Some of these inventions, after flourishing for a generation or more, were retired with blushes during the period of aesthetic consciousness following the Civil War, but a large number have survived to our own day, and are in good usage. Not even the most bilious purist would think of objecting to /to affiliate/, /to itemize/, /to resurrect/ or /to Americanize/ today, and yet all of them gave grief to the judicious when they first appeared in the debates of Congress, brought there by statesmen from the backwoods. Nor to such simpler verbs of the period as /to corner/ (/i. e./, the market), /to boss/ and /to lynch/.[16] Nor perhaps to /to boom/, /to boost/, /to kick/ (in the sense of to protest), /to coast/ (on a sled), /to engineer/, /to collide/, /to chink/ (/i. e./, logs), /to feaze/, /to splurge/, /to aggravate/ (in the sense of to anger), /to yank/ and /to crawfish/. These verbs have entered into the very fibre of the American vulgate, and so have many nouns derived from them, /e. g./, /boomer/, /boom-town/, /bouncer/, /kicker/, /kick/, /splurge/, /roller-coaster/. A few of them, /e. g./, /to collide/ and /to feaze/, were [Pg078] archaic English terms brought to new birth; a few others, /e. g./, /to holler/[17] and /to muss/, were obviously mere corruptions. But a good many others, /e. g./, /to bulldoze/, /to hornswoggle/ and /to scoot/, were genuine inventions, and redolent of the soil. With the new verbs came a great swarm of verb-phrases, some of them short and pithy and others extraordinarily elaborate, but all showing the true national talent for condensing a complex thought, and often a whole series of thoughts, into a vivid and arresting image. Of the first class are /to fill the bill/, /to fizzle out/, /to make tracks/, /to peter out/, /to plank down/, /to go back on/, /to keep tab/, /to light out/ and /to back water/. Side by side with them we have inherited such common coins of speech as /to make the fur fly/, /to cut a swath/, /to know him like a book/, /to keep a stiff upper lip/, /to cap the climax/, /to handle without gloves/, /to freeze on to/, /to go it blind/, /to pull wool over his eyes/, /to know the ropes/, /to get solid with/, /to spread one's self/, /to run into the ground/, /to dodge the issue/, /to paint the town red/, /to take a back seat/ and /to get ahead of/. These are so familiar that we use them and hear them without thought; they seem as authentically parts of the English idiom as /to be left at the post/. And yet, as the labors of Thornton have demonstrated, all of them are of American nativity, and the circumstances surrounding the origin of some of them have been accurately determined. Many others are palpably the products of the great movement toward the West, for example, /to pan out/, /to strike it rich/, /to jump/ or /enter a claim/, /to pull up stakes/, /to rope in/, /to die with one's boots on/, /to get the deadwood on/, /to get the drop/, /to back and fill/ (a steamboat phrase used figuratively)