)
uses the word in the same way: 'And therefore did not _emproove_ his
interest to engage the country in the quarrel.
uses the word in the same way: 'And therefore did not _emproove_ his
interest to engage the country in the quarrel.
James Russell Lowell
Sheridan, bid us say _invidgeous_.
Yet after all it is no worse
than the debasement which all our terminations in _tion_ and _tience_
have undergone, which yet we hear with _resignashun_ and _payshunce_,
though it might have aroused both _impat-i-ence_ and _in-dig-na-ti-on_
in Shakespeare's time. When George Herbert tells us that if the sermon
be dull,
'God takes a text and preacheth patience,'
the prolongation of the word seems to convey some hint at the
longanimity of the virtue. Consider what a poor curtal we have made of
Ocean. There was something of his heave and expanse in _o-ce-an_, and
Fletcher knew how to use it when he wrote so fine a verse as the second
of these, the best deep-sea verse I know,--
'In desperate storms stem with a little rudder
The tumbling ruins of the ocean. '
Oceanus was not then wholly shorn of his divine proportions, and our
modern _oshun_ sounds like the gush of small-beer in comparison. Some
other contractions of ours have a vulgar air about them. _More 'n_ for
_more than_, as one of the worst, may stand for a type of such. Yet our
old dramatists are full of such obscurations (elisions they can hardly
be called) of the _th_, making _whe'r_ of _whether_, _where_ of
_whither_, _here_ of _hither_, _bro'r_ of _brother_, _smo'r_ of
_smother_, _mo'r_ of _mother_, and so on. And dear Brer Rabbit, can I
forget him? Indeed, it is this that explains the word _rare_ (which has
Dryden's support), and which we say of meat where an Englishman would
use _underdone_. I do not believe, with the dictionaries, that it had
ever anything to do with the Icelandic _hrar_ (_raw_), as it plainly has
not in _rareripe_, which means earlier ripe,--President Lincoln said of
a precocious boy that 'he was a _rareripe_. ' And I do not believe it,
for this reason, that the earliest form of the word with us was, and the
commoner now in the inland parts still is, so far as I can discover,
_raredone_. Golding has 'egs reere-rosted,' which, whatever else it
mean, cannot mean _raw_-roasted, I find _rather_ as a monosyllable in
Donne, and still better, as giving the sound, rhyming with _fair_ in
Warner. There is an epigram of Sir Thomas Browne in which the words
_rather than_ make a monosyllable;--
'What furie is't to take Death's part
And rather than by Nature, die by Art! '
The contraction _more'n_ I find in the old play 'Fuimus Troes,' in a
verse where the measure is so strongly accented as to leave it beyond
doubt,--
'A golden crown whose heirs
More than half the world subdue. '
It may be, however, that the contraction is in 'th'orld. ' It is
unmistakable in the 'Second Maiden's Tragedy:'--
'It were but folly,
Dear soul, to boast of _more than_ I can perform. '
Is our _gin_ for _given_ more violent than _mar'l_ for _marvel_, which
was once common, and which I find as late as Herrick? Nay, Herrick has
_gin_ (spelling it _gen_), too, as do the Scotch, who agree with us
likewise in preferring _chimly_ to _chimney_.
I will now leave pronunciation and turn to words or phrases which have
been supposed peculiar to us, only pausing to pick up a single dropped
stitch, in the pronunciation of the word _supreme_, which I had thought
native till I found it in the well-languaged Daniel. I will begin with a
word of which I have never met with any example in any English writer of
authority. We express the first stage of withering in a green plant
suddenly cut down by the verb _to wilt_. It is, of course, own cousin of
the German _welken_, but I have never come upon it in literary use, and
my own books of reference give me faint help. Graff gives _welhen_,
_marcescere_, and refers to _weih_ (_weak_), and conjecturally to A. -S,
_hvelan_. The A. -S. _wealwian_ (_to wither_) is nearer, but not so near
as two words in the Icelandic, which perhaps put us on the track of its
ancestry,--_velgi_, _tepefacere_, (and _velki_, with the derivative)
meaning _contaminare_. _Wilt_, at any rate, is a good word, filling, as
it does, a sensible gap between drooping and withering, and the
imaginative phrase 'he wilted right down,' like 'he caved right in,' is
a true Americanism. _Wilt_ occurs in English provincial glossaries, but
is explained by _wither_, which with us it does not mean. We have a few
words such as _cache_, _cohog_, _carry_ (_portage_), _shoot_ (_chute_),
_timber_ (_forest_), _bushwhack_ (to pull a boat along by the bushes on
the edge of a stream), _buckeye_ (a picturesque word for the
horse-chestnut); but how many can we be said to have fairly brought into
the language, as Alexander Gill, who first mentions Americanisms, meant
it when he said, '_Sed et ab Americanis nonnulla mutuamur ut_ MAIZ _et_
CANOA'? Very few, I suspect, and those mostly by borrowing from the
French, German, Spanish, or Indian. [28] 'The Dipper,' for the 'Great
Bear,' strikes me as having a native air. _Bogus_, in the sense of
_worthless_, is undoubtedly ours, but is, I more than suspect, a
corruption of the French _bagasse_ (from low Latin _bagasea_), which
travelled up the Mississippi from New Orleans, where it was used for the
refuse of the sugar-cane. It is true, we have modified the meaning of
some words. We use _freshet_ in the sense of _flood_, for which I have
not chanced upon any authority. Our New England cross between Ancient
Pistol and Dugald Dalgetty, Captain Underhill, uses the word (1638) to
mean a _current_, and I do not recollect it elsewhere in that sense. I
therefore leave it with a? for future explorers. _Crick_ for _creek_ I
find in Captain John Smith and in the dedication of Fuller's 'Holy
Warre,' and _run_, meaning a _small stream_, in Waymouth's 'Voyage'
(1605). _Humans_ for _men_, which Mr. Bartlett includes in his
'Dictionary of Americanisms,' is Chapman's habitual phrase in his
translation of Homer. I find it also in the old play of 'The Hog hath
lost his Pearl. ' _Dogs_ for _andirons_ is still current in New England,
and in Walter de Biblesworth I find _chiens_ glossed in the margin by
_andirons_. _Gunning_ for _shooting_ is in Drayton. We once got credit
for the poetical word _fall_ for _autumn_, but Mr. Bartlett and the last
edition of Webster's Dictionary refer us to Dryden. It is even older,
for I find it in Drayton, and Bishop Hall has _autumn fall_. Middleton
plays upon the word: 'May'st thou have a reasonable good _spring_, for
thou art like to have many dangerous foul _falls_. ' Daniel does the
same, and Coleridge uses it as we do. Gray uses the archaism _picked_
for _peaked_, and the word _smudge_ (as our backwoodsmen do) for a
smothered fire. Lord Herbert of Cherbury (more properly perhaps than
even Sidney, the last _preux chevalier_) has 'the Emperor's folks' just
as a Yankee would say it. _Loan_ for _lend_, with which we have hitherto
been blackened, I must retort upon the mother island, for it appears so
long ago as in 'Albion's England. ' _Fleshy_, in the sense of _stout_,
may claim Ben Jonson's warrant, and I find it also so lately as in
Francklin's 'Lucian. ' _Chore_ is also Jonson's word, and I am inclined
to prefer it to _chare_ and _char_, because I think that I see a more
natural origin for it in the French _jour_--whence it might come to mean
a day's work, and thence a job--than anywhere else. [29] _At onst_ for _at
once_ I thought a corruption of our own, till I found it in the Chester
Plays. I am now inclined to suspect it no corruption at all, but only an
erratic and obsolete superlative _at onest_. _To progress_ was flung in
our teeth till Mr. Pickering retorted with Shakespeare's 'doth progress
down thy cheeks. ' I confess that I was never satisfied with this answer,
because the accent was different, and because the word might here be
reckoned a substantive quite as well as a verb. Mr. Bartlett (in his
dictionary above cited) adds a surrebutter in a verse from Ford's
'Broken Heart. ' Here the word is clearly a verb, but with the accent
unhappily still on the first syllable. Mr. Bartlett says that he
'cannot say whether the word was used in Bacon's time or not. ' It
certainly was, and with the accent we give to it. Ben Jonson, in the
'Alchemist,' had this verse,
'Progress so from extreme unto extreme,'
and Sir Philip Sidney,
'Progressing then from fair Turias' golden place. '
Surely we may now sleep in peace, and our English cousins will forgive
us, since we have cleared ourselves from any suspicion of originality in
the matter! Even after I had convinced myself that the chances were
desperately against our having invented any of the _Americanisms_ with
which we are _faulted_ and which we are in the habit of _voicing_, there
were one or two which had so prevailingly indigenous an accent as to
stagger me a little. One of these was 'the biggest _thing out_. ' Alas,
even this slender comfort is denied me. Old Gower has
'So harde an herte was none _oute_,'
and
'That such merveile was none _oute_. '
He also, by the way, says 'a _sighte_ of flowres' as naturally as our
up-country folk would say it. _Poor_ for _lean_, _thirds_ for _dower_,
and _dry_ for _thirsty_ I find in Middleton's plays. _Dry_ is also in
Skelton and in the 'World' (1754). In a note on Middleton, Mr. Dyce
thinks it needful to explain the phrase _I can't tell_ (universal in
America) by the gloss _I could not say_. Middleton also uses _sneeked_,
which I had believed an Americanism till I saw it there. It is, of
course, only another form of _snatch_, analogous to _theek_ and _thatch_
(cf. the proper names Dekker and Thacher), _break_ (_brack_) and
_breach_, _make_ (still common with us) and _match_. _'Long on_ for
_occasioned by_ ('who is this 'long on? ') occurs constantly in Gower and
likewise in Middleton. _'Cause why_ is in Chaucer. _Raising_ (an English
version of the French _leaven_) for _yeast_ is employed by Gayton in his
'Festivous Notes on Don Quixote. ' I have never seen an instance of our
New England word _emptins_ in the same sense, nor can I divine its
original. Gayton has _limekill_; also _shuts_ for _shutters_, and the
latter is used by Mrs. Hutchinson in her 'Life of Colonel Hutchinson. '
Bishop Hall, and Purchas in his 'Pilgrims,' have _chist_ for _chest_,
and it is certainly nearer _cista_, as well as to its form in the
Teutonic languages, whence probably we got it. We retain the old sound
from _cist_, but _chest_ is as old as Chaucer. Lovelace says _wropt_ for
_wrapt_. 'Musicianer' I had always associated with the militia-musters
of my boyhood, and too hastily concluded it an abomination of our own,
but Mr. Wright calls it a Norfolk word, and I find it to be as old as
1642 by an extract in Collier. 'Not worth the time of day,' had passed
with me for native till I saw it in Shakespeare's 'Pericles. ' For
_slick_ (which is only a shorter sound of _sleek_, like _crick_ and the
now universal _britches_ for _breeches_) I will only call Chapman and
Jonson. 'That's a sure card! ' and 'That's a stinger! ' both sound like
modern slang, but you will find the one in the old interlude of
'Thersytes' (1537), and the other in Middleton. 'Right here,' a favorite
phrase with our orators and with a certain class of our editors, turns
up _passim_ in the Chester and Coventry plays. Mr. Dickens found
something very ludicrous in what he considered our neologism _right
away_. But I find a phrase very like it, and which I would gladly
suspect to be a misprint for it, in 'Gammer Gurton:'--
'Lyght it and bring it _tite away_. '
But _tite_ is the true word in this case. After all, what is it but
another form of _straightway_? _Cussedness_, meaning _wickedness,
malignity_, and _cuss_, a sneaking, ill-natured fellow, in such phrases
as 'He done it out o' pure cussedness,' and 'He is a nateral cuss,' have
been commonly thought Yankeeisms. To vent certain contemptuously
indignant moods they are admirable in their rough-and-ready way. But
neither is our own. _Cursydnesse_, in the same sense of malignant
wickedness, occurs in the Coventry Plays, and _cuss_ may perhaps claim
to have come in with the Conqueror. At least the term is also French.
Saint Simon uses it and confesses its usefulness. Speaking of the Abbe
Dubois, he says, 'Qui etoit en plein ce qu'un mauvais francois appelle
un _sacre_, mais qui ne se peut guere exprimer autrement. ' 'Not worth a
cuss,' though supported by 'not worth a damn,' may be a mere corruption,
since 'not worth a _cress_' is in 'Piers Ploughman. ' 'I don't see it,'
was the popular slang a year or two ago, and seemed to spring from the
soil; but no, it is in Cibber's 'Careless Husband. ' _Green sauce_ for
_vegetables_ I meet in Beaumont and Fletcher, Gayton, and elsewhere. Our
rustic pronunciation _sahce_ (for either the diphthong _au_ was
anciently pronounced _ah_, or else we have followed abundant analogy in
changing it to the latter sound, as we have in _chance, dance_, and so
many more) may be the older one, and at least gives some hint at its
ancestor _salsa_. _Warn_, in the sense of _notify_, is, I believe, now
peculiar to us, but Pecock so employs it. I find _primmer_ (_primer_, as
we pronounce it) in Beaumont and Fletcher, and a 'square eater' too
(compare our '_square_ meal'), _heft_ for _weight_, and 'muchness' in
the 'Mirror for Magistrates,' _bankbill_ in Swift and Fielding, and _as_
for _that_ I might say _passim_. _To cotton to_ is, I rather think, an
Americanism. The nearest approach to it I have found is _cotton
together_, in Congreve's 'Love for Love. ' To _cotton_ or _cotten_, in
another sense, is old and common. Our word means to _cling_, and its
origin, possibly, is to be sought in another direction, perhaps in A. S.
_cvead_, which means _mud, clay_ (both proverbially clinging), or better
yet, in the Icelandic _qvoda_ (otherwise _kod_), meaning _resin_ and
_glue_, which are [Greek: kat' exochaen], sticky substances. To _spit
cotton_ is, I think, American, and also, perhaps, to _flax_ for to
_beat_. _To the halves_ still survives among us, though apparently
obsolete in England. It means either to let or to hire a piece of land,
receiving half the profit in money or in kind (_partibus locare_). I
mention it because in a note by some English editor, to which I have
lost my reference, I have seen it wrongly explained. The editors of
Nares cite Burton. _To put_, in the sense of _to go_, as _Put! _ for
_Begone! _ would seem our own, and yet it is strictly analogous to the
French _se mettre a la voie_, and the Italian _mettersi in via_. Indeed,
Dante has a verse,
'_Io sarei_ [for _mi sarei_] _gia messo per lo sentiero_,'
which, but for the indignity, might be translated,
'I should, ere this, have _put_ along the way,'
I deprecate in advance any share in General Banks's notions of
international law, but we may all take a just pride in his exuberant
eloquence as something distinctively American. When he spoke a few years
ago of 'letting the Union slide,' even those who, for political
purposes, reproached him with the sentiment, admired the indigenous
virtue of his phrase. Yet I find 'let the world slide' in Heywood's
Edward IV. ;' and in Beaumont and Fletcher's 'Wit without Money,'
Valentine says,
'Will you go drink,
And let the world slide? '
So also in Sidney's 'Arcadia,'
'Let his dominion slide. '
In the one case it is put into the mouth of a clown, in the other, of a
gentleman, and was evidently proverbial. It has even higher sanction,
for Chaucer writes,
'Well nigh all other cures _let he slide_. '
Mr. Bartlett gives 'above one's bend' as an Americanism; but compare
Hamlet's 'to the top of my bent. ' _In his tracks_ for _immediately_ has
acquired an American accent, and passes where he can for a native, but
is an importation nevertheless; for what is he but the Latin _e
vestigio_, or at best the Norman French _eneslespas_, both which have
the same meaning? _Hotfoot_ (provincial also in England), I find in the
old romance of 'Tristan,'
'_Si s'en parti_ CHAUT PAS'
_Like_ for _as_ is never used in New England, but is universal in the
South and West. It has on its side the authority of two kings (_ego sum
rex Romanorum et supra grammaticam_), Henry VIII. and Charles I. This
were ample, without throwing into the scale the scholar and poet Daniel.
_Them_ was used as a nominative by the majesty of Edward VI. , by Sir P.
Hoby, and by Lord Paget (in Froude's 'History'). I have never seen any
passage adduced where _guess_ was used as the Yankee uses it. The word
was familiar in the mouths of our ancestors, but with a different shade
of meaning from that we have given it, which is something like _rather
think_, though the Yankee implies a confident certainty by it when he
says, 'I guess I _du! _' There are two examples in Otway, one of which
('So in the struggle, I guess the note was lost') perhaps might serve
our purpose, and Coleridge's
'I guess 'twas fearful there to see'
certainly comes very near. But I have a higher authority than either in
Selden, who, in one of his notes to the 'Polyolbion,' writes, 'The first
inventor of them (I _guess_ you dislike not the addition) was one
Berthold Swartz. ' Here he must mean by it, 'I take it for granted. '
Robert Greene, in his 'Quip for an Upstart Courtier,' makes
Cloth-breeches say, 'but I _gesse_ your maistership never tried what
true honor meant. ' In this case the word seems to be used with a meaning
precisely like that which we give it. Another peculiarity almost as
prominent is the beginning sentences, especially in answer to questions,
with 'well. ' Put before such a phrase as 'How d'e do? ' it is commonly
short, and has the sound of it _wul_, but in reply it is deliberative,
and the various shades of meaning which can be conveyed by difference of
intonation, and by prolonging or abbreviating, I should vainly attempt
to describe. I have heard _ooa-ahl_, _wahl_, _ahl_, _wal_ and something
nearly approaching the sound of
the _le_ in _able_. Sometimes before 'I' it dwindles to a mere _l_, as
''l _I_ dunno. ' A friend of mine (why should I not please myself, though
I displease him, by brightening my page with the initials of the most
exquisite of humorists, J. H. ? ) told me that he once heard five 'wells,'
like pioneers, precede the answer to an inquiry about the price of land.
The first was the ordinary _wul_, in deference to custom; the second,
the long, perpending _ooahl_, with a falling inflection of the voice;
the third, the same, but with the voice rising, as if in despair of a
conclusion, into a plaintively nasal whine; the fourth, _wulh_, ending
in the aspirate of a sigh; and then, fifth, came a short, sharp _wal_,
showing that a conclusion had been reached. I have used this latter form
in the 'Biglow Papers,' because, if enough nasality be added, it
represents most nearly the average sound of what I may call the
interjection.
A locution prevails in the Southern and Middle States which is so
curious that, though never heard in New England, I will give a few lines
to its discussion, the more readily because it is extinct elsewhere. I
mean the use of _allow_ in the sense of _affirm_, as 'I allow that's a
good horse. ' I find the word so used in 1558 by Anthony Jenkinson in
Hakluyt: 'Corne they sowe not, neither doe eate any bread, mocking the
Christians for the same, and disabling our strengthe, saying we live by
eating the toppe of a weede, and drinke a drinke made of the same,
_allowing_ theyr great devouring of flesh and drinking of milke to be
the increase of theyr strength. ' That is, they undervalued our strength,
and affirmed their own to be the result of a certain diet. In another
passage of the same narrative the word has its more common meaning of
approving or praising: 'The said king, much allowing this declaration,
said. ' Ducange quotes Bracton _sub voce_ ADLOCARE for the meaning 'to
admit as proved,' and the transition from this to 'affirm,' is by no
means violent. Izaak Walton has 'Lebault _allows_ waterfrogs to be good
meat,' and here the word is equivalent to _affirms_. At the same time,
when we consider some of the meanings of _allow_ in old English, and of
_allouer_ in old French, and also remember that the verbs _prize_ and
_praise_ are from one root, I think we must admit _allaudare_ to a share
in the paternity of _allow_. The sentence from Hakluyt would read
equally well, 'contemning our strengthe, . . . and praising (or valuing)
their great eating of flesh as the cause of their increase in strength. '
After all, if we confine ourselves to _allocare_, it may turn out that
the word was somewhere and somewhen used for _to bet_, analogously to
_put up, put down, post_ (cf. Spanish _apostar_), and the like. I hear
boys in the street continually saying, 'I bet that's a good horse,' or
what not, meaning by no means to risk anything beyond their opinion in
the matter.
The word _improve_, in the sense of to 'occupy, make use of, employ,' as
Dr. Pickering defines it, he long ago proved to be no neologism. He
would have done better, I think, had he substituted _profit by_ for
_employ_. He cites Dr. Franklin as saying that the word had never, so
far as he knew, been used in New England before he left it in 1723,
except in Dr. Mather's 'Bemarkable Providences,' which he oddly calls a
'very old book. ' Franklin, as Dr. Pickering goes on to show, was
mistaken.
Mr. Bartlett in his 'Dictionary' merely abridges Pickering. Both of them
should have confined the application of the word to material things, its
extension to which is all that is peculiar in the supposed American use
of it. For surely 'Complete Letter-Writers' have been '_improving_ this
opportunity' time out of mind. I will illustrate the word a little
further, because Pickering cites no English authorities. Skelton has a
passage in his 'Phyllyp Sparowe,' which I quote the rather as it
contains also the word _allowed_ and as it distinguishes _improve_ from
_employ:_--
'His [Chaucer's] Englysh well alowed,
So as it is _emprowed_
For as it is employd,
There is no English voyd. '
Here the meaning is to _profit by_. In Fuller's 'Holy Warre' (1647), we
have 'The Egyptians standing on the firm ground, were thereby enabled to
_improve_ and enforce their darts to the utmost. ' Here the word might
certainly mean _to make use of_. Mrs. Hutchison (Life of Colonel H.
)
uses the word in the same way: 'And therefore did not _emproove_ his
interest to engage the country in the quarrel. ' Swift in one of his
letters says: 'There is not an acre of land in Ireland turned to half
its advantage; yet it is better _improved_ than the people. ' I find it
also in 'Strength out of Weakness' (1652), and Plutarch's
'Morals'(1714), but I know of only one example of its use in the purely
American sense, and that is 'a very good _improvement_ for a mill' in
the 'State Trials' (Speech of the Attorney. General in the Lady Ivy's
case, 1864). In the sense of _employ_, I could cite a dozen old English
authorities.
In running over the fly-leaves of those delightful folios for this
reference, I find a note which reminds me of another word, for our abuse
of which we have been deservedly ridiculed. I mean _lady,_ It is true I
might cite the example of the Italian _donna_[30] (_domina_), which has
been treated in the same way by a whole nation, and not, as _lady_ among
us, by the uncultivated only. It perhaps grew into use in the
half-democratic republics of Italy in the same way and for the same
reasons as with us. But I admit that our abuse of the word is
villainous. I know of an orator who once said in a public meeting where
bonnets preponderated, that 'the ladies were last at the cross and first
at the tomb'! But similar sins were committed before our day and in the
mother country. In the 'Harleian Miscellany' (vol. v. p. 455) I find
'this _lady_ is my servant; the hedger's daughter Ioan. ' in the 'State
Trials' I learn of 'a _gentlewoman_ that lives cook with' such a one,
and I hear the Lord High Steward speaking of the wife of a waiter at a
bagnio as a _gentlewoman_! From the same authority, by the way, I can
state that our vile habit of chewing tobacco had the somewhat unsavory
example of Titus Oates, and I know by tradition from an eye-witness that
the elegant General Burgoyne partook of the same vice. Howell, in one of
his letters (dated 26 August, 1623), speaks thus of another
'institution' which many have thought American: 'They speak much of that
boisterous Bishop of Halverstadt (for so they term him here), that,
having taken a place where ther were two Monasteries of Nuns and Friers,
he caus'd divers feather-beds to be rip'd, and all the feathers to be
thrown in a great Hall, whither the Nuns and Friers were thrust naked
with their bodies oil'd and pitch'd, and to tumble among the feathers. '
Howell speaks as if the thing were new to him, and I know not if the
'boisterous' Bishop was the inventor of it, but I find it practised in
England before our Revolution.
Before leaving the subject, I will add a few comments made from time to
time on the margin of Mr. Bartlett's excellent 'Dictionary,' to which I
am glad thus publicly to acknowledge my many obligations. 'Avails' is
good old English, and the _vails_ of Sir Joshua Reynolds's porter are
famous. Averse _from_, averse _to_, and in connection with them the
English vulgarism 'different _to_;' the corrupt use of _to_ in these
cases, as well as in the Yankee 'he lives to Salem,' 'to home,' and
others, must be a very old one, for in the one case it plainly arose
from confounding the two French prepositions _a_, (from Latin _ad_ and
_ab_), and in the other from translating the first of them. I once
thought 'different to' a modern vulgarism, and Mr. Thackeray, on my
pointing it out to him in 'Henry Esmond,' confessed it to be an
anachronism. Mr. Bartlett refers to 'the old writers quoted in
Richardson's Dictionary' for 'different to,' though in my edition of
that work all the examples are with _from_. But I find _to_ used
invariably by Sir R. Hawkins in Hakluyt. _Banjo_ is a negro corruption
of O. E. _bandore_. _Bind-weed_ can hardly be modern, for _wood-bind_ is
old and radically right, intertwining itself through _bindan_ and
_windan_ with classic stems. _Bobolink_: is this a contraction for Bob
o' Lincoln? I find _bobolynes_, in one of the poems attributed to
Skelton, where it may be rendered _giddy-pate_, a term very fit for the
bird in his ecstasies. _Cruel_ for _great_ is in Hakluyt.
_Bowling-alley_ is in Nash's 'Pierce Pennilesse. ' _Curious_, meaning
_nice_, occurs continually in old writers, and is as old as Pecock's
'Repressor. ' _Droger_ is O. E. _drugger_. _Educational_ is in Burke.
_Feeze_ is only a form of _fizz_. _To fix_, in the American sense, I
find used by the Commissioners of the United Colonies so early as 1675,
'their arms well _fixed_ and fit for service. ' _To take the foot in the
hand_ is German; so is to _go under_. _Gundalow_ is old; I find
_gundelo_ in Hakluyt, and _gundello_ in Booth's reprint of the folio
Shakespeare of 1623. _Gonoff_ is O. E. _gnoffe_. _Heap_ is in 'Piers
Ploughman' ('and other names _an heep_'), and in Hakluyt ('seeing such a
_heap_ of their enemies ready to devour them'). _To liquor_ is in the
'Puritan' ('call 'em in, and liquor 'em a little'). _To loaf_: this, I
think, is unquestionably German. _Laufen_ is pronounced _lofen_ in some
parts of Germany, and I once heard one German student say to another,
_Ich lauf_ (lofe) _hier bis du wiederkehrest_, and he began accordingly
to saunter up and down, in short, to _loaf_. _To mull_, Mr. Bartlett
says, means 'to soften, to dispirit,' and quotes from
'Margaret,'--'There has been a pretty considerable _mullin_ going on
among the doctors,'--where it surely cannot mean what he says it does.
We have always heard _mulling_ used for _stirring, bustling_, sometimes
in an underhand way. It is a metaphor derived probably from _mulling_
wine, and the word itself must be a corruption of _mell_, from O. F.
_mesler_. _Pair_ of stairs is in Hakluyt. _To pull up stakes_ is in
Curwen's Journal, and therefore pre-Revolutionary. I think I have met
with it earlier. _Raise_: under this word Mr. Bartlett omits 'to raise a
house,' that is, the frame of a wooden one, and also the substantive
formed from it, a _raisin'_. _Retire_ for _go to bed_ is in Fielding's
'Amelia. ' _Setting-poles_ cannot be new, for I find 'some _set_ [the
boats] with long _poles_' in Hakluyt. _Shoulder-hitters_: I find that
_shoulder-striker_ is old, though I have lost the reference to my
authority. _Snag_ is no new word, though perhaps the Western application
of it is so; but I find in Gill the proverb, 'A bird in the bag is worth
two on the snag. ' Dryden has _swop_ and _to rights_. _Trail_: Hakluyt
has 'many wayes _traled_ by the wilde beastes. '
I subjoin a few phrases not in Mr. Bartlett's book which I have heard.
_Bald-headed_: 'to go it bald-beaded;' in great haste, as where one
rushes out without his hat. _Bogue_: 'I don't git much done 'thout I
_bogue_ right in along 'th my men. ' _Carry_: a _portage_. _Cat-nap_: a
short doze. _Cat-stick_: a small stick. _Chowder-head_: a muddle-brain.
_Cling-john_: a soft cake of rye. _Cocoanut_; the head. _Cohees_:
applied to the people of certain settlements in Western Pennsylvania,
from their use of the archaic form _Quo' he_. _Dunnow'z I know_: the
nearest your true Yankee ever comes to acknowledging ignorance.
_Essence-pedler_: a skunk. _First-rate and a half_. _Fish flakes_, for
drying fish: O. E. _fleck_ (_cratis_). _Gander-party_: a social gathering
of men only. _Gawnicus_: a dolt. _Hawkin's whetstone_: rum; in derision
of one Hawkins, a well-known temperance-lecturer. _Hyper_: to bustle: 'I
mus' _hyper_ about an' git tea. ' _Keeler-tub_: one in which dishes are
washed. ('And Greasy Joan doth _keel_ the pot. ') _Lap-tea_: where the
guests are too many to sit at table. _Last of pea-time_: to be hard-up.
_Lose-laid_ (_loose-laid_): a weaver's term, and probably English;
weak-willed. _Malahack_: to cut up hastily or awkwardly. _Moonglade_: a
beautiful word: for the track of moonlight on the water. _Off-ox_: an
unmanageable, cross-grained fellow. _Old Driver, Old Splitfoot_: the
Devil. _On-hitch_: to pull trigger (cf. Spanish _disparar_). _Popular_:
conceited, _Rote_: sound of surf before a storm. _Rot-gut_: cheap
whiskey; the word occurs in Heywood's 'English Traveller' and Addison's
'Drummer,' for a poor kind of drink. _Seem_: it is habitual with the
New-Englander to put this verb to strange uses, as 'I can't _seem_ to be
suited,' 'I couldn't _seem_ to know him. ' _Sidehill_, for _hillside_.
_State-house_: this seems an Americanism, whether invented or derived
from the Dutch _Stad-huys_, I know not. _Strike_ and _string_; from the
game of ninepins; to make a _strike_ is to knock down all the pins with
one ball, hence it has come to mean fortunate, successful. _Swampers_:
men who break out roads for lumberers. _Tormented_: euphemism for
damned, as, 'not a tormented cent. ' _Virginia fence, to make a_: to walk
like a drunken man.
It is always worth while to note down the erratic words or phrases which
one meets with in any dialect. They may throw light on the meaning of
other words, on the relationship of languages, or even on history
itself. In so composite a language as ours they often supply a different
form to express a different shade of meaning, as in _viol_ and _fiddle_,
_thrid_ and _thread_, _smother_ and _smoulder_, where the _l_ has crept
in by a false analogy with _would_. We have given back to England the
excellent adjective _lengthy_, formed honestly like _earthy, drouthy_,
and others, thus enabling their journalists to characterize our
President's messages by a word civilly compromising between _long_ and
_tedious_, so as not to endanger the peace of the two countries by
wounding our national sensitiveness to British criticism. Let me give
two curious examples of the antiseptic property of dialects at which I
have already glanced. Dante has _dindi_ as a childish or low word for
_danari_ (money), and in Shropshire small Roman coins are still dug up
which the peasants call _dinders_. This can hardly be a chance
coincidence, but seems rather to carry the word back to the Roman
soldiery. So our farmers say _chuk, chuk_, to their pigs, and _ciacco_
is one of the Italian words for _hog_. When a countryman tells us that
he 'fell _all of a heap_,' I cannot help thinking that he unconsciously
points to an affinity between our word _tumble_, and the Latin
_tumulus_, that is older than most others. I believe that words, or even
the mere intonation of them, have an astonishing vitality and power of
propagation by the root, like the gardener's pest, quitch-grass,[31]
while the application or combination of them may be new. It is in these
last that my countrymen seem to me full of humor, invention, quickness
of wit, and that sense of subtle analogy which needs only refining to
become fancy and imagination. Prosaic as American life seems in many of
its aspects to a European, bleak and bare as it is on the side of
tradition, and utterly orphaned of the solemn inspiration of antiquity,
I cannot help thinking that the ordinary talk of unlettered men among us
is fuller of metaphor and of phrases that suggest lively images than
that of any other people I have seen. Very many such will be found in
Mr. Bartlett's book, though his short list of proverbs at the end seem
to me, with one or two exceptions, as un-American as possible. Most of
them have no character at all but coarseness, and are quite too
long-skirted for working proverbs, in which language always 'takes off
its coat to it,' as a Yankee would say. There are plenty that have a
more native and puckery flavor, seedlings from the old stock often, and
yet new varieties. One hears such not seldom among us Easterners, and
the West would yield many more. 'Mean enough to steal acorns from a
blind hog;' 'Cold as the north side of a Jenooary gravestone by
starlight;' 'Hungry as a graven image;' 'Pop'lar as a hen with one
chicken;' 'A hen's time ain't much;' 'Quicker 'n greased lightnin';'
'Ther's sech a thing ez bein' _tu_' (our Yankee paraphrase of [Greek:
maeden agan]); hence the phrase _tooin' round_, meaning a supererogatory
activity like that of flies; 'Stingy enough to skim his milk at both
eends;' 'Hot as the Devil's kitchen;' 'Handy as a pocket in a shirt;'
'He's a whole team and the dog under the wagon;' 'All deacons are good,
but there's odds in deacons' (to _deacon_ berries is to put the largest
atop); 'So thievish they hev to take in their stone walls nights;'[32]
may serve as specimens. 'I take my tea _barfoot_,' said a backwoodsman
when asked if he would have cream and sugar. (I find _barfoot_, by the
way, in the Coventry Plays. ) A man speaking to me once of a very rocky
clearing said, 'Stone's got a pretty heavy mortgage on that land,' and I
overheard a guide in the woods say to his companions who were urging him
to sing, 'Wal, I _did_ sing once, but toons gut invented, an' thet spilt
my trade. ' Whoever has driven over a stream by a bridge made of _slabs_
will feel the picturesque force of the epithet _slab-bridged_ applied to
a fellow of shaky character. Almost every county has some good
die-sinker in phrase, whose mintage passes into the currency of the
whole neighborhood. Such a one described the county jail (the one stone
building where all the dwellings are of wood) as 'the house whose
underpinnin' come up to the eaves,' and called hell 'the place where
they didn't rake up their fires nights. ' I once asked a stage-driver if
the other side of a hill were as steep as the one we were climbing:
'Steep? chain lightnin' couldn' go down it 'thout puttin' the shoe on! '
And this brings me back to the exaggeration of which I spoke before. To
me there is something very taking in the negro 'so black that charcoal
made a chalk-mark on him,' and the wooden shingle 'painted so like
marble that it sank in water,' as if its very consciousness or its
vanity had been overpersuaded by the cunning of the painter. I heard a
man, in order to give a notion of some very cold weather, say to another
that a certain Joe, who had been taking mercury, found a lump of
quicksilver in each boot, when he went home to dinner. This power of
rapidly dramatizing a dry fact into flesh and blood and the vivid
conception of Joe as a human thermometer strike me as showing a poetic
sense that may be refined into faculty. At any rate there is humor here,
and not mere quickness of wit,--the deeper and not the shallower
quality. The _tendency_ of humor is always towards overplus of
expression, while the very essence of wit is its logical precision.
Captain Basil Hall denied that our people had any humor, deceived,
perhaps, by their gravity of manner. But this very seriousness is often
the outward sign of that humorous quality of the mind which delights in
finding an element of identity in things seemingly the most incongruous,
and then again in forcing an incongruity upon things identical. Perhaps
Captain Hall had no humor himself, and if so he would never find it. Did
he always feel the point of what was said to himself? I doubt it,
because I happen to know a chance he once had given him in vain. The
Captain was walking up and down the veranda of a country tavern in
Massachusetts while the coach changed horses. A thunder-storm was going
on, and, with that pleasant European air of indirect self-compliment in
condescending to be surprised by American merit, which we find so
conciliating, he said to a countryman lounging against the door, 'Pretty
heavy thunder you have here. ' The other, who had divined at a glance his
feeling of generous concession to a new country, drawled gravely, 'Waal,
we _du_, considerin' the number of inhabitants. ' This, the more I
analyze it, the more humorous does it seem. The same man was capable of
wit also, when he would. He was a cabinet-maker, and was once employed
to make some commandment-tables for the parish meeting-house. The
parson, a very old man, annoyed him by looking into his workshop every
morning, and cautioning him to be very sure to pick out 'clear mahogany
without any _knots_ in it. ' At last, wearied out, he retorted one day:
'Wal, Dr. B. , I guess ef I was to leave the _nots_ out o' some o' the
c'man'ments, 't'ould soot you full ez wal! '
If I had taken the pains to write down the proverbial or pithy phrases I
have heard, or if I had sooner thought of noting the Yankeeisms I met
with in my reading, I might have been able to do more justice to my
theme. But I have done all I wished in respect to pronunciation, if I
have proved that where we are vulgar, we have the countenance of very
good company. For, as to the _jus et norma loquendi_, I agree with
Horace and those who have paraphrased or commented him, from Boileau to
Gray. I think that a good rule for style is Galiani's definition of
sublime oratory,--'l'art de tout dire sans etre mis a la Bastille dans
un pays ou il est defendu de rien dire. ' I profess myself a fanatical
purist, but with a hearty contempt for the speech-gilders who affect
purism without any thorough, or even pedagogic knowledge of the
engendure, growth, and affinities of the noble language about whose
_mesalliances_ they profess (like Dean Alford) to be so solicitous. If
_they_ had their way--! 'Doch es sey,' says Lessing, 'dass jene
gotbische Hoflichkeit eine unentbehrliche Tugend des heutigen Umganges
ist. Soll sie darum unsere Schriften eben so schaal und falsch machen
als unsern Umgang? ' And Drayton was not far wrong in affirming that
'Tis possible to climb,
To kindle, or to slake,
Although in Skelton's rhyme. '
Cumberland in his Memoirs tells us that when, in the midst of Admiral
Rodney's great sea-fight, Sir Charles Douglas said to him, 'Behold, Sir
George, the Greeks and Trojans contending for the body of Patroclus! '
the Admiral answered, peevishly, 'Damn the Greeks and damn the Trojans!
I have other things to think of. ' After the battle was won, Rodney thus
to Sir Charles, 'Now, my dear friend, I am at the service of your Greeks
and Trojans, and the whole of Homer's Iliad, or as much of it as you
please! ' I had some such feeling of the impertinence of our
pseudo-classicality when I chose our homely dialect to work in. Should
we be nothing, because somebody had contrived to be something (and that
perhaps in a provincial dialect) ages ago? and to be nothing by our very
attempt to be that something, which they had already been, and which
therefore nobody could be again without being a bore? Is there no way
left, then, I thought, of being natural, of being _naif_, which means
nothing more than native, of belonging to the age and country in which
you are born? The Yankee, at least, is a new phenomenon; let us try to
be _that_. It is perhaps a _pis aller_, but is not _No Thoroughfare_
written up everywhere else? In the literary world, things seemed to me
very much as they were in the latter half of the last century. Pope,
skimming the cream of good sense and expression wherever he could find
it, had made, not exactly poetry, but an honest, salable butter of
worldly wisdom which pleasantly lubricated some of the drier morsels of
life's daily bread, and, seeing this, scores of harmlessly insane people
went on for the next fifty years coaxing his buttermilk with the regular
up and down of the pentameter churn. And in our day do we not scent
everywhere, and even carry away in our clothes against our will, that
faint perfume of musk which Mr. Tennyson has left behind him, or worse,
of Heine's _patchouli_? And might it not be possible to escape them by
turning into one of our narrow New England lanes, shut in though it were
by bleak stone walls on either hand, and where no better flowers were to
be gathered than goldenrod and hardhack?
Beside the advantage of getting out of the beaten track, our dialect
offered others hardly inferior. As I was about to make an endeavor to
state them, I remembered something that the clear-sighted Goethe had
said about Hebel's 'Allemannische Gedichte,' which, making proper
deduction for special reference to the book under review, expresses what
I would have said far better than I could hope to do: 'Allen diesen
innern guten Eigenschaften kommt die behagliche naive Sprache sehr zu
statten. Man findet mehrere sinnlich bedeutende and wohlklingende Worte
. . . von einem, zwei Buchstaben, Abbreviationen, Contractionen, viele
kurze, leichte Sylben, neue Reime, welches, mehr als man glaubt, ein
Vortheil fur den Dichter ist. Diese Elemente werden durch gluckliche
Constructionen und lebhafte Formen zu einem Styl zusammengedrangt der zu
diesem Zwecke vor unserer Buchersprache grosse Vorzuge hat. ' Of course I
do not mean to imply that _I_ have come near achieving any such success
as the great critic here indicates, but I think the success is _there_,
and to be plucked by some more fortunate hand.
Nevertheless, I was encouraged by the approval of many whose opinions I
valued. With a feeling too tender and grateful to be mixed with any
vanity, I mention as one of these the late A. H. Clough, who more than
any one of those I have known (no longer living), except Hawthorne,
impressed me with the constant presence of that indefinable thing we
call genius. He often suggested that I should try my hand at some Yankee
Pastorals, which would admit of more sentiment and a higher tone without
foregoing the advantage offered by the dialect. I have never completed
anything of the kind, but, in this Second Series, both my remembrance of
his counsel and the deeper feeling called up by the great interests at
stake, led me to venture some passages nearer to what is called poetical
than could have been admitted without incongruity into the former
series. The time seemed calling to me, with the old poet,--
'Leave, then, your wonted prattle,
The oaten reed forbear;
For I hear a sound of battle,
And trumpets rend the air! '
The only attempt I had ever made at anything like a pastoral (if that
may be called an attempt which was the result almost of pure accident)
was in 'The Courtin'. ' While the introduction to the First Series was
going through the press, I received word from the printer that there was
a blank page left which must be filled. I sat down at once and
improvised another fictitious 'notice of the press,' in which, because
verse would fill up space more cheaply than prose, I inserted an extract
from a supposed ballad of Mr. Biglow.
than the debasement which all our terminations in _tion_ and _tience_
have undergone, which yet we hear with _resignashun_ and _payshunce_,
though it might have aroused both _impat-i-ence_ and _in-dig-na-ti-on_
in Shakespeare's time. When George Herbert tells us that if the sermon
be dull,
'God takes a text and preacheth patience,'
the prolongation of the word seems to convey some hint at the
longanimity of the virtue. Consider what a poor curtal we have made of
Ocean. There was something of his heave and expanse in _o-ce-an_, and
Fletcher knew how to use it when he wrote so fine a verse as the second
of these, the best deep-sea verse I know,--
'In desperate storms stem with a little rudder
The tumbling ruins of the ocean. '
Oceanus was not then wholly shorn of his divine proportions, and our
modern _oshun_ sounds like the gush of small-beer in comparison. Some
other contractions of ours have a vulgar air about them. _More 'n_ for
_more than_, as one of the worst, may stand for a type of such. Yet our
old dramatists are full of such obscurations (elisions they can hardly
be called) of the _th_, making _whe'r_ of _whether_, _where_ of
_whither_, _here_ of _hither_, _bro'r_ of _brother_, _smo'r_ of
_smother_, _mo'r_ of _mother_, and so on. And dear Brer Rabbit, can I
forget him? Indeed, it is this that explains the word _rare_ (which has
Dryden's support), and which we say of meat where an Englishman would
use _underdone_. I do not believe, with the dictionaries, that it had
ever anything to do with the Icelandic _hrar_ (_raw_), as it plainly has
not in _rareripe_, which means earlier ripe,--President Lincoln said of
a precocious boy that 'he was a _rareripe_. ' And I do not believe it,
for this reason, that the earliest form of the word with us was, and the
commoner now in the inland parts still is, so far as I can discover,
_raredone_. Golding has 'egs reere-rosted,' which, whatever else it
mean, cannot mean _raw_-roasted, I find _rather_ as a monosyllable in
Donne, and still better, as giving the sound, rhyming with _fair_ in
Warner. There is an epigram of Sir Thomas Browne in which the words
_rather than_ make a monosyllable;--
'What furie is't to take Death's part
And rather than by Nature, die by Art! '
The contraction _more'n_ I find in the old play 'Fuimus Troes,' in a
verse where the measure is so strongly accented as to leave it beyond
doubt,--
'A golden crown whose heirs
More than half the world subdue. '
It may be, however, that the contraction is in 'th'orld. ' It is
unmistakable in the 'Second Maiden's Tragedy:'--
'It were but folly,
Dear soul, to boast of _more than_ I can perform. '
Is our _gin_ for _given_ more violent than _mar'l_ for _marvel_, which
was once common, and which I find as late as Herrick? Nay, Herrick has
_gin_ (spelling it _gen_), too, as do the Scotch, who agree with us
likewise in preferring _chimly_ to _chimney_.
I will now leave pronunciation and turn to words or phrases which have
been supposed peculiar to us, only pausing to pick up a single dropped
stitch, in the pronunciation of the word _supreme_, which I had thought
native till I found it in the well-languaged Daniel. I will begin with a
word of which I have never met with any example in any English writer of
authority. We express the first stage of withering in a green plant
suddenly cut down by the verb _to wilt_. It is, of course, own cousin of
the German _welken_, but I have never come upon it in literary use, and
my own books of reference give me faint help. Graff gives _welhen_,
_marcescere_, and refers to _weih_ (_weak_), and conjecturally to A. -S,
_hvelan_. The A. -S. _wealwian_ (_to wither_) is nearer, but not so near
as two words in the Icelandic, which perhaps put us on the track of its
ancestry,--_velgi_, _tepefacere_, (and _velki_, with the derivative)
meaning _contaminare_. _Wilt_, at any rate, is a good word, filling, as
it does, a sensible gap between drooping and withering, and the
imaginative phrase 'he wilted right down,' like 'he caved right in,' is
a true Americanism. _Wilt_ occurs in English provincial glossaries, but
is explained by _wither_, which with us it does not mean. We have a few
words such as _cache_, _cohog_, _carry_ (_portage_), _shoot_ (_chute_),
_timber_ (_forest_), _bushwhack_ (to pull a boat along by the bushes on
the edge of a stream), _buckeye_ (a picturesque word for the
horse-chestnut); but how many can we be said to have fairly brought into
the language, as Alexander Gill, who first mentions Americanisms, meant
it when he said, '_Sed et ab Americanis nonnulla mutuamur ut_ MAIZ _et_
CANOA'? Very few, I suspect, and those mostly by borrowing from the
French, German, Spanish, or Indian. [28] 'The Dipper,' for the 'Great
Bear,' strikes me as having a native air. _Bogus_, in the sense of
_worthless_, is undoubtedly ours, but is, I more than suspect, a
corruption of the French _bagasse_ (from low Latin _bagasea_), which
travelled up the Mississippi from New Orleans, where it was used for the
refuse of the sugar-cane. It is true, we have modified the meaning of
some words. We use _freshet_ in the sense of _flood_, for which I have
not chanced upon any authority. Our New England cross between Ancient
Pistol and Dugald Dalgetty, Captain Underhill, uses the word (1638) to
mean a _current_, and I do not recollect it elsewhere in that sense. I
therefore leave it with a? for future explorers. _Crick_ for _creek_ I
find in Captain John Smith and in the dedication of Fuller's 'Holy
Warre,' and _run_, meaning a _small stream_, in Waymouth's 'Voyage'
(1605). _Humans_ for _men_, which Mr. Bartlett includes in his
'Dictionary of Americanisms,' is Chapman's habitual phrase in his
translation of Homer. I find it also in the old play of 'The Hog hath
lost his Pearl. ' _Dogs_ for _andirons_ is still current in New England,
and in Walter de Biblesworth I find _chiens_ glossed in the margin by
_andirons_. _Gunning_ for _shooting_ is in Drayton. We once got credit
for the poetical word _fall_ for _autumn_, but Mr. Bartlett and the last
edition of Webster's Dictionary refer us to Dryden. It is even older,
for I find it in Drayton, and Bishop Hall has _autumn fall_. Middleton
plays upon the word: 'May'st thou have a reasonable good _spring_, for
thou art like to have many dangerous foul _falls_. ' Daniel does the
same, and Coleridge uses it as we do. Gray uses the archaism _picked_
for _peaked_, and the word _smudge_ (as our backwoodsmen do) for a
smothered fire. Lord Herbert of Cherbury (more properly perhaps than
even Sidney, the last _preux chevalier_) has 'the Emperor's folks' just
as a Yankee would say it. _Loan_ for _lend_, with which we have hitherto
been blackened, I must retort upon the mother island, for it appears so
long ago as in 'Albion's England. ' _Fleshy_, in the sense of _stout_,
may claim Ben Jonson's warrant, and I find it also so lately as in
Francklin's 'Lucian. ' _Chore_ is also Jonson's word, and I am inclined
to prefer it to _chare_ and _char_, because I think that I see a more
natural origin for it in the French _jour_--whence it might come to mean
a day's work, and thence a job--than anywhere else. [29] _At onst_ for _at
once_ I thought a corruption of our own, till I found it in the Chester
Plays. I am now inclined to suspect it no corruption at all, but only an
erratic and obsolete superlative _at onest_. _To progress_ was flung in
our teeth till Mr. Pickering retorted with Shakespeare's 'doth progress
down thy cheeks. ' I confess that I was never satisfied with this answer,
because the accent was different, and because the word might here be
reckoned a substantive quite as well as a verb. Mr. Bartlett (in his
dictionary above cited) adds a surrebutter in a verse from Ford's
'Broken Heart. ' Here the word is clearly a verb, but with the accent
unhappily still on the first syllable. Mr. Bartlett says that he
'cannot say whether the word was used in Bacon's time or not. ' It
certainly was, and with the accent we give to it. Ben Jonson, in the
'Alchemist,' had this verse,
'Progress so from extreme unto extreme,'
and Sir Philip Sidney,
'Progressing then from fair Turias' golden place. '
Surely we may now sleep in peace, and our English cousins will forgive
us, since we have cleared ourselves from any suspicion of originality in
the matter! Even after I had convinced myself that the chances were
desperately against our having invented any of the _Americanisms_ with
which we are _faulted_ and which we are in the habit of _voicing_, there
were one or two which had so prevailingly indigenous an accent as to
stagger me a little. One of these was 'the biggest _thing out_. ' Alas,
even this slender comfort is denied me. Old Gower has
'So harde an herte was none _oute_,'
and
'That such merveile was none _oute_. '
He also, by the way, says 'a _sighte_ of flowres' as naturally as our
up-country folk would say it. _Poor_ for _lean_, _thirds_ for _dower_,
and _dry_ for _thirsty_ I find in Middleton's plays. _Dry_ is also in
Skelton and in the 'World' (1754). In a note on Middleton, Mr. Dyce
thinks it needful to explain the phrase _I can't tell_ (universal in
America) by the gloss _I could not say_. Middleton also uses _sneeked_,
which I had believed an Americanism till I saw it there. It is, of
course, only another form of _snatch_, analogous to _theek_ and _thatch_
(cf. the proper names Dekker and Thacher), _break_ (_brack_) and
_breach_, _make_ (still common with us) and _match_. _'Long on_ for
_occasioned by_ ('who is this 'long on? ') occurs constantly in Gower and
likewise in Middleton. _'Cause why_ is in Chaucer. _Raising_ (an English
version of the French _leaven_) for _yeast_ is employed by Gayton in his
'Festivous Notes on Don Quixote. ' I have never seen an instance of our
New England word _emptins_ in the same sense, nor can I divine its
original. Gayton has _limekill_; also _shuts_ for _shutters_, and the
latter is used by Mrs. Hutchinson in her 'Life of Colonel Hutchinson. '
Bishop Hall, and Purchas in his 'Pilgrims,' have _chist_ for _chest_,
and it is certainly nearer _cista_, as well as to its form in the
Teutonic languages, whence probably we got it. We retain the old sound
from _cist_, but _chest_ is as old as Chaucer. Lovelace says _wropt_ for
_wrapt_. 'Musicianer' I had always associated with the militia-musters
of my boyhood, and too hastily concluded it an abomination of our own,
but Mr. Wright calls it a Norfolk word, and I find it to be as old as
1642 by an extract in Collier. 'Not worth the time of day,' had passed
with me for native till I saw it in Shakespeare's 'Pericles. ' For
_slick_ (which is only a shorter sound of _sleek_, like _crick_ and the
now universal _britches_ for _breeches_) I will only call Chapman and
Jonson. 'That's a sure card! ' and 'That's a stinger! ' both sound like
modern slang, but you will find the one in the old interlude of
'Thersytes' (1537), and the other in Middleton. 'Right here,' a favorite
phrase with our orators and with a certain class of our editors, turns
up _passim_ in the Chester and Coventry plays. Mr. Dickens found
something very ludicrous in what he considered our neologism _right
away_. But I find a phrase very like it, and which I would gladly
suspect to be a misprint for it, in 'Gammer Gurton:'--
'Lyght it and bring it _tite away_. '
But _tite_ is the true word in this case. After all, what is it but
another form of _straightway_? _Cussedness_, meaning _wickedness,
malignity_, and _cuss_, a sneaking, ill-natured fellow, in such phrases
as 'He done it out o' pure cussedness,' and 'He is a nateral cuss,' have
been commonly thought Yankeeisms. To vent certain contemptuously
indignant moods they are admirable in their rough-and-ready way. But
neither is our own. _Cursydnesse_, in the same sense of malignant
wickedness, occurs in the Coventry Plays, and _cuss_ may perhaps claim
to have come in with the Conqueror. At least the term is also French.
Saint Simon uses it and confesses its usefulness. Speaking of the Abbe
Dubois, he says, 'Qui etoit en plein ce qu'un mauvais francois appelle
un _sacre_, mais qui ne se peut guere exprimer autrement. ' 'Not worth a
cuss,' though supported by 'not worth a damn,' may be a mere corruption,
since 'not worth a _cress_' is in 'Piers Ploughman. ' 'I don't see it,'
was the popular slang a year or two ago, and seemed to spring from the
soil; but no, it is in Cibber's 'Careless Husband. ' _Green sauce_ for
_vegetables_ I meet in Beaumont and Fletcher, Gayton, and elsewhere. Our
rustic pronunciation _sahce_ (for either the diphthong _au_ was
anciently pronounced _ah_, or else we have followed abundant analogy in
changing it to the latter sound, as we have in _chance, dance_, and so
many more) may be the older one, and at least gives some hint at its
ancestor _salsa_. _Warn_, in the sense of _notify_, is, I believe, now
peculiar to us, but Pecock so employs it. I find _primmer_ (_primer_, as
we pronounce it) in Beaumont and Fletcher, and a 'square eater' too
(compare our '_square_ meal'), _heft_ for _weight_, and 'muchness' in
the 'Mirror for Magistrates,' _bankbill_ in Swift and Fielding, and _as_
for _that_ I might say _passim_. _To cotton to_ is, I rather think, an
Americanism. The nearest approach to it I have found is _cotton
together_, in Congreve's 'Love for Love. ' To _cotton_ or _cotten_, in
another sense, is old and common. Our word means to _cling_, and its
origin, possibly, is to be sought in another direction, perhaps in A. S.
_cvead_, which means _mud, clay_ (both proverbially clinging), or better
yet, in the Icelandic _qvoda_ (otherwise _kod_), meaning _resin_ and
_glue_, which are [Greek: kat' exochaen], sticky substances. To _spit
cotton_ is, I think, American, and also, perhaps, to _flax_ for to
_beat_. _To the halves_ still survives among us, though apparently
obsolete in England. It means either to let or to hire a piece of land,
receiving half the profit in money or in kind (_partibus locare_). I
mention it because in a note by some English editor, to which I have
lost my reference, I have seen it wrongly explained. The editors of
Nares cite Burton. _To put_, in the sense of _to go_, as _Put! _ for
_Begone! _ would seem our own, and yet it is strictly analogous to the
French _se mettre a la voie_, and the Italian _mettersi in via_. Indeed,
Dante has a verse,
'_Io sarei_ [for _mi sarei_] _gia messo per lo sentiero_,'
which, but for the indignity, might be translated,
'I should, ere this, have _put_ along the way,'
I deprecate in advance any share in General Banks's notions of
international law, but we may all take a just pride in his exuberant
eloquence as something distinctively American. When he spoke a few years
ago of 'letting the Union slide,' even those who, for political
purposes, reproached him with the sentiment, admired the indigenous
virtue of his phrase. Yet I find 'let the world slide' in Heywood's
Edward IV. ;' and in Beaumont and Fletcher's 'Wit without Money,'
Valentine says,
'Will you go drink,
And let the world slide? '
So also in Sidney's 'Arcadia,'
'Let his dominion slide. '
In the one case it is put into the mouth of a clown, in the other, of a
gentleman, and was evidently proverbial. It has even higher sanction,
for Chaucer writes,
'Well nigh all other cures _let he slide_. '
Mr. Bartlett gives 'above one's bend' as an Americanism; but compare
Hamlet's 'to the top of my bent. ' _In his tracks_ for _immediately_ has
acquired an American accent, and passes where he can for a native, but
is an importation nevertheless; for what is he but the Latin _e
vestigio_, or at best the Norman French _eneslespas_, both which have
the same meaning? _Hotfoot_ (provincial also in England), I find in the
old romance of 'Tristan,'
'_Si s'en parti_ CHAUT PAS'
_Like_ for _as_ is never used in New England, but is universal in the
South and West. It has on its side the authority of two kings (_ego sum
rex Romanorum et supra grammaticam_), Henry VIII. and Charles I. This
were ample, without throwing into the scale the scholar and poet Daniel.
_Them_ was used as a nominative by the majesty of Edward VI. , by Sir P.
Hoby, and by Lord Paget (in Froude's 'History'). I have never seen any
passage adduced where _guess_ was used as the Yankee uses it. The word
was familiar in the mouths of our ancestors, but with a different shade
of meaning from that we have given it, which is something like _rather
think_, though the Yankee implies a confident certainty by it when he
says, 'I guess I _du! _' There are two examples in Otway, one of which
('So in the struggle, I guess the note was lost') perhaps might serve
our purpose, and Coleridge's
'I guess 'twas fearful there to see'
certainly comes very near. But I have a higher authority than either in
Selden, who, in one of his notes to the 'Polyolbion,' writes, 'The first
inventor of them (I _guess_ you dislike not the addition) was one
Berthold Swartz. ' Here he must mean by it, 'I take it for granted. '
Robert Greene, in his 'Quip for an Upstart Courtier,' makes
Cloth-breeches say, 'but I _gesse_ your maistership never tried what
true honor meant. ' In this case the word seems to be used with a meaning
precisely like that which we give it. Another peculiarity almost as
prominent is the beginning sentences, especially in answer to questions,
with 'well. ' Put before such a phrase as 'How d'e do? ' it is commonly
short, and has the sound of it _wul_, but in reply it is deliberative,
and the various shades of meaning which can be conveyed by difference of
intonation, and by prolonging or abbreviating, I should vainly attempt
to describe. I have heard _ooa-ahl_, _wahl_, _ahl_, _wal_ and something
nearly approaching the sound of
the _le_ in _able_. Sometimes before 'I' it dwindles to a mere _l_, as
''l _I_ dunno. ' A friend of mine (why should I not please myself, though
I displease him, by brightening my page with the initials of the most
exquisite of humorists, J. H. ? ) told me that he once heard five 'wells,'
like pioneers, precede the answer to an inquiry about the price of land.
The first was the ordinary _wul_, in deference to custom; the second,
the long, perpending _ooahl_, with a falling inflection of the voice;
the third, the same, but with the voice rising, as if in despair of a
conclusion, into a plaintively nasal whine; the fourth, _wulh_, ending
in the aspirate of a sigh; and then, fifth, came a short, sharp _wal_,
showing that a conclusion had been reached. I have used this latter form
in the 'Biglow Papers,' because, if enough nasality be added, it
represents most nearly the average sound of what I may call the
interjection.
A locution prevails in the Southern and Middle States which is so
curious that, though never heard in New England, I will give a few lines
to its discussion, the more readily because it is extinct elsewhere. I
mean the use of _allow_ in the sense of _affirm_, as 'I allow that's a
good horse. ' I find the word so used in 1558 by Anthony Jenkinson in
Hakluyt: 'Corne they sowe not, neither doe eate any bread, mocking the
Christians for the same, and disabling our strengthe, saying we live by
eating the toppe of a weede, and drinke a drinke made of the same,
_allowing_ theyr great devouring of flesh and drinking of milke to be
the increase of theyr strength. ' That is, they undervalued our strength,
and affirmed their own to be the result of a certain diet. In another
passage of the same narrative the word has its more common meaning of
approving or praising: 'The said king, much allowing this declaration,
said. ' Ducange quotes Bracton _sub voce_ ADLOCARE for the meaning 'to
admit as proved,' and the transition from this to 'affirm,' is by no
means violent. Izaak Walton has 'Lebault _allows_ waterfrogs to be good
meat,' and here the word is equivalent to _affirms_. At the same time,
when we consider some of the meanings of _allow_ in old English, and of
_allouer_ in old French, and also remember that the verbs _prize_ and
_praise_ are from one root, I think we must admit _allaudare_ to a share
in the paternity of _allow_. The sentence from Hakluyt would read
equally well, 'contemning our strengthe, . . . and praising (or valuing)
their great eating of flesh as the cause of their increase in strength. '
After all, if we confine ourselves to _allocare_, it may turn out that
the word was somewhere and somewhen used for _to bet_, analogously to
_put up, put down, post_ (cf. Spanish _apostar_), and the like. I hear
boys in the street continually saying, 'I bet that's a good horse,' or
what not, meaning by no means to risk anything beyond their opinion in
the matter.
The word _improve_, in the sense of to 'occupy, make use of, employ,' as
Dr. Pickering defines it, he long ago proved to be no neologism. He
would have done better, I think, had he substituted _profit by_ for
_employ_. He cites Dr. Franklin as saying that the word had never, so
far as he knew, been used in New England before he left it in 1723,
except in Dr. Mather's 'Bemarkable Providences,' which he oddly calls a
'very old book. ' Franklin, as Dr. Pickering goes on to show, was
mistaken.
Mr. Bartlett in his 'Dictionary' merely abridges Pickering. Both of them
should have confined the application of the word to material things, its
extension to which is all that is peculiar in the supposed American use
of it. For surely 'Complete Letter-Writers' have been '_improving_ this
opportunity' time out of mind. I will illustrate the word a little
further, because Pickering cites no English authorities. Skelton has a
passage in his 'Phyllyp Sparowe,' which I quote the rather as it
contains also the word _allowed_ and as it distinguishes _improve_ from
_employ:_--
'His [Chaucer's] Englysh well alowed,
So as it is _emprowed_
For as it is employd,
There is no English voyd. '
Here the meaning is to _profit by_. In Fuller's 'Holy Warre' (1647), we
have 'The Egyptians standing on the firm ground, were thereby enabled to
_improve_ and enforce their darts to the utmost. ' Here the word might
certainly mean _to make use of_. Mrs. Hutchison (Life of Colonel H.
)
uses the word in the same way: 'And therefore did not _emproove_ his
interest to engage the country in the quarrel. ' Swift in one of his
letters says: 'There is not an acre of land in Ireland turned to half
its advantage; yet it is better _improved_ than the people. ' I find it
also in 'Strength out of Weakness' (1652), and Plutarch's
'Morals'(1714), but I know of only one example of its use in the purely
American sense, and that is 'a very good _improvement_ for a mill' in
the 'State Trials' (Speech of the Attorney. General in the Lady Ivy's
case, 1864). In the sense of _employ_, I could cite a dozen old English
authorities.
In running over the fly-leaves of those delightful folios for this
reference, I find a note which reminds me of another word, for our abuse
of which we have been deservedly ridiculed. I mean _lady,_ It is true I
might cite the example of the Italian _donna_[30] (_domina_), which has
been treated in the same way by a whole nation, and not, as _lady_ among
us, by the uncultivated only. It perhaps grew into use in the
half-democratic republics of Italy in the same way and for the same
reasons as with us. But I admit that our abuse of the word is
villainous. I know of an orator who once said in a public meeting where
bonnets preponderated, that 'the ladies were last at the cross and first
at the tomb'! But similar sins were committed before our day and in the
mother country. In the 'Harleian Miscellany' (vol. v. p. 455) I find
'this _lady_ is my servant; the hedger's daughter Ioan. ' in the 'State
Trials' I learn of 'a _gentlewoman_ that lives cook with' such a one,
and I hear the Lord High Steward speaking of the wife of a waiter at a
bagnio as a _gentlewoman_! From the same authority, by the way, I can
state that our vile habit of chewing tobacco had the somewhat unsavory
example of Titus Oates, and I know by tradition from an eye-witness that
the elegant General Burgoyne partook of the same vice. Howell, in one of
his letters (dated 26 August, 1623), speaks thus of another
'institution' which many have thought American: 'They speak much of that
boisterous Bishop of Halverstadt (for so they term him here), that,
having taken a place where ther were two Monasteries of Nuns and Friers,
he caus'd divers feather-beds to be rip'd, and all the feathers to be
thrown in a great Hall, whither the Nuns and Friers were thrust naked
with their bodies oil'd and pitch'd, and to tumble among the feathers. '
Howell speaks as if the thing were new to him, and I know not if the
'boisterous' Bishop was the inventor of it, but I find it practised in
England before our Revolution.
Before leaving the subject, I will add a few comments made from time to
time on the margin of Mr. Bartlett's excellent 'Dictionary,' to which I
am glad thus publicly to acknowledge my many obligations. 'Avails' is
good old English, and the _vails_ of Sir Joshua Reynolds's porter are
famous. Averse _from_, averse _to_, and in connection with them the
English vulgarism 'different _to_;' the corrupt use of _to_ in these
cases, as well as in the Yankee 'he lives to Salem,' 'to home,' and
others, must be a very old one, for in the one case it plainly arose
from confounding the two French prepositions _a_, (from Latin _ad_ and
_ab_), and in the other from translating the first of them. I once
thought 'different to' a modern vulgarism, and Mr. Thackeray, on my
pointing it out to him in 'Henry Esmond,' confessed it to be an
anachronism. Mr. Bartlett refers to 'the old writers quoted in
Richardson's Dictionary' for 'different to,' though in my edition of
that work all the examples are with _from_. But I find _to_ used
invariably by Sir R. Hawkins in Hakluyt. _Banjo_ is a negro corruption
of O. E. _bandore_. _Bind-weed_ can hardly be modern, for _wood-bind_ is
old and radically right, intertwining itself through _bindan_ and
_windan_ with classic stems. _Bobolink_: is this a contraction for Bob
o' Lincoln? I find _bobolynes_, in one of the poems attributed to
Skelton, where it may be rendered _giddy-pate_, a term very fit for the
bird in his ecstasies. _Cruel_ for _great_ is in Hakluyt.
_Bowling-alley_ is in Nash's 'Pierce Pennilesse. ' _Curious_, meaning
_nice_, occurs continually in old writers, and is as old as Pecock's
'Repressor. ' _Droger_ is O. E. _drugger_. _Educational_ is in Burke.
_Feeze_ is only a form of _fizz_. _To fix_, in the American sense, I
find used by the Commissioners of the United Colonies so early as 1675,
'their arms well _fixed_ and fit for service. ' _To take the foot in the
hand_ is German; so is to _go under_. _Gundalow_ is old; I find
_gundelo_ in Hakluyt, and _gundello_ in Booth's reprint of the folio
Shakespeare of 1623. _Gonoff_ is O. E. _gnoffe_. _Heap_ is in 'Piers
Ploughman' ('and other names _an heep_'), and in Hakluyt ('seeing such a
_heap_ of their enemies ready to devour them'). _To liquor_ is in the
'Puritan' ('call 'em in, and liquor 'em a little'). _To loaf_: this, I
think, is unquestionably German. _Laufen_ is pronounced _lofen_ in some
parts of Germany, and I once heard one German student say to another,
_Ich lauf_ (lofe) _hier bis du wiederkehrest_, and he began accordingly
to saunter up and down, in short, to _loaf_. _To mull_, Mr. Bartlett
says, means 'to soften, to dispirit,' and quotes from
'Margaret,'--'There has been a pretty considerable _mullin_ going on
among the doctors,'--where it surely cannot mean what he says it does.
We have always heard _mulling_ used for _stirring, bustling_, sometimes
in an underhand way. It is a metaphor derived probably from _mulling_
wine, and the word itself must be a corruption of _mell_, from O. F.
_mesler_. _Pair_ of stairs is in Hakluyt. _To pull up stakes_ is in
Curwen's Journal, and therefore pre-Revolutionary. I think I have met
with it earlier. _Raise_: under this word Mr. Bartlett omits 'to raise a
house,' that is, the frame of a wooden one, and also the substantive
formed from it, a _raisin'_. _Retire_ for _go to bed_ is in Fielding's
'Amelia. ' _Setting-poles_ cannot be new, for I find 'some _set_ [the
boats] with long _poles_' in Hakluyt. _Shoulder-hitters_: I find that
_shoulder-striker_ is old, though I have lost the reference to my
authority. _Snag_ is no new word, though perhaps the Western application
of it is so; but I find in Gill the proverb, 'A bird in the bag is worth
two on the snag. ' Dryden has _swop_ and _to rights_. _Trail_: Hakluyt
has 'many wayes _traled_ by the wilde beastes. '
I subjoin a few phrases not in Mr. Bartlett's book which I have heard.
_Bald-headed_: 'to go it bald-beaded;' in great haste, as where one
rushes out without his hat. _Bogue_: 'I don't git much done 'thout I
_bogue_ right in along 'th my men. ' _Carry_: a _portage_. _Cat-nap_: a
short doze. _Cat-stick_: a small stick. _Chowder-head_: a muddle-brain.
_Cling-john_: a soft cake of rye. _Cocoanut_; the head. _Cohees_:
applied to the people of certain settlements in Western Pennsylvania,
from their use of the archaic form _Quo' he_. _Dunnow'z I know_: the
nearest your true Yankee ever comes to acknowledging ignorance.
_Essence-pedler_: a skunk. _First-rate and a half_. _Fish flakes_, for
drying fish: O. E. _fleck_ (_cratis_). _Gander-party_: a social gathering
of men only. _Gawnicus_: a dolt. _Hawkin's whetstone_: rum; in derision
of one Hawkins, a well-known temperance-lecturer. _Hyper_: to bustle: 'I
mus' _hyper_ about an' git tea. ' _Keeler-tub_: one in which dishes are
washed. ('And Greasy Joan doth _keel_ the pot. ') _Lap-tea_: where the
guests are too many to sit at table. _Last of pea-time_: to be hard-up.
_Lose-laid_ (_loose-laid_): a weaver's term, and probably English;
weak-willed. _Malahack_: to cut up hastily or awkwardly. _Moonglade_: a
beautiful word: for the track of moonlight on the water. _Off-ox_: an
unmanageable, cross-grained fellow. _Old Driver, Old Splitfoot_: the
Devil. _On-hitch_: to pull trigger (cf. Spanish _disparar_). _Popular_:
conceited, _Rote_: sound of surf before a storm. _Rot-gut_: cheap
whiskey; the word occurs in Heywood's 'English Traveller' and Addison's
'Drummer,' for a poor kind of drink. _Seem_: it is habitual with the
New-Englander to put this verb to strange uses, as 'I can't _seem_ to be
suited,' 'I couldn't _seem_ to know him. ' _Sidehill_, for _hillside_.
_State-house_: this seems an Americanism, whether invented or derived
from the Dutch _Stad-huys_, I know not. _Strike_ and _string_; from the
game of ninepins; to make a _strike_ is to knock down all the pins with
one ball, hence it has come to mean fortunate, successful. _Swampers_:
men who break out roads for lumberers. _Tormented_: euphemism for
damned, as, 'not a tormented cent. ' _Virginia fence, to make a_: to walk
like a drunken man.
It is always worth while to note down the erratic words or phrases which
one meets with in any dialect. They may throw light on the meaning of
other words, on the relationship of languages, or even on history
itself. In so composite a language as ours they often supply a different
form to express a different shade of meaning, as in _viol_ and _fiddle_,
_thrid_ and _thread_, _smother_ and _smoulder_, where the _l_ has crept
in by a false analogy with _would_. We have given back to England the
excellent adjective _lengthy_, formed honestly like _earthy, drouthy_,
and others, thus enabling their journalists to characterize our
President's messages by a word civilly compromising between _long_ and
_tedious_, so as not to endanger the peace of the two countries by
wounding our national sensitiveness to British criticism. Let me give
two curious examples of the antiseptic property of dialects at which I
have already glanced. Dante has _dindi_ as a childish or low word for
_danari_ (money), and in Shropshire small Roman coins are still dug up
which the peasants call _dinders_. This can hardly be a chance
coincidence, but seems rather to carry the word back to the Roman
soldiery. So our farmers say _chuk, chuk_, to their pigs, and _ciacco_
is one of the Italian words for _hog_. When a countryman tells us that
he 'fell _all of a heap_,' I cannot help thinking that he unconsciously
points to an affinity between our word _tumble_, and the Latin
_tumulus_, that is older than most others. I believe that words, or even
the mere intonation of them, have an astonishing vitality and power of
propagation by the root, like the gardener's pest, quitch-grass,[31]
while the application or combination of them may be new. It is in these
last that my countrymen seem to me full of humor, invention, quickness
of wit, and that sense of subtle analogy which needs only refining to
become fancy and imagination. Prosaic as American life seems in many of
its aspects to a European, bleak and bare as it is on the side of
tradition, and utterly orphaned of the solemn inspiration of antiquity,
I cannot help thinking that the ordinary talk of unlettered men among us
is fuller of metaphor and of phrases that suggest lively images than
that of any other people I have seen. Very many such will be found in
Mr. Bartlett's book, though his short list of proverbs at the end seem
to me, with one or two exceptions, as un-American as possible. Most of
them have no character at all but coarseness, and are quite too
long-skirted for working proverbs, in which language always 'takes off
its coat to it,' as a Yankee would say. There are plenty that have a
more native and puckery flavor, seedlings from the old stock often, and
yet new varieties. One hears such not seldom among us Easterners, and
the West would yield many more. 'Mean enough to steal acorns from a
blind hog;' 'Cold as the north side of a Jenooary gravestone by
starlight;' 'Hungry as a graven image;' 'Pop'lar as a hen with one
chicken;' 'A hen's time ain't much;' 'Quicker 'n greased lightnin';'
'Ther's sech a thing ez bein' _tu_' (our Yankee paraphrase of [Greek:
maeden agan]); hence the phrase _tooin' round_, meaning a supererogatory
activity like that of flies; 'Stingy enough to skim his milk at both
eends;' 'Hot as the Devil's kitchen;' 'Handy as a pocket in a shirt;'
'He's a whole team and the dog under the wagon;' 'All deacons are good,
but there's odds in deacons' (to _deacon_ berries is to put the largest
atop); 'So thievish they hev to take in their stone walls nights;'[32]
may serve as specimens. 'I take my tea _barfoot_,' said a backwoodsman
when asked if he would have cream and sugar. (I find _barfoot_, by the
way, in the Coventry Plays. ) A man speaking to me once of a very rocky
clearing said, 'Stone's got a pretty heavy mortgage on that land,' and I
overheard a guide in the woods say to his companions who were urging him
to sing, 'Wal, I _did_ sing once, but toons gut invented, an' thet spilt
my trade. ' Whoever has driven over a stream by a bridge made of _slabs_
will feel the picturesque force of the epithet _slab-bridged_ applied to
a fellow of shaky character. Almost every county has some good
die-sinker in phrase, whose mintage passes into the currency of the
whole neighborhood. Such a one described the county jail (the one stone
building where all the dwellings are of wood) as 'the house whose
underpinnin' come up to the eaves,' and called hell 'the place where
they didn't rake up their fires nights. ' I once asked a stage-driver if
the other side of a hill were as steep as the one we were climbing:
'Steep? chain lightnin' couldn' go down it 'thout puttin' the shoe on! '
And this brings me back to the exaggeration of which I spoke before. To
me there is something very taking in the negro 'so black that charcoal
made a chalk-mark on him,' and the wooden shingle 'painted so like
marble that it sank in water,' as if its very consciousness or its
vanity had been overpersuaded by the cunning of the painter. I heard a
man, in order to give a notion of some very cold weather, say to another
that a certain Joe, who had been taking mercury, found a lump of
quicksilver in each boot, when he went home to dinner. This power of
rapidly dramatizing a dry fact into flesh and blood and the vivid
conception of Joe as a human thermometer strike me as showing a poetic
sense that may be refined into faculty. At any rate there is humor here,
and not mere quickness of wit,--the deeper and not the shallower
quality. The _tendency_ of humor is always towards overplus of
expression, while the very essence of wit is its logical precision.
Captain Basil Hall denied that our people had any humor, deceived,
perhaps, by their gravity of manner. But this very seriousness is often
the outward sign of that humorous quality of the mind which delights in
finding an element of identity in things seemingly the most incongruous,
and then again in forcing an incongruity upon things identical. Perhaps
Captain Hall had no humor himself, and if so he would never find it. Did
he always feel the point of what was said to himself? I doubt it,
because I happen to know a chance he once had given him in vain. The
Captain was walking up and down the veranda of a country tavern in
Massachusetts while the coach changed horses. A thunder-storm was going
on, and, with that pleasant European air of indirect self-compliment in
condescending to be surprised by American merit, which we find so
conciliating, he said to a countryman lounging against the door, 'Pretty
heavy thunder you have here. ' The other, who had divined at a glance his
feeling of generous concession to a new country, drawled gravely, 'Waal,
we _du_, considerin' the number of inhabitants. ' This, the more I
analyze it, the more humorous does it seem. The same man was capable of
wit also, when he would. He was a cabinet-maker, and was once employed
to make some commandment-tables for the parish meeting-house. The
parson, a very old man, annoyed him by looking into his workshop every
morning, and cautioning him to be very sure to pick out 'clear mahogany
without any _knots_ in it. ' At last, wearied out, he retorted one day:
'Wal, Dr. B. , I guess ef I was to leave the _nots_ out o' some o' the
c'man'ments, 't'ould soot you full ez wal! '
If I had taken the pains to write down the proverbial or pithy phrases I
have heard, or if I had sooner thought of noting the Yankeeisms I met
with in my reading, I might have been able to do more justice to my
theme. But I have done all I wished in respect to pronunciation, if I
have proved that where we are vulgar, we have the countenance of very
good company. For, as to the _jus et norma loquendi_, I agree with
Horace and those who have paraphrased or commented him, from Boileau to
Gray. I think that a good rule for style is Galiani's definition of
sublime oratory,--'l'art de tout dire sans etre mis a la Bastille dans
un pays ou il est defendu de rien dire. ' I profess myself a fanatical
purist, but with a hearty contempt for the speech-gilders who affect
purism without any thorough, or even pedagogic knowledge of the
engendure, growth, and affinities of the noble language about whose
_mesalliances_ they profess (like Dean Alford) to be so solicitous. If
_they_ had their way--! 'Doch es sey,' says Lessing, 'dass jene
gotbische Hoflichkeit eine unentbehrliche Tugend des heutigen Umganges
ist. Soll sie darum unsere Schriften eben so schaal und falsch machen
als unsern Umgang? ' And Drayton was not far wrong in affirming that
'Tis possible to climb,
To kindle, or to slake,
Although in Skelton's rhyme. '
Cumberland in his Memoirs tells us that when, in the midst of Admiral
Rodney's great sea-fight, Sir Charles Douglas said to him, 'Behold, Sir
George, the Greeks and Trojans contending for the body of Patroclus! '
the Admiral answered, peevishly, 'Damn the Greeks and damn the Trojans!
I have other things to think of. ' After the battle was won, Rodney thus
to Sir Charles, 'Now, my dear friend, I am at the service of your Greeks
and Trojans, and the whole of Homer's Iliad, or as much of it as you
please! ' I had some such feeling of the impertinence of our
pseudo-classicality when I chose our homely dialect to work in. Should
we be nothing, because somebody had contrived to be something (and that
perhaps in a provincial dialect) ages ago? and to be nothing by our very
attempt to be that something, which they had already been, and which
therefore nobody could be again without being a bore? Is there no way
left, then, I thought, of being natural, of being _naif_, which means
nothing more than native, of belonging to the age and country in which
you are born? The Yankee, at least, is a new phenomenon; let us try to
be _that_. It is perhaps a _pis aller_, but is not _No Thoroughfare_
written up everywhere else? In the literary world, things seemed to me
very much as they were in the latter half of the last century. Pope,
skimming the cream of good sense and expression wherever he could find
it, had made, not exactly poetry, but an honest, salable butter of
worldly wisdom which pleasantly lubricated some of the drier morsels of
life's daily bread, and, seeing this, scores of harmlessly insane people
went on for the next fifty years coaxing his buttermilk with the regular
up and down of the pentameter churn. And in our day do we not scent
everywhere, and even carry away in our clothes against our will, that
faint perfume of musk which Mr. Tennyson has left behind him, or worse,
of Heine's _patchouli_? And might it not be possible to escape them by
turning into one of our narrow New England lanes, shut in though it were
by bleak stone walls on either hand, and where no better flowers were to
be gathered than goldenrod and hardhack?
Beside the advantage of getting out of the beaten track, our dialect
offered others hardly inferior. As I was about to make an endeavor to
state them, I remembered something that the clear-sighted Goethe had
said about Hebel's 'Allemannische Gedichte,' which, making proper
deduction for special reference to the book under review, expresses what
I would have said far better than I could hope to do: 'Allen diesen
innern guten Eigenschaften kommt die behagliche naive Sprache sehr zu
statten. Man findet mehrere sinnlich bedeutende and wohlklingende Worte
. . . von einem, zwei Buchstaben, Abbreviationen, Contractionen, viele
kurze, leichte Sylben, neue Reime, welches, mehr als man glaubt, ein
Vortheil fur den Dichter ist. Diese Elemente werden durch gluckliche
Constructionen und lebhafte Formen zu einem Styl zusammengedrangt der zu
diesem Zwecke vor unserer Buchersprache grosse Vorzuge hat. ' Of course I
do not mean to imply that _I_ have come near achieving any such success
as the great critic here indicates, but I think the success is _there_,
and to be plucked by some more fortunate hand.
Nevertheless, I was encouraged by the approval of many whose opinions I
valued. With a feeling too tender and grateful to be mixed with any
vanity, I mention as one of these the late A. H. Clough, who more than
any one of those I have known (no longer living), except Hawthorne,
impressed me with the constant presence of that indefinable thing we
call genius. He often suggested that I should try my hand at some Yankee
Pastorals, which would admit of more sentiment and a higher tone without
foregoing the advantage offered by the dialect. I have never completed
anything of the kind, but, in this Second Series, both my remembrance of
his counsel and the deeper feeling called up by the great interests at
stake, led me to venture some passages nearer to what is called poetical
than could have been admitted without incongruity into the former
series. The time seemed calling to me, with the old poet,--
'Leave, then, your wonted prattle,
The oaten reed forbear;
For I hear a sound of battle,
And trumpets rend the air! '
The only attempt I had ever made at anything like a pastoral (if that
may be called an attempt which was the result almost of pure accident)
was in 'The Courtin'. ' While the introduction to the First Series was
going through the press, I received word from the printer that there was
a blank page left which must be filled. I sat down at once and
improvised another fictitious 'notice of the press,' in which, because
verse would fill up space more cheaply than prose, I inserted an extract
from a supposed ballad of Mr. Biglow.
