WUNST-Once.

Characterized by a writer in Harper's Monthly (66.665) as a Sussex provincialism.

YANK-Jerk.

Y

Skeat says this word "was carried from the north of England or Scotland to America."

YELLOW JACK-Yellow fever.

"His elder brother died of yellow-jack in the West Indies."-Dombey & Son, 10 (1847).

SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE

Our British critic, Mr. Whibley, whose statement to the effect that only three words generally counted as Americanisms are really of old English origin is quoted at the head of this chapter, adds some other remarks ("American Sketches," page 215) which it seems more convenient to treat separately. They are these:

"That a country which makes a constant boast of its practical intelligence should delight in long, flat, cumbrous collections of syllables such as locate, operate, antagonize, transportation, commutation and proposition, is an irony of civilization. These words, if words they may be called, are hideous to the eye, offensive to the ear, and inexpressive to the mind. They are the base coins of language. They are put upon the street fresh from some smasher's den."

It will be observed that Mr. Whibley raises no point about any American misuse of any of these "collections of syllables"; his objection is to our using them at all, and rests on his supposing that they are very recently invented (invented by Americans, he seems to think, but that is not material) and that they have no sort of authority in their favor; he questions whether they should be called English words! The fact is, every one of them has been in use in England for decades, all but one of them for centuries. That one is transportation, which may not be older than 1776, but certainly appeared in that year in Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations," Book 1, Chap. 11. Locate occurs in Lord Stair's "Institutions of the Laws of Scotland," 1.15 (1681), antagonize in Sir Thomas Herbert's "Travels," 211 (1634), operate in "Troilus and Cressida," 5.3.108 (1606), commutation in Hawes' "Pastime of Pleasure," 10.5 (1509), proposition in Wyclif's "Exodus," 25.30 (1382). They have been used in England, without falling at all into disfavor, ever since the dates given, down to the present time, as quotations of the present century could easily be given to prove. The fact that Mr. Whibley seems to have taken a queer and inexplicable dislike to them, is really of no sort of consequence to anybody but perhaps himself.

A case of similar blundering is to be found on page 24 of the Messrs. Fowler's "The King's English," where the reader is exhorted to make "a very firm

stand" against three "American verbs" that illustrate the "barbaric taste" that prevails in the United States. These dreadful American inventions are placate, which was used by Cudworth, in "Intellectual System," 1.4, published in 1678; antagonize, which is defined in Bailey's Dictionary, 1742; and transpire, for which Murray gives a string of citations, running in date from 1597 to 1908. It really does appear, as some writer has expressed it, that when an Englishman dislikes a word, he is very likely to call it an Americanism and think that settles it.

CHAPTER FOUR

SOME REAL AMERICANISMS

"And you may have a pretty considerable good sort of a feeble notion that it don't fit nohow; and that it ain't calculated to make you smart overmuch; and that you don't feel special bright, and by no means first rate, and not at all tonguey; and that, however rowdy you may be by natur', it does use you up com-plete, and that's a fact; and makes you quake considerable, and disposed toe damn the engine-all which phrases, I beg to add, are pure Americanisms of the first water."-Charles Dickens, Letter to John Forster.

The present writer is not quite old enough to remember the time of the great English novelist's first visit to the United States; and therefore cannot bear personal testimony to the language of the Americans of that period; but he has been interested in colloquial speech, and the use of words in general, for over fifty years, taking careful notice of verbal, especially oral, peculiarities in many parts of this country and among all sorts and conditions of people; and he can honestly say that the above elegant extract contains only one probably American error that he believes himself ever to have heard the pronouncing long the i in engine. He recalls hearing one of his schoolmates so speak the word, somewhere back in the fifties; and recalls

also the unmannerly guffaw of laughter with which the mispronunciation was greeted, not one of the boys in the group, except the speaker, having ever heard it before. He never in his life heard anybody pronounce the sign of the infinitive like toe; and he never heard the word rowdy used by anybody except to designate a ruffian. The don't with subject in the singular (used more than once by Dickens himself), the double negative, the adjectives for adverbs, the cacophanous aint, the mispronunciation natur' (reprobated by Walker as long ago as 1791) are surely one and all quite as common on the other side of the sea as they are here, always have been so, and are of no great consequence in any case, being simply faults of speech characteristic of the vulgar, in whatever country they may be heard. As for tonguey, it occurs in Wyclif's "Ecclesiasticus," 8.4-"strive not with a man that is tonguey," a translation completed almost a century before Columbus was born, and made by a scholar who ranks as the father of English prose. So much for one discovery of a batch of "Americanisms of the first water."

But that is not to say that such things do not exist. Here is a list, with briefest possible definitions (or none at all, if the meaning is unmistakable) of about 1900 of them,1 words and phrases that appear for the most part to be genuine Americanisms, which is to say that each of them, so far as known, either (1) ►

1 Which may be thought a large number; but please see p. 28.