The characteristic American substitution of /mad/ for /angry/ goes back to the eighteenth century, and perhaps denotes the survival of an English provincialism. Witherspoon noticed it and denounced it in 1781, and in 1816 Pickering called it "low" and said that it was not used "except in very familiar conversation." But it got into much better odor soon afterward, and by 1840 it passed unchallenged. Its use is one of the peculiarities that Englishmen most quickly notice in American colloquial speech today. In formal written discourse it is less often encountered, probably because the English marking of it has so conspicuously singled it out. But it is constantly met with [Pg080] in the newspapers and in the /Congressional Record/, and it is not infrequently used by such writers as Howells and Dreiser. In the familiar simile, /as mad as a hornet/, it is used in the American sense. But /as mad as a March hare/ is English, and connotes insanity, not mere anger. The English meaning of the word is preserved in /mad-house/ and /mad-dog/, but I have often noticed that American rustics, employing the latter term, derive from it a vague notion, not that the dog is demented, but that it is in a simple fury. From this notion, perhaps, comes the popular belief that dogs may be thrown into hydrophobia by teasing and badgering them. It was not, however, among the verbs and adjectives that the American word-coiners of the first half of the century achieved their gaudiest innovations, but among the substantives. Here they had temptation and excuse in plenty, for innumerable new objects and relations demanded names, and here they exercised their fancy without restraint. Setting aside loan words, which will be considered later, three main varieties of new nouns were thus produced. The first consisted of English words rescued from obsolescence or changed in meaning, the second of compounds manufactured of the common materials of the mother tongue, and the third of entirely new inventions. Of the first class, good specimens are /deck/ (of cards), /gulch/, /gully/ and /billion/, the first three old English words restored to usage in America and the last a sound English word changed in meaning. Of the second class, examples are offered by /gum-shoe/, /mortgage-shark/, /dug-out/, /shot-gun/, /stag-party/, /wheat-pit/, /horse-sense/, /chipped-beef/, /oyster-supper/, /buzz-saw/, /chain-gang/ and /hell-box/. And of the third there are instances in /buncombe/, /greaser/, /conniption/, /bloomer/, /campus/, /galoot/, /maverick/, /roustabout/, /bugaboo/ and /blizzard/.