fic in slang, some of which, as to rattle, in the sense of to confuse, soon become public property. Most of our colloquial expressions are short-lived, but the following may be instanced as having been in use for a long period: to absquatulate; baggage-smasher; to bark up the wrong tree; bottom dollar; caboodle; to boost; to cavort; conniption fit; not to cure a continental; a continental darn; to chip in; coon, a colored man; a coon's age, an indefinitely long time; to dust, to leave quickly; to euchre out; to flash in the pan; flatfooted; gum game; highfalutin; last o' pea time; level best; to liquor; to moosey, to leave quickly; obligated; to paddle one's own canoe; to pan out; picayune, small, mean; to raise Cain; right away; to run, in the sense of to manage or conduct: to salt a mine; sample room, drinking-bar; shoddy, applied to a person; to smile, to drink spirits; socdologer, a finishing blow or argument; to sour on; a square meal; to strike oil, to get rich suddenly; to stump, to puzzle, or challenge; to talk turkey, to brag; tuckered out; to vamose (Sp. vamos), to leave quickly; to weaken, to yield or give out.
T. W. Higginson (see Bibliography, infra), in examining a glossary of the slang used about 1798 by British prisoners in the Castle in Boston Harbor, now Fort Independence, discovered a number of words that had been classed as of recent origin, the most familiar of which are grub, victuals; douse the glim, to put out the light; and spotted, for found out. Also some that are not given in any English glossaries, as briar, a saw; nipping-jig, the gallows; and wibble, a dollar. Most of these expressions belong to the argot of thieves.
When we remember that the dialects of the counties in England have marked differences — so marked indeed that it may be doubted whether a Lancashire miner and a Lincolnshire farmer could understand each other — we may as well be proud that our vast country has, strictly speaking, only one language. It is remarkable that the influx of European immigrants has not resulted in some States in reducing English to a patois, if not in extinguishing it, or in giving it scant room in a mongrel vocabulary. Again, it might reasonably be expected that, in the course of three centuries, the political and social changes which we have undergone, and the peculiar circumstances attending the settlement of new regions, would have separated us so widely from the mother country that, in spite of kinship and commercial and literary intercourse, some radical differences in language would have been evolved.
Bibliography. J. Witherspoon, D.D., essay in The Druid, Volume IV. (Philadelphia, 1801); J. Pickering, Vocabulary of Words and Phrases Supposed to be Peculiar to America (Boston, 1810); J. R. Lowell, introduction to the Biglow Papers (Cambridge, 1848); A. L. Elwyn, Glossary of Supposed Americanisms (New York, 1858); J. R. Bartlett, Dictionary of Americanisms (Philadelphia, 1859); Schele de Vere, Americanisms (New York, 1872); Norton, Political Americanisms (London, 1890); Leland, A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant (London, 1887); G. Gibbs, Dictionary of the Chinook Jargon (Washington, 1863); Leland, Hans Breitmann's Ballads (Philadelphia, 1870); Harris, Uncle Remus, His Sonqs and His Sayings (New York, 1880), and Nights With Uncle Remus (New York, 1883); R. G. White, “Americanisms,” Atlantic Monthly, Volumes XLI.-XLV.; T. R. Lounsbury, “The English Language in America,” International Review, Volume VIII.; G. M. Tucker, “American English,” North American Review, Volume CXXXVI.; W. W. Crane, “The American Language,” Putnam's Magazine, Volume XVI.; Rev. H. Reeves, “Our Provincialisms,” Lippincott's Magazine, Volume III.; T. W. Higginson, “American Flash Language in 1798,” Science, May, 1885; “Southwestern Slang,” Overland Monthly, August, 1869; Brander Matthews, “Briticisms and Americanisms,” Harper's Magazine, July, 1891. See also Dialect Notes, published by the American Dialect Society since 1889. The same society has issued a list of American slang words, edited by E. H. Babbitt. Studies of several Southern dialects, by Calvin S. Brown and Sylvester Primer, have appeared in the Publications of the Modern Language Association.
AMER'ICAN KNIGHTS, Order of. See Knights of the Golden Circle.
AMERICAN LIT'ERATURE. A term applied ratlier loosely to the body of writings in the English language produced in the territory now occupied by the Lfnited States. It includes a period extending from 1608, when Captain John Smith's True Relation was published in
London, to the present day. Strictly speaking,
the works of Smith and of those of his contempo-
raries who did not make a permanent sojourn
in the N^ew World, belong rather to British than
to American literature. Again, it is plain that
the term literature must be used with consid-
erable latitude, if it can be made to include the
news-letters, the bare annals, the topographical
treatises, the controversial pamphlets, the ser-
mons and other theological lucubrations that
form the bulk, of the writings produced by the
colonists of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies. The paucity of the materials at their
command has, however, induced American liter-
ary historians to give a hospitable reception to
almost everything that can be called a book
written in the American colonies or about them,
whether published in England or at home after
Stephen Daye had set up his press at Cambridge,
Mass., in 1639. We need not here imitate their
grasping tendencies, yet we may find a few works
of importance dating before 1700 that will de-
mand our attention.
Surprise has sometimes been expressed at the fact that Englishmen, contemporaries of Shakespeare and Slilton, should, in their new environment, have written practically nothing of iesthetio value. The excuse is usually made for them that they had many more necessary things to do, such as felling the forests and keeping off the Indians. This excuse is certainly applicable, but it may be doubted whether the Puritan or the Cavalier stock that settled America would have Ijeen noted for great contributions to English literature had they remained in the mother country. The companions of Bradford and Winthrop would have done wdiat writing tbey did on theological lines; the companions of Captain Smith and the younger sons of royalist country gentlemen would have written little more than they did in Virginia. This is but to say that there is slight reason to express surprise that the colonial literature of the seventeenth century is chiefly valuable to the historian and the antiquarian. The early colonists wrote for utilitarian purposes. The
