The Making of American
A Dictionary of American English, On Historical Principles. Edited by Sir 1191liam Craigie and James R. Hulbert. Part I, A —Baggage . (Chicago University Press : Oxford University Press. 1 7s.) IT was first announced in 1924 that the University of Chicago Would undertake the project of an American Dictionary which should be in scale and authority a counterpart to the Oxford
English Dictionary. And now after eleven years of labour, this first part (of a work which will end with its twentieth) disposes once for all of transatlantic bickering, fear of contamination, and the hot suspicion that the American language was something wickedly thought up as a hoax by Mr. Meneken in his Baltimore den. Sir William Craigie and his workers have no thesis, propose no argument. They set out merely to compile a dictionary of American English. But the doubters on this side of the Atlantic, who always suppose that Americanisms came in with the talkies, or anyway not much earlier than their undergraduate days, will probably feel that Sir William's fatal dagger (conclusively marking words or phrases " originated in the United States ") stabs hard in their heart, deeper than their memory. When Thornton or Mr. Meneken present their evidence, our reviewers protest that they are " claiming " a word or mis-dating phrase. But. Sir William is not suggesting, he is simply telling you that " Americanisms which have passed into general use and are now common in the English of Great Britain and the world at large . . . are far more numerous than might be supposed . . . one might readily suspect a number of them, such as bogus, boom, boss, but no one unacquainted with the subject wouja be inclined to add census, immigrant, loafer, schooner, wallpaper. law-abiding, to belittle, to cave in, to clear out, once in a while, time and again, &e., &c." "Yet," adds Sir William. with no mercy at all, " the evidence for these, and many more, is quite conclusive."
In the present volume, identical in format and inexhaustible reference with the Oxford Dictionary, there are many painful surprises for those " unacquainted with the subject " : for instance, arm-bond, anaesthetic, advance (of troops), aboriginal, an axe to grind, anything else, about right, to go ahead. The phrase getting along particularly hurt British visitors befween 1830 and 1850, Anthony Trollope's mother remarking, . . . but I was then new to Western America, and unaccus- tomed to their mode of ' getting along,' as they term it." Even the word awful, conventional for many English genera- tions now as an emotive adjective, infuriated one J. Lambert as long ago as 1813, for he scribbled in his travel diary, " Every thing that creates surprise is awful with them ; what an awful wind ! awful hole ! awful hill ! awful nose ! ' " And nine years later it was new and odd enough to Charles Lamb to require the usual tag : She is indeed, as the Americans would express it, awful." It is still funny that we should " suspect" Americanisms when long before we were threatened by their advances we had cheerfully accepted anything from Greek to Norman French, Dutch to Hindustani, had wallowed in mis-matings and allowed in our own home all sorts of incestuous goings-on " which," as Daniel noted with a relieved embarrassment in 1599, " come ever amplify'd with th' abounding humours that do :multiply." It is good and apt that a monumental work of scholarship should be dedicated with this poem, which Opens. " And do not thou contemn this swelling .tide, and stream of words."
The editors confess that to canalise this particular tidal wave is " impracticable at the present time." They therefore set themselves two principles of selection to exhibit clearly " those features by which the English of the American colonies and the United States is distinguished from that of England and the rest of the English-speaking world " ; and to collect and document words or phrases of " clearly American origin," and also " every word:denoting something which has a real connexion with the -development of the country and the history of its people?': If these 'Mucked and fifty pages are typical of the two- thousand odd that are to follow, it is evident that the editors have done nobly by their principles, apart from any incidental
wealth of information, anecdote, humour, their excavations dig up. For a student coming fresh to the subject would learn first, from - this volume, 'precisely- what the editors wished to illustrate. On the showing anly.of words beginning with A he .would discover the tricky variety of - American legal names, the extent of the Spanish legacy in American, the importance of the apple in colonial cooking, the un-Etiropean mode of household geography—arcade, apart- ment, annex, adobe. He would encounter the common difficulty of understanding the description of natural scenery in a language which specifies so many plants and birds and trees he does not know, in a country where the arm and artery of a river are essential d:itinctions. He would find certain familiar words now disqualified for general use in America, because they recall too vividly or stormily a single historical practice or incident—words like abolitionist, appropriation, annexationist. Turning from that last word, a page or two ahead, he would note the endless anti-3, the certain clean division of American opinion on any major question into two parties, a habit rooted enough to produce the noun, anti.
On the second count, there are hundreds of moving illus- trations to the life and development of the people ; often the colour or pathos is in the accidental juxtaposition of rAerenoes. Two examples must suffice. The prefix back multiplies many Americanisms now familiar enough, from backwoods, to backbone (strength of character), take a back seat, and a back number (it is a shock that the literal as well as the figurative sense was a native coining). And these will soon embroil him in seventeenth-century dialect which is now educated contemporary usage, as in back of for behind. And he may finally settle on an unknown word—back country, and from that article begin to sense the depths and mists of association that that word possesses for Americans. Secondly, three references on anaesthesia are landmarks of social history, tell with a firmer pathos than a novel the gallantry of a man who had no idea he was about to put posterity in his debt.
In November, 1846, Holmes writing to Morton, outlining the researches which led to the first administering of ether, at Massachusetts General Hospital, timidly says, " The state produced should, I think, be called anaesthesia. This signifies insensibility.. . . The adjective will be anaesthetic. Perhaps it might be allowable to say 'anaesthetic agent.' ; but this admits of doubt."
In September, 1865, Harper's Magazine is quoted : " A meeting of Boston dentists was called . . . to make a formal protest against anaesthesia?'
Two issues later, it'is the date that comes suddenly poignant, with the simple sentence, " Dr. Morton has attended the principal battlefields, administering anaesthetics with his
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