A History of English Language

A history of the english language 370
A much more ambitious Dictionary of Americanisms was published in 1848 by John
R.Bartlett and greatly enlarged in a second edition of 1859. The author was for three
years commissioner on the Mexican boundary and had an opportunity to gather many
words from prairie and frontier life. Considering the date at which it was compiled, it is a
very commendable piece of work. In it the older attitude of Pickering has given place
almost entirely to an interest in dialect for its own sake. Bartlett refrains from
controversy, and though he has no hope that “the pure old idiomatic English style can
ever be restored in this country,” he ventures the thought that we may some day have
a“style and a literature which will also have their beauties and merits, although fashioned
after a somewhat different model.”
Up to the time of the Civil War the prevailing attitude in the United States seems to
have been one of deference to English usage. In 1866, however, James Russell Lowell
published in book form the Second Series of The Biglow Papers and supplied it with a
lengthy introduction. Ostensibly an exposition of the dialect in which the Papers were
written, this essay is in reality one of the most important contributions to the controversy
over Americanisms. Although it had often been recognized that many of the distinctive
features of American English were survivals of the older English of England, no one had
been at pains to bring together the enormous mass of evidence on the subject. Lowell
filled more than fifty pages with closely packed but eminently readable parallels to
American expressions, drawn from his wide reading of the older literature of England.
His reputation both in this country and abroad ensured a wide public for his views. Since
the appearance of this essay, the legitimacy of one large class of Americanisms has not
been questioned. Those who have written most on the subject, such as Lounsbury 55 and
Brander Matthews, have generally taken Lowell’s defense as a point of departure,
explicitly or implicitly, and have employed their strength in combatting the idea that
because an expression is of American origin it has no right to a hearing. They have
preached the doctrine of American English for the American as a natural mark of
intellectual sincerity. “For our novelists to try to write Americanly, from any motive,”
said William Dean Howells, “would be a dismal error, but being born Americans, we
would have them use ‘Americanisms’ whenever these serve their turn; and when their
characters speak, we should like to hear them speak true American, with all the varying
Tennesseean,
55
Lounsbury further stressed the fact that many so-called Americanisms were not Americanisms at
all by pointing to parallels in the English dialects. He found such “typically American” expressions
as to ride like blazes, in a jiffy, a tip-top fellow, before you could say Jack Robinson, that’s a
whopper, gawky (awkward), glum (gloomy), gumption (sense), sappy (silly) in a glossary for
Suffolk, England, published in 1823. Cf. the International Rev., 8 (1880), 479.