/New Words of English Material/--But of far more importance than these borrowings was the great stock of new words that the colonists coined in English metal--words primarily demanded by the "new circumstances under which they were placed," but also indicative, in more than one case, of a delight in the business for its own sake. The American, even in the early eighteenth century, already showed many of the characteristics that were to set him off from the Englishman later on--his bold and somewhat grotesque imagination, his contempt for authority, his lack of aesthetic sensitiveness, his extravagant humor. Among the first colonists there were many men of education, culture and gentle birth, but they were soon swamped by hordes of the ignorant and illiterate, and the latter, cut off from the corrective influence of books, soon laid their hands upon the language. It is impossible to imagine the austere Puritan divines of Massachusetts inventing such verbs as /to cowhide/ and /to logroll/, or such adjectives as /no-account/ and /stumped/, or such adverbs as /no-how/ and [Pg045] /lickety-split/, or such substantives as /bull-frog/, /hog-wallow/ and /hoe-cake/; but under their eyes there arose a contumacious proletariat which was quite capable of the business, and very eager for it. In Boston, so early as 1628, there was a definite class of blackguard roisterers, chiefly made up of sailors and artisans; in Virginia, nearly a decade earlier, John Pory, secretary to Governor Yeardley, lamented that "in these five moneths of my continuance here there have come at one time or another eleven sails of ships into this river, but fraighted more with ignorance than with any other marchansize." In particular, the generation born in the New World was uncouth and iconoclastic;[16] the only world it knew was a rough world, and the virtues that environment engendered were not those of niceness, but those of enterprise and resourcefulness.
Upon men of this sort fell the task of bringing the wilderness to the ax and the plow, and with it went the task of inventing a vocabulary for the special needs of the great adventure. Out of their loutish ingenuity came a great number of picturesque names for natural objects, chiefly boldly descriptive compounds: /bull-frog/, /canvas-back/, /lightning-bug/, /mud-hen/, /cat-bird/, /razor-back/, /garter-snake/, /ground-hog/ and so on. And out of an inventiveness somewhat more urbane came such coinages as /live-oak/, /potato-bug/, /turkey-gobbler/, /poke-weed/, /copper-head/, /eel-grass/, /reed-bird/, /egg-plant/, /blue-grass/, /pea-nut/, /pitch-pine/, /cling-stone/ (peach), /moccasin-snake/, /June-bug/ and /butter-nut/. /Live-oak/ appears in a document of 1610; /bull-frog/ was familiar to Beverley in 1705; so was /James-Town weed/ (later reduced to /Jimson weed/, as the English /hurtleberry/ or /whortleberry/ was reduced to /huckleberry/). These early Americans were not botanists. They were often ignorant of the names of the plants they encountered, even when those plants already had English names, and so they exercised their fancy upon new ones. So arose /Johnny-jump-up/ for the /Viola tricolor/, and /basswood/ for the common European /linden/ or /lime-tree/ (/Tilia/), and /locust/ for the /Robinia pseudacacia/ and its allies. The /Jimson weed/ itself was anything but a [Pg046] novelty, but the pioneers apparently did not recognize it, and so we find them ascribing all sorts of absurd medicinal powers to it, and even Beverley solemnly reporting that "some Soldiers, eating it in a Salad, turn'd natural Fools upon it for several Days." The grosser features of the landscape got a lavish renaming, partly to distinguish new forms and partly out of an obvious desire to attain a more literal descriptiveness. I have mentioned /key/ and /hook/, the one borrowed from the Spanish and the other from the Dutch. With them came /run/, /branch/, /fork/, /bluff/, (noun), /neck/, /barrens/, /bottoms/, /underbrush/, /bottom-land/, /clearing/, /notch/, /divide/, /knob/, /riffle/, /gap/, /rolling-country/ and /rapids/,[17] and the extension of /pond/ from artificial pools to small natural lakes, and of /creek/ from small arms of the sea to shallow feeders of rivers. Such common English geographical terms as /downs/, /weald/, /wold/, /fen/, /bog/, /fell/, /chase/, /combe/, /dell/, /heath/ and /moor/ disappeared from the colonial tongue, save as fossilized in a few proper names. So did /bracken/.