OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW

FACES.

"Ideas which filter slowly into English soil and abide there for a generation, flash like comets into the elastic atmosphere of America."

(North British Review, 1867.)

THE largest part of so-called Americanisms are nothing more than good old English words, which for one reason or another have become obsolete or provincial in England, while they have retained their full power and citizenship in the United States. Thus all the provincialisms of the Northern and Western counties of England have been naturalized in the New England States, thanks to the Pilgrim Fathers, who had left the banks of the Trent and the Humber, and subsequently by new colonists, who followed from Norfolk and Suffolk. They brought not only their words, which the Yankee still uses, but also a sound of the voice and a mode of utterance which have been faithfully preserved, and are now spoken of as the "New England drawl," and "the high, metallic ring of the New England voice." (Charles Wentworth Dilke.) The former is nothing but the well-known Norfolk "whine," the proverbial annoyance of visitors from the "shires." From New England words and sounds alike were carried westward, and speedily extended through the neighboring States, even to the Mississippi. Precisely the same happened in Virginia, which also received through her cavalier-settlers and the countless indenture-colonists a strongly-marked vocabulary of her own, which she faithfully and with Southern conservatism preserved, while at home and all around her everything changed, and which she at a later period transmitted to those vast new territories, that looked up to her as the Mother of States.

When these settlers were cut off from constant intercourse with

the mother-country, their language ceased, of course, to be influenced by the court, the great writers, and the press of England; it retained the familiar forms and sounds, undisturbed by fashion and the effects of close intimacy with other nations. But greater results yet were effected, when the colonies threw off the political restraints that had heretofore attached them to England; the language became as independent as the republic, and refused any longer to be guided and controlled in any way by English authorities. At the same time, an unbroken stream of immigration poured into this country vast numbers of persons, mostly of humble origin and without education, who brought with them the local words of English counties, and the provincialisms of the sister kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland.

During all this time great changes had taken place in England. At a very early period, already, a large number of good old Saxon words were banished from polite society, and continued to exist only as far as they were used by the peasantry or a few families belonging to the upper classes in remote country districts. Puttenham, in his Art of English Poesie (ed. 1582), teaches (eleven years before Shakespeare): "Our writer, therefore, in these days shall not follow Piers the Plowman, nor Gower nor Lydgate, nor yet Chaucer, for their language is now out of use with us; neither yet shall he take the terms of Northmen, such as they use in daily talk, whether they be noblemen or gentlemen or their best clerks, nor in effect any speech used beyond the river Trent; though no man can deny that theirs is the purest English Saxon at this day. Yet it is not so courtly, nor so current as our Southern English is, no more is the far Western man's speech. He shall, therefore, take the usual speech of the Court, and that of London, and the shires lying about London, within sixty miles and not much above." The English writers obeyed his behest, and the English people followed their example; but not so the colonies. In America the "purest English-Saxon" of Puttenham's day was carefully preserved, unaffected by court, or town, or shire, and hence the curious result is obtained that by many an humble fireside in the Low Country of Virginia, the pines of New Jersey, or in the shadow of the mountains of New England, words are heard pronounced as they were in the days of Alfred, and with meanings unknown to England. Moreover, whenever America has

needed a new word for new wants and new discoveries, it has gone to that immense mine of treasure in the early English days, from which to borrow-as William Hamilton eloquently expresses it—

"Ancient words

That come from the poetic quarry
As sharp as swords."

(Letters to Allan Ramsay.)

"Into this treasure," says a Scottish critic, "the Americans are dipping more deeply than we, and so far the influence of their example upon the mother-tongue must be recognized as both legitimate and beneficial." (Blackwood, October, 1867.) Hence, nothing is more common than to hear English writers blame Americans for adopting a new word; then the word is found in English writers, and we are scolded for claiming the honor of producing it! Such was the case, as Mr. Pickering shows, for instance, with the word to advocate, which was first censured as an Americanism, and then, having been found repeatedly in the pages of Milton and Burke, was made the basis for a charge of "unfounded claims to discovery."

Nor must it be forgotten that the strange revolutions which are stated to have taken place in the meaning of many common words are, in most instances, nothing more than the result of the preservation of an old sense, which, if carefully traced, may still be found existing in remote districts of some of the English counties. This is occasionally acknowledged even by British travellers; thus Waterton, after his fourth journey through this country in 1824, said of the American as he found him: "He has certainly hit upon the way (but I could not find out by what means) of speaking a much purer English language than that which is commonly spoken on the parent soil. This astonished me much, but is really the case." (Wanderings in South America.) The nomadic character of the American, the ubiquity of the newspaper, and the diffusion of knowledge throughout all classes of society, have, subsequently, given a uniformity to this pure English which is unknown in other countries; and if really better English is not spoken here than in the mother-country, the American idiom is at least free from provincialisms, and the masses speak it better than the people of England.

It has, hence, been the purpose of the compiler to collect, in the following pages, mainly words which are obsolete in England, while still preserving here their former power; such as have changed their meaning to adapt themselves to new purposes and altered circumstances, and a few entirely new forms, unknown to the Old World.

A.

Abergoins, a Western corruption for Aboriginal, frequently used for original. "That is an aboriginal idea; I never heard it before." Also instead of Indian: "Bolling Robertson, equally a descendant of Pocahontas, had the Indian eye, and the whole cast of his countenance was aboriginal; his temper was quick, but his heart kind and excellent." (Letters from the South, I., p. 23.)

Academy, used with grandiloquence for school; as every college of some pretensions must needs be a "University." "Schools no longer exist in the towns and villages, rarely in the fields; academies and colleges supplant them." (Putnam's Magazine, February, 1855.) A custom denounced with great scorn by Boswell's father, the old Laird of Auchinleck: "Whose tail do you think he has pinned himself to now, mon? Dominie, mon—an auld dominie; he keepit a schule and call'd it an acaademy!"

Accommodate, to, is in New England especially used in the sense of providing for travellers, from the meaning of accommodation as applied to public houses. "The question (where is the hotel?) invariably called forth the response: Thar ain't nun, but farmer Smoot accommodates." (Putnam's Magazine, January, 1870.)

Admire is mentioned by J. R. Bartlett as being "often and absurdly used in New England," in the sense of a lively, eager wish. "I should admire to see the President.” He seems to object in like manner to the use of the word, when it means to wonder at, to be affected with surprise; and yet this use has the highest authority for it.

"The undaunted fiend what this might be admired,
Admired, not fear'd."

(Milton. Paradise Lost, II., v. 677.)
"The more I admire your flintiness.".

1

(Beaumont and Fletcher. Nice Valor.)

And Pepys, in his Diary, besides numerous other instances, says, February 22, 1663-4: "He, that is, Charles II., is so fond of the Duke of Monmouth, that everybody admires it, that is, wonders at it."

Ad is the printer's usual abbreviation for "advertisement," adopted not only in newspaper-offices, but also in the daily expanding advertising business of the country. "Ad means exactly as much as advertisement, and is two letters instead of thirteen." (Putnam's Magazine, August, 1868.)

Advanced Female is one of the most distasteful pet-terms of the day, generally bestowed sneeringly upon women who claim all the rights and privileges of men, in addition to those already willingly granted to their sex in appreciation of its peculiar claims. "One of the oddest instances of the shortsightedness of the Advanced Female to the interest of her own cause, was given in the petition recently offered to our State Legislature, for the appointment of young girls between the ages of fourteen and eighteen in the place of boys, as pages in the two Houses at Albany. Now, even if those petitioners, who seem to be in earnest, were blind to the impropriety of thrusting young girls hardly past childhood into such a position, it is strange that common sense did not suggest to them, that a man with ordinary respect for decency, or with daughters of his own, had no object in becoming equally blind, nor would ever be likely to consent to such an arrangement." (New York Tribune, February 2, 1871.)

Advocate, to, a word once much objected to by English critics as an Americanism, is not only good English-"whether this reflect not with a contumely upon the Parliament itself, which thought this petition worthy not only of receiving, but of voting to a commitment, after it had been advocated and moved for by some honorable and learned gentlemen"-(Milton, Animadversions, § 1.)—but has established itself beyond controversy in modern writers on both sides of the Atlantic.

Afeared, still in use in the Southern States, especially in Virginia, is, of course, only the once familiar word preserved, while elsewhere the modern form afraid has superseded it. The old verb fearan and old English to fear, were constantly used in the transitive sense of "to frighten or terrify," and hence afeared came to mean "frightened," as in Shakespeare's well-known lines: