The derivation of /poker/, which came into American from California in the days of the gold rush, has puzzled etymologists. It is commonly derived from /primero/, the name of a somewhat similar game, popular in England in the sixteenth century, but the relation seems rather fanciful. It may possibly come, indirectly, from the Danish word /pokker/, signifying the devil. /Pokerish/, in the sense of alarming, was a common adjective in the United States before the Civil War; Thornton gives an example dated 1827. Schele de Vere says that /poker/, in the sense of a hobgoblin, was still in use in 1871, but he derives the name of the game from the French /poche/ (=/pouche/, /pocket/). He seems to believe that the bank or pool, in the early days, was called the /poke/. Barrère and Leland, rejecting all these guesses, derive /poker/ from the Yiddish /pochger/, which comes in turn from the verb /pochgen/, signifying to conceal winnings or losses. This /pochgen/ is obviously related to the German /pocher/ (=/boaster/, /braggart/). There were a good many German Jews in California in the early days, and they were ardent gamblers. If Barrère and Leland are correct, then /poker/ enjoys the honor of being the first loan-word taken into American from the Yiddish. § 5 /Pronunciation/--Noah Webster, as we saw in the last chapter, sneered at the broad /a/, in 1789, as an Anglomaniac affectation. In the course of the next 25 years, however, he seems to have suffered a radical change of mind, for in "The American Spelling Book," published in 1817, he ordained it in /ask/, /last/, /mass/, /aunt/, [Pg095] /grant/, /glass/ and their analogues, and in his 1829 revision he clung to this pronunciation, beside adding /master/, /pastor/, /amass/, /quaff/, /laugh/, /craft/, etc., and even /massive/. There is some difficulty, however, in determining just what sound he proposed to give the /a/, for there are several /a/-sounds that pass as broad, and the two main ones differ considerably. One appears in /all/, and may be called the /aw/-sound. The other is in /art/, and may be called the /ah/-sound. A quarter of a century later Richard Grant White distinguished between the two, and denounced the former as "a British peculiarity." Frank H. Vizetelly, writing in 1917, still noted the difference, particularly in such words as /daunt/, /saunter/ and /laundry/. It is probable that Webster, in most cases, intended to advocate the /ah/-sound, as in /father/, for this pronunciation now prevails in New England. Even there, however, the /a/ often drops to a point midway between /ah/ and /aa/, though never actually descending to the flat /aa/, as in /an/, /at/ and /anatomy/.