VI.

I AM not Feste, and yet the Malvolios of literature might say of me, with more reason than their prototype said of him, that I am a barren rascal, and that unless some one ministers occasion to me I am gagged. But again, in the selfperfection of their characters, they furnish me occasion themselves. Since the writing of my last article upon my present subject, the following illustration of the prevalent British ignorance upon it has appeared. A letter professing to be A letter professing to be written by an American was published in the London World, about hotels in that city. Upon this the London Figaro undertakes to show that the writer is not an American, "because, while trying to assume the Yankee style of expression, he shows a lack of familiarity with peculiarly American phrases." The point in itself is well taken, and if maintained it would be fatal to the pretense of the "American" origin of the letter. But to accomplish this the critic must have a double knowledge as to the phrases which are the grounds of his criticism, – that they are or are not used by "Americans," and that they are or are not used by Englishmen. As to his possession of this knowledge we shall see. "For example," he says, "Americans say railroad, not railway; they say a hotel, not an hotel; andirons, not fire-dogs; that's so, not that is so; baggage, not luggage; parquet or reserved seats, not stalls; right away, not right off the reel; shirt bosom, not shirt front; on hand or on deck, not to the fore; and many other things besides." What the other things are I do not know. I have seen neither the letter nor the criticism in situ, but quote the latter from a New York paper in which it is presented as settling completely the question at issue. Now whether the letter was written by a Yankee or not I shall not undertake to say; that matter is nothing to my purpose.

But I shall show by a few illustrations lying just at hand that this formidable attack upon its origin based upon internal evidence is quite futile, and that the British critic was not sufficiently informed as to what are peculiarly "American" phrases.

As to the use of railway being evidence of non-American origin, see the following passages, the first from the most American of newspapers:

"The Board of Fire Commissioners of the District [of Columbia] has refused to recognize Mr. W. B. Reed. The funds for paying for the Railway Mail Service will run short in December." (New York Tribune, October 23, 1878.)

"Whenever the Greeks have tried to establish railway communication with the rest of the world, they have been met by the opposition of Turkey," etc. (Speech of General Reed, United States minister to Greece, in London Week, September 21, 1878.)

I have before me a letter dated Paris, September 12, 1878, from a gentleman now traveling in France, one who till four months ago had never been out of New England or New York, and in it are these passages:

"We took a bottle of old Beaune into the railway carriage, which we had to ourselves," etc.

"In France they set the clocks in front of the railway stations ten minutes in advance, so everybody shall come early."

Clearly, a letter may be written by an "American" of the most pronounced type although its writer uses railway and not railroad. On the other hand, see the following evidence that Englishmen use railroad. In the very London journal which on one page quotes the American minister's speech containing railway is the following passage:

"For investors are not so well situated, and therefore the descriptions of American railroad securities are to be

commended at this moment in preference to government bonds." (The Week, September 21, 1878.)

"For here the railroad comes to an end, and a good riddance to it." (The same, October 19, 1878.)

But if it should be said that this is mere newspaper writing (although upon such a point of usage there is no better evidence than that of a high-class London weekly paper), see the following examples furnished by an eminent Englishman who is regarded by many persons as the writer of the purest and most unexceptionable English of the day:

"In these times newspapers, railroads, and magnetic telegraphs make us independent of government messengers." (John Henry Newman, Callista, chap. vii.)

"Therefore, for example, education, periodical literature, railroad traveling, ventilation, drainage, and the arts of life, when fully carried out, serve to make a population moral and happy.' (The same, Apologia pro Vita sua, page 296. Note on Liberalism.)

These illustrations might be largely increased. I have taken merely what was within reach of my hand as I sat at my table.1 Clearly, again, a man need not be an "American to use railroad instead of railway. But railway is right and railroad wrong, as I have shown in Words and their Uses, for the reason, in brief, that a railway is laid upon a road, and the road is always somewhat, and generally very much, wider than the way. Of this view of the case I find the following illustration in a recent number of a London journal:

-"but the years passed away, and one governor-general succeeded another, and still the railway was not begun. At last it was determined, in the interests of economy, to lay down the rails on the existing trunk road, a very fine work." (Pall Mall Budget, October 12, 1878.)

1 Railroad occurs four times on a single page (vol. i. p. 282) of Memoirs of a Quiet Life; and Mrs. Trollope, most American-eschewing of British females, furnishes this instance: "When an individual, or set of individuals, desire to commence some expensive undertaking, such as the construction of a railroad, the establishment of steam vessels, or

As to baggage, I have already shown (Atlantic, April, 1878) that it is not distinctively "American" upon the evidence of the writings of Fielding, Sterne, Walter Scott, Mrs. Trollope, Thomas Hughes, and others. As to right off the reel, I can only say that I have constantly heard it from my childhood upon the lips of New England people who, although educated, were entirely unsophisticated by British example; and it is remarkable that Mr. Bartlett gives right off, in the sense of immediately (which is a mere abbreviation of right off the reel), as an Americanism! A similarly laughable confusion exists as to fire-dogs. At the end of that excellent work, Chambers's Dictionary of the English Language (Lond. 1872), there is a glossary of “Americanisms," so called; and in this glossary dogs is set forth as an Americanism for andirons! Truly, we may leave our British critics to settle what is British English and what is American English among themselves. As to andiron, there is not a word in the language more thoroughly English, past or present. I will observe, by the way, that in this same Chambers's Glossary of Americanisms I find, under F, fleshy in the sense of stout, upon which I remarked in my last article; and flashy, in the sense of not sweet and fruitful, notwithstanding Bacon's "else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things" (Essay, Of Studies); and, St. Patrick help us! forment, in the sense of opposite, -a word not only never heard from Yankee lips, but the occasion of smiling remark to us when we hear it from Biddy and Murphy. We shall next be told that Ochone! is an Americanism. Returning to our critic: I hear to the fore quite as often here as I heard it in England (where I also heard on hand), and much oftener than I hear on deek, which is slang of a kind not used by persons fastidious as to their hotel

the like," etc. (Vienna and the Austrians, page 183, chap. lvii.) Dickens also writes: "At one point, as we ascended a steep hill, athwart whose base a railroad, yet constructing, took its course, we came upon an Irish colony." (American Notes, vol. ii p. 212, Lond. 1842.)

accommodations.

To the fore is rather

rococo in both countries, and is used, as it were, within quotation marks, except among some plain provincial people. Upon the very serious question of shirt bosom for shirt front I dare not venture an opinion, but will only say that both are known to me as the name of that stiff, starchy stomacher, a fault in the set of which is the cause of so much anguish to the manly heart which beats beneath it.

The truth is that in all this array of assumed tests of Americanism in language there is only one of any value; and that one is a hotel for an hotel. According to my observation the elision of n before hotel is so general in this country that it may be regarded as universal, while in England it is very rare. This difference is the consequence of the difference in the pronunciation of hotel, which in England, except among a very few of the most highly cultivated speakers, is pronounced otel. To the tendency to this pronunciation of unaccented syllables beginning with h is to be attributed the old rule that in those cases then is to be preserved; for example, a history, but an historian. But this usage has been for some time passing away, even in England. For example, in one of the papers lying on my table I find, "In this sense of the word Gibbon is not a historian." (Pall Mall Budget, October 12, 1878: Review of English Men of Letters.)

Leaving our British critic, I turn to the Boston Dictionary of Americanisms. The first word under the letter G is an example of a sort of word, so called, which is largely represented in this compilation; but it is a sort which has no proper place in any collection which professes to represent the vocabulary of any community or any sort of people. These words are not good English, nor are they Americanisms, nor are they the cant or the slang of England, of the British colonies, or of any part of the United States. The word in question is gabblement. It is said to be a Southern word; and an example is quoted which would seem to support that view of its origin.

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Doubtless the word is used at the South; but so it is at the North, as thousands of readers of The Atlantic will bear witness. I have heard it again and again in New York, New Jersey, and New England; and more, I have heard it from the lips of children. Indeed, it is merely a grotesque word used in light, jocose, colloquial speech, a word that might be "made up," as children say, by any one on the spur of the moment, as I have no doubt that it has been made again and again by persons who have never heard it used. That it has been and is so used in England I have no doubt; but, as I have had occasion to remark before, all such light and frivolous words, like other light and frivolous things, are not exhibited to the world in England as they are here. The works of British authors are full of dialect words, folkspeech, and even of vulgarisms which are characteristic; but they do not put in print words which, while they deviate from standard speech, are in their difference utterly characterless and without significance. Such are gabblement, galboy, go-aheadativeness, goneness, grandacious, grandiferous, and the like. They are merely the whimsical coinage of a moment, caught up and used again in the whim of the moment; and although some of them may have got into print in that depressing department of our journalism and our literature which professes to be humorous, they are never used, even by children, or the childish, seriously, as language, but with a full knowledge that they are not really words, and merely for "the fun of the thing" (for to some people it is exquisitely funny to say grandacious); and they have therefore no claim to consideration or record as part of the language of a people. Goneness, indeed, has some humor and suggestiveness, and might be accepted as good slang if it were in sufficiently common use. It is described as being a "woman's word;" but I have heard it from men; and I once heard a very small boy, guiltless of the word itself, give the spirit of it while suffering the sensation which it describes. At luncheon he had managed to get a

tremendous swig of some strong ale that might have disturbed older heads than his. Not long after the discovery of his draught he broke in upon the general conversation by exclaiming, "Mamma, it makes my legs go out."1 Gentleman turkey, for turkey-cock, is also admitted by Mr. Bartlett into his dictionary, with the explanation that "the mock-modesty of the Western States demands that a male turkey should be so called." With all my heart I cheer Mr. Bartlett in any attack upon mock-modesty in language; but I cannot agree with him in his appreciation of this phrase. It is used, and is put by writers into the mouths of the personages of their sketches and stories, not. with a modest motive, but jocosely, whimsically. With that thin humor and weak satire which some people enjoy, and repeat at second-hand till one is sick of it, they thus repudiate the very mock-modesty to which Mr. Bartlett assumes that they conform.

There is a great deal of this kind of talk among "Americans" of a sort found all over the country, but naturally most numerous at the West. Words so used are no part of the true language of the country regarded in any light; because, as I have remarked before, they are not dialect, or cant, or slang, and are not used seriously by the very persons who utter them. They have no fixed character or permanent place of any kind, but pertain to the persons who speak them and to the moment when they are spoken. Mistakenly accepted as Americanisms, they wrongfully swell the catalogue of words which, with a seeming "American"' authority, give occasion for the assumption, perhaps the honest belief, that the language in common use among us is something else than English.

Something similar in kind to these words and phrases is to go off, which appears in Mr. Bartlett's third edition, but is discreetly omitted from the fourth. It is not peculiar to either country, or to

1 While this article is going through the press I receive from a friend, who is cavorting over the boundless prairie, a letter dated Denver, November 20th, in which he says: "The air here has a queer effect upon some people. It gives them a 'gone' feeling about the knees, so that you see new comers

any class in either country. Nor was it in the former edition correctly explained as meaning to expire. It is an abbreviated expression, or rather one left purposely incomplete. It may mean to go off in laughter, to go off in a swoon, or something else. We may be sure that the Widow Bedott, who is quoted in illustration, when she said, "I thought I should go off last night when I see that old critter squeeze up and hook on to you," did not mean that she thought she would expire. She might have meant that she would go off in laughter, or in a faint, or perhaps in a conniption fit."

But while go off is omitted from the last edition, go it is added; why, it is difficult to discover. For the phrase is not of late introduction, nor is it of "American" origin, or peculiar to this country in any way. I can bear witness that it has been in common use among Englishmen, educated and uneducated, for thirty years, and few of us here can remember the time when we first heard it. The explanation of it, "to undertake a thing, to go at it, to succeed in a thing, go through it, to be earnestly engaged in," is unsatisfactory. “Going it " in an affair does not mean being successful in it; and a man may undertake a thing and yet not "go it," because he has no 66 go " in him. Perhaps "to go at earnestly" would express its meaning; which, however, includes something more than earnestness, something of a sustained rush. Another one of the phrases which make their first appearance in the edition of 1878 is to go to the bad; the presentation of which as an Americanism is astonishing. It is a semi-slang phrase which has been in vogue in England for a generation, as any Englishman will testify; and its use was strictly confined to England until comparatively a few years ago, when it began to creep in here, although its use is still so restricted going about as if at every step they were going to drop upon their knees." This illustrates the meaning of gone and goneness, and the quotation of the word by my correspondent shows its recognition only as a slang phrase.

that to most people it would seem strange, if not foreign. All these phrases founded on go, however, are mere slang, and however good slang (and go it could not be bettered), they should be set apart by themselves. It is one of the injurious features in the Dictionary of Americanisms that all its various matter is "lumped" together and arranged only in alphabetical order. The "nigger," the "Injin," the Canadian "habitan," the Mexican "greaser," the backwoodsman, the California miner, the loafer, and the decent, educated American are all mixed up together in one indistinguishable heap.

sense.

Gal, g'hal, g'lang, and gray deal (great deal) are representatives of a very numerous class of words in this collection of so-called Americanisms. They are not words, but merely slovenly pronunciations of words which are used in their simple and universally accepted English Three of these, the first and the last two, are not in any sense peculiarly American; as the same slovenly pronunciations prevail in England among a class of people corresponding to those who use them here. The second, g'hal, is not, but was, an affected pronunciation peculiar to a certain part of New York. It prevailed, however, but for a short time; it has entirely disappeared, with its companion, b'hoy. The Bowery boy, who used both, has not lasted so long as Mr. Bartlett's dictionary, many items in which are of an equally circumscribed and ephemeral sort.

A large class of words to which I have before directed attention is represented under this letter by gerrymander, guano, Gulf States, Graham bread, Grahamites, gong-punch, greenback. These are not in any proper sense Americanisms. They are merely the names of things, just as hari-karu, mandarin, tabu, boomerang, and wampum are. They involve no perversion or modification of English words or phrases, such, for example, as appears

1 Mr. Bartlett would have found go it and to go to the bad in any edition of the London Slang Dictionary, published by John Camden Hotten.

2 In further illustration of this point: The Spaniards called a certain red river in the far West, Colorado; and we have a territory, Colorado. But

in right away for immediately, or lumber for timber. The latter are examples of true Americanisms; and they are neither slang nor cant. Of the words in question, guano is not even the name of a thing found in the United States, or a word originating among or peculiar to the people of this country. It is a Spanish name of the product of Spanish or quasi-Spanish islands thousands of miles from our borders; and it is used by all European peoples just as it is used by the people of the United States. I am reluctant to say what would imply or suggest any other than the most perfect conscientiousness and singleness of intent upon Mr. Bartlett's part; but it does seem at times that he has been carried away by the mania of the specialist and the collector so far as to stick at nothing that would stand in the way of increasing the bulk of his volume.

Gad. Why this word, the meaning of which need not be told, should be included in a collection of words peculiar to the United States is a mystery past understanding. It is pure Anglo-Saxon; it appears in the Promptorium Parvulorum, 1440; in Baret's Alvearie, 1580; and I believe in every English dictionary that has ever been published, down to Johnson and Richardson. Mr. Bartlett tells us it is used in the north of England. So indeed it is, and also in the south, and in the east, and in the west. It is as English as a word can be. Wedgewood says of it, after remarking that gad and goad "differ only in the more or less broad pronunciation of the vowel," that "the primitive meaning is a rod or switch, probably from the sound of a blow with such an implement. Then as a cut with a flexible rod or prick with a pointed one are equally efficient in urging an animal forwards, the name is extended to the implement used for either purpose, and a goad is the pointed rod used in driving bullocks." Apart from Wedgewood's

"river Colorado" and "Colorado territory" are not Americanisms, they are merely names of things here which are not elsewhere. If, however, we were from them to adopt colorado as a synonym for red, and use it in that sense, then colorado would be an Americanism