Of adjectives the list is scarcely less long. Among the coinages of the first half of the century that are in good use today are /non-committal/, /highfalutin/, /well-posted/, /down-town/, /played-out/, /flat-footed/, /whole-souled/ and /true-blue/. The first appears in a Senate debate of 1841; /highfalutin/ in a political speech of the same decade. Both are useful words; it is impossible, not employing them, to convey the ideas behind them without circumlocution. The use of /slim/ in the sense of meagre, as in /slim chance/, /slim attendance/ and /slim support/, goes back still further. The English use /small/ in place of it. Other, and less respectable contributions of the time are /brash/, /brainy/, /peart/, /locoed/, /pesky/, /picayune/, /scary/, /well-heeled/, /hardshell/ (/e. g./, Baptist), /low-flung/, /codfish/ (to indicate opprobrium) and /go-to-meeting/. The use of /plumb/ as an adjective, as in /plumb crazy/, is an English archaism that was revived in the United States in the early years of the century. In the more orthodox adverbial form of /plump/ it still survives, for example, in "she fell /plump/ into his arms." But this last is also good English.
The characteristic American substitution of /mad/ for /angry/ goes back to the eighteenth century, and perhaps denotes the survival of an English provincialism. Witherspoon noticed it and denounced it in 1781, and in 1816 Pickering called it "low" and said that it was not used "except in very familiar conversation." But it got into much better odor soon afterward, and by 1840 it passed unchallenged. Its use is one of the peculiarities that Englishmen most quickly notice in American colloquial speech today. In formal written discourse it is less often encountered, probably because the English marking of it has so conspicuously singled it out. But it is constantly met with [Pg080] in the newspapers and in the /Congressional Record/, and it is not infrequently used by such writers as Howells and Dreiser. In the familiar simile, /as mad as a hornet/, it is used in the American sense. But /as mad as a March hare/ is English, and connotes insanity, not mere anger. The English meaning of the word is preserved in /mad-house/ and /mad-dog/, but I have often noticed that American rustics, employing the latter term, derive from it a vague notion, not that the dog is demented, but that it is in a simple fury. From this notion, perhaps, comes the popular belief that dogs may be thrown into hydrophobia by teasing and badgering them.