December 1, 18S7.] 



♦ KNO^VLEDGE ♦ 



29 



It may possibly have been suggested by those Southern 

 duels in which the combatants were left free to seek for 

 each other over a wide tract of country. For if a Southerner's 

 generosity knows no limit, neither does his combativeness, 

 when he considers it j ustifiably excited. 



Go IT ALONE, To. In euchre a player may decide to 

 play the hand alone, his partner turning down his cards 

 (sometimes after giving the best card to the lone player, who 

 then discards his worst). Success in such a case counts 

 double, as also does failure. A player who thus decides to 

 play alone, is said to " go it alone," and a similar expression 

 is applied to one who decides to carry out any business 

 operation on his own sole responsibility, and without help 

 from others. 



Go IT Blind, To. At poker a player who bets on his 

 hand before seeing it is said to "go it blind," and the usage 

 is extended to any one who in any undertaking trusts I lindly 

 to chance. 



Golly ! Used euphemistically (says Bartlett I) for 

 "God." Dogberry could hardly have beaten this; God 

 forbid but God should go before such a villainous niggerism 

 as Golly. 



Gone Case, for a person or event past hope is as much 

 English as Amer-ican : but 



Gone Coon, for one in hopeless case, is a good Western 

 Americanism, simply because we have no i-acoons in the 

 home country. 



Gone Goose, Gone GANT)ER=Gk)ne Coon: nor is "gone 

 gosling " different in significance, save perhaps that it 

 suggests a more youthful unfortunate. 



GoNER=gone goose, <tc., itc. The "r" termination may 

 be regarded as simply the usual Teutonic way of indicating 

 personality. The CJreeks and Latins preferred '• s." 



Good, for " well " is simply an Americanism in being a 

 piece of bad grammar more commonly heard in America 

 than in England. But the word "good" is also used in 

 America in a way which must be regarded as essentially 

 American. Thus, "Take that toddy; it will make you 

 feel good," by no means signifies, as an Englishman might 

 suppose, that imbibing the toddy will produce a virtuous 

 feeling (though I have known men who have mistaken 

 intoxication of one kind or another for saintliness) ; it 

 means simply that after taking the toddy you will feel, or 

 the toddy-maker hopes you will feel, jolly. This peculiar 

 usage has proved a source of perplexity in some cases, and 

 of amusement in others, to Englishmen passing their time 

 in the States, whether on pleasure or instruction bent. A 

 friend of mine tells how a proposition was once invitingly 

 made to him which, to say the least, involved no virtuous 

 self-abnegation, and he was urged to accept it by the plea 

 that " it would m.ake him feel good." 



Goodies. Mr. Bartlett is good enough to inform us that 

 " goodies," for sweetmeats, is " provincial in Suffolk, Eng- 

 land." I have yet to learn of any pait of England where 

 sweetmeats are not called " goodits." 



Goose, Sound on the. In the Southern States, in the 

 old slavery times, to be sound on the goose, meant to be 

 orthodox on the slavery question. As to the origin of the 

 expression, this deponent, knowing nothing, says the fame. 



Goose hangs high. The. All is serene. The origin of 

 this expression is also lost in mystery. 



Gopher. Any mining or burrowing creature seems 

 entitled to be called a " gopher " in the States. In the 

 middle States the term is usually applied to a species of 

 mole ; elsewhere to a kind of squiiTcl ; while in the South a 

 gopher is a species of land-turtle which, in the low country, 

 burrows in the gi'ound. 



Gosh. Used in a form of oath, which Mr. Bartlett 

 insists on considering " euphemistic," insomuch that one is 



led to wonder what he understands by " euphemism." If 

 " by Gosh ! " is euphemistic to Mr. Bartlett's ears, what, one 

 would like to know, would he regard as cacophonous ? 



GoTHAJi. A name applied to New York by Washington 

 Irving, and now constantly employed as a synonym for the 

 American metropolis — so that 



GoTHAMiTES are Xew Yorkers. 



Go THROUGH, To. After explaining that our English 

 expression " to go the whole hog " is " a Western vulgarism 

 caught up by some late English writers " — though Cowper 

 long since gave the saying position — Mr. Bartlett is kind 

 enough to tell us that whereas Americans say this train 

 goes through to such and such a town, meaning — well, 

 meaning — that it does go through, we benighted Briti.<hers 

 would imagine if we heard such an expression that a tunnel 

 was referred to ! It might perhaps surprise him to learn 

 (only he is dead) that not only do we speak of a train going 

 through to a place, without thinking of tunnels, but we 

 have gone a step beyond, and devised the term " through 

 train " for a train that does in this way go right on to some 

 specified place. 



Go THROUGH, To. In the sense of robbing any one of 

 evervthing he possesses, the verb " to go through " would 

 appear to be essentially American. The practice, however, 

 is not so limited. 



Go-TO-siEETiNG as an adjective, " Go-to-meeting hat," 

 " go-to-meeting clothes," kc, is as much English as Ameri- 

 can. 



Gouge, To. To force an eye-ball out with the thumb. 

 This pi-actice, always, let us hope, confined to the most 

 brutal of the lower orders, is now no longer in vogue in any 

 part of the States. How much there is to choose between 

 gouging and shooting, I do not know. As tokens of 

 savagery they seem much on a par. 



Gracious ! My gracious ! Gracious sakes ! and 

 Gracious sakes alive ! These exclamations are tolerably 

 familiar in England ; but Bartlett, because, like so many 

 others, they have been migrations, deals with them as 

 Americanisms of the purest water. 



Grade, To. To change the level of a road by excava- 

 ting. I have not heard this word commonly used in this 

 sense in England, though it is generally used by surveyors 

 of roads and towns; in America the word is familiarly 

 used, in this its proper sense. 



Graft, To. To graft boots is to repair them by adding 

 new leather outside the worn-out feet of the boots. 



Grave-yard. Mr. Bartlett says our English ears, accus- 

 tomed to the word " churchyard," find " grave-yard " novel. 

 This, at any rate, will strike most English folk as exceed- 

 ingly novel. 



Greaser. A term applied to Mexicans and other 

 Spanish-Americans by the ruder sort in the Far West. 



Greasy. The pronunciation of this word with the non- 

 sonant or surd " s " seems to be peculiar to Americans. 



Greenbacks. I^egal tender notes. These bills are for 

 single dollars, two dollars, five dollars, ten dollars, twenty 

 dollars, a hundred dollars, and higher amounts. Until 

 about 1877 or '78 smaller coins had their paper representa- 

 tives, down to ten cents, or fivepence in English money. 



Grig, To. To vex or irritate. In provincial English, to 

 grig is to ntj) or pinch. 



Gripsack. A hand-bag or satchel. Bartlett omits this 

 word from his Americanisms ; and I have seen it deliber- 

 ately quoted as the English for what Americans call a 

 satchel. But the word has never been used in this sense in 

 England, except as a borrowed Americanism. That it is 

 not an old-fa.shioned English word is shown by its intro- 

 duction as the name of a trumpet in the language of the 

 winged nation discovered by Peter Wilkins. 



