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
/Store/, /shop/, /lumber/, /pie/, /dry-goods/, /cracker/, /rock/ and
/partridge/ among nouns and /to haul/, /to jew/, /to notify/ and /to
heft/ among verbs offer further examples of changed meanings. Down to
the [Pg053] middle of the eighteenth century /shop/ continued to
designate a retail establishment in America, as it does in England to
this day. /Store/ was applied only to a large establishment--one
showing, in some measure, the character of a warehouse. But in 1774 a
Boston young man was advertising in the /Massachusetts Spy/ for "a
/place/ as a /clerk/ in a /store/" (three Americanisms in a row!).
Soon afterward /shop/ began to acquire its special American meaning as
a factory, /e. g./, /machine-shop/. Meanwhile /store/ completely
displaced /shop/ in the English sense, and it remained for a late
flowering of Anglomania, as in the case of /boot/ and /shoe/, to
restore, in a measure, the /status quo ante/. /Lumber/, in eighteenth
century English, meant disused furniture, and this is its common
meaning in England today. But the colonists early employed it to
designate timber, and that use of it is now universal in America. Its
familiar derivatives, /e. g./, /lumber-yard/, /lumberman/,
/lumberjack/, greatly reinforce this usage. /Pie/, in English, means a
meat-pie; in American it means a fruit-pie. The English call a
fruit-pie a /tart/; the Americans call a meat-pie a /pot-pie/.
/Dry-goods/, in England, means "non-liquid goods, as corn" (/i. e./,
wheat); in the United States the term means "textile fabrics or
wares."[30] The difference had appeared before 1725. /Rock/, in
English, always means a large mass; in America it may mean a small
stone, as in /rock-pile/ and /to throw a rock/. The Puritans were
putting /rocks/ into the foundations of their meeting-houses so early
as 1712.[31] /Cracker/ began to be used for /biscuit/ before the
Revolution. /Tavern/ displaced /inn/ at the same time. As for
/partridge/, it is cited by a late authority[32] as a salient example
of changed meaning, along with /corn/ and /store/. In England the term
is applied only to the true partridge (/Perdix perdix/) and its nearly
related varieties, but in the United States it is also used to
designate the ruffed grouse (/Bonasa umbellus/), the common quail
(/Colinus virginianus/) and various [Pg054] other tetraonoid birds.
This confusion goes back to colonial times. So with /rabbit/. Properly
speaking, there are no native rabbits in the United States; they are
all hares. But the early colonists, for some unknown reason, dropped
the word /hare/ out of their vocabulary, and it is rarely heard in
American speech to this day. When it appears it is almost always
applied to the so-called Belgian hare, which, curiously enough, is not
a hare at all, but a true rabbit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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