Words of Pennsylvania
Last week’s post on words born in California caused me to wonder
about words that began their lives (as English words) in other states. So why
not Pennsylvania?
Pennsylvania was home to a group of German immigrants known in
the region as Pennsylvania Dutch. Heaps of fascinating words made their way
into English through this group of folks. One such word is the verb ferhoodle,
to confuse or perplex. Ferhoodle
didn’t make its way into English until 1956 & came through what linguists
call Pennsylvania German (when the Pennsylvania German folks mentioned their
homeland – Deutschland - it sounded like Dutch to somebody).
In 1830 the word hex showed up in English, courtesy
of this same group of people. The original German word was hexe, to practice witchcraft. It was used in English initially as a
synonym to the noun witch, but later
grew to mean magical spell.
In 1919 the word dunk showed up in the language,
meaning to dip. Its Pennsylvania
German source word meant to soak. Dunk
made its way into the world of basketball in 1937.
But not all Pennsylvania-born words come via those early German
settlers.
Bits of seasoned pork dipped into cornmeal, fried and pressed
into cakes are known as scrapple, a take-off on the word scraps,
most likely from Old Norse, & born in Pennsylvania about 1850.
One of the native Iroquois tribes of Pennsylvania loaned its
tribal name to the conestoga wagon in the 1750s. Later, an abbreviation of the
word conestoga
came to mean cigar. First known as stoga & later as stogie
or stogy, the cigar was thus named due to conestoga drivers’
fondness for cheap cigars.
Our present meaning of the word cent came to English
during the 1786 Continental Congress in Pennsylvania. Though from the times of
Middle English cent (borrowed from Latin) had meant hundred, the Continental Congressfolk wanted to move away from the
Revolutionary & Colonial dollars being divided into ninetieths (no kidding),
so they embraced the suggestion of Robert Morris that they divide the dollar
into one hundredths and label those hundredths with the word cent.
The story is that the related word percent influenced Morris’s
thinking.
And in 1965, Pennsylvanian Pauline M. Leet coined the word sexist
by combining the word sex with the intent of the –ist
from racist.
Leet was the Director of Special Programs at Franklin & Marshall
College. When her coined word hit the presses in the 1968 book by Caroline
Bird, Born Female, it became a part of American parlance.
If
you have anything to say about Pennsylvania &/or its contributions to
English, please do so below in comments.