the changes so copiously reported--/e. g./, from /Bielefelder/ to
/Benson/, and from /Pulvermacher/ to /Pullman/--were merely efforts at
protective coloration. The immigrant, in a time of extraordinary
suspicion and difficulty, tried to get rid of at least one
handicap.[24] [Pg280]

This motive constantly appears among the Jews, who face an
anti-Semitism that is imperfectly concealed and may be expected to
grow stronger hereafter. Once they have lost the faith of their
fathers, a phenomenon almost inevitable in the first native-born
generation, they shrink from all the disadvantages that go with
Jewishness, and seek to conceal their origin, or, at all events, to
avoid making it unnecessarily noticeable.[25] To this end they modify
the spelling of the more familiar Jewish surnames, turning /Levy/ into
/Lewy/, /Lewyt/, /Levitt/, /Levin/, /Levine/, /Levey/, /Levie/[26] and
even /Lever/, /Cohen/ into /Cohn/, /Cahn/, /Kahn/, /Kann/, /Coyne/ and
/Conn/, /Aarons/ into /Arens/ and /Ahrens/ and /Solomon/ into
/Salmon/, /Salomon/ and /Solmson/. In the same way they shorten their
long names, changing /Wolfsheimer/ to /Wolf/, /Goldschmidt/ to /Gold/,
and /Rosenblatt/, /Rosenthal/, /Rosenbaum/, /Rosenau/, /Rosenberg/,
/Rosenbusch/, /Rosenblum/, /Rosenstein/, /Rosenheim/ and /Rosenfeldt/
to /Rose/. Like the Germans, they also seek refuge in translations
more or less literal. Thus, on the East Side of New York, /Blumenthal/
is often changed to /Bloomingdale/, /Schneider/ to /Taylor/,
/Reichman/ to /Richman/, and /Schlachtfeld/ to /Warfield/. /Fiddler/,
a common Jewish name, becomes /Harper/; so does /Pikler/, which is
Yiddish for /drummer/. /Stolar/, which is a Yiddish word borrowed from
the Russian, signifying /carpenter/, is often changed to /Carpenter/.
/Lichtman/ and /Lichtenstein/ become /Chandler/. /Meilach/, which is
Hebrew for /king/, becomes /King/, and so does /Meilachson/. The
strong tendency to seek English-sounding equivalents for names of
noticeably foreign origin changes /Sher/ into /Sherman/, /Michel/ into
/Mitchell/, /Rogowsky/ into /Rogers/, /Kolinsky/ into /Collins/,
/Rabinovitch/ into /Robbins/, /Davidovitch/ into /Davis/, /Moiseyev/
into /Macy/ or /Mason/, and /Jacobson/, /Jacobovitch/ and /Jacobovsky/
into /Jackson/. This last [Pg281] change proceeds by way of a
transient change to /Jake/ or /Jack/ as a nickname. /Jacob/ is always
abbreviated to one or the other on the East Side. /Yankelevitch/ also
becomes /Jackson/, for /Yankel/ is Yiddish for /Jacob/.[27]

Among the immigrants of other stocks some extraordinarily radical
changes in name are to be observed. Greek names of five, and even
eight syllables shrink to /Smith/; Hungarian names that seem to be all
consonants are reborn in such euphonious forms as /Martin/ and /Lacy/.
I have encountered a /Gregory/ who was born /Grgurevich/ in Serbia; a
/Uhler/ who was born /Uhlyarik/; a /Graves/ who descends from the fine
old Dutch family of /'sGravenhage/. I once knew a man named /Lawton/
whose grandfather had been a /Lautenberger/. First he shed the
/berger/ and then he changed the spelling of /Lauten/ to make it fit
the inevitable American mispronunciation. There is, again, a family of
/Dicks/ in the South whose ancestor was a /Schwettendieck/--apparently
a Dutch or Low German name. There is, yet again, a celebrated American
artist, of the Bohemian patronymic of /Hrubka/, who has abandoned it
for a surname which is common to all the Teutonic languages, and is
hence easy for Americans. The Italians, probably because of the
relations established by the Catholic church, often take Irish names,
as they marry Irish girls; it is common to hear of an Italian pugilist
or politician named /Kelly/ or /O'Brien/. The process of change is
often informal, but even legally it is quite facile. The
Naturalization Act of June 29, 1906, authorizes the court, as a part
of the naturalization of any alien, to make an order changing his
name. This is frequently done when he receives his last papers;
sometimes, if the newspapers are to be believed, without his
solicitation, and even against his protest. If the matter is
overlooked at the time, he may change his name later on, like any
other citizen, by simple application to a court of record.

Among names of Anglo-Saxon origin and names naturalized long before
the earliest colonization, one notes certain American peculiarities,
setting off the nomenclature of the United States [Pg282] from that
of the mother country. The relative infrequency of hyphenated names in
America is familiar; when they appear at all it is almost always in
response to direct English influences.[28] Again, a number of English
family names have undergone modification in the New World. /Venable/
may serve as a specimen. The form in England is almost invariably
/Venables/, but in America the final /s/ has been lost, and every
example of the name that I have been able to find in the leading
American reference-books is without it. And where spellings have
remained unchanged, pronunciations have been frequently modified. This
is particularly noticeable in the South. /Callowhill/, down there, is
commonly pronounced /Carrol/; /Crenshawe/ is /Granger/; /Hawthorne/,
/Horton/; /Heyward/, /Howard/; /Norsworthy/, /Nazary/; /Ironmonger/,
/Munger/; /Farinholt/, /Fernall/; /Camp/, /Kemp/; /Buchanan/,
/Bohannan/; /Drewry/, /Droit/; /Enroughty/, /Darby/; and /Taliaferro/,
/Tolliver/.[29] The English /Crowninshields/ pronounce every syllable
of their name; the American /Crowninshields/ commonly make it
/Crunshel/. /Van Schaick/, an old New York name, is pronounced /Von
Scoik/. A good many American Jews, aiming at a somewhat laborious
refinement, change the pronunciation of the terminal /stein/ in their
names so that it rhymes, not with /line/, but with /bean/. Thus, in
fashionable Jewish circles, there are no longer any /Epsteins/,
/Goldsteins/ and /Hammersteins/ but only /Epsteens/, /Goldsteens/ and
/Hammersteens/. The American Jews differ further from the English in
pronouncing /Levy/ to make the first syllable rhyme with /tea/; the
English Jews always make the name /Lev-vy/. To match such [Pg283]
American prodigies as /Darby/ for /Enroughty/, the English themselves
have /Hools/ for /Howells/, /Sillinger/ for /St. Leger/, /Sinjin/ for
/St. John/, /Pool/ for /Powell/, /Weems/ for /Wemyss/, /Kerduggen/ for
/Cadogen/, /Mobrer/ for /Marlborough/, /Key/ for /Cains/, /Marchbanks/
for /Marjoribanks/, /Beecham/ for /Beauchamp/, /Chumley/ for
/Cholmondeley/, /Trosley/ for /Trotterscliffe/, and /Darby/ for
/Derby/, not to mention /Maudlin/ for /Magdalen/.

§ 2

/Given Names/--The non-Anglo Saxon American's willingness to anglicize
his patronymic is far exceeded by his eagerness to give "American"
baptismal names to his children. The favorite given names of the old
country almost disappear in the first native-born generation. The
Irish immigrants quickly dropped such names as /Terence/, /Dennis/ and
/Patrick/, and adopted in their places the less conspicuous /John/,
/George/ and /William/. The Germans, in the same way, abandoned
/Otto/, /August/, /Hermann/, /Ludwig/, /Heinrich/, /Wolfgang/,
/Albrecht/, /Wilhelm/, /Kurt/, /Hans/, /Rudolf/, /Gottlieb/, /Johann/
and /Franz/. For some of these they substituted the English
equivalents: /Charles/, /Lewis/, /Henry/, /William/, /John/, /Frank/
and so on. In the room of others they began afflicting their offspring
with more fanciful native names: /Milton/ and /Raymond/ were their
chief favorites thirty or forty years ago.[30] The Jews carry the
thing to great lengths. At present they seem to take most delight in
/Sidney/, /Irving/, /Milton/, /Roy/, /Stanley/ and /Monroe/, but they
also call their sons /John/, /Charles/, /Henry/, /Harold/, /William/,
/Richard/, /James/, /Albert/, /Edward/, /Alfred/, /Frederick/,
/Thomas/, and even /Mark/, /Luke/ and /Matthew/, and their daughters
/Mary/, /Gertrude/, /Estelle/, /Pauline/, /Alice/ and /Edith/. As a
boy I went to school with many Jewish boys. The commonest given names
among them were /Isadore/, /Samuel/, /Jonas/, /Isaac/ and /Israel/.
These are seldom bestowed by [Pg284] the rabbis of today. In the same
school were a good many German pupils, boy and girl. Some of the girls
bore such fine old German given names as /Katharina/, /Wilhelmina/,
/Elsa/, /Lotta/, /Ermentrude/ and /Frankziska/. All these have begun
to disappear.

The newer immigrants, indeed, do not wait for the birth of children to
demonstrate their naturalization; they change their own given names
immediately they land. I am told by Abraham Cahan that this is done
almost universally on the East Side of New York. "Even the most
old-fashioned Jews immigrating to this country," he says, "change
/Yosel/ to /Joseph/, /Yankel/ to /Jacob/, /Liebel/ to /Louis/,
/Feivel/ to /Philip/, /Itzik/ to /Isaac/, /Ruven/ to /Robert/, and
/Moise/ or /Motel/ to /Morris/." Moreover, the spelling of /Morris/,
as the position of its bearer improves, commonly changes to /Maurice/,
though the pronunciation may remain /Mawruss/, as in the case of Mr.
Perlmutter. The immigrants of other stocks follow the same habit.
Every Bohemian /Vaclav/ or /Vojtĕch/ becomes a /William/, every
/Jaroslav/ becomes a /Jerry/, every /Bronislav/ a /Barney/, and every
/Stanislav/ a /Stanley/. The Italians run to /Frank/ and /Joe/; so do
the Hungarians and the Balkan peoples; the Russians quickly drop their
national system of nomenclature and give their children names
according to the American plan. Even the Chinese laundrymen of the big
cities become /John/, /George/, /Charlie/ and /Frank/; I once
encountered one boasting the name of /Emil/.

The Puritan influence, in names as in ideas, has remained a good deal
more potent in American than in England. The given name of the
celebrated /Praise-God/ Barebones marked a fashion which died out in
England very quickly, but one still finds traces of it in America,
/e. g./, in such women's names as /Faith/, /Hope/, /Prudence/, /Charity/
and /Mercy/, and in such men's names as /Peregrine/.[31] The religious
obsession of the New England colonists is also kept in mind by the
persistence of Biblical names: /Ezra/, /Hiram/, /Ezekial/,
/Zachariah/, /Elijah/, /Elihu/, and so on. These [Pg285] names excite
the derision of the English; an American comic character, in an
English play or novel, always bears one of them. Again, the fashion of
using surnames as given names is far more widespread in America than
in England. In this country, indeed, it takes on the character of a
national habit; fully three out of four eldest sons, in families of
any consideration, bear their mothers' surnames as middle names. This
fashion arose in England during the seventeenth century, and one of
its fruits was the adoption of such well-known surnames as /Stanley/,
/Cecil/, /Howard/, /Douglas/ and /Duncan/ as common given names.[32]
It died out over there during the eighteenth century, and today the
great majority of Englishmen bear such simple given names as /John/,
/Charles/ and /William/--often four or five of them--but in America it
has persisted. A glance at a roster of the Presidents of the United
States will show how firmly it has taken root. Of the ten that have
had middle names at all, six have had middle names that were family
surnames, and two of the six have dropped their other given names and
used these surnames. This custom, perhaps, has paved the way for
another: that of making given names of any proper nouns that happen to
strike the fancy. Thus General Sherman was named after an Indian
chief, /Tecumseh/, and a Chicago judge was baptized /Kenesaw
Mountain/[33] in memory of the battle that General Sherman fought
there. A late candidate for governor of New York had the curious given
name of /D-Cady/.[34] Various familiar American given names,
originally surnames, are almost unknown in England, among them,
/Washington/, /Jefferson/, /Jackson/, /Lincoln/, /Columbus/ and /Lee/.
/Chauncey/ forms a curious addition to the list. It was the surname of
the second president of Harvard College, and was bestowed upon their
offspring by numbers of his graduates. It then got into [Pg286]
general use and acquired a typically American pronunciation, with the
/a/ of the first syllable flat. It is never encountered in England.

In the pronunciation of various given names, as in that of many
surnames, English and American usages differ. /Evelyn/, in England, is
given two syllables instead of three, and the first is made to rhyme
with /leave/. /Irene/ is given two syllables, making it /Irene-y/.
/Ralph/ is pronounced /Rafe/. /Jerome/ is accented on the first
syllable; in America it is always accented on the second.[35]

§ 3

/Geographical Names/--"There is no part of the world," said Robert
Louis Stevenson, "where nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous
and picturesque as in the United States of America." A glance at the
latest United States Official Postal Guide[36] or report of the United
States Geographic Board[37] quite bears out this opinion. The map of
the country is besprinkled with place names from at least half a
hundred languages, living and dead, and among them one finds examples
of the most daring and elaborate fancy. There are Spanish, French and
Indian names as melodious and charming as running water; there are
names out of the histories and mythologies of all the great races of
man; there are names grotesque and names almost sublime. No other
country can match them for interest and variety. When there arises
among us a philologist who will study them as thoroughly and
intelligently as the Swiss, Johann Jakob Egli, studied the place names
of Central Europe, his work will be an invaluable contribution to the
history of the nation, and no less to an understanding of the
psychology of its people.

The original English settlers, it would appear, displayed little
imagination in naming the new settlements and natural features
[Pg287] of the land that they came to. Their almost invariable
tendency, at the start, was to make use of names familiar at home, or
to invent banal compounds. /Plymouth Rock/ at the North and
/Jamestown/ at the South are examples of their poverty of fancy; they
filled the narrow tract along the coast with new /Bostons/,
/Cambridges/, /Bristols/ and /Londons/, and often used the adjective
as a prefix. But this was only in the days of beginning. Once they had
begun to move back from the coast and to come into contact with the
aborigines and with the widely dispersed settlers of other races, they
encountered rivers, mountains, lakes and even towns that bore far more
engaging names, and these, after some resistance, they perforce
adopted. The native names of such rivers as the /James/, the /York/
and the /Charles/ succumbed, but those of the /Potomac/, the
/Patapsco/, the /Merrimack/ and the /Penobscot/ survived, and they
were gradually reinforced as the country was penetrated. Most of these
Indian names, in getting upon the early maps, suffered somewhat severe
simplifications. /Potowánmeac/ was reduced to /Potomack/ and then to
/Potomac/; /Unéaukara/ became /Niagara/; /Reckawackes/, by the law of
Hobson-Jobson, was turned into /Rockaway/, and /Pentapang/ into /Port
Tobacco/.[38] But, despite such elisions and transformations, the
charm of thousands of them remained, and today they are responsible
for much of the characteristic color of American geographical
nomenclature. Such names as /Tallahassee/, /Susquehanna/,
/Mississippi/, /Allegheny/, /Chicago/, /Kennebec/, /Patuxent/ and
/Arkansas/ give a barbaric brilliancy to the American map. Only the
map of Australia, with its mellifluous Maori names, can match it.

The settlement of the American continent, once the eastern coast
ranges were crossed, proceeded with unparalleled speed, and so the
naming of the new rivers, lakes, peaks and valleys, and of the new
towns and districts no less, strained the inventiveness of the
pioneers. The result is the vast duplication of names that shows
itself in the Postal Guide. No less than eighteen imitative [Pg288]
/Bostons/ and /New Bostons/ still appear, and there are nineteen
/Bristols/, twenty-eight /Newports/, and twenty-two /Londons/ and /New
Londons/. Argonauts starting out from an older settlement on the coast
would take its name with them, and so we find /Philadelphias/ in
Illinois, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee, /Richmonds/ in Iowa,
Kansas and nine other western states, and /Princetons/ in fifteen.
Even when a new name was hit upon it seems to have been hit upon
simultaneously by scores of scattered bands of settlers; thus we find
the whole land bespattered with /Washingtons/, /Lafayettes/,
/Jeffersons/ and /Jacksons/, and with names suggested by common and
obvious natural objects, /e. g./, /Bear Creek/, /Bald Knob/ and
/Buffalo/. The Geographic Board, in its last report, made a belated
protest against this excessive duplication. "The names /Elk/,
/Beaver/, /Cottonwood/ and /Bald/," it said, "are altogether too
numerous."[39] Of postoffices alone there are fully a hundred
embodying /Elk/; counting in rivers, lakes, creeks, mountains and
valleys, the map of the United States probably shows at least twice as
many such names.

A study of American geographical and place names reveals eight general
classes, as follows: (/a/) those embodying personal names, chiefly the
surnames of pioneers or of national heroes; (/b/) those transferred
from other and older places, either in the eastern states or in
Europe; (/c/) Indian names; (/d/) Dutch, Spanish and French names;
(/e/) Biblical and mythological names; (/f/) names descriptive of
localities; (/g/) names suggested by the local flora, fauna or
geology; (/h/) purely fanciful names. The names of the first class are
perhaps the most numerous. Some consist of surnames standing alone, as
/Washington/, /Cleveland/, /Bismarck/, /Lafayette/, /Taylor/ and
/Randolph/; others consist of surnames in combination with various old
and new /Grundwörter/, as /Pittsburgh/, /Knoxville/, /Bailey's
Switch/, /Hagerstown/, /Franklinton/, /Dodge City/, /Fort Riley/,
/Wayne Junction/ and /McKeesport/; and yet others are contrived of
given names, either alone or in combination, as /Louisville/, /St.
Paul/, /Elizabeth/, /Johnstown/, /Charlotte/, /Williamsburg/ and
/Marysville/. The number of towns in the United States bearing women's
given names is enormous. [Pg289] I find, for example, eleven
postoffices called /Charlotte/, ten called /Ada/ and no less than
nineteen called /Alma/. Most of these places are small, but there is
an /Elizabeth/ with 75,000 population, an /Elmira/ with 40,000, and an
/Augusta/ with nearly 45,000.

The names of the second class we have already briefly observed. They
are betrayed in many cases by the prefix /New/; more than 600 such
postoffices are recorded, ranging from /New Albany/ to /New Windsor/.
Others bear such prefixes as /West/, /North/ and /South/, or various
distinguishing affixes, /e. g./, /Bostonia/, /Pittsburgh Landing/,
/Yorktown/ and /Hartford City/. One often finds eastern county names
applied to western towns and eastern town names applied to western
rivers and mountains. Thus, /Cambria/, which is the name of a county
but not of a postoffice in Pennsylvania, is a town name in seven
western states; /Baltimore/ is the name of a glacier in Alaska, and
/Princeton/ is the name of a peak in Colorado. In the same way the
names of the more easterly states often reappear in the west, /e. g./,
in /Mount Ohio/, Colo., /Delaware/, Okla., and /Virginia City/, Nev.
The tendency to name small American towns after the great capitals of
antiquity has excited the derision of the English since the earliest
days; there is scarcely an English book upon the states without some
fling at it. Of late it has fallen into abeyance, though sixteen
/Athenses/ still remain, and there are yet many /Carthages/, /Uticas/,
/Syracuses/, /Romes/, /Alexandrias/, /Ninevahs/ and /Troys/. The third
city of the nation, /Philadelphia/, got its name from the ancient
stronghold of Philadelphus of Pergamun. To make up for the falling off
of this old and flamboyant custom, the more recent immigrants have
brought with them the names of the capitals and other great cities of
their fatherlands. Thus the American map bristles with /Berlins/,
/Bremens/, /Hamburgs/, /Warsaws/ and /Leipzigs/, and is beginning to
show /Stockholms/, /Venices/, /Belgrades/ and /Christianias/.

The influence of Indian names upon American nomenclature is quickly
shown by a glance at the map. No less than 26 of the states have names
borrowed from the aborigines, and the same thing is true of most of
our rivers and mountains. There was an effort, at one time, to get rid
of these Indian names. Thus [Pg290] the early Virginians changed the
name of the /Powhatan/ to the /James/, and the first settlers in New
York changed the name of /Horicon/ to /Lake George/. In the same way
the present name of the /White Mountains/ displaced /Agiochook/, and
/New Amsterdam/, and later /New York/, displaced /Manhattan/, which
has been recently revived. The law of Hobson-Jobson made changes in
other Indian names, sometimes complete and sometimes only partial.
Thus, /Mauwauwaming/ became /Wyoming/, /Maucwachoong/ became /Mauch
Chunk/, /Ouabache/ became /Wabash/, /Asingsing/ became /Sing-Sing/,
and /Machihiganing/ became /Michigan/. But this vandalism did not go
far enough to take away the brilliant color of the aboriginal
nomenclature. The second city of the United States bears an Indian
name, and so do the largest American river, and the greatest American
water-fall, and four of the five great Lakes, and the scene of the
most important military decision ever reached on American soil.

The Dutch place-names of the United States are chiefly confined
to the vicinity of New York, and a good many of them have become
greatly corrupted. /Brooklyn/, /Wallabout/ and /Gramercy/ offer
examples. The first-named was originally /Breuckelen/, the second
was /Waale Bobht/, and the third was /De Kromme Zee/. /Hell-Gate/
is a crude translation of the Dutch /Helle-Gat/. During the early
part of the last century the more delicate New Yorkers transformed
the term into /Hurlgate/, but the change was vigorously opposed
by Washington Irving, and so /Hell-Gate/ was revived. The law of
Hobson-Jobson early converted the Dutch /hoek/ into /hook/, and it
survives in various place-names, /e. g./, /Kinderhook/ and /Sandy
Hook/. The Dutch /kill/ is a /Grundwort/ in many other names,
/e. g./, /Catskill/, /Schuylkill/, /Peekskill/, /Fishkill/ and
/Kill van Kull/; it is the equivalent of the American /creek/. Many
other Dutch place-names will come familiarly to mind: /Harlem/,
/Staten/, /Flushing/, /Cortlandt/, /Calver Plaat/, /Nassau/,
/Coenties/, /Spuyten Duyvel/, /Yonkers/, /Hoboken/ and /Bowery/
(from /Bouvery/).[40] /Block/ Island was originally /Blok/, and Cape
/May/, according to Schele de Vere, was /Mey/, both Dutch. [Pg291]
A large number of New York street and neighborhood names come down
from Knickerbocker days, often greatly changed in pronunciation.
/Desbrosses/ offers an example. The Dutch called it /de Broose/, but
in New York today it is commonly spoken of as /Dez-bros-sez/.

French place-names have suffered almost as severely. Few persons would
recognize /Smackover/, the name of a small town in Arkansas, as
French, and yet in its original form it was /Chemin Couvert/. Schele
de Vere, in 1871, recorded the degeneration of the name to /Smack
Cover/; the Postoffice, always eager to shorten and simplify names,
has since made one word of it and got rid of the redundant /c/. In the
same way /Bob Ruly/, a Missouri name, descends from /Bois Brulé/. "The
American tongue," says W. W. Crane, "seems to lend itself reluctantly
to the words of alien languages."[41] This is shown plainly by the
history of French place-names among us. A large number of them,
/e. g./, /Lac Superieur/, were translated into English at an early day,
and most of those that remain are now pronounced as if they were
English. Thus /Des Moines/ is /dee-moyns/, /Terre Haute/ is
/terry-hut/, /Beaufort/ is /byu-fort/, /New Orleans/ is /or-leens/,
/Lafayette/ has a flat /a/, /Havre de Grace/ has another, and
/Versailles/ is /ver-sales/. The pronunciation of /sault/, as in
/Sault Ste. Marie/, is commonly more or less correct; the Minneapolis,
St. Paul and Sault Ste. Marie Railroad is popularly called the /Soo/.
This may be due to Canadian example, or to some confusion between
/Sault/ and /Sioux/. The French /Louis/, in /St. Louis/ and
/Louisville/, is usually pronounced correctly. So is the /rouge/ in
/Baton Rouge/, though the /baton/ is commonly boggled. It is possible
that familiarity with /St. Louis/ influenced the local pronunciation
of /Illinois/, which is /Illinoy/, but this may be a mere attempt to
improve upon the vulgar /Illin-i/.[42]

For a number of years the Geographic Board has been seeking [Pg292]
vainly to reestablish the correct pronunciation of the name of the
/Purgatoire/ river in Colorado. Originally named the /Rio de las
Animas/ by the Spaniards, it was renamed the /Rivière du Purgatoire/
by their French successors. The American pioneers changed this to
/Picketwire/, and that remains the local name of the stream to this
day, despite the effort of the Geographic Board to compromise on
/Purgatoire/ river. Many other French names are being anglicized with
its aid and consent. Already half a dozen /Bellevues/ have been
changed to /Belleviews/ and /Bellviews/, and the spelling of nearly
all the /Belvédères/ has been changed to /Belvidere/. /Belair/, La.,
represents the end-product of a process of decay which began with
/Belle Aire/, and then proceeded to /Bellaire/ and /Bellair/. All
these forms are still to be found, together with /Bel Air/. The
Geographic Board's antipathy to accented letters and to names of more
than one word[43] has converted /Isle Ste. Thérèse/, in the St.
Lawrence river, to /Isle Ste. Therese/, a truly abominable barbarism,
and /La Cygne/, in Kansas, to /Lacygne/, which is even worse.
/Lamoine/, /Labelle/, /Lagrange/ and /Lamonte/ are among its other
improvements; /Lafayette/, for /La Fayette/, long antedates the
beginning of its labors.

The Spanish names of the Southwest are undergoing a like process of
corruption, though without official aid. /San Antonio/ has been
changed to /San Antone/ in popular pronunciation and seems likely to
go to /San Tone/; /El Paso/ has acquired a flat American /a/ and a
/z/-sound in place of the Spanish /s/; /Los Angeles/ presents such
difficulties that no two of its inhabitants agree upon the proper
pronunciation, and many compromise on simple /Los/, as the folks of
/Jacksonville/ commonly call their town /Jax/. Some of the most
mellifluous of American place-names are in the areas once held by the
Spaniards. It would be hard to match the beauty of /Santa Margarita/,
/San Anselmo/, /Alamogordo/, /Terra Amarilla/, /Sabinoso/, /Las
Palomas/, /Ensenada/, /Nogales/, /San Patricio/ and /Bernalillo/. But
they are under a severe and double assault. Not only do the present
lords of the soil debase them in speaking them; in many cases they are
formally displaced by native names of the utmost harshness and
banality. Thus, [Pg293] one finds in New Mexico such absurdly-named
towns as /Sugarite/, /Shoemaker/, /Newhope/, /Lordsburg/, /Eastview/
and /Central/; in Arizona such places as /Old Glory/, /Springerville/,
/Wickenburg/ and /Congress Junction/, and even in California such
abominations as /Oakhurst/, /Ben Hur/, /Drytown/, /Skidoo/,
/Susanville/, /Uno/ and /Ono/.

The early Spaniards were prodigal with place-names testifying to their
piety, but these names, in the overwhelming main, were those of
saints. Add /Salvador/, /Trinidad/ and /Concepcion/, and their
repertoire is almost exhausted. If they ever named a town /Jesus/ the
name has been obliterated by Anglo-Saxon prudery; even their use of
the name as a personal appellation violates American notions of the
fitting. The names of the Jewish patriarchs and those of the holy
places in Palestine do not appear among their place-names; their
Christianity seems to have been exclusively of the New Testament. But
the Americans who displaced them were intimately familiar with both
books of the Bible, and one finds copious proofs of it on the map of
the United States. There are no less than seven /Bethlehems/ in the
Postal Guide, and the name is also applied to various mountains, and
to one of the reaches of the Ohio river. I find thirteen /Bethanys/,
seventeen /Bethels/, eleven /Beulahs/, nine /Canaans/, eleven
/Jordans/ and twenty-one /Sharons/. /Adam/ is sponsor for a town in
West Virginia and an island in the Chesapeake, and /Eve/ for a village
in Kentucky. There are five postoffices named /Aaron/, two named
/Abraham/, two named /Job/, and a town and a lake named /Moses/. Most
of the /St. Pauls/ and /St. Josephs/ of the country were inherited
from the French, but the two /St. Patricks/ show a later influence.
Eight /Wesleys/ and /Wesleyvilles/, eight /Asburys/ and twelve names
embodying /Luther/ indicate the general theological trend of the plain
people. There is a village in Maryland, too small to have a
postoffice, named /Gott/, and I find /Gotts Island/ in Maine and
/Gottville/ in California, but no doubt these were named after German
settlers of that awful name, and not after the Lord God directly.
There are four /Trinities/, to say nothing of the inherited Spanish
/Trinidads/. [Pg294]

Names wholly or partly descriptive of localities are very numerous
throughout the country, and among the /Grundwörter/ embodied in them
are terms highly characteristic of America and almost unknown to the
English vocabulary. /Bald Knob/ would puzzle an Englishman, but the
name is so common in the United States that the Geographic Board has
had to take measures against it. Others of that sort are /Council
Bluffs/, /Patapsco Neck/, /Delaware Water Gap/, /Curtis Creek/,
/Walden Pond/, /Sandy Hook/, /Key West/, /Bull Run/, /Portage/,
/French Lick/, /Jones Gulch/, /Watkins Gully/, /Cedar Bayou/, /Keams
Canyon/, /Parker Notch/, /Sucker Branch/, /Fraziers Bottom/ and /Eagle
Pass/. /Butte Creek/, in /Montana/, is a name made up of two
Americanisms. There are thirty-five postoffices whose names embody the
word /prairie/, several of them, /e. g./, /Prairie du Chien/, Wis.,
inherited from the French. There are seven /Divides/, eight /Buttes/,
eight town-names embodying the word /burnt/, innumerable names
embodying /grove/, /barren/, /plain/, /fork/, /center/, /cross-roads/,
/courthouse/, /cove/ and /ferry/, and a great swarm of /Cold Springs/,
/Coldwaters/, /Summits/, /Middletowns/ and /Highlands/. The flora and
fauna of the land are enormously represented. There are twenty-two
/Buffalos/ beside the city in New York, and scores of /Buffalo
Creeks/, /Ridges/, /Springs/ and /Wallows/. The /Elks/, in various
forms, are still more numerous, and there are dozens of towns,
mountains, lakes, creeks and country districts named after the
/beaver/, /martin/, /coyote/, /moose/ and /otter/, and as many more
named after such characteristic flora as the /paw-paw/, the
/sycamore/, the /cottonwood/, the /locust/ and the /sunflower/. There
is an /Alligator/ in Mississippi, a /Crawfish/ in Kentucky and a /Rat
Lake/ on the Canadian border of Minnesota. The endless search for
mineral wealth has besprinkled the map with such names as /Bromide/,
/Oil City/, /Anthracite/, /Chrome/, /Chloride/, /Coal Run/,
/Goldfield/, /Telluride/, /Leadville/ and /Cement/.

There was a time, particularly during the gold rush to California,
when the rough humor of the country showed itself in the invention of
extravagant and often highly felicitous place-names, but with the
growth of population and the rise of civic spirit they have tended to
be replaced with more seemly coinages. [Pg295] /Catfish/ creek, in
Wisconsin, is now the /Yahara/ river; the /Bulldog/ mountains, in
Arizona, have become the /Harosomas/; the /Picketwire/ river, as we
have seen, has resumed its old French name of /Purgatoire/. As with
natural features of the landscape, so with towns. Nearly all the old
/Boozevilles/, /Jackass Flats/, /Three Fingers/, /Hell-For-Sartains/,
/Undershirt Hills/, /Razzle-Dazzles/, /Cow-Tails/, /Yellow Dogs/,
/Jim-Jamses/, /Jump-Offs/, /Poker Citys/ and /Skunktowns/ have yielded
to the growth of delicacy, but /Tombstone/ still stands in Arizona,
/Goose Bill/ remains a postoffice in Montana, and the Geographic Board
gives its imprimatur to the /Horsethief/ trail in Colorado, to
/Burning Bear/ creek in the same state, and to /Pig Eye/ lake in
Minnesota. Various other survivors of a more lively and innocent day
linger on the map: /Blue Ball/, Ark., /Cowhide/, W. Va.,
/Dollarville/, Mich., /Oven Fork/, Ky., /Social Circle/, Ga., /Sleepy
Eye/, Minn., /Bubble/, Ark., /Shy Beaver/, Pa., /Shin Pond/, Me.,
/Rough-and-Ready/, Calif., /Non Intervention/, Va., /Noodle/, Tex.,
/Nursery/, Mo., /Number Four/, N. Y., /Oblong/, Ill., /Stock Yards/,
Neb., /Stout/, Iowa, and so on. West Virginia, the wildest of the
eastern states, is full of such place-names. Among them I find
/Affinity/, /Annamoriah/ (/Anna Maria?/), /Bee/, /Bias/, /Big
Chimney/, /Billie/, /Blue Jay/, /Bulltown/, /Caress/, /Cinderella/,
/Cyclone/, /Czar/, /Cornstalk/, /Duck/, /Halcyon/, /Jingo/, /Left
Hand/, /Ravens Eye/, /Six/, /Skull Run/, /Three Churches/, /Uneeda/,
/Wide Mouth/, /War Eagle/ and /Stumptown/. The Postal Guide shows two
/Ben Hurs/, five /St. Elmos/ and ten /Ivanhoes/, but only one
/Middlemarch/. There are seventeen /Roosevelts/, six /Codys/ and six
/Barnums/, but no /Shakespeare/. /Washington/, of course, is the most
popular of American place-names. But among names of postoffices it is
hard pushed by /Clinton/, /Centerville/, /Liberty/, /Canton/, /Marion/
and /Madison/, and even by /Springfield/, /Warren/ and /Bismarck/.

The Geographic Board, in its laudable effort to simplify American
nomenclature, has played ducks and drakes with some of the most
picturesque names on the national map. Now and then, as in the case of
/Purgatoire/, it has temporarily departed from this policy, but in the
main its influence has been thrown against the fine old French and
Spanish names, and against the [Pg296] more piquant native names no
less. Thus, I find it deciding against /Portage des Flacons/ and in
favor of the hideous /Bottle portage/, against /Cañada del Burro/ and
in favor of /Burro canyon/ against /Canos y Ylas de la Cruz/ and in
favor of the barbarous /Cruz island/. In /Bougére landing/ and /Cañon
City/ it has deleted the accents. The name of the /De Grasse river/ it
has changed to /Grass/. /De Laux/ it has changed to the intolerable
/Dlo/. And, as we have seen, it has steadily amalgamated French and
Spanish articles with their nouns, thus achieving such forms as
/Duchesne/, /Eldorado/, /Deleon/ and /Laharpe/. But here its policy is
fortunately inconsistent, and so a number of fine old names has
escaped. Thus, it has decided in favor of /Bon Secours/ and against
/Bonsecours/, and in favor of /De Soto/, /La Crosse/ and /La Moure/,
and against /Desoto/, /Lacrosse/ and /Lamoure/. Here its decisions are
confused and often unintelligible. Why /Laporte/, Pa., and /La Porte/,
Iowa? Why /Lagrange/, Ind., and /La Grange/, Ky.? Here it would seem
to be yielding a great deal too much to local usage.

The Board proceeds to the shortening and simplification of native names
by various devices. It deletes such suffixes as /town/, /city/ and
/courthouse/; it removes the apostrophe and often the genitive /s/ from
such names as /St. Mary's/; it shortens /burgh/ to /burg/ and /borough/
to /boro/; and it combines separate and often highly discreet words. The
last habit often produces grotesque forms, /e. g./, /Newberlin/,
/Boxelder/, /Sabbathday lake/, /Fallentimber/, /Bluemountain/,
/Westtown/, /Threepines/ and /Missionhill/. It apparently cherishes a
hope of eventually regularizing the spelling of /Allegany/. This is now
/Allegany/ for the Maryland county, the Pennsylvania township and the
New York and Oregon towns, /Alleghany/ for the mountains, the Colorado
town and the Virginia town and springs, and /Allegheny/ for the
Pittsburgh borough and the Pennsylvania county, college and river. The
Board inclines to /Allegheny/ for both river and mountains. Other Indian
names give it constant concern. Its struggles to set up
/Chemquasabamticook/ as the name of a Maine lake in place of
/Chemquasabamtic/ and /Chemquassabamticook/, and /Chatahospee/ as the
name of an Alabama creek in place of /Chattahospee/, [Pg297]
/Hoolethlocco/, /Hoolethloces/, /Hoolethloco/ and /Hootethlocco/ are
worthy of its learning and authority.[44]

The American tendency to pronounce all the syllables of a word more
distinctly than the English shows itself in geographical names. White,
in 1880,[45] recorded the increasing habit of giving full value to the
syllables of such borrowed English names as /Worcester/ and /Warwick/.
I have frequently noted the same thing. In Worcester county, Maryland,
the name is usually pronounced /Wooster/, but on the Western Shore of
the state one hears /Worcest-'r/.[46] /Norwich/ is another such name;
one hears /Nor-wich/ quite as often as /Norrich/.[47] Yet another is
/Delhi/; one often hears /Del-high/. White said that in his youth the
name of the /Shawangunk/ mountains, in New York, was pronounced
/Shongo/, but that the custom of pronouncing it as spelled had arisen
during his manhood. So with /Winnipiseogee/, the name of a lake; once
/Winipisaukie/, it gradually came to be pronounced as spelled. There
is frequently a considerable difference between the pronunciation of a
name by natives of a place and its pronunciation by those who are
familiar with it only in print. /Baltimore/ offers an example. The
natives always drop the medial /i/ and so reduce the name to two
syllables; the habit identifies them. /Anne Arundel/, the name of a
county in Maryland, [Pg298] is usually pronounced /Ann 'ran'l/ by its
people. /Arkansas/, as everyone knows, is pronounced /Arkansaw/ by the
Arkansans, and the Nevadans give the name of their state a flat /a/.
The local pronunciation of /Illinois/ I have already noticed. /Iowa/,
at home, is often /Ioway/.[48] Many American geographical names offer
great difficulty to Englishmen. One of my English acquaintances tells
me that he was taught at school to accent /Massachusetts/ on the
second syllable, to rhyme the second syllable of /Ohio/ with /tea/,
and to sound the first /c/ in /Connecticut/. In Maryland the name of
/Calvert/ county is given a broad /a/, whereas the name of /Calvert/
street, in Baltimore, has a flat /a/. This curious distinction is
almost always kept up. A Scotchman, coming to America, would give the
/ch/ in such names as /Loch Raven/ and /Lochvale/ the guttural Scotch
(and German) sound, but locally it is always pronounced as if it were
/k/.

Finally, there is a curious difference between English and American
usage in the use of the word /river/. The English invariably put it
before the proper name, whereas we almost as invariably put it after.
/The Thames river/ would seem quite as strange to an Englishman as
/the river Chicago/ would seem to us. This difference arose more than
a century ago and was noticed by Pickering. But in his day the
American usage was still somewhat uncertain, and such forms as /the
river Mississippi/ were yet in use. Today /river/ almost always goes
after the proper name.

§ 4

/Street Names/--"Such a locality as 'the /corner/ of /Avenue H/ and
/Twenty-third/ street,'" says W. W. Crane, "is about as distinctively
American as Algonquin and Iroquois names like /Mississippi/ and
/Saratoga/."[49] Kipling, in his "American Notes,"[50] gives testimony
to the strangeness with which the [Pg299] number-names, the phrase
"the corner of," and the custom of omitting /street/ fall upon the ear
of a Britisher. He quotes with amazement certain directions given to
him on his arrival in San Francisco from India: "Go six blocks north
to [the] corner of /Geary/ and /Markey/ [/Market?/]; then walk around
till you strike [the] corner of /Gutter/ and /Sixteenth/." The English
always add the word /street/ (or /road/ or /place/ or /avenue/) when
speaking of a thoroughfare; such a phrase as "/Oxford/ and /New Bond/"
would strike them as incongruous. The American custom of numbering and
lettering streets is almost always ascribed by English writers who
discuss it, not to a desire to make finding them easy, but to sheer
poverty of invention. The English apparently have an inexhaustible
fund of names for streets; they often give one street more than one
name. Thus, /Oxford/ street, London, becomes the /Bayswater/ road,
/High/ street, /Holland Park/ avenue, /Goldhawke/ road and finally the
/Oxford/ road to the westward, and /High Holborn/, /Holborn/ viaduct,
/Newgate/ street, /Cheapside/, the /Poultry/, /Cornhill/ and
/Leadenhall/ street to the eastward. The Strand, in the same way,
becomes /Fleet/ street, /Ludgate/ hill and /Cannon/ street.
Nevertheless, there is a /First/ avenue in /Queen's Park/, and
parallel to it are /Second/, /Third/, /Fourth/, /Fifth/ and /Sixth/
avenues--all small streets leading northward from the Harrow road,
just east of Kensal Green cemetery. I have observed that few Londoners
have ever heard of them. There is also a /First/ street in Chelsea--a
very modest thoroughfare near Lennox gardens and not far from the
Brompton Oratory.

Next to the numbering and lettering of streets, a fashion apparently
set up by Major Pierre-Charles L'Enfant's plans for Washington, the
most noticeable feature of American street nomenclature, as opposed to
that of England, is the extensive use of such designations as
/avenue/, /boulevard/, /drive/ and /speedway/. /Avenue/ is used in
England, but only rather sparingly; it is seldom applied to a mean
street, or to one in a warehouse district. In America the word is
scarcely distinguished in meaning from /street/.[51] /Boulevard/,
/drive/ and /speedway/ are almost [Pg300] unknown to the English, but
they use /road/ for urban thoroughfares, which is very seldom done in
America, and they also make free use of /place/, /walk/, /passage/,
/lane/ and /circus/, all of which are obsolescent on this side of the
ocean. Some of the older American cities, such as Boston and
Baltimore, have surviving certain ancient English designations of
streets, /e. g./, /Cheapside/ and /Cornhill/; these are unknown in the
newer American towns. /Broadway/, which is also English, is more
common. Many American towns now have /plazas/, which are unknown in
England. Nearly all have /City Hall parks/, /squares/ or /places/;
/City Hall/ is also unknown over there. The principal street of a
small town, in America, is almost always /Main street/; in England it
is as invariably /High/ street, usually with the definite article
before /High/.

I have mentioned the corruption of old Dutch street and neighborhood
names in New York. Spanish names are corrupted in the same way in the
Southwest and French names in the Great Lakes region and in Louisiana.
In New Orleans the street names, many of them strikingly beautiful,
are pronounced so barbarously by the people that a Frenchman would
have difficulty recognizing them. Thus, /Bourbon/ has become
/Bur-bun/, /Dauphine/ is /Daw-fin/, /Foucher/ is /Foosh'r/, /Enghien/
is /En-gine/, and /Felicity/ (originally /Félicité/) is /Fill-a-city/.
The French, in their days, bestowed the names of the Muses upon
certain of the city streets. They are now pronounced /Cal´-y-ope/,
/Terp´-si-chore/, /Mel-po-mean´/, /You-terp´/, and so on. /Bon
Enfants/, apparently too difficult for the native, has been translated
into /Good Children/. Only /Esplanade/ and /Bagatelle/, among the
French street names of the city, seem to be commonly pronounced with
any approach to correctness.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The great Irish famine, which launched the chief emigration to
America, extended from 1845 to 1847. The Know Nothing movement, which
was chiefly aimed at the Irish, extended from 1852 to 1860.

[2] A. B. Faust: The German Element in the United States, 2 vols.;
Boston, 1909, vol. ii, pp. 34 /et seq./

[3] Richard T. Ely: Outlines of Economics, 3rd rev. ed.; New York,
1916, p. 68.

[4] /Cf./ Seth K. Humphrey: Mankind; New York, 1917, p. 45.

[5] /Cf./ William G. Searle: Onomasticon Anglo-Saxonicum; Cambridge,
1897.

[6] /New York World/ Almanac, 1914, p. 668.

[7] It was announced by the Bureau of War Risk Insurance on March 30,
1918, that there were then 15,000 /Millers/ in the United States Army.
On the same day there were 262 /John J. O'Briens/, of whom 50 had
wives named /Mary/.

[8] /Cf./ Carlyle's Frederick the Great, bk. xxi, ch. vi.

[9] S. Grant Oliphant, in the /Baltimore Sun/, Dec. 2, 1906.

[10] Harriet /Lane/ Johnston was of this family.

[11] /Cf./ Faust, /op. cit./, vol. ii, pp. 183-4.

[12] A Tragedy of Surnames, by Fayette Dunlap, /Dialect Notes/, vol.
iv, pt. 1, 1913, p. 7-8.

[13] Americanisms, p. 112.

[14] Henry Harrison, in his Dictionary of the Surnames of the United
Kingdom; London, 1912, shows that such names as /Bloom/, /Cline/,
etc., always represent transliterations of German names. They are
unknown to genuinely British nomenclature.

[15] A great many more such transliterations and modifications are
listed by Faust, /op. cit./, particularly in his first volume. Others
are in Pennsylvania Dutch, by S. S. Haldemann; London, 1872, p. 60 /et
seq./, and in The Origin of Pennsylvania Surnames, by L. Oscar Kuhns,
/Lippincott's Magazine/, March, 1897, p. 395.

[16] I lately encountered the following sign in front of an automobile
repair shop:

 For puncture or blow
 Bring it to /Lowe/.

[17] /Baltimore Sun/, March 17, 1907.

[18] /Cf./ The Origin of Pennsylvania Surnames, /op. cit./

[19] /Koch/, a common German name, has very hard sledding in America.
Its correct pronunciation is almost impossible to Americans; at best
it becomes /Coke/. Hence it is often changed, not only to /Cook/, but
to /Cox/, /Koke/ or even /Cockey/.

[20] This is army slang, but promises to survive. The Germans, during
the war, had no opprobrious nicknames for their foes. The French were
always /die Franzosen/, the English were /die Engländer/, and so on,
even when most violently abused. Even /der Yankee/ was rare.

[21] /Cf./ Some Current Substitutes for Irish, by W. A. McLaughlin,
/Dialect Notes/, vol. iv, pt. ii.

[22] /Spiggoty/, originating at Panama, now means a native of any
Latin-American region under American protection, and in general any
Latin-American. It is navy slang, but has come into extensive civilian
use. It is a derisive daughter of "No /spik/ Inglese."

[23] /Cf./ Reaction to Personal Names, by Dr. C. P. Oberndorf,
/Psychoanalytic Review/, vol. v, no. 1, January, 1918, p. 47 /et seq./
This, so far as I know, is the only article in English which deals
with the psychological effects of surnames upon their bearers.
Abraham, Silberer and other German psychoanalysts have made
contributions to the subject. Dr. Oberndorf alludes, incidentally, to
the positive social prestige which goes with an English air, and, to a
smaller extent, with a French air in America. He tells of an Italian
who changed his patronymic of /Dipucci/ into /de Pucci/ to make it
more "aristocratic." And of a German bearing the genuinely
aristocratic name of /von Landsschaffshausen/ who changed it to "a
typically English name" because the latter seemed more distinguished
to his neighbors.

[24] The effects of race antagonism upon language are still to be
investigated. The etymology of /slave/ indicates that the inquiry
might yield interesting results. The word /French/, in English, is
largely used to suggest sexual perversion. In German anything
/Russian/ is barbarous, and /English/ education hints at flagellation.
The French, for many years, called a certain contraband appliance a
/capote Anglaise/, but after the /entente cordiale/ they changed the
name to /capote Allemande/. The common English name to this day is
/French letter/. /Cf./ The Criminal, by Havelock Ellis; London, 1910,
p. 208.

[25] /Cf./ The Jews, by Maurice Fishberg; New York, 1911, ch. xxii,
and especially p. 485 /et seq./

[26] The English Jews usually change /Levy/ to /Lewis/, a substitution
almost unknown in America. They also change /Abraham/ to /Braham/ and
/Moses/ to /Moss/. /Vide/ Surnames, Their Origin and Nationality, by
L. B. McKenna; Quincy (Ill.), 1913, pp. 13-14.

[27] For these observations of name changes among the Jews I am
indebted to Abraham Cahan.

[28] They arose in England through the custom of requiring an heir by
the female line to adopt the family name on inheriting the family
property. Formerly the heir dropped his own surname. Thus the ancestor
of the present Duke of Northumberland, born /Smithson/, took the
ancient name of /Percy/ on succeeding to the underlying earldom in the
eighteenth century. But about a hundred years ago, heirs in like case
began to join the two names by hyphenation, and such names are now
very common in the British peerage. Thus the surname of Lord Barrymore
is /Smith-Barry/, that of Lord Vernon is /Venables-Vernon/, and that
of the Earl of Wharncliffe is /Montagu-Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie/.

[29] B. W. Green: Word-Book of Virginia Folk-Speech; Richmond, 1899,
pp. 13-16.

[30] The one given name that they have clung to is /Karl/. This, in
fact, has been adopted by Americans of other stocks, always, however,
spelled /Carl/. Such combinations as /Carl/ Gray, /Carl/ Williams and
even /Carl/ Murphy are common. Here intermarriage has doubtless had
its effect.

[31] /Cf./ Curiosities of Puritan Nomenclature, by Charles W.
Bardsley; London, 1880.

[32] /Cf./ Bardsley, /op. cit./, p. 205 /et seq./

[33] The Geographic Board has lately decided that /Kenesaw/ should be
/Kennesaw/, but the learned jurist sticks to one /n/.

[34] Thornton reprints a paragraph from the /Congressional Globe/ of
June 15, 1854, alleging that in 1846, during the row over the Oregon
boundary, when "Fifty-four forty or fight" was a political slogan,
many "canal-boats, and even some of the babies, ... were christened
/54° 40′/."

[35] The Irish present several curious variations. Thus, they divide
/Charles/ into two syllables. They also take liberties with various
English surnames. /Bermingham/, for example, is pronounced
/Brimmingham/ in Ireland.

[36] Issued annually in July, with monthly supplements.

[37] The latest report is the fourth, covering the period 1890-1916;
Washington, 1916.

[38] The authority here is River and Lake Names in the United States,
by Edmund T. Ker; New York, 1911. Stephen G. Boyd, in Indian Local
Names; York (Pa.), 1885, says that the original Indian name was
/Pootuppag/.

[39] P. 17.

[40] /Cf./ Dutch Contributions to the Vocabulary of English in
America, by W. H. Carpenter, /Modern Philology/, July, 1908.

[41] Our Naturalized Names, /Lippincott's Magazine/, April, 1899. It
will be recalled how Pinaud, the French perfumer, was compelled to
place advertisements in the street-cars, instructing the public in the
proper pronunciation of his name.

[42] The same compromise is apparent in the pronunciation of
/Iroquois/, which is /Iro-quoy/ quite as often as it is /Iro-quoys/.

[43] /Vide/ its Fourth Report (1890-1916), p. 15.

[44] The Geographic Board is composed of representatives of the Coast
and Geodetic Survey, the Geological Survey, the General Land Office,
the Post Office, the Forest Service, the Smithsonian Institution, the
Biological Survey, the Government Printing Office, the Census and
Lighthouse Bureaus, the General Staff of the Army, the Hydrographic
Office, Library and War Records Office of the Navy, the Treasury and
the Department of State. It was created by executive order Sept. 4,
1890, and its decisions are binding upon all federal officials. It has
made, to date, about 15,000 decisions. They are recorded in reports
issued at irregular intervals and in more frequent bulletins.

[45] Every-Day English, p. 100.

[46] I have often noted that Americans, in speaking of the familiar
/Worcestershire/ sauce, commonly pronounce every syllable and
enunciated /shire/ distinctly. In England it is always /Woostersh'r/.

[47] The English have a great number of such decayed pronunciations,
/e. g./, /Maudlin/ for /Magdalen College/, /Sister/ for /Cirencester/,
/Merrybone/ for /Marylebone/. Their geographical nomenclature shows
many corruptions due to faulty pronunciation and the law of
Hobson-Jobson, /e. g./, /Leighton Buzzard/ for the Norman French
/Leiton Beau Desart/.

[48] Curiously enough, Americans always use the broad /a/ in the first
syllable of /Albany/, whereas Englishmen rhyme the syllable with
/pal/. The English also pronounce /Pall Mall/ as if it were spelled
/pal mal/. Americans commonly give it two broad /a/'s.

[49] Our Street Names, /Lippincott's Magazine/, Aug., 1897, p. 264.

[50] Ch. i.

[51] There are, of course, local exceptions. In Baltimore, for
example, /avenue/ used to be reserved for wide streets in the suburbs.
Thus Charles /street/, on passing the old city boundary, became
Charles /street-avenue/. Further out it became the Charles
/street-avenue-road/--probably a unique triplication. But that was
years ago. Of late many fifth-rate streets in Baltimore have been
changed into avenues.

[Pg301]

IX

Miscellanea

§ 1

/Proverb and Platitude/--No people, save perhaps the Spaniards, have a
richer store of proverbial wisdom than the Americans, and surely none
other make more diligent and deliberate efforts to augment its riches.
The American literature of "inspirational" platitude is enormous and
almost unique. There are half a dozen authors, /e. g./, Dr. Orison
Swett Marden and Dr. Frank Crane, who devote themselves exclusively,
and to vast profit, to the composition of arresting and uplifting
apothegms, and the fruits of their fancy are not only sold in books
but also displayed upon an infinite variety of calendars, banners and
wall-cards. It is rarely that one enters the office of an American
business man without encountering at least one of these wall-cards. It
may, on the one hand, show nothing save a succinct caution that time
is money, say, "Do It Now," or "This Is My Busy Day"; on the other
hand, it may embody a long and complex sentiment, ornately set forth.
The taste for such canned sagacity seems to have arisen in America at
a very early day. Benjamin Franklin's "Poor Richard's Almanac," begun
in 1732, remained a great success for twenty-five years, and the
annual sales reached 10,000. It had many imitators, and founded an
aphoristic style of writing which culminated in the essays of Emerson,
often mere strings of sonorous certainties, defectively articulated.
The "Proverbial Philosophy" of Martin Farquhar Tupper, dawning upon
the American public in the early 40's, was welcomed with enthusiasm;
as Saintsbury says,[1] its success [Pg302] on this side of the
Atlantic even exceeded its success on the other. But that was the last
and perhaps the only importation of the sage and mellifluous in bulk.
In late years the American production of such merchandise has grown so
large that the balance of trade now flows in the other direction.
Visiting Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, France and Spain in the spring
of 1917, I found translations of the chief works of Dr. Marden on sale
in all those countries, and with them the masterpieces of such other
apostles of the New Thought as Ralph Waldo Trine and Elizabeth Towne.
No other American books were half so well displayed.

The note of all such literature, and of the maxims that precipitate
themselves from it, is optimism. They "inspire" by voicing and
revoicing the New Thought doctrine that all things are possible to the
man who thinks the right sort of thoughts--in the national phrase, to
the /right-thinker/. This right-thinker is indistinguishable from the
/forward-looker/, whose belief in the continuity and benignity of the
evolutionary process takes on the virulence of a religious faith. Out
of his confidence come the innumerable saws, axioms and /geflügelte
Worte/ in the national arsenal, ranging from the "It won't hurt none
to try" of the great masses of the plain people to such exhilarating
confections of the wall-card virtuosi as "The elevator to success is
not running; take the stairs." Naturally enough, a grotesque humor
plays about this literature of hope; the folk, though it moves them,
prefer it with a dash of salt. "Smile, damn you, smile!" is a typical
specimen of this seasoned optimism. Many examples of it go back to the
early part of the last century, for instance, "Don't monkey with the
buzz-saw" and "It will never get well if you pick it." Others are
patently modern, /e. g./, "The Lord is my shepherd; I should worry"
and "Roll over; you're on your back." The national talent for
extravagant and pungent humor is well displayed in many of these
maxims. It would be difficult to match, in any other folk-literature,
such examples as "I'd rather have them say 'There he goes' than 'Here
he lies,'" or "Don't spit: remember the Johnstown flood," or "Shoot it
in the arm; your leg's full," or "Cheer up; [Pg303] there ain't no
hell," or "If you want to cure homesickness, go back home." Many very
popular phrases and proverbs are borrowings from above. "Few die and
none resign" originated with Thomas Jefferson; Bret Harte, I believe,
was the author of "No check-ee, no shirt-ee," General W. T. Sherman is
commonly credited with "War is hell," and Mark Twain with "Life is one
damn thing after another." An elaborate and highly characteristic
proverb of the uplifting variety--"So live that you can look any man
in the eye and tell him to go to hell"--was first given currency by
one of the engineers of the Panama Canal, a gentleman later retired,
it would seem, for attempting to execute his own counsel. From humor
the transition to cynicism is easy, and so many of the current sayings
are at war with the optimism of the majority. "Kick him again; he's
down" is a depressing example. "What's the use?" a rough translation
of the Latin "Cui bono?" is another. The same spirit is visible in
"Tell your troubles to a policeman," "How'd you like to be the
ice-man?" "Some say she do and some say she don't," "Nobody loves a
fat man," "I love my wife, but O you kid," and "Would you for fifty
cents?" The last originated in the ingenious mind of an advertisement
writer and was immediately adopted. In the course of time it acquired
a naughty significance, and helped to give a start to the amazing
button craze of ten or twelve years ago--a saturnalia of proverb and
phrase making which finally aroused the guardians of the public morals
and was put down by the police.

That neglect which marks the study of the vulgate generally extends to
the subject of popular proverb-making. The English publisher, Frank
Palmer, prints an excellent series of little volumes presenting the
favorite proverbs of all civilized races, including the Chinese and
Japanese, but there is no American volume among them. Even such
exhaustive collections as that of Robert Christy[2] contain no
American specimens--not even "Don't monkey with the buzz-saw" or
"Root, hog, or die." [Pg304]

§ 2

/American Slang/--This neglect of the national proverbial philosophy
extends to the national slang. There is but one work, so far as I can
discover, formally devoted to it,[3] and that work is extremely
superficial. Moreover, it has been long out of date, and hence is of
little save historical value. There are at least a dozen careful
treatises on French slang,[4] half as many on English slang,[5] and a
good many on German slang, but American slang, which is probably quite
as rich as that of France and a good deal richer than that of any
other country, is yet to be studied at length. Nor is there much
discussion of it, of any interest or value, in the general
philological literature. Fowler and all the other early native
students of the language dismissed it with lofty gestures; down to the
time of Whitney it was scarcely regarded as a seemly subject for the
notice of a man of learning. Lounsbury, less pedantic, viewed its
phenomena more hospitably, and even defined it as "the source from
which the decaying energies of speech are constantly refreshed," and
Brander Matthews, following him, has described its function as that of
providing "substitutes for the good words and true which are worn out
by hard service."[6] But that is about as far as the investigation has
got. Krapp has some judicious paragraphs upon the matter in his
"Modern English,"[7] there are a few scattered essays upon the
underlying psychology,[8] and various uninforming magazine articles,
but that is all. The practising authors of the country, like its
philologians, have always shown [Pg305] a gingery and suspicious
attitude. "The use of slang," said Oliver Wendell Holmes, "is at once
a sign and a cause of mental atrophy." "Slang," said Ambrose Bierce
fifty years later, "is the speech of him who robs the literary garbage
carts on their way to the dumps." Literature in America, as we have
seen, remains aloof from the vulgate. Despite the contrary examples of
Mark Twain and Howells, all the more pretentious American authors try
to write chastely and elegantly; the typical literary product of the
country is still a refined essay in the /Atlantic Monthly/, perhaps
gently jocose but never rough--by Emerson, so to speak, out of Charles
Lamb--the sort of thing one might look to be done by a somewhat
advanced English curate. George Ade, undoubtedly one of the most adept
anatomists of the American character and painters of the American
scene that the national literature has yet developed, is neglected
because his work is grounded firmly upon the national speech--not that
he reports it literally, like Lardner and the hacks trailing after
Lardner, but that he gets at and exhibits its very essence. It would
stagger a candidate for a doctorate in philology, I daresay, to be
told off by his professor to investigate the slang of Ade in the way
that Bosson,[9] the Swede, has investigated that of Jerome K. Jerome,
and yet, until something of the sort is undertaken, American philology
will remain out of contact with the American language.

Most of the existing discussions of slang spend themselves upon
efforts to define it, and, in particular, upon efforts to
differentiate it from idiomatic neologisms of a more legitimate type.
This effort is largely in vain; the border-line is too vague and
wavering to be accurately mapped; words and phrases are constantly
crossing it, and in both directions. There was a time, perhaps, when
the familiar American counter-word, /proposition/, was slang; its use
seems to have originated in the world of business, and it was soon
afterward adopted by the sporting fraternity. But today it is employed
without much feeling that it needs apology, and surely without any
feeling that it is low. [Pg306] /Nice/, as an adjective of all work,
was once in slang use only; today no one would question "a /nice/
day," or "a /nice/ time" or "a /nice/ hotel." /Awful/ seems to be
going the same route. "/Awful/ sweet" and "/awfully/ dear" still seem
slangy and school-girlish, but "/awful/ children," "/awful/ weather"
and "an /awful/ job" have entirely sound support, and no one save a
pedant would hesitate to use them. Such insidious purifications and
consecrations of slang are going on under our noses all the time. The
use of /some/ as a general adjective-adverb seems likely to make its
way in the same manner. It is constantly forgotten by purists of
defective philological equipment that a great many of our most
respectable words and phrases originated in the plainest sort of
slang. Thus, /quandary/, despite a fanciful etymology which would
identify it with /wandreth/ (=/evil/), is probably simply a
composition form of the French phrase, /qu'en dirai-je?/ Again, to
turn to French itself, there is /tête/, a sound name for the human
head for many centuries--though its origin was in the Latin /testa/
(=/pot/), a favorite slang-word of the soldiers of the decaying
empire, analogous to our own /block/, /nut/ and /conch/. The word
/slacker/, recently come into good usage in the United States as a
designation for an unsuccessful shirker of conscription, is a
substantive derived from the English verb /to slack/, which was born
as university slang and remains so to this day. Brander Matthews, so
recently as 1901, thought /to hold up/ slang; it is now perfectly good
American.

The contrary movement of words from the legitimate vocabulary into
slang is constantly witnessed. Some one devises a new and intriguing
trope or makes use of an old one under circumstances arresting the
public attention, and at once it is adopted into slang, given a host
of remote significances, and ding-donged /ad nauseam/. The
Rooseveltian phrases, /muck-raker/, /Ananias Club/, /short and ugly
word/, /nature-faker/ and /big-stick/, offer examples. Not one of them
was new and not one of them was of much pungency, but Roosevelt's vast
talent for delighting the yokelry threw about them a charming air, and
so they entered into current slang and were mouthed idiotically for
months. Another example is to be found in /steam-roller/. [Pg307] It
was first heard of in June, 1908, when it was applied by Oswald F.
Schuette, of the /Chicago Inter-Ocean/, to the methods employed by the
Roosevelt-Taft majority in the Republican National Committee in
over-riding the protests against seating Taft delegates from Alabama
and Arkansas. At once it struck the popular fancy and was soon heard
on all sides. All the usual derivatives appeared, /to steam-roller/,
/steam-rollered/, and so on. Since then, curiously enough, the term
has gradually forced its way back from slang to good usage, and even
gone over to England. In the early days of the Great War it actually
appeared in the most solemn English reviews, and once or twice, I
believe, in state papers.

Much of the discussion of slang by popular etymologists is devoted to
proofs that this or that locution is not really slang at all--that it
is to be found in Shakespeare, in Milton, or in the Revised Version.
These scientists, of course, overlook the plain fact that slang, like
the folk-song, is not the creation of people in the mass, but of
definite individuals, and that its character /as/ slang depends
entirely upon its adoption by the ignorant, who use its novelties too
assiduously and with too little imagination, and so debase them to the
estate of worn-out coins, smooth and valueless. It is this error,
often shared by philologists of sounder information, that lies under
the doctrine that the plays of Shakespeare are full of slang, and that
the Bard showed but a feeble taste in language. Nothing could be more
absurd. The business of writing English, in his day, was unharassed by
the proscriptions of purists, and so the vocabulary could be enriched
more facilely than today, but though Shakespeare and his
fellow-dramatists quickly adopted such neologisms as /to bustle/, /to
huddle/, /bump/, /hubbub/ and /pat/, it goes without saying that they
exercised a sound discretion and that the slang of the Bankside was
full of words and phrases which they were never tempted to use. In our
own day the same discrimination is exercised by all writers of sound
taste. On the one hand they disregard the senseless prohibitions of
school-masters, and on the other hand they draw the line with more or
less watchfulness, according as they are of conservative or liberal
habit. I [Pg308] find /the best of the bunch/ and /joke-smith/ in
Saintsbury;[10] one could scarcely imagine either in Walter Pater. But
by the same token one could not imagine /chicken/ (for young
girl),[11] /aber nit/, /to come across/ or /to camouflage/ in
Saintsbury.

What slang actually consists of doesn't depend, in truth, upon
intrinsic qualities, but upon the surrounding circumstances. It is the
user that determines the matter, and particularly the user's habitual
way of thinking. If he chooses words carefully, with a full
understanding of their meaning and savor, then no word that he uses
seriously will belong to slang, but if his speech is made up chiefly
of terms poll-parroted, and he has no sense of their shades and
limitations, then slang will bulk largely in his vocabulary. In its
origin it is nearly always respectable; it is devised not by the
stupid populace, but by individuals of wit and ingenuity; as Whitney
says, it is a product of an "exuberance of mental activity, and the
natural delight of language-making." But when its inventions happen to
strike the popular fancy and are adopted by the mob, they are soon
worn thread-bare and so lose all piquancy and significance, and, in
Whitney's words, become "incapable of expressing anything that is
real."[12] This is the history of such slang phrases, often
interrogative, as "How'd you like to be the ice-man?" "How's your poor
feet?" "Merci pour la langouste," "Have a heart," "This is the life,"
"Where did you get that hat?" "Would you for fifty cents?" "Let her
go, Gallegher," "Shoo-fly, don't bother me," "Don't wake him up" and
"Let George do it." The last well exhibits the process. It originated
in France, as "Laissez faire à Georges," during the fifteenth century,
and at the start had satirical reference to the multiform activities
of Cardinal Georges d'Amboise, prime minister to Louis XII.[13] It
later [Pg309] became common slang, was translated into English, had a
revival during the early days of David Lloyd-George's meteoric career,
was adopted into American without any comprehension of either its
first or its latest significance, and enjoyed the brief popularity of
a year.

Krapp attempts to distinguish between slang and sound idiom by setting
up the doctrine that the former is "more expressive than the situation
demands." "It is," he says, "a kind of hyperesthesia in the use of
language. /To laugh in your sleeve/ is idiom because it arises out of
a natural situation; it is a metaphor derived from the picture of one
raising his sleeve to his face to hide a smile, a metaphor which arose
naturally enough in early periods when sleeves were long and flowing;
but /to talk through your hat/ is slang, not only because it is new,
but also because it is a grotesque exaggeration of the truth."[14] The
theory, unluckily, is combated by many plain facts. /To hand it to
him/, /to get away with it/ and even /to hand him a lemon/ are
certainly not metaphors that transcend the practicable and probable,
and yet all are undoubtedly slang. On the other hand, there is
palpable exaggeration in such phrases as "he is not worth the powder
it would take to kill him," in such adjectives as /break-bone/
(fever), and in such compounds as /fire-eater/, and yet it would be
absurd to dismiss them as slang. Between /block-head/ and /bone-head/
there is little to choose, but the former is sound English, whereas
the latter is American slang. So with many familiar similes, /e. g./,
/like greased lightning/, /as scarce as hen's teeth/; they are
grotesque hyperboles, but surely not slang.

The true distinction between slang and more seemly idiom, in so far as
any distinction exists at all, is that indicated by Whitney. Slang
originates in an effort, always by ingenious individuals, to make the
language more vivid and expressive. When in the form of single words
it may appear as new metaphors, [Pg310] /e. g./, /bird/ and /peach/;
as back formations, /e. g./, /beaut/ and /flu/; as composition-forms,
/e. g./, /whatdyecallem/; as picturesque compounds, /e. g./,
/booze-foundry/; as onomatopes, /e. g./, /biff/ and /zowie/; or in any
other of the shapes that new terms take. If, by the chances that
condition language-making, it acquires a special and limited meaning,
not served by any existing locution, it enters into sound idiom and is
presently wholly legitimatized; if, on the contrary, it is adopted by
the populace as a counter-word and employed with such banal
imitativeness that it soon loses any definite significance whatever,
then it remains slang and is avoided by the finical. An example of the
former process is afforded by /Tommy-rot/. It first appeared as
English school-boy slang, but its obvious utility soon brought it into
good usage. In one of Jerome K. Jerome's books, "Paul Kelver," there
is the following dialogue:

 "The wonderful songs that nobody ever sings, the wonderful pictures
 that nobody ever paints, and all the rest of it. It's /Tommy-rot/!"

 "I wish you wouldn't use slang."

 "Well, you know what I mean. What is the proper word? Give it to me."

 "I suppose you mean /cant/."

 "No, I don't. /Cant/ is something that you don't believe in yourself.
 It's /Tommy-rot/; there isn't any other word."

Nor was there any other word for /hubbub/ and to /dwindle/ in
Shakespeare's time; he adopted and dignified them because they met
genuine needs. Nor was there any other satisfactory word for /graft/
when it came in, nor for /rowdy/, nor for /boom/, nor for /joy-ride/,
nor for /omnibus-bill/, nor for /slacker/, nor for /trust-buster/.
Such words often retain a humorous quality; they are used satirically
and hence appear but seldom in wholly serious discourse. But they have
standing in the language nevertheless, and only a prig would hesitate
to use them as Saintsbury used /the best of the bunch/ and
/joke-smith/.

On the other hand, many an apt and ingenious neologism, by falling too
quickly into the gaping maw of the proletariat, is spoiled forthwith.
Once it becomes, in Oliver Wendell Holmes' phrase, "a cheap generic
term, a substitute for differentiated [Pg311] specific expressions,"
it quickly acquires such flatness that the fastidious flee it as a
plague. One recalls many capital verb-phrases, thus ruined by
unintelligent appreciation, /e. g./, /to hand him a lemon/, /to freeze
on to/, /to have the goods/, /to fall for it/, and /to get by/. One
recalls, too, some excellent substantives, /e. g./, /dope/ and /dub/,
and compounds, /e. g./, /come-on/ and /easy-mark/, and verbs, /e. g./,
/to vamp/. These are all quite as sound in structure as the great
majority of our most familiar words, but their adoption by the
ignorant and their endless use and misuse in all sorts of situations
have left them tattered and obnoxious, and they will probably go the
way, as Matthews says, of all the other "temporary phrases which
spring up, one scarcely knows how, and flourish unaccountably for a
few months, and then disappear forever, leaving no sign." Matthews is
wrong in two particulars here. They do not arise by any mysterious
parthenogenesis, but come from sources which, in many cases, may be
determined. And they last, alas, a good deal more than a month.
/Shoo-fly/ afflicted the American people for at least two years, and
"I /don't/ think" and /aber nit/ quite as long. Even "good-/night/"
lasted a whole year.

A very large part of our current slang is propagated by the
newspapers, and much of it is invented by newspaper writers. One needs
but turn to the slang of baseball to find numerous examples. Such
phrases as /to clout the sphere/, /the initial sack/, /to slam the
pill/ and /the dexter meadow/ are obviously not of bleachers
manufacture. There is not enough imagination in that depressing army
to devise such things; more often than not, there is not even enough
intelligence to comprehend them. The true place of their origin is the
perch of the newspaper reporters, whose competence and compensation is
largely estimated, at least on papers of wide circulation, by their
capacity for inventing novelties. The supply is so large that
connoisseurship has grown up; an extra-fecund slang-maker on the press
has his following. During the summer of 1913 the /Chicago
Record-Herald/, somewhat alarmed by the extravagant fancy of its
baseball reporters, asked its readers if they would prefer a return to
plain English. Such of them as were literate enough [Pg312] to send
in their votes were almost unanimously against a change. As one of
them said, "one is nearer the park when Schulte /slams the pill/ than
when he merely /hits the ball/." In all other fields the newspapers
originate and propagate slang, particularly in politics. Most of our
political slang-terms since the Civil War, from /pork-barrel/ to
/steam-roller/, have been their inventions. The English newspapers,
with the exception of a few anomalies such as the /Pink-Un/, lean in
the other direction; their fault is not slanginess, but an otiose
ponderosity--in Dean Alford's words, "the insisting on calling common
things by uncommon names; changing our ordinary short Saxon nouns and
verbs for long words derived from the Latin."[15] The American
newspapers, years ago, passed through such a stage of bombast, but
since the invention of yellow journalism by the elder James Gordon
Bennett--that is, the invention of journalism for the frankly ignorant
and vulgar--they have gone to the other extreme. Edmund Clarence
Stedman noted the change soon after the Civil War. "The whole
country," he wrote to Bayard Taylor in 1873, "owing to the contagion
of our newspaper 'exchange' system, is flooded, deluged, swamped
beneath a muddy tide of slang."[16] A thousand alarmed watchmen have
sought to stay it since, but in vain. The great majority of our
newspapers, including all those of large circulation, are chiefly
written, as one observer says, "not in English, but in a strange
jargon of words that would have made Addison or Milton shudder in
despair."[17]

§ 3

/The Future of the Language/--The great Jakob Grimm, the founder of
comparative philology, hazarded the guess more than three-quarters of
a century ago that English would one day become [Pg313] the chief
language of the world, and perhaps crowd out several of the then
principal idioms altogether. "In wealth, wisdom and strict economy,"
he said, "none of the other living languages can vie with it." At that
time the guess was bold, for English was still in fifth place, with
not only French and German ahead of it, but also Spanish and Russian.
In 1801, according to Michael George Mulhall, the relative standing of
the five, in the number of persons using them, was as follows:

 French    31,450,000
 Russian   30,770,000
 German    30,320,000
 Spanish   26,190,000
 English   20,520,000

The population of the United States was then but little more than
5,000,000, but in twenty years it had nearly doubled, and thereafter
it increased steadily and enormously, and by 1860 it was greater than
that of the United Kingdom. Since that time the majority of
English-speaking persons in the world have lived on this side of the
water; today there are nearly three times as many as in the United
Kingdom and nearly twice as many as in the whole British Empire. This
great increase in the American population, beginning with the great
immigrations of the 30's and 40's, quickly lifted English to fourth
place among the languages, and then to third, to second and to first.
When it took the lead the attention of philologists was actively
directed to the matter, and in 1868 one of them, a German named
Brackebusch, first seriously raised the question whether English was
destined to obliterate certain of the older tongues.[18] Brackebusch
decided against on various philological grounds, [Pg314] none of them
sound. His own figures, as the following table from his dissertation
shows,[19] were against him:

 English   60,000,000
 German    52,000,000
 Russian   45,000,000
 French    45,000,000
 Spanish   40,000,000

This in 1868. Before another generation had passed the lead of
English, still because of the great growth of the United States, was
yet more impressive, as the following figures for 1890 show:

 English    111,100,000
 German      75,200,000
 Russian     75,000,000
 French      51,200,000
 Spanish     42,800,000
 Italian     33,400,000
 Portuguese  13,000,000[20]

Today the figures exceed even these. They show that English is now
spoken by two and a half times as many persons as spoke it at the
close of the American Civil War and by nearly eight times as many as
spoke it at the beginning of the nineteenth century. No other language
has spread in any such proportions. Even German, which is next on the
list, shows but a four-fold gain since 1801, or just half that of
English. The number of persons speaking Russian, despite the vast
extension of the Russian empire during the last century of the czars,
has little more than tripled, and the number speaking French has less
than doubled. But here are the figures for 1911:

 English    160,000,000
 German     130,000,000
 Russian    100,000,000
 French      70,000,000
 Spanish     50,000,000
 Italian     50,000,000
 Portuguese  25,000,000[21]

Japanese, perhaps, should follow French: it is spoken by 60,000,000
persons. But Chinese may be disregarded, for it is split into half a
dozen mutually unintelligible dialects, and shows no sign of spreading
beyond the limits of China. The same may be said of Hindustani, which
is the language of 100,000,000 inhabitants of British India; it shows
wide dialectical variations and the people who speak it are not likely
to spread. But English is the possession of a race that is still
pushing in all directions, and wherever that race settles the existing
languages tend to succumb. Thus French, despite the passionate
resistance of the French-Canadians, is gradually decaying in Canada;
in all the newly-settled regions English is universal. And thus
Spanish is dying out in our own Southwest, and promises to meet with
severe competition in some of the nearer parts of Latin-America. The
English control of the sea has likewise carried the language into far
places. There is scarcely a merchant ship-captain on deep water, of
whatever nationality, who does not find some acquaintance with it
necessary, and it has become, in debased forms, the /lingua franca/ of
Oceanica and the Far East generally. "Three-fourths of the world's
mail matter," says E. H. Babbitt, "is now addressed in English," and
"more than half of the world's newspapers are printed in English."[22]

Brackebusch, in the speculative paper just mentioned, came to the
conclusion that the future domination of English would be prevented by
its unphonetic spelling, its grammatical decay and the general
difficulties that a foreigner encounters in seeking to master it. "The
simplification of its grammar," he said, "is the commencement of
dissolution, the beginning of the end, and its extraordinary tendency
to degenerate into slang of [Pg316] every kind is the foreshadowing
of its approaching dismemberment." But in the same breath he was
forced to admit that "the greater development it has obtained" was the
result of this very simplification of grammar, and an inspection of
the rest of his reasoning quickly shows its unsoundness, even without
an appeal to the plain facts. The spelling of a language, whether it
be phonetic or not, has little to do with its spread. Very few men
learn it by studying books; they learn it by hearing it spoken. As for
grammatical decay, it is not a sign of dissolution, but a sign of
active life and constantly renewed strength. To the professional
philologist, perhaps, it may sometimes appear otherwise. He is apt to
estimate languages by looking at their complexity; the Greek aorist
elicits his admiration because it presents enormous difficulties and
is inordinately subtle. But the object of language is not to bemuse
grammarians, but to convey ideas, and the more simply it accomplishes
that object the more effectively it meets the needs of an energetic
and practical people and the larger its inherent vitality. The history
of every language of Europe, since the earliest days of which we have
record, is a history of simplifications. Even such languages as
German, which still cling to a great many exasperating inflections,
including the absurd inflection of the article for gender, are less
highly inflected than they used to be, and are proceeding slowly but
surely toward analysis. The fact that English has gone further along
that road than any other civilized tongue is not a proof of its
decrepitude, but a proof of its continued strength. Brought into free
competition with another language, say German or French or Spanish, it
is almost certain to prevail, if only because it is vastly
easier--that is, as a spoken language--to learn. The foreigner
essaying it, indeed, finds his chief difficulty, not in mastering its
forms, but in grasping its lack of forms. He doesn't have to learn a
new and complex grammar; what he has to do is to forget grammar.

Once he has done so, the rest is a mere matter of acquiring a
vocabulary. He can make himself understood, given a few nouns,
pronouns, verbs and numerals, without troubling [Pg317] himself in
the slightest about accidence. "Me see she" is bad English, perhaps,
but it would be absurd to say that it is obscure--and on some not too
distant tomorrow it may be very fair American. Essaying an inflected
language, the beginner must go into the matter far more deeply before
he may hope to be understood. Bradley, in "The Making of English,"[23]
shows clearly how German and English differ in this respect, and how
great is the advantage of English. In the latter the verb /sing/ has
but eight forms, and of these three are entirely obsolete, one is
obsolescent, and two more may be dropped out without damage to
comprehension. In German the corresponding verb, /singen/, has no less
than sixteen forms. How far English has proceeded toward the complete
obliteration of inflections is shown by such barbarous forms of it as
Pigeon English and Beach-la-Mar, in which the final step is taken
without appreciable loss of clarity. The Pigeon English verb is
identical in all tenses. /Go/ stands for both /went/ and /gone/;
/makee/ is both /make/ and /made/. In the same way there is no
declension of the pronoun for case. /My/ is thus /I/, /me/, /mine/ and
our own /my/. "No belong /my/" is "it is not /mine/"--a crude
construction, of course, but still clearly intelligible. Chinamen
learn Pigeon English in a few months, and savages in the South Seas
master Beach-la-Mar almost as quickly. And a white man, once he has
accustomed himself to either, finds it strangely fluent and
expressive. He cannot argue politics in it, nor dispute upon
transubstantiation, but for all the business of every day it is
perfectly satisfactory.

As we have seen in Chapters V and VI, the American dialect of English
has gone further along the road thus opened ahead than the mother
dialect, and is moving faster. For this reason, and because of the
fact that it is already spoken by a far larger and more rapidly
multiplying body of people than the latter, it seems to me very likely
that it will determine the final form of the language. For the old
control of English over American to be reasserted is now quite
unthinkable; if the two dialects are not to drift apart entirely
English must follow in American's tracks. This yielding seems to have
begun; the exchanges from [Pg318] American into English grow steadily
larger and more important than the exchanges from English into
American. John Richard Green, the historian, discerning the inevitable
half a century ago, expressed the opinion, amazing and unpalatable
then, that the Americans were already "the main branch of the English
people." It is not yet wholly true; a cultural timorousness yet shows
itself; there is still a class which looks to England as the Romans
long looked to Greece. But it is not the class that is shaping the
national language, and it is not the class that is carrying it beyond
the national borders. The Americanisms that flood the English of
Canada are not borrowed from the dialects of New England Loyalists and
fashionable New Yorkers, but from the common speech that has its
sources in the native and immigrant proletariat and that displays its
gaudiest freightage in the newspapers.

The impact of this flood is naturally most apparent in Canada, whose
geographical proximity and common interests completely obliterate the
effects of English political and social dominance. By an Order in
Council, passed in 1890, the use of the redundant /u/ in such words as
/honor/ and /labor/ is official in Canada, but practically all the
Canadian newspapers omit it. In the same way the American flat /a/ has
swept whole sections of the country, and American slang is everywhere
used, and the American common speech prevails almost universally in
the newer provinces. More remarkable is the influence that American
has exerted upon the speech of Australia and upon the crude dialects
of Oceanica and the Far East. One finds such obvious Americanisms as
/tomahawk/, /boss/, /bush/, /canoe/, /go finish/ (=/to die/) and
/pickaninny/ in Beach-la-Mar[24] and more of them in Pigeon English.
And one observes a very large number of American words and phrases in
the slang of Australia. The Australian common speech, in pronunciation
and intonation, resembles Cockney English, and a great many
Cockneyisms are in it, but despite the small number of Americans in
the Antipodes [Pg319] it has adopted, of late, so many Americanisms
that a Cockney visitor must often find it difficult. Among them are
the verb and verb-phrases, /to beef/, /to biff/, /to bluff/, /to
boss/, /to break away/, /to chase one's self/, /to chew the rag/, /to
chip in/, /to fade away/, /to get it in the neck/, /to back and fill/,
/to plug along/, /to get sore/, /to turn down/ and /to get wise/; the
substantives, /dope/, /boss/, /fake/, /creek/, /knockout-drops/ and
/push/ (in the sense of /crowd/); the adjectives, /hitched/ (in the
sense of /married/) and /tough/ (as before /luck/), and the adverbial
phrases, /for keeps/ and /going strong/.[25] Here, in direct
competition with English locutions, and with all the advantages on the
side of the latter, American is making steady progress.

"This American language," says a recent observer, "seems to be much
more of a pusher than the English. For instance, after eight years'
occupancy of the Philippines it was spoken by 800,000, or 10 per cent,
of the natives, while after an occupancy of 150 of India by the
British, 3,000,000, or one per cent, of the natives speak
English."[26] I do vouch for the figures. They may be inaccurate, in
detail, but they at least state what seems to be a fact. Behind that
fact are phenomena which certainly deserve careful study, and, above
all, study divested of unintelligent prejudice. The attempt to make
American uniform with English has failed ingloriously; the neglect of
its investigation is an evidence of snobbishness that is a folly of
the same sort. It is useless to dismiss the growing peculiarities of
the American vocabulary and of grammar and syntax in the common speech
as vulgarisms beneath serious notice. Such vulgarisms have a way of
intrenching themselves, and gathering dignity as they grow familiar.
"There are but few forms in use," says Lounsbury, "which, judged by a
standard previously existing, would not be regarded as gross
barbarisms."[27] Each language, in such matters, is a law unto itself,
and each vigorous dialect, particularly if it be spoken by millions,
is a [Pg320] law no less. "It would be as wrong," says Sayce, "to use
/thou/ for the nominative /thee/ in the Somersetshire dialect as it is
to say /thee art/ instead of /you are/ in the Queen's English." All
the American dialect needs, in the long run, to make even pedagogues
acutely aware of it, is a poet of genius to venture into it, as
Chaucer ventured into the despised English of his day, and Dante into
the Tuscan dialect, and Luther, in his translation of the Bible, into
peasant German. Walt Whitman made a half attempt and then drew back;
Lowell, perhaps, also heard the call, but too soon. The Irish dialect
of English, vastly less important than the American, has already had
its interpreters--Douglas Hyde, John Milington Synge and Augusta
Gregory--and with what extraordinary results we all know. Here we have
writing that is still indubitably English, but English rid of its
artificial restraints and broken to the less self-conscious grammar
and syntax of a simple and untutored folk. Synge, in his preface to
"The Playboy of the Western World,"[28] tells us how he got his gypsy
phrases "through a chink in the floor of the old Wicklow house where I
was staying, that let me hear what was being said by the servant girls
in the kitchen." There is no doubt, he goes on, that "in the happy
ages of literature striking and beautiful phrases were as ready to the
story-teller's or the playwright's hand as the rich cloaks and dresses
of his time. It is probable that when the Elizabethan dramatist took
his ink-horn and sat down to his work he used many phrases that he had
just heard, as he sat at dinner, from his mother or his children."

The result, in the case of the neo-Celts, is a dialect that stands
incomparably above the tight English of the grammarians--a dialect so
naïf, so pliant, so expressive, and, adeptly managed, so beautiful
that even purists have begun to succumb to it, and it promises to
leave lasting marks upon English style. The American dialect has not
yet come to that stage. In so far as it is apprehended at all it is
only in the sense that Irish-English was apprehended a generation
ago--that is, as something [Pg321] uncouth and comic. But that is the
way that new dialects always come in--through a drum-fire of cackles.
Given the poet, there may suddenly come a day when our /theirns/ and
/would'a hads/ will take on the barbaric stateliness of the peasant
locutions of old Maurya in "Riders to the Sea." They seem grotesque
and absurd today because the folks who use them seem grotesque and
absurd. But that is a too facile logic and under it is a false
assumption. In all human beings, if only understanding be brought to
the business, dignity will be found, and that dignity cannot fail to
reveal itself, soon or late, in the words and phrases with which they
make known their high hopes and aspirations and cry out against the
intolerable meaninglessness of life.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xiii, p. 167.

[2] Proverbs, Maxims and Phrases of All Ages; New York, 1905. This
work extends to 1267 pages and contains about 30,000 proverbs,
admirably arranged.

[3] James Maitland: The American Slang Dictionary; Chicago, 1891.

[4] For example, the works of Villatte, Virmaitre, Michel, Rigaud and
Devau.

[5] The best of these, of course, is Farmer and Henley's monumental
Slang and Its Analogues, in seven volumes.

[6] Matthews' essay, The Function of Slang, is reprinted in Clapin's
Dictionary of Americanisms, pp. 565-581.

[7] P. 199 /et seq./

[8] For example, The Psychology of Unconventional Language, by Frank
K. Sechrist, /Pedagogical Seminary/, vol. xx, p. 413, Dec., 1913, and
The Philosophy of Slang, by E. B. Taylor, reprinted in Clapin's
Dictionary of Americanisms, pp. 541-563.

[9] Olaf E. Bosson: Slang and Cant in Jerome K. Jerome's Works;
Cambridge, 1911.

[10] Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xii, p. 144.

[11] Curiously enough, the American language, usually so fertile in
words to express shades of meaning, has no respectable synonym for
/chicken/. In English there is /flapper/, in French there is
/ingénue/, and in German there is /backfisch/. Usually either the
English or the French word is borrowed.

[12] The Life and Growth of Language, New York, 1897, p. 113.

[13] /Cf./ Two Children in Old Paris, by Gertrude Slaughter; New York,
1918, p. 233. Another American popular saying, once embodied in a coon
song, may be traced to a sentence in the prayer of the Old Dessauer
before the battle of Kesseldorf, Dec. 15, 1745: "Or if Thou wilt not
help me, don't help those Hundvögte."

[14] Modern English, p. 211.

[15] A Plea for the Queen's English, p. 244.

[16] Life and Letters of E. C. Stedman, ed. by Laura Stedman and
George M. Gould; New York, 1910, vol. i, p. 477.

[17] Governor M. R. Patterson, of Tennessee, in an address before the
National Anti-Saloon League at Washington, Dec. 13, 1917.

[18] Long before this the general question of the relative superiority
of various languages had been debated in Germany. In 1796 the Berlin
Academy offered a prize for the best essay on The Ideal of a Perfect
Language. It was won by one Jenisch with a treatise bearing the
sonorous title of A Philosophico-Critical Comparison and Estimate of
Fourteen of the Ancient and Modern Languages of Europe, viz., Greek,
Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, English,
Danish, Swedish, Polish, Russian and Lithuanian.

[19] Is English Destined to Become the Universal Language?, by W.
Brackebusch; Göttingen, 1868.

[20] I take these figures from A Modern English Grammar, by H. G.
Buehler; New York, 1900, p. 3.

[21] /World Almanac/, 1914, p. 63.

[22] The Geography of Great Languages, /World's Work/, Feb., 1908, p.
9907. Babbitt predicts that by the year 2000 English will be spoken by
1,100,000,000 persons, as against 500,000,000 speakers of Russian,
300,000,000 of Spanish, 160,000,000 of German and 60,000,000 of
French.

[23] P. 5 /et seq./

[24] /Cf./ Beach-la-Mar, by William Churchill, former United States
consul-general in Samoa and Tonga. The pamphlet is published by the
Carnegie Institution of Washington.

[25] A glossary of latter-day Australian slang is in Doreen and the
Sentimental Bloke, by C. J. Dennis; New York, 1916.

[26] The American Language, by J. F. Healy; Pittsburgh, 1910, p. 6.

[27] History of the English Language, p. 476.

[28] Dublin, 1907. See also ch. ii of Ireland's Literary Renaissance,
by Ernest A. Boyd; New York, 1916.

[Pg323]

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