; heft (Sackville, T. Hughes) ; help, servant (T. Hughes) ; human, person (Chapman's Ho mer); hung, hanged (Shakespeare, C. Meade) ; to hustle (a.) ; illy (a. m.) ; influeaydial (\V. Thomp son, c. 1760) ; improvement, of an occasion, etc. (Defoe, Gibbon) ; institution in the sense of an establishment or foundation (Beatty, 1784; Trol lope) ; interview, to meet for conversation (Dek ker) ; to let on, to divulge (in.) ; to let slide (Gower) ; limb, leg (Fielding) ; lore, like (Cow per) ; lucrative (Bacon) ; mad, angry Aliddleton); magnetic as an adjective ( Donne ; to make a visit (in.) ; tnetropolis, the chief city of the State (Milton, De Onincey, Macaulay) ; mi/tion, melon (Pepys) ; m sieia net- Byrom); nice, pleasing or agreeable (a. ill.) ; notify, to give notice (m.); notions, for small wares (Young) ; orerly, excessively (111.) : parlor, for drawing-room (G. Eliot, llelps) ; peruse, scan or read (W. Scott) ; professor of religion (Milton) ; pump ion. (pumpkin) pie (I655); quit, leave oil (Ben Jonson) ; railroad, railway ( .1. IL Newman, Mrs. Trollope) ; rare, underdone ( Dryden) ; reli able (Richard Montagu, 1624, Gladstone) ; reck on, suppose or conclude (Bible, W. Scott) ; rock, stone (a.) ; run, a small stream (a.) ; sick, ill (Bible, Evelyn) ; skeddadle (m.) ; slick (a.) ; span new (Chaucer) ; spell, a period of time (a.); spruce, for neat (Evelyn); spunky (Burns); strop (B. Jonson, Dryden) ; to take on, to wail or grieve (a.) ; tool, attend (Shakespeare) town, as a geographical division (Wiclif) ; well, prefacing a sentence (Disraeli) ; whittling (Walpole) ; and the writer would add the following which are sometimes ridiculed as outlandish products of the New World: A howling wilderness (Bible) : Mr. and lady (Thackeray) ; and to set store by, in the sense of to prize or appreciate (Mrs. Oli phant). Gilbert Al. Tucker says that the 460 words in Elwyn's (flo.!•sury of Supposed .4 nreri eanisms are all of British origin; that in Pick ering's work (I816) not more than 70 words out of the 500 are really American; and that out of the 5000 or more entries in Bartlett's Diction ary, only about 500 are genuine and distinct Americanisms now in decent use. Most New Englanders, said James Russell Lowell, speaking of colloquialisms still heard in Massachusetts, stand less in need of a glossary to Shakespeare than many a native of the old country. It may be added that many words formerly termed Americanisms are as commonly used in England as here, though not in polite speech or literature: e.g., bamboozle, chorkful, duds, and sight for number, while, on the other hand, such old forms as are for ask, and house), for houses, are fre quently heard in England and rarely here.
Richard Grant White and T. H. Lounsbury limit tha term "Americanisms"narrowly. Accord ing to the former, they must not have been trans planted, but must be perversions or modifica tions of English words or phrases, and must be used in the current speech or literature of the United States at the present day. "Words which are the names of things peculiar to this country are not Americanisms, except under certain con ditions (maize, squaw, wigwam.). They are merely names which :ire necessarily used by writers and speakers of all languages. If, how ever, any such word is adopted here as the name of a thing which already had an English name (wigwam, for hut; squaw, for wife), it then be comes properly an Americanism. Indian, and names compounded of Indian, were given by Europeans. Indian pudding is an American thing, but its name is not an Americanism." As he rejects Indian paleface. .succotash, tomahawk, and the rest, White asks, "What have we to do with the Indian?" and proceeding, crosses from the list of cherished "American isins," bronco, lacrosse, stampede, and their kin; abolitionist, border-ruffian, gerrymander, reserva tion, etc., as well as groundhog, long-moss., pine barrens, and saltlick, to go further, besides refusing to discuss such words as intervals and trate/ -gap, because they are "legitimate English."
Lounsbury, like White, objects to the expression, ''the American language," and remarks of the so-called "Yankee dialect" that it is never "the characteristic tongue of any one man, or of any one class, or of any one district." He doubts whether the term "Americanisms" can be regu larly applied to cent, congress, mileage, nullifica tion, and so on, and prefers to call them "Ameri can contributions to the common language." American newspapers are largely to blame for the mongrel and high-sounding words heard in the United States, especially those derived from the Latin or the Greek. The oratory of political campaigns gives rise to not a few astonishing Americanisms, and our humorists have coined many more that are beloved by the public. Per sons of fair education, who, as we learn from their talk, engage in avocations, reside in a man sion, wear pants. donate to eharities, ride to the metropolis in a smoker, retire to bed, and have proclivities, must he expected to use also CO1111SC, funeralize, saleslady, and shootist. when they find them in their favorite journals; but criticism under this head comes with little grace from the English, whose leaderette is as absurd as our editorial paragraph, and agricultural laborer, a clumsy name for him whom we term a farm hand. Our colleges,1 ale in particular, are proli fie in slang, some of which, as to rattle, in the sense of to confuse, soon become public property. Most of our colloquial expressions are short-lived, but the following may be instanced as having been in use for a long period: to absquatalate; baggage-smasher; to bark up the wrong tree; bot tom dollar; caboodle; to boost : to carort ; con niption fit ; not to care a continental ; a contin ental darn; to chip in; coon, a colored man; a coon's age, an indefinitely long time; to dust, to leave quickly; to euchre out : to flash in the pan ; flatfooted; guin game; highfalutin; last o' pea time; level best ; to liquor; to 'mosey, to leave quickly; obligated; to paddle one's own ca noe; to pan out ; picayune. small, mean; to raise Cain; right away; to run, in the sense of to manage or conduct; to salt a mine; sample room, drinking-bar ; shoddy, applied to a person; to smile, to drink spirits: socdologer, a finishing blow or argument; to sour on; a square meal; to strike oil, to get rich suddenly; to stump, to puzzle, or challenge; to talk turkey, to brag; tuckered out; to ramose (Sp. Tamos), to leave quickly; to weaken, to yield or give out.
T. W. Higginsun (see Bibliography, infra), in examining a glossary of the slang used about 1798 by British prisoners in the Castle in Bos ton Harbor, now Fort Independence, discovered a number of words that had been classed as of recent origin, the most familiar of which are grub, victuals: douse the glim, to put out the light; and spotted, for found out. Also some that are not given in any English glossaries, as briar, a saw; nipping-jig, the gallows; and wib ble, a dollar. Most of these expressions belong to the argot of thieves.
When we remember that the dialects of the counties in England have marked differences—so marked indeed that it may be doubted whether a Lancashire miner and a Lincolnshire farmer could understand each other—we may as well be proud that our vast country has, strictly speak ing, only one language. It is remarkable that the influx of European immigrants has not re sulted in some States in reducing English to a patois, if not in extinguishing it, or in giving it scant room in a mongrel vocabulary. Again, it might reasonably he expected that, in the course of three centuries, the political and social changes which we have undergone, and the pe culiar circumstances attending the settlement of new regions, would have separated us so widely from the mother country that, in spite of kinship and commercial and literary intercourse, some radical differences in language would have been evolved.