Read American Language Supplement 2 Online
Authors: H.L. Mencken
American Language Supplement 2 (133 page)
1
A Guide to Burlington, Iowa; Burlington, n.d., produced by the Federal Writers’ Project, says that “Edwards was the man who originated the appellation of
Hawkeyes
for the people of the Iowa country,” but no evidence for this is offered.
2
Burdette (1844–1914) was born in Greensboro, Pa., and educated in Illinois. He served in the Civil War as a private. He began his newspaper career in Peoria, Ill. His writings in the
Hawkeye
attracted nation-wide attention. In 1876 he took to the lecture platform, and in 1887 he was converted to Christianity and became a Baptist preacher. From 1887 onward he was pastor of the Temple Baptist Church in Los Angeles, and helped to lay the foundations of that great city as the theological capital of the United States. He belonged to the flight of American newspaper humorists headed by Eugene Field and Bill Nye.
1
Squatter
is marked an Americanism by the DAE and traced to 1788, when it was used by James Madison. It was listed by John Pickering in his pioneer Vocabulary of 1816 and defined as “a cant name in New England for those people who enter upon new lands and cultivate them without permission of the owners.”
Squatter sovereignty
meant the right of settlers in the Western lands to make their own laws. It is traced to 1854, and
squatter law
to 1857.
2
Cyclone
is apparently not an Americanism. The DAE traces it in this country to 1856, but it was proposed in 1848 by an English nautical writer named Piddington.
Cyclone-cellar
, however, is an American invention, traced by the DAE to 1887.
3
When
Sunflower State
came in is uncertain. A writer in
Harper’s Magazine
for June, 1888, quoted by the DAE, reported that it was already used “affectionately” at that time.
4
Mr. Charles B. Driscoll, a native, tells me that it is never
Jayhawk
, but always
Jayhawker
.
5
Jayhawkers
, by Rockwell D. Hunt,
Nation
. April 30, 1903, p. 374. Hunt gave as his authority Death Valley in ’49, by William Lewis Manly, pp. 321–22. In describing the trip of a party of young emigrants from Illinois through Death Valley during the Winter of 1849–50 Manly said: “These Illinois boys were young and full of mirth and fun, which was continually overflowing.… One of the boys was Ed Doty, who was a sort of model traveller in this line.… One day when Doty was engaged in the duty of cooking flap-jacks, another frolicsome fellow came up and took off the cook’s hat and commenced going through the motions of a barber, giving his customer a vigorous shampoo, saying: ‘
I am going to make a Jayhawker out of you, old boy.’
Now it happened at the election for captain in this division that Ed Doty was chosen captain, and no sooner was the choice declared than the boys took the newly elected captain on their shoulders and carried him around the camp, introducing him as
the King Bird of the Jayhawkers
. So their division was afterwards known as the
Jayhawkers
, but whether the word originated with them or was some old frontier word used in sport on the occasion, is more than I will undertake to say.” Manly added that when they returned to Illinois they formed an organization called the
Jayhawkers’ Union
.
1
Cf
. Nebraska Pioneer English, by Melvin Van den Bark,
American Speech
, Dec., 1933, p. 50.
2
The Mythical
Jayhawk;
Topeka, 1944, p. 2. Albert Matthews in the
Nation
, April 9, 1903, p. 291: “The noun
Jayhawk
… and the verb [to]
Jayhawk
… were used in Kansas as early as November or December, 1858, at which time they were applied to James Montgomery and his men, who, in retaliation for the atrocities committed on Free-State settlers by the Border Ruffians, raided the pro-slavery settlers and their abettors from Missouri.”
3
Discovered: Ancestor of
Jayhawkornis Kansasensis. Graduate Magazine of the University of Kansas
, Lawrence, April, 1932, p. 10.
1
I am indebted to Miss Ellet for a copy of this editorial.
2
Is There a Santa Claus?, Sept. 21, 1897. It is reprinted in Casual Essays of the
Sun;
New York, 1905, pp. 1–3.
1
The Mystical
Jayhawk
, p. 6.
2
See Supplement I, pp. 245–252.
3
For many years the battle-cry of the University of Kansas students at football games was
Rock Chalk! Jayhawk! K.U.!
I am indebted here to Mr. L. V. Graham of San Francisco, a former Kansan.
4
Americanisms, p. 407.
1
See Supplement I, pp. 597 and 631n. See also
Creole
and
Cajan
, by William A. Read,
American Speech
, June, 1926, p. 483, and
Creole
and
West Indies
, by E. C. Hills,
American Speech
, March, 1927, pp. 293–94.
1
Nov. 30, 1918.
2
New York, 1912, p. 656.
3
Its European counterpart is the
glutton
(
Gulo luscus
or
articus
). Both belong to the
Mustelidae
, and are related to the otters, minks and badgers.
1
pp. 181–82.
2
I am indebted for this to Dr. Joseph M. Carrière, of the University of Virginia.
3
St. Paul, 1900, pp. 242–44.
1
In her Letters From the United States, Cuba, and Canada; New York, 1856, p. 324, the Hon. Amelia M. Murray called it the
Wolverine State
, but this was an obvious slip. I am indebted here to Dr. Joseph M. Carrière.
2
Vandiver (1854–1932) was a pedagogue turned politician. He served in Congress from 1897 to 1905. His later years were mainly devoted to the insurance business, though he was assistant United States treasurer at St. Louis from 1913 to 1920.
1
Reprinted as Why Is Missouri the
Show-Me State?
, St. Louis
Post-Dispatch
, July 11, 1941.
2
Published in two volumes in 1921. Stevens (1848–1939) was a native of Connecticut, but went to work for St. Louis newspapers as a young man. He was secretary of the St. Louis Exposition of 1904, and in that office picked up a glittering battery of foreign decorations. His first book, Through Texas, was published in 1892. After that he wrote more than twenty others, including a history of St. Louis, lives of various local worthies, and two volumes on Robert Burns.
1
I am indebted to Mr. Gazzam for this letter, and also for the Wellman article above quoted. He tells me that he found the phrase current among the miners of South Africa in 1903.
1
Before that the office was only a commissionership. Colman was the last commissioner and first secretary. He served under Grover Cleveland. He was born in 1827 and died in 1911.
2
In a prefatory note to Huckleberry Finn; New York, 1884, Mark Twain said: “In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri Negro dialect; the ordinary
Pike-County
dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork, but painstakingly and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.”
3
Letters from two Missourians, protesting against
Puke
, were in
Life
, Nov. 2, 1942, pp. 8 and 10. The editors replied that “like it or not, Missourians have been called
Pukes
for years,” though “nobody knows just why.” They added that certain unnamed “scholars” traced “the inelegant term to the Galena, Ill., lead-mine boom of 1827,” when “so many Missourians rushed to the mines that the blunt miners said Missouri ‘had taken a
puke
,’ meaning it had vomited up all its people.” The first occurrence of
to puke
in English is in Jaques’ famous “All the world’s a stage” speech in As You Like It, 1600: “At first the infant, mewling and
puking
in the nurse’s arms.” It is possible that Shakespeare invented it, but it is much more likely that it was borrowed from some branch of German, and is related to the modern German verb,
spucken
, to spit.
1
Congressional Record
, 1945, p. A1264: “The Anaconda Copper Corporation, which owns and operates the great copper mines of Butte, Mont., has for years endeavored to keep a tight rein on Montana politics. Owning or controlling, also, most of the State’s vast industries – lumber, coal, silver, zinc, public utilities, hydroelectric plants, etc. – it has also added to its assets nearly all the daily newspapers in the
Treasure State
.”
2
The full text is given by Shankle.
1
This is used in the subtitle of the State Guide brought out by the Federal Writers Project. Lovell traces the name to 1851. In The Background to Mark Twain’s Vocabulary,
American Speech
, April, 1947, p. 96, he traces
Silverland
to 1863.
1
Why is Ohio Called the
Buckeye State?, Historical Collections of Ohio
(Columbus), 1890, Vol. I, p. 202.
1
A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English; New York, 1937, p. 801.
1
It appears in the subtitle of the guide to the State brought out by the Federal Writers’ Project under the sponsorship of the State Department of Conservation.
1
Texas Protests: You Shouldn’t Say
Panhandler
, May 7, 1936. In Southwestern Slang, by Socrates Hyacinth,
Overland Monthly
, Aug., 1869, Texas is called the
Rawhide State
, but this was probably only a nonce use.
2
Political Americanisms, by Charles Ledyard Norton; New York, 1890, p. 64.
3
Ether II, 3.
1
See Supplement I, p. 309–11.
AMERICAN SLANG
The boundaries separating true slang from cant and argot are wavering and not easily defined. The latter two are differentiated from slang by the fact that they belong to the speech of relatively small and cohesive groups, and cant is separated from both argot and slang by the fact that one of its purposes is to deceive or mystify the outsider, but there is a constant movement of words and phrases from one category to another. When, in 1785, Captain Francis Grose published the first edition of his “Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue,” the word
slang
itself seems to have been confined mainly to the argot of criminals and vagabonds, but by the beginning of the Nineteenth Century it had begun to be used generally as a new and piquant synonym for
jargon
, and today it appears unchallenged in all dictionaries, though no one, as yet, has worked out its etymology.
1
The movement of novelties is in both directions: sometimes from above to below,
e.g., bones
for
dice
, which Chaucer used quite seriously,
c
. 1386, and sometimes from below to above,
e.g., to stump
in the political sense, which was a Western slang phrase when it came in more than a century ago,
2
but is now almost as respectable as
to caucus
. As everyone knows, most slang terms have relatively short lives, and nothing seems more stale than one that has passed out,
e.g., skiddoo, snake’s hips, nerts, attaboy
and
I don’t think
, but now and then one survives for years and even for centuries, without either going into eclipse on the one hand or being elevated to standard speech on the other.
To bamboozle
is still below the salt and would hardly be used by a bishop in warning against Satan, but it is more than
two hundred years old and was listed as slang by Richard Steele in the
Tatler
in 1710.
Gas
(talk) has been traced to 1847,
kibosh
to 1836,
lip
(impudence) to 1821,
sap
to 1815,
cheese it
to 1811,
to chisel
to 1808,
racket
to 1785,
hush-money
to 1709,
to knock off
(to quit) to 1662,
tick
(credit) to 1661,
grub
to 1659,
to cotton to
to 1605,
bat
(a loose woman) to 1612,
to plant
(to hide) to 1610,
brass
(impudence) to 1594,
duds
(clothes) to 1567 and
to blow
(to boast) to
c
. 1400: all remain in use today and all continue to be slang.
1
It would be hard to figure out precisely what makes one slang term survive for years and another perish quickly and miserably, but some of the elements which may shape the process are discernible. One of them is the degree to which a neologism fills a genuine need. It may do so by providing a pungent name, nearly always metaphorical, for an object or concept that is new to the generality of people,
e.g., ghost-writer
and
caterpillar
(running gear), or it may do so by supplying a more succinct or more picturesque designation for something already familiar in terms more commonplace,
e.g., bellhop, sorehead, rubberneck
and
killjoy
. Many of the best slang-terms are simple compounds, as the examples I have just given show; others are bold tropes,
e.g., bull
(a policeman),
to squeal, masher, cold feet, yellow
(cowardly),
baloney, apple-sauce, cat’s pajamas
(something very rare) and
hitched
(married); yet others are the products of a delirious delight in language-making which throws phonemes together helter-skelter,
e.g., fantods, heebie-jeebies, nifty, whoopee, hubba-hubba, to burp
and
oomph
. When a novelty is obvious it seldom lasts very long,
e.g., shellacked
for drunk,
skirt
for a woman,
peach
for a beautiful girl,
trigger-man
and
to put on the spot
, and when its humor is strained it dies as quickly,
e.g., movie-cathedral, lounge-lizard, third-termite
, and the frequent inventions of the Broadway school. Moreover, its longevity seems to run in obverse proportion to its first success, so that over-night crazes like
skiddoo
and
goo-goo eyes
2
are
soon done for, whereas novelties of slower growth,
e.g., booze, to goose
and
gimcrack
last a long, long while. The same autointoxication seems to cut short the silly phrases of negation that come and go,
e.g., aber nit, sez you, oh yeah, I don’t think
and
over the left
, and the numerous catch-phrases that have little if any precise meaning but simply delight the moron by letting him show that he knows the latest,
e.g
., “How’d you like to be the ice-man?,” “Wouldn’t that jar you?,” “O you kid,” “Tell it to Sweeney,” “Yes, we have no bananas,” “Ish kabibble” (and its twin, “I should worry”), and “Shoo fly, don’t bother me.”
1
