American Language Supplement 1 Page 3

  Witherspoon’s second category of errors consisted of “vulgarisms in England and America” and his third of “vulgarisms in America only.” Among the former he listed an’t (now ain’t), can’t, han’t (now haven’t),1 don’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t, knowed for knew, see for saw, this here, that there, drownded, gownd, fellar, waller for wallow, winder for window, on ’em for of ’em, lay for lie, thinks in the first person singular, has for have, as following equally, most highest, had fell, had rose, had spoke, had wrote, had broke, had threw, had drew, sat out for set out, and as how. Most of these are common vulgarisms, discussed in Chapter IX of AL4. The astonishing thing is that Witherspoon reported them in use by “gentlemen and scholars” in America. “There is great plenty,” he said, “to be found everywhere in writing and conversation. They need very little explication, and indeed would scarcely deserve to be mentioned in a discourse of this nature were it not for the circumstance … that scholars and public persons are at less pains to avoid them here than in Britain.” Apparently the American politicians of those days, encountered by Witherspoon in the New Jersey constitutional convention, in the Continental Congress and on the stump, were as careless of their parts of speech as those of today — and no doubt as calculatingly so. As for can’t, don’t, shouldn’t, wouldn’t and couldn’t, they are obviously quite sound in both English and American. As for ain’t, it is apparently coming into countenance in the United States, even among pedagogues.

  Witherspoon’s list of “vulgarisms in America only” was thus set forth in the second of his “Druid” papers:

  1. I have not done it yet, but am just going to. This is an imperfect construction; it wants the words do it. Imperfect constructions are the blemish of the English language in general, and rather more frequent in this country than in England.

  2. It is partly all gone, it is mostly all gone. This is an absurdity or barbarism, as well as a vulgarism.

  3. This is the weapon with which he defends himself when he is attacted, for attacked; or according to the abbreviation, attack’d.

  4. As I told Mr. —–, for as I told you, I hope Mr. —– is well this morning — What is Mr. —’s opinion upon this subject? This way of speaking to one who is present in the third person, and as if he were absent, is used in this country by way of respect. No such thing is done in Britain, except that to persons of very high rank, they say your Majesty, your Grace, your Lordship; yet even there the continuance of the discourse in the third person is not customary.

  5. I have been to Philadelphia, for at or in Philadelphia; I have been to dinner, for I have dined.

  6. Walk in the house, for into the house.

  7. You have no right to pay it, where right is used for what logicians would call the correlative term obligation.

  8. A spell of sickness, a long spell, a bad spell. Perhaps this word is borrowed from the sea dialect.

  9. Every of these states, every of them, every of us; for every one. I believe the word every is used in this manner in some old English writers, and also in some old laws, but not in modern practice. The thing is also improper, because it should be every one to make it strictly a partitive and subject to the same construction as some of them, part of them, many of them, &c., yet it must be acknowledged that there is no greater impropriety, if so great, in the vulgar construction of every than in another expression very common in both countries, viz., all of them.

  At the end of this list Witherspoon charged, as in the case of the other list, that even the worst barbarisms on it were affected in his day by Americans of condition. He ascribed this habit to a desire to avoid “bombast and empty swelling,” and though he did not say so, I suspect again that a desire to curry favor with voters may have had something to do with it. The first of his caveats has certainly not disposed of the elision he condemns: “I have not done it yet, but I am just going to” is perfectly good American idiom at this moment. So is “I have been to Philadelphia.” So is the free use of spell to designate a stretch of time or action. The DAE traces the latter, in the form of “a spell of weather,” to 1705: it was not encountered in England until 1808. In the more general sense, as in “I’ll continue a spell,” it goes back to 1745, and in the form of “a spell of sickness” to 1806. It must be remembered that the DAE’s examples do not always show the first actual use; all they indicate is the first printed use encountered by its searchers. The forms denounced by Witherspoon in his fourth and ninth counts are now extinct, but those mentioned in his second and seventh still survive in the vulgar speech, and so does attacted or attackted.

  His fourth list, devoted to “local phrases or terms,” shows that, despite his statement that the Americans of his time were not “liable to local peculiarities either in accent or phraseology,” there were still differences in regional dialect. He offers, unfortunately, but seven examples, so his list is not very illuminating. Three are ascribed to New England or “the northern parts”: the use of considerable as a general indicator of quality or quantity, the use of occasion as a substitute for opportunity, and the use of to improve in such a sentence as “He improved the horse for ten days,” meaning he rode it. The DAE says that this use of considerable is old in English, and the NED cites an example from Hobbes’s “Leviathan,” 1651. But the Americans seem to have employed the adjective much more freely than the English, and may have originated its application to material things, as in considerable snow and considerable money. Combined with of, as in considerable of a shock, it appears to be clearly American. The other New Englandisms that Witherspoon mentions survive only in rural dialects. He offers two specimens of “improprieties” from the South and two from the middle colonies. The former are raw salad for salad and the verb to tote, which he spells tot. Raw salad does not appear in the DAE, but to tote goes back to the Seventeenth Century, and is still in wide use. It is, in fact, a perfectly good word. Witherspoon’s two examples from the middle colonies are chunk, in the sense of a half-burned piece of wood, and once in a while in the sense of occasionally, as in “He will once in a while get drunk.” Chunk is but little used in English, but it is very familiar in American, and in many senses indicating a thick object. Once in a while for occasionally was apparently a novelty in Witherspoon’s day, for the DAE’s first example of it is taken from his denunciation of it. It is still somewhat rare in English, but in American it has long been perfectly sound idiom.

  Witherspoon’s fifth category of Americanisms is made up of “common blunders through ignorance.” The first is the misuse of eminent for imminent, and he follows with the misuse of ingenious for ingenuous, successfully for successively, intelligible for intelligent, confisticate for confiscate, fictious for fictitious, susceptive for susceptible, veracity for credibility, detect for dissect, scrimitch for skirmish, duplicit as an adjective from duplicity, and rescind for recede. Most of these must have been rarely encountered among educated persons, even in Witherspoon’s day. He says specifically, however, that one of them, the substitution of veracity for credibility, was “not a blunder in conversation, but in speaking and writing.” The example he gives is “I have some doubt of the veracity of this fact.” Well, why not? Veracity has been used as a synonym of truth by some of the best English authors, including Samuel Johnson. In fact, the NED’s second definition of it is “agreement of statement or report with the actual fact or facts; accordance with truth; correctness, accuracy.” As for scrimitch, it is obviously only a bad reporting of scrimmage, not a manhandling of skirmish. In the precise sense of skirmish it goes back in English to the Fifteenth Century. In America it was in common use during the Revolution, and since the post-Civil War period it has been made familiar as a football term, often used figuratively in the general speech. Witherspoon, in fact, had a bad ear, and not only missed many salient Americanisms, but reported others that probably did not exist. He was archetypical of the academic bigwigs of his day, and showed many of the weaknesses that have since marked the American schoolma’am.

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nbsp; His sixth class of improprieties consists of “cant phrases introduced into public speaking or composition.” Most of them are what we would now call slang, e.g., to take in (to swindle), to bilk, to bite (to swindle), quite the thing, not the thing, to bamboozle, to sham Abraham. All of these save to sham Abraham (a sailor’s locution, meaning to pretend illness) are now in common use, and not one of them originated in America. Witherspoon, always prissy, reproved Johnson for admitting to bamboozle to the Dictionary, but he was nevertheless intelligent enough to see that the fate of a word is not determined by lexicographers, but by public opinion. “It is first,” he said, “a cant phrase; secondly, a vulgarism; thirdly, an idiom of the language. Some expire in one or other of the two first [sic] stages; but if they outlive these they are established forever.… I think topsy-turvy and upside-down have very nearly attained the same privilege.”

  He was right about both. Topsy-turvy, as a matter of fact, had been in familiar use in England since the early Sixteenth Century, and today not even the most fanatical purist would think of questioning it. Upside-down is two centuries older, and quite as respectable. It appeared in the Coverdale Bible, 1535, and occurs five times in the Authorized Version.1 It was used by Chaucer, Gower, Spenser and Addison, and got into the Encyclopedia Britannica ten years after Witherspoon discussed it.

  His seventh and last category comprises “personal blunders, that is to say, effects of ignorance and want of precision in an author, which are properly his own and not reducible to any of the heads above mentioned.”2 These throw a revealing light upon the sad state of American writing in 1781, but have little to do with the subject of Americanisms. His examples are:

  1. The members of a popular government should be continually availed of the situation and condition of every part.

  2. A degree of dissentions and oppositions under some circumstances, and a political lethargy under others, impend certain ruin to a free state.

  3. I should have let your performance sink into silent disdain.

  4. He is a man of most accomplished abilities.

  5. I have a total objection against this measure.

  6. An axiom as well established as any Euclid ever demonstrated.

  Witherspoon hints that he found these in the political writing of the time. All they show is that when the primeval American politicians tried to imitate the bow-wow manner of their elegant opposite numbers in England, they sometimes came to grief. In fact, they still do. No. 6, I suspect, was introduced mainly to show off Witherspoon’s own learning. It must have been a considerable satisfaction for a president of Princeton to be able to inform a non-academic publicist that Euclid “never demonstrated axioms, but took them for granted.”3

  Witherspoon’s account of the Americanisms prevailing in his day must be received with some caution, for he was a Scotsman and had never lived in London. Wyld shows in “A History of Modern Colloquial English” that not a few of the words, phrases and pronunciations that he denounced in America were commonly heard in the best English society of the time. Mathews, below cited, reprints two letters from readers that appeared in the Pennsylvania Journal in June, 1781, commenting upon the “Druid” articles. The first, published June 20, was signed X and included the following additional list of alleged Americanisms:

  Manured for inured.

  Bony-fidely for bona fide.

  Scant-baked and slack-baked, meaning deficient in understanding.

  Sarten for certainly.

  Nice for handsome.

  E’en amost and e’en just for almost.

  Tarnal for eternal.

  Grand for excellent.

  Keount for count.

  Keow for cow.

  Darn for d—–d.

  To swear e’en amost like a woodpile.

  Power for multitude.

  To these the writer appended a “speech said to have been made by a member of an important public body, soon after the evacuation of Ticonderoga,” as follows:

  General Clear behaved with great turpitude at the vacation of Ty; Gen. Burgoyne shot language at our people, thinking thereby to intimate them; but it only served to astimate them, for they took up the very dientical language, and shot it back again at the innimy and did great persecution; for their wounds purified immediately.

  This anticipation of the later struggles of colored preachers with hard words (a favorite subject of American humor in the 1850–1900 period) is scarcely, of course, worth recording, save perhaps as an indicator of the primitiveness of philological discussion in that era. It is, indeed, not at all impossible that the whole communication was intended to be a sort of burlesque of Witherspoon. Manured for inured is not listed in the DAE, and probably was never in use. Nor does the DAE list bony-fidely, scant-baked or slack-baked. Sarten, as an illiterate or dialectical form of certain, goes back to the Fifteenth Century, and still survives in the speech of Appalachia.1 Nice for handsome is encountered in many English dialects, and tarnal lives on in various American dialects.2 Grand in the sense of excellent is now almost good American; set beside swell, indeed, it takes on a certain elegance. Power, in the sense of a multitude, was used by Thomas Fuller in “The Worthies of England,” c. 1661, and retained such respectability in England until 1803 that it appeared in “Thaddeus of Warsaw,” published in that year by the refined lady author, Jane Porter. As for a’most, Wyld shows1 that it was commonly heard in England, even in good society, in the early Eighteenth Century. It was listed without objection in a work on phonology published by one Jones, a Welshman, in 1701. Many other words in which l follows a, at that time, dropped the l, for example, almanac, falter, falcon, and the proper nouns, Talbot, Walter and Falmouth.

  The second letter to the Pennsylvania Journal on Witherspoon’s “Druid” papers was signed Quercus, and consisted mainly of frank spoofing of the learned and rev. grammarian on his own failings in English. There were, in fact, many slips in his four articles, especially misplacings of only, as in “The poor man only meant to say,” and a certain shakiness in number, as in “The scholars … write all their life afterward.” Good Witherspoon, in truth, was not only the first American writer on “correct” English, but also a shining exemplar of the failings of the whole fraternity, now so numerous, for it is a lamentable fact that but one book on “good” writing has ever been written by an author of any recognized capacity as a writer. That exception was by Ambrose Bierce — and his “Write It Right,” published in 1909, was so pedantic and misleading as to be worse than most of the treatises of the pedagogues.

  7. [John Adams wrote to the president of Congress from Amsterdam on September 5, 1780, suggesting that Congress set up an academy for “correcting, improving and ascertaining the English language.”] This was not the first proposal of the sort. In the January 1774, issue of the Royal American Magazine, a writer signing him self An American published a short article suggesting the organization of what he called the Fellows of the American Society of Language. Krapp hazards the opinion that An American was probably Adams, and I am inclined to agree. Most of the text of the letter is given in AL4, p. 8. The rest follows:

  I conceive that such a society might easily be established, and that great advantages would thereby accrue to science, and consequently America would make swifter advances to the summit of learning. It is perhaps impossible for us to form an idea of the perfection, the beauty, the grandeur, and sublimity to which our language may arrive in the progress of time, passing through the improving tongues of our rising posterity, whose aspiring minds, fired by our example and ardor for glory, may far surpass all the sons of science who have shone in past ages, and may light up the world with new ideas bright as the sun.1

  Adams’s letter to the president of Congress, omitting the first paragraph, was as follows:

  Most of the nations of Europe have thought it necessary to establish by public authority institutions for fixing and improving their proper languages. I need not mention the academies in France, Spain, and Italy, their learned labor
s, nor their great success. But it is very remarkable, that although many learned and ingenious men in England have from age to age projected similar institutions for correcting and improving the English tongue, yet the government have never found time to interpose in any manner; so that to this day there is no grammar nor dictionary extant of the English language which has the least public authority; and it is only very lately that a tolerable dictionary has been published, even by a private person, and there is not yet a passable grammar enterprised by any individual.

  The honor of forming the first public institution for refining, correcting, improving, and ascertaining2 the English language, I hope is reserved for congress; they have every motive that can possibly influence a public assembly to undertake it. It will have a happy effect upon the union of the States to have a public standard for all persons in every part of the continent to appeal to, both for the signification and pronunciation of the language. The constitutions of all the States in the Union are so democratical that eloquence will become the instrument for recommending men to their fellow-citizens, and the principal means of advancement through the various ranks and offices of society.

  In the last century Latin was the universal language of Europe. Correspondence among the learned, and indeed among merchants and men of business, and the conversation of strangers and travellers, was generally carried on in that dead language. In the present century, Latin has been generally laid aside, and French has been substituted in its place, but has not yet become universally established, and, according to present appearances, it is not probable that it will. English is destined to be in the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the last or French is in the present age. The reason of this is obvious, because the increasing population in America, and their universal connection and correspondence with all nations will, aided by the influence of England in the world, whether great or small, force their language into general use, in spite of all the obstacles that may be thrown in their way, if any such there should be.