Made In America - Bill Bryson [49]
The nineteenth century was in short the Americans’ Elizabethan age, and the British hated them for it. Among the many neologisms that stirred their bile were backwoodsman, balance for remainder, spell in the context of time or weather, round-up, once in a while, no great shakes, to make one’s mind up, there’s no two ways about it, influential, census, presidential, standpoint, outhouse, cross purposes, rambunctious, scrumptious, loan for lend (not actually an Americanism at all), portage, immigration, fork, as in a road, milage, gubernatorial, reliable, and almost any new verb.
The first recorded attack on an American usage came in 1735 when an English visitor named Francis Moore referred to the young city of Savannah as standing upon a hill overlooking a river ‘which they in barbarous English call a bluff and thereby, in the words of H. L. Mencken, ‘set the tone that English criticism has maintained ever since’.12
Samuel Johnson, who seldom passed up a chance to insult his colonial cousins (they were, in his much quoted phrase, ‘a race of convicts, and ought to be grateful for anything we allow them short of hanging’), vilified an American book on geography for having the misguided audacity to use such terms as creek, gap, branch and spur when they had not been given a British benediction. Another critic attacked Noah Webster for including the Americanism lengthy in his dictionary. ‘What are we coming to?’ he despaired. ‘If the word is permitted to stand, the next edition will authorize the word “strengthy”.‘13 One Captain Basil Hall, a professional traveller, writer and, it would appear, halfwit, spoke for many when he remarked that America’s penchant for neologisms was unnecessary because ‘there are enough words already’.14
By the 1800s, the American continent fairly crawled with British observers who reported with patronizing glee on America’s eccentric and irregular speech habits. Captain Frederick Marryat, best known for the novels Mr Midshipman Easy (1836) and Masterman Ready (1841), recounted how one American had boasted to him that he had not just trebled an investment but ‘fourbled and fivebled’ it. It was Marryat who also reported the often recounted – and conveniently un-verifiable – story of the family that clad its piano legs in little skirts so as not to excite any untoward sexual hankerings among the more impressionable of their visitors.
The classlessness of US English – the habit of calling every woman a lady, every man a gentleman – attracted particular vituperation. Charles Janson, a British writer, recorded how he made the mistake of referring to a young maid as a servant. ‘I’d have you to know, man, that I am no sarvant,’ she bristled. ‘None but negers are sarvants.’ She was, she informed him solemnly, her employer’s help.15 Though easy enough to mock, such semantic distinctions contributed mightily towards making America a less stratified society. Moreover, they underscored the essential openness of the American character. As Henry Steele Commager put it: The American was good natured, generous, hospitable and sociable, and he reversed the whole history of language to make the term “stranger” one of welcome.‘16
Before long, it seemed, Americans could scarcely open their mouths without running the risk of ending up mocked between hard covers. Abuse was heaped upon the contemptible American habit of shortening or simplifying words – using pants for trousers, thanks in favour of thank you, gents instead of gentlemen. ’If I were naked and starving I would refuse to be clothed gratis in a “Gent’s Furnishing Store”,’ sniffed one especially fastidious social commentator.17 Pants, a shortening of pantaloons, is an Americanism first recorded in 1840 and attacked as a needless lexical affectation within the year. Incidentally, but not without interest, panties came into American English in 1845 and for a long time signified