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 Barefoot Doctor’s
Handbook
for the
Urban Warrior

Wayward Taoist Survival Technique

 Dedicated to
Walter
The Taoist Dog
Copyright © Stephen Russell aka Barefoot Doctor
2016
First published 1998
New edition published by Wayward Publications Ltd
© 2016
www.waywardpublications.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced, nor transmitted in any form, by any
means, electronic, or mechanical, including
photocopy, recording, or through any information
storage, or retrieval system, whether invented, or yet
to be invented, other than for ‘fair use’ for brief
quotations embodied in articles and reviews, without
prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Cover design Spanky Pymm
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
ISBN 978-1-912062-00-3 in epub format
ISBN 978-1-912062-01-0 in mobi format
ISBN 978-1-912062-02-7 in azw3 format
ISBN 978-1-912062-04-1 in pdf format
ISBN 978-1-912062-04-1 in print
A word from the author

This is a reprinted updated version of Liberation,

though we still welcome any feedback on references,
items or chunks that need updating in your opinion
as we can adjust manuscript mid-flight – and in
return the author will reward you with an
acknowledgment in the revised version.

Barefoot Doctor 2017

 Disclaimer
Be warned: what follows is pure
propaganda and the author a complete
charlatan and fraud.
The information, ideas and suggestions contained in
this book are based on a system which is potentially
subversive. In essence, it proposes living without
morals and returning to your true nature, which it
assumes is innocent and free of distortion.

In so doing, your life and, by extension, the lives of

those around you can be deeply affected. Whether
the effect is positive or negative, helpful or harmful
depends entirely upon you, the reader. Though
interaction with this Handbook is obviously intended
to enhance your experience of reality, the introduction
of any catalyst for change in your life is necessarily
experimental with unpredictable results. This author
therefore takes no responsibility for any outcome
arising from your use of the Handbook.

As for this author, while it’s certainly true that he’s

taught the Taoist arts to thousands of people, written
a book on the subject, which has so far been read by
more than half a million people around the world in
twenty languages including Chinese, produced
healing trance music which has been enjoyed on
every continent, and is health editor of a groovy
spiritual lifestyle magazine, it’s preposterous, these
impressive credentials notwithstanding, that he
should have the audacity to set himself up as an
expert of this ancient ‘system’. As an expert of a
system for achieving absolute mastery, he’s a fake,
being as damaged, confused and unmasterly as the
next person.
What he is, in fact, is an artist. An artist with an
oblique angle and bizarre tastes, who, in the
traditional Taoist mold, for better or for worse, has
made his whole life his art-form, his creation, his
fully interactive, multi-media, mobile installation and
has proceeded to stumble through it like a drunken
monkey ever since.

In fact, like any artist, he is no more than a mere

interpreter who having adopted the Taoist warrior
tradition as his own, worked with it, played with it,
danced with it, grabbed and grappled with it for
twenty years, has emerged at this point in his travails
and deeds of derring do, with one of those humble-
but-proud smiles on his face and this book in his
hand, proclaiming, ‘I have this!’.

This Handbook represents the author ’s impression

(so far) of an ancient system which, though Chinese
in origin, is universal in its application and which he
now desires, for both altruistic and self-seeking
reasons, to share with you, the reader.
So now you know. Suspend your judgement and read
on (at your own risk).
Introducing the Barefoot Doctor
and the Handbook
Barefoot Doctor here with you, wishing to introduce
myself discreetly.
In days of old, throughout the Orient, the barefoot
doctor would patrol his local patch, going humbly
(barefoot) from village to village, helping the people
remain in good spirits and health.

He would do this by administering healing herbs and

lotions, acupuncture, massage and energy transfer
healing; by teaching martial arts, exercises and
meditation techniques; by doing ‘miracles’ and by
playing music on a pippa (lute) or bamboo flute and
reciting magical poetry.
His comprehensive healthcare services were offered
with the loving heart of a true warrior without
concern for financial or personal gain. As reward for
his generosity, the local folk would take care of all his
needs and ensure he would want for nothing.

This Barefoot Doctor of modern-day Taoist folk-hero

fame lives and works (literally barefoot) in
accordance with these principles and will never turn
someone away who needs healing for having no
money.

I see sixty people a week on average, some of whom

are too sick to work or, being unemployed, have no
money. They bring me flowers, food and even little
bits of ‘sacred’ wood to burn in my fire.

This is not to toot my own horn, I’m as self-centered

as the next barefoot doctor. It’s just to assure you of
my full commitment and integrity in playing the
barefoot doctor role to the utmost so that you can
simply sit back and enjoy the Handbook without
getting jittery.

Though reputed to be somewhat of a rascal in my

private life, I have been living as a Taoist urban
warrior and experimenting fearlessly with this system
for the past twenty years or more, being at the time of
writing an old bastard of forty-two, and have taught
and been party to the healing of hundreds of
thousands of people around the world, directly
through my touch and indirectly through my writing,
music and broadcasts.

I myself have been taught by some superb ‘first

generation’ teachers, among them R D Laing, Master
Han Tao, Sonny Spruce, Nackovitch and F B Kramer,
and it is also their work I am humbly continuing in
my own way.
This Handbook is part of the result of all that
valuable experience and I proffer it now as a full-on
gift of love. The relationship you are about to begin
with it could constitute a major experiment with your
reality.

It is written primarily for your enjoyment, both in the

reading and in the after-effect on your life. It contains
some pretty heavy stuff and is therefore best treated
lightly with a peck of pickled pepper.

Though it happens to contain all the information you

need to install the warrior ’s mind set in your circuitry,
the information is presented so as to entertain you
and therefore facilitate easy absorption.

This is no mere two-dimensional intellectual

explanation (literally a laying out flat on a plain) of a
system, but is in fact a total ‘sensaround’ four-
dimensional interactive reading experience.

I am appealing to your true intelligence which lies

behind your intellect, the intelligence of your body.
Dimension three is introduced by placing the ideas in
the context of your ‘everyday’ life.

Dimension four comes into play during the process

of unfoldment you may experience as the information
itself unfolds over time.

If you follow the material in sequence, its silken

thread will guide you to a full understanding of the
Taoist warrior ‘system’ almost without your realizing
it’s happening.
If you let click randomly on any page you can use it as
a personal oracle or magical counsellor to give you
the answer to whichever question is on your mind, to
give you a portion of friendly company, a little
chuckle and a spot of up-lift to help you on your way.

Focus on whatever ’s bothering you most at the

moment, then once you have read this passage, close
your eyes and the Handbook. Now let the Handbook
fall open at any page and read that page.
Perhaps it’ll give you some elucidation on your
situation, perhaps it won’t. But may you receive ten
thousand benefits from the reading of it.
Background view
If you were to look at life on Earth from the point of
view of the healer, you’d be forgiven for diagnosing
the patient as pretty sick.

It is unnecessary here to enumerate the various ills

and stresses affecting our chances of survival on this
planet at the present time. No one alive knows
whether or not we’ve passed the point of no return in
the process of plundering and polluting our
environment; whether the melting of the ice-caps will
actually cause our oceans to rise up and flood all sea-
level population centers; or if anyone will actually let
fire toxic nerve gases in a frenzy of martial one-
upmanship during wars which may erupt over water
rights. Nobody is sure whether the Hale-Bopp comet
was indeed the herald of Armageddon or just another
casual celestial body crossing our orbit at 90,000 mph.

Just the other night in London’s East End, a young

black man was walking along enjoying his freedom to
exist, when he was set upon by four young white men
who proceeded unprovoked to dowse him with
gasoline, set him alight and watch him burn till he
died. For him and his family the apocalypse has
already come.

More than two thousand years ago, the Hopi ‘Indians’

prophesied that there would come a time when
people would communicate verbally through
cobwebs in the sky and build a platform in space. At
this time, they predicted that life would be totally
nuts. The weather would become erratic, society
would become insane, resources would become
scarce, the ground would become unstable and the
life-giving sun would become our enemy. The
conclusion of the prophecy is too dreadful to
mention. Suffice to say that the patient (life on Earth)
has arrived at this time in this state and the prognosis
isn’t so good.
Now you have a choice. You can partially or totally
ignore the situation for a short while longer, you can
become immobilized with fear, or you can be an
urban warrior (or warrioress) and groove on the
greatest, most spectacular tragicomic, science-‘fiction’
drama ever enacted on this planet (probably) until
the lights go out. And that’s what this Handbook is
here to help you do.

Of course, there’s always the chance that if enough of

us take that path, our combined creative intelligence
might forestall things a while and enable us to carry
on a little longer in our collective madness.
Definitions
Greetings, denizen of the global metropolis!

Since we first started seeing images of Earth taken

from space, we have been learning literally to get our
minds round the entire planet. We have made
exponential advances in communications and
computer technology. Alongside this has been a rapid
increase of national and international travel which
enables us to send ourselves anywhere on the planet
with relative ease within twenty-four hours or so.

As a result, there is nothing on Earth, no air, no water,

no ground, which has not been touched by the poison
of our doings. We have generated a vast electronic
polluted womb.

Its placenta, though disintegrating, is fighting hard to

maintain balance and regenerate itself.
At the same time there is nowhere, not the highest
mountain peak, nor the deepest ocean bed, where we
cannot or could not remain in contact to share our
ideas with each other.

A city is the product of ideas. You have an idea to

build a house. You instruct an architect to transform
your idea into a more specific idea, who instructs a
contractor to transform that into a building, which
comprises various components like wiring and
plumbing, which themselves are the result of ideas.
This building stands in a street which is part of a road
system which originated from an idea. You could say
that the one cohesive factor in a city, this one thing
that makes it a city, is the force of ideas.
You could also say, and I do, that with our
communications and transport web, we have created,
through the combined force of all our ideas, one huge
mother of a global urban sprawl. And you’re in it
right now. Wherever you may be as you read this, no
matter how remote or apparently isolated, you’re in
it, part of a vast planetary web of population centers
linked by planes, cars, boats, phone lines, electric
cable, oil pipelines, microwave phones, radio waves,
internet, television signals, satellite, postal services
and homing pigeons.

You cannot escape. Resistance is futile. The only

viable strategy is to accept it and make the most of it
by enjoying every moment of it.

Urban is dirty, urban is exciting, urban is dangerous

and urban is where opportunity lies, where all your
heart’s true desires are made manifest if you’re
willing to risk it.

Take a long slow breath, come back and notice that that’s
exactly where you are.
You are an urban warrior
If you’re here reading this book, anywhere in the
global urbanized sprawl, dealing with your reality
with some degree of consciousness, you’re an urban
warrior. ‘Warrior ’ may bring to mind all manner of
images to you, from the muscle-bound gladiator to
the diminutive tai chi master but these are just
archetypes. ‘Warrior ’ has the same root as ‘war ’ so
when you say you’re a warrior it implies that you’re at
war. This war is an internal one, which is taking place
in the spiritual realm between the forces of light and
the forces of dark throughout the universe and
specifically within you.

From the beginning of time the generative, life-

affirming current has been at war with the
degenerative, entropic, life-negating current and this
drama is enacted millennium after millennium by us
unwitting puppets.

War is happening in microcosm within each of us and

in varying degrees macro-cosmically in our global
society and the result to date is the world you see
around you.

This is neither a negative nor positive statement but

merely a description of a condition.

As a warrior, your challenge is successfully to

negotiate this condition in order that you thrive, not
just survive, in a state of relaxation and unshakeable,
impenetrable wholeness in the very midst of events.

You do this by channeling the forces of light and dark

within you into a perpetual dance of equality as
opposed to an eternal series of inner street brawls.
For this you need all your energy channels open so
you can be centered, clear-minded, aware, alert,
positive and loving in any conditions in order to
appreciate fully and enjoy the miracle of your
existence at all times.

When the two opposing forces are in harmony within

you the world around you will reflect this and you
will manifest harmony wherever you go.
As a warrior you take responsibility for holding the
balance between light and dark within you and, by
extension, the world around you, and ultimately
when you go deep enough, the universe.

It’s a big responsibility, the biggest in fact and once

you sign on its irreversible but the pay-off is also the
biggest - absolute freedom and a wonderful life for as
long as it goes on, of ease, richness, joy and peace in
full conscious awareness.
So if you’re on for the gambol, say immediately, ‘I am an
urban warrior. I am willing to take on the responsibility of
being a warrior and willing to take on all associated
benefits as of now.’

This may seem daft but being a warrior requires you

do quite a few daft little rituals just to remind
yourself.
Taoism is a wayward pursuit.
Taoism doesn’t exist really. It’s not a religion. It’s not
an institution. It’s not even an ism.

It’s simply an idea, a collection of methods for

restoring peace and prolonging life. That’s all there is
to it. You don’t have to believe anything or have blind
faith. You don’t have to take any oaths. All you have
to do is entertain some basic concepts [see next
twenty items or so], and practice some easy psycho-
physical techniques on a regular basis and you can
call yourself a Taoist. Mind you, if you do, do it in a
jocular manner because the actual word is a
contradiction in terms and is a bit of an in-joke.

Tao roughly translates as ‘way’, referring to that

which happens of itself along the way or Great
Thoroughfare of life. This applies as much to the
landing of a ladybird upon your summer shirt as it
does to the formation of this universe. Underlying
and running in the cracks and spaces between reality,
the Tao is the primary generative force of existence
and, for that matter, non-existence.

Although some overly eager folk over the past few

centuries have attempted to institutionalize the idea
of Taoism and turn it into a religion of sorts, their
attempts have been laughable and have thankfully
failed to kill the living spirit of the Tao, unlike other
more successful religions. Taoism, the art of living by
following only the way that comes naturally, hence
wayward, has always appealed to the more
individually minded amongst us, which is why, in this
epoch of the individual, it is enjoying such a global
airing. It originated in ancient China, no one knows
how or through whom, but according to legend was
passed down by a posse called something like ‘The
Children of Reflected Light’ who were said to be
seven feet tall, wear strange clothes and inhabit the
high places (mountains). They were said to possess
this vast body of knowledge and to disappear without
trace once they have passed it on to the locals.
This knowledge trickled down through the millennia,
mingling with Buddhism, Confucianism and even
Christianity at times, until it reached us today in the
form of tai chi, the I Ching, acupuncture and feng
shui, to name a few of its better known carriers.

You don’t have to renounce any belief or creed you

may subscribe to, including gross materialism, to be
able to take part in this game. Nor will your
involvement in Taoism impinge on anything you hold
dear. On the contrary, by following your natural path
or Tao you will enhance all existing aspects of your
life while adding a few new good’ns into the bargain.
There’s only really one of us here
looking out from many different faces:
name’s ‘Tao’.
This one central and ubiquitous being sits for eternity
in the undifferentiated absolute, doing absolutely
nothing. It gets totally bored. Being bored, it grows
restless, being restless it grows curious, and so
almost without noticing, develops a sense of self,
which implies there being something other than self,
and the grand, universal game of hide and seek
begins. The being begets ‘other ’, which makes two,
yin and yang [see Yin-Yang].

Yin-yang proliferates exponentially, as these things

do, the ten thousand things come into existence of
themselves and you end up with this, the world of
appearances.

And thus the Great Being amuses itself by playing

this irresistible, inevitable, never-ending game of
hide and seek with itself, splitting itself into myriad
versions of the original holographic template. Then it
pretends to forget it’s done that, so that Bob or Joan,
Ronald or Snod, Nakovitch or whoever, are now
walking around taking themselves seriously as
separate, autonomous entities. And that’s where the
confusion begins, fear and greed are born, wars erupt
and so on.

If everyone in the entire universe, every woman, man,

centipede, Martian, shark, dog, suicide bomber, saint,
butterfly, hooker, bigot, reflexologist and cab-driver,
were simultaneously to drop into an advanced level,
hardcore-heavyweight meditation, and all went deep
enough inside, we’d all meet up, along with everyone
who’s ever lived, ever, in one absurdly mad, huge
inner chamber, and to our utter astonishment
(feigned of course), we’d, you’d, I’d discover that
there’d only been one of us here all the time.
‘Tao’, pronounced ‘dow’ and not ‘tayo’, as I said,
means ‘way’, as in the Japanese version ‘do’, used for
example in ‘aikido’ - the way of life-force; ‘judo’ - the
Other documents randomly have
different content
[14] From Sint-Klaas—Saint Nicholas. Santa Claus has also become familiar
to the English, but the Oxford Dictionary still calls the name an
Americanism.
[15] The spelling is variously sauerkraut, saurkraut, sourkraut and sourkrout.
[16] Cf. The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. i, pp. 14 and 22.
[17] The American origin of this last word has been disputed, but the weight
of evidence seems to show that it was borrowed from the rapides of the
French Canadians. It is familiar in the United States and Canada, but
seldom met with in England.
[18] Log-cabin came in later. Thornton's first quotation is dated 1818. The
Log-Cabin campaign was in 1840.
[19] Theo. Roosevelt: Gouverneur Morris; Boston, 1888, p. 104.
[20] William Brown Meloney: The Heritage of Tyre; New York, 1916, p. 15.
[21] Vide his preface to Every-Day English, pp. xxi and xv, respectively.
[22] Vide Lyell's Travels in North America; London, 1845.
[23] Pref. to the Biglow Papers, 2nd series, 1866.
[24] Reprinted in Helpful Hints in Writing and Reading, comp. by Grenville
Kleiser; New York, 1911, pp. 15-17.
[25] A. Cleveland Coxe: Americanisms in England, Forum, Oct., 1886.
[26] Edwin S. Gould: Good English, or, Popular Errors in Language: New York,
1867; pp. 25-27.
[27] Cf. Ch. I, § 5, and Ch. V, § 1.
[28] Lott appears in the Connecticut Code of 1650. Vide the edition of
Andrus; Hartford, 1822. On page 35 is "their landes, lotts and
accommodations." On page 46 is "meadow and home lotts."
[29] Vide Hutchinson's Diary, vol. i, p. 171; London, 1883-6.
[30] The definitions are from the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current
English (1914) and the Standard Dictionary (1906), respectively.
[31] S. Sewall: Diary, April 14, 1712: "I lay'd a Rock in the North-east corner
of the Foundation of the Meeting-house."
[32] The Americana, ... art. Americanisms: New York, 1903-6.
[33] Immigration, 2nd ed.; New York, 1913, p. 4. Sir J. R. Seeley says, in The
Expansion of England (2nd ed.; London, 1895, p. 84) that the emigration
from England to New England, after the meeting of the Long Parliament
(1640), was so slight for a full century that it barely balanced "the
counter-movement of colonists quitting the colony." Richard Hildreth, in
his History of the United States, vol. i, p. 267, says that the departures
actually exceeded the arrivals.
[34] Works, ed. by Sparks: vol. ii, p. 319.
[35] Cf. Pehr Kalm: Travels into N. America, tr. by J. R. Forster, 3 vols.;
London, 1770-71.
[36] Sydney George Fisher: The True Story of the American Revolution; Phila.
and London, 1902, p. 27. See also John T. Morse's Life of Thomas
Jefferson in the American Statesmen series (Boston and New York,
1898), p. 2. Morse points out that Washington, Jefferson and Madison
belonged to this new aristocracy, not to the old one.
[37] Cf. the Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. i, p. 119. Francis
Jeffrey, writing on Franklin in the Edinburgh Review for July, 1806, hailed
him as a prodigy who had arisen "in a society where there was no relish
and no encouragement for literature."
[38] Examples of its use in the American sense, considered vulgar and even
indecent in England, are to be found in Gen. xlviii, 1; II Kings viii, 7;
John xi, 1, and Acts ix, 37.
[39] J. O. Halliwell (Phillips): A Dictionary of Archaisms and Provincialisms,
Containing Words now Obsolete in England All of Which are Familiar and
in Common Use in America, 2nd ed.; London, 1850.
[40] An interesting discussion of this verb appeared in the New York Sun,
Nov. 27, 1914.
[41] Cf. J. H. Combs: Old, Early and Elizabethan English in the Southern
Mountains, Dialect Notes, vol. iv, pt. iv, pp. 283-97.
[42] Henry Sweet: A History of English Sounds; London, 1876; Oxford, 1888.
[43] P. 124.
[44] Cf. Art. Changes in the Language Since Shakespeare's Time, by W.
Murison, in The Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. xiv, p. 485.
[45] English Spelling and Spelling Reform; New York, 1909.
[46] C. H. Grandgent: Fashion and the Broad A, Nation, Jan. 7, 1915.
[47] Thomas Sheridan: A Complete Dictionary of the English Language;
London, 1780.
[48] It first appeared in Robert Nares' Elements of Orthography; London,
1784. In 1791 it received full approbation in John Walker's Critical
Pronouncing Dictionary.
[49] Robert J. Menner; The Pronunciation of English in America, Atlantic
Monthly, March, 1915.
[50] The Question of Our Speech; Boston and New York, 1906, pp. 27-29.
[51] Elizabeth H. Hancock: Southern Speech, Neale's Monthly, Nov., 1913,
pp. 606-7.
[52] Vide his remarks on balance in his Vocabulary. See also Marsh, p. 671.

[Pg063] toc
 III
The Period of Growth

§1

The New Nation

—The American language thus began to be recognizably
differentiated from English in both vocabulary and pronunciation by
the opening of the nineteenth century, but as yet its growth was
hampered by two factors, the first being the lack of a national
literature of any pretentions and the second being an internal
political disharmony which greatly conditioned and enfeebled the
national consciousness. During the actual Revolution common aims
and common dangers forced the Americans to show a united front,
but once they had achieved political independence they developed
conflicting interests, and out of those conflicting interests came
suspicions and hatreds which came near wrecking the new
confederation more than once. Politically, their worst weakness,
perhaps, was an inability to detach themselves wholly from the
struggle for domination still going on in Europe. The surviving
Loyalists of the revolutionary era—estimated by some authorities to
have constituted fully a third of the total population in 1776—were
ardently in favor of England, and such patriots as Jefferson were as
ardently in favor of France. This engrossment in the quarrels of
foreign nations was what Washington warned against in his Farewell
Address. It was at the bottom of such bitter animosities as that
between Jefferson and Hamilton. It inspired and perhaps excused
the pessimism of such men as Burr. Its net effect was to make it
difficult for the people of the new nation to think of themselves,
politically, as Americans. Their state of mind, vacillating, uncertain,
alternately timorous and [Pg064] pugnacious, has been well described
by Henry Cabot Lodge in his essay on "Colonialism in America."[1]
Soon after the Treaty of Paris was signed, someone referred to the
late struggle, in Franklin's hearing, as the War for Independence.
"Say, rather, the War of the Revolution," said Franklin. "The War for
Independence is yet to be fought."
"That struggle," adds Lossing, "occurred, and that independence
was won, by the Americans in the War of 1812."[2] In the interval
the new republic had passed through a period of Sturm und Drang
whose gigantic perils and passions we have begun to forget—a
period in which disaster ever menaced, and the foes within were no
less bold and pertinacious than the foes without. Jefferson, perhaps,
carried his fear of "monocrats" to the point of monomania, but under
it there was undoubtedly a body of sound fact. The poor debtor
class (including probably a majority of the veterans of the
Revolution) had been fired by the facile doctrines of the French
Revolution to demands which threatened the country with
bankruptcy and anarchy, and the class of property-owners, in
reaction, went far to the other extreme. On all sides, indeed, there
flourished a strong British party, and particularly in New England,
where the so-called codfish aristocracy (by no means extinct, even
today) exhibited an undisguised Anglomania, and looked forward
confidently to a rapprochement with the mother country.[3] This
Anglomania showed itself, not only in ceaseless political agitation,
but also in an elaborate imitation of English manners. We have
already seen, on Noah Webster's authority, how it even extended to
the pronunciation of the language.
The first sign of the dawn of a new national order came with the
election of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency in 1800. The issue in
the campaign was a highly complex one, but under it lay a plain
conflict between democratic independence and the [Pg065] old doctrine
of dependence and authority; and with the Alien and Sedition Laws
about his neck, so vividly reminiscent of the issues of the Revolution
itself, Adams went down to defeat. Jefferson was violently anti-
British and pro-French; he saw all the schemes of his political
opponents, indeed, as English plots; he was the man who introduced
the bugaboo into American politics. His first acts after his
inauguration were to abolish all ceremonial at the court of the
republic, and to abandon spoken discourses to Congress for written
messages. That ceremonial, which grew up under Washington, was
an imitation, he believed, of the formality of the abhorrent Court of
St. James; as for the speeches to Congress, they were palpably
modelled upon the speeches from the throne of the English kings.
Both reforms met with wide approval; the exactions of the English,
particularly on the high seas, were beginning to break up the British
party. But confidence in the solidarity and security of the new nation
was still anything but universal. The surviving doubts, indeed, were
strong enough to delay the ratification of the Twelfth Amendment to
the Constitution, providing for more direct elections of President and
Vice-President, until the end of 1804, and even then three of the five
New England states rejected it,[4] and have never ratified it, in fact,
to this day. Democracy was still experimental, doubtful, full of
gunpowder. In so far as it had actually come into being, it had come
as a boon conferred from above. Jefferson, its protagonist, was the
hero of the populace, but he was not of the populace himself, nor
did he ever quite trust it.
It was reserved for Andrew Jackson, a man genuinely of the
people, to lead and visualize the rise of the lower orders. Jackson, in
his way, was the archetype of the new American—ignorant, pushful,
impatient of restraint and precedent, an iconoclast, a Philistine, an
Anglophobe in every fibre. He came from the extreme backwoods
and his youth was passed amid surroundings but little removed from
downright savagery.[5] [Pg066] Thousands of other young Americans
like him were growing up at the same time—youngsters filled with a
vast impatience of all precedent and authority, revilers of all that had
come down from an elder day, incorrigible libertarians. They
swarmed across the mountains and down the great rivers, wrestling
with the naked wilderness and setting up a casual, impromptu sort
of civilization where the Indian still menaced. Schools were few and
rudimentary; there was not the remotest approach to a cultivated
society; any effort to mimic the amenities of the East, or of the
mother country, in manner or even in speech, met with instant
derision. It was in these surroundings and at this time that the
thorough-going American of tradition was born: blatant, illogical,
elate, "greeting the embarrassed gods" uproariously and matching
"with Destiny for beers." Jackson was unmistakably of that company
in his every instinct and idea, and it was his fate to give a new and
unshakable confidence to its aspiration at the Battle of New Orleans.
Thereafter all doubts began to die out; the new republic was turning
out a success. And with success came a vast increase in the national
egoism. The hordes of pioneers rolled down the western valleys and
on to the great plains.[6] America began to stand for something quite
new in the world—in government, in law, in public and private
morals, in customs and habits of mind, in the minutia of social
intercourse. And simultaneously the voice of America began to take
on its characteristic twang, and the speech of America began to
differentiate itself boldly and unmistakably from the speech of
England. The average Philadelphian or Bostonian of 1790 had not
the slightest difficulty in making himself understood by a visiting
Englishman. But the average Ohio boatman of 1810 or plainsman of
1815 was already speaking a dialect that the Englishman would have
shrunk from as barbarous and unintelligible, and before long it
began to leave [Pg067] its mark upon and to get direction and support
from a distinctively national literature.
That literature, however, was very slow in coming to a dignified,
confident and autonomous estate. Down to Jefferson's day it was
almost wholly polemical, and hence lacking in the finer values; he
himself, an insatiable propagandist and controversialist, was one of
its chief ornaments. "The novelists and the historians, the essayists
and the poets, whose names come to mind when American literature
is mentioned," says a recent literary historian, "have all flourished
since 1800."[7] Pickering, so late as 1816, said that "in this country
we can hardly be said to have any authors by profession." It was a
true saying, though the new day was about to dawn; Bryant had
already written "Thanatopsis" and was destined to publish it the year
following. Difficulties of communication hampered the circulation of
the few native books that were written; it was easier for a man in
the South to get books from London than to get them from Boston
or New York, and the lack of a copyright treaty with England flooded
the country with cheap English editions. "It is much to be regretted,"
wrote Dr. David Ramsay, of Charleston, S. C., to Noah Webster in
1806, "that there is so little intercourse in a literary way between the
states. As soon as a book of general utility comes out in any state it
should be for sale in all of them." Ramsay asked for little; the most
he could imagine was a sale of 2,000 copies for an American work in
America. But even that was far beyond the possibilities of the time.
An external influence of great potency helped to keep the national
literature scant and timorous during those early and perilous days. It
was the extraordinary animosity of the English critics, then at the
zenith of their pontifical authority, to all books of American origin or
flavor. This animosity, culminating in Sydney Smith's famous sneer,[8]
was but part of a [Pg068] larger hostility to all things American, from
political theories to table manners. The American, after the war of
1812, became the pet abomination of the English, and the chief butt
of the incomparable English talent for moral indignation. There was
scarcely an issue of the Quarterly Review, the Edinburgh, the
Foreign Quarterly, the British Review or Blackwood's, for a
generation following 1814, in which he was not stupendously
assaulted. Gifford, Sydney Smith and the poet Southey became
specialists in this business; it took on the character of a holy war;
even such mild men as Wordsworth were recruited for it. It was
argued that the Americans were rogues and swindlers, that they
lived in filth and squalor, that they were boors in social intercourse,
that they were poltroons and savages in war, that they were
depraved and criminal, that they were wholly devoid of the remotest
notion of decency or honor. The Foreign Quarterly, summing up in
January, 1844, pronounced them "horn-handed and pig-headed,
hard, persevering, unscrupulous, carnivorous, with a genius for
lying." Various Americans went to the defense of their countrymen,
among them, Irving, Cooper, Timothy Dwight, J. K. Paulding, John
Neal, Edward Everett and Robert Walsh. Paulding, in "John Bull in
America, or, the New Munchausen," published in 1825, attempted
satire. Even an Englishman, James Sterling, warned his fellow-
Britons that, if they continued their intolerant abuse, they would
"turn into bitterness the last drops of good-will toward England that
exist in the United States." But the avalanche of denunciation kept
up, and even down to a few years ago it was very uncommon for an
Englishman to write of American politics, or manners, or literature
without betraying his dislike. Not, indeed, until the Prussian began
monopolizing the whole British talent for horror and invective did the
Yankee escape the lash.[9]
This gigantic pummelling, in the long run, was destined to
encourage an independent spirit in the national literature, if [Pg069]
only by a process of mingled resentment and despair, but for some
time its chief effect was to make American writers of a more delicate
aspiration extremely self-conscious and diffident. The educated
classes, even against their will, were influenced by the torrent of
abuse; they could not help finding in it an occasional
reasonableness, an accidental true hit. The result, despite the efforts
of Channing, Knapp and other such valiant defenders of the native
author, was uncertainty and skepticism in native criticism. "The first
step of an American entering upon a literary career," says Lodge,
writing of the first quarter of the century, "was to pretend to be an
Englishman in order that he might win the approval, not of
Englishmen, but of his own countrymen." Cooper, in his first novel,
"Precaution," chose an English scene, imitated English models, and
obviously hoped to placate the critics thereby. Irving, too, in his
earliest work, showed a considerable discretion, and his "History of
New York," as everyone knows, was first published anonymously. But
this puerile spirit did not last long. The English onslaughts were
altogether too vicious to be received lying down; their very fury
demanded that they be met with a united and courageous front.
Cooper, in his second novel, "The Spy," boldly chose an American
setting and American characters, and though the influence of his
wife, who came of a Loyalist family, caused him to avoid any direct
attack upon the English, he attacked them indirectly, and with great
effect, by opposing an immediate and honorable success to their
derisions. "The Spy" ran through three editions in four months; it
was followed by his long line of thoroughly American novels; in 1834
he formally apologized to his countrymen for his early truancy in
"Precaution." Irving, too, soon adopted a bolder tone, and despite
his English predilections, he refused an offer of a hundred guineas
for an article for the Quarterly Review, made by Gifford in 1828, on
the ground that "the Review has been so persistently hostile to our
country that I cannot draw a pen in its service."
The same year saw the publication of the first edition of [Pg070]
Webster's American Dictionary of the English language, and a year
later followed Samuel L. Knapp's "Lectures on American Literature,"
the first history of the national letters ever attempted. Knapp, in his
preface, thought it necessary to prove, first of all, that an American
literature actually existed, and Webster, in his introduction, was
properly apologetic, but there was no real need for timorousness in
either case, for the American attitude toward the attack of the
English was now definitely changing from uneasiness to defiance.
The English critics, in fact, had overdone the thing, and though their
clatter was to keep up for many years more, they no longer spread
terror or had much influence. Of a sudden, as if in answer to them,
doubts turned to confidence, and then into the wildest sort of
optimism, not only in politics and business, but also in what passed
for the arts. Knapp boldly defied the English to produce a "tuneful
sister" surpassing Mrs. Sigourney; more, he argued that the New
World, if only by reason of its superior scenic grandeur, would
eventually hatch a poetry surpassing even that of Greece and Rome.
"What are the Tibers and Scamanders," he demanded, "measured
by the Missouri and the Amazon? Or what the loveliness of Illysus or
Avon by the Connecticut or the Potomack?"
In brief, the national feeling, long delayed at birth, finally leaped
into being in amazing vigor. "One can get an idea of the strength of
that feeling," says R. O. Williams, "by glancing at almost any book
taken at random from the American publications of the period. Belief
in the grand future of the United States is the key-note of everything
said and done. All things American are to be grand—our territory,
population, products, wealth, science, art—but especially our political
institutions and literature. The unbounded confidence in the material
development of the country which now characterizes the extreme
northwest of the United States prevailed as strongly throughout the
eastern part of the Union during the first thirty years of the century;
and over and above a belief in, and concern for, materialistic
progress, there were enthusiastic anticipations of achievements in all
the moral and intellectual fields of national [Pg071] greatness."[10] Nor
was that vast optimism wholly without warrant. An American
literature was actually coming into being, and with a wall of hatred
and contempt shutting in England, the new American writers were
beginning to turn to the Continent for inspiration and
encouragement. Irving had already drunk at Spanish springs;
Emerson and Bayard Taylor were to receive powerful impulses from
Germany, following Ticknor, Bancroft and Everett before them;
Bryant was destined to go back to the classics. Moreover, Cooper
and John P. Kennedy had shown the way to native sources of literary
material, and Longfellow was making ready to follow them; novels in
imitation of English models were no longer heard of; the ground was
preparing for "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Finally, Webster himself, as
Williams demonstrated, worked better than he knew. His American
Dictionary was not only thoroughly American: it was superior to any
of the current dictionaries of the English, so much so that for a good
many years it remained "a sort of mine for British lexicography to
exploit."
Thus all hesitations disappeared, and there arose a national
consciousness so soaring and so blatant that it began to dismiss all
British usage and opinion as puerile and idiotic. William L. Marcy,
when Secretary of State under Pierce (1853-57), issued a circular to
all American diplomatic and consular officers, loftily bidding them
employ only "the American language" in communicating with him.
The Legislature of Indiana, in an act approved February 15, 1838,
establishing the state university at Bloomington,[11] provided that it
should instruct the youth of the new commonwealth (it had been
admitted to the Union in 1816) "in the American, learned and foreign
languages ... and literature." Such grandiose pronunciamentos [Pg072]
well indicate and explain the temper of the era.[12] It was a time of
expansion and braggadocia. The new republic would not only
produce a civilization and a literature of its own; it would show the
way for all other civilizations and literatures. Rufus Wilmot Griswold,
the enemy of Poe, rose from his decorous Baptist pew to protest
that so much patriotism amounted to insularity and absurdity, but
there seems to have been no one to second the motion. It took,
indeed, the vast shock of the Civil War to unhorse the optimists.
While the Jackson influence survived, it was the almost unanimous
national conviction that "he who dallies is a dastard, and he who
doubts is damned."

§2

The Language in the Making

—All this jingoistic bombast, however, was directed toward
defending, not so much the national vernacular as the national
beautiful letters. True enough, an English attack upon a definite
American locution always brought out certain critical minute-men,
but in the main they were anything but hospitable to the racy
neologisms that kept crowding up from below, and most of them
were eager to be accepted as masters of orthodox English and very
sensitive to the charge that their writing was bestrewn with
Americanisms. A glance through the native criticism of the time will
show how ardently even the most uncompromising patriots imitated
the Johnsonian jargon then fashionable in England. Fowler and
Griswold followed pantingly in the footsteps of Macaulay; their prose
is extraordinarily ornate and self-conscious, and one searches it in
vain for any concession to colloquialism. Poe, the master of them all,
achieved a style so elephantine that many an English leader-writer
must have studied it with envy. A few bolder spirits, as we have
seen, spoke out for national freedom in language as well as in letters
—among them, Channing—but in the main the Brahmins of the time
were conservatives in [Pg073] that department, and it is difficult to
imagine Emerson or Irving or Bryant sanctioning the innovations
later adopted so easily by Howells. Lowell and Walt Whitman, in fact,
were the first men of letters, properly so called, to give specific
assent to the great changes that were firmly fixed in the national
speech during the half century between the War of 1812 and the
Civil War. Lowell did so in his preface to the second series of "The
Biglow Papers." Whitman made his declaration in "An American
Primer." In discussing his own poetry, he said: "It is an attempt to
give the spirit, the body and the man, new words, new potentialities
of speech—an American, a cosmopolitan (for the best of America is
the best cosmopolitanism) range of self-expression." And then: "The
Americans are going to be the most fluent and melodious-voiced
people in the world—and the most perfect users of words. The new
times, the new people, the new vistas need a new tongue according
—yes, and what is more, they will have such a new tongue." To
which, as everyone knows, Whitman himself forthwith contributed
many daring (and still undigested) novelties, e. g., camerado,
romanza, Adamic and These States.
Meanwhile, in strong contrast to the lingering conservatism above
there was a wild and lawless development of the language below,
and in the end it forced itself into recognition, and profited by the
literary declaration of independence of its very opponents. "The jus
et norma loquendi," says W. R. Morfill, the English philologist, "do
not depend upon scholars." Particularly in a country where
scholarship is still new and wholly cloistered, and the overwhelming
majority of the people are engaged upon novel and highly
exhilarating tasks, far away from schools and with a gigantic
cockiness in their hearts. The remnants of the Puritan civilization had
been wiped out by the rise of the proletariat under Jackson, and
whatever was fine and sensitive in it had died with it. What
remained of an urbane habit of mind and utterance began to be
confined to the narrowing feudal areas of the south, and to the still
narrower refuge of the Boston Brahmins, now, for the first time, a
definitely recognized caste of intelligentsia, self-charged with
carrying the [Pg074] torch of culture through a new Dark Age. The
typical American, in Paulding's satirical phrase, became "a bundling,
gouging, impious" fellow, without either "morals, literature, religion
or refinement." Next to the savage struggle for land and dollars,
party politics was the chief concern of the people, and with the
disappearance of the old leaders and the entrance of pushing
upstarts from the backwoods, political controversy sank to an
incredibly low level. Bartlett, in the introduction to the second edition
of his Glossary, describes the effect upon the language. First the
enfranchised mob, whether in the city wards or along the western
rivers, invented fantastic slang-words and turns of phrase; then they
were "seized upon by stump-speakers at political meetings"; then
they were heard in Congress; then they got into the newspapers;
and finally they came into more or less good usage. Much
contemporary evidence is to the same effect. Fowler, in listing "low
expressions" in 1850, described them as "chiefly political." "The
vernacular tongue of the country," said Daniel Webster, "has become
greatly vitiated, depraved and corrupted by the style of the
congressional debates." Thornton, in the appendix to his Glossary,
gives some astounding specimens of congressional oratory between
the 20's and 60's, and many more will reward the explorer who
braves the files of the Congressional Globe. This flood of racy and
unprecedented words and phrases beat upon and finally penetrated
the retreat of the literati, but the purity of speech cultivated there
had little compensatory influence upon the vulgate. The newspaper
was now enthroned, and belles lettres were cultivated almost in
private, and as a mystery. It is probable, indeed, that "Uncle Tom's
Cabin" and "Ten Nights in a Bar-room," both published in the early
50's, were the first contemporary native books, after Cooper's day,
that the American people, as a people, ever read. Nor did the pulpit,
now fast falling from its old high estate, lift a corrective voice. On
the contrary, it joined the crowd, and Bartlett denounces it
specifically for its bad example, and cites, among its crimes against
the language, such inventions as to doxologize and to funeralize.
[Pg075] To these novelties, apparently without any thought of their

uncouthness, Fowler adds to missionate and consociational.

As I say, the pressure from below broke down the defenses of the
purists, and literally forced a new national idiom upon them. Pen in
hand, they might still achieve laborious imitations of Johnson and
Macaulay, but their mouths began to betray them. "When it comes
to talking," wrote Charles Astor Bristed for Englishmen in 1855, "the
most refined and best educated American, who has habitually
resided in his own country, the very man who would write, on some
serious topic, volumes in which no peculiarity could be detected, will,
in half a dozen sentences, use at least as many words that cannot
fail to strike the inexperienced Englishman who hears them for the
first time." Bristed gave a specimen of the American of that time,
calculated to flabbergast his inexperienced Englishman; you will find
it in the volume of Cambridge Essays, already cited. His aim was to
explain and defend Americanisms, and so shut off the storm of
English reviling, and he succeeded in producing one of the most
thoughtful and persuasive essays on the subject ever written. But his
purpose failed and the attack kept up, and eight years afterward the
Very Rev. Henry Alford, D.D., dean of Canterbury, led a famous
assault. "Look at those phrases," he said, "which so amuse us in
their speech and books; at their reckless exaggeration and contempt
for congruity; and then compare the character and history of the
nation—its blunted sense of moral obligation and duty to man; its
open disregard of conventional right where aggrandizement is to be
obtained; and I may now say, its reckless and fruitless maintenance
of the most cruel and unprincipled war in the history of the world."
[13] In his American edition of 1866 Dr. Alford withdrew this
reference to the Civil War and somewhat ameliorated his indignation
otherwise, but he clung to the main counts in his indictment, and
most Englishmen, I daresay, still give them a certain support. The
American is no longer a [Pg076] "vain, egotistical, insolent,
rodomontade sort of fellow"; America is no longer the "brigand
confederation" of the Foreign Quarterly or "the loathsome creature,
... maimed and lame, full of sores and ulcers" of Dickens; but the
Americanism is yet regarded with a bilious eye, and pounced upon
viciously when found. Even the friendliest English critics seem to be
daunted by the gargantuan copiousness of American inventions in
speech. Their position, perhaps, was well stated by Capt. Basil Hall,
author of the celebrated "Travels in North America," in 1827. When
he argued that "surely such innovations are to be deprecated," an
American asked him this question: "If a word becomes universally
current in America, why should it not take its station in the
language?" "Because," replied Hall in all seriousness, "there are
words enough in our language already."

§3

The Expanding Vocabulary

—A glance at some of the characteristic coinages of the time, as
they are revealed in the Congressional Globe, in contemporary
newspapers and political tracts, and in that grotesque small
literature of humor which began with Judge Thomas C. Haliburton's
"Sam Slick" in 1835, is almost enough to make one sympathize with
Dean Alford. Bartlett quotes to doxologize from the Christian
Disciple, a quite reputable religious paper of the 40's. To citizenize
was used and explained by Senator Young, of Illinois, in the Senate
on February 1, 1841, and he gave Noah Webster as authority for it.
To funeralize and to missionate, along with consociational, were
contributions of the backwoods pulpit; perhaps it also produced hell-
roaring and hellion, the latter of which was a favorite of the
Mormons and even got into a sermon by Henry Ward Beecher. To
deacon, a verb of decent mien in colonial days, signifying to read a
hymn line by line, responded to the rough humor of the time, and
began to mean to swindle or adulterate, e. g., to put the largest
berries at the top of the box, to extend one's fences sub rosa, or to
mix sand with sugar. A great rage for extending the vocabulary by
the use of suffixes seized upon [Pg077] the corn-fed etymologists, and
they produced a formidable new vocabulary in -ize, -ate, -ify, -acy, -
ous and -ment. Such inventions as to obligate, to concertize, to
questionize, retiracy, savagerous, coatee (a sort of diminutive for
coat) and citified appeared in the popular vocabulary, and even got
into more or less good usage. Fowler, in 1850, cited publishment and
releasement with no apparent thought that they were uncouth. And
at the same time many verbs were made by the simple process of
back formation, as, to resurrect, to excurt, to resolute, to burgle[14]
and to enthuse.[15]
Some of these inventions, after flourishing for a generation or
more, were retired with blushes during the period of aesthetic
consciousness following the Civil War, but a large number have
survived to our own day, and are in good usage. Not even the most
bilious purist would think of objecting to to affiliate, to itemize, to
resurrect or to Americanize today, and yet all of them gave grief to
the judicious when they first appeared in the debates of Congress,
brought there by statesmen from the backwoods. Nor to such
simpler verbs of the period as to corner (i. e., the market), to boss
and to lynch.[16] Nor perhaps to to boom, to boost, to kick (in the
sense of to protest), to coast (on a sled), to engineer, to collide, to
chink (i. e., logs), to feaze, to splurge, to aggravate (in the sense of
to anger), to yank and to crawfish. These verbs have entered into
the very fibre of the American vulgate, and so have many nouns
derived from them, e. g., boomer, boom-town, bouncer, kicker, kick,
splurge, roller-coaster. A few of them, e. g., to collide and to feaze,
were [Pg078] archaic English terms brought to new birth; a few others,
e. g., to holler[17] and to muss, were obviously mere corruptions. But
a good many others, e. g., to bulldoze, to hornswoggle and to scoot,
were genuine inventions, and redolent of the soil.
With the new verbs came a great swarm of verb-phrases, some of
them short and pithy and others extraordinarily elaborate, but all
showing the true national talent for condensing a complex thought,
and often a whole series of thoughts, into a vivid and arresting
image. Of the first class are to fill the bill, to fizzle out, to make
tracks, to peter out, to plank down, to go back on, to keep tab, to
light out and to back water. Side by side with them we have
inherited such common coins of speech as to make the fur fly, to cut
a swath, to know him like a book, to keep a stiff upper lip, to cap
the climax, to handle without gloves, to freeze on to, to go it blind,
to pull wool over his eyes, to know the ropes, to get solid with, to
spread one's self, to run into the ground, to dodge the issue, to
paint the town red, to take a back seat and to get ahead of. These
are so familiar that we use them and hear them without thought;
they seem as authentically parts of the English idiom as to be left at
the post. And yet, as the labors of Thornton have demonstrated, all
of them are of American nativity, and the circumstances surrounding
the origin of some of them have been accurately determined. Many
others are palpably the products of the great movement toward the
West, for example, to pan out, to strike it rich, to jump or enter a
claim, to pull up stakes, to rope in, to die with one's boots on, to get
the deadwood on, to get the drop, to back and fill (a steamboat
phrase used figuratively) and to get the bulge on. And in many
others the authentic American is no less plain, for example, in to kick
the bucket, to put a bug in his [Pg079] ear, to see the elephant, to
crack up, to do up brown, to bark up the wrong tree, to jump on
with both feet, to go the whole hog, to make a kick, to buck the
tiger, to let it slide and to come out at the little end of the horn. To
play possum belongs to this list. To it Thornton adds to knock into a
cocked hat, despite its English sound, and to have an ax to grind. To
go for, both in the sense of belligerency and in that of partisanship,
is also American, and so is to go through (i. e., to plunder).
Of adjectives the list is scarcely less long. Among the coinages of
the first half of the century that are in good use today are non-
committal, highfalutin, well-posted, down-town, played-out, flat-
footed, whole-souled and true-blue. The first appears in a Senate
debate of 1841; highfalutin in a political speech of the same decade.
Both are useful words; it is impossible, not employing them, to
convey the ideas behind them without circumlocution. The use of
slim in the sense of meagre, as in slim chance, slim attendance and
slim support, goes back still further. The English use small in place of
it. Other, and less respectable contributions of the time are brash,
brainy, peart, locoed, pesky, picayune, scary, well-heeled, hardshell
(e. g., Baptist), low-flung, codfish (to indicate opprobrium) and go-
to-meeting. The use of plumb as an adjective, as in plumb crazy, is
an English archaism that was revived in the United States in the
early years of the century. In the more orthodox adverbial form of
plump it still survives, for example, in "she fell plump into his arms."
But this last is also good English.
The characteristic American substitution of mad for angry goes
back to the eighteenth century, and perhaps denotes the survival of
an English provincialism. Witherspoon noticed it and denounced it in
1781, and in 1816 Pickering called it "low" and said that it was not
used "except in very familiar conversation." But it got into much
better odor soon afterward, and by 1840 it passed unchallenged. Its
use is one of the peculiarities that Englishmen most quickly notice in
American colloquial speech today. In formal written discourse it is
less often encountered, probably because the English marking of it
has so conspicuously singled it out. But it is constantly met with
[Pg080] in the newspapers and in the Congressional Record, and it is

not infrequently used by such writers as Howells and Dreiser. In the

familiar simile, as mad as a hornet, it is used in the American sense.
But as mad as a March hare is English, and connotes insanity, not
mere anger. The English meaning of the word is preserved in mad-
house and mad-dog, but I have often noticed that American rustics,
employing the latter term, derive from it a vague notion, not that the
dog is demented, but that it is in a simple fury. From this notion,
perhaps, comes the popular belief that dogs may be thrown into
hydrophobia by teasing and badgering them.
It was not, however, among the verbs and adjectives that the
American word-coiners of the first half of the century achieved their
gaudiest innovations, but among the substantives. Here they had
temptation and excuse in plenty, for innumerable new objects and
relations demanded names, and here they exercised their fancy
without restraint. Setting aside loan words, which will be considered
later, three main varieties of new nouns were thus produced. The
first consisted of English words rescued from obsolescence or
changed in meaning, the second of compounds manufactured of the
common materials of the mother tongue, and the third of entirely
new inventions. Of the first class, good specimens are deck (of
cards), gulch, gully and billion, the first three old English words
restored to usage in America and the last a sound English word
changed in meaning. Of the second class, examples are offered by
gum-shoe, mortgage-shark, dug-out, shot-gun, stag-party, wheat-
pit, horse-sense, chipped-beef, oyster-supper, buzz-saw, chain-gang
and hell-box. And of the third there are instances in buncombe,
greaser, conniption, bloomer, campus, galoot, maverick, roustabout,
bugaboo and blizzard.
Of these coinages, perhaps those of the second class are most
numerous and characteristic. In them American exhibits one of its
most marked tendencies: a habit of achieving short cuts in speech
by a process of agglutination. Why explain laboriously, as an
Englishman might, that the notes of a new bank (in a day of
innumerable new banks) are insufficiently secure? Call [Pg081] them
wild-cat notes and have done! Why describe a gigantic rain storm
with the lame adjectives of everyday? Call it a cloud-burst and
immediately a vivid picture of it is conjured up. Rough-neck is a
capital word; it is more apposite and savory than the English navvy,
and it is overwhelmingly more American.[18] Square-meal is another.
Fire-eater is yet another. And the same instinct for the terse, the
eloquent and the picturesque is in boiled-shirt, blow-out, big-bug,
claim-jumper, spread-eagle, come-down, back-number, claw-
hammer (coat), bottom-dollar, poppy-cock, cold-snap, back-talk,
back-taxes, calamity-howler, cut-off, fire-bug, grab-bag, grip-sack,
grub-stake, pay-dirt, tender-foot, stocking-feet, ticket-scalper, store-
clothes, small-potatoes, cake-walk, prairie-schooner, round-up,
snake-fence, flat-boat, under-the-weather, on-the-hoof, and
jumping-off-place. These compounds (there must be thousands of
them) have been largely responsible for giving the language its
characteristic tang and color. Such specimens as bell-hop, semi-
occasional, chair-warmer and down-and-out are as distinctively
American as baseball or the quick-lunch.
The spirit of the language appears scarcely less clearly in some of
the coinages of the other classes. There are, for example, the
English words that have been extended or restricted in meaning,
e. g., docket (for court calendar), betterment (for improvement to
property), collateral (for security), crank (for fanatic), jumper (for
tunic), tickler (for memorandum or reminder),[19] carnival (in such
phrases as carnival of crime), scrape (for fight or difficulty),[20] flurry
(of snow, or in the market), suspenders, diggings (for habitation)
and range. Again, there are the new assemblings of English
materials, e. g., doggery, rowdy, teetotaler, goatee, tony and
cussedness. Yet again, there are the purely artificial words, e. g.,
sockdolager, hunkydory, scalawag, guyascutis, spondulix,
slumgullion, rambunctious, scrumptious, [Pg082] to skedaddle, to
absquatulate and to exfluncticate.[21] In the use of the last-named
coinages fashions change. In the 40's to absquatulate was in good
usage, but it has since disappeared. Most of the other inventions of
the time, however, have to some extent survived, and it would be
difficult to find an American of today who did not know the meaning
of scalawag and rambunctious and who did not occasionally use
them. A whole series of artificial American words groups itself
around the prefix ker, for example, ker-flop, ker-splash, ker-thump,
ker-bang, ker-plunk, ker-slam and ker-flummux. This prefix and its
onomatopoeic daughters have been borrowed by the English, but
Thornton and Ware agree that it is American. Its origin has not been
determined. As Sayce says, "the native instinct of language breaks
out wherever it has the chance, and coins words which can be
traced back to no ancestors."
In the first chapter I mentioned the superior imaginativeness
revealed by Americans in meeting linguistic emergencies, whereby,
for example, in seeking names for new objects introduced by the
building of railroads, they surpassed the English plough and
crossing-plate with cow-catcher and frog. That was in the 30's.
Already at that early day the two languages were so differentiated
that they produced wholly distinct railroad nomenclatures. Such
commonplace American terms as box-car, caboose, air-line and
ticket-agent are still quite unknown in England. So are freight-car,
flagman, towerman, switch, switching-engine, switch-yard,
switchman, track-walker, engineer, baggage-room, baggage-check,
baggage-smasher, accommodation-train, baggage-master,
conductor, express-car, flat-car, hand-car, way-bill, expressman,
express-office, fast-freight, wrecking-crew, jerk-water, commutation-
ticket, commuter, round-trip, mileage-book, ticket-scalper, depot,
limited, hot-box, iron-horse, stop-over, tie, rail, fish-plate, run, train-
boy, chair-car, club-car, diner, sleeper, bumpers, mail-clerk,
passenger-coach, day-coach, excursionist, [Pg083] excursion-train,
railroad-man, ticket-office, truck and right-of-way, not to mention
the verbs, to flag, to derail, to express, to dead-head, to side-swipe,
to stop-over, to fire (i. e., a locomotive), to switch, to side-track, to
railroad, to commute, to telescope and to clear the track. These
terms are in constant use in America; their meaning is familiar to all
Americans; many of them have given the language everyday figures
of speech.[22] But the majority of them would puzzle an Englishman,
just as the English luggage-van, permanent-way, goods-waggon,
guard, carrier, booking-office, return-ticket, railway-rug, R. S. O.
(railway sub-office), tripper, line, points, shunt, metals and bogie
would puzzle the average untravelled American.
In two other familiar fields very considerable differences between
English and American are visible; in both fields they go back to the
era before the Civil War. They are politics and that department of
social intercourse which has to do with drinking. Many characteristic
American political terms originated in revolutionary days, and have
passed over into English. Of such sort are caucus and mileage. But
the majority of those in common use today were coined during the
extraordinarily exciting campaigns following the defeat of Adams by
Jefferson. Charles Ledyard Norton has devoted a whole book to their
etymology and meaning;[23] the number is far too large for a list of
them to be attempted here. But a few characteristic specimens may
be recalled, for example, the simple agglutinates: omnibus-bill,
banner-state, favorite-son, anxious-bench, gag-rule, office-seeker
and straight-ticket; the humorous metaphors: pork-barrel, pie-
counter, wire-puller, land-slide, carpet-bagger, lame-duck and on the
fence; the old words put to new uses: plank, platform, machine,
precinct, slate, primary, floater, repeater, bolter, stalwart, filibuster,
regular and fences; the new coinages: gerrymander, heeler,
buncombe, roorback, mugwump and to bulldoze; the new
derivatives: abolitionist, candidacy, boss-rule, [Pg084] per-diem, to
lobby and boodler; and the almost innumerable verbs and verb-
phrases: to knife, to split a ticket, to go up Salt River, to bolt, to eat
crow, to boodle, to divvy, to grab and to run. An English candidate
never runs; he stands. To run, according to Thornton, was already
used in America in 1789; it was universal by 1820. Platform came in
at the same time. Machine was first applied to a political
organization by Aaron Burr. The use of mugwump is commonly
thought to have originated in the Blaine campaign of 1884, but it
really goes back to the 30's. Anxious-bench (or anxious-seat) at first
designated only the place occupied by the penitent at revivals, but
was used in its present political sense in Congress so early as 1842.
Banner-state appears in Niles' Register for December 5, 1840.
Favorite-son appears in an ode addressed to Washington on his visit
to Portsmouth, N. H., in 1789, but it did not acquire its present
ironical sense until it was applied to Martin Van Buren. Thornton has
traced bolter to 1812, filibuster to 1863, roorback to 1844, and split-
ticket to 1842. Regularity was an issue in Tammany Hall in 1822.[24]
There were primaries in New York city in 1827, and hundreds of
repeaters voted. In 1829 there were lobby-agents at Albany, and
they soon became lobbyists; in 1832 lobbying had already extended
to Washington. All of these terms are now as firmly imbedded in the
American vocabulary as election or congressman.
In the department of conviviality the imaginativeness of Americans
has been shown in both the invention and the naming of new and
often highly complex beverages. So vast has been the production of
novelties, in fact, that England has borrowed many of them, and
their names with them. And not only England: one buys cocktails
and gin-fizzes in "American bars" that stretch from Paris to
Yokohama. Cocktail, stone-fence and sherry-cobbler were mentioned
by Irving in 1809;[25] by Thackeray's day they were already well-
known in England. Thornton traces the sling to 1788, and the
stinkibus and anti-fogmatic, [Pg085] both now extinct, to the same
year. The origin of the rickey, fizz, sour, cooler, skin, shrub and
smash, and of such curious American drinks as the horse's neck,
Mamie Taylor, Tom-and-Jerry, Tom-Collins, John-Collins, bishop,
stone-wall, gin-fix, brandy-champarelle, golden-slipper, hari-kari,
locomotive, whiskey-daisy, blue-blazer, black-stripe, white-plush and
brandy-crusta is quite unknown; the historians of alcoholism, like the
philologists, have neglected them.[26] But the essentially American
character of most of them is obvious, despite the fact that a number
have gone over into English. The English, in naming their drinks,
commonly display a far more limited imagination. Seeking a name,
for example, for a mixture of whiskey and soda-water, the best they
could achieve was whiskey-and-soda. The Americans, introduced to
the same drink, at once gave it the far more original name of high-
ball. So with ginger-ale and ginger-pop. So with minerals and soft-
drinks. Other characteristic Americanisms (a few of them borrowed
by the English) are red-eye, corn-juice, eye-opener, forty-rod,
squirrel-whiskey, phlegm-cutter, moon-shine, hard-cider, apple-jack
and corpse-reviver, and the auxiliary drinking terms, speak-easy,
sample-room, blind-pig, barrel-house, bouncer, bung-starter, dive,
doggery, schooner, shell, stick, duck, straight, saloon, finger, pony
and chaser. Thornton shows that jag, bust, bat and to crook the
elbow are also Americanisms. So are bartender and saloon-keeper.
To them might be added a long list of common American synonyms
for drunk, for example, piffled, pifflicated, awry-eyed, tanked,
snooted, stewed, ossified, slopped, fiddled, edged, loaded, het-up,
frazzled, jugged, soused, jiggered, corned, jagged and bunned.
Farmer and Henley list corned and jagged among English synonyms,
but the former is obviously an Americanism derived from corn-
whiskey or corn-juice, and Thornton says that the latter originated
on this side of the Atlantic also. [Pg086]

§4

Loan-Words
—The Indians of the new West, it would seem, had little to add to
the contributions already made to the American vocabulary by the
Algonquins of the Northeast. The American people, by the beginning
of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, knew almost all
they were destined to know of the aborigine, and they had names
for all the new objects that he had brought to their notice and for
most of his peculiar implements and ceremonies. A few translated
Indian terms, e. g., squaw-man, big-chief, great-white-father and
happy-hunting ground, represent the meagre fresh stock that the
western pioneers got from him. Of more importance was the
suggestive and indirect effect of his polysynthetic dialects, and
particularly of his vivid proper names, e. g., Rain-in-the-Face, Young-
Man-Afraid-of-His-Wife and Voice-Like-Thunder. These names, and
other word-phrases like them, made an instant appeal to American
humor, and were extensively imitated in popular slang. One of the
surviving coinages of that era is Old-Stick-in-the-Mud, which Farmer
and Henley note as having reached England by 1823.
Contact with the French in Louisiana and along the Canadian
border, and with the Spanish in Texas and further West, brought
many more new words. From the Canadian French, as we have
already seen, prairie, batteau, portage and rapids had been
borrowed during colonial days; to these French contributions bayou,
picayune, levee, chute, butte, crevasse, and lagniappe were now
added, and probably also shanty and canuck. The use of brave to
designate an Indian warrior, almost universal until the close of the
Indian wars, was also of French origin.
 From the Spanish, once the Mississippi was crossed, and
particularly after the Mexican war, in 1846, there came a swarm of
novelties, many of which have remained firmly imbedded in the
language. Among them were numerous names of strange objects:
lariat, lasso, ranch, loco (weed), mustang, sombrero, canyon,
desperado, poncho, chapparel, corral, broncho, plaza, [Pg087] peon,
cayuse, burro, mesa, tornado, sierra and adobe. To them, as soon as
gold was discovered, were added bonanza, eldorado, placer and
vigilante. Cinch was borrowed from the Spanish cincha in the early
Texas days, though its figurative use did not come in until much
later. Ante, the poker term, though the etymologists point out its
obvious origin in the Latin, probably came into American from the
Spanish. Thornton's first example of its use in its current sense is
dated 1857, but Bartlett reported it in the form of anti in 1848.
Coyote came from the Mexican dialect of Spanish; its first parent
was the Aztec coyotl. Tamale had a similar origin, and so did frijole
and tomato. None of these is good Spanish.[27] As usual, derivatives
quickly followed the new-comers, among them peonage, broncho-
buster, ranchman and ranch-house, and the verbs to ranch, to lasso,
to corral, to ante up, and to cinch. To vamose (from the Spanish
vamos, let us go), came in at the same time. So did sabe. So did
gazabo.
This was also the period of the first great immigrations, and the
American people now came into contact, on a large scale, with
peoples of divergent race, particularly Germans, Irish Catholics from
the South of Ireland (the Irish of colonial days "were descendants of
Cromwell's army, and came from the North of Ireland"),[28] and, on
the Pacific Coast, Chinese. So early as the 20's the immigration to
the United States reached 25,000 in a year; in 1824 the Legislature
of New York, in alarm, passed a restrictive act.[29] The Know-Nothing
movement of the 50's need not concern us here. Suffice it to recall
that the immigration of 1845 passed the 100,000 mark, and that
that of 1854 came within sight of 500,000. These new Americans,
most of them Germans and Irish, did not all remain in the East; a
great many spread through the West and Southwest with the other
pioneers. Their effect upon the language was not large, [Pg088]
perhaps, but it was still very palpable, and not only in the
vocabulary. Of words of German origin, saurkraut and noodle, as we
have seen, had come in during the colonial period, apparently
through the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch, i. e., a mixture, much
debased, of the German dialects of Switzerland, Suabia and the
Palatinate. The new immigrants now contributed pretzel,
pumpernickel, hausfrau, lager-beer, pinocle, wienerwurst, dumb (for
stupid), frankfurter, bock-beer, schnitzel, leberwurst, blutwurst,
rathskeller, schweizer (cheese), delicatessen, hamburger (i. e.,
steak), kindergarten and katzenjammer.[30] From them, in all
probability, there also came two very familiar Americanisms, loafer
and bum. The former, according to the Standard Dictionary, is
derived from the German laufen; another authority says that it
originated in a German mispronounciation of lover, i. e., as lofer.[31]
Thornton shows that the word was already in common use in 1835.
Bum was originally bummer, and apparently derives from the
German bummler.[32] Both words have produced derivatives: loaf
(noun), to loaf, corner-loafer, common-loafer, to bum, bum (adj.)
and bummery, not to mention on the [Pg089] bum. Loafer has
migrated in England, but bum is still unknown there in the American
sense. In English, indeed, bum is used to designate an
unmentionable part of the body and is thus not employed in polite
discourse.
Another example of debased German is offered by the American
Kriss Kringle. It is from Christkindlein, or Christkind'l, and properly
designates, of course, not the patron saint of Christmas, but the
child in the manger. A German friend tells me that the form Kriss
Kringle, which is that given in the Standard Dictionary, and the form
Krisking'l, which is that most commonly used in the United States,
are both quite unknown in Germany. Here, obviously, we have an
example of a loan-word in decay. Whole phrases have gone through
the same process, for example, nix come erous (from nichts kommt
heraus) and 'rous mit 'im (from heraus mit ihm). These phrases, like
wie geht's and ganz gut, are familiar to practically all Americans, no
matter how complete their ignorance of correct German. Most of
them know, too, the meaning of gesundheit, kümmel, seidel,
wanderlust, stein, speck, maennerchor, schützenfest, sängerfest,
turnverein, hoch, yodel, zwieback, and zwei (as in zwei bier). I have
found snitz (=schnitz) in Town Topics.[33] Prosit is in all American
dictionaries.[34] Bower, as used in cards, is an Americanism derived
from the German bauer, meaning the jack. The exclamation, ouch! is
classed as an Americanism by Thornton, and he gives an example
dated 1837. The New English Dictionary refers it to the German
autsch, and Thornton says that "it may have come across with the
Dunkers or the Mennonites." Ouch is not heard in English, save in
the sense of a clasp or buckle set with precious stones (=OF
nouche), and even in that sense it is archaic. Shyster is very
probably German also; Thornton has traced it back to the 50's.[35]
Rum-dumb is grounded upon the [Pg090] meaning of dumb borrowed
from the German; it is not listed in the English slang dictionaries.[36]
Bristed says that the American meaning of wagon, which indicates
almost any four-wheeled, horse-drawn vehicle in this country but
only the very heaviest in England, was probably influenced by the
German wagen. He also says that the American use of hold on for
stop was suggested by the German halt an, and White says that the
substitution of standpoint for point of view, long opposed by all
purists, was first made by an American professor who sought "an
Anglicized form" of the German standpunkt. The same German
influence may be behind the general facility with which American
forms compound nouns. In most other languages, for example, Latin
and French, the process is rare, and even English lags far behind
American. But in German it is almost unrestricted. "It is," says L. P.
Smith, "a great step in advance toward that ideal language in which
meaning is expressed, not by terminations, but by the simple
method of word position."
The immigrants from the South of Ireland, during the period under
review, exerted an influence upon the language that was vastly
greater than that of the Germans, both directly and indirectly, but
their contributions to the actual vocabulary were probably less. They
gave American, indeed, relatively few new words; perhaps shillelah,
colleen, spalpeen, smithereens and poteen exhaust the unmistakably
Gaelic list. Lallapalooza is also probably an Irish loan-word, though it
is not Gaelic. It apparently comes from allay-foozee, a Mayo
provincialism, signifying a sturdy fellow. Allay-foozee, in its turn,
comes from the French Allez-fusil, meaning "Forward the
muskets!"—a memory, [Pg091] according to P. W. Joyce,[37] of the
French landing at Killala in 1798. Such phrases as Erin go bragh and
such expletives as begob and begorry may perhaps be added: they
have got into American, though they are surely not distinctive
Americanisms. But of far more importance than these few
contributions to the vocabulary were certain speech habits that the
Irish brought with them—habits of pronunciation, of syntax and even
of grammar. These habits were, in part, the fruit of efforts to
translate the idioms of Gaelic into English, and in part borrowings
from the English of the age of James I. The latter, preserved by Irish
conservatism in speech,[38] came into contact in America with habits
surviving, with more or less change, from the same time, and so
gave those American habits an unmistakable reinforcement. The
Yankees, so to speak, had lived down such Jacobean pronunciations
as tay for tea and desave for deceive, and these forms, on Irish lips,
struck them as uncouth and absurd, but they still clung, in their
common speech, to such forms as h'ist for hoist, bile for boil, chaw
for chew, jine for join,[39] sass for sauce, heighth for height and
rench for rinse and lep for leap, and the employment of precisely the
same forms by the thousands of Irish immigrants who spread
through the country undoubtedly gave them a certain support, and
so protected them, in a measure, from the assault of the purists.
And the same support was given to drownded for drowned, oncet
for once, ketch for catch, ag'in for against and onery for ordinary.
[Pg092]

Certain usages of Gaelic, carried over into the English of Ireland,

fell upon fertile soil in America. One was the employment of the
definite article before nouns, as in French and German. An Irishman
does not say "I am good at Latin," but "I am good at the Latin." In
the same way an American does not say "I had measles," but "I had
the measles." There is, again, the use of the prefix a before various
adjectives and gerunds, as in a-going and a-riding. This usage, of
course, is native to English, as aboard and afoot demonstrate, but it
is much more common in the Irish dialect, on account of the
influence of the parallel Gaelic form, as in a-n-aice=a-near, and it is
also much more common in American. There is, yet again, a use of
intensifying suffixes, often set down as characteristically American,
which was probably borrowed from the Irish. Examples are no-siree
and yes-indeedy, and the later kiddo and skiddoo. As Joyce shows,
such suffixes, in Irish-English, tend to become whole phrases. The
Irishman is almost incapable of saying plain yes or no; he must
always add some extra and gratuitous asseveration.[40] The
American is in like case. His speech bristles with intensives: bet your
life, not on your life, well I guess, and no mistake, and so on. The
Irish extravagance of speech struck a responsive chord in the
American heart. The American borrowed, not only occasional words,
but whole phrases, and some of them have become thoroughly
naturalized. Joyce, indeed, shows the Irish origin of scores of
locutions that are now often mistaken for native Americanisms, for
example, great shakes, dead (as an intensive), thank you kindly, to
split one's sides (i. e., laughing), and the tune the old cow died of,
not to mention many familiar similes and proverbs. Certain Irish
pronunciations, Gaelic rather than archaic English, got into American
during the nineteenth century. Among them, one recalls bhoy, which
entered our political slang in the middle 40's and survived into our
own time. Again, there is the very characteristic American word
ballyhoo, signifying [Pg093] the harangue of a ballyhoo-man, or spieler
(that is, barker) before a cheap show, or, by metaphor, any noisy
speech. It is from Ballyhooly, the name of a village in Cork, once
notorious for its brawls. Finally, there is shebang. Schele de Vere
derives it from the French cabane, but it seems rather more likely
that it is from the Irish shebeen.
The propagation of Irishisms in the United States was helped,
during many years, by the enormous popularity of various dramas of
Irish peasant life, particularly those of Dion Boucicault. So recently
as 1910 an investigation made by the Dramatic Mirror showed that
some of his pieces, notably "Kathleen Mavourneen," "The Colleen
Bawn" and "The Shaugraun," were still among the favorites of
popular audiences. Such plays, at one time, were presented by
dozens of companies, and a number of Irish actors, among them
Andrew Mack, Chauncey Olcott and Boucicault himself, made
fortunes appearing in them. An influence also to be taken into
account is that of Irish songs, once in great vogue. But such
influences, like the larger matter of American borrowings from
Anglo-Irish, remain to be investigated. So far as I have been able to
discover, there is not a single article in print upon the subject. Here,
as elsewhere, our philologists have wholly neglected a very
interesting field of inquiry.
From other languages the borrowings during the period of growth
were naturally less. Down to the last decades of the nineteenth
century, the overwhelming majority of immigrants were either
Germans or Irish; the Jews, Italians and Slavs were yet to come. But
the first Chinese appeared in 1848, and soon their speech began to
contribute its inevitable loan-words. These words, of course, were
first adopted by the miners of the Pacific Coast, and a great many of
them have remained California localisms, among them such verbs as
to yen (to desire strongly, as a Chinaman desires opium) and to flop-
flop (to lie down), and such nouns as fun, a measure of weight. But
a number of others have got into the common speech of the whole
country, e. g., fan-tan, kow-tow, chop-suey, ginseng, joss, yok-a-mi
and tong. Contrary to the popular opinion, dope and hop are not
from the Chinese. [Pg094] Neither, in fact, is an Americanism, though
the former has one meaning that is specially American, i. e., that of
information or formula, as in racing-dope and to dope out. Most
etymologists derive the word from the Dutch doop, a sauce. In
English, as in American, it signifies a thick liquid, and hence the
viscous cooked opium. Hop is simply the common name of the
Humuluslupulus. The belief that hops have a soporific effect is very
ancient, and hop-pillows were brought to America by the first
English colonists.
The derivation of poker, which came into American from California
in the days of the gold rush, has puzzled etymologists. It is
commonly derived from primero, the name of a somewhat similar
game, popular in England in the sixteenth century, but the relation
seems rather fanciful. It may possibly come, indirectly, from the
Danish word pokker, signifying the devil. Pokerish, in the sense of
alarming, was a common adjective in the United States before the
Civil War; Thornton gives an example dated 1827. Schele de Vere
says that poker, in the sense of a hobgoblin, was still in use in 1871,
but he derives the name of the game from the French poche
(=pouche, pocket). He seems to believe that the bank or pool, in the
early days, was called the poke. Barrère and Leland, rejecting all
these guesses, derive poker from the Yiddish pochger, which comes
in turn from the verb pochgen, signifying to conceal winnings or
losses. This pochgen is obviously related to the German pocher
(=boaster, braggart). There were a good many German Jews in
California in the early days, and they were ardent gamblers. If
Barrère and Leland are correct, then poker enjoys the honor of being
the first loan-word taken into American from the Yiddish.

§5

Pronunciation
—Noah Webster, as we saw in the last chapter, sneered at the broad
a, in 1789, as an Anglomaniac affectation. In the course of the next
25 years, however, he seems to have suffered a radical change of
mind, for in "The American Spelling Book," published in 1817, he
ordained it in ask, last, mass, aunt, [Pg095] grant, glass and their
analogues, and in his 1829 revision he clung to this pronunciation,
beside adding master, pastor, amass, quaff, laugh, craft, etc., and
even massive. There is some difficulty, however, in determining just
what sound he proposed to give the a, for there are several a-
sounds that pass as broad, and the two main ones differ
considerably. One appears in all, and may be called the aw-sound.
The other is in art, and may be called the ah-sound. A quarter of a
century later Richard Grant White distinguished between the two,
and denounced the former as "a British peculiarity." Frank H.
Vizetelly, writing in 1917, still noted the difference, particularly in
such words as daunt, saunter and laundry. It is probable that
Webster, in most cases, intended to advocate the ah-sound, as in
father, for this pronunciation now prevails in New England. Even
there, however, the a often drops to a point midway between ah and
aa, though never actually descending to the flat aa, as in an, at and
anatomy.
But the imprimatur of the Yankee Johnson was not potent enough
to stay the course of nature, and, save in New England, the flat a
swept the country. He himself allowed it in stamp and vase. His
successor and rival, Lyman Cobb, decided for it in pass, draft, stamp
and dance, though he kept to the ah-sound in laugh, path, daunt
and saunter. By 1850 the flat a was dominant everywhere West of
the Berkshires and South of New Haven, and had even got into such
proper names as Lafayette and Nevada.[41]
Webster failed in a number of his other attempts to influence
American pronunciation. His advocacy of deef for deaf had popular
support while he lived, and he dredged up authority for it out of
Chaucer and Sir William Temple, but the present pronunciation
gradually prevailed, though deef remains familiar in the common
speech. Joseph E. Worcester and other rival lexicographers stood
against many of his pronunciations, and he took the field against
them in the prefaces to the successive editions of his spelling-books.
Thus, in that to "The Elementary Spelling [Pg096] Book," dated 1829,
he denounced the "affectation" of inserting a y-sound before the u in
such words as gradual and nature, with its compensatory change of
d into a French j and of t into ch. The English lexicographer, John
Walker, had argued for this "affectation" in 1791, but Webster's
prestige, while he lived, remained so high in some quarters that he
carried the day, and the older professors at Yale, it is said, continued
to use natur down to 1839.[42] He favored the pronunciation of
either and neither as ee-ther and nee-ther, and so did most of the
English authorities of his time. The original pronunciation of the first
syllable, in England, probably made it rhyme with bay, but the ee-
sound was firmly established by the end of the eighteenth century.
Toward the middle of the following century, however, there arose a
fashion of an ai-sound, and this affectation was borrowed by certain
Americans. Gould, in the 50's, put the question, "Why do you say i-
ther and ni-ther?" to various Americans. The reply he got was: "The
words are so pronounced by the best-educated people in England."
This imitation still prevails in the cities of the East. "All of us," says
Lounsbury, "are privileged in these latter days frequently to witness
painful struggles put forth to give to the first syllable of these words
the sound of i by those who have been brought up to give it the
sound of e. There is apparently an impression on the part of some
that such a pronunciation establishes on a firm foundation an
otherwise doubtful social standing."[43] But the vast majority of
Americans continue to say ee-ther and not eye-ther. White and
Vizetelly, like Lounsbury, argue that they are quite correct in so
doing. The use of eye-ther, says White, is no more than "a copy of a
second-rate British affectation."
 FOOTNOTES:
[1] In Studies in History; Boston, 1884.
[2] Benson J. Lossing: Our Country....; New York, 1879.
[3] The thing went, indeed, far beyond mere hope. In 1812 a conspiracy was
unearthed to separate New England from the republic and make it an
English colony. The chief conspirator was one John Henry, who acted
under the instructions of Sir John Craig, Governor-General of Canada.
[4] Maine was not separated from Massachusetts until 1820.
[5] Vide Andrew Jackson...., by William Graham Sumner; Boston, 1883, pp.
2-10.
[6] Indiana and Illinois were erected into territories during Jefferson's first
term, and Michigan during his second term. Kentucky was admitted to
the union in 1792, Tennessee in 1796, Ohio in 1803. Lewis and Clark set
out for the Pacific in 1804. The Louisiana Purchase was ratified in 1803,
and Louisiana became a state in 1812.
[7] Barrett Wendell: A Literary History of America; New York, 1900.
[8] "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes
to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue?"
Edinburgh Review, Jan., 1820.
[9] Cf. As Others See Us, by John Graham Brooks; New York, 1908, ch. vii.
Also, The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. i, pp. 205-8.
[10] Our Dictionaries and Other English Language Topics; New York, 1890,
pp. 30-31.
[11] It is curious to note that the center of population of the United States,
according to the last census, is now "in southern Indiana, in the western
part of Bloomington city, Monroe county." Can it be that this early
declaration of literary independence laid the foundation for Indiana's
recent pre-eminence in letters? Cf. The Language We Use, by Alfred Z.
Reed, New York Sun, March 13, 1918.
[12] Support also came from abroad. Czar Nicholas I, of Russia, smarting
under his defeat in the Crimea, issued an order that his own state
papers should be prepared in Russian and American—not English.
[13] A Plea for the Queen's English; London, 1863; 2nd ed., 1864; American
ed., New York, 1866.
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