Made In America (5 page)

They were also among the first to make use of the newly minted letter
j.
Previously
i
had served this purpose, so that Chaucer, for instance, wrote
ientyl
and
ioye
for
gentle
and
joy.
At first,
j
was employed simply as a variant of
i,
as S was a variant for
s.
Gradually j took on its modern
juh
sound, a role previously filled by
g
(and hence the occasional freedom in English to choose between the two letters, as with
jibe
and
gibe).

In terms of language, the Pilgrims could scarcely have chosen a more exciting time to come. Perhaps no other period in history has been more linguistically diverse and dynamic, more accommodating to verbal invention, than that into which they were born. It was after all the age of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Lyly, Spenser, Donne, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, Elizabeth I. As Mary Helen Dohan has put it: ‘Had the first settlers left England earlier or later, had they learned their speechways and their attitudes, linguistic and otherwise, in a different time, our language – like our nation – would be a different thing.‘
⁶

Just in the century or so that preceded the Pilgrims’ arrival in the New World, English gained 10,000 additional words,
about half of them sufficiently useful as to be with us still. Shakespeare alone created some 2,000 –
reclusive, gloomy, barefaced, radiance, dwindle, countless, gust, leapfrog, frugal, summit,
to name but a few – but he was by no means alone in this unparalleled outpouring.

A bare sampling of words that entered English around the time of the Pilgrims gives some hint (another Shakespeare coinage, incidentally) of the lexical vitality of the age:
alternative
(1590);
incapable
(1591);
noose
(1600);
nomination
(1601);
fairy, surrogate
and
sophisticated
(1603);
option
(1604);
creak,
in the sense of a noise, and
susceptible
(1605);
coarse,
in the sense of being rough (as opposed to natural), and
castigate
(1607);
obscenity
(1608);
tact
(1609);
commitment, slope, recrimination
and
gothic
(1611);
coalition
(1612);
freeze,
in a metaphoric sense (1613);
nonsense
(1614);
cult, boulder
and
crazy,
in the sense of insanity (1617);
customer
(1621);
inexperienced
(1626).

If the Pilgrims were aware of this linguistic ferment into which they had been born, they gave little sign of it. Nowhere in any surviving colonial writings of the seventeenth century is there a single reference to Shakespeare or even the Puritans’ own revered Milton. And in some significant ways their language is curiously unlike that of Shakespeare. They did not employ the construction ‘methinks’, for instance. Nor did they show any particular inclination to engage in the new fashion of turning nouns into verbs, a practice that gave the age such perennially useful innovations as
to gossip
(1590),
to fuel
(1592),
to attest
(1596),
to inch
(1599),
to preside
(1611),
to surround
(1616),
to hurt
(1662) and several score others, many of which (to
happy, to property, to malice)
didn’t last.

Though they were by no means linguistic innovators, the peculiar circumstances in which they found themselves forced the first colonists to begin tinkering with their vocabulary almost from the first day. As early as 1622, they were using
pond,
which in England designated a small
artificial pool, to describe large and wholly natural bodies of water, as in
Walden Pond. Creek
in England described an inlet of the sea; in America it came to signify a stream. For reasons that have never, so far as I can tell, been properly investigated, the colonials quickly discarded many seemingly useful English topographic words –
hurst, mere, mead, heath, moor, marsh
and (except in New England)
brook,
and began coming up with new ones, like
swamp
(first recorded in John Smith’s
Generall Historie of Virginia
in 1626),
⁷
ravine, hollow, range
(for an open piece of ground) and
bluff.
Often these were borrowed from other languages.
Bluff,
which has the distinction of being the first word attacked by the British as a misguided and obviously unnecessary Americanism, was probably borrowed from the Dutch
blaf,
meaning a flat board.
Swamp
appears to come from the German
zwamp,
and
ravine,
first recorded in 1781 in the diaries of George Washington though almost certainly used much earlier, is from the French.

Oddly, considering the extremities of the American climate, weather words were slow in arising.
Snowstorm,
the first meteorological Americanism, is not recorded before 1771 and no one appears to have noticed a
tornado
before 1804. In between came
cold snap
in 1776, and that about exhausts America’s contribution to the world of weather terms in its first two hundred years.
Blizzard,
a word without which any description of a northern American winter would seem incomplete, did not in fact come to describe a heavy snowstorm until as late as 1870, when a newspaper editor in Estherville, Iowa, applied it to a particularly fierce spring snow. The word, of unknown origin, had been coined in America some fifty years earlier, but previously had denoted a blow or series of blows, as from fists or guns.

Where they could, however, the first colonists stuck doggedly to the words of the Old World. They preserved
words with the diligence of archivists. Scores, perhaps hundreds, of English terms that would later perish from neglect in their homeland live on in America thanks to the essentially conservative nature of the early colonists.
Fall
for
autumn
is perhaps the best known. It was a relatively new word at the time of the Pilgrims – its first use in England was recorded in 1545 – but it remained in common use in England until as late as the second half of the nineteenth century. Why it died out there when it did is unknown. The list of words preserved in America is practically endless. Among them:
cabin
in the sense of a humble dwelling,
bug
for any kind of insect,
hog
for a pig,
deck
as in a pack of cards and
jack
for a knave within the deck,
raise
for rear,
junk
for rubbish,
mad
in the sense of angry rather than unhinged,
bushel
as a common unit of measurement,
closet
for cupboard,
adze, attic, jeer
and
hatchet, stocks
as in stocks and bonds,
cross-purposes, livestock, gap
and (principally in New England)
notch
for a pass through hills,
gully
for a ravine,
rooster
for the male fowl,
slick
as a variant of sleek,
zero
for nought,
back and forth
(instead of
backwards and forwards), plumb
in the sense of utter or complete,
noon
^*8
in favour of
midday, molasses
for treacle,
cesspool, home-spun, din, trash, talented, chore, mayhem, maybe, copious,
and so on. And that is just a bare sampling.

The first colonists also brought with them many regional terms, little known outside their private corners of Britain, which prospered on American soil and have often since spread to the wider English-speaking world:
drool, teeter, hub, swamp, squirt
(as a term descriptive of a person),
spool
(for thread),
to wilt, cater-cornered, skedaddle
(a north British
dialect word meaning to spill something noisy, such as a bag of coal),
gumption, chump
(an Essex word meaning a lump of wood and now preserved in the expression ‘off your chump’),
⁸
scalawag, dander
(as in
to get one’s dander up), chitterlings, chipper, chisel
in the sense of to cheat, and
skulduggery.
The last named has nothing to do with skulls which is why it is spelled with one
l
. It comes from the Scottish
sculdudrie,
a word denoting fornication.
Chitterlings,
or
chitlins,
for the small intestines of the pig, was unknown outside Hampshire until nourished to wider glory in the New World.
⁹
That it evolved in some quarters of America into
kettlings
suggests that the
ch-
may have been pronounced by at least some people with the hard
k of chaos
or
chorus.

And of course they brought many words with them that have not survived in either America or Britain, to the lexical impoverishment of both:
flight
for a dusting of snow,
fribble
for a frivolous person,
bossloper
for a hermit,
spong
for a parcel of land,
bantling
for an infant,
sooterkin
for a sweetheart,
gurnet
for a protective sandbar, and the much-missed
slobberchops
for a messy eater.

Everywhere they turned in their new-found land, the early colonists were confronted with objects that they had never seen before, from the mosquito (at first spelled
mosketoe
or
musketto)
to the persimmon to poison ivy, or ‘poysoned weed’ as they called it. At first, no doubt overwhelmed by the wealth of unfamiliar life in their new Eden, they made no distinction between pumpkins and squashes or between the walnut and pecan trees. They misnamed plants and animals.
Bay, laurel, beech, walnut, hemlock,
the
robin
(actually a thrush),
blackbird, hedgehog, lark, swallow
and
marsh hen
all signify different species in America from those of England.
¹⁰
The American rabbit is actually a hare. (That the first colonists couldn’t tell the difference offers some testimony to their incompetence in the wild.) Often they took the simplest route and gave the new creatures names imitative of the
sounds they made –
bob white, whippoorwill, katydid
– and when that proved impractical they fell back on the useful, and eventually distinctively American, expedient of forming a new compound from two older words.

Colonial American English positively teems with such constructions:
jointworm, glowworm, eggplant, canvasback, copperhead, rattlesnake, bluegrass, backtrack, bobcat, catfish, blue-jay, bullfrog, sapsucker, timberland, underbrush, cookbook, frostbite, hillside
(at first sometimes called a
sidehill),
plus such later additions as
tightwad, sidewalk, cheapskate, sharecropper, skyscraper, rubberneck, drugstore, barbershop, hangover, rubdown, blowout
and others almost without number. These new terms had the virtues of directness and instant comprehensibility – useful qualities in a land whose populace included increasingly large numbers of non-native speakers – which their British counterparts often lacked.
Frostbite
is clearly more descriptive than
chilblains, sidewalk,
than
pavement, eggplant
than
aubergine, doghouse
than
kennel, bedspread
than
counterpane,
whatever the English might say.

One creature that very much featured in the lives of the earliest colonists was the passenger pigeon. The name comes from an earlier sense of passenger as one that passes by, and passenger pigeons certainly did that in almost inconceivably vast numbers. One early observer estimated a passing flock as being a mile wide and 240 miles long. They literally darkened the sky. At the time of the
Mayflower
landing there were perhaps nine billion passenger pigeons in North America, more than twice the number of all the birds found on the continent today. With such numbers they were absurdly easy to hunt. One account from 1770 reported that a hunter brought down 125 with a single shot from a blunderbuss. Some people ate them, but most were fed to pigs. Millions more were slaughtered for the sport of it. By 1800 their numbers had been roughly halved and by 1900 they were all but gone. On 1 September 1914 the last one died at Cincinnati Zoo.

The first colonists were not, however, troubled by several other creatures that would one day plague the New World. One was the common house rat. It wouldn’t reach Europe for another century (emigrating there abruptly and in huge numbers from Siberia for reasons that have never been explained) and did not make its first recorded appearance in America until 1775, in Boston. (Such was its adaptability that, by the time of the 1849 gold rush, early arrivals to California found the house rat waiting for them. By the 1960s there were an estimated one hundred million house rats in America.) Many other now common animals, among them the house mouse and the common pigeon, were also yet to make their first trip across the ocean.

For certain species we know with some precision when they arrived, most notoriously with that airborne irritant the starling, which was brought to America by one Eugene Schieffelin, a wealthy German emigrant who had the odd, and in the case of starlings regrettable, idea that he should introduce to the American landscape all the birds mentioned in the writings of Shakespeare. Most of the species he introduced failed to prosper, but the forty pairs of starlings he released in New York’s Central Park in the spring of 1890, augmented by twenty more pairs the following spring, so thrived that within less than a century they had become the most abundant bird species in America, and one of its greatest pests. The common house sparrow (actually not a sparrow at all but an African weaverbird) was in similar fashion introduced to the New World in 1851 or 1852 by the president of the Natural History Society of Brooklyn, and the carp by the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in the 1870s.
¹¹
That there were not greater ecological disasters from such well-meaning but often misguided introductions is a wonder for which we may all be grateful.