TEE MODERN ENGLISH LANGUAGE 159 



the more living boycott; we owe to it democracy, oligarch, aristocracy, 

 tyrant and politics, but we have borrowed from the American Indians 

 Tammany, mugwump, and perhaps caucus; nor has anthropological 

 science any greater words to conjure with to-day than totem and taboo, 

 the first of which is derived from an Algonkian language of North 

 America, and the second from one of the Polynesian dialects. To create 

 sociology, a hybrid of Greek and Latin that shocked the purists was 

 called into being, but the very useful and significant term cluh was 

 taken from a cognate Scandinavian language. The familiar word 

 squirrel goes back to Greek, but chipmunk, in spite of its rather decep- 

 tive appearance, is derived from the Ojibwa dialect of the Algonkian 

 Indians. The Latin ending of petunia can not altogether disguise its 

 ultimate origin from one of the Tupi-Guaranian languages of aboriginal 

 Brazil. Megatherium is Latinized Greek, but mammoth is little changed 

 from the form it had in a Tatar language of Siberia. The vocabulary 

 of English owes much to Greek and Latin, but this debt does not 

 include terms like the following, which have all become part and parcel 

 of everyday speech: Slave (Slavonic) and nabob (Hindi) ; talk (Lithu- 

 anian) and jungle (Sanskrit) ; thug (Hindustani) and bantam 

 (Javanese); gong (Malay), tattoo (Tahitian) and guinea (W. Afri- 

 can) ; alcohol, assassin, and tariff (all Arabic) ; buccaneer, cannibal, 

 hammock, hurricane, mahogany, potato, tobacco, tomahaiuk, wigwam 

 (all from the various Indian tongues of the New World). What list 

 of the important loan words of modern English could omit Tammany, 

 mugwump, totem, etc. ? And what place-name of classic origin has, in 

 the present day and generation, been given new life and significance in 

 our tongue, like Chautauqua, one of the remembrancers of the Iroquoian 

 predecessors of the white man in the great state of New York ? Another 

 place-name from the same source, Saratoga, has also won lodgment, but 

 with less fame and repute. In American English, in particular, the only 

 memorial existing of some now extinct and forgotten tribe of savages 

 may be some such word which has won a place in our hospitable lexicon. 

 On the other hand, the united efforts of all the " purists " in the land 

 are often insufficient to secure permanent footing for some new coinage, 

 whose classical parentage is quite unimpeachable and whose grammatical 

 attire forbids criticism. Very often does our language illustrate the 

 truth of the old saying, " the first shall be last, and the last shall be 

 first." It is a democratic institution, having adopted a declaration of 

 independence against King Grammar and his whole court. 



2. Hybrid Tf orcZs.^English has no morbid fear of joining its words 

 together regardless of the remoter origin of the newly-wedded elements. 

 It is a language in possession of those who use it, and not one in per- 

 petual and cringing serfdom to grammarians and lexicographers. It 

 shows its genius in its independence of these linguistic tyrants, being 



