October 1, 1887.] 



KNOWLEDGE - 



275 



in America " gets religion " when he has lost character. 

 After thoroughly losing all semblance of decency, he can 

 start a new character as a penitent, which usually lasts him 

 long enough to get all he wants. The infamous Colonel 

 Chartres used to .say that he would give ten thousand pounds 

 for a good character, because it would be worth twenty 

 thousand pounds to him. He lived too early. Had he 

 belonged to these days, and lived out West (for in the Ea.st 

 and South this ghastly hypocrisy is almost unknown), he 

 could have done all the renewed swindling he wanted by 

 simply pretending to have " got religion." There is all the 

 diflerence in the world, be it noted, between a man getting 

 religion and religion getting a man. 



To GET THE Mitten is used in America where in 

 England men speak of " getting the sack." 



G'hal. Having the Bowery B'hoij American slang was 

 bound to have also the Bowery G'hal. Where the fun of 

 these extra aspirations comes in the dull Englishman fails 

 to see. The B'hoys and G'hals in question are simply Boys 

 and Gals with aspirations — strongly developed aspirations — 

 for beer and skittles, candy and chewing gum. 



GiMPY. Sprightly. Bartlett remarks that Porljy notices 

 the adjective " gimp " for neat, spruce, kc, as provincial in 

 England. Gousidering that it is found in the classic lines 

 of Burns, " gimp " may be regarded as not wholly unknown 

 on this side of the Atlantic. But " gimpy," though a natural 

 dei-ivative, I have not heard in Great Britain or Ireland. 



Gin Mill. A drinking place; much, as we shall see 

 piesently, that a preaching place is a gospel shop. In 

 England we have " gin palaces." 



GiSM. Spirit. Akin probably to the Dutch " geest." It 

 is strange that men found in old times in the breathing or 

 spiritus, the breath or anima or pneunia or psyche, the 

 suggestion of soul or spirit. And yet perhaps it was not 

 very strange : for the breath seemed to them the " invisible 

 part of man." The classic languages could find but one 

 word for the Holy Ghost, for the spirit of a man, and for 

 his breath. I suppose the mystery of the invisible, yet 

 manifestly existent lireath of a man, led men to regard it 

 as the true spirit or soul, seeing that with its departure life 

 departed also, the soul seeming to pass away to heaven. 

 What would have been thought of any one who had ex- 

 plained in tho.se times the real nature of the breath drawn 

 in and the chemical changes which have taken place ere the 

 breath is breathed out "l It would have seemed like a 

 wicked attempt to destroy men's faith in the immortality of 

 the soul. Yet it is strange to think that " in=breathing " 

 should have been accepted as ecjuivalent to " inspiration " in 

 the religious sense, or that men should have found the 

 suggestion of something holy in an nfflatus, or full breath- 

 ing. We should find nothing specially suggestive nowadays 

 in " The Holy Wind " (though that is almost the exact 

 equivalent of the Greek for " The Holy Ghost," Ilagion 

 Fneiima) or in " The Sacred Breath," though that corre- 

 sponds exactly with the Latin for the same (Spiritus 

 Sanctus). We might as reasonably speak of " Holy Oxygen," 

 or " Divine Carbon Dioxide," or " Sacred Sulphuretted 

 Hydrogen." An American means no more when he speaks 

 of " knocking the gism " (or gas) " out of .■\ny one " than an 

 English boy means when he talks of " knocking the wind 

 out of a fellow." 



GiT. This word, which is a veritable Americanism, 

 Bartlett, of course, utterly fails to imderstand. He says it 

 is equivalent to "go it," of which it may be a contraction. 

 This is sheer nonsense. It is simply '• get " mispronounced, 

 just as it always is mispronounced by the vulgar in 

 " forget " ; and the only strange thing about the Ameri- 

 canism "git" is its quaint use alone for "get out." The 

 average cockney says "git" as uniformly as the average 



American cowboy in such expressions as " git up " (generally 

 addressed by the suave coster to his patient Neddy), " git 

 along," and so on. But it is only in America, so far as I 

 know, that any one will say simply "git," as a gentle hint 

 that a man's room is more desired than his company. The 

 hint may be given either with the .simple monosyllable 

 "git "or in the form " you git." It is equally an Ameri- 

 canism when the nigger pronunciation "git" is changed to 

 the more civilised "get"; for only in America would 

 " get " or " you get " be regarded as equivalent to " get you 

 gone " or " you get out." They tell in the West, with some 

 natural pride, of a laconic conversation between a miner and 

 a thief (sometimes a farmer takes the miner's place, and a 

 horse thief replaces the thief unadorned — but, anyhow, one 

 man was presumably honest, and the other more or less " on 

 the cross "). The ostensibly honest man sees the thief 

 trying to make his way in to rob, and, holding a revolver at 

 his head, remarks, " You get," receiving for reply, as the 

 thief recognises the position, the anti-rhythmic response, 

 " You bet." 



GiT UP AND Git. This is a development of the simple 

 " git," somewhat as our English " he's gone and done it " is 

 a development of " he has done it," and as the nigger " he's 

 done gone done it " is a development of that. These re- 

 dundancies and reduplications characterise the speech of the 

 uncultured, even as among the early Greeks " tetupha " and 

 " tetummai " established themselves as the expressions of 

 very definitely past actions. We might interpret " git uj) 

 and git" to mean simply " arise and go," were it not applied 

 constantly to cases where no arising is called for or possible. 

 In the South the expression " git up and dust" is often 

 heard. Here " dust " is short for " make the dust fly," and 

 suggests an even more rapid exit than the simple " git." 



To GlT TO do anything is a niggerism for " getting 

 leave." Bartlett, oddly enough, goes through numbers of 

 examples of the u.se of " git " which are obviously simple 

 mispronunciations of " get," yet sees no occasion to correct 

 his preposterous explanation of "git" as a contraction for 

 " go it." One might as reasonably imagine that our cockney 

 " forgit " is contracted from " forego it." 



Given Name. As sometimes in Scotland, the expression 

 " Christian name " is commonly replaced in America by 

 " given name." The expression is Puritan in origin ; and 

 may probably be traced back to the time when the Christian 

 name was always a saint's name, and superstition had 

 associated each such name with the special influence of the 

 patron saint. Among the Puritans in times before America 

 was colonised, a feeling of dislike, amounting to hatred, had 

 sprung up against such superstitions, as the names in com- 

 mon use among the early Puritans attest. They were "given 

 names." Some of them must have been unpleasant gifts. 



To Give out, to become exhausted. " Yet did not that 

 widow's cruse give out," a Western preacher would say, 

 meaning that the cruse did not fail. 



Givv. Yielding; ready to "give," in the sense of 

 bending easily. 



Glades. The word " glade " of course is English, signi- 

 fying, when projjerly used, a bright open place in a forest, 

 where all around is more or less in shadow. In the Southern 

 States this term has come to be applied — quite wrongly at 

 first, though now custom justifies the u.sage — to grassy 

 tracts covered with water, glades proper being distinguished 

 as "dry glades." The word is akin to "glad," "glow," 

 &c. The wet glades are far fiom being gladsome places. 



G'lang. If clipping good English makes an Americanism, 

 G'lang may be regarded as American for " Go along." 

 Haliburton has somehow associated the contraction with 

 the emphatically Transatlantic address of Sam Slick to his 

 horse, " G'lang, ye skunk, and turn yer toes out pritty." 



