ABSTRACT
S 0 MER E A LAM E RIC A N ISM S 225 also the unmannerly guffaw of laughter with which the mispronunciation was greeted, not one of the boys in the group, except the speaker, having ever heard it before. He never in his life heard an~body pronounce the sign of the infinitive like toe; and he never heard the word rowdy used by anybody except to designate a ruffian. The don't with subject in the singular (used more than once by Dickens himself), the double negative, the adjectives for adverbs, the cacophanous aint, the mispronunciation natut' (reprobated by Walker as long ago as 1791) are surely one and all quite as common on the other side of the sea as they are here, always have been so, and are of no great consequence in any case, being simply faults of speech characteristic of the vulgar, in whatever country they may be heard. As for tonguey, it occurs in Wyclif's "Ecclesiasticus," 8.4-"strive not with a man that is tonguey," a translation completed almost a century before Columbus was born, and made by a scholar who ranks as the father of English prose. So much for one discovery of a batch of "Americanisms of the first water.n
But that is not to say that such things do not exist. >Here is a list, with briefest possible definitions (or none at all, if the meaning is unmistakruble) of about 1900 of them, l words and phrases that appear for the most part to be genuine Americanisms, which is to say that each of them, so far as known, either (1)
6. Perfectly regular and self-explanatory compounds, like office-holder in Bartlett, planing-machine in Farmer, ink-slinger in Clapin and fly-time in Thornton; and finally,
7. Purely technical terms, often hard to distinguish from slang, like many of those used in newspaper accounts of base-ball matches, terms quite as unintelligible to Americans, except those specially interested in the game, as they can possibly be to any Englishman.
