THE MAKING OF AMERICANISMS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 98, 22 October 1938, Page 26

THE MAKING OF AMERICANISMS

Since chewing gum is itself an' Americanism, the word naturally has: a place in the scholarly "Dictionary of American English" being compiled, at the University of Chicago, says the "Christian Science Monitor." But who would have guessed that Yale University introduced the word into the world of print? Responsibility < for the word's debut into written English was pinned upon that institution when volume IV of the monumental dictionary—"Butterfly

Pea to Chubby"—came from the press. The first appearance of the term "chewing gum" in print, so far as these lexicographers have been able to find in their thirteen years of work on the' dictionary, was in the Yale "Literary Magazine" of 1864. Mark Twain used it later. It appeared in "Tom Sawyer" in 1876. In 1884, Bill Nye, humorist, reported that "chewing gum is rapidly advancing in. price, and the demand isi far beyond the supply." Mark Twain is found to be supplying the dictionary with a great many of its "first uses." Dictionary researchers report that approximately 12,000 reference cards bearing quotations from this American writer are being used in their work. The term "central," meaning a tele-phone-exchange operator, was found to

have been first used in writing by Mark Twain. In 1889, he wrote in the "Connecticut Yankee": "I used to wake . . . and say, 'Hello, Central!' just to hear her dear voice." Such typical , New Englanders as Oliver Wendell Holmes . and Ralph Waldo Emerson also produced' picturesque Americanisms. In 1860, Holmes borrowed a term from billiards when he wrote, "She glanced from every human contact, and 'caromed' from one relation, to an-

other." f " Emerson's contribution to volume IV is the word "candy-braids." "Why need I speak of steam . . . which . . '. can twist beams of iron like candybraids," he wrote: in 1870. The dictionary calls this an individualism because it didn't get into general use. Even George Washington helpe.d to get Americanisms into print, this volume shows. His contribution is the humble one of "chinch, bugs." The country's most famous farmer noted the existence of an insect by that name in something he wrote in 1786. The American-English Dictionary is under the editorship, of Sir William Craigie, co-editor- of the Oxford English Dictionary, and Professor James R. Hulbert, both working with a staff of trained lexicographers at the University of Chicago.