Gleanings for the 'DAE' Supplement

Abstract

ment, each of which in some way supplements the information contained in the Dictionary of American English. Forty-four examples antedate present DAE citations; five, of words no longer in current use, postdate DAE entries; and five establish or strengthen likelihood that the words or phrases cited are Americanisms. American usage of monkey-wrench, for instance, is thus established at a date (1860) only two years later than the earliest entry in the New English Dictionary (NED), of jaw-breaker four years earlier (1835), of hat in the context passing the hat thirteen years earlier (1844), and of to court-martial, earlier by twenty-five years (1834). Present DAE examples of court-martial as a verb begin at 1862. Twenty-three words are hitherto unlisted Americanisms, or unlisted in the use or sense given. Of particular interest among these, the words to kill (consume), ditch (small stream), Sam Patch, jassack, and foot-tub are still heard in the Middle West. Only one word in the list appears to be a nonce-form. The words chance (luck), drumstick (applied to a person), and swell (rise of a river) perpetuate meanings that seem to have lapsed in England; possibly, however, they continue in dialect or colloquial usage there. Six items serve to correct dates now appearing in the DAE. In a few instances, I have discovered pertinent information in the great Oxford dictionary which did not find its way into the American work. Of special etymological interest are the quotations supporting the entries A-No. i, graft, and spile, all from Haliburton's The Clockmaker, which appears in the bibliography of both NED and DAE. The first, appearing as No. r, letter A, seems to have been a transient expression before the phrase became fixed in its present form. Although Thornton suggests the origin of graft in thieves' cant, perhaps one ought still to consider that it may be an extension of the horticultural term, suggested by the quotation from Sam Slick. The word spile, in the sense of a spigot, is last cited in the DAE for 1830; in the newer sense of a wooden spout inserted when tapping a tree for sap, the earliest entry is for 1844. The quotation from Sam Slick, which still retains the earlier sense, in the present context may have suggested the newer sense of the word. For the phrase spoiling for a fight, it is now possible to construct a complete etymology, from the original literal sense of spoiling, through the transitional form of the phrase, spoiling for lack of a fight (earliest