Fred's Book Club: Use Your Words!

Welcome to our Wednesday meeting of the Humpback Writers! Why do we call it that? Because of that weird Americanism that calls Wednesday Hump Day. And speaking of Americanisms, this week's book is chosen in honor of our friend and commenter PeaceLoveWoodstock, a professed and confessed fan of etymology -- the origins of words.  

Never Enough Words: How Americans Invented Expressions as Ingenious, Ornery, and Colorful as Themselves is a fun book on Americanisms by linguistic scholar Jeffrey McQuain, Ph.D., a onetime researcher for the late Times language lover William Safire and author of a number of books on fascinating coinages and good word usage. This 1999 tome is a great one to dip into from time to time, or use as a reference book for the origin of strange terms native to the United States.

You might think right off that this refers to weird and often funny words like teetotaler, catawampus, succotash, and hornswaggle, all Americanisms, and it does. But more common words like belittle, ornery, and wayback are of U.S. origin as well. And if that's not interesting enough, McQuain includes some lists of awesome American expressions, like these variations on lousy automobiles:

Wherever possible the scholarly doctor has traced expressions to their origins. Often the trail of history just peters out, as with hornswaggle; sometimes it's more obvious -- but more involved than expected. Take baloney:

As another food given a larger meaning, the slang BALONEY for "nonsense" probably came from the large smoked sausage named for the city credited with its origin: Bologna, Italy. That sausage, mentioned in English more than four centuries ago, led to the 1920 use of "baloney" for an untalented prizefighter. Collier's Magazine reported in 1920 that "Kane Halliday, alias Kid Roberts, had won his first professional fight by knocking out a boloney with the nom du ring of Young Du Fresne." The "boloney" spelling was popular during the 1920s, but a decade later the "baloney" spelling superseded it.

A lot of our fondness for words that function like weird contraptions, like exflunctified (worn out), comes from our love for "tall talk." Tall talk arose with tall tales and their tellers, the classic American big-mouthed entertainer with the long wind and the hilarious stories being the archetype and indeed architect of many a big word.

Tall talk, a mouthful of unmistakably American language, has grown as much by chance as by design. The tall tales of the American frontier required tall talk, bountiful boasting based on mile-long words that covered the countryside with hyperbole.... Imported or homegrown, pioneering words seemed magically to appear whenever new meanings needed to be expressed. If English words proved inadequate, our forebears found ways to adapt or invent what they needed. 

Here's a great page of Tall Talk words that need revival:

I wonder what Professor Strunk of The Elements of Style, who always preferred short and effective Anglo-Saxon words to more fluid Latin words, would have made of that.

It's not just the early American period covered in this book, though. More modern coinages like road rage, drive-by, knee-jerk, -gate, and full-court press also make the pages. It seems like we Americans are always groping for a new, topical, and vivid term to describe the events of the day and the people in them.

Some of the tech terms in the book have fallen by the wayside; in the last twenty years we've lost interest in words like cybercash and webaholic. Others have arisen to take their place. But unless we work at keeping alive our linguistic heritage, I fear one day we'll all just wind up blathering in grunts and emojis. And what a dad-blasted* conbobberation** of a clatterwhacking*** that would be!

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* "Dad" was a euphemism for "God" in these kind of expressions
** Fuss or disturbance
*** Noise