• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2597 0

the extremities of the American climate, weather words were slow in arising. Snowstorm, the first meteorological Americanism, is not recorded before 1771 and no one appears to have noticed a tornado before 1804. In between came cold snap in 1776, and that about exhausts America’s contribution to the world of weather terms in its first two hundred years. Blizzard, a word without which any description of a northern American winter would seem incomplete, did not in fact come to describe a heavy snowstorm until as late as 1870, when a newspaper editor in Estherville, Iowa, applied it to a particularly fierce spring snow. The word, of unknown origin, had been coined in America some fifty years earlier, but previously had denoted a blow or series of blows, as from fists or guns.

Where they could, however, the first colonists stuck doggedly to the words of the Old World. They preserved words with the diligence of archivists. Scores, perhaps hundreds, of English terms that would later perish from neglect in their homeland live on in America thanks to the essentially conservative nature of the early colonists. Fall for autumn is perhaps the best known. It was a relatively new word at the time of the Pilgrims – its first use in England was recorded in 1545 – but it remained in common use in England until as late as the second half of the nineteenth century. Why it died out there when it did is unknown. The list of words preserved in America is practically endless. Among them: cabin in the sense of a humble dwelling, bug for any kind of insect, hog for a pig, deck as in a pack of cards and jack for a knave within the deck, raise for rear, junk for rubbish, mad in the sense of angry rather than unhinged, bushel as a common unit of measurement, closet for cupboard, adze, attic, jeer and hatchet, stocks as in stocks and bonds, cross-purposes, livestock, gap and (principally in New England) notch for a pass through hills, gully for a ravine, rooster for the male fowl, slick as a variant of sleek, zero for nought, back and forth (instead of backwards and forwards), plumb in the sense of utter or complete, noon*8 in favour of midday, molasses for treacle, cesspool, home-spun, din, trash, talented, chore, mayhem, maybe, copious, and so on. And that is just a bare sampling.

The first colonists also brought with them many regional terms, little known outside their private corners of Britain, which prospered on American soil and have often since spread to the wider English-speaking world: drool, teeter, hub, swamp, squirt (as a term descriptive of a person), spool (for thread), to wilt, cater-cornered, skedaddle (a north British dialect word meaning to spill something noisy, such as a bag of coal), gumption, chump (an Essex word meaning a lump of wood and now preserved in the expression ‘off your chump’),8 scalawag, dander (as in to get one’s dander up), chitterlings, chipper, chisel in the sense of to cheat, and skulduggery. The last named has nothing to do with skulls which is why it is spelled with one l. It comes from the Scottish sculdudrie, a word denoting fornication. Chitterlings, or chitlins, for the small intestines of the pig, was unknown outside Hampshire until nourished to wider glory in the New World.9 That it evolved in some quarters of America into kettlings suggests that the ch- may have been pronounced by at least some people with the hard k of chaos or chorus.

And of course they brought many words with them that have not survived in either America or Britain, to the lexical impoverishment of both: flight for a dusting of snow, fribble for a frivolous person, bossloper for a hermit, spong for a parcel of land, bantling for an infant, sooterkin for a sweetheart, gurnet for a protective sandbar, and the much-missed slobberchops for a messy eater.

Everywhere they turned in their new-found land, the early colonists were confronted with objects that they had never seen before, from the mosquito (at first spelled mosketoe or musketto) to the persimmon to poison ivy, or ‘poysoned weed’ as they called it. At first, no doubt overwhelmed