NOT AMERICANISMS.
In Bartlett’s Dictionary the term “stocking-feet” is given as an Americanism. But the following quotation from Thackeray’s Newcomes (vol. i. ch. viii.) shows that this is an error:—
“Binnie found the Colonel in his sitting-room arrayed in what are called in Scotland his stocking-feet.”
Professor Tyndall, at the farewell banquet given in his honor by the citizens of New York, prior to his departure, in referring to his successful lecture-course in the United States, said he had had—to quote his words—“what you Americans call ‘a good time.’”
But this expression is not an Americanism. It is used by Dean Swift in his letter to Stella, (Feb. 24, 1710–11); “I hope Mrs. Wells had a good time.”
That not very elegant adjective bully, though found in Bartlett, and used by Washington Irving cannot be claimed as an Americanism. Friar Tuck sings, in Scott’s Ivanhoe:—
“Come troll the brown bowl to me, bully boy,
Come troll the brown bowl to me.”
But to go further back, we find it in the burden of an old three-part song, “We be three poor Mariners,” in Ravenscroft’s Deuteromelia, 1609:
“Shall we go dance the round, the round,
Shall we go dance the round;
And he that is a bully boy,
Come pledge me on the ground.”
One of the words which the English used to class among Americanisms—ignorant that it was older and better English than their own usage—was Fall, used as the name of the third of the seasons. The English, corrupted by the Johnsonese of the Hanoverian reigns, call it by the Latinism, Autumn. But the other term, in general use on this side of the Atlantic, is the word by which all the old writers of the language know it. “The hole yere,” says scholarly Roger Ascham in his Toxophilus, “is divided into iiii. partes, Spring tyme, Sommer, Faule of the leafe, & Winter, whereof the hole winter for the roughnesse of it, is cleane taken away from shoting: except it be one day amonges xx., or one yeare amonges xi.”
This statement, by the way, that exceptionally mild winters were in the ratio of one to eleven, is worth noting with reference to the recent announcement of science that the spots on the sun have an eleven-year period of maximum frequency.