A-to-Baggage

Etymologists have long recognized the difference between U. S. and British English, but it was a layman, Henry Louis Mencken (The American Language), who first popularized the idea that U. S. citizens speak a tongue of their own. Eleven years ago the University of Chicago asked slight, bearded Professor Sir William Alexander Craigie, since 1901 co-editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, to collect in definitive form the words that have meanings and currency peculiar to the U. S. Last week in Chicago appeared the first section, A-to-Baggage, of his long-awaited Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles* When complete the Dictionary will be as bulky as a Webster's Unabridged, will sell for $80.

Sir William decided that to be admitted a word must have originated in the U. S., or disappeared in England since it arrived in the U. S., or changed its meaning since immigration from England. A candidate must have been in use before 1900. This ruled out slang/- since Sir William found: "Slang and dialect words . . . can be treated with proper fulness only in separate dictionaries."

Although A-to-Baggage, as the editors point out, is composed chiefly of abstract words, it contains many U. S. technical coinages like airbrake, airline, automobile, autobus, autocar, autotruck. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes thought up the word anaesthetic in 1846. Appendicitis was introduced by another U. S. physician, Reginald Heber Fitz, 40 years later. Alumnus was taken directly from Latin about 1696, and in 1882 Doglover Albert Payson Terhune's mother, Essayist "Marion Harland," first used alumnae. Politics produced Abolitionist, anti-liquor, anti-saloon, anti-imperialist. From the Southwestern border filtered Spanish words like adobe, alfalfa, arroyo. Also listed as Spanish in origin, on H. L. Mencken's authority, is the U. S. poker term ante.

"American inventiveness, coupled with the strange and rich conditions which faced pioneers on the frontier," explains Lexicographer Craigie, accounts for the U. S. habit of twisting familiar English words into new meanings. Inventive John Adams first used appreciation to mean an increase in value. Inventive George Washington introduced administration in its U. S. political sense in his 1796 Farewell Address, first used average as a verb, first used the term back country. Since then back has been firmly imbedded as an adjective in such U. S. phrases as back taxes, back pay, back number, back talk, backhouse. Likewise inventive was Mark Twain who introduced far along and well along, meaning advanced. The phrase get along appeared in 1830, awful in the sense of "unpleasant" in 1828.

For most of their source material the editors relied on second-rate writers, extinct magazines like the Southern Literary Messenger, the Lowell Magazine, the early Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Scribner's, The Congressional Record. Writers like Hawthorne. Emerson, and Thoreau, Sir William observes, were "too English" to contribute much to his compendium.

Although Sir William spent the last eleven years at the University of Chicago on professorship to work on the Dictionary, returning to England only for the summers, most of the spadework was done by his colleague. Chicago Professor James Root Hulburt and small, Scottish George Watson, longtime subordinate on the Oxford Dictionary who followed Craigie to Chicago in 1926. Last week with the Dictionary well under way, Sir William had returned to his home at Watlington, England, where he will probably stay to work on a new Dictionary of Scottish Tongues.

*University of Chicago Press--$4.

/-The Chicago Tribune headlined Sir William's appointment: MIDWAY SIGNS LIMEY PROF TO DOPE YANK TALK

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.