turned into Hobson-Jobson. The same process is constantly in operation elsewhere. By it the French route de roi has become Rotten Row in English, écrevisse has become crayfish, and the English bowsprit has become beau pré (= beautiful meadow) in French. No doubt squash originated in the same way. That woodchuck did so is practically certain. Its origin is to be sought, not in wood and chuck, but in the Cree word otchock, used by the Indians to designate the animal.
In addition to the names of natural objects, the early colonists, of course, took over a great many Indian place-names, and a number of words to designate Indian relations and artificial objects in Indian use. To the last division belong hominy, pone, toboggan, canoe, pemmican, mackinaw, tapioca, moccasin, paw-paw, papoose, sachem, sagamore, tomahawk, wigwam, succotash and squaw, all of which were in common circulation by the beginning of the eighteenth century. Finally, new words were made during the period by translating Indian terms, for example, war-path, war-paint, pale-face, big-chief, medicine-man, pipe-of-peace and fire-water. The total number of such borrowings, direct and indirect, was a good deal larger than now appears, for with the disappearance of the red man the use of loan-words from his dialects has decreased. In our own time such words as papoose, sachem, tepee, samp, wigman and wampum have begun to drop out of everyday use;[1] at an earlier period the language sloughed off ocelot, manitee, calumet, supawn and quahaug, or began to degrade them to the estate of provincialisms.[2] A curious phenomenon is presented by the case of maize, which came into the
- ↑ A number of such Indian words are preserved in the nomenclature of Tammany Hall and in that of the Improved Order of Red Men, an organization with more than 500,000 members. The Red Men, borrowing from the Indians, thus name the months, in order: Cold Moon, Snow, Worm, Plant, Flower, Hot, Buck, Sturgeon, Corn, Travelers', Beaver and Hunting. They call their officers incohonee, sachem, wampum-keeper, etc. But such terms, of course, are not in general use.
- ↑ A long list of obsolete Americanisms, from Indian and other sources, is given by Clapin in his Dictionary. It is unfortunate that there is no dictionary of them on the plan of the New English Dictionary—that is, showing when they came in and when they went out. There is a constant loss in our own time. For example, the use of cars to designate railroad came in in the 40's, was universal during the Civil War (as a glance at any newspaper of the time will show), and then was abandoned. Today it survives only in the signs occasionally seen at railroad crossings: "Look Out for the Cars," e. g., on the Long Island Railroad, and in the verb-phrase, to change cars. Again, there is dude, born, as Thornton shows, in 1883, and dead by 1895.
