The Adventure of English (21 page)

They drank while they played. Drink has been good to the English vocabulary. “Bar-room” and “saloon” entered the language in the first half of the nineteenth century, soon followed by “bar-tender” and “set 'em up!” A “snifter,” a “jigger” and a “finger” — all these measures came from America. So did “cocktail.” Not from the 1920s but from 1806, on the frontier, when it was a mixture of spirits, sugar, water and bitters. “Bootlegging,” which became an industry, a crime, a social disaster, began when men hid a flat bottle of whisky in the leg of a boot, whisky which would be sold illegally to the natives.

They were good on words for a drunk. Even before the Revolution, Benjamin Franklin listed two hundred twenty-nine! Here are a few of them, set out, as a tribute to those who have been intoxicated (American English), as if they were verse:

And many more then, and many more since. For such bounty, English could only say “Cheers!”

“On the wagon” is only first recorded in the twentieth century. Perhaps “on the wagon” meant that when you were driving the wagon, being drunk was not a good idea.

The wagon routes like the Oregon and the Santa Fe trails were bringing the invader and the indigenous people into conflict. “Scalp” has already been noted: a harmless English noun become a verb fit to make your hair stand on end. In came “war-path,” “war-whoop,” “wardance” — the white man identifying the practices of his enemy. There are some grey areas here. Phrases once thought of as translations from Indian languages — “How?” for “hello,” “heap” as in “heap big,” “pale-face,” “happy hunting ground” and others — may have emerged from the frontier pidgin Indians developed or they may have been made up by writers such as Fenimore Cooper, who certainly used them. Phrases like “no can do” and “long time no see” seem to be translated from the Indian but they are classic pidgin — they emerge on the Mexican border, too. “Brave,” as in an Indian brave, is French. But whoever introduced “white man speaks with forked tongue” was describing life on the frontier as it was. Americans made declarations of fair play to themselves before God and sometimes strove to keep them: their promises to the indigenous population, the Native Americans, were worthless. The word “reservation” adopted a new and miserable meaning.

Meanwhile Americans met landscapes on a scale and of a magnificence they had never before encountered, could scarcely have imagined, and were yet undaunted in letting their English loose on them. The frontier rang with the sound of words striking out as loudly as the axe hitting the tree. Frontier English came in like a hungry mountain lion, like a crazed grizzly, like a wildcat full of spit and vengeance — and if you think that a trifle exaggerated, hear the words attributed to that Scots-Irishman, Davy Crockett:

Davy Crockett. Born, as the song says, on a mountain top in Tennessee. His father was a veteran of the Revolution. He became “the King of the wild frontier,” the hero of a series of paperbound books telling stories about him. He read about himself as a legend of the west. He became a famously plain-speaking Congressman and died defending the Alamo in Texas in 1836. He was the first great exponent of a style of speech that seemed to want to be as big as the country. It was called Tall Talk.

The east coast's mission for Americans to become the guardians of a perfected classical English was a long way away. Ornate words were prized. “Shebang,” “shindy” and “slumgullion”; “kerbang,” “kerflop” and “kerthump.” American English meant that an American need not simply leave hurriedly, he could “absquatulate” or “skedaddle”; he didn't just use something up, he “exfluncticated” it. The language was “hunky-dory,” “rambunctious” and “splendiferous.” The comparison with Cambridge in the sixteenth century and all those Latinate Inkhorn words, many of them loved and invented by Shakespeare, is irresistible. But there were not only new words of the ravines and rapids, the forests and the high mountains, there were new words you met on the streets, as in:

All American.

The derivation of OK, okay, allegedly the most used word in the world, is a casebook study in the origin of a word. The theories are so many and so various, so many groups wish to claim it. At one point I thought that it depended entirely on who you were, as different ethnic, political and academic groups fight for the ownership of the number one word.

Here are just a few of the more respectable theories, brought together by Mike Todd. There are hundreds more . . .

The Choctaw Indians had the word “Okeh,” which means “it is so.” There is a report that Andrew Jackson, during the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, learned this Choctaw word, liked it and used it. Woodrow Wilson also used it when he approved official papers.

Liberia has “Oke,” Burmese has “hoakeh,” and these might have flitted over to America before 1840, by which time it was in familiar use.

Then there are the young bucks in Boston who enjoyed playing with or tormenting the language. “ISBD” was used to mean “It shall be done,” for instance; SP meant small potatoes. In the
Boston Morning Post,
March 1839, OK was claimed as short for “all correct,” which the young bucks spelled as “orl korrekt.” Which brings it out of Native American hands and back to the descendants of the English.

In 1840, Martin van Buren was standing as the Democratic presidential candidate and he acquired the nickname “Old Kinderhook” (he was born in Kinderhook). In March 1840 the Democrats opened the OK Club in New York based on his nickname.

The Times
(London) in 1939 claimed it was of Cockney origin — Orl Korrec. The French claimed it came from their sailors who made appointments with American girls “aux quais” (at the quayside). The Finns have “oikea,” which means correct.
The Times
proposed another theory, that bills going through the House of Lords had to be approved by Lords Onslow and Kilbracken and each initialled them — O.K. Latinists pointed out that for generations schoolmasters would mark examination papers “Omnis Korecta,” sometimes abbreviated. Shipbuilders marked timber for the outer keel as “OK Number 1,” meaning Outer Keel Number 1. The Scots draw our attention to “Och aye,” of which OK may be an adaptation. The Prussians propose that one of their generals fighting for the American colonies in the War of Independence would sign his orders O.K. — his initials. The Greeks come up with a magical incantation from the past, “Omega, Khi.” When repeated twice it drives away fleas. The American army suggests that in the Civil War the U.S. War Department bought supplies of crackers from a company called Orrins-Kendall: OK appeared on these boxes and came to stand for good quality . . . etc.

It can get exhausting. Wise linguists now speak of “coincidental coinage,” which covers all eventualities. OK by me.

Two generations after the opening up of Louisiana, American English had been kicked and hurled into another dimension. This was the democratic language that Adams had foreseen although it is debatable whether he would have altogether enjoyed everyone's “two cents' worth.” Decorum and polite taste were not at the table for this feast.

The gold rush brought even more people west and yet again the language was up for it. “Prospector” was a new word: he “staked a claim,” he could “pan out” gold dust from the river bed, he might “strike it lucky,” even “strike it rich” and get a “bonanza” (which came from the Spanish word for fair weather). A good investment anywhere from now on became “a gold mine.”

And there was Mr. Levi Strauss, who made his fortune providing hard-wearing clothes for the miners. He used a cloth called geane fustian, a three-hundred-year-old English name derived from its original manufacture in Genoa. “Levis” and “jeans” were born and show no signs of age or ageing as they stride into their third century.

But Mr. Strauss's products were distinguished by the modesty of their name. It was the time of Tall Talk and talking up, as if words could conjure reality into being. This became the particular fever of the “booster,” whose job was to talk up property, talk up prospects, talk up gold, talk up the west to whip on to fever the tens of thousands tumbling out of the settled cities of the east, headed for El Dorado. A single-room school might be called a college, a flea-pit could be called a hotel, and, in the spirit not of exaggeration but anticipation, a one-street town could be called a city. And what cities! Out in the west there is Rome, Cairo, Paris and Paradise City. Superior ghost towns in Kansas include Alexandria, Athens, Berlin, Calcutta, London, Moscow, Oxford and Sparta. Mining camps could get names like Bonanza, Wealthy City, Gold Hill or Rich Bar. The spirit of Davy Crockett would not be denied, and we have Dead Mule Canyon, Jackson's Gulch, Hardscrabble, Poverty Hill, Hell-for-Noon City, Slumgullion, One Eye and Quack Hill. The vigour comes from speech, the speech of men on a high and in a hurry, loving to land a KO with words.

Newspapers spoke for this gold-rushing people and language and beat a persistent drum. In 1859, in the
Rocky Mountain News:
“To our Esteemed Readers. It is now being settled beyond dispute that rich deposits of gold exist throughout a great extent of the country . . . Persons desirous of trying their fortunes in the new Eldorado can now safely begin to make their calculations how to act.”

History in the American west in the mid nineteenth century was on the fast track. Not so much change as transformation every decade. Yet another hurricane of activity came when the railroad opened up the country and created an industry that gave the west its most characteristic vocabulary.

Joseph McCoy had the big idea. He would drive his cattle often hundreds of miles to a railhead where they could be carried to the big city markets in the east. Previously they had only been butchered for local use. McCoy became rich. So rich that some of his innumerable imitators tried to pretend they were the great man himself. McCoy developed the habit of introducing himself to strangers as “the real McCoy.”

So we come to the cowboy. If any one word describes the quintessential ideal of the American male (and subsequent males in many other countries), if any word has influenced the style of the American male manner and manners, has been copied by Presidents and slid helplessly between truth and fantasy in its power to evoke a certain kind of courage, endurance, probity, determination, clean-living, woman-respecting, lawabiding, but always willing and able to take the law into his own hands when that was required, slow to anger but swift in pursuit of justice, it is the cowboy. The word came from eighteenth-century English, where it referred to an illiterate young lad watching over a few docile beasts. In America it became and it remains multi-dimensional, iconic, heroic, a word the country is proud to describe itself by.

Cowboys down on the Mexican border had been picking up Spanish words for years. They took them north and pooled them straight into the deepening reservoir of English. “Ranch” comes from Spanish, as do “mustang” and “bronco” and the “chaps,” “sombrero” and “poncho” they might wear. The “cinch” secured the saddle and they used the “lariat” and the “lasso.” They cried out “Vamoose!” and “Pronto!” and more than anything they feared a “stampede.” “Plumb loco” is a conjunction of the American and the Spanish words. “Vigilantes” took their name from the Spanish, as did the “rodeo” and the “fiesta.”