Contents -SUBJECT INDEX -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956). The American Language. 1921.

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of them borrowed by the English) are red-eye, corn-juice, eye-opener, forty-rod, squirrel-whiskey, phlegm-cutter, moon-shine, hard-cider, apple-jack and corpse-reviver, and the auxiliary drinking terms, speak-easy, boot-legger, sample-room, blind-pig, barrel-house, bouncer, bung-starter, dive, doggery, schooner, moonshine, shell, stick, duck, straight, hooch, saloon, finger and chaser. Thornton shows that jag, bust, bat and to crook the elbow are also Americanisms. So are bar-tender and saloon-keeper. To them might be added a long list of common American synonyms for drunk, for example, piffled, pifflicated, awry-eyed, tanked, snooted, stewed, ossified, slopped, fiddled, edged, loaded, het-up, frazzled, jugged, soused, jiggered, corned, jagged and bunned. Farmer and Henley list corned and jagged among English synonyms, but the former is probably an Americanism derived from corn-whiskey or corn-juice, and Thornton says that the latter originated on this side of the Atlantic also.

4. Loan-Words and Non-English Influences

The Indians of the new West, it would seem, had little to add to the contributions already made to the American vocabulary by the Algonquins of the Northwest. The American people, by the beginning of the second quarter of the nineteenth century, knew almost all they were destined to know of the aborigines, and they had names for all the new objects thus brought to their notice and for most of the red man’s peculiar ceremonials. A few translated Indian terms, e. g., squaw-man, Great White Father, Father of Waters, and happy-hunting ground, represent the meagre fresh stock that the western pioneers got from him. Of more importance was the suggestive and indirect effect of his polysynthetic dialects, and particularly of his vivid proper names, e. g., Rain-in-the-Face, Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Wife and Voice-Like-Thunder. These names, and other word-phrases like them, made an instant appeal to American humor, and were extensively imitated in popular slang. One of the surviving