For the student interested in the biology of language, as opposed to its paleontology, there is endless material in the racy neologisms of American, and particularly in its new compounds and novel verbs. Nothing could exceed the brilliancy of such inventions as /joy-ride/, /high-brow/, /road-louse/, /sob-sister/, /nature-faker/, /stand-patter/, /lounge-lizard/, /hash-foundry/, /buzz-wagon/, /has-been/, /end-seat-hog/, /shoot-the-chutes/ and /grape-juice-diplomacy/. They are bold; they are vivid; they have humor; they meet genuine needs. /Joy-ride/, I note, is already going over into English, and no wonder. There is absolutely no synonym for it; to convey its idea in orthodox English would take a whole sentence. And so, too, with certain single words of metaphorical origin: /barrel/ for large and illicit wealth, /pork/ for unnecessary and dishonest appropriations of public money, /joint/ for illegal liquor-house, /tenderloin/ for gay and dubious neighborhood.[64] Most of these, and of the new compounds with them, belong to the vocabulary of disparagement. Here an essential character of the American shows itself: his tendency to combat the disagreeable with irony, to heap ridicule upon what he is suspicious of or doesn't understand. The rapidity with which new verbs are made in the United States is really quite amazing. Two days after the first regulations of the Food Administration were announced, /to hooverize/ appeared spontaneously in scores of newspapers, and a week later it was employed without any visible sense of its novelty in the debates of Congress and had taken on a respectability equal to that of /to bryanize/, /to fletcherize/ and /to oslerize/. /To electrocute/ appeared inevitably in the first public discussion of capital [Pg164] punishment by electricity; /to taxi/ came in with the first taxi-cabs; /to commute/ no doubt accompanied the first commutation ticket; /to insurge/ attended the birth of the Progressive balderdash. Of late the old affix /-ize/, once fecund of such monsters as /to funeralize/, has come into favor again, and I note, among its other products, /to belgiumize/, /to vacationize/, /to picturize/ and /to scenarioize/. In a newspaper headline I even find /to s o s/, in the form of its gerund.[65] Many characteristic American verbs are compounds of common verbs and prepositions or adverbs, with new meanings imposed. Compare, for example, /to give/ and /to give out/, /to go back/ and /to go back on/, /to beat/ and /to beat it/, /to light/ and /to light out/, /to butt/ and /to butt in/, /to turn/ and /to turn down/, /to show/ and /to show up/, /to put/ and /to put over/, /to wind/ and /to wind up/. Sometimes, however, the addition seems to be merely rhetorical, as in /to start off/, /to finish up/, /to open up/ and /to hurry up/. /To hurry up/ is so commonplace in America that everyone uses it and no one notices it, but it remains rare in England. /Up/ seems to be essential to many of these latter-day verbs, /e.