Of these coinages, perhaps those of the second class are most numerous and characteristic. In them American exhibits one of its most marked tendencies: a habit of achieving short cuts in speech by a process of agglutination. Why explain laboriously, as an Englishman might, that the notes of a new bank (in a day of innumerable new banks) are insufficiently secure? Call [Pg081] them /wild-cat/ notes and have done! Why describe a gigantic rain storm with the lame adjectives of everyday? Call it a /cloud-burst/ and immediately a vivid picture of it is conjured up. /Rough-neck/ is a capital word; it is more apposite and savory than the English /navvy/, and it is overwhelmingly more American.[18] /Square-meal/ is another. /Fire-eater/ is yet another. And the same instinct for the terse, the eloquent and the picturesque is in /boiled-shirt/, /blow-out/, /big-bug/, /claim-jumper/, /spread-eagle/, /come-down/, /back-number/, /claw-hammer/ (coat), /bottom-dollar/, /poppy-cock/, /cold-snap/, /back-talk/, /back-taxes/, /calamity-howler/, /cut-off/, /fire-bug/, /grab-bag/, /grip-sack/, /grub-stake/, /pay-dirt/, /tender-foot/, /stocking-feet/, /ticket-scalper/, /store-clothes/, /small-potatoes/, /cake-walk/, /prairie-schooner/, /round-up/, /snake-fence/, /flat-boat/, /under-the-weather/, /on-the-hoof/, and /jumping-off-place/. These compounds (there must be thousands of them) have been largely responsible for giving the language its characteristic tang and color. Such specimens as /bell-hop/, /semi-occasional/, /chair-warmer/ and /down-and-out/ are as distinctively American as baseball or the quick-lunch.