A survey of vocabulary, such as has been attempted in this chapter, manifestly can accomplish only a relatively small number of the ends which it is desirable to attain in this field of study. In the first place, the limits of space make it impossible for such a discussion to become exhaustive. Complete inclusiveness would be possible only in a dictionary, and the provinces of the dictionary maker and the discursive historian are quite separate and distinct. Neither can such a discussion be exhaustive of all the main or the minor categories of words and shadings in the use of words, which have entered into the composition of the American vocabulary. What it can do, however, is to suggest some of the main lines of interest and of further investigation which may be carried along perhaps in the end to final conclusions. The greatest need in the study of American vocabulary is a more abundant collection of materials, not merely of words, but of words with an accompanying commentary of context or circumstance which makes their historical significance definitely determinable. This need can be satisfied only by systematic reading of the monuments of American literature. Casual jottings will not get one far, nor is the casual method an economical one of gathering the material. One has visions of a coöperative undertaking by which this task could be accomplished with no impracticable expense of labor. If the body of American literature which calls for examination could be gathered under one roof, a kind of Solomon's House, as indeed it is gathered under several roofs, and a body of industrious scholars and readers set to work on this literature, aiding and systematizing each other's work by mutual criticism, not many years would be required to finish the task in such way as to place it among the permanent achievements of human endeavor. When finished, the value of this work would consist in the light the history of the vocabulary throws on the development of ideas and culture in the life of the people who have used the language. That this light would illuminate all the dark places of American history could not be expected, but it would certainly aid in reading more clearly the hidden and unconscious thought of past generations, and would add many instructive and amusing moments to the life of our own. PROPER NAMES In many respects proper names occupy a special position in the historical study of language. The personal element enters into their formation and preservation more effectively than in common nouns, and individual volition, not to say whimsical volition, must often be taken into account in the endeavor to explain them. Proper names are also on the whole more conservative in form than common nouns, the reason being that there often collect about proper names certain legal, patriotic, pious and other sentiments which tend to give them a fixed form. The proper names with which an unlearned person is familiar are likely to be subjected to the crystallizing influences of written speech before the words of the ordinary language are reduced writing. One of the first things an illiterate person learns to write is his own name. Yet again proper names differ from common names in that they fall more readily into clearly defined logical categories. No great degree of generalizing power is required to divide proper names into place names and personal names, and then place names into mountain, river and city names, personal names into family and given names, and so on through a multitude of obvious classifications. This ease of classification tends to give proper names certain typical values and to cause them to be repeated in traditional associations. The nomenclature of a civilized people is also likely to be much more variegated than its vocabulary of common nouns. All nations of the modern world are ethnologically mixed, and aliens when they enter a new community, if they carry not a stick of furniture with them, must at least enter with a name. Inferences as to race may be drawn from proper names, though even these may easily be mistaken, as Flom points out in detail in his discussion of Norwegian surnames, Scandinavian Studies, V, 130 ff., but inferences as to nationality cannot be derived securely from proper names. A person who comes from France may bear a German name and may be of German origin, but nevertheless may not be German. The special interest of proper names in the history of the English language in America lies in the unparalleled opportunity afforded for the exercise of imagination, ingenuity, sentiment, in providing this virgin territory with the human associations of a local and personal nomenclature. Never before had a similar opportunity presented itself to a civilized people of the western world. With a whole continent at its disposal to name and to people, what use did the American colonists make of this privilege? Can we find in this situation a clear index of the powers of the American mind to rise or fail to rise to a great opportunity for the exercise of the creative imagination? In fact, however, the opportunity was not as unhampered as it might seem to be. For the colonization of America was not an instantaneous process, but complicated and long continued. Nor is it conceivable that the colonists at any time thought of themselves as selected for the utilization of an unusual imaginative opportunity. When they came to settle in America they brought with them the same human impulses and associations as had colored their lives before migration. They came to America not to exemplify theories, but to live. It is therefore unfair to measure American nomenclature by any other tests than those of the practical circumstances under which the proper names of the country became established. These practical circumstances were very much the same as had determined the character of the names traditional in the old homes of the colonists. Fine names, even appropriate names, are not the exclusive possession of the old world, nor on the other hand are such crudities as Meadville or Jonesburg to be met with only in America. The esthetic distance between Jonesburg and Peterborough or Petrograd is not great, and it is true of all proper names that time and conventional association can make any name seem respectable or distinguished. If Pitt is a distinguished name, may not Pittsburgh be equally distinguished? May not the name also be as closely associated with its place, may it not be as "inevitable," as Edinburg, or Hamburg, or any -ville of France, or any -by, -chester, or -ton of England? "American local names lend themselves strangely little to retention," lamented Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother, p. 309, "I find, if one has happened to deal for long years with almost any group of European designations-these latter springing, as it has almost always come to seem, straight from the soil where natural causes were anciently to root them, each with its rare identity. The bite into interest of the borrowed, the imposed, the 'faked' label, growing but as by a dab of glue on an article of trade, is inevitably much less sharp." All this because Henry James found it hard to remember after forty years the name of a convalescent camp for soldiers in Rhode Island which he had visited but once, though finally the name "figures" to his memory, "though with a certain vagueness," as Portsmouth Grove. It is difficult to see how at any time or in any country natural causes were able to "root" names. Names are applied only by agreement and convention, and though natural causes may suggest a name, proximity to a view, a mountain, a bay, or what not, yet only common acceptance of such a name can root it in common use. Names indeed always arise out of common human experiences, among which must be counted recollection and memory carrying over the name of an old and familiar place to a new and strange one. If this is borrowing or faking, mankind has been guilty of this misdemeanor in all ages and climes. If the glue which attaches a name to its place in America seems thin and lacking in adhesiveness, it can be so only because the human associations one has here with a place are thin and vague. But to assume that all local associations, all personal associations referable to names are dull and thin in America is to make one of those broad general charges against a race which are always rendered ineffective by their too indiscriminate inclusiveness. No general or official method for establishing a fixed form for a name that varied in traditional use was available in the United States until the establishment of the United States Geographic Board in 1890. During the time it has existed this Board has made some |