The evolution of language in the Colonies has always fascinated me. How did the Southern accent develop? The slave states were settled disproportionately by Scots. You can hear the Scottish brogue in slaver English. American English developed as on an island from the island Mother Country and strange life forms develop on islands. Within the New Republic, because of the difficulty of travel over so vast a land as even extended only along the Eastern Seaboard, there were islands within the island.
English settlers faced with unfamiliar landscapes and previously unknown plants and animals in the Americas had to find terms to name and describe them. They sometimes borrowed words from Native American languages. They also repurposed existing English words and invented new terms, as well as keeping words that had become archaic in British English. As non-English-speaking immigrants began to arrive during the eighteenth century, they accepted words from those languages as well. By the time of the American Revolution, English had been evolving separately in England and America for nearly two hundred years, and the trickle of new words had become a flood.
Corn offers an example of how English words evolved in America. Before 1492, the plant that Americans call corn (Zea mays) was unknown in England. The word corn was a general term for grain, usually referring to whichever cereal crop was most abundant in the region.
For instance, corn meant wheat in England, but usually referred to oats in Ireland. When American corn came to Britain, it was named maize, the English version of mahiz...When the first colonists encountered it in North America, however, they almost always referred to it as corn or Indian corn, probably because it was the main cereal crop of the area.
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Corn was central to survival for the English settlers, so corn terms soon proliferated. In Noah Webster’s 1828 dictionary, the entries under corn cover two columns. These include the terms corn basket, corn blade, corn cutter, corn flour, corn field, cornmill, and cornstalk, among others. Webster defined corn the way the English do, as a cover term for any grain, but noted, “In the United States…by custom it is appropriated to maize.”
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Much of the landscape of North America was new to the English, so many early word inventions applied to the natural world. Often these simply combined a noun with an adjective: backcountry, backwoods (and backwoodsman), back settlement, pine barrens, canebrake, salt lick, foothill, underbrush, bottomland, cold snap. Plants and animals were similarly named, for instance, fox grape, live oak, bluegrass, timothy grass, bullfrog, catfish, copperhead, lightning bug, garter snake, and katydid (a grasshopper named for the sound it makes). All were part of the vocabulary by the mid-eighteenth century. Other descriptive landscape names included clearing, rapids, and bluff.
Bluff has the distinction of being the first word with a changed meaning to be noticed and criticized by a visiting Englishman. Writing about Savannah, he reported, “It stands upon the flat of a hill; the bank of the river (which they in barbarous English call a bluff) is steep and about forty-five feet perpendicular.” A bluff in England denoted a high but rounded shoreline, while in America it was used to describe steep cliffs.
Americans repurposed other English words as well. For example, bug, which meant a bedbug in England, broadened to cover any insect, and sick, which referred specifically to a digestive upset, became a general term for any illness. What the British called timber, Americans called lumber. (In England, lumber is old, discarded furniture and other items of the sort usually found in attics.) Americans called a shop a store...and said fall for autumn. ...
The expression I guess, meaning that one supposes or agrees, is often used to stereotype Americans in British books and movies... During the nineteenth century, it was a regionalism specific to New England, although it later became common everywhere.
I didn't know that! Ho-ho-ho.
During the nineteenth century, it was a regionalism specific to New England, although it later became common everywhere. To quote the Massachusetts Spy again, for November 8, 1815, “You may hear [a Southerner] say ‘I count’—‘I reckon’—‘I calculate’; but you would as soon hear him blaspheme as guess.”
The "Massachusetts Spy"!
Several words for bodies of water changed meanings between the old country and the new. In England a pond is artificial, but in America it is natural. ...
The language that influenced early American English the most is Dutch. ...
New Netherland changed hands in 1664...the Duke of York, who renamed it New York. A substantial Dutch population remained, however, still...speaking their own language. Dutch could be heard in both New York and New Jersey until the late nineteenth century. Meanwhile, English speakers adopted several Dutch terms.
...coleslaw (Dutch for cabbage salad), cookie (Dutch for little cake), cruller, and waffle. ...Bushwhacker, from a Dutch term meaning forest keeper, made its first appearance in print in 1809, in Washington Irving’s comic novel A History of New York, written under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker. ...
Dutch orange is part of the color scheme of the New York "Mets" baseball club and the New York "Knickerbockers" basketball club. Harlem is American English for the Dutch Haarlem.
...Yankee is also almost certainly a Dutch contribution. ...At first Yankee referred only to New Englanders, but by the time of the Revolution, when the song “Yankee Doodle” was first heard, the British applied it to all Americans. During the Civil War, Southerners adopted the term to apply to anyone from a Union state.
Love it.
