Gilbert M. Tucker[1] has argued that only 70 of them were genuine Americanisms. But a careful study of the list, in comparison with the early quotations recently collected by Thornton, seems to indicate that both of these judgments, and many others no less, have done injustice to Pickering. He made the usual errors of the pioneer, but his sound contributions to the subject were anything but inconsiderable, and it is impossible to forget his diligence and his constant shrewdness. He established firmly the native origin of a number of words now in universal use in America—e. g., backwoodsman, breadstuffs, caucus, clapboard, sleigh and squatter—and of such familiar derivatives as gubernatorial and dutiable, and he worked out the genesis of not a few loan–words, including prairie, scow, rapids, hominy and barbecue. It was not until 1848, when the first edition of Bartlett appeared, that his work was supplanted.
§2
Sources of Early Americanisms—The first genuine Americanisms were undoubtedly words borrowed bodily from the Indian dialects—words, in the main, indicating natural objects that had no counterparts in England. We find opossum, for example, in the form of opasum, in Captain John Smith's "Map of Virginia" (1612), and, in the form of apossoun, in a Virginia document two years older. Moose is almost as old. The word is borrowed from the Algonquin musa, and must have become familiar to the Pilgrim Fathers soon after their landing in 1620, for the woods of Massachusetts then swarmed with the huge quadrupeds and there was no English name to designate them. Again, there are skunk (from the Abenaki Indian seganku), hickory, squash, paw-paw, raccoon, chinkapin, porgy, chipmunk, pemmican, terrapin, menhaden, catalpa, persimmon and cougar. Of these, hickory and terrapin are to be found in Robert Beverley's "History and Present State of Virginia" (1705), and squash, chinkapin and persimmon are in documents of the preceding century. Many of these words, of course, were short–
- ↑ American English, North American Review, April, 1883.
