[15] This process, of course, is philologically respectable, however uncouth its occasional products may be. By it we have acquired many everyday words, among them, to accept (from acceptum), to exact (from exactum), to darkle (from darkling), and pea (from pease=pois).
[16] All authorities save one seem to agree that this verb is a pure Americanism, and that it is derived from the name of Charles Lynch, a Virginia justice of the peace, who jailed many Loyalists in 1780 without warrant in law. The dissentient, Bristed, says that to linch is in various northern English dialects, and means to beat or maltreat.
[17] The correct form of this appears to be halloo or holloa, but in America it is pronounced holler and usually represented in print by hollo or hollow. I have often encountered holloed in the past tense. But the Public Printer frankly accepts holler. Vide the Congressional Record, May 12, 1917, p. 2309. The word, in the form of hollering, is here credited to "Hon." John L. Burnett, of Alabama. There can be no doubt that the hon. gentleman said hollering, and not holloaing, or holloeing, or hollowing, or hallooing. Hello is apparently a variation of the same word.
[18] Rough-neck is often cited, in discussions of slang, as a latter-day invention, but Thornton shows that it was used in Texas in 1836.
[19] This use goes back to 1839.
[20] Thornton gives an example dated 1812. Of late the word has lost its final e and shortened its vowel, becoming scrap.
[21] Cf. Terms of Approbation and Eulogy.... by Elise L. Warnock, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, part 1, 1913. Among the curious recent coinages cited by Miss Warnock are scallywampus, supergobosnoptious, hyperfirmatious, scrumdifferous and swellellegous.
[22] E. g., single-track mind, to jump the rails, to collide head-on, broad-gauge man, to walk the ties, blind-baggage, underground-railroad, tank-town.
[23] Political Americanisms....; New York and London, 1890.
[24] Gustavus Myers: The History of Tammany Hall; 2nd ed.; New York, 1917, ch. viii.