Book Description

Excerpt from A New Dictionary of Americanisms: Being a Glossary of Words Supposed to Be Peculiar to the United States and the Dominion of Canada A very dull man, and a pertinacious reader - the terms are by no means incompatible - is said to have had Johnson's Dictionary lent to him by some mischievous friend as an interesting new work, and to have read it through from beginning to end, quite unconscious that he was doing anything unusual. He observed, when he returned it, that the author appeared to him a person of considerable information, but that his style was slightly unconnected. The remark had a good deal of truth in it, for a dictionary is not bad reading on the whole. It is much more endurable than a good many of what are called lighter books, and not much more unconnected. What is an Americanism? In a good many instances the name is given to some archaism belated, or some English provincialism that has worked its way into general acceptance in the United States. It is usual to object, when expressions of either kind are classed by. some one as Americanisms, that they are nothing of the kind, which, though in strictness true enough, is a little unpractical; for surely, when words that have become obsolete in the mother country, or are merely "local" here and there, find themselves in wide or universal popularity in America, it is indeed convenient to class them as what they have practically become - Americanisms. Such words, for instance, as shyster, meeching, etc., are for all practical purposes Americanisms now, and are best classed and defined therewith. If we reject them, we must reject also such characteristic words as boss, stoop, portage, etc. Carry it far enough, and we would have hardly anything left but neologisms. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.