Made In America - Bill Bryson [13]
In terms of language, the Pilgrims could scarcely have chosen a more exciting time to come. Perhaps no other period in history has been more linguistically diverse and dynamic, more accommodating to verbal invention, than that into which they were born. It was after all the age of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Lyly, Spenser, Donne, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, Elizabeth I. As Mary Helen Dohan has put it: ‘Had the first settlers left England earlier or later, had they learned their speechways and their attitudes, linguistic and otherwise, in a different time, our language – like our nation – would be a different thing.‘6
Just in the century or so that preceded the Pilgrims’ arrival in the New World, English gained 10,000 additional words, about half of them sufficiently useful as to be with us still. Shakespeare alone created some 2,000 – reclusive, gloomy, barefaced, radiance, dwindle, countless, gust, leapfrog, frugal, summit, to name but a few – but he was by no means alone in this unparalleled outpouring.
A bare sampling of words that entered English around the time of the Pilgrims gives some hint (another Shakespeare coinage, incidentally) of the lexical vitality of the age: alternative (1590); incapable (1591); noose (1600); nomination (1601); fairy, surrogate and sophisticated (1603); option (1604); creak, in the sense of a noise, and susceptible (1605); coarse, in the sense of being rough (as opposed to natural), and castigate (1607); obscenity (1608); tact (1609); commitment, slope, recrimination and gothic (1611); coalition (1612); freeze, in a metaphoric sense (1613); nonsense (1614); cult, boulder and crazy, in the sense of insanity (1617); customer (1621); inexperienced (1626).
If the Pilgrims were aware of this linguistic ferment into which they had been born, they gave little sign of it. Nowhere in any surviving colonial writings of the seventeenth century is there a single reference to Shakespeare or even the Puritans’ own revered Milton. And in some significant ways their language is curiously unlike that of Shakespeare. They did not employ the construction ‘methinks’, for instance. Nor did they show any particular inclination to engage in the new fashion of turning nouns into verbs, a practice that gave the age such perennially useful innovations as to gossip (1590), to fuel (1592), to attest (1596), to inch (1599), to preside (1611), to surround (1616), to hurt (1662) and several score others, many of which (to happy, to property, to malice) didn’t last.
Though they were by no means linguistic innovators, the peculiar circumstances in which they found themselves forced the first colonists to begin tinkering with their vocabulary almost from the first day. As early as 1622, they were using pond, which in England designated a small artificial pool, to describe large and wholly natural bodies of water, as in Walden Pond. Creek in England described an inlet of the sea; in America it came to signify a stream. For reasons that have never, so far as I can tell, been properly investigated, the colonials quickly discarded many seemingly useful English topographic words – hurst, mere, mead, heath, moor, marsh and (except in New England) brook, and began coming up with new ones, like swamp (first recorded in John Smith’s Generall Historie of Virginia in 1626),7 ravine, hollow, range (for an open piece of ground) and bluff. Often these were borrowed from other languages. Bluff, which has the distinction of being the first word attacked by the British as a misguided and obviously unnecessary Americanism, was probably borrowed from the Dutch blaf, meaning a flat board. Swamp appears to come from the German zwamp, and ravine, first recorded in 1781 in the diaries of George Washington though almost certainly used much earlier, is from the French.
Oddly, considering