Made In America - Bill Bryson [92]
Dutch, for instance, remained widely spoken in rural New York well into the nineteenth century, some two hundred years after the Netherlands had retreated from the continent. The celebrated feminist and public speaker Sojurner Truth, for instance, was raised in a Dutch household in Albany and spoke only Dutch until she reached adulthood.16 According to Raven I. McDavid, jun., ‘a few native speakers [of Dutch] survived in the remoter parts of the Hudson Valley as late as 1941’.17
Though the Dutch were only a passing political presence in America, their linguistic legacy is immense. From their earliest days of contact, Americans freely appropriated Dutch terms – blunderbuss (literally ‘thunder gun’) as early as 1654, scow in 1660, sleigh in 1703. By the mid-eighteenth century Dutch words flooded into American English: stoop, span, coleslaw, boss, pit in the sense of the stone of a fruit, bedpan, bedspread (previously known as a counterpane), cookie, waffle, nitwit (from the colloquial Dutch ‘Ik niet weet’, meaning ‘I don’t know’), the distinctive American interrogative how come? (a literal translation of the Dutch hoekom), poppycock (from pappekak, ’soft dung’), dunderhead, and probably the caboodle in kit and caboodle. (Boedel in Dutch is a word for household effects, though Dillard, it is worth noting, mentions its resemblance to the Krio kabudu of West Africa.)18
Two particularly durable Americanisms that emanate from Dutch are Santa Claus (out of Sinter Klaas, a familiar form of St Nicholas), first recorded in American English in 1773, and Yankee (probably from either Janke, a diminutive equivalent to the English Johnny, or Jan Kaas, ’John Cheese’, intended originally as a mild insult). Often Dutch words were given entirely new senses. Snoepen, meaning to slip candy into one’s mouth when no one is watching, was transformed into the English snoop, meaning to spy or otherwise manifest nosiness.19 Docke, ’doll’, became doxy, a woman of easy virtue. Hokester, an innocuous tradesman, became huckster, someone not to be entirely trusted. Doop to the Dutch signified a type of sauce. In America, transliterated as dope, it began with that sense in 1807, but gradually took on many others, from a person of limited mental acuity (1851), to a kind of lubricant (1870s), to a form of opium (1889), to any kind of narcotic drug (1890s), to a preparation designed to affect a horse’s performance (1900), to inside information (1910). Along the way it spawned several compounds, notably dope fiend (1896) and dope addict (1933).
Still other Dutch terms came to English by way of nautical contacts, reflecting the Netherlands’ days of eminence on the seas, among them hoist, bumpkin (originally a short projecting spar; how it became transferred to a rustic character is unclear), bulwark, caboose (originally a ship’s galley), freebooter, hold, boom and sloop.
As Dutch demonstrates, a group’s linguistic influence bears scant relation to the numbers of people who spoke it. The Irish came in their millions, but supplied only a handful of words, notably smithereens, lallapalooza, speakeasy, hooligan (from Gaelic uallachán, a braggart20) and slew (Gaelic sluagh), plus one or two semantic nuances, notably a more casual approach to the distinctions between shall and will, and the habit of attaching definite articles to conditions that previously lacked them, so that whereas a Briton might go into hospital with flu or measles, Americans go to the hospital and suffer from the flu and the measles.
The Scandinavians imparted even less. With the exception of a very few food words like gravlaks and smorgasbord, and a few regional terms like lutfisk (a fish dish) and lefse (a pancake) that are generally unknown outside the upper Midwest and the books of Garrison Keillor, their linguistic presence in America left no trace.
Italian was slightly more productive, though again only