The American Language: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Development of English in the United StatesMencken, H. L. (Henry Louis)
General
The American Language: A Preliminary Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States
Mencken, H. L. (Henry Louis)
Americanisms; English language; Names -- United States; Names, Personal -- United States
With the new landscape came an entirely new mode of life--new foods,
new forms of habitation, new methods of agriculture, new kinds of
hunting. A great swarm of neologisms thus arose, and, as in the
previous case, they were chiefly compounds. /Back-country/,
/back-woods/, /back-woodsman/, /back-settlers/, /back-settlements/:
all these were in common use early in the eighteenth century.
/Back-log/ was used by Increase Mather in 1684. /Log-house/ appears in
the Maryland Archives for 1669.[18] /Hoe-cake/, /Johnny-cake/,
/pan-fish/, /corn-dodger/, /roasting-ear/, /corn-crib/, /corn-cob/ and
/pop-corn/ were all familiar before the Revolution. So were
/pine-knot/, /snow-plow/, /cold-snap/, /land-slide/, /salt-lick/,
/prickly-heat/, /shell-road/ and /cane-brake/. /Shingle/ was a novelty
in 1705, but one S. Symonds wrote to John Winthrop, of Ipswich, about
a /clapboarded/ house in 1637. /Frame-house/ seems to have come in
with /shingle/. /Trail/, /half-breed/, /Indian-summer/ and [Pg047]
/Indian-file/ were obviously suggested by the Red Men. /State-house/
was borrowed, perhaps, from the Dutch. /Selectman/ is first heard of
in 1685, displacing the English /alderman/. /Mush/ had displaced
/porridge/ by 1671. Soon afterward /hay-stack/ took the place of the
English /hay-cock/, and such common English terms as /byre/, /mews/,
/weir/, and /wain/ began to disappear. /Hired-man/ is to be found in
the Plymouth town records of 1737, and /hired-girl/ followed soon
after. So early as 1758, as we find by the diary of Nathaniel Ames,
the second-year students at Harvard were already called /sophomores/,
though for a while the spelling was often made /sophimores/.
/Camp-meeting/ was later; it did not appear until 1799. But
/land-office/ was familiar before 1700, and /side-walk/,
/spelling-bee/, /bee-line/, /moss-back/, /crazy-quilt/, /mud-scow/,
/stamping-ground/ and a hundred and one other such compounds were in
daily use before the Revolution. After that great upheaval the new
money of the confederation brought in a number of new words. In 1782
Gouverneur Morris proposed to the Continental Congress that the coins
of the republic be called, in ascending order, /unit/, /penny-bill/,
/dollar/ and /crown/. Later Morris invented the word /cent/,
substituting it for the English /penny/.[19] In 1785 Jefferson
proposed /mill/, /cent/, /dime/, /dollar/ and /eagle/, and this
nomenclature was adopted.
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