H. L. Mencken

“ The belief that hops have a soporific effect is very ancient, and hop-pillows were brought to America by the first English colonists.
The derivation of poker, which came into American from California in the days of the gold rush, has puzzled etymologists. It is commonly derived from primero, the name of a somewhat similar game, popular in England in the sixteenth century, but the relation seems rather fanciful. It may possibly come, indirectly, from the Danish word pokker, signifying the devil. Pokerish, in the sense of alarming, was a common adjective in the United States before the Civil War ”

“ In the same way an American does not say “I had measles,” but “I had the measles.” There is, again, the use of the prefix a before various adjectives and gerunds, as in a-going and a-riding. This usage, of course, is native to English, as aboard and afoot demonstrate, but it is much more common in the Irish dialect, on account of the influence of the parallel Gaelic form, as in a-n-aice=a-near, and it is also much more common in American. There is, yet again, a use of intensifying suffixes, often set down as characteristically American, which was probably borrowed from the Irish. ”

“ We shall see various indications of the Irish influence later on, not only on the vocabulary, but also upon pronunciation and idiom. The Germans also left indelible marks upon American, and particularly upon the spoken American of the common people. The everyday vocabulary is full of German words. ”

“ These new Americans, most of them Germans and Irish, did not all remain in the East; a great many spread through the West and Southwest with the other pioneers. Their effect upon the language was a great deal more profound than most of us think. The Irish, speaking the English of Cromwell’s time, greatly reinforced its usages in the United States, where it was beginning to yield to the schoolmasters, who were inclined to follow contemporary English precept and practice. “The influence of Irish-English,” writes an English correspondent, “is still plainly visible all over the United States. ”

“ Lallapalooza is also probably an Irish loan-word, though it is not Gaelic. It apparently comes from allay-foozee, a Mayo provincialism, signifying a sturdy fellow. Allay-foozee, in its turn, comes from the French allez-fusil, meaning “Forward the muskets!”—a memory, according to P. W. Joyce, [12] of the French landing at Killala in 1798. Such phrases as Erin go bragh and such expletives as begob and egorry may perhaps be added: they have got into American, though they are surely not distinctive Americanisms. ”

“ There were a good many German Jews in California in the early days, and they were ardent gamblers. If Barrère and Leland are correct, then poker enjoys the honor of being the first loan-word taken into American from the Yiddish. ”

“ These phrases, like wie geht’s and ganz gut, are familiar to practically all Americans, no matter how complete their ignorance of correct German. So are such slang phrases, obviously suggested by German, as ach Louie and on the Fritz. So is the use of dumb for stupid, a borrowing from the German dumm. Most of them know, too, the meaning of gesundheit, k ̈mmel, seidel, wanderlust, stein, speck, männerchor, schützenfest, sängerfest, turn-verein, hoch, yodel, zwie-back and zwei (as in zwei bier) . I have found snitz (=schnitz) in Town Topics. [8] Prosit is in all American dictionaries. ”

“ Shyster is very probably German also; Thornton has traced it back to the 50’s. [10] Rum-dumb is grounded upon the meaning of dumb borrowed from the German; it is not listed in the English slang dictionaries. [11] Bristed says that the American meaning of wagon, which indicates almost any four-wheeled, horse-drawn vehicle in this country but only the very heaviest in England, was probably influenced by the German wagen. ”

“ This was also the period of the first great immigrations, and the American people now came into contact, on a large scale, with peoples of divergent race, particularly Germans, Irish Catholics from the South of Ireland (the Irish of colonial days “were descendants of Cromwell’s army, and came from the North of Ireland”) , [2] and, on the Pacific Coast, Chinese. So early as the 20’s the immigration to the United States reached 25,000 in a year; in 1824 the Legislature of New York, in alarm, passed a restrictive act. [3] The Know-Nothing movement of the 50’s need not concern us here. ”

“ To these French contributions bayou, picayune, levee, chute, butte, crevasse and lagniappe were now added, and probably also shanty and canuck. The use of brave to designate an Indian warrior, almost universal until the close of the Indian wars, was also of French origin. ”