348 



American English. 



into a language that is to be called ac some future day the American 

 tongue I * * * Nor is this the only view in which a radical 

 cliange of hinguage would be an evil. To say nothing of the facili- 

 ties afforded by a common language in the ordinary intercourse of 

 business, it should not be forgotten that our religion and our laws are 

 studied in the language of the nation from which we are descended; 

 and, with the loss of the language, we should finally suffer the loss of 

 those peculiar advantages which we now derive from the investiga- 

 tions of the jurists and divines of that country." 



To do what lay in his power to avert a calamity so appalling, was 

 the object that Mr. Pickering had in view ; and lest his own impres- 

 sions should be faulty, or his imperfect knowledge of pure English 

 should prove inadequate to the task of properly branding all the prin- 

 cipal American corruptions, he took the pains of submitting his list 

 to several well informed friends, and particularly to two English gen- 

 tlemen whose authority he considered beyond question, although he 

 admits that as they had lived some twenty years in America, their 

 ear had lost much of that sensibility to deviations from the pure Eng- 

 lish idiom which would once have enabled them to pronounce with 

 decision in cases where they now felt doubts." As finally published, 

 the Vocabulary contains over five hundred words, of which not more 

 than about seventy, less than a seventh of the whole number, are 

 really of American origin and now in respectable use. As examples 

 may be cited — Mchvoodsjnan, barbecue, belittle, bookstore, bottomlands, 

 breadstuff, caucus, clajjboard, creeh in the sense of brook or small 

 stream, declension of an office, deed as a verb, desk for pulpit, dutiable, 

 to girdle a tree, gubernatorial, liominy, intervale, salt4ich, lot — a divi- 

 sion of land, lumber, offset, ^Jine barrens, portage, rapids, renewedly, 

 samp, section of the country, sleigh, span of horses, and staging lor 

 scaffolding. The other six-sevenths of the book consists of, first, 

 mere vulgarisms and blunders ; second, unauthorized expressions in- 

 vented by eccentric writers and never generally adopted ; and, third, 

 of words really British in their origin though not current in good 

 London society — to which last class, by the way, it is highly proba- 

 ble that several of the terms above mentioned as genuine Americanisms 

 might be transferred, were their full history known. 



The Vocabulary was reviewed by Noah "Webster in a letter to the 

 author, published at Boston in 1817, and by Dr. Beck in a paper read 

 before this Institute, March 18, 1829, and included in the first volume 

 of the Transactions. 



