fly fakir," a gypsy term, meaning simply a
 
 166 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 shrewd, plausible, inventive man. In other words, 
 an ingenious liar. 
 
 "It's up to you " means something menacing or 
 dangerous, requiring one's best powers to meet 
 it. 
 
 "Up against it" means an ordeal or ill luck 
 of any kind. 
 
 A professional appreciator, a man who laughs 
 at everything, pays for nothing, and is universally 
 sympathetic, is known as a "genial." 
 
 " The handshaker " is another name for a 
 "genial." 
 
 An honest man is described by the terms 
 "dead square" and "dead white." It may be 
 said that " dead" and "smooth" are words v/hich 
 are used continually and before many a slang 
 term. They are used both singly and together, 
 as a " smooth handshaker," " dead smooth genial." 
 " Smooth " means shrewd ; thus a man can be 
 " dead smooth," denoting oily and dishonest. In 
 New Yo r k it is a term of . reproach ; in col- 
 lg^e_sl ang it is^ ather_gji pxpression of praise than" 
 - otherwi se. -, 
 
 " To have your hand out " is to beg, and " a 
 man with his hand out " is a beggar. 
 
 "To stake" and "to heel" mean to lend. 
 
 " To give a flash " is to show money. 
 
 "To give up" and "to blow in" mean to 
 spend money. 
 
 " To stand off" is to have charged, to get some- 
 thing on credit, or to put off or get extended the 
 time of payment of an obligation.
 
 SLANG. 171 
 
 '* He wouldu't staud for it " means chiefly i«. 
 disclaim responsibility or to repudiate an accu- 
 sation, though it is applied to other instances. 
 
 " Well-heeled " is a term borrowed from the 
 cock-pit, and means to have plenty of money. 
 
 "Lush," "booze," "a ball," and "hops" for 
 beer, and "red liquor" for all sorts of spirits 
 except gin are some of the many' terms for drink. 
 
 "Chasing the can," or the "duck," "rolling the 
 rock," and "rushing" or "working the growler" 
 all mean sending the tin can to the corner bar- 
 room for beer. In the West they call it "canning 
 beer." 
 
 "In the know" means behind the scenes, so to 
 speak. 
 
 "To croak" is to die; vrhereas "to do a croak" 
 and "to do a gun croak" mean to be shot. 
 
 "A cold frost" and "frost crystals" and "he 
 gave me the marl)le heart" mean to be treated 
 coldly. 
 
 "The glad hand" means a real or simulated 
 warmth of greeting. 
 
 "To queer" really means to place one in a 
 false position ; but it also has other meanings, as 
 "shoving the queer" — that is, to pass counterfeit 
 money, or, as when a man hits another on the 
 head with a club, in slang parlance he "queers" 
 him w^th a club. 
 
 "Wouldn't that jar you?" is self-defined. 
 
 "Blind baggage" means riding between freight 
 cars and is a tramp expression.
 
 172 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 who could do it without losing somewhat, if not 
 much, of the vigor aud virility of the " Sage of 
 Chelsea." 
 
 "I am .not a man scrupulous about words or 
 names or such things," said Oliver Cromwell, in 
 one of his weak moments. If he had taken 
 more pains in these very matters, he would have 
 been a greater man. The mistake often made 
 by one of our finest American singers was to 
 drop from his higher moods into flippancy, or, 
 what was far worse, into punning. But who 
 shall say that an author must not use a slang 
 term — always assuming that it is a decent one ? 
 Slang is not always humorous or satirical : it 
 may be pathetic, nay, deeply serious. In a few 
 strokes Sterne could sketch a mental picture or 
 delineate a character. He was a fine colorist 
 with words, but he never let them blur his 
 thoughts. These flowed naturally and clearly. 
 Few books possess the qualities of refined feel- 
 ing, the many graces of phraseology, the unique 
 and not too obvious humor, the coherence of 
 subtle reasoning, and the charming variety of 
 style to such a degree as A Sentimental Journey. 
 Yet Sterne used slang more or less and did not 
 refrain from filching a felicitous phrase now and 
 then from a contemporary or predecessor. 
 
 Spoken slang, if anything, is more ofieusive to 
 refined ears than printed slang, because it usually 
 is uttered with bravado or animus, and its full 
 force comes upon one like a shock. The same sen- 
 sibilities that are so frequently harried by vulgar
 
 SLANG. 1 / o 
 
 slang are the readiest to perceive that, as George 
 Eliot puts it, "The right word is always a power, 
 and communicates its definiteness to our action." 
 But in the hands of a skilful author slang is 
 made diverting, if not edifying. What gives to 
 Mary E. Wilkins' New England stories their 
 chief charm to me is their true-to-uature touches, 
 and particularly the life-like dialogue of her 
 characters. I believe that it is through works 
 such as hers that the provincialisms and 
 idioms of a certain section expand and become 
 general slang. Bret Harte is minutely faithful 
 to the colloquial traditions of the California 
 mines of the pioneer period, which he describes 
 in a classical style that offers all the more agree- 
 able and striking contrast to the coarse verbali- 
 ties of Yuba Bill, the typical parlance of Jack 
 Hamlin, and the vernacular of Poker Flat and 
 Red Gulch. George W. Cable happily caught 
 the indigenous expressions of the Creoles of New 
 Orleans ; and you find in his books that some of 
 his best characterizations are brought out in the 
 language of the quarters, voiced by the person- 
 ages themselves. The same is true of Kipling's 
 stories of life in India and the far East ; of F. 
 Marion Crawford's Italian tales ; of Mr. Howells' 
 narratives of contemporaneous life among middle- 
 class types in Boston, New York, etc. With 
 equal justice and discrimination it may be said 
 of Hamlin Garland's delineations of the native 
 and Scandinavian population of the Great North- 
 west ; of Gil])ert Parker's browsings in Canada ;
 
 174 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 of James Laue Allen's portraiture of Kentucky 
 life ; of Joel Chandler Harris's studies of the 
 Georgia negro ; and of a score or more of others 
 that might be mentioned. 
 
 The main secret of Dickens' popularity was 
 that he knew his types ; their counterparts were 
 in real life. They talked the argot of the London 
 slums, the bombast of the Old Bailey, the synco- 
 phantic phrases of the counting-room, the cockney 
 jargon of the sla}>up swells. English slang, of 
 course, is no longer what it was when Dickens 
 wrote, and in judging his works now allowances 
 should be made for these changes. Wherein 
 certain historical romances of our day fail artis- 
 tically is in the fact that their personages, with 
 few exceptions, speak in the language of the last 
 decade of the nineteenth century, which very 
 greatly mars the illusion ; for ho one who has 
 studied the epoch with which WJien Knighthood 
 ivas in Flower deals, for instance, will argue that 
 the modes of thought and expression of the 
 princess Mary Tudor and of Henry VIII. were 
 identical with our own. 
 
 I have shown the character of the street slang 
 of large cities, and is it not a sorry commentary 
 upon the intelligence of so many thousands of 
 people who confine themselves to this kind of dis- 
 course that they are really incapable of express- 
 ing an original idea in terms conforming to the 
 rules of syntax' and good taste? Their mental 
 horizon is bounded by these verbal shambles; 
 the garden of their minds is overgrown with the
 
 SLANG. 175 
 
 poisonous fungi and weeds of language. Like 
 slaves to the drug habit, there seems to be no 
 hope for them. The user of slang from youth 
 becomes hopelessly dependent upon it. Would 
 not a refined man be likely to change his opinion 
 of a sweet and adorable creature to whom he 
 said, "Be mine!" and who replied: "Oh, come 
 off!" — one of those delightful (?j non-sequitors 
 for which some women display so extreme a lik- 
 ing? And there are authors whose center of 
 gravity sinks so low that they become top-heavy 
 with conceit, and then their literary malversa- 
 tions often challenge and merit the kind of criti- 
 cism^which is neither timid nor indulgent. 
 / ^^e now come to general slang. In one of his 
 ( "Condon Letters" William L. Alden wrote: 
 \ " Not long ago there was a discussion in one of 
 jthe London dailies as to the origin of the expres- 
 ysion 'so long,' in the sense of good-by. Some 
 y one suggested that it was American, but an 
 
 ^s, American replied that the expression was quite 
 unknown in America, which shows that the 
 
 / writer had never read his Walt Whitman and 
 that he knew very little of America. I had sup- 
 posed that the expression came from California, 
 but according to Whitman it vras known in New 
 York before we ever heard of California slang. 
 From what it is derived I have not the slightest 
 
 y^ idea, but that it is American is as certain as that 
 
 ^ b'gosh is America^j) 
 
 This phrase reminds me of a tloral wreath 
 seen at the funeral of a promising Harvard stu-
 
 176 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 deut some years ago. It bore the letters S. Y. L., 
 which, not being the initials of the deceased, 
 created much curiosity as to what they stood for. 
 To the wreath was attached the card of the 
 sender, — a fellow-student, — who, on being asked 
 what the S. Y. L. meant, replied : *' See you 
 later " — a phrase which became and still remains 
 as common as "so long." 
 
 "Another American expression," says Mr. 
 Alden, "is very often used in London, without 
 a suspicion of its origin. English women say 
 * Great Scott ! ' and never dream that they are 
 celebrating the fame and name of Winfield Scott. 
 In the days of the Mexican War, when we were 
 decidedly younger than we are at present, we 
 firmly believed that General Scott was the great- 
 est general the world had ever seen. It became 
 the fashion in the army to swear by him, and 
 the custom has spread to England, although 
 General Scott is nearly forgotten, and the Mexi- 
 can War now ranks in our estimation with the 
 war with Sitting Bull." 
 
 Though Mr. Alden' s version of the origin of 
 this exclamatory expression appears probable 
 enough, some enthusiastic admirer of Sir Walter 
 Scott may trump up a story equally plausible to 
 show that "the Wizard of the North" was the 
 inspiration of it. A great many of our slang 
 words undergo changes among the costers after 
 they reach London. Such Londonese as " Urry 
 lydy, don't tike all dye," " I'm not in that 
 clawss," etc., seems like a patois to unaccustomed
 
 SLANG. 177 
 
 American ears. Into the talk of the day creep 
 many terms and phrases that are first familiar to 
 the stage, the prize-ring, the race-course, etc. A 
 complete glossary of these graphic expressions 
 would require a large volume. In fact, divers 
 dictionaries of slang have been published from 
 time to time. 
 
 The gibberish of thieves is so extensive as to 
 be almost a language in itself. Only among 
 themselves and by policemen who are forced to 
 acquire the knowledge of its meaning is it under- 
 stood. Many of the terms that have been in use 
 for years had their origin among the "fences" 
 or depots for the reception of stolen goods in 
 London, and are really corruptions from the 
 Hebrew. This jargon, while continued for years, 
 has never obtained outside of the police and the 
 criminal classes. The terms used by English 
 thieves differ in many respects from those in use 
 among American rogues. Here are some of them : 
 
 " A nark " is a police spy. 
 
 " A toygetter " is a burglar. 
 
 "A broadsman" is a watch stealer. 
 
 "A snide-pitcher" is a card sharp. 
 
 "A man at the duff" is an utterer of false 
 money. 
 
 "A skittle sharp" is a passer of false jewelry. 
 
 "The chat" is a house. 
 
 "The wedge" is silver. 
 
 "The kipsy" is a basket to hold the loot. 
 
 "Piping the reeler round the double" is seeing 
 the policeman at the corner. 
 12
 
 178 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 The vernacular of the chase and of the open 
 season, as used in England, was invented by 
 sportsmen evidently of picturesque minds, and in 
 the main is both sensible and appropriate. Some 
 of the mighty St. Huberts of the United States 
 may not be altogether familiar with this nomen- 
 clature, which includes: 
 
 A sleuth of bears. A cast of hawlvs. 
 
 A troop of monkeys. A watch of nightingales. 
 
 A skulk of foxes. A bevy of quail. 
 
 A pride of lions. A trip of dottrel. 
 
 A gang of elk. A stand of plover. 
 
 A sounder of hogs. A building of rooks. 
 
 A siege of herons. A clattering of doughs. 
 
 A hide of pheasants. A plump of wild fowl. 
 
 A whisp of snipe. A brood of grouse. 
 
 A muster of peacocks. A covey of partridges, etc. 
 
 The political slang word "Gerrymander," which 
 originated in Boston in the spring of 1812, com- 
 pactly expresses what otherwise would require 
 several sentences to explain. "Humbug" was 
 once slang, but it is so no longer. It is not to be 
 preferred, however, to "deceive," nor is "bam- 
 boozle" to be preferred to "mislead." "Rey- 
 nakaboo," to express fraud or misrepresentation, 
 has passed the slum stage, but it is not the more 
 desirable because it happens to get into res}>ectable 
 newspapers new and then. " Mugwump," which 
 came into vogue during Cleveland's first cam- 
 paign for President, is now good American, for the 
 reason that it means something that no other word
 
 SLANG. 179 
 
 expresses, and that is the test of good shing. It 
 is the survival of the fittest. It will be in every 
 dictionary in the year 1950, just as the good slang 
 of fifty years ago is in the lexicons of to-day. 
 
 An English literary journal of high standing 
 points out that Stevenson's peculiar phrases — and 
 it must be admitted that some of them are pecu- 
 liar — will be far less likely to jar upon the ears of 
 posterity than upon ours. " Only the other day 
 some of our correspondents traced back the word 
 ' brick,' used as a term of endearment to Aristotle 
 and Plato, and in another fifty years critics may 
 trace l)ack Stevenson's expression, ' ]\Ierivale is a 
 howling cheese' to Juvenal and Catullus." 
 
 " Hobos," now the common name for tramps, is 
 said to be a Southern corruption of hoe boys, and 
 originally was applied to itinerant laborers who 
 came to the South during the cotton season. 
 
 A local word in New York, " pantata," mean- 
 ing the old man or the man in authority, had 
 some vogue six or seven years ago, but it did not 
 get into general circulation, probably because it 
 partook more of the nature of a " gag " than of 
 slang. 
 
 In the sentence, "Get on to the shirt-waist 
 man, if you want to see something out of sight," 
 are two slang phrases, the latter of which, already 
 referred to, is one of those anachronisms that 
 imply a meaning just the reverse of the declara- 
 tion. One of the most popular and common 
 phrases of the day, it is a synonym for the super- 
 lative in appearance, performance, or accomplish-
 
 180 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 ment. It was the balloon soaring skyward that 
 was first declared out of sight, and then came the 
 adaptation of this new form of expressing altitude 
 and exemption from competition. 
 
 "Isn't in it" is a term borrowed from the turf. 
 The race-track has also given us "cinch," as 
 meaning something settled beyond all doubt or 
 peradventure. A cinch is a saddle girth, tight- 
 ened by the Spanish method of a complicated knot 
 that will not come untied. Hence cinch, or sure 
 thing, cinched, or all settled beforehand — can't 
 lose. 
 
 As applying to mental delinquency, " off his 
 base" came from the base-ball field. Of doul:)t- 
 ful origin is the phrase " wheels in his head," de- 
 scriptive of a man with cranky notions, later con- 
 verted into " he has a Ferris " (suggested by the 
 big Ferris wheel at the Chicago World's Fair), 
 implying that the person under discussion has a 
 very decided delusion. These phrases gave way 
 to the more popular one, " off his trolley," which 
 very terse and descriptive term comes, of course, 
 from the street-car world. 
 
 " Switched," with the meaning of diverted, came 
 from the railroad yards ; also "side-tracked," mean- 
 ing temporary foilure or suspension, the result of out- 
 side interference ; " ditched," as expressing ruin 
 and collapse ; and " wide open," referring to the 
 throttle of the locomotive and the extreme of 
 speed, although it has since come to mean in full 
 swing, reckless, and regardless of interference, 
 frequently applied to the former condition of
 
 SLANG. 181 
 
 things in New York. In this connection the Kew 
 York World coined the word ivideopenness in a 
 leading article not long ago. 
 (From the mining camps of the far West have 
 come many terms. ^lark Twain once said : " The 
 slang of Nevada is the richest and most infinitely 
 varied and copious that has ever existed any- 
 where in the world, perhaps, except in the mines 
 of California in the early days. It was hard to 
 preach a sermon without it and be understoocCy 
 
 Among these terms may be mentioned : "Struck 
 it rich," which now applies to any human suc- 
 cess ; " up the flume," signifying failure; "hard 
 pan," meaning a solid paying basis ; " petered 
 out," which suggests a gradual decline and final 
 suspension of resources; "grubstake" — that is, 
 assistance given a new business enterprise on 
 condition of a share in prospective or possible 
 profits. For thirty years bonanza has been a 
 good American word, and the Century Diction- 
 ary accepted it along with such words as " boom," 
 meaning to manufacture support and enthusi- 
 asm, and "squeal," meaning to confess and be- 
 tray companions, synonymous with the English 
 " peach." And that reminds me of the phrase, 
 " He had a narrow squeak," meaning escape ; 
 also of " He's N. G." — that is, no good, said of 
 a worthless fellow. The term "fat," now in gen- 
 eral use, as indicative of something of maximum 
 remuneration for minimum exertion, sprang from 
 the composing-rooms of the newspaper. 
 
 Circus slang was the forerunner of the argot
 
 182 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 of the variety, uovv called the vaudeville, stage ; 
 for the circus folk had a language of their own in 
 the good old days wheu " the gas-lit city of tents" 
 was planted upou the village green. The names 
 of various parts of the tent and equipment sup- 
 plied the roots of this vernacular. The boss of 
 the show was called "the main guy." This 
 expression, to a certain extent, has survived the 
 decline of the circus, and "the main guy" is 
 still heard in the workshops. We also hear a 
 peculiar man spoken of as a " queer guy." Almost 
 unintelligible are the conversation and "shop 
 talk" of acrobats, sketch teams, seriocomics, soug- 
 aud-dance men, and the lower order of Thes- 
 pians. For instance, struck by the similarity of 
 the words pardon and pudding, some knockabout 
 artist conceived the expression "I beg your 
 tapioca," but there is no danger that in the polite 
 world it will ever supersede "I beg vour par- 
 don." 
 
 Actors bring into existence many of these short- 
 lived, but more or less expressive, phrases. " The 
 ghost walks " is one of the few instances of the par- 
 lance of stageland that has survived the years and 
 become general. ]Many years ago an actor cast 
 for the ghost in Hamlet refused to go on with his 
 part until his demands for a portion of long- 
 delayed salary were acceded to. He was paid 
 and went on; "the ghost walked," and gradually 
 thereafter the phrase was adopted as expressive 
 of the payment of actors' salaries. And to-day 
 it is among the most frequent and common
 
 SLANG. 183 
 
 things heard said by the histrionic loungers on 
 the Rialto. '' An angel " is a man who inno- 
 cently backs unprofitable or question alJe enter- 
 prises to the profit of the promoters solely. It is 
 a term of contempt. Many " an angel " is vic- 
 timized in theatrical speculation. The continuous 
 performance, instituted by B. F. Keith in 1885, 
 has brought into the theatrical profession the word 
 chaser — one who does a turn or an act at two or 
 three places of amusement nightly. 
 
 The term " round up " was given to the world 
 by the great cattle-ranges of the West. Origi- 
 nally it referred to the annual gathering together 
 of the cattle of various owners that they might 
 be separated for shipment. In the business world 
 of to-day it indicates an inquiry into the affairs 
 of a firm or corporation, and has really the sig- 
 nificance of stock-taking. 
 
 The lingo of every Jack Tar is salted with the 
 briny flavor of the Seven Seas. It would be 
 impossible to give here more than a few of the 
 more characteristic phrases derived from the sea. 
 First comes to put things " ship shape," then to 
 be ready "in a brace of shakes" — i. e., before 
 the sail has flapped three times; to "kick up a 
 breeze"; to "steer a middle course "; to "steer 
 clear " of a man ; to follow a thing to the " bitter 
 end " — that is, to pay out cable until there is no 
 more left at the bitts ; to " tell it to the marines " ; 
 to "go to Old Nick," or St. Nicholas, the patron 
 saint of sailors ; to "look out for squalls" ; to be 
 left " high and dry " ; to recognize a man by the
 
 184 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 " cut of his jib " ; to leave a comrade " in the 
 lurch"; to be "hard up," or to "bear up for 
 Poverty Bay" ; to be "half seas over," used by 
 writers from Dean Swift downward as expressive 
 of too much drinking; to "run the gantlet" 
 (properly gantlope), once a well-known ordeal on 
 shipboard ; to "cut and run " ; to have a "snug 
 berth " ; to give a man a "wide berth" ; to bring 
 a man to his "bearings" ; to be "taken aback" 
 — i. e., by a sudden change of wind ; to " keep 
 aloof" — i. e., to keep your luff when sailing to 
 the wind, a term in common use on land, says a 
 writer in Temjjle Bar, since the days of Matthew 
 Paris — say about the middle of the thirteenth 
 century. 
 
 The slang of a crowd at a political meeting : A 
 man sings out, " What's the matter with ^NIcKin- 
 ley?" And the assemblage promptly answers 
 as with one tremendous voice : " He's all right ! " 
 This is conclusive and leaves nothing more con- 
 vincing to be said. 
 
 The mountaineers of Missouri say : " Stop your 
 glattering" — that is chattering ; whereas they say 
 in Wales, " What you glabbering about?" These 
 are provincialisms which should interest the phil- 
 ologist ; but wdiat I have to say about provin- 
 ciaj^isms must be reserved for the next chapter. 
 (Much of the slang quoted in the foregoing 
 pa^ is e^hemeralj because it is silly, weak, and 
 far-fetchecTT^The present writer does not advise 
 any one to memorize the stock speech of the East 
 Side. It has been cited somewhat in extenso in
 
 SLANG. 185 
 
 order that its invidious and detestable character — 
 and I have avoided quoting indecent specimens — 
 might the better substantiate my sincere protest 
 ag^jfist its use. 
 
 AVhy does the average school-girl use ''awfully 
 nice and "horribly ugly" and other superlatives 
 so often ? Is it because she has a limited supply 
 of words to select from and must therefore repeat 
 herselfp Holding a glass of water in her hand, the 
 giddy Frenchwoman exclaimed: "If it were only 
 wrong to drink this, how delicious it would be ! " 
 In some such spirit of mischief many presumably 
 refined society women use outre expressions and 
 slang. It was said that the color of the rose came 
 from the blood of Venus, who pricked her foot on 
 a thorn. Xo such pretty conceit could be con- 
 trived to account for the drab and purple talk of 
 some of our bachelor girls. Think you such crass 
 phrases as "I guess you're not so much," "She 
 has a bat in her belfry," " Wouldn't that rattle 
 your slats?" gain any elegance or refinement of 
 meaning by being spoken through the lips of 
 a beautiful woman ? Indeed, would not such talk 
 go far to rob her of her personal charms ? Yes, I 
 believe that superficial culture and meager vocab- 
 ularies among American women (Boston blue 
 stockings excepted) explain in a large measure 
 the unhappy choice of their words, but they should 
 not always accuse their brothers, lovers, husbands, 
 or their little sons of having taught them such 
 phraseology. 
 
 Do vou remember what Shenstone savs? —
 
 -"■J 
 
 186 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 ** The common fluency of speech in many men, 
 and most women, is owing to a scarcity of matter 
 and a scarcity of words ; for whoever is master of 
 a language, and moreover has a mind full of 
 ideas, will be apt, in speaking, to hesitate upon a 
 choice of both ; but common speakers have only 
 one set of ideas and one set of words to clothe 
 them in, and they are ahvays ready at the mouth. 
 Just so people can come faster out of a church 
 when it is almost empty than when a crowd is at 
 the door." 
 
 Emerson says of Montaigne : " His words are 
 vascular — if you cut them, they will bleed." 
 If you cut the words of some people, you would 
 find that those words could claim no title to 
 the Peerage of the English language. If critics 
 and criticasters of this book protest that our 
 language is adulterated enough now without sug- 
 gesting other rubbish, I answer, paraphrasing 
 from the light-hearted lover of Highland Mary : 
 
 The rank is but the guinea's stamp. 
 A word's a word for a' that — 
 
 That is, if it be a . r^al word ; some so-called 
 words are not wordsy^^^If they object to the slang 
 and Americanese iutrocTuced here, I ask them if 
 they can conceive of anything better calculated to 
 demonstrate the inherent beauty of the English 
 language than the perversions thereof? Such 
 things — college slang, for example — are the out- 
 growth of youthful ebullitions^ of spirit. When 
 is the time for a man to sow his philologic
 
 SLANG. 187 
 
 wild oats if it is not when he is an undergradu- 
 ate ? " The glowing periods of the masters of our 
 language seem even more beautiful," says a writer, 
 "when contrasted with the vulgarisms of the 
 slangy, and if a man can compress into his four 
 undergraduate years his licenses of speech, and 
 come forth into the larger life danrj-sore, so much 
 the better for his method of expressing his ideas." 
 It is to be lamented, however, that the propor- 
 tion of slang in the conversation of school-boys 
 amounts to nearly one-half of the entire body of 
 their speech. W. J. Holland, LL. D., Chancel- 
 lor of the Western University of Pennsylvania, 
 overheard the following dialogue between two 
 lads who are fondly supposed by their parents to 
 be in training at a fashionable pre^oaratory school 
 for admission to one of the leading colleges of the 
 country : 
 
 John — I say, Dick, pawn me your horse for half 
 an hour. I must do a soak with which Doo- 
 licks has stuck me. 
 
 Dick — All right. The old duffer gave me a 
 soak, too, the other day. But don't keep 
 the ponv more than an hour. I need it mv- 
 self 
 
 Johti — Say, that Haggard is a peach. I made 
 him mad this morning, and he up with his 
 blooming fists and came and shook them 
 under my snoot, and told me he would give 
 me an agile stunt. 
 
 Dick — What did you do ?
 
 188 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 John — I caterpillared. 
 
 Dich — How did you travel in your Latin this 
 
 morning ? 
 John — Bully ! I rowled and tore my shirt. 
 Dick — Good for you ! 
 
 The subject of the foregoing conversation was 
 the temporary loan of an interlinear translation 
 of Homer's Iliad, familiarly known as a " pony," 
 though sometimes called a "horse." Many a 
 college youth rides through his Greek and Latin 
 recitations on a pony. " A soak " appears to be 
 a task imposed as a penalty. ''An agile stunt" 
 signifies a quick check — a sudden reprimand. 
 
 Kow, not until a young man understands words 
 and their proper uses will he know their sources 
 in human feeling. When Horace Walpole penned 
 his famous epigram : " Life is a comedy to him 
 who thinks and a tragedy to him who feels " he 
 did not characterize the impression of the man 
 who does both. In order to accomplish any think- 
 ing that is worth while one must feel, and feel 
 deeply. Wherefore any sort of conscious feeling 
 without thought is impossible. But like many 
 another epigram, this one of the eccentric Mr. 
 Walpole's is true only in a limited sense. It is 
 strange how numerous are the cant phrases and 
 paradoxes which have caught and lingered in the 
 popular fancy, but which, on analysis, are found 
 to be but a clever play upon words. Of all the 
 proverl^s and precious maxims that have been 
 bequeathed to this world of ours, at least seven-
 
 SLANG. 189 
 
 tenths are literally fal<e and misleading. And 
 this recalls to mind Josh Billings' bright saying, 
 which is wholly credible, that "it is better to be 
 ignorant than to know so many things that ain't 
 so." 
 
 It is certainly a great thing to have a meto- 
 nymic gift like that of Bertha Ruukle, or Booth 
 Tarkington, or the late Stephen Crane, of whom 
 Hamlin Garlin hns said, "The author had the 
 genius which makes an old word new." It is a 
 great thing, too, to employ such a gift in the right 
 direction. Xone but the heaven-born poet may 
 bring out of the vanished, past the forgotten 
 word, and by the divine alchemy of his art gal- 
 vanize it and give it life. 
 
 "At dead of night he melts old joy, old truth, old 
 
 pain, 
 Through his new soul, and runs new forms of light ; 
 Till battered jewels, dull and marred, reset again, 
 Eeceive new luster to enchant our sight. "•" 
 
 Beautifully, indeed, has the Irish novelist, 
 George ^loore, described the evolution of lan- 
 guage : " In its beginning a language is pure, 
 like spring water ; it can be drunk from the well 
 — that is to say, from popular speech. But as 
 the spring trickles into a rivulet and then into a 
 river it has to be filteredy^ and after long use the 
 language has to be filtered, too. The filter is the 
 personal taste of the writer. We call the filter 
 ^^de.'" 
 
 Qf people better understood literary values, 
 they would be more particular in their language^)
 
 190 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 r Slang is usually affected by the laziest people 
 and by those who have no time or inclination to 
 think.y As to the importance and immense satis- 
 faction of word-study Archbishop Trench ob- 
 serves : " In words contemplated singly, there are 
 boundless stores of moral and historic truth, and 
 no less of passion and imagination laid up . 
 I am sure, at least, that for many a young man 
 his first discovery of the fact that words are living 
 2)owers, are the vesture — yea, even the body — 
 which thoughts weave for themselves, has been 
 like the dropping of scales from his eyes, like the 
 acquisition of another sense, or the introduction 
 into a new world." 
 
 The great mass of slang, then, should not be 
 encouraged. If, at times, it seems less formal 
 than dignified language ; if its saucy smartness 
 seems to voice more vividly and directly the 
 spirit of democracy and of bonhomie, it neverthe- 
 less is no more justifiable than rudeness on in- 
 formal occasions. " Observation teaches," wrote 
 Noah Webster, ''that languages must improve 
 and undergo great changes as knowledge in- 
 creases, and be subject to continual alterations 
 from other causes incident to men in society." 
 As a means of expression and not the essential 
 product of thought language is ever fluent, ever 
 iiexile. Like a ship, it gathers verl:)al barnacles ; 
 like a beautiful green plant, it attracts verbal 
 parasites. These become the harder to eradicate 
 the longer they are allowed to take root and 
 thrive.
 
 SLANG. 191 
 
 jN^^"*^ ^lang is the scum of language, and is likely to 
 w^^^'^ generate literary miasmas .perilous, if not fatal, 
 
 to the health and vitality of that languajrej It 
 possesses low minds completely and ever threatens 
 to invade the realm of letters like a plague. 
 Nothing is too sacred for its mockery. The most 
 vapid gaucheries of thought will find somewhere 
 admirers among the morbid and neurotic. To 
 he glib in slang exclamations and phrases is con- 
 sidered by some persons as tantamount to inherent 
 cleverness. Intellectual stupidity thus masquer- 
 ades in the shoddy plumes of a sham vocabulary. 
 ^The English language has now — in fact, some 
 time ago — reached a stage of conscious construc- 
 tion, not only of words for new inventions and 
 discoveries, but of grammatic forms, of substitute 
 words and phrases, and of the forms for recog- 
 nized deficiencies. It is a dangerous and critical 
 period just now for the English language. And 
 it is every cultured and intelligent person's duty 
 to oppose any and all changes or innovations 
 which will tend to deteriorate or taint, in the 
 slightest deo-ree, our magnificent and immortal 
 mother tongu^rs.
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 PROVINCIALISMS AND AMERICANESE. 
 
 I AM almost tempted to say that by provin- 
 cialisms I mean Americanisms that may be related 
 to Briticisms or to idioms of other languages ; 
 and that by Americanese I mean the unique and 
 curious words that have sprung up in the United 
 States and are not cognate to any form of dialect 
 or provincialism — pan-American words, if you 
 please. Yet I perceive how hard it would be to 
 keep to so arbitrary a distinction, and I shall not 
 insist upon it, except for convenience. 
 
 Americanese often inspires doubt as to its legit- 
 imacy. Indeed, it may knock about, frankly 
 discredited for the higher literary purposes, but 
 tolerated and even petted by the average user. 
 
 It is a fairly safe rule that where you find the 
 most ignorance you will find the most distinctive 
 dialect, and where you go among people who are 
 rough and degenerate, but with a certain kind 
 of smartness and low cunning, you will hear the 
 most slang. 
 
 Many so-called provincialisms have ceased to 
 be provincial, so effective has been the fusing 
 process of dialect words and phrases, and so gen- 
 
 192
 
 PROVINCIALISMS AND AMERICANESE. 193 
 
 eral the distribution of colloquialisms. Nor is it 
 always right to call them Americanisms, so far as 
 their etymology is concerned ; for in apparently 
 strange, though I think accountable, ways dialect 
 words from remote peoples steal into our folk- 
 speech. For all we know to the contrary, the 
 Wild Man of Borneo, w^ho was exhibited in this 
 country years ago by Mr. Barnum, may have 
 left a souvenir or two of his native speech, which 
 we may hear often without knowing its origin. 
 
 A broad-minded writer tells us that " in the 
 pursuit of words and phrases, of local idioms and 
 honest Americanisms, the one thing to avoid is 
 dogma, and the one thing to attend to, besides 
 authentic quotations, is chronology. A diction- 
 ary of words should resemble a biographic cyclo- 
 pedia — the closer, the better. And next to 
 chronology, an American dictionary of American 
 terms should report environment, locality, topog- 
 raphy. It is wholly imp ossible that-Montana ^»4 — - 
 Bosto n talk e xactly alike^' 
 
 The sectional peculiarities of our speech, how- 
 ever, are daily diminishing. Fifty years ago there 
 was a far more marked geographic distribution 
 of intelligence in the United States than there is 
 to-day, and a corresponding variety of colloqui- 
 alisms, each more or less peculiar to a certain 
 section of the country. But the uniform diffu- 
 sion of the means of education, our methods of 
 rapid communication, our newspapers, our shift- 
 ing population — all these have combined to make 
 known everywhere the forms of expression once 
 13
 
 194 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 exclusively local. Couseqiieiitly, in nothing is 
 the student of provincialisms so liable to error 
 as in assigning geographic limits to a word or 
 phrase. 
 
 The fact is, our local dialects, as well as the 
 local English dialects from which we get many 
 of our folk-words and phrases, are pretty thor- 
 oughly mixed. Certain usages, however, cling 
 to certain communities and gain no wide-spread 
 currency. Of these more particularly mention 
 will be made here. Professor George Hempl, 
 of the University of Michigan, President of the 
 American Dialect Society, recently read an inter- 
 esting paper on how people talk to the cows in 
 different parts of the country — "co' boss," "co' 
 mully," "sook cow," and "come wench" being 
 the most common calls. 
 
 In rural Kew York the word "orts" — the 
 stubbly ends of hay which a fastidious horse 
 leaves uneaten in his manger — is in common use. 
 Some one of bucolic simplicity insists that '' eat 
 up your orts " would be a natural reproof to a 
 child at table. 
 
 "Stillyurds," with which housewives weighed 
 their mince-meat is one of the old farm words. 
 "Tow," a contemptuous or emphatic form of 
 "Oh, no," is still in use; also "dah" for no. 
 " M'm-h'm " and " uh-huh " for yes are heard 
 all over the land. "'Sh-h" or "Ssh," a sibilant 
 request or command to hush, to keep quiet, 
 belongs to no dialect district : it is common from 
 one end of the country to the other, as well as
 
 PROVINCIALISMS AXD AMERICAXESE. 195 
 
 in all parts of the world. The word "chunies," 
 used aifectiouately of little children, is sometimes 
 heard in the North, but seldom seen in print. 
 The folk-speech of rural New York and that of 
 New England have points of dissimilarity, but 
 they are not so notable as they once were. The 
 proyincial word "resky," heard in New Eng- 
 land, is doubtless a folk adaptation of the French 
 Canadians' " risque," which has the same mean- 
 ing. 
 
 Queer words may be said to run in families, 
 and nearly eyery person employs some novel 
 epithet which has no etymology. The remark 
 of a certain old gentleman I know, when he is 
 playing cards, is "let her squill," which his asso- 
 ciates have come to understand means, "throw 
 your card." His married daughter was once in 
 the habit of saying, in school-girl style, " Well, 
 I'll be everlastingly dinked." I asked her one 
 day what she meant by it. She said she meant 
 that she would be beaten in the game of pedro we 
 were playing. So I suppose that to be " dinked " 
 is to be defeated. 
 
 An old farmer in the Catskills came to a vil- 
 lage merchant and said : " Mr. M , I want to 
 
 borrow some money, but I ain't in no damn strut 
 about it " — meaning he wasn't in a great hurry. 
 Here was an instance of sematics which I think 
 was original with the man from Dry Brook. 
 
 Dr. Edward Caird says : " The use of an idea 
 by any writer is by no means always limited by 
 his own interpretation of it." This being true of
 
 196 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 words as well, the accumulation of many meanings 
 to a term is the result. Professor Breal calls this 
 phenomenon of multiplication polysemia (from 
 TTo/o?, " numerous," and o-ry/jtefov, "signification"), 
 and this tendency is illustrated in dialect as well 
 as in literary words. For instance, dingbat seems 
 to haye had an eyentful career. According to 
 one authority, ''it started as a ball of dirt on the 
 legs of sheep in Vermont, became a smart spank 
 to the Northern Nevy Englander, a squabble, a 
 flying missile, and money to the Maine lumber- 
 man, the biscuit of the New England boarding- 
 school, while in Georgia it has turned to a mother's 
 kiss, and you may there say of the girl you ad- 
 mire, 'She is a regular dingbat' " 
 
 This is among the strange words and usages 
 collected by the American Dialect Society. A 
 New York newspa}5er amusingly cites other finds 
 of this society. " We are told that on entering 
 the house the Ithacan hangs up his shock, his hat 
 and coat ; the Otsego thief when caught looks 
 meechincj or guilty, eyen when he has stolen a 
 mere smitch, a yery small quantity." In the 
 central part of the Empire State "sloughy is lop- 
 lolly, sticky is tacky, you are bushed when you are 
 tired, you cJiam/e q^when you moye, you go large 
 when you are extrayagant, you pronounce hoax 
 as a dissyllable, you pooster about when you are 
 fussy, you are in a yang when in a hurry, and 
 when violent you do things kabang, kachunck, ka- 
 flop, kaslamy 
 
 But this is not all ; our rulers up the State
 
 PROVINCIALISMS AND AMERICANESE. 197 
 
 are said to express their amazement by such eu- 
 phemisms as "Geeswax Christmas," and "I'll be 
 dingswizzled and hornswaggled." " On Staten 
 Island splendid is (jalloptious, titbits are manave- 
 lins, and to turn is to tarve. Patchogue says 
 noink and sidnk for nothing and something. In 
 the northwestern part of the State, when two 
 young hearts begin to beat as one they are said to 
 be scamuljugated. The farmers of Orange and 
 Sulliyan Counties haye the reprehensible practice 
 of making their maple syrup by melting the sugar ; 
 this they call alamagoozilum.'^ 
 
 As for the metropolis, we learn that in fash- 
 ionable boarding-houses we may be requested to 
 trun the butter; that the watermen say that a 
 schooner is tuung out when she sails wing and 
 wing, that drug for drew and scrojje for scraped 
 may he heard among New Yorkers. 
 
 In the Tennessee mountains sugar is sweeten- 
 ing, but molasses is long sweetening ; a man sub- 
 ject to fits is fitified, and his past tenses are fotch 
 and holp and seed and squez and swole. Down 
 there yery much is a heap sight, or a good few, 
 or some several, or way yander. 
 
 " The sty-baked or stay-at-home Jersey matron 
 coosters or potters around the house, calls her 
 preserves do-ups, pork spak f perhaps derived 
 from the German Speek), her husband, if need 
 be, a lobscouse or lojyer, meaning a worthless 
 fellow." 
 
 Some typical words come from the shores of 
 Newfoundland, where lolly is the ice and snow in
 
 198 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 the water near the shore, soft snow is sloh, a hole 
 in the ice is a swatch. A fisherman is just 
 scrammed when he is thoroughly chilled. He 
 calls a sleet storm a silver thaw, and the sound 
 of the waves breaking on the shore is rote. " His 
 improperly baked bread is dunch, ih^ material for 
 his fish balls is Jiuggernum biiff,^ unfair behavior 
 is hunker sliding, and a quid of tobacco is old sojer. 
 He calls fish that is not sorted tolqual, which is 
 the French tel quel, as the Maine backwoodsman's 
 compromjjo for a Frenchman is comprend pas, and 
 the Gloucester fisherman's matross for a sailor is 
 the German Matrose. 
 
 "Coof is, the name for an off-islander in Nan- 
 tucket ; on Mount Desert the summer visitor is a 
 rusticrata; a stupid Vermonter is a dodunk ; sl 
 goober grubber digs peanuts in Tennessee. AVhen 
 a man is confused, he is mommixed in Kentucky, 
 he is muxed up in Otsego County (N. Y.), gal- 
 leyied in New Bedford, stodged in Indiana, and 
 wuzzled in Central New York. 'I don't hurt for 
 it ' means ' I don't care ' in Mississippi, while ' I 
 don't mind it a bit ' implies terror in North Caro- 
 lina, where a great calamity is scandalous. The 
 sunset is day-down on the Virginia coast. A man 
 has large money in Cincinnati, he has scuds of it 
 in Missouri, and a session of it in Georgia. When 
 a Terre Haute citizen is sullen he isputchiky, and 
 
 ^The Philadelphians eat what they call ''scrapple," 
 which is made of pork and Indian meal or hominy, 
 boiled together and cooled in a dish. When wanted for 
 use, it is cut in slices and fried, much as hominy is.
 
 PROVINX'IALISMS AND AMERICANESE, 199 
 
 if too weak to get out of bed, is on the lift, while 
 a pawky Ohioan is oue in poor health, and a men- 
 tally weak Kentuckian is slack tivided. Hogo is 
 a strong smell in New Hampshire, where a severe 
 storm is a tan toaster. Missouri slush is sposh. 
 Green corn remains roasfn ear in Florida, even 
 when it is canned, and there a cow may give birth 
 to a yearling." 
 
 Professor Richard Burton says: "Study the 
 freshest, most flavorous American idiom,' and 
 where is its source? In the West, three times 
 out of four." This is largely true, no doubt, 
 but we should bear in mind that many of these 
 so-called Western idioms are merely transplanted 
 exotics. There is a popular notion that the old 
 question, " Who's hyer ? " gave the name to the 
 Hoosier State^ but this is more than improbable. 
 The term Hoosier is not indigenous to Indiana, if, 
 as is claimed, it was taken there by early settlers 
 from North Carolina mountains, where an uncouth 
 person was once, and perhaps still is, called a 
 Hoosier. 
 
 It is well known that no small portion of Indi- 
 ana was settled ]:)y North Carolinians, and what is 
 more likely than that they brought the term with 
 them ? As a localism Hoosier, of course, has lost 
 its Carolina meaning, though Indiana is still the 
 Hoosier State. Jesse S. Reeves, of Richmond, 
 Ind., has found the name in print as early as 
 1836, and in writing about ten years earlier. In 
 
 ^ Farmer's Americanisms Old and Neio is an excellent 
 reference book.
 
 200 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 the northern part of the State the folk-speech 
 differs somewhat from that of the southern. A 
 strong Yankee twang is heard in the north, which 
 was settled mainly by people from northern Ohio, 
 Pennsylvania, New York, and New England ; 
 while in the south the pioneers came chiefly from 
 the Carolinas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, 
 Maryland, and southern Ohio. Hence the dialect 
 of this region is marked by the southern influence, 
 and has some features of resemblance to the negro 
 and the " poor white" or cracker dialect. Rarely 
 met with further north, the expression "right 
 smart " is used generally in central and southern 
 Indiana. 
 
 But exact geographic bounds cannot be given 
 to the Hoosier dialect ; for it extends beyond the 
 state lines into Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, and 
 Michigan, gradually becoming modified and 
 shading off* into other colloquialisms. Of course, 
 other folk-speech extends into Indiana in much 
 the same way. Hoosiers who have migrated to 
 States farther west probably speak their dialect in 
 almost its original form ; while expressions osten- 
 sibly of Hoosier liirth have been scattered broad- 
 cast over the country. 
 
 The word "tote" is a part of Hoosier dialect, 
 yet it did not originate in Indiana. Most persons 
 probably would associate it with the negro, who 
 uses the word freely in dialect stories. As early 
 as 1677 the word was used in Virginia, where 
 there were four times as many white bond-ser- 
 vants at that time as there were negroes. In
 
 PROVINCIALISMS AND AMERICANESE. 201 
 
 Maine, where negroes were unknown, there are 
 old post-roads that went by the name of "tote 
 roads." Moreover, the word was a common one 
 in England during the seventeenth century. It 
 scarcely can be of African origin then, nor is it 
 used exclusively by the negroes. 
 
 Though often met with in Hoosier dialect, the 
 word "cantankerous" is not confined to the 
 bounds of Indiana. It is certified by the usage 
 of no less a writer than Thackeray, who speaks of 
 a "cantankerous humor," cited in Webster. In 
 her story. The Casting Vote, Miss Murfree (Charles 
 Egbert Craddock) puts into the mouth of the coro- 
 ner the sentence : " He's ez hard-headed, an' ty- 
 rannical, an' perverse, an' cantankerous a critter 
 ez ever lived." Even Chaucer, of whom Spenser 
 sang as the "well of English uudefyled," makes 
 use of the word "conteke," from which "cantan- 
 kerous" probably is derived. 
 
 The word "ord'nary," a variation of ordinary, 
 and meaning common, mean, low down, is used 
 in Indiana, but so it is elsewhere. A word often 
 heard is "mosey" — in such expressions as, "He 
 moseyed off down the creek." It seems to have 
 the Hoosier stamp. In central Indiana, at least, 
 it means to saunter along, to walk slowly and 
 aimlessly, and is rarely or never used in the sense 
 given by the dictionaries, which is to move ofi" 
 quickly, to get out, to light out, to hustle. 
 Equally erroneous are most accounts of its 
 derivation. One author tells a story of a de- 
 faulting postmaster named Moses, who left be-
 
 202 WORr>-COINAGE. 
 
 tween two days, and iu this account the word is 
 absurdly connected with the name and manner of 
 flight. Possibly the word comes from the Spanish 
 imperative verb vamos, "go" — L e., it may be a 
 variant of "vamoose," which is so derived, and 
 wdiich has some of the meanings ascribed to 
 "mosey." 
 
 The elliptic phrases "wants out" and "wants 
 iu," iu such sentences as "the dog wants out," 
 that is, "wants to go out," have been pointed out 
 as peculiar to Indiana, but similar phrases — e. (j., 
 "the hired man wants off" — are heard iu many 
 other places. 
 
 The unsigned writers of a sagacious article in 
 the Indianapolis News (with some of the fat of 
 which these paragraphs are larded) are compelled, 
 they say, " to confess, and they take no shame to 
 themselves for so doing, that iu spite of consider- 
 able search, they have been unable to find a single 
 provincialism which they would be willing to 
 assert is at present confined to Indiana alone." 
 In his recent book on The Hoosiers, Meredith 
 Nicholson expresses grave doubts as to the exist- 
 ence of a distinct Hoosier dialect. "The real 
 Hoosier," he says, "who has been little in contact 
 with the people of cities, speaks a good deal as his 
 Pennsylvania or North Carolina or Kentucky 
 grandfather or great-grandfather did before him, 
 and has created nothing new." 
 
 Probably some, if not all, of the following words 
 and phrases are more frequently used in Indi- 
 ana than elsewhere : "Heap-sight," as in " more
 
 PROVINCIALISMS AND AMERICANESE. 203 
 
 ground by a heap-sight"; "juberous," as in "I 
 felt mighty juberoiis about crossiu' the river"; 
 "jamboree," in the sense of a " big time " ; "flab- 
 bergasted" — i. e., exhausted; "gargly" — i. e., 
 awkward; "I mind that," for I remember that ; 
 "bumfoozled" — i e., "rattled" ; "whang-doodle," 
 as in "Are you going to the whang-doodle to- 
 night?" 
 
 In short, the abbreviations and contortions of 
 words, the wrong accent or mispronunciation 
 rather than the possession of expressions notably 
 its own, give individuality to the Hoosier dialect, 
 as to most others. The Hoosiers say kyounty 
 for county, and call their State Injeanny. They 
 make the "a" long-drawn and flat, as in 
 *'sasses," " saft," " pasnips." They use "furder " 
 for further, "sheer" for share, "kinder" or 
 "kindy" for kind of, "kin" for can, "drap" for 
 drop, "quare" for queer, "fur" for far, "jint " 
 for joint, "ruinated" for rumed, "tuck" for 
 took, "biler" for boiler, "sumpin" for something, 
 "kittle" for kettle, "histed" for hoisted, etc. 
 
 Other frequent expressions are : " thing-a-ma- 
 jig." as in " What kind of a thing-a-majig have 
 you got there?" — "slather,"^ as in "He just 
 slathers away and says anything" ; "shenani- 
 gan," to cheat; "fixin's," as in "pie an' cake, an' 
 chicken, an' sich fixin's"; "hump your stumps" 
 — i. e., to make haste; "passel,"- as in "They're 
 
 ^ In southern New York i.'i often heard the sentence : 
 " He has slathers of money."' 
 ^ Also common in some parts of England.
 
 204 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 jest a passel o' fools"; "all-git-out," as iu "It's 
 rainin' to beat all-git-out." 
 
 An expression often used in some localities in 
 Indiana, and said to be connected in derivation 
 with doxology, is "socdolager." Say my ingeni- 
 ous authorities: "The doxology comes near the 
 end of a 'meeting,' and when a man or a boy 
 gives another a 'socdolager' (the similarity in 
 sound must be apparent), the end of the fight is at 
 hand." The temperature of the Hoosier is repre- 
 sented to be about normal, as a rule, but when 
 his feelings are overwrought he resorts to a great 
 variety of swear words and exclamations, such as : 
 " Jerusalem crickets," "shucks," "byjing," "by 
 cracky," "dinged if I don't," "jeeminy-crim- 
 minny-whiz," "gosh danged," "gee whilliken," 
 "by gravy," "by grab," "dad zooks," "dad burn," 
 "by gum," "all fired," "I'll be clogon'd," or 
 "dagon'd" (Barrie uses a similar form, "da- 
 gont" in Sentimental Tommy), "for the land's 
 sakes," "great Scott," " my goodness," "Oh, my," 
 "the dickens" (which means little devil, being a 
 contraction of the old diminutive devilkins), 
 "laws-a-mercy," "plague take it," etc. 
 
 Thus it will be seen that much of what is called 
 Hoosier dialect serves the same purpose in many 
 other parts of the country. Dr. Weatherly, of 
 the Indiana State University, in the course of 
 some remarks pertinent to the subject of Hoosier 
 dialect in literature, is reported as saying: "A 
 few months ago I met a typical Hoosier in New 
 York city. He was perfectly natural, perfectly
 
 PROVINCIALISMS AND AMERICANESE. 205 
 
 individual ; but you will uot find him in any of 
 the books, for the truth is no one has yet suc- 
 ceeded in getting a real, live Hoosier into a book. 
 Eggleston has given us his talk, and Riley has 
 occasionally given us some delightful and prom- 
 ising mirror-like glimpses, but neither has quite 
 succeeded. If we look long enough, we see that 
 the man himself is not there. A certain indefin- 
 able something is wanting. Doubtless many per- 
 sons have had much the same feeling. Some 
 moderately good Hoosier dialect stories there un- 
 doubtedly are, but the characters in them have 
 too often been either caricatures or else mere 
 automatons." 
 
 Apropos of Americanese, ''jimmermerig " and 
 " jiggumbob " are heard now and then. They 
 are sometimes applied to adjuncts of a woman's 
 attire by men who cannot give a more lucid descrip- 
 tion of these sartorial accessories. Sometimes 
 they are applied to parts of machinery the definite 
 names of which are unknown to the observer. 
 "Fad" is not Americanese, but according to the 
 Xeiu English Dictionary its earliest appearance 
 was in Hughes's Life of BisJwj? Frazer, pub- 
 lished in 183-1-. The etymology of the word is 
 unknown, but its origin is in current English 
 dialects, chiefly Midland. 
 
 Here is an account of one bit of Americanese. 
 An American college professor who was abroad 
 during the Civil War, returned at its close, and 
 on the steamer bringing him home he fell into a 
 controversy with an Englishman as to the origin
 
 206 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 pf the word "skedaddle." The professor de- 
 clared that no such word existed, and the Eng- 
 lishman insisted that he had heard it used con- 
 stantly during his visit to this country the pre- 
 vious year. He finally offered to bet a "jolly " 
 good dinner that he was right, and the professor 
 promptly assented. Several times during the 
 remainder of the voyage each gentleman jocularly 
 referred to the feast he was sure he should eat at 
 the other's expense. Scarcely had the professor 
 landed when he heard baggage-men ordering 
 their drivers to skedaddle with their loads, boot- 
 blacks asked him to let them shine his shoes 
 before he skedaddled home, and the word which 
 had sprung into existence in his absence seemed 
 to be in everybody's mouth. The professor paid 
 the wager with good grace, it is said, and prob- 
 ably thereafter was a still wiser man. After 
 trailing through the language for a time this 
 verbal pyrotechnic vanished into the limbo of 
 semi-obsolete words. 
 
 The English author of Alice in Wonderland, 
 etc., Lewis Carroll (Dr. Dodgson), was the in- 
 ventor of the "snark"and the "jabberwock," 
 and Miss Caroline Wetherell has given our 
 American children those quaint "jobbernowls," 
 as she calls them. "Jobbernowl" is an obsolete 
 word of old English origin, and means " block- 
 head." In the time of Queen Elizabeth it was 
 freely used. In an old translation of Rabelais' 
 works the word is spelled jobbernol. It is in 
 Webster's and other dictionaries. Miss AVeth-
 
 PROVI^XIALISMS AND AMERICANESE. 207 
 
 erell merely adopted the old forgotten term be- 
 cause it suited her purpose. She wanted a quaint 
 word to describe some characters in verses she 
 was writing for the children's page of the Ameri- 
 can Press Association. The characters were 
 wooden marionettes, and, writes ]Miss Wetherell, 
 "you readily see 'wooden-head,' 'blockhead,' 
 and 'jobbernowl ' are the same. The really odd 
 part of it is that no one seems to know that job- 
 bernowl is not a new word, but a very old one 
 that of right has a place in the language." 
 
 Henry James, in one of his stories, alludes to 
 the atmosphere of an English country house as 
 jumpy. Grace Margaret Gallaher, in her Vassar 
 Stories, speaks of a most /oathy frog, and says 
 that the feeling of anybody who is a good deal 
 in the house is apt to be fubsy. A sufferer from 
 the fubsy state should go out-doors, etc. And 
 some things, even at Vassar, we learn from Miss 
 Gallaher, are borey. 
 
 A bad ver])al by-product is like a son who is 
 a failure in life, and so I dislike to '' Boswell " 
 this to posterity : " He stood only two skipometers 
 from the brink of the abyss," but a dear friend 
 sent it to me with the assurance that he never 
 would do anything like it again. Only as a re- 
 minder of his ghastly offense and of his worthy 
 resolution is it included. Another gentleman, 
 who does not wish his name mentioned, suggests 
 quassid, as an adjective, meaning shaken, agitated, 
 from quassare, to shake. Still another corre- 
 spondent calls my attention to ksskss, which is
 
 208 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 smaller than least, and, he says, more expressive 
 than less. But it is not a word that bites the 
 mind, so to speak. 
 
 The power of words never impresses some 
 persons. They never feel as did Mrs. Gilchrist 
 when she wrote of Whitman's poems : " I had 
 not dreamed that words could cease to be words 
 and become electric streams like these." Such 
 persons are not likely to appreciate the mot juste 
 nor to know what bit of slang is de trop in polite 
 conversation. With them all words are equal. 
 They know not what words have the cachet of 
 good literary usage nor what words are under lit- 
 erary ban. They do not perceive that language 
 has an aura, like an individual. 
 
 There is no ]:)liilologic sleuthery cunning enough 
 to trace all the mysterious survivals of our 
 speech, but the day is near when men will know 
 much more about the English language than is 
 known now. In volumes new and old, besides 
 reference books, there are many examples of 
 Americanese. In them, too, may be found still- 
 born words — seen in one author's book and no- 
 where else. As has been said, the illicit and 
 ineligible words soon find their way into the 
 Potter's Field of language — "unwept, unhonored, 
 and unsung." Others, repudiated by everybody 
 else, linger in the mind perhaps of him who is — ■ 
 
 'Must at the age 'twixt boy and youth, 
 When thought is speech, and speech is truth." 
 
 Some writers make up Americanese merely to
 
 PROVINCIALISMS AND AMERICANESE. 209 
 
 give a facetious turn to their ideas. Thus Elbert 
 Hubbard : '"Whoever saw au augel with pants?' 
 asked the quibbling critic as he stood before one 
 of Mr. Samuel Warner's art creations. 'Who- 
 ever saw an angel without pants ?' replied Sammy, 
 and thus did Sammy place the kibosh upon the 
 astute visitor." 
 
 James L. Ford, the inventor and sole patentee 
 of cuhurine, describes it "as a substance that 
 bears the same relation to culture that velveteen 
 does to velvet, oleomargarin to butter, or plush 
 to sealskin. Like all imitations, it has a distinct 
 reason for existence, and in a certain limited 
 sense may be likened to a mixture of a large 
 amount of cotton with a small percentage of silk, 
 the latter appearing on the outside of the fabric 
 in the form of a very thin and very shiny gloss. 
 
 "Culturine may be had in various forms, the 
 most popular of which, perhaps, are artine, ])ros- 
 aline, and versaletie. There are, of course, other 
 special varieties, but those I have named may be 
 obtained from almost any one engaged in the 
 
 business Artine is simply nothing 
 
 more nor less than information, both accurate and 
 inaccurate, regarding modern and classic art, put 
 up in small capsules, and sold in boxes contain- 
 ing one dozen each.'' 
 
 Now compare the foregoing with the following 
 masterly definition of Ruskin's, and perhaps we 
 shall see what Americanese is not: "What do 
 you think the beautiful word 'wife' comes from? 
 It is the great word in which the English and 
 14
 
 210 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 Latin languages conquer the French or Greek. 
 I hope the French will some clay get a word for 
 it instead of their /e7?i77ie. But what do you think 
 it comes from? The great value of the Saxon 
 words is that they mean something. 'Wife' 
 means weaver. You must be either house-wives 
 or house-moths, remember that. In the deep sense 
 you must either weave mens' fortunes and em- 
 broider them, or feed upon them, and bring them 
 to decay. Wherever a true wife comes, home 
 is always around her. The stars may be over- 
 head, the glow-worm in the night's cold grass may 
 be the fire at her feet ; but home is where she is, 
 and for a noble woman it stretches far around 
 her better than houses ceiled with cedar or painted 
 with vermilion, shedding its quiet light for those 
 who are homeless. This, I believe, is the woman's 
 true place and power."
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 SOME VERBAL CURIOS. 
 
 Not long ago the London Academy offered 
 prizes for four new words, and the competition 
 brought out some amusing results. One of the 
 words suggested \\2is penandincompoop, a term for 
 a stupid, silly writer. Another was ineompoop — 
 an income-tax collector. As this word contains 
 a cockney pun it may become popular among a 
 certain class. Still another was snumble, to sig- 
 nify a child's effort to express the sensation felt 
 in the nostrils when one drinks an effervescino^ 
 mineral water. Perhaps the most successful ex- 
 ample was hluedomer — that is, one who declines 
 to go to church because of his ability to worship 
 God more easily under the blue dome of heaven. 
 The word roofer is defined as a letter written 
 after staying with a friend to express your grati- 
 tude for his hospitality. Other new words sub- 
 mitted to the Academy were : 
 
 Crotion — an occurrence which enables you "to 
 crow" over another person. It is the noun cor- 
 respondina: to Mr. Kipling's interjections, "gloats" 
 ^and "fids." 
 
 Balmyanns — originally " baby," for Parmesan 
 
 211
 
 212 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 biscuits, and hence auy treasure-trove between 
 meals. 
 
 Gliig — a greasy mud peculiar to the streets of 
 large cities. 
 
 Gluxy — an adjective denoting the quality that 
 is not quite oily or creamy or glutinous, but sug- 
 gestive of each. 
 
 Conflumiion — catastrophe. 
 
 Quinnydingles — irrelevancies and trivialities. 
 
 Scree! — the sensation produced by hearing a 
 knife-edge squeal on a slate. 
 
 Scriuigle — the noise made by a slate pencil 
 squeaked on a slate. 
 
 Twink — a testy person full of kinks and cranks. 
 
 Tilge — decoction of tea which has stood too 
 long, whether warm or cold. (Evidently sug- 
 gested by bilge water, as in the bottom of a boat.) 
 
 Sinequanonymous — most essential. 
 
 Whifflement — object o| small importance. 
 
 Flopulent — the method of sitting or reclining 
 of one's adipose aunt. 
 
 Before our late difficulty with Spain was ended 
 an enterprising individual started on a lecture 
 tour, giving what he barbarously called a war- 
 alogue. The moving picture machine, according 
 to various modifications, has been called the cine- 
 matograph or kinematograph, the mutoscope, the 
 vitascope, the hiograph, etc. 
 
 One of the most ludicrous word-coiners I ever 
 knew was an eccentric character who lived in the 
 Catskills. He died years ago. His favorit^ 
 tipple was hard cider, and when "mellowed" by
 
 SOME VERBAL CURIOS. 213 
 
 this insidious l^everage, he was wout to indulge in 
 some wonderful monologues. One day he met 
 Doctor Green, to whom he said: "Doc, I've got 
 a complaint you can't cure." "What is it?" 
 asked the unsuspecting old physician. " Well," 
 drawled "Lon," a cider leer in his eyes, "I was 
 taken last night with the inflammation of the 
 dwadlum, operating very extensively on the 
 crisis of the revenue of the revellee of the incon- 
 gongaelix." 
 
 The doctor dryly admitted that he knew of no 
 remedy for that malady, and " Lon " was so elated 
 at having "stumped" Doctor Green that he told 
 the incident on every possible occasion, now and 
 then varying the jargon according to his mood. 
 
 Americaphiles and Americaphobes were intro- 
 duced by Julian Ealph in an article published in 
 Hcuyers Magazine. They are not happy expres- 
 sions, though I notice that other writers have 
 used them. 
 
 Charles Reade's manipulation of the English 
 language was erratic, to say the least. In Read- 
 iana he described a gentleman giving a luncheon 
 to two ladies at a railway restaurant as follows : 
 " He souped them, he tough-chickened them, he 
 brandied and cochinealed one, and he brandied 
 and burnt-sugared the other" (brandy and 
 cochineal and brandy and burnt sugar being 
 Reade's euphemisms for port and sherry respect- 
 ively). In Christie Johnson, anent the complex- 
 ion of the Newhaven fishwives, he says: "It is a 
 race of women that the Northern sun peachifies
 
 214 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 instead of rosewoodizing." " They showed napes," 
 is the way he indicated that two persons in a fit 
 of temper turned their backs on each other. This 
 phrase occurs in A Simpleton. 
 
 Abnormally long words may be included under 
 the heading of this chapter. Determining to 
 frame a word which would be readily intelligible 
 to all who understand the Flemish language and 
 who had never seen a " horseless carriage," the 
 members of the Flemish Academy of Auvers, 
 after much deep thought, evolved the following- 
 word : Snelpaardelooszonderspoorwegpetrolrijtuig. 
 This euphonious (?) word signifies "a carriage 
 which is worked by means of petroleum, which 
 travels fast, which has no horses, and which is not 
 run on rails." A Xew York newspaper, com- 
 menting on it, said : " This is, from one point of 
 view, a fine example of mnltum in parvo, but it 
 may be questioned whether one extraordinarily 
 long word is preferable to half a dozen short 
 ones. The Flemish people, however, think dif- 
 ferently, and the Academicians of Anvers have 
 been highly complimented by them on their lin- 
 guistic skill as seen in this unique word." 
 
 In Jeremy Bentham's Abridged Petition for 
 Justice (1829, p. 18) occurs the nine-syllabled 
 word disintellectualization. Jeremy Bentham 
 was the man who defined the whole of a good 
 style to lie in the choice of " the same word for 
 the same thing and a different word for a differ- 
 ent thing." Ehew ! 
 
 A word of twenty-two letters — viz., incircum-
 
 SOME VERBAL CURIOS. 215 
 
 scriptibleness — was used by one Byfield, an Eng- 
 lish divine, in a treatise on Colossians, published 
 in 1615. In the biography of Dr. Benson is an 
 entry from the Archbishop's diary to the effect 
 that "the Free Kirk of the Xorth of Scotland 
 are strong antidisestablishmentarians " — twenty- 
 six letters. In keeping with his rather ponder- 
 ous language in general William E. Gladstone 
 coined the word cUsedablishmentariani.sm. Re- 
 ferring to Love's Labor's Lost (act v., sc. i. 1. 44; 
 we find : Costard — " Oh, they have lived long on 
 the alms- basket of words. I marvel thy master 
 hath not eaten thee for a word ; for thou art not 
 so long by the head as houorificabilitudinitatibus; 
 thou art easier swallowed than a flai>dragon." 
 This word contains twenty-seven letters. " Thus," 
 says the Literary Difjest, " Shakespeare, as usual, 
 stands at the top." But the editor will find sanc- 
 tioned in the Standard Dictionary the twenty- 
 eight-lettered word, antitranssubstantiationalist. 
 
 The German language is singularly well 
 adapted for the formation of compound words, 
 which the English language is not (see p. 225), 
 and hence big words in German are quite beyond 
 rivalry. For instance, there is the word Con- 
 stantinopolitanischerdudelsackspfeifenmacherge - 
 sellschaft (d9 letters), meaning "an association of 
 Constantinopolitan bagpipe makers." A German- 
 American fearlessly — and correctly — announces 
 that this word, when properly written, has seven 
 additional letters. But there is a word of 71 let- 
 ters, attri])uted to Bismarck, and if it l)e, as some
 
 216 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 one has put it, "a worthy offspring of a mighty 
 brain," it is also much more than a proper 
 mouthfuh Bismarck disliked everything foreign, 
 especially everything French, and the word 
 "apotheker" provoked his disapproval as having 
 a foreign, though certainly not a French, kinship. 
 As a substitute, so the story goes, he proposed a 
 truly German word, defining an apothecary. 
 Here it is: Gesundheitswiederherstellungsmittel- 
 zusammenmischungsverhaltnisskundiger. 
 
 Speaking of sesquipedalian words, on page 837 
 of Liddell and Scott's Greek Lexicon may be 
 found a Greek word with 176 letters. It is from 
 one of the old plays and means ''hash." 
 
 Unlike his remote predecessor, Frederick the 
 Great, Wilhelm II. is averse to French words in 
 the German language, and he has made several 
 attempts to have substituted for them German or 
 Germanized words. The first published imperial 
 order of the year 1899 was entitled "Germaniza- 
 tion of Certain Foreign Expressions," and began 
 as follows : " AVith a view of furthering the pur- 
 ity of language in my army, I give orders, in 
 consequence of a report that has been made to me, 
 that while paying full regard to traditions, from 
 to-day the following expressions are to be re- 
 placed by the German words written opposite to 
 them." Then followed a list of titles and expres- 
 sions to be changed. A more recent order of 
 Emperor Wilhelm is to substitute English for 
 French in the higher classes of the upper schools 
 or gymnasia. In the lower classes it is to be
 
 SOME VERBAL CURIOS. 217 
 
 made equal with Greek. The political meaning 
 of this decree may become historic. Germany 
 is reaching out in the commercial affairs of the 
 world, and the Emperor, whether by advice or 
 his own discernment, sees that in order to cope 
 with the Anglo-Saxon race and to diminish the 
 odds against his own, the latter must know the 
 English language. 
 
 The words of command are no longer given in 
 French, and all drill words, names of accoutre- 
 ments, etc., of French extraction have been 
 abolished by the Germans. Wilhelm's patriot- 
 ism is somewhat truculent, but who can blame 
 him for loving his own land and his own lan- 
 guage ? It is very natural that he should wish 
 to redeem his mother tongue from the badge of 
 servitude which the French in particular had set 
 upon it. Prince Bismarck, too, insisted that it 
 was the supremest folly to think of abolishing 
 the "bearded type." The German script, how- 
 ever, has been a thing of barbaric mystery to for- 
 eign eyes these many years, and set spectacles on 
 every other German nose throughout the Father- 
 land. Charles V. loathed the German lan- 
 guage. He called it "the language of horses"; 
 but then it should be remembered that Charles 
 was more of a Spaniard than a German. When 
 Napoleon, by changing the date of the annexa- 
 tion of Corsica to France, made himself a 
 Frenchman, he took a terrible dislike to the 
 Italian language and showed his intense disgust 
 if any deputation addressed him in that language.
 
 218 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 The present Kaiser has a like prejudice against 
 the French language, and when he ascended the 
 throne he had a number of foreign words in every 
 department abolished and replaced by German 
 terms. He eliminated all Gallicisms from the 
 imperial bills of fare, even insisting on having 
 Speisenfolge in place of menu. 
 
 The Emperor also issued an edict making it 
 obligatory on his subjects to be very careful in 
 their pick of words when speaking of the married 
 fair sex. A general's wife must be alluded to as 
 consort ( Gemahlin) ; a woman whose husband is 
 high in the civil service must be called spouse 
 ( Gattin) ; she who belongs to the bourgeoise is 
 her husband's lady (Fran) ; while the working- 
 man's helpmate is just a plain wife (Weib). 
 Anent these amenities an American journal re- 
 marks : " The peculiarity of this mathematic 
 distinction is that, in the nature of things, it 
 cannot be applied to speaking to the consorts, 
 spouses, ladies, or wives directly. It is a law for 
 the recognition of the social prestige of the 
 absent — the very refinement of politeness." 
 
 Julian Hawthorne writes me : '' I have Wor- 
 cester, Webster, the Century, and the Standard 
 dictionaries, and have not yet finished using the 
 words therein collected ; so I believe I have not 
 begun manufacturing on my own account. A 
 dozen years ago, however, I seem to have perpe- 
 trated the inclosed, which is at your service, 
 though I fear not in your line." 
 
 The inclosure Mr. Hawthorne alludes to is a
 
 SOME VERBAL CURIOS. 219 
 
 clipping from The Boole mart (now defunct) of 
 August, 1887, headed " The Story of Alphonso," 
 the subtitle being "A Romance." It is a gro- 
 tesque piece of nonsense, too long to quote, but 
 under an original verbal symbolism is veiled a 
 certain prophetic element of a more or less per- 
 sonal tendency. His first chapter is headed The 
 Dinkunabuhim, and the author sets one agog by 
 such terms as catastrlfied, hnposthumed, bulga- 
 roons, hilliicinking, golliicombles, i^wrA'/e, squinly, 
 stimpered, gattlegreens, brolliant, stither-and-sjnn, 
 begrafed, fumor, raddled, invedor, membrenate, 
 murid, pidget, morpid, ravid, greeves, floughs, 
 sprangUy galloived, bilbo, " his breek was jostled," 
 "hiswizandwasup," "crockles along," "twiddling 
 moonbeams," "he moddled his face," "froddled 
 forward," etc. What most of them mean cannot 
 be learned from the context and only Mr. Haw- 
 thorne knows, if he remembers.
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE. 
 
 One of my correspondents thinks that we 
 English-speaking people know a good thing when 
 we see it, and hence our avidity in seizing upon 
 and making our own any foreign word of which 
 we really believe we stand in need. 
 
 "We don't care where it comes from. The 
 only question with us is : Will it serve our pur- 
 pose better than any word we now have in our 
 vocabulary ? In this way we have succeeded in 
 making the English tongue the language of the 
 world, rich, flexible, and adapted to all peoples 
 and all climes. Look at the long list of foreign 
 words we have made our own during the half 
 century just passed. No, we have no desire to 
 * purify ' our beloved English tongue by striking 
 out foreign words from it. On the contrary, we 
 are in favor of enriching it from year to year 
 until it overshadows the other tongues of the 
 world, even as the towering oak overshadows the 
 humble children of the plain. God bless the 
 English tongue! May it live long and prosper!" 
 
 To which I say amen! But, fortunately, we 
 do not all think alike as to the value of for- 
 220
 
 LANGUAGE AND CULTURK. 221 
 
 eign words for our own use. Indeed, there has 
 been much wrangling on the subject. For my 
 own part, I think the more words are taken from 
 the Latin and Greek the more artificial and 
 flabby our language becomes, and the most tedious 
 writing in English is usually that which contains 
 a preponderance of words derived from those 
 dead languages. 
 
 There is a kind of writing which, as a fine art, 
 belles lettres, may be called analogous to painting, 
 and the fact of this resemblance is expressed by 
 the commonly applied term "word-painting." 
 Another kind of writing finds its analogy in 
 music, by reason of the rhythmic flow of the sen- 
 tences whose very sound helps the meaning and 
 in which a varied tonality may suggest the whole 
 gamut of melody such as Euskin's, up to the 
 richest diapason, such as Milton's. For such 
 kinds of writing many foreign prototypes or 
 derivatives, in default of anything so expressive 
 in our own language, are quite indispensable. 
 
 In an address at Oxford Frederic Harrison 
 offered this sterling advice : "I do not say stick 
 to Saxon words and avoid Latin words as a law 
 of language, because English now consists of 
 both ; good and plain English prose needs both. 
 We seldom get the highest poetry without a large 
 use of Saxon, and we hardly reach precise and 
 elaborate explanation without Latin terms. . . . 
 Current English prose — not the language of 
 poetry or of prayer — must be of both kinds, 
 Saxon and Latin. But wherever a Saxon word
 
 222 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 is enough, use it ; because if you have all the 
 fulness and the precision you need, it is the more 
 simple, the more direct, the more homely." 
 
 Probably not more than a third of the words 
 in the vocabulary are Saxon derivatives, and 
 the reason why there are not more is because 
 didactic English writers and theologians have cast 
 their ideas in classic molds — put new wine in old 
 bottles. Hence many are the instances which 
 indicate the lingual demarcation of English from 
 the original Teutonic branch or from the German 
 language of to-day. Even in the grammar itself, 
 supposed to be wholly Teutonic, a striking differ- 
 entiation is seen, and this is owing to the count- 
 less efforts to Latinize our grammar. Yet the 
 vital, formative principle of our language is 
 Anglo-Saxon. Says Richard Grant White : "If 
 what has come to us through the Normans, and 
 since their time from France and Italy and the 
 Latin lexicon, were turned out of our vocabu- 
 lary, we could live, and love, and work, and talk, 
 and sing, and have a folk-lore and a higher lit- 
 erature. But take out the former, the movement 
 of our lives would be clogged, and the language 
 would fall to pieces for lack of framework and 
 foundation." And he says it may be doubted 
 "whether out of the simples of our ancient Eng- 
 lish, or Anglo-Saxon, so called, we might not 
 have formed a language copious enough for all 
 the needs of the highest civilization, and subtle 
 enough for all the requisitions of philosophy." 
 
 Geor":e Perkins Marsh advanced much the
 
 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE. 223 
 
 same idea. Borrowing so freely from other 
 tongues has brought its penalties. Though we 
 have rifled the whole orbis verbonun, " these for- 
 eign conquests, indeed, have not been won . . . 
 without some shedding of Saxon blood — some 
 sacrifice of domestic coin ; and if we have gained 
 largely in vocabulary, we have, for the time at 
 least, lost no small portion of that original con- 
 structive power whereby we could have fabri- 
 cated a nomenclature scarcely less wide and 
 diversified than that which we have borrowed 
 from so distant and diversified sources." 
 
 Not only do Anglo-Saxon words, like father 
 and mother, comprise the vocabulary of common 
 life, but also the language of the emotions — fear, 
 sorrow, love, hope, hate, shame, and the like. 
 The history of most languages shows the con- 
 scious will first in the foreground, while the 
 understanding comes to its own at a later date. 
 Anglo-Saxon "has given names to most of those 
 objects which are associated with our strongest 
 feelings — as home, hearth, fireside, life, death, 
 sickness : and claims the words of childhood and 
 youth, which for all after-life have the dee])est 
 meaning and are surrounded by the most moving 
 associations." The proportion of iiVnglo-Saxon 
 words in the authorized version of the English 
 Bible, rightly considered the noblest body of 
 English prose which the language possesses, is 
 greater than in any other English book. 
 
 From the Latin are derived the general and 
 abstract terras, while the Anglo-Saxon furnishes
 
 224 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 those which are special and definite. In an essay 
 Henry Rogers has illustrated this in the follow- 
 ing way : " ' Move ' and ' motion ' are general terms 
 of Latin origin ; but all the special terms for 
 expressing varieties of motion are Anglo-Saxon, 
 as 'run,' 'walk,' 'leap,' 'stagger,' 'slip,' 'step,' 
 ' slide.' Color is Latin, but white, black, green,^ 
 yellow, blue, red, brown, are Anglo-Saxon. 
 'Crime' is Latin, but 'murder,' 'theft,' 'rob- 
 bery,' 'to lie,' 'to steal,' are Anglo-Saxon. 'Mem- 
 ber' and 'organ' as applied to the body are 
 Latin or Greek, but 'ear,' 'eye,' 'hand,' 'foot,' 
 'lip,' 'mouth,' 'teeth,' 'hair,' 'finger,' 'nostril' 
 are Anglo-Saxon. 'Animal' is Latin, but 'man,' 
 'horse,' 'cow,' 'sheep,' 'dog,' 'calf,' 'goat,' are 
 Anglo-Saxon. 'Number' is Latin, but all our 
 cardinal and ordinal numbers as far as a million 
 are Anglo-Saxon." 
 
 Many words of Latin origin, however, are 
 equally as simple and perspicuous as those of 
 Anglo-Saxon origin, and they should not be 
 avoided merely because they bear the mint-mark 
 of Latinity. But as between a Latin word and 
 an Anglo-Saxon word, when both are equally 
 clear and intelligible, preference should be given 
 to the latter. 
 
 I verily believe that a writer's mental weari- 
 ness and discouragement often come from the 
 habit of straining for effects by using big words 
 of Latin extraction. His diction loses spirit and 
 
 1 Strangely enough, the Homeric Greeks had no ex- 
 pression for green.
 
 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE. 225 
 
 grows languid and ponderous when he ceases to 
 use the brisk, glowing, bracing, biting Anglo- 
 Saxon words. He perhaps attributes his failure 
 to produce something effective to a flagging fancy, 
 when in truth his fancy is still up to its pristine 
 mark, but has been embodied in pale and blood- 
 less derivatives. Perhaps his style is more debil- 
 itated than his ideas, though they too must be 
 enfeebled by confinement in such a verbal prison. 
 If he finds his work blessed with the Latin 
 merits of euphony, sonorousness, and harmony, 
 but otherwise weak and banal, let him come back 
 to his mother tongue and draw on it for that 
 strength, tenderness, and simplicity which makes 
 English literature the crowning glory of all the 
 works of man. Let him learn there is no finer 
 literary bread than is made of English wheat. 
 
 The original Anglo-Saxon, like the Greek and 
 the modern German, had the power of composi- 
 tion in a great degree, but its coalition with the 
 Norman-French and the influence of the latter 
 so weakened this power that it began to decay in 
 the early English period. And now, less than 
 any other language in the Teutonic family, is the 
 English adapted for new compounds. In the 
 power of composition the Latin was always very 
 deficient, and the same peculiarity is shown by 
 the languages which have been derived from it. 
 Several reasons account for the modern German 
 influence in our language, especially in making 
 compounds, which, to say the least, are usually 
 no ornament to it. De ^lille has stated these 
 
 15
 
 226 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 reasons as follows: "German philosophy has a 
 commanding position and is illustrated by several 
 schools, each of which has its own nomenclature 
 made up out of German words ; and English 
 thinkers who discuss philosophical subjects are 
 forced to transfer German compounds to their 
 own lano^uage. 
 
 "These words in many cases have roots which 
 also exist in English. In the case of scientific 
 writing every liberty must be allowed: and as 
 the botanist may freely make use of Greek 
 words, so the metaphysician may employ German. 
 But in general literature the case is different, and 
 English imitations of German compounds are to 
 be condemned." Among the objectionable com- 
 pounds De Mille includes such words as "time- 
 spirit," "earth-soul," "hero-saint," "wonder- 
 smith," "life-pleasure," "youth-season." As a 
 rule, a compound which can be written without a 
 hyphen is better formed than one which requires 
 it. Words come from the Greek and Latin 
 already compounded, but words that exist in the 
 language are often compounded with sad results. 
 For instance, Hon. Charles Francis Adams, a 
 polished scholar, made the execrable compound, 
 " filiopietistic." 
 
 Certainly it would be unwise to leave the 
 future growth of the English language to chance, 
 and it is equally clear that its abuses cannot be 
 corrected by legal measures. Jacques-George 
 Danton said : " One had better be a poor fisher- 
 man than meddle with the art of governing
 
 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE. 227 
 
 men." So I say one might better be deaf when 
 bad grammar or other solecisms are spoken than 
 try to regulate language by legislation. Radical 
 changes of any kind cannot be made in a day. 
 AVas it not jVEacchiavelli who said: "God will not 
 do everything at once." Literary taste and crit- 
 ical scholarship may be safeguards against the 
 permanent usage of unfit words, but, as Archer 
 says, "the fact is that three-fourths of the English 
 language would crumble away before a purist, 
 and we should be left without words to express 
 the commonest and most necessary ideas." 
 
 Joseph Joubert maintained that it is a good 
 plan to use words in their popular rather than 
 in their philosophic sense, and a still better plan 
 to use them in their natural or essential than in 
 their popular sense. " To prove a thing by defi- 
 nition," he says, "proves nothing if the defini- 
 tion is purely philosophical ; for such definitions 
 only bind him who makes them." An illustra- 
 tion of this is afforded in a criticism by Professor 
 Hyslop, in the North American Revieic, of the 
 recent book. From India to the Planet Mars. 
 Professor Hyslop thinks that M. Flouruoy puts a 
 peculiar meaning on the term supernormal. "He 
 speaks as if it were convertible with supernat- 
 ural. He considers these processes (of clairvoy- 
 ance) as perfectly natural, and in the case of tel- 
 epathy speaks of it as something rather to be 
 expected than doubted. You would suppose that 
 the 'supernormal' sustained the same relation to 
 the normal that hypersesthesia sustains to sesthe-
 
 228 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 sia ; but no, it is made equivalent to the super- 
 natural, and this assumption annihilates all ra- 
 tional perspective in the case," which is that of 
 the famous spiritist medium, "Mile. Smith," of 
 Geneva, S^Yitzerland. 
 
 " But to prove a thing by definition," goes on 
 Joubert (in Matthew'Arnold's translation), "when 
 the definition expresses the necessary, inevitable, 
 and clear idea which the world at large attaches 
 to the object, is, on the contrary, all in all ; be- 
 cause then what one does is simply to show people 
 what they do really think, in spite of themselves 
 and without knowing it. The rule that one is 
 free to give to words what sense one will, and 
 that the only thing needful is to be agreed upon 
 the sense one gives them, is very well for the mere 
 purposes of argumentation ; but in the genuine 
 world of literature it is good for nothing." 
 
 Bacon believed that the Elizabethan language 
 would become obsolete. Perhaps he fondly 
 dreamed of a time when the English language 
 would be entirely Latinized. However that may 
 be, if we accept orthodox history, it was the 
 sturdy and intense individualism of the Saxons 
 which enabled them to overcome the more or less 
 communistic Britons and Angles and Danes, and 
 finally the Kormans. 
 
 The greatest reaction against the dead lan- 
 guages ever seen in this country is shown to-day ; 
 and this prejudice is growing, even among col- 
 lege-bred men. Why is it? In literature the 
 English language is richest of all languages, and
 
 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE. 229 
 
 it is superior to any other, except in the matter 
 of precision. A complete study of etymoloofv and 
 philology should, no doubt, include the Greek 
 and Latin languages, but for knowledge and as 
 means of discipline the value of these languages 
 has been and is still much overestimated. Of 
 late years, however, the study of Greek has 
 steadily declined. Look over the college cur- 
 ricula and you will see how many provide elec- 
 tive studies in place of Greek. Fifty years ago 
 the idea of a liberal education made the study 
 of Greek compulsory. It is generally conceded 
 among scholars to be a model, an ideal, lan- 
 guage, vastly superior to Latin, two serious 
 faults in the latter being the lack of the article 
 and of a distinction between the preterit and the 
 aorist tenses. But Greek seems to have had its 
 day. 
 
 There is much truth in Herbert Spencer's 
 remark that ''if we inquire what is the real 
 motive for giving boys a classical education we 
 find it to be simply conformity to public custom." 
 Certainly English etymology is not acquired by 
 mastering the vocabulary of Homer ancl Horace, 
 or learning by rote the conjugation of tupio and 
 amo. 
 
 The English language has no better friend to- 
 day than Thomas J. Allen, President of Aurora 
 College, who has made some observations, not 
 less fair than candid, relating to classic learning. 
 He maintains that for all but the 1 per cent, of 
 college students who will become specialists, the
 
 230 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 study of three or four languages concurrently is 
 a shameful waste of time and energy. "The 
 study of the classics," says Professor Allen, "ex- 
 ercises little more than the verbal memory. That 
 the study of Latin and Greek is the best means 
 of acquiring a good English style is pure pre- 
 sumption. A knowledge of Anglo-Saxon is of 
 more value for this end than a knowledge of 
 Latin. Notwithstanding the attempts of gram- 
 marians to Latinize our grammar, English re- 
 mains an uninflected, almost a grammarless ^ 
 tongue, to be acquired more by practice than by 
 rule. A knowledge of original meaning is not a 
 safe guide to present use ; the history of a word 
 and its present use are more important than its 
 original signification. Common observation, as 
 well as literary history, shows that there is little 
 relation between ability to write pure English 
 and knowledge of the classics, ' Every lan- 
 guage,' says Macaulay, 'throws light on every 
 other.' We acknowledge, too, that the great 
 body of our educated countrymen learn to 
 grammatize their English by means of their 
 Latin. This, however, proves, not the useful- 
 ness of their Latin, but the folly of their in- 
 structors. . . . Not more than 5 per cent, of 
 those who translate from Horace or Homer have 
 the time or inclination to do more than, by the 
 help of lexicon and paradigm, to render a pass- 
 
 1 This fact is ably and amply demonstrated by Rich- 
 ard Grant White "in Words and Their Uses and in 
 Every-Day English.
 
 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE, 231 
 
 able translation ; and of that 5, not 1 per cent, 
 would, five years after graduation, choose to read 
 the original in preference to a translation. Xot 
 only because there are in English better transla- 
 tions of the classics than the ordinary student 
 could, at great loss of time and energy, make 
 for himself, but because our own language con- 
 tains a greater literature than the ancient classics, 
 is it necessary to devote much time to Greek and 
 Latin ? " 
 
 Having carefully measured and examined the 
 shallows of American culture, Professor ^lark H. 
 Liddell not only succinctly outlines the defects 
 in our educational methods and ideals, but 
 proposes a humanistic way of meeting the new 
 conditions and needs of the twentieth century. 
 Some of his views tally with those of Professor 
 Allen, as where he says : " Modern science has 
 entirely overthrown this notion of the ideal per- 
 fection of Latin and Greek as means of expres- 
 sion, and modern life is beginning to demand 
 more economy in the expenditure of educational 
 time than is illustrated by a five years' propae- 
 deutic for the mastery of a dead language." 
 
 What Professor Liddell very sensibly brings 
 to our notice is the necessity for a national culture 
 whose literary elements, if they are to harmonize 
 with our science, " must be such as are closely 
 allied to our national experience, our national 
 life, and national habits of thought. And if 
 literature is to be used as machinery of culture, 
 we must found our culture upon the study of our
 
 232 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 own literature." Then be points out a deeper 
 reason why our culture should be national, by 
 showing that a national speech is much more 
 than a means of general communication and a 
 vehicle of expression ; it is a way of looking at 
 life and is the embodiment of a national exper- 
 ience. He truly says there is "a heredity in 
 speech " and that " we think in inherited idiom 
 even after we learn to translate our thought into 
 foreign words. ... To seek culture in a for- 
 eign speech before mastering the native one is 
 only to exchange natural for artificial limitations, 
 which, as it cannot understand their nature, only 
 confuse and embarrass the mind's thinking pro- 
 cesses." 
 
 We now seem to be putting the cart before the 
 horse in pursuing classic studies and really 
 neglecting our own living speech. Sir Robert 
 Ball is one of many men who desire to see " such 
 a reform of the educational systems as shall give 
 to science its true position. Too much imix)rtance 
 is at present given to the study of languages." 
 But there is one good thing about it — the Greek 
 and Latin vocabularies will be drained dry after 
 a time, if the scientists, the parsons, and espe- 
 cially the doctors, keep drawing on them as they 
 have been doing for centuries. Then we may 
 come to our senses, throw overboard a lot of our 
 useless and damaged cargo, and, to mix the meta- 
 phor a little more, begin excavating on our own 
 historic premises. All this may happen some 
 time before the close of the present century, when
 
 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE. 233 
 
 the Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage predicts that health- 
 ologij will be complete aud imiversal. 
 
 By a happy coiucidence English was made the 
 official language of the kingdom of Great Britain 
 about the time Geoftry Chaucer began to write, 
 and perhaps for this reason it was once the fashion 
 erroneously to style him the " Father of English 
 Poetry." To a large extent his vocabulary and 
 grammar had become obsolete at the time the 
 Bard of Avon was wooing Melpomene and 
 Thalia. I have often wondered whether Shake- 
 speare would have been a greater writer if he 
 could have had command of an English vocabu- 
 lary as copious as our present one. Perhaps, by 
 the use of our modern words he might have been 
 a more accomplished, but not a stronger, writer ; 
 for he had a good stock of Anglo-Saxon words 
 at hand, and, to paraphrase from Story : 
 
 Now clear, pure, hard, bright, and one by one like to 
 
 hailstones, 
 Short words fell from his pen fast as the first of a 
 
 shower. 
 
 Back of Shakespeare's perfection of art was his 
 unexampled genius as a psychologist. In the 
 words of Lewis W. Smith : " No one talks or 
 ever did talk such noble poetry as Portia's speech 
 in the trial scene or Hamlet's soliloquy. All the 
 finer passages in the great dramatist, all the more 
 perfect presentations of passion, transcend the 
 realities of human speech ; but as a more com- 
 plete expression of feeling than is actually pos-
 
 234 ■ WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 sible we accept them with unquestioning faith in 
 their fidelity to the enduring facts of life." 
 
 AVhen driven to mental bay, Shakespeare in- 
 vented his own verbal means of extricating him- 
 self His pithy phrases and terse expressions 
 have never been surpassed, and yet he used only 
 15,000 different words, and the great ^lilton used 
 but 8000. But did you ever stop to think that 
 the only dictionary of the English language at 
 the time of Shakespeare's death contained just 
 5080 words, and that in ]Milton's day the lan- 
 guage had been enriched, according to the best 
 dictionary, to only 13,000 words? AVho dares to 
 estimate how many words Shakespeare would use 
 if he lived in these days, when the number of 
 dictionary words exceeds 300,000? Countless 
 men of modern times have used more words than 
 did Shakespeare and ^lilton together. 
 
 For the ordinary needs of cultivated intercourse 
 from 3000 to 5000 words are necessary, says Whit- 
 ney, in his Life and Growth of Language. Both 
 he and Preyer state that a vocabulary of from 
 25,000 to 30,000 words is not unusual among 
 well-educated persons. When Professor Whitney 
 made that statement he estimated the whole num- 
 ber of words in the language at 100,000. When 
 he put forth the Century Dictionary, a few years 
 later, he found about 225,000. 
 
 Professor E. S. Holden tested himself by a 
 reference to all the words in Webster's Un- 
 abridged Dictionary, and found that 33,456 words 
 comprised his own vocabulary, which doubtless
 
 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE. 235 
 
 would have proved much larger had he been 
 able to consult the more recent Century or Stand- 
 ard dictionaries, not then published. Mr. Edwin 
 W. Doran, of Clinton, Mo., says an unusually 
 talkative parrot of his acquaintance had a vocab- 
 ulary of fifty-nine words, several of which he 
 heard it use very fluently. It could, no doubt, 
 speak many more, and it seemed to understand 
 the meaning of those used. It spoke Spanish, 
 French, and English. 
 
 ]Mr. Doran, who is an earnest investigator in 
 educational matters, concludes a magazine article 
 as follows: "If a word is the sign of an idea, as 
 we have been taught, the person knowing the 
 most words — other things being equal — will have 
 the most ideas. We think only in words, and 
 the man who has the most words ought to have 
 the most thoughts. A man without clear defini- 
 tions of words will likely be without clear ideas. 
 Hence both clear thinking and clear expression 
 of thought depend upon the extent and accuracv 
 of one's vocabulary." This author advises the 
 habit of reading with a standard dictionary at 
 one's elbow. When new words are met, thev 
 should be mastered as to definition, and then fixed 
 in the mind, so that they will be immediately 
 available when there is occasion. 
 
 It has been estimated that there are 860 dis- 
 tinct languages and al:)out 5000 dialects spoken 
 by peoples now living in the world. Of the 
 various languages, 89 are allotted to Europe, 123 
 to Asia, 114 to Africa, 117 to America, and 417
 
 236 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 to the islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. 
 Plutarch says that Cleopatra "spoke most lan- 
 guages," and that she seldom needed an interpre- 
 ter when she gave audiences to foreign ambassa- 
 dors, but Plutarch's veracity is somewhat elastic. 
 At all events, if Cleopatra was anything like her 
 sisters of to-day, it is safe to believe that she 
 always had "the last word." 
 
 With all these languages is it not surprising 
 what dense ignorance there is, even in civilized 
 countries? Take Kussia : there you find, in the 
 two capitals themselves, a curious detail. Says a 
 writer in Scribner's Macjazine : "All the shops 
 which offer wares to the people do so, not in 
 words, as with us, but with pictures. The provi- 
 sion merchant's shop is a veritable picture-gal- 
 lery of sausages and cheeses and bread and butter 
 and hams and everything eatable. The iron- 
 monger hangs out illustrations of knives and 
 forks and scissors and chisels and foot-rules, and 
 the like. The tailor shows paintings of coats and 
 trousers. Why is this? Simply because a ma- 
 jority of potential customers cannot read. . . . 
 The Russian people, then, is illiterate, in the 
 strict sense of the word." 
 
 About 60 per cent, of the Russian people can 
 neither read nor write, and those who can write 
 have to be very discreet if they would escape the 
 vengeance of the public censor and the secret 
 police — ever on the watch for "free thinkers," 
 who are regarded as no better than enemies of 
 the Great White Tsar's government. It was less
 
 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE. 237 
 
 than a century ago that the Russian language 
 attained its full development, chiefly through the 
 genius of the two great poets, Pushkin and Ler- 
 montoff, who hold the same rank in Russian as 
 do their contemporaries, Goethe and Schiller, in 
 German literature. But there still remain philo- 
 logic snags in the Russian language which pre- 
 clude a broad range of expression, and, all things 
 considered, it is not surprising that the wretched 
 serfs and peasants of that country are not savants. 
 
 The final stage in the rational development of 
 language is intelligent, conscious construction. 
 But who is to do it? Who is to overhaul the 
 language, strike out objectionable forms, correct 
 inappropriate expressions, and supply deficien- 
 cies? Language grows and changes by natural 
 processes of evolution, despite the dicta of gram- 
 marians and rhetoricians. Can its development 
 and use as an instrument of expression be con- 
 trolled by legislation like law, the instrument of 
 justice? 
 
 Shades of our forefathers, no ! It would be 
 setting an appalling precedent for Congress to 
 attempt to amend English spelling or to simplify 
 English grammar, not to mention the pitiful 
 results of such tinkering. It is not within the 
 scope of legislative tribunals to tamper with a 
 language which is largely the product of intui- 
 tive reason and of agencies entirely outside the 
 pale of civic or other authority. In the world 
 to-day there are two currents which flow together 
 in places, part in others, and again run counter.
 
 238 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 The tendency of art, literature, theology, and 
 government is to complicate the general under- 
 standing of elementary laws. On the other hand, 
 there is a utilitarian influence in civilization 
 which tends not only to level social conditions, 
 but to clarify philosophy, to modernize the pro- 
 cesses of culture, and to specialize the functions 
 of human labor and activity. What seem to us 
 complexities are mainly the result of combina- 
 tion of a few simple elements — but a combination 
 that may be incalculable in its power and extent. 
 We have modern science to thank for lifting the 
 cloud of mystery and ignorance which once shut 
 out from the vision of mankind many truths of 
 nature and of life. But her mission is not half 
 attained ; her finest miracles are yet to come. 
 She sometimes discovers the secrets of natural law 
 in a blind, clumsy way, but her final results are 
 sure and clear. As the aim of the inventor is to 
 make his device as simple in construction as pos- 
 sible, so the ultimate aim of science must be to 
 bring order out of chaos, and, while deepening 
 the channels of knowledge, now littered with lin- 
 guistic wrecks, to let into them pellucid streams 
 of thought which shall sweep away all verbal 
 derelicts that should have been in the Saraijossa 
 Sea of language long ago. 
 
 White insists, more than once and with the 
 most forcible proofs, that the misuse of language 
 cannot be justified by ever so good authority; 
 that a new word may be good English not because 
 a great writer uses it, but "because its meaning
 
 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE. 239 
 
 is clear and its formation normal." Such words 
 come at once "by intuition to men who are mas- 
 terful in language, or ready and true in its 
 apprehension." He declares that " Neologism is 
 not reprehensible if the deviation from precedent 
 is in the line of normal movement ; which is a 
 very different matter, for instance, from the sub- 
 stitution of one part of speech for another." 
 
 Again he says: "If there are to be no new 
 words, how can language express more than the 
 first and lowest needs of human nature ? With- 
 out neologism language could not grow, could 
 not conform itself to the new needs of new gen- 
 erations. . . . But one parent of language 
 must be precedent. The language of one genera- 
 tion brings forth the language of the next as 
 surely as the women of one generation bring 
 forth the men of the next. Hence, indeed, the 
 language spoken by a people is its mother 
 tongue. ... If we make the use of eminent 
 writers and cultivated speakers authoritative, we 
 shall soon find ourselves involved in a conflict 
 not only of use with reason, and of use with pre- 
 cedent, but of use with itself." 
 
 Professor Breal recognizes the diverse aspects 
 of this question of neologism in saying: ''To 
 condemn neologism in principle and absolutely 
 would be the most annoying and the most useless 
 of prohil^itions. Each onward step of a language 
 is the work first of an individual, then of a more 
 or less large minority. A country in which inno- 
 vations were forbidden would deprive its Ian-
 
 240 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 guage of all chance of development. By neolo- 
 gism we must understand the bestowal of a new 
 meaning on an old word, as well as the introduc- 
 tion of a wholly new vocable. Just as the change 
 which modifies pronunciation is at once imper- 
 ceptible and constant, to such a degree that a 
 stranger who returns to a country after thirty 
 years of absence can appreciate the march of 
 time, .so also is the meaning of words being cease- 
 lessly transformed by the action of events, new dis- 
 coveries, of revolutions in ideas and in customs. 
 A contemporary of Lamartine would find it dif- 
 ficult to understand the language of modern 
 French newspapers. We all work more or less 
 at the vocabulary of the future, whether we are 
 scholars or unlettered, writers or artists, men of 
 society or men of the people. Children have a 
 part in it which is by no means small ; as they 
 take up the language at the point to which the 
 preceding generations have brought it, they gen- 
 erally are ten or twenty years in advance of their 
 parents. The limit at wliich the riglit of inno- 
 vation ceases is not determined I)y the idea of 
 purity alone, which can always be disputed ; it 
 is also im}30sed by the need which we feel of 
 remaining in contact with the minds of those who 
 have gone before." 
 
 Doubtless the English language, like the 
 French, is eccentric, illogical, and unsystematic 
 in some of its spelling. As a rural friend of mine 
 says, "there's too much of it." Revision and 
 reform in our orthography are alleged to be cry-
 
 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE. 241 
 
 ing needs, and, except for the difficulty of intro- 
 ducing it,, many people claim there is no valid 
 objection to phonetic spelling — not even the ety- 
 mologic objection, for etymology as a study, they 
 say, \YOuld be of no value if there were a change- 
 less orthography. 
 
 The American Philological Association is the 
 strongest supporter in this country of the spelling- 
 reform movement. Its members contend that 
 the irregular spelling of the English language is 
 a great hindrance to the progress of the educa- 
 tion of those speaking it and to its spread among 
 other nations ; that it involves a waste of millions 
 of dollars, for each generation, for teachers and 
 for writing and printing superfluous letters, and, 
 most grievous of all, that it actually causes a 
 loss of two years of the school time of each child, 
 and is mainly the cause of the alarming illiteracy 
 of our people. These reformers are now trying 
 to get a bill, in one form or another, through 
 Congress to do away with letters that are not 
 sounded, their aim being, for one thing, to influ- 
 ence publishers and printers generally to use the 
 soft "g" for the sound of "j " in all cases. They 
 are urging the adoption of gradual amendments, 
 mainly the dropping of silent letters — especially 
 of the final "e" and the change of "ed" to "t" 
 in preterits and past participles. They claim there 
 is an inconsistency in using so lumbering a mass 
 of letters as occur in "called" and "stepped" 
 for the sake of designating sounds exactly analo- 
 gous to those expressed by "bald" and "wept."
 
 242 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 Professor Francis H. March, who is at the head 
 of this spelling-reform movement, says: "It 
 requires a special adjustment of the vocal cords 
 to utter ' d ' a sonant after a surd, and to neglect 
 the adjustment turns 'd' into a 't,' as in blest, 
 past, curst, for the unpronounceable blesd, pasd, 
 cursd." Ko one should grumble at such changes 
 or because the preterits of our regular verbs are 
 two syllables shorter than they were in the time 
 of Wyclif 
 
 Various odd phrases and forms of expression 
 have passed or are passing out of use, " because 
 of a perception that they are at variance with 
 reason." Among these are the double negatives 
 and double superlatives, universally used by 
 Anglo-Saxon and early English speakers and 
 writers up to about the beginning of the seven- 
 teenth century ; also the separation of the limit- 
 ing adjective from the word which it modifies, 
 etc. These changes, including the lopping off of 
 nearly all the Anglo-Saxon inflections, are due 
 chiefly to the logical exactions of modern thought. 
 
 But some of the changes proposed by this asso- 
 ciation are rather complex, for with every rule 
 formulated is an exception or two. It may be 
 questioned whether cluttering a reform system of 
 spelling with exceptions would not be as trouble- 
 some as is our present bad spelling ; whether the 
 remedies would not be worse than the disease. 
 Then, too, imagine the average member of Con- 
 gress passing his erudite opinion upon such mat- 
 ters. " Laws are enforced by penalties, because
 
 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE. 243 
 
 the violation of law is injurious to society ; but 
 penalties for breach of etiquette, of fashion, and 
 of correct lano-uage are unnecessary" (Allen). 
 
 The chief difficulty with these suggestions of 
 the Spelling Reform Association is that they are 
 only half-way measures, for they do not cover 
 phonetic requirements. Such a makeshift system, 
 owing its authority, though it may, to the dic- 
 tates of common sense, and that of an unusually 
 acute kind, will not answer in the long run. The 
 fad is, we need more, not feicer, letters. AVe lack 
 an alphabet which represents all the sounds in 
 our language in a simple and uniform manner. 
 The same may be said of the French language, 
 but the incomplete and defective Roman alpha- 
 bet is managed much more consistently by the 
 French than by the English-speaking people. 
 
 Phonetically analyzed, there are forty distinct 
 elementary sounds in English, and only forty dis- 
 tinct letters can completely represent them. It 
 is particularly rich in vowels, and few others of 
 the Indo-European group have such a variety of 
 sounds. Thus it will be seen that the demands 
 of English phonetics are but inadequately met 
 by our present alphabet, and that radical changes, 
 assuming that they are desirable, cannot be made 
 possible until a complete phonetic alphabet is 
 adopted. Each letter of this proposed alphabet 
 must always have a significance and always the 
 same significance. 
 
 Says Dr. A. L. Benedict: "A genuine English 
 spelling reform cannot logically stop much short
 
 244 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 of the adoption of a unilinear system of writing, 
 analogous to the simple style of several steno- 
 graphic alphabets now in vogue. . . . Any 
 attempt at spelling reform while retaining the 
 present Roman alphabet must result as unsatis- 
 factorily as the effort to remodel for a big boy a 
 suit of clothes a third too small for him." 
 
 Perhaps, for their own uses, the spelling reform- 
 ers might add to our alphabet fourteen letters to 
 stand for the sounds now not represented by let- 
 ters, and thus solve the crux that confronts them. 
 This plan would ol)viate making too abrupt a 
 departure from the Roman alphabet, which, they 
 doubtless will admit, is good enough as far as it 
 goes. But, seriously, slight changes in spelling 
 may be both advisable and possible within the 
 phonetic limits of our present alpha])et. But the 
 proposed substitution of "f " for "ph," the drop- 
 ping of "o" and "a" from ancient diphthongs 
 ending in " e," etc. — these changes violate custom 
 and the history of the words themselves, while 
 they preserve the expedients of silent indicators 
 and arbitrary binominal expressions of single 
 sounds. The same sound, sometimes represented 
 by "f" and sometimes by "ph," is not a matter 
 of accident. The latter originally indicated a 
 difference in pronunciation and almost always 
 marks a derivation from the Greek, "f" being 
 sounded between the lower lip and upper teeth, 
 while the Greek 2)hi was blown between the lips. 
 Important changes in the English language are 
 denoted by the peculiarities in our spelling, and
 
 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE. 245 
 
 the latter, as recording the source of contribu- 
 tions to our vocabulary, are of value. Dr. Ben- 
 edict aptly says that by no means without signifi- 
 cance are ps in pseudo, ce in homoeopathy and 
 oeconomic, ce and rrh in haemorrhage, Hon instead 
 of shun ; and is it not less gracious and less logical 
 to find fault because the primitive spelling has 
 not changed to conform to our modern mispro- 
 nunciation than to complain because the lazy 
 English lips and tongue have slurred their orig- 
 inal sounds ? 
 
 A number of our best writers now drop the 
 Latin syllable «/, added by false analogy to such 
 Greek adjectives as chemic and microscopic, and 
 the practice may become general. In America 
 we have discarded, except in books to be read by 
 the British, the "u" which our earlier writers 
 insinuated into "labor," "honor," and other sim- 
 ilar Latin words. A few peculiarly grotesque 
 errors of spelling may be sloughed off"; we may 
 drop the apostrophe and the apology for "tho' " ; 
 we may universally write "plow" instead of 
 "plough" ; we may prune other words like "cat- 
 alogue," which carry unmeaning and unwar- 
 ranted letters. Finally, the spelling reformers 
 may succeed "in mutilating word-images and in 
 destroying linguistic landmarks, but they cannot 
 make two letters out of one or prevent the inev- 
 itable confusion of attaching different significa- 
 tions to the same graphic sign " (Benedict). Xor 
 can they contract the life-sphere of the noble old 
 Saxon words.
 
 246 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 Questions in English, such as the following, 
 sometimes come up : What is the law and its 
 cause for the change in the vowel sound in the 
 English irregular verb system, while the consonant 
 base remains unchanged ? Which vowel changes 
 do we use to express past tense and perfect parti- 
 ciple? How many of the prehistoric conjugations 
 are represented in said verb system ? Name and 
 trace them. A forthcoming laook by Robert W. 
 Haire will throw the search-light on such matters 
 as these. 
 
 For many years Mr. Haire has been working 
 on a word-list of the Aryan elements of the Eng- 
 lish tongue, arranged under the Aryan roots. 
 This monumental work ought to be of very great 
 service to English-speaking people. It is not to 
 be a work of literature, in the accepted sense, 
 but rather an examination of the foundations — 
 in the cellar of our language, so to speak. Yet 
 it will be a compendium for the common school- 
 teacher, who has no time to study Latin, Greek, 
 or Saxon, and to whom the borrowed words from 
 these languages are mere symbols as devoid of 
 meaning as the symbols of algebra. 
 
 "One of the great needs of the day, in regard 
 to language, is the purging it of the prurient and 
 pretentious metaphors which have broken out all 
 over it, and the getting plain people to say plain 
 things in a plain way." ^ If there had been no 
 English and American poets, I dare not think 
 
 1 Kichard Grant White. 
 
 J
 
 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE. 247 
 
 what our lauoruao^e would be like now. Thev 
 have kept in use all the simple words, the crisp 
 words, the keen, sharp words, the small words, 
 that mean so much. Most of their rhymes are 
 monosyllabic, the frequent use of short words 
 fortunately being the only earnest of a graceful 
 swing of meter and of a perfect rhythm. Anglo- 
 Saxon primitives, for the most part, have fur- 
 nished these priceless monosyllables. 
 
 The poets have been a wonderful boon to the 
 language. The scientists, the philosophers, the 
 historians, the learned writers, have done ten 
 thousand times more injury to English than the 
 poets. In truth, the poets have done the most 
 to preserve the vigor, the strength, the beauty 
 of the Anglo-Saxon speech, while the ponderous 
 prose pedants have done the most to spoil our lan- 
 guage by dragging into it 100,000 Latin deriva- 
 tives, chiefly to give a tinge of profundity to their 
 writings. They have made the language turgid, 
 roily, unwieldy. Let us study more zealously the 
 history and charms of our own language ; let us 
 delve into old English and Saxon fields and their 
 primal wildwood glories. 
 
 It is hoped that at no distant day an Inter- 
 national Academy will be established, under the 
 direction of representative men of England and 
 America, — not a clique or congress of log-rollers, 
 — whose decisions on disputed questions in lan- 
 guage and whose suggestions would be accepted 
 as authoritative. This is the only way in which 
 we ever may expect to raise English to its high-
 
 248 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 est plane of excellence, and even such an institu- 
 tion would have its drawbacks. 
 
 Surely the English language should not be 
 left to adventitious factors alone. No one expects 
 government or law to grow out of the genius of 
 the people without conscious effort; no more is 
 language capable of developing spontaneously in 
 the right direction. It needs at the helm men 
 as sharp of eye and as unerring of instinct as 
 are the Indian pilots on the St. Lawrence River. 
 Men of higher mental ability and training than 
 professional politicians, men who are as incorrui> 
 tible as they are scholarly, should have the power 
 to determine what text-books shall be used in 
 the public schools; and an International Academy 
 of Letters is needed, if for no other purpose than 
 to decide between the claims of rival publishers 
 and to weigh the evidence set forth by warring 
 professors and literary critics. Many desirable 
 forms now obsolete should be restored, definite 
 meanings assigned to many words of vague and 
 of disputed signification, new words proposed to 
 supply deficiencies, and other improvements made 
 by a conscious process of construction. 
 
 Professor Brander Mattliews thinks that ^'in 
 the good work of injecting more sense into our 
 orthography, as in the other good work of still 
 further simplifying our grammar, we Americans 
 will have to take the lead. It is only by ven- 
 turing boldly that we can keep our language up 
 to its highest efticiency. It is for us to hand it 
 down to our children fitted for the service it is to
 
 LANGUAGE AND CULTURE. 249 
 
 render. It is our duty to help it to draw new life 
 and power from every source, and to urge along 
 the simplification of its grammar and orthog- 
 raphy." 
 
 But why should we nut haye the cooperation 
 of our British cousins, Professor Matthews ? Are 
 not Anglicisms as objectionable as American- 
 isms? Why should we fayor a purely American 
 English ? If English is to become the uniyersal 
 language, let the English-speaking races, whose 
 essential unity was neyer so marked as now, do 
 all that is judicious to further this great achieye- 
 ment. With its matchless vocabulary and infi- 
 nite resources, it stands to-day the best chance 
 of winning its way wherever mankind is pre- 
 pared to choose between it and other civilized 
 tongues. 
 
 A more general study of the earlier forms of 
 our language and a revival of some of the short, 
 apt, stanch Anglo-Saxon words used centuries 
 ago, would yield the most beneficial results to 
 the English literature of the future. Our speech 
 should more closely fit our national character 
 and high destiny. We are far removed from the 
 pagan ideals of the Greeks and Romans. The 
 cast of our thought is difierent from theirs, and 
 if we think through or in words, why should we 
 appropriate their terms, which so often dilute our 
 conceptions? The Latin races, moreover, tend 
 to socialism and anarchy, because they have 
 become weak and dependent. The Anglo-Saxon 
 race, imbued with the spirit and zest of liberty,
 
 250 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 is pushing forward, because it is self-reliant and 
 resourceful. 
 
 Lord Charles Beresford has shown that the 
 Anglo-Saxon race owns, controls, or dominates 
 nearly three-fourths of the earth's surface and 
 over one-fourth of its population. What other 
 race ever had such a record of supremacy ? And 
 what will the Anglo-Saxon race be in the year 
 2000 A. D. at the same rate of progression? 
 Why, it will own the earth and have a million 
 good words in its vocabulary ; and probably 
 some with a little of the old Adam still clinging 
 to them ; for, bright as the prospect seems, the 
 next one hundred or the next one thousand years 
 will not mold the Anglo-Saxon into a perfect race 
 or the English into a perfect language.
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 The subject of word-coiuage is so cumulative 
 that there really is no end to it. Since this book 
 was written a mass of fresh material has come to 
 hand, but I can cull from it only here and there, 
 presenting in random notes what seems most in- 
 teresting and important. There are some verbal 
 whimsies which may be inserted. Other words 
 cited mav not be new coinages, but are unusual. 
 Nor can any one be sure that a new word, a new 
 variant, a new use or meaning, supposedly evolved 
 by a certain person, has not been employed by 
 others. Such verbal coincidences may be as 
 common as the coincidence of ideas ; for the endur- 
 ing words spring from the soul of the race. For 
 instance, Captain Mahan's word "eventless" was 
 used bv George William Curtis in his Prue and 
 I, published in 1856. And a Chicago critic, in 
 the Inter-Ocean, has pointed out that the idea of 
 Edgar Fawcett's "congenials" is found in Pope's 
 use of "congenial" in his Epistle to Mr. Jervas. 
 
 Referring to the Japanese idea of duty, their 
 superstition about it, etc., Osman Edwards calls 
 this ancient training of theirs dutiolatry, in his 
 book, Japanese Plays and Playfellows. 
 
 Dorothy Dix says: "Good manners are the 
 preservaline of peace and concord." 
 
 251
 
 252 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 Exactarian, said of oue who is exact, is pro- 
 posed by a well-wisher of mine. Bacon said: 
 ''Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready 
 man, writing, an exact man." The same friend 
 suggests />iic, made on the analogy of cynic, and 
 meaning one who is finical. 
 
 J. C. Barthoff, associate editor of The Pilgrim, 
 wonders why trusticate, meaning to form or organ- 
 ize into a trust, on the model of syndicate, has 
 occurred to no one but himself. 
 
 Dr. Franz Hartmann says: "We speak of 
 existence, and say that we exist; but it seems that 
 our ancestors, who discovered this term, knew 
 more about its true meaning than we do. They 
 used to call things by their right names. The 
 term 'exist,' from the Latin ex, out, and est, is, 
 evidently means 'to be out.' Out of what? Evi- 
 dently did the things which exist come out of the 
 unmanifested state ; they were contained as ideas 
 in the universal mind and projected into outward 
 existence. Thus the word ' existence ' suggests a 
 whole system of philosophy and gives us a key to 
 the mystery of creation " (see p. 34). 
 
 " The Chrysocracy of the United States " was 
 the headline of an article in the New York 
 Herald of April 28, 1901, referring to the mil- 
 lionaires in our country. The word is obviously 
 a variant of the name of Chrysostom, who "talked 
 gold." It was made by Oliver ^YendeIl Holmes, 
 but plutocracy, meaning the same thing, has been 
 more generally adopted. 
 
 John H. Girdner, M. D., is the author of a
 
 CONCLUSION. 253 
 
 book which he calls Newyorhitis, by no means a 
 medical book, yet it treats of some of the pecu- 
 liarities of the New Yorker. 
 
 Julien Gordon (Mrs. Van Rensselaer Cruger) 
 wrote this sentence : " He had seen a photograph, 
 slightly faded and more or less speckled, ornatiwj 
 for four years his companion's dressing-table." In 
 The Wage of Character she says : " This incon- 
 gruous melange was a source of constant amuse- 
 ment to Vincent, who could trone among them to 
 his complete satisfaction, striking terror to their 
 simple hearts." 
 
 Clinton Scollard, in a poem, '' The Dancing of 
 Suleima," has this line : 
 
 The fountain spuriled^ with mellow fret. 
 
 Edgar Saltus has used the word encounter able. 
 
 One reason perhaps, and a chief one, why 
 fashionable people in this country have taken up 
 the game of golf so zealously is because it pro- 
 vides them with a new lingo — many sporting 
 technical terms which have a smart sound to 
 them. 
 
 In Pendennis, chapter xxii., Thackeray speaks 
 of "soldatesque manoeuvers." It will be seen 
 that the novelist here tacked on an Italian suffix 
 to a German word. In the same book Thackeray 
 used colloquially the term "perfectionate." 
 
 In a short story Louise Betts Edwards used the 
 word forlornity. 
 
 Bric-a-brac was a neologism in France when 
 Balzac wrote Le Cousin Pons.
 
 254 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 Robert Herrick: "He smiled delpli'icallyy 
 
 Speaking of dendral (see p. 103), the United 
 States Department of Agriculture has, in the 
 Division of Forestry, what it calls dendrologists. 
 
 Nixon Waterman, the poet, fears he has not 
 " brained " any new thing worthy of a place in 
 this volume. 
 
 W. D. Howells makes one of his characters 
 say, in effect, that there ought to be some other 
 word that doesn't accuse a man's sanity in the 
 degree "hallucinations" does — that is, when the 
 man apparently shows no other signs of an un- 
 sound mind. 
 
 TJie greatest ivord-coiner in the Bible ims Paul! 
 He coined nearly 600 Greek words in his writings 
 in the New Testament. 
 
 Rev. Edward Taylor, of Binghamton, N. Y., 
 in an impromptu address (February, 1901) coined 
 the word possumist — one capable of power, one to 
 whom is possible the greatest strength. He spoke 
 of the possumist as being of more account than 
 either the optimist or the pessimist. The use of 
 this word in an extempore speech was a fine 
 instance of swift intellection. 
 
 Mr. Howells does not hesitate to use the word 
 spilth, as "spilth of blood," marked obsolete in 
 the dictionaries. Certain writers have tried to 
 force coohh, as an antonym of warmth. 
 
 Eva Best: "As to the word 'theory,' allow me 
 to say that it has its origin in an old Sanscrit 
 word dhya, meaning to meditate, to think. The 
 word theater is also derived from this word dhya,
 
 CONCLUSION. 255 
 
 and it really means, in this sense, to stand off and 
 view — see — any spectacle or pageant or display 
 going on before one's eyes. Now, he who has a 
 'theory,' who 'theorizes,' in imagination views 
 that of which he thinks as a passing show ; sees 
 the whole subject before his mind's eye, and from 
 the picture of all the parts thus presented he 
 forms his 'theory,' or what seems to him the right 
 idea of anything not as yet proved by being put 
 in practice." But, Mrs. Best might have added, 
 he may be ^^■rong. 
 
 Rev. Alfred A. Wright, of Boston, uses his 
 own word distinctionary in his discourses some- 
 times, meaning the distinctions in words and mean- 
 ings. 
 
 Some one has pointed out how interesting it is 
 to note the influence of the art of printing in 
 preventing arbitrary changes in the formation of 
 words. This is particularly true of those begin- 
 ning with a vowel. Thus in olden times the 
 French word naperon, a table-cloth, was adopted 
 as an English word meaning a garment to pro- 
 tect the clothes of a person engaged in any kind 
 of work. In the spoken language a naperon 
 ultimately became an apron. Another example 
 of common words which originally began with 
 the letter "n" is orange. In its first English 
 form it was norange, but a uorange in time became 
 orange. Again, the name of the poisonous snake, 
 adder, formerly began with an "n" (nadder), as 
 it does to-day in nearly every language other 
 than English.
 
 256 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 The word "gas," says Professor William Kara* 
 say, " was not invented until Van Helmont devised 
 it to designate various kinds of airs he observed. 
 
 In an admirable notice of a book by Edith 
 Wharton, Ellen Burns Sherman observes: "The 
 power to 'depolarize' words and phrases from 
 their hackneyed associations is a gift that is none 
 too common among authors whose plots are rea- 
 sonably original. Certain adjectives become so 
 wedded by usage to their nouns that few literary 
 courts will grant them a divorce, however weary 
 they may have become of each other. Conse- 
 quently people go on writing about 'the mazy 
 waltz,' 'a glowing tribute,' 'the happy couple' 
 (made so by an 'officiating clergyman'), and a 
 thousand other bethumbed phrases, till gradually 
 a large part of the dictionary gets done up into 
 little dried bouquets of faded phrases, coupled 
 with nouns and adjectives, verbs and adverbs, 
 with which the mantels of literature are adorned. 
 So we should feel grateful to an author like j\Irs. 
 Wharton, who takes down from their figurative 
 mantels some of these dried bouquets of literary 
 grasses and substitutes for them fresh and fragrant 
 blossoms culled from the pied meadows of fancy. 
 
 "In this gift of weaving new patterns upon 
 the same old verbal looms that have been used 
 for centuries, and in a certain chaste aloofness of 
 style, Mrs. Wharton is related to Mrs. Meynell, 
 though the former has a far wider and deeper 
 scope than the English essayist. Mrs. Meynell's 
 work is a kind of literary frost-work, and so
 
 CONCLUSION. 257 
 
 lacking in all suggestion of ruddy caloric proper- 
 ties that one fancies that only a colorless ichor 
 would flow if her essays could be probed with a 
 literary lancet. In the works of Mrs. Wharton, 
 on the other hand, the reader is conscious of 
 strong, healthy pulsations of feeling under her 
 most restrained passages. In The Moving Flncjer 
 there is, ethically, a tonic effect which affects the 
 reader like a breeze wafted down from a grove 
 of mountain pines. One is taken into an atmos- 
 phere vivified by moral oxygenation, and the 
 sensation is a most delightful one after reading 
 some of the works of other authors who lead their 
 readers into malarial swamps and bogs." 
 
 I find this in an editorial in Scribnei^s Maga- 
 zine: "There is one trait that belongs in common 
 to every artistic effort of Americans, and that is 
 the cerebrality, if the word mav pass, of such 
 effort." 
 
 Some recent examples of nouns turned into 
 verbs are furnished by the English publication, 
 Notes and Queries, as follows : 
 
 To gregory — to gibbet, to hang, from three 
 successive hangmen of the name of Gregory. 
 Hence the "Gregorian Tree," a name for the 
 gallows. 
 
 To grimthorpe — to restore an ecclesiastical edi- 
 fice badly — e. g., the west front of St. Alban's 
 Abbey and its window, when taken in hand by 
 Lord Grimthorpe ; a word first used in The Athe- 
 nceum of July 23, 1892. 
 
 To lush — the slang word "lush," meaning beer 
 17
 
 258 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 or other intoxicating liquor, is au abl^reviatiou 
 of Lushingtou, the name of a Loudon brewer.. 
 Its adoption in this sense was perhaps facilitated 
 by the fact of Shakespeare having used the old 
 adjective ''lush," meaning succulent, rich, luxu- 
 riant (T/ie TempesU ii., 1) : 
 
 ' ' How lush and lusty the grass looks ! How green ! ' ' 
 
 "They didn't look like regular Lushingtons at 
 all." — Mayhew, London Labour and London 
 Poor. 
 
 To sandwich — to place one object between two 
 others of a different kind, character, etc. The 
 Earl of Sandwich, a famous admiral who served 
 under both Cromwell and Charles II., is said to 
 have been the inventor of the sandwich composed 
 of two pieces of bread and a thin slice of ham 
 or other meat. 
 
 To simpson — to adulterate milk by adding 
 water thereto, from a dairyman of this name who 
 in the sixties was prosecuted on this account. 
 
 Some of the special terms used in Wall street 
 and their meanings include : 
 
 Averaging — buying or selling stocks on a 
 scale. 
 
 Bear — one who has sold stocks and who gains 
 by a decline. 
 
 Big board — the New York Stock Exchange. 
 
 Blind pool — a close corporation ; one which 
 does not issue any statement of expenses or earn-
 
 CONCLUSION. 259 
 
 Block — a number of shares bought or sold in 
 a lump. 
 
 Boom — the opposite of a slump. 
 
 Bottom — the lowest point or price reached by 
 a stock. 
 
 Break — a sudden decline caused by a strin- 
 gency in the money market. 
 
 Bucketing — to execute orders in stocks without 
 dealing on any regular exchange. 
 
 Bulge — the upward movement of a stock. 
 
 Bull — one who has bought stocks, expecting 
 an advance. 
 
 Carrying — to hold a stock with the expecta- 
 tion of an advance. 
 
 Collateral — any security given in pawn when 
 money is borrowed. 
 
 Covering — buying stock to satisfy a short sale 
 on the day of delivery. 
 
 Crazy market — one which fluctuates violently 
 without apparent reason. 
 
 Hunch — a tip based on one's instinct or impres- 
 sion. 
 
 Insider — one who causes a movement in the 
 stock market. 
 
 Irish dividend — an assessment upon stock- 
 holders. 
 
 Lamb — a new speculator without knowledge 
 of the market or its methods. 
 
 Leading — to buy stocks heavily. 
 
 Long — to have bought for a rise. 
 
 On 'Change — the floor of the Stock Exchange. 
 
 Piker — a small speculator.
 
 260 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 Plunger — one who deals heavily in stocks, 
 taking great risks. 
 
 Pool — the stock and money contributed by a 
 clique to carry through a corner. 
 
 Scalping — buying or selling stocks on slight 
 fluctuations. 
 
 Short — one who has sold stocks for a decline. 
 
 Slump — a sudden decline in the price of 
 stocks. 
 
 Squeeze — a sudden movement of the market 
 which forces the bulls or bears to close out their 
 stocks at a loss. 
 
 Tip — private information in advance of the 
 movement of a stock. 
 
 Top — the highest quotation of a stock. 
 
 Unloading — to sell out stocks which have been 
 carried for some time. 
 
 Watering — to increase the quantity of a stock 
 without improving its quality. 
 
 Writing in Harper's M'agaziyie, Mr. Ho wells 
 uses the word aijocryphers. Also this : " The 
 events of the Summer Islands are few, and none 
 of the order of athletics between teams of the 
 army and navy, and what may be called socie- 
 tetics, have happened in that past enchanted fort- 
 night." 
 
 H.'M. Alden: "We are so fixed in our fine 
 cosmicity," etc. 
 
 In Papa Bouchard ]Molly Elliot Seawell says : 
 "This cataclysm consisted of the simultaneous 
 departure, or rather levanting, of the entire mas- 
 culine element." In the same story she uses 
 
 I
 
 CONCLUSION. 261 
 
 debonairness and larkij — "and if Victor led the 
 larky life you so unjustly suspect him of," etc. 
 
 Eugene Wood, in a short story, has this : " 'My 
 child I my child!' peacocked Mrs. O' Conor from 
 the head of the stairs, followed by the sedater 
 flither." 
 
 To give in detail recent word-coinage in mat- 
 ters of science and technics would be equiva- 
 lent almost to writing a history of modern scien- 
 tific and technical evolution, and so I have con- 
 fined myself chiefly to words used in imaginative 
 work. F. M. F. Cazin calls my attention to an 
 expression which, though of scientific importance, 
 indicates only an imaginary thing. "Average 
 section^' is the resulting section when a volume of 
 irregular form and a stated length is transformed 
 into a volume of regular form, and uniform section 
 of the same stated length. The action of a ship 
 in continuous displacement after initial immer- 
 sion cannot be fully explained or mathematically 
 expressed without the use of Mr. Cazin's term. 
 
 Holman F. Day has this in one of his verses : 
 
 '•You could hear the c-ronching-cranchiyig of his 
 swashing spike-sole boots." 
 
 The editor of a Philadelphia journal says : 
 " The storiest (meaning the story-teller or nov- 
 elist) has his opportunity to shame formal history 
 by the exactitude of his picture." 
 
 Dr. John H. Girdner and others use the phrase, 
 "pracfiser of surgery," and why isn't this better 
 than practitioner?
 
 262 AVORD-COINAGE. 
 
 Duncan Smith, in a translation of fragment 22 
 from the Greek of Simouides of Ceos, has this 
 line : 
 
 O Pather Zeus, to usward change thy will. 
 
 Several exponents of the so-called New Thought, 
 among them Henry Wood, use the mysterious col- 
 location, at-oiie-ment. 
 
 Edgar Saltus, in a short story, says : " Barring 
 two others, the rest of the party interested me but 
 mediocrally. 
 
 Why not ordinarily say haps for happenings ? 
 The editor of Harper's Magazine and others have 
 so used it. 
 
 Edith Wharton speaks of a '' skyey task." 
 
 Marguerite Merington, in A Gainshoroarjli 
 Lady, makes an adjective of chance — chancy; 
 also uses dalnt for dainty. 
 
 In an article Henry Holt mentions " bratify- 
 ing spectacles." 
 
 In a recent editorial the New York World 
 said : " Milady has made up her mind that she 
 had as much right to after-danj liberty as 
 Milord." 
 
 In a short story William Bulfin wrote : " The 
 creamy, silky fleeces of the merinos rolled their 
 greasy folds on the boarded floor of the vast shed 
 as they fell under the snick-snicking of a hundred 
 pairs of shears." • 
 
 Carlyle, in his essay on Boswell, used the word 
 "gigmanity," which has been defined as a sar- 
 castic synonym for pseudo-respectability.
 
 CONCLUSION. 263 
 
 The literary critic, Alfred ^Mathews, has al- 
 luded to the " paeanesque swagger " of a certain 
 book. 
 
 William S. Walsh says : " When a novel is 
 turned into a play, you say that the novel has 
 been dramatized. There is no analogous word 
 for the turning of a play into a novel. Yet the 
 word is needed, because the thing, though un- 
 usual, is not unknown to literature. 
 The problem now presented . . . is to find a 
 neat, expressive, and intelligible word that will 
 be a fit corollary to 'dramatize,' and will describe 
 the act of making a novel out of a drama. ' Fic- 
 tionize' is hopeless." Many writers have used 
 " novelize" in default of anything better. 
 
 Here is a little sensible philology from the pen 
 of the President of the United States — Theodore 
 Roosevelt : " In the books the bobcat is always 
 called a lynx, which it is, of course ; but when- 
 ever a hunter or trapper speaks of a lynx (which 
 he usually calls 'link,' feeling dimly that the 
 other pronunciation is a plural) he means a lu- 
 civee. Bobcat is a good distinctive name, and it 
 is one which I think the book people might with 
 advantage adopt ; for wildcat, which is the name 
 given to the small lynx in the East, is already 
 preempted by the true wildcat of Europe. 
 Like all people of European descent who have 
 gone into strange lands, we Americans have 
 christened our wild beasts with a fine disregard 
 for their specific and generic relations. We called 
 the bison ' buftalo ' as long as it existed, and we
 
 264 WORD-COINAGE. 
 
 still call the big stag an 'elk,' instead of using 
 for it the excellent term wapiti ; on the other 
 hand, to the true elk and the reindeer we gave 
 the new names of moose and caribou — excellent 
 names, too, by the way. The prong buck is 
 always called antelope, though it is not an ante- 
 lope at all ; and the white goat is not a goat ; 
 while the distinctive name of ' big-horn ' is rarely 
 used for the mountain sheep. In most cases, how- 
 ever, it is mere pedantry to try to upset popular 
 custom in such matters ; and where, as with the 
 bobcat, a perfectly good name is taken, it would 
 be better for scientific men to adopt it. I may 
 add that in this particular of nomenclature we 
 are no worse sinners than other people. The 
 English in Ceylon, the English and Dutch in 
 South Africa, and the Spanish in South America 
 have all shown the same genius for misnaming 
 beasts and birds." 
 
 A well-known woman writer sometimes uses 
 bloivth for bloom, and I have noticed that she is 
 not the only one who so employs it. 
 
 The late Senator Dr. Kyle, of South Dakota, 
 described himself as an Indocmf, that is, he 
 was Independent and a Democrat — a little of 
 each. At one time — some ten years ago — the es- 
 tablishment of an Indocratic party was seriously 
 proposed, but came to nothing. 
 
 The following is condensed from a newspaper 
 article : When, not long ago, a certain young scion 
 of French nobility began squandering his wife's 
 property without rhyme or reason, the doctors
 
 CONCLUSION. 265 
 
 were asked to tell what was the matter with him. 
 They refused to believe it was just old-fashioned 
 depravity or profligacy ; but they proved the 
 case with sufficient pathologic care by taking 
 the Greek word " Coeu" meaning " common," 
 and another Greek word, " esthesi.%" meaning taste 
 (from which we get esthetic), and putting them 
 together thus, coenesthesi-% which they defined as 
 a determination to communism. Thus science 
 steps in to spare the feelings of a nobleman with 
 a tendency to give away things, especially things 
 belonging to somebody else. 
 
 Carolyn Wells is responsible for iviseaereage. 
 
 Says a New York literary journal : " One of 
 the things one wishes one had said, and which one 
 might so easily have said after some one else has 
 said it, is found in the opening chapter of John 
 Kendrick Bangs' clever story, The Enchanted 
 Type-writer. In explaining his use of the word 
 
 * monkey ' as a verb, Mr. Bangs admits that it 
 may savor somewhat of what a friend of his calls 
 the 'English slanguage,' as distinguished from 
 
 * Andrew Language.' The difference could hardly 
 have been more neatly expressed, yet it is obvi- 
 ously so easy to say." 
 
 John W. Foster, ex-Secretary of State, in show- 
 ing the modem origin of the word diplomacy, 
 points out that it is " derived from the word dij)- 
 loma, the significance of which grew out of the 
 practice of sovereigns of the medij?eval period, fol- 
 lowing the Roman method of preservation of im- 
 portant documents, in having their royal war-
 
 266 WORD-COIXAGE. 
 
 rants, decrees, and finally their treaties carefully 
 inscribed on parchments or diplomas." 
 
 Some writer whom I cannot identify has given 
 this origin to the word tantalize : A long time 
 ago a wicked king named Tantalus lived in 
 Phrygia, and in order to punish him the gods put 
 him in a large tank almost full of water. Near 
 him grew trees loaded with delicious fruits, and 
 the boughs were almost within his reach. But 
 every time he tried to pluck an orange or a pome- 
 granate the limbs of the trees would wave beyond 
 his grasp and he could not relieve his hunger. 
 Whenever he bent his head to drink of the water 
 that surrounded him it would shrink away from 
 his lips, and he never could touch it. From the 
 name Tantalus we get our word '' tantalize." To 
 show some good thing just ahead and yet keep the 
 hopeful person from reaching it is the worst kind 
 of teasing. It is really tantalizing. 
 
 A Philadelphia dramatic critic recently spoke 
 of the underdoneness of a certain play. 
 
 Flora Bigelow Dodge has given us hideos- 
 ities. 
 
 It is rightly contended that the term " wireless 
 telegraphy " is not only too long and cumbersome, 
 but a misnomer as well. Various persons have 
 tried to think of a short, pronounceable name, of 
 irreproachable linguistic antecedents, and such 
 as to be acceptable to those speaking languages 
 other than English. Among the names sug- 
 gested thus far have been, Marconi grapliy, cdmog- 
 raphy, etherography, ethergraphy, conigrapliyy 
 
 I
 
 CONCLUSIOX. 267 
 
 syntography, etc. Doubtless some term much 
 better thau any of these will be found. 
 
 And DOW, kind reader, let us part with an 
 amiable understanding, if jwssible. If I agree 
 with you that really no great gain to the lan- 
 guage seems to have resulted from any of our 
 authors cited in this book, will you not admit 
 that the study has been both interesting and 
 profitable — in that you see words in a new and 
 more potential light ? For the shortcomings of 
 the work I ask your indulgence ; and to all who 
 have rendered me assistance I feel most deeply 
 indebted.
 
 i
 
 INDEX. 
 
 All new words and variants are indicated by italics. 
 
 Abutter, 132. 
 
 Academy, An International, 
 247', 248. 
 
 The Flemish, 214. 
 
 The French, 53. 
 
 The London, 211. 
 Adams, Hon. Charles Francis, 
 226. 
 
 John, 129. 
 Ade, George, 170. 
 Adjective, the tired, 49. 
 Adler, Dr. Felix, .52. 
 Advice and consent, 129. 
 Affective, 123. 
 AJter-dary, 262. 
 Agnostic. 67. 
 Agronomy, 70. 
 Agrotechny, 70. 
 Alamagoozilum, 197. 
 Alden. Henry Mills, 260. 
 
 William L., 175, 176. 
 Aldrich. Thomas Bailey, 95. 
 Alexander the Great, 16. 
 Allen, James Lane, 174. 
 
 Professor Thomas J., 141, 
 229, 2.30. 
 Alphabet, the Roman, 243, 244. 
 Altitudinoiis, 106. 
 Altrospection, 69. 
 Altruria, 88, 147. 
 Alula. 122. 
 Arnbiguify, 144. 
 
 American Dialect Society. 196. 
 American Philological 'Asso- 
 ciation, 241. 
 Americanese, 205. 
 Americanisms, 192, 249. 
 Amerieaphiles, 213. 
 AmerirMphobes, 213. 
 Analogy, 162. 
 
 Andrews, Professor E. Benja- 
 min, 87. 
 
 Anecdotage, 104. 
 Anemic words, 85. 
 Anglo-Saxon, 222, 223. 
 
 adjectives, 14. 
 
 intinitives, 13. 
 Anthropocentric, 100. 
 Antres, 122. 
 Apocryphers, 260. 
 Appleton, Thomas, 40. 
 Archteologv, 8. 
 Archer, Wi'lliam, 16, 36, 227. 
 Arden, In the Forest of, 28. 
 Arful, 14. 
 Aristotle, 47, 179. 
 Arnold, Matthew, 94, 228. 
 Artine, 209. 
 Aryan roots, 3. 
 A Sentimental Journey, 40. 
 Asiotic, 84. 
 
 Atherton, Gertrade, 90. 
 Atlantic Monthly, 78, 79, 148. 
 Atmography, 266. 
 At-one-ment, 262. 
 Aureole, 9.3. 
 Aido-drome, 119. 
 Autolatry, 98. 
 Automobilically, 90. 
 Auto-typed, 119. 
 Ayres, Alfred, 105. 
 
 Bacon. Francis, 41, 228. 
 Bailev. Professor L. H., 116. 
 Ball, Sir Robert. 232. 
 Balmyann-s, 211. 
 Bamboozle, 178. 
 Bangs, John Kendrick, 265. 
 Barnard, Charles, 152. 
 Barnum. P. T., 193. 
 Barr. Amelia E., 149. 
 
 Robert, 153. 
 Barrie, J. M.,204. 
 Bartlett, John Russell, 163. 
 
 269
 
 270 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Bashkirtseff, Marie, 29. 
 
 Beers, Professor Henry A., 103. 
 
 Begraffed, 219. 
 
 Belknap, Jeremy, 129. 
 
 Bell, Lillian, 146. 
 
 Ben Bolt, 79. 
 
 Benedict, Dr. A. L., 243, 245. 
 
 Bentham, Jeremy, 214. 
 
 Benton, Joel, 103.* 
 
 Beresford, Lord Charles, 250. 
 
 Berg, 55. 
 
 Best, Eva, 254. 
 
 Betweenlties, 106. 
 
 Bibliocranks, 36. 
 
 Bibliomaniac, 36. 
 
 Biblioparnoiacs, 36. 
 
 Blbliophrodisiacs, 36. 
 
 Bibliotics, 72, 77. 
 
 Bicycler, 132. 
 
 Big words, 214, 215, 216. 
 
 Bilbo, 219. 
 
 Bilderback, 99. 
 
 Billings, Josh, 189, 
 
 Billiwinking, 219. 
 
 Biltong, 55. 
 
 Bindery, 131. 
 
 Birmingham, 108. 
 
 Bismarck, 216. 
 
 Blanks, 132. 
 
 Blind Man's Alley, 84. 
 
 Block, 132. 
 
 Blockheads, 57. 
 
 Blowth, 264. 
 
 Blnedomer, 211. 
 
 Bobcat, 263. 
 
 Boc, 57. 
 
 Bog, 57. 
 
 Bogus, 56. 
 
 Boissier, Gaston, 53, 54. 
 
 Bom-bom, 62. 
 
 Bookery, 131. 
 
 Boom, 181. 
 
 Borey, 207. 
 
 Bosc, 93. 
 
 Boss. 129. 
 
 Boston brown bread, 133. 
 
 words coined in, 126-133. 
 Bostonian Society, 127. 
 Boswell, James, S. 
 Boycott, 64. 
 
 Bradley, Sarah Guernsey, 140. 
 Braid, Dr. James, 139. 
 Braird, 122. 
 
 Br6al, Professor Michel, v, 5, 
 
 11, 14, 196, 239. 
 Bree-reeing, 114. 
 Breme, 14. 
 Brick, 179. 
 
 Brinton, Professor D. G., 75. 
 Briscoe, Margaret Sutton, 152. 
 Brit, 124. 
 Brolliant, 219. 
 Bronteized, 115. 
 Broodle, 88. 
 
 Browning, Robert, 28, 102. 
 Brugmaim, Carl, 44. 
 Brummagem, 107. 
 Bubble, 126. 
 Buck, Gertrude, 46. 
 Buffon, 40. 
 Bulfin, William, 262. 
 Bulgaroons, 219. 
 Bull-dogged, 140. 
 Bullv, 60. 
 Bum'foozled, 203. 
 Buole, 60. 
 
 Burdette, Robert J., 98, 99. 
 Burke, Edmund, 2. 
 Burns, Robert, 29. 
 Burroughs, John, 25. 35, 100. 
 Burrowes, Rev. Dr., 7. 
 Burton, Professor Richard, 83, 
 
 140, 199. 
 Bushed, 196. 
 Byron, Lord, 110. 
 
 Cable, George W., 147, 173. 
 
 Cad, 60. 
 
 Caesar, 16, 107. 
 
 Caird, Dr. Edward. 195. 
 
 California, words from, 181. 
 
 Cambridge University, 5. 
 
 Cantankerous, 201. 
 
 Card, Professor, 118. 
 
 Carlvle, Thomas, 39, 46, 171. 
 
 Carlvlese. 43. 
 
 Carroll, Louis (Dr. Dodgson), 
 
 206. 
 Catastrified, 219. 
 Catullus, 179. 
 Caucus, 128. 
 Causer, 142. 
 Centrogenesis, 117. 
 Century Dictionary, 3, 79, 95, 
 
 100, 152. 181, 235. 
 Cerebrality, 257. 
 
 J
 
 INDEX. 
 
 271 
 
 Chancy, 262. 
 
 Changes in language, 190, 240. 
 
 Charles V., 217. 
 
 Chaser, 183. 
 
 Chaucer, Geoflfry, 201, 233. 
 
 Chesterfield, Lord, i. 
 
 Chinese, 62, 63. 
 
 Chivy, 106. 
 
 Chow-chow, 62. 
 
 Chromo, 132. 
 
 Chrysocracy, 252. 
 
 Chumlock, 103. 
 
 Chuuies, 195. 
 
 Churchill, Winston, 153. 
 
 Cinch, 180. 
 
 Cinematograph, 212. 
 
 Claneocracy, 120. 
 
 Clapp, Henry Austin, 88. 
 
 Clarid, 122. 
 
 Cleopatra, 236. 
 
 Cleveland, Grover, 63. 
 
 Closet-verse, 102. 
 
 Coaster, 127. 
 
 Coco, 56. 
 
 Coenesthesis, 265. 
 
 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 95. 
 
 College slang, 186. 
 
 Colloquialisms, 193, 200. 
 
 Combination, the wonders of, 
 
 238. 
 Commandeer, 55. 
 Commando, 55. 
 Commonwealth, 129. 
 Cnrn m unal-wtensity , 117. 
 Commute, 130. 
 Cornpendence, 111. 
 Com pendency, 111. 
 Composition of English words, 
 
 225. 
 Compound words, 11; 225, 226. 
 Comprompo, 198. 
 Comte, Auguste, 35. 
 Conferentia, 68. 
 Confliimtion,212. 
 Congenials, 82. 
 Con'plomerafion, 86. 
 Conigraphy, 266. 
 Conservative. 37. 
 Constructive power of English, 
 
 223. 
 Conteke,'201. 
 Contraversion., ^8. 
 Converse, C. C.,105. 
 
 Coof, 198. 
 
 Cook, Kev. Joseph, 67, 
 
 Coolth, 254. 
 
 Coosters, 197. 
 
 Cope, E. D., 75, 76. 
 
 Copyosis, 143. 
 
 Corder, 131. 
 
 Corijty-U'hifty, 101. 
 
 Cornwall, Barry, 78. 
 
 Oorogna, 60. 
 
 Cosmicity, 260. 
 
 Cosmopathic, 137. 
 
 Craddock, Charles Egbert (Miss 
 
 Murfree), 201. 
 Crane, Stephen, 32, 189. 
 Crawford, F. Marion, 99, 148,173. 
 Crebcaking, 113. 
 Crescive, 122. 
 Crisping. 95, 96. 
 Croker, John Wilson, 8. 
 Cromwell, Oliver, 172. 
 Cronching-cranching , 261. 
 Crotion, 211. 
 
 Cidtural-deoeneracy, 117. 
 Cidturine, 209. 
 Curtiosity, 38. 
 Curtis, George William, 251. 
 
 Isabel Gordon, 143. 
 " Cussedness," 87. 
 Cust, Mrs. Henry, v. 
 Cuttage, 116. 
 Cyamologer, 133. 
 Cyamologist, 133. 
 Cyamology, 133. 
 Cyamomystical, 134. 
 Cyamophagi, 134. 
 Cyamophagist, 134. 
 Cyamophifist, 134. 
 I Cynophiles, 83. 
 
 ' Dab, 194. 
 ! Daint, 262. 
 
 Danes, 228. 
 I Dante, 28. 
 
 Danton, Jacques-George, 226. 
 
 Davies, T. L. O., 60. 
 
 Dav, Holman F., 261. 
 
 Day-down, 198. 
 
 Deavihropomorphization, 95. 
 
 Decline of Greek study, 229. 
 
 r>e feminization, 115. 
 1 Deficiencies in the English 
 I language, 191, 237.
 
 272 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 De Foe, Daniel, 41. 
 
 De Forei>t, J. W., U9. 
 
 Deluud, Margaret, 150, 
 
 Delphicalhj, 254. 
 
 Delta, 85. 
 
 De Mille, James, 34, 225, 226. 
 
 Democrat, lol. 
 
 Dcndral, 103. 
 
 Denscnimh 78. 
 
 Ihpcndablc, 114. 
 
 Depreciating, 128. 
 
 Dt'provincializtd, 116. 
 
 Dcviator, 115. 
 
 Dt'.i:tro-ccrebriiI, 137. 
 
 Bialcctophobc.<:, 104. 
 
 Dialedophobin, 104. 
 
 Dickens, Charles, 174. 
 
 Diet, 145. 
 
 Di[Tercntin. 68. 
 
 Dingbat, li>6. 
 
 Dingswizzled, 197. 
 
 Dinked, 195. 
 
 Diitkunabulum, 219. 
 
 Dinky. 169. 
 
 Piphu ro(7(i>i:.<i.<, 117. 
 
 Diplomacy, 265. 
 
 Diplomatics, 73, 75. 
 
 Di.'^('onciirit.<ta>t, 100. 
 
 Pi.<ntiiifii.<iii' , 102. 
 
 " Disgrnntled," 120. 
 
 Disner, 61. 
 
 Diiiplaced stress, 85. 
 
 Di><tinctio>iar!/, 255. 
 
 Dirina Conimedia, The, 30. 
 
 Dix, Dorothy, 251. 
 
 Dockage, 131. 
 
 Dodderig. 4. 
 
 Dodolga, 4. 
 
 Dodunk, 198. 
 
 BoUphin, 101. 
 
 Donga, 55. 
 
 Dooming-board, 132. 
 
 Doran, Edwin W., 235. 
 
 Dorp, 55. 
 
 Dother, 4. 
 
 Douglass. William, 128. 
 
 Do-nps, 197. 
 
 Dressmaker, 132. 
 
 Drift, 55. 
 
 Drvden, John, 42. 
 
 Dude, 3. 
 
 Pudelkop, 4. 
 
 Duer, Caroline K., 144. 
 
 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 149. 
 Dunch, 198. 
 Dunne, F. P., 170. 
 Didiolatry, 251. 
 Di/namic, 86. 
 Dyrne, 14. 
 
 Earle, John, 156. 
 
 East Frisian words, 4. 
 
 East-side (N. Y.) slang, 164, 184. 
 
 Ece, 14. 
 
 Edwards, Louise Betts, 253. 
 
 Osman, 251. 
 Effcminization, 115. 
 Eggleston, f]dward, 205. 
 
 George Cary, 158. 
 Electioneering, 129. 
 Elevator, 126. 
 Elfscine, 14. 
 Eliot, Charles William, 149. 
 
 George, 34, 173. 
 Elizabethan words, 3. 
 Elliptic phrases, 202. 
 Elshemus, Louis M., 79. 
 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 25, 50, 
 
 51, 186. 
 Encoitntcrable, 258. 
 Endi/minn, 19. 
 English, Thomas Dunn, 79. 
 Englishmen, the great word- 
 makers, 120. 
 Entencephalic, 137. 
 Episodic. 115. 
 Eraoomplt, 144. 
 Erne, Lord 64. 
 Ernst, C. W., 126. 
 EntnoQraplii/, 73. 
 Ethergraphti, 266. 
 Ethero(jrap'/u/, 266. 
 Eutmpelin, 68. 
 Eutrapelous, 68. 
 Eventless, 80. 
 Even/-dai/ English, 34. 230. 
 Evolution of language, 237. 
 E.vactarian, 252. 
 E.ti'e»tric, 80. 
 Expellent, 100. 
 Express, 128. 
 
 Factory, 131. 
 
 Fad. 205. 
 
 Family names, 57, 58, 59. 
 
 Faunian, 93.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 273 
 
 Faust, 30. 
 
 Fawcett, Edgar, SI. 
 Foninology, 87. 
 Ferris, Mtirv L. D., 143. 
 Field, Eugene, 21, 36. 
 Filibuster, GO. 
 FiUphia, 141. 
 Filofloss, 10. 
 Fin used as a verb, 83. 
 Finic, 252. 
 Fireward, 132. 
 Fiske. Professor John, 95. 
 Flabbergasted. 203. 
 Flaubert, Gustave, 38, 39. 
 ropuh'iit, 212. 
 Floughs, 219. 
 
 Flournoy, Professor, 227. 
 Fluotuaiin<r, 128. 
 Flynt, Josiah, 168. 
 Folk-speech, 195. 
 Fontein, 55. 
 Ford, James L., 209. 
 Forlornitv, 253. 
 Foster. Hon. John W., 265. 
 Franklin, Benjamin, 37. 
 Fraternia. SS. 
 Frau, 218. 
 
 Frazer. Dr. Persifor. 70-77. 
 Frederick the Great, 216. 
 French Revolution. The. 6. 
 Fvb.^ij. 207. 
 Fudee. 38. 
 
 '• Fulsrence " used as a noun, 93. 
 Fulke, Thomas, 6. 
 Fuller, Margaret. 110. 
 Fnlmant, 112. 
 Finnor. 219. 
 Furqitiouf'. 102. 
 
 Furness. Dr. Horace Ho-ward, 
 73, 74. 75. 
 
 Gallaher. Grace Margaret, 207. 
 • raUeyied. ICS. 
 (^alloptious. 197. 
 Gallowed. 219. 
 Gau£r Rule. 64. 
 Garsrlv. 203. 
 
 Garland, Hamlin, 173. 189. 
 Garrison, Theodosia Pickering, 
 ia5. 
 
 Gas. 256. 
 
 Gates. Professor Elmer, 134. 
 Professor Louis E., 150. 
 
 IS 
 
 GoUin, 218. 
 
 Gatilegreens, 219. 
 
 Gemahlin, 218. 
 
 Geminy, 103. 
 
 Genet, Citizen, 131. 
 
 George III., 107. 
 
 Gtrard, M., 54. 
 
 Gtjrman language, the, 215, 217. 
 
 Gerrymander. 178. 
 
 Gignianilv, 262. 
 
 Gilchrist," Mrs., 208. 
 
 Gilman, Daniel G., 149. 
 
 Ging, 14. 
 
 Girdner, Dr. John H., 252, 261. 
 
 Glabberiug, 184. 
 
 Gladstone, William E., 215. 
 
 Glatiering, 184. 
 
 GluQ, 212. 
 
 GliiJcy, 212. 
 
 Goethe von, Johanu Wolfgang, 
 103. 
 
 Goldsmith, Oliver. 38. 
 
 GoUiwomblo^, 219. 
 
 Goober-grubber, 198. 
 t Goodies, 132. 
 i Googoo, 62. 
 
 1 Gordon, Julien (Mrs. Van 
 j Renssalaer Crugert, 2.53. 
 
 I Goss, Rev. Charles Frederick, 
 I 106. 
 
 Gothamite, 2. 
 ' Gmfiage. 116. 
 , Grdmmaphoiy, 72, 77. 
 ■ Graphnnatomy, 73. 
 
 Graph Uosophy, 73. 
 i Graphopheny, 73. 
 ' Graphoplastir, 75. 
 
 Graphoplaxy, 75. 
 
 Graphopsyc'hology, 74. 
 
 Gmphosc'opu, 73. 
 
 Grav, Thornas, 66. 
 
 Great Scott. 176. 
 
 I Greenough, Professor James 
 Bradstreet, 43. 
 
 Greeve.<', 219. 
 
 GrieHet, 100. 
 
 Grimlic, 14. 
 
 Grimm's Deutsche Mythdogie, 4. 
 
 Grubstake. 181. 
 
 Grundv, Mrs., 63. 
 
 Guide," 82. 
 
 Habberton, John, 84.
 
 274 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Hador, 14. 
 
 Haire, Robert W., 246. 
 
 Hale, Rev. Edward Everett, 107. 
 
 Half- Gothic, 86. 
 
 Halig, 14. 
 
 Hamlet, 30, 182, 233. 
 
 Hancock, H. Irving, 62. 
 
 Hand-holds, 92, 
 
 Handkerchiejiet, 100. 
 
 Haps, 262. 
 
 Harland, Marion, 105. 
 
 Harness, 128. 
 
 Harris, Joel Chandler, 174. 
 
 Harrison, Mrs. Burton, 150. 
 
 Frederic, 221. 
 Hart, yir Robert, 145. 
 Harte, Bret, 125, 173. 
 Hartmann, Dr. Franz, 252. 
 Hawthorne, Julian, 218. 
 
 Nathaniel, 37, 
 Heading-up, 83. 
 HeaUhology, 233. 
 Heap-sight, 202, 203. 
 Hello, 132. 
 Help, 130. 
 Hempl, Professor George, 84, 
 
 194. 
 Henderson, William J., 96. 
 Henry VIII., 174. 
 Heredity in speech, 232. 
 Heterophemy, 30, 71. 
 Hewlett, Maurice, 96. 
 Hevlin's Observations, etc., 7. 
 Hideosities, 266. 
 Higginson, Thomas Went- 
 
 worth, 78. 
 Hike, Hiker, Hiking, 62. 
 Hill, Professor Adams S., 183, 
 
 155. 
 Hippopsean, 91. 
 Hobos, 179. 
 
 Hobson, Lieutenant R. P., 64. 
 Hobsonization, 65. 
 Hobsonize, 65. 
 Hogo, 199. 
 
 Holden, Professor E. S., 234. 
 Holland, 130. 
 
 Dr. W. J., 187. 
 Holt, Henry, 262. 
 Homeoidal, 111. 
 Homeoidality, 111. 
 Homer, 229, 280. 
 Hooliganism, 64. 
 
 Hoosier dialect, 200, 202. 
 Horace, 229, 230. 
 Hornswaggled, 197. 
 Hovey, Richard, 22, 23. 
 Howells, William Dean, 25, 88, 
 
 147, 173, 254, 260. 
 Hubbard. Elbert, 111, 209. 
 Huggernum Buff, 198. 
 Hughes, Rupert, 104. 
 Humbug, 178. 
 Huneker, James G., 96. 
 Hunkersliding, 198. 
 Hunt, Leigh, 18. 
 Hunter-brute, 123. 
 Hustler, 163. 
 Huxley, Professor T. H., 35, 41, 
 
 67. 
 Hydrogen, 5. 
 Hyperpromethia, 137. 
 Hypethral, 103. 
 Hypnopompic, 138. 
 Hypnotic, etc., 139. 
 Hyslop, Professor James H., 68. 
 
 Ideate, 123. 
 
 Ideatia, 128. 
 
 Iliad, The, 30, 188. 
 
 Immigrant, 129. 
 
 Imp-gels, 84. 
 
 Incompoop, 211. 
 
 Indiana, folk speech in, 200. 
 
 Indocrat, 264. 
 
 Indo-European, 18, 44. 
 i Infurled, 105. 
 
 Ingersoll, Ernest, 79. 
 I Innocentism, 116. 
 " Insinuendo, 102. 
 
 Intern, 126. 
 i Inter-tillaqe, 116. 
 I Invedor, 219. 
 
 Inwidda, 14. 
 
 Ipecactus, 101. 
 
 Irreluctant, 88. 
 
 Irving, Washington, 2. 
 
 Isomodal, 96. 
 
 Israelites, The, 26. 
 
 Italian half-Gothic, 86. 
 
 Jabberwock, 206. 
 
 Jackson, Edward Payson, 141. 
 
 Jamboree, 203. 
 
 James, Henry, 147, 207. 
 
 Jo^m, 87.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 275 
 
 Jefferson, Thomas, 131. 
 
 Jejune, 61. 
 
 Jiggumbob, 205. 
 
 Jimmermerig, 205. 
 
 Jobbernowl, 206. 
 
 Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 7, 8, 9, 10, 
 
 30, 128, 156. 
 Professor William Preston, 
 
 157. 
 Jones, Sir William, 44. 
 Joubert, Joseph, 48, 227, 228. 
 Jours, 91. 
 Juberous, 203. 
 Jukes, 99. 
 Jumpy. 207. 
 Junius, 39. 
 Juvenal, 179. 
 
 Kabang, 196. 
 
 Kachunck, 196. 
 
 Kaflop, 196. 
 
 Kakistocracy , 69. 
 
 Kangarooster, 101. 
 
 Kaslam, 196. 
 
 Keats, John, 19. 
 
 Keeley. John W., 1. 
 
 Keith, B. F., 183. 
 
 Kellner, 61. 
 
 Kibosh, 209. 
 
 King, General Charles, 146. 
 
 Kipling. Rudvard, 38, 39, 52, 68, 
 
 121, 173, "211. 
 Kittredge, Professor George 
 
 Lyman, 43. 
 Klip, 5-5. 
 Kloof, 55. 
 Kopje, 55. 
 Kraal, 55. 
 
 Krehbiel, Henrv E., 96. 
 Kroll. Rev. Anselm, 68. 
 Kyle, Dr., 264. 
 
 Laager, 55. 
 
 Ladd, Professor George Trum- 
 bull, 123. 
 Lalla Bookh, 38. 
 Lamb, Charles, 39. 
 Lampman, Archibald, 122. 
 Land Leaguers, the Irish. 64. 
 Landor, Walter Savage, 49, 94. 
 Landscape-horticulture. 111. 
 Latin, words from the, 224, 247. 
 " Laud" used as a noun, 140. 
 
 Lavadan, M., 54. 
 Lavoisieur, M., 5, 6. 
 Layer age, 116. 
 Leqatioaers, 63. 
 Lenard, M., 39. 
 Lermontoff, 237. 
 Lessless, 207. 
 
 Lexicographer, Johnson's defi- 
 nition of, 9. 
 Liber, ol. 
 
 Liddell, Professor Mark H.,231. 
 Limbs, 132. 
 LittlelA.^t, 90. 
 Littre, M., 54. 
 Loanor, 143. 
 Loathy, '2ldl. 
 Lobscouse, 197. 
 Lockwood, Colonel H. C, 120. 
 
 Ingersoll, 118. 
 Lolly, 197. 
 London Academy, 211. 
 
 Philological Society, 3. 
 
 Spectator, 120. 
 Loomis, Charles Battel!, 87. 
 Loper. 197. 
 Loplollv, 196. 
 Lot, 128. 
 
 Louis XIV., 107. 
 Louis XV., 56. 
 Low German words, 4. 
 Lowell, James Russell, 103. 
 Lumber, 128. 
 Lyronym, 78. 
 
 McCosh. Dr. James, 3-5. 
 McKinlev. William. 184. 
 Mabie. Hamilton W.. 28, 147. 
 Macarthur, Rev. R. S., 67. 
 Macaulav. Lord T. B., 31, 37, 
 
 156; 2.30. 
 Macchiavelli, 227. 
 Macrobioty. 36. 
 Madame Bovary, 38. 
 Mahan. Captain Alfred T., 80. 
 Maitland. J., 60. 
 Major, Charles, 87. 
 Mo'lfnlgence, 91. 
 Mahavelins. 197. 
 March. Professor F. A., 4, 242. 
 Marconioraphy, 266. 
 Marsh. George Perkins, 222. 
 Mason. Caroline A.. 88. 
 Mather, Increase, 129.
 
 276 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Mathews, Alfred, 263. 
 
 Matross, 198. 
 
 Matthews, Frances Aymar, 114. 
 
 Professor Brander, 2, 37, 
 121, 145, 248, 249. 
 Mealies, 55. 
 Mediocrally, 262. 
 Meeching, 196. 
 Membrenate, 219. 
 Merington, Marguerite, 262. 
 Merivale, Herman, 179. 
 Merrimac, 65. 
 
 Merryweather, F. Somer, 36. 
 Mesmer, Friedrich Anton, 139. 
 Messian, 68. 
 Metaphor, the, 46. 
 Metapharaphobia, 47. 
 Methectic, 138. 
 Metropoliarchy, 79. 
 Mex, 62. 
 
 Meynell, Mrs., 256. 
 Mezieres, M., 54. 
 Mezzofanti, Cardinal, vii. 
 Mifflin, Llovd, 90. 
 Milton, John, 221, 2^4. 
 ^Jiri(tgnos(ic, 35, 67. 
 Misholler, 144. 
 Mitchell, Donald G., 98. 
 M'm-h'm, 194. 
 Moany, 89. 
 Modig, 14. 
 Moli^re, 52. 
 Mommixed, 198. 
 Monoideism, 139. 
 Mono-ideology, 139. 
 MonopoUan, 90. 
 Monosyllables, 82. 
 Montaigne, 186. 
 Moore, George, 189. 
 
 Professor Charles H., 149. 
 
 Thomas, 38. 
 More, Hannah, 161. 
 Morley, Hon. John, 31. 
 Morpid, 219. 
 Morton, Thomas, 64. 
 Mosey, 201. 
 
 Mosso, Professor A., 144. 
 Mugwump, 178. 
 MunKittrick, R. K., 100. 
 Murid, 219. 
 Murray, Dr. James A. H., 3, 4, 
 
 60. 
 Murth, 124. 
 
 Mutoscope, 212. 
 Muxed up, 198. 
 Myers, F. W. H., 135. 
 
 Nadder, 255. 
 Naperon, 255. 
 Napoleon I., 59, 63, 217. 
 Nek, 55. 
 
 Neologisms, 78-160. 
 Neologistically, 90. 
 Neurohypnotism, 139. 
 Neurypnology , 139. 
 Nevada, slang in, 181. 
 Newyorkitis, 253. 
 Nicholls, George, 79. 
 Nicholson, Meredith, 202. 
 Nicoll, Dr. W. Robertson, 33. 
 Noink, 197. 
 
 Xomcn clatologicalistical, 107. 
 Nordau, Max, 36. 
 Norman-French, 33, 225. 
 Norton, Professor Charles E., 
 
 145. 
 Nouns, 50. 
 Nuciculture, 118. 
 
 Odyssey, the, 30. 
 Offscape, 118. 
 Olericulture, 118. 
 Onomatopoeia, 162. 
 Opsomania, 141. 
 Ord'narv, 201. 
 O'Rell, 5lax, 142. 
 Ornating, 253. 
 Orts, 194. 
 Osteopath, 35. 
 Osteopathy, 35. 
 I Ostraca, 57. 
 
 Oxford Dictionary, 72, 126. 
 Oxygen, 5, 6. 
 
 Packet. 128. 
 Padre Bandelli, 28. 
 Page, Professor Curtis Hidden, 
 102. 
 Thomas Nelson, 145. 
 Pall Mall Magazine, 16. 
 Palma, A. S., 60. 
 Pan, 55. 
 
 Panxsthesia, 138. 
 Panmnesia, 137. 
 Pantata, 179. 
 Paramnesia, 138. 
 
 I
 
 INDEX. 
 
 277 
 
 Paris, Matthew, IM. 
 Parker, Gilbert, 151, 173. 
 Paronyms. 38. 
 Passel, 203. 
 
 Patten, Professor Simon N., 69. 
 Paul, Jean, 30. 
 Saint, 254. 
 Pawky, 199. 
 Peach, 181. 
 Penandincompoop, 211. 
 Pentecost, Rev. George F., 1-42. 
 Perfunctory, 125. 
 Pernicketty, 140. 
 Perrv, Bliss, 148. 
 Peter Bell, 27. 
 Phaeton, 128. 
 Pheiwgraphy, 73. 
 Philippine slang, 62. 
 Phillips. 8. 
 PfiilopoUst, 106. 
 Philosography, 73. 
 Phonetics, vi, 243, 244, 245. 
 Pidget, 219. 
 Pitkin, Helen, 110. 
 Plasmenysis. 76. 
 Pla^mograpjhy , 73. 
 Plass€Cpha7iy, 76. 
 Plassmenyma, 73. 
 Pla.i:sogrdphy, 73. 
 Plassomenysis, 76. 
 Plassopheny, 72, 77. 
 Plato, 179. 
 " Plebisitary," 120. 
 Plur-anniial, 118. 
 Plmioloqy, 36. 
 Plutarch, 236. 
 Poe. Edsrar Allan, 114. 
 Poefhood, 103. 
 Polaric, 90. 
 Politethics, 81. 
 Polysemia, 196. 
 Pont, 55. 
 Poort, 55. 
 Pooster, 196. 
 
 Pope. Alexander, 3, 31, 156. 
 Possumist, 254. 
 
 Postgate, Professor J. P., vi. 
 Practiser, 261. 
 Prang, Louis, 132. 
 Pratt, C. E., 132. 
 "Precise" as a verb, 119. 
 Precisionist, 105. 
 Prefixes, 12, 13. 
 
 Preaervnline, 251. 
 j Preterits and past participles, 
 
 241, 242. 
 ' Preversion, 138 
 
 Printery, 131. 
 I Procrastinative, 106. 
 
 Proctor, Bryan Waller, 78. 
 
 Prornnesia, 1.38. 
 I Promoters, 128. 
 
 Propository, 96. 
 
 Prosalim, 209. 
 
 Provincialisms, 192-205. 
 
 Psalms of David, 22. 
 
 P^eudaleogmph, lb. 
 
 Pseudaleography, 75. 
 
 Pseud-annual, 117. 
 
 Psychology in language, 42, 43. 
 
 Psycho-physiology, 139. 
 
 Puccoon, 101. 
 
 Piifliite, 113. 
 
 Purkle, 219. 
 
 Pushkin, 237. 
 
 Putchiky, 198 
 
 Putnam, Ruth, 102. 
 
 Quackenbos, Professor John 
 
 Duncan, 141. 
 Quassid, 207. 
 Quern, 122. 
 Quinnydingles, 212. 
 Quotated, 79. 
 
 Raddled, 219. 
 
 Ranged V, 101. 
 
 Ralph, Julian, 218. 
 
 Rasped, 91. 
 
 Ravid, 219. 
 
 Read, Thomas Buchanan, 131. 
 
 Reade, Charles, 213. 
 
 Real-estate, 131. 
 
 Realf. Richard, 27. 
 
 Reckelsome, 102. 
 
 Redingote, 101. 
 
 Relationist. 157. 
 
 Remington, Frederick, 140. 
 
 Renan, M., 46. 
 
 Repolonization, 108. 
 
 Reskv, 195. 
 
 Resonant, 86. 
 
 " Restorator," 129, 
 
 Retrocngnition, 1.38. 
 
 Review. The Quarterly, 19. 
 
 Reynakaboo, 178.
 
 278 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Rhematology, vi. 
 
 Rheine, vi. 
 
 Rhetoric, 23, 27. 
 
 Rialto, tlie New York, 183. 
 
 Rideing, William H., 149. 
 
 Riley, James Whitcomb, 101, 
 
 205. 
 Roast'n ear, 199. 
 Roberts, Charles G. D., 151. 
 Robins, Elizabeth, 122. 
 Rodgers, Dr. M. M., 118. 
 Rof, U. 
 
 Rogers, Henry, 224. 
 Romeikiti!<, 111. 
 Romeo and Juliet, 30. 
 Roofer, 211. 
 
 Roosevelt, Theodore, 150. 
 Roseboro, Viola, 152. 
 Rote, 198. 
 
 Royal Irish Society, 7. 
 " Royal" used as a verb, 115. 
 Ruh, 14. 
 Rum, 127. 
 
 Runkle, Bertha, 189. 
 Rusk in, John, 2, 209, 221. 
 Russia, illiteracy in, 236. 
 Rusticrata, 198. 
 
 Saint-Beuve. 46, 114. 
 
 Salammb6, 38. 
 
 Saltus, Edgar, 89, 253, 262. 
 
 Sandal-wood ij, 104. 
 
 Sanscrit, 3. 
 
 Savorsome, 98. 
 
 "Savour" as an active verb, 
 
 123. 
 Scamuljugated, 197. 
 Scencan, 61. 
 Schelm, 61. 
 Schiller von, Johann Christoph 
 
 Friedrich, 237. 
 Schooner, 128. 
 Seine, 14. 
 
 Scollard, Clinton, 89. 
 Scopography, 73. 
 Scott, Dr. C. P. G., 4. 
 
 General Winfield, 176. 
 
 Professor Fred Newton, 46. 
 
 Sir Walter, 176. 
 Scrapple, 198. 
 Screel, 212. 
 ScrunQle, 212. 
 Scudder, Vida D., 150. 
 
 Scuds, 198. 
 
 Sea power, 80. 
 
 Seawell, Molly Elliot, 101. 
 
 Seedage, 116. 
 
 Sel, 14. 
 
 Selectmen, 127. 
 
 Sematics, v, 11, 195. 
 
 Separate particles, 12. 
 
 Sermonette, 123. 
 
 Session, 198. 
 
 Seton, Ernest Thompson, 123. 
 
 Shakespeare, 2, 60, 94, 215, 233, 
 
 234. 
 Shampoodle, 100. 
 Shattennent, 123. 
 Sheldon, Professor Edward S., 
 
 4. 
 Shelley, P. B., 94. 
 Shenanigan, 203. 
 Shenstone, William, 185. 
 Sherman, Ellen Burns, 256. 
 Sherwood, M. E. W., 149. 
 'Sh-h or Ssh, 194. 
 Shiftings of meaning in words, 
 
 4, 5, 6. 
 Shock, 196. 
 
 Shute, Professor Samuel M., 13. 
 Sib, 98. 
 
 Sidney, Sir Philip, 63. 
 Silhouette, 56. 
 Sill, Dr. Andrew T., 35. 
 Silver thaw, 198. 
 Sinequanonymous, 212. 
 Sinistro-eerebral, 137. 
 Skeat, Professor Walter W., 4. 
 Skedaddle, 206. 
 Skinker, 61. 
 Skipometers, 207. 
 Slack twisted, 199. 
 Slambangaree, 101. 
 Slang in general, 175. 
 
 in the West, 181. 
 
 of English sportsmen, 178. 
 
 of English thieves, 177. 
 
 of sailors, 183. 
 Slap-dasher, 105. 
 Slather, 203. 
 Sleigh, 127. 
 Slob, 198. 
 Sluit, 55. 
 Smitch, 196. 
 Smith, Duncan, 262. 
 
 F. Hopkiuson, 150.
 
 INDEX. 
 
 279 
 
 Smith. Goldwin, 151. 
 
 Mile., 228. 
 
 Professor Louis W., 233. 
 
 Professor William B., Ill, 
 Smylt, 14. 
 Snack, 61. 
 Snark, 206. 
 Siiick-sn icking, 262. 
 Sniping, 63. 
 Snitch, 62. 
 Snumble, 211. 
 SoUet, HX). 
 Socdolager, 204. 
 SocieMics, 260. 
 Societology, 88. 
 Society of American Authors, 
 
 70. 
 Soldatesque, 253. 
 So long, 175. 
 Songs of Solomon, 22. 
 Sonorant, 84, 86. 
 Sonoric, 84, 86. 
 Sortment, 130. 
 
 South Africa, words from, 55. 
 So wage, 122. 
 Spak, 197. 
 Speisenfolge, 218. 
 Spencer, Herbert, 40, 47, 229. 
 Spenser, Edmund, 201. 
 Sphinxy, 104. 
 Spilth, 2-54. 
 
 " Spirit " used as a verb, 83. 
 Spofford, Harriet Prescott, 154. 
 Spo^h, 105. 
 Sprachgefiihl, 43. 
 Sprangle, 219. 
 Spread, 5. 
 Spruit, .55. 
 Spurtled. 2-53. 
 Squeal, 181. 
 Sqidnly, 219. 
 Standard Dictionary, 4, 105, 108, 
 
 111, 118, 120, 215, 235. 
 St. Clair. D. F.. 6-5. 
 Stedman, Edmund Clarenee,78. 
 Stephen, Leslie, 9. 
 Stercology, 118. 
 Sterne, Laurence, 40, 172. 
 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 83, 
 
 179. 
 Stillyurds, 194. 
 Stimpered, 219. 
 Stimson, Frederick Jesup, 123. 
 
 Stither-and-xpin, 219. 
 Stockton, Frank R., 148. 
 Stoddard, Richard Henry, 147. 
 
 William O., 106. 
 Stodged, 198. 
 Store, 130. 
 Storiest, 261. 
 Story, W. W., 28, 233. 
 Soul-drama, 102. 
 Street slang, 164-184. 
 Strong, Rev. Augustus H., 87. 
 
 Rev. Josiah, IW. 
 Strut, 195. 
 
 Stuart, Ruth McEnery, 106. 
 Sturtevant, Dr. E.;;Louis, 118. 
 Suffixes, 11, 12, 13, 14. 
 Sugary, 131. 
 Suink, 197. 
 Summer colt, 93. 
 Sumner, Professor W. G., 88. 
 Sun, New York, 124, 133. 
 Supernurmal, 136. 
 Swatch, 198. 
 
 Swetchine, Madame, 48. 
 Swift, 101. 
 Swinburne, 48. 
 Swosh, 105. 
 Synonyms, 33, 34, 35. 
 Syntography, 267. 
 
 Taal, 55. 
 
 Tabloid, 10. 
 
 Tackv, 196. 
 
 Taine, H., ai, 46. 
 
 Taliesin, 22. 
 
 Talkahility, 141. 
 
 Talmage, Rev. T. Dewitt, 233. 
 
 Tannery, 131. 
 
 Tantalize, alleged origin of 
 
 word, 266. 
 Tan-toaster, 199. 
 Tar dies, 115. 
 
 Tarkington, Booth, 189. 
 Tavlor, Bavard, 24. 
 
 'Rev. Edward, 254. 
 Team, 131. 
 Teamster, 131. 
 TelsestheHa, 1:35. 
 Telepathy, 135. 
 Telergy, 136. 
 
 Tennessee, dialect in, 197. 
 Terms used in Wall Street, 258, 
 
 259, 260.
 
 280 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 Thackeray, W. M., 201. 
 Thanet, Octave (Alice French), 
 
 139. 
 Thing-a-majig, 203. 
 Thomas, Edith M., 154. 
 
 Isaiah, 131. 
 Thompson, Vance, 97, 98. 
 Thon, 105. 
 ThriUful, 123. 
 Thud-thudding, 144. 
 Thwing. Major Nathaniel, 133. 
 Tilge, 212. 
 
 Times, New York, 144. 
 Tip-most, 93. 
 Tod, 4. 
 
 Togetherness, 143. 
 Tolqual, 198. 
 Tomlinson, 6. 
 Tonist, 105. 
 Tooke, Home, 10. 
 Tote, 200. 
 Touristing, 107. 
 Tow, 197. 
 
 Townsend, E. W., 170. 
 Train, Elizabeth P., 146. 
 Ti-ansferred stress, 85. 
 Transients, 132. 
 Traubel, Horace L., 24. 
 Trek, 55. 
 
 Trench, Archbishop, 190. 
 TriUer-triller, 114. 
 Troll, 104. 
 Trone. 253. 
 Tropologj% 38. 
 True, A. C, 70. 
 Tiiherosey. 104. 
 Tudor English in Boston, 127. 
 
 ■ Mary. 174. 
 Titlkinghorni/, 104. 
 Tundra, 59. 
 Twain, Mark, 124, 181. 
 Twipgerv, 123. 
 Twi'nk, 212. 
 Tyler, Professor Moses Coit, 
 
 158. 
 Typogram, 145. 
 Typograph, 145. 
 Typographer, 145. 
 
 Uh-huh, 194. 
 
 Uitlander. 5.5. 
 
 Un, 12. 
 
 Unavoidable, law of the, 54. 
 
 Unconstitutional, 129. 
 Under, 12. 
 
 Under doneness, 266. 
 Undern, 122. 
 
 Unimpressioned, 124. 
 
 United Statesman, 90. 
 
 Univolism, 69. 
 
 Unniched, 93. 
 
 Unpretty, 106. 
 
 Unthoughted, 93. 
 ■Unurns, 89. 
 
 Usward, 262. 
 
 Vagrom, 98. 
 
 Vamoose, 202. 
 
 Van Dyke, Professor Henry, 46, 
 
 81, 141. 
 Van Rensellaer, M. K., 101. 
 
 Mrs. Schuvler, 55. 
 Van Zile, Edward S., 148. 
 Varietal-difference, 118. 
 Varro, Marcus Terentius, 31. 
 Veldt, 55. 
 Velleity, 69. 
 
 Vermilye, Kate Jordan, 143. 
 Versalehe, 209. 
 Viceversation, 104. 
 Viewpoint, 82. 
 Virgil, 52. 
 Vitascope, 212. 
 Vivic, 84. 
 Vividity, 96. 
 Vlei, 55. 
 
 Vocabulary, 234, 235. 
 Volume, 57. 
 
 Wac, 14. 
 Wagon, 130. 
 
 Wal-e field, Tlie Vicar of, 38. 
 Walking-side, 101. 
 Wallace, General Lew, 149. 
 Walpole, Horace, 188. 
 Walsh, William S., 142. 
 Waralogne, 212. 
 War-farer, 89. 
 
 Warner, Charles Dudley, 151. 
 Wafchpoint, 82. 
 Water-faUy, 81. 
 Waterman, Nixon, 254. 
 Watrous, E. F., 59. 
 Waxed-e72d, 101. 
 Wax-minster, 101. 
 Wax tapir, 101. 
 
 i
 
 INDEX. 
 
 281 
 
 Weatherlv, Dr., 204. 
 Webster, Noah, .53, 190. 
 Webster's Dictionary, 93, 161, 
 
 201. 
 Wedgwood, Heusleigh, 60. 
 Weib, 218. 
 Weirditles, 140. 
 Wells, Carolyn, 265. 
 Wendell, Professor Barret, 146. 
 Weor, 14. 
 
 Weyman, Stanley J., 32. 
 Whang-doodle, 203. 
 Wharton, Edith, 46, 2-56, 2-57. 
 Wheeler, Professor Benjamin 
 
 Ide, 48. 
 Whetherell, Caroline, 206. 
 Whethering, 143. 
 Whifflement, 212. 
 Whipple, E. P.. 48. 
 White, Richard Grant, 34, 36, 
 
 41, 51, 66, 71, 103, 222, 230, 
 
 246. 
 Whiting, Lilian, 151. 
 Whitman, Walt, 22, 23, 24, 25, 
 
 175. 
 Whitney, Professor William 
 
 Dwight, 4, 35, 234. 
 Wideopenness, 181. 
 
 Wife, 209, 210. 
 
 Wiggin, Kate Douglass, 149. 
 
 "Wild-cat" banking, 126. 
 
 WUd-flowerij, 81. 
 Wilhelm 11., 216. 217, 218. 
 Wilkins, Mary E., 1-54, 173. 
 Will and doom, 132. 
 Wilson, Robert Burns, 123. 
 Winthrop, John, 129. 
 Wistor, Owen, 154. 
 Wood, Henry, 262. 
 Woodberry, Professor George 
 
 E., 148. 
 Worcester's Dictionary, 80, 154, 
 157, 218. 
 
 Words and their Uses, 36, 230. 
 
 Words and their Ways in English 
 
 Speech, 43. 
 Words once obsolete, 6, 7, 8. 
 Wordsworth, William, 27. 
 
 World-beaidy, 103. 
 Wright, Rev. Alfred A., 255. 
 Wuzzled, 198. 
 Wyclif de, John, 242. 
 
 Yearnful, 19. 
 
 Zarp, 55. 
 Zootechny, 70.
 
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