Parts of Speech: Essays on English

by Brander Matthews

So far the attempt has been here made to subtract from the immense and heterogeneous mass of so-called Americanisms three classes of terms falsely so called: first, the mere individualisms, for which America as a whole has a right to shirk the responsibility; second, the survivals in the United States of words and usages that happen to have fallen into abeyance in Great Britain; and, third, the American contributions to the English language. As to each of these three groups the case is clear enough; but as to a fourth group, which ought also to be deducted, one cannot speak with quite so much confidence.

This group would include the peculiarities of speech existing sporadically in this or that special locality and contributing what are often called the American dialects—the Yankee dialect first of all, then the dialect of the Appalachian mountaineers, the dialect of the Western cow-boys, etc. Are these localisms fairly to be classed as Americanisms? The question, so far as I know, has never been raised before, for it has been taken for granted that if any such things as Americanisms existed at all, they could surely be collected from the mouth of Hosea Biglow. And yet if we pause to think, we cannot but admit that the so-called Yankee dialect is local, that it is unknown outside of New England, and that a majority of the inhabitants of the United States find it almost as strange in their ears as the broad Scotch of Burns. As for the so-called dialect of the cow-boy, it is not a true dialect at all; it is simply carelessly colloquial English with a heavy infusion of fugitive slang; and whatever it may be in itself, it is local to the cow-country. The Appalachian dialect is perhaps more like a true dialect; but it is even less wide-spread than either of the others here picked out for consideration. No one of these three alleged dialects is in any sense national; all three of them are narrowly local—altho the New England speech has spread more or less into the middle west.

Perhaps some light on this puzzle may be had by considering how they regard a similar problem in England itself. The local dialects which still abound throughout the British Isles are under investigation, each by itself. No one has ever suggested the lumping of them all together as Briticisms. Indeed, the very definition of Briticism would debar this. What is a Briticism but a term frequently used throughout Great Britain and not accepted in the United States? And if this definition is acceptable, we are forced to declare that an Americanism is a term frequently used throughout the United States and not accepted in Great Britain. The terms of the Yankee dialect, of the Appalachian, and of the cow-boy, are localisms; they are not frequently used throughout the United States; they are not to be classed as Americanisms any more than the cockney idioms, the Wessex words, and the Yorkshire phrases are to be classed as Briticisms.

It is greatly to be regretted that Dr. Murray and Mr. Bradley and the other editors of the comprehensive Oxford Dictionary have not been so careful as they might be in identifying the locality of American dialectic peculiarities. They have taken great pains to record and circumscribe British dialectic peculiarities; but they are in the habit of appending a vague and misleading (U. S.) to such American words and usages as they may set down. It is to be hoped that they may hereafter aim at a greater exactness in their attributions, since their present practice is quite misleading, as it often suggests that a term is a true Americanism, used freely throughout the United States, when it is perhaps merely an individualism or at best a localism.

Of true Americanisms there are not so very many left, when we have ousted from their usurped places these four groups of terms having no real title to the honorable name. And true Americanisms might be subdivided again into two groups, the one containing the American terms for which there are equivalent Briticisms, thus indicating a divergence of usage, and the other including only the words and phrases which have sprung up here without correlative activity on the other side of the Atlantic.

When the attempt is made to set up parallel columns of Briticisms and Americanisms, each more or less equal to the other, it is with surprise that we discover how few of these equivalencies there are. In other words, the variations of usage between Great Britain and the United States are infrequent. In England the railway was preceded by the stage-coach, and in America the railroad was preceded rather by the river steamboat; and probably this accounts for the slight differentiation observable in the vocabulary of the traveler. But this is not the reason why we in America make misuse of a French word, dépôt, while the British prefer the Latin word terminus,—restricting its application accurately to the terminal station of a line. In England they name him a guard whom we in America name brakeman or trainman; and it is to be noted that when Stevenson was an Amateur Emigrant he sought to use the word of the country and so mentions the brakesman—thus proving again the difficulty of attaining exactness in local usage. The British call that a goods-train which we call a freight-train; and they speak of a crossing-plate when they mean what we know as a frog. In the United States a sleeping-car is often termed a sleeper, whereas in Great Britain what they call a sleeper is what we here call a tie. They say a keyless watch where we say a stem-winder. They say leader where we say editorial. They call that a lift which we call an elevator; and we call him a farm-hand whom they call an agricultural laborer. They have even borrowed one Americanism, caucus, and made it a Briticism by changing its meaning to signify what we are wont to describe as the machine or the organisation. It is to be noted also that corn in England refers to wheat and in America to maize; and that in Great Britain calico is a plain cotton cloth and in the United States a printed cotton cloth.

This list of correlative Americanisms and Briticisms might be extended, of course; but however sweeping our investigations may be we cannot make it very long. Far longer is the list of American words and phrases and usages for which there is no British equivalent—far too long, indeed, for inclusion in this essay. All that can be done here and now is to pick up a surface specimen or two from the outcroppings to show the quality of the vein. For instance, the vocabulary of the university is largely indigenous—altho we have recently borrowed a British vulgarism, speaking now of the varsity team and the varsity crew. Campus seems to be unknown to the British, and so does sophomoric, a most useful epithet understood at once all over the United States. Its absence from the British vocabulary is probably due to the fact that the four-year course of the old-fashioned American college is unknown in England, where there are freshmen indeed, but no sophomores.

Going out from the academic groves to the open air of the wider West, as so many of our college graduates do every year, we meet with a host of Americanisms vigorous with the free life of the great river and of the grand mountains. But is blaze=“to mark a trail through the woods by chipping off bits of bark”—is this a true Americanism? Is it not rather an American contribution to the English language? Surely every man in Africa or in Asia who wishes to retrace his path through a virgin forest must needs blaze his way as he goes. But shack=“a cabin of logs driven perpendicularly into the ground”—this is a true Americanism undoubtedly. And its compound claim-shack=“a shack built to hold a claim on a preëmption”—this is another true Americanism likely to puzzle a British reader. Even preëmpt and preëmption are probably Americanisms in that they have with us a meaning somewhat different from that they may have on the other side of the Atlantic. Another true Americanism, which comes to us from the plains, is mavericks=“the unbranded cattle at large to become the property of the first ranch-owner whose men may chance upon them.” And ranch, while it is itself a contribution to the language, has usages in which it is an Americanism merely—as in the Californian hen-ranch, for example.

There is a large freedom about the Western vernacular and a swift directness not elsewhere observable in the English language, whether in the United States or in the British Empire. These are most valuable qualities, and they are likely to be of real service to English in helping to refresh the jaded vocabulary of more scholarly communities. The function of slang as a true feeder of language is certain to get itself more widely recognized as time goes on; and there is no better nursery for these seedlings of speech than the territory west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies. To say this is not to say that there are not to be found east of the Mississippi many interesting locutions still inadequately established in the language. For example, there are three words applied to the same thing in different parts of the East; perhaps they ought to be styled localisms, but as they would be comprehended all over the United States, they are probably entitled to be received as true Americanisms—if, on the other hand, they are not in fact good old English words. A pass through the hills is often called a notch in the White Mountains, a clove in the Catskills, and a gap in the Blue Ridge. Yet even as I write this I have my doubts as to there being any narrow geographical delimitation of usage, since I can recall a Parker Notch in the Catskills, not far from Stony Clove and Kaaterskill Clove.

One of the best known of true Americanisms is lumber=“timber.” When we speak of the lumbering industry we mean not only the cutting down of trees and their sawing up into planks, but also their marketing. From the apparent participle lumbering a verb has been made to lumber—a not uncommon process in the history of the language, one British analog being the making of the verb to bant from the innocent name of Mr. Banting. To lumber is apparently now used in the sense of to deforest, if we may rely on a newspaper paragraph which informed us that a certain tract of twenty-five thousand acres in the Adirondacks had “been lumbered, but not in such a way as to injure it for a park.” The verb to launder=“to wash,” has been revived of late in America, if indeed it has not been made anew from the noun laundry; and shirt-makers in their price-lists specify whether the shirts are to be sold laundered or unlaundered. And to the word laundry itself has been given a further extension of meaning. In New York, at least,—and the verbal fashions of the metropolis spread swiftly throughout the Union,—it signifies not only the place where personal linen is washed but the personal linen itself. An advertisement in a college magazine informed the lone student that “gentlemen’s laundry” was “mended free.”