Various nautical terms peculiar to America, or taken into English from American sources, came in during the eighteenth century, among them, /schooner/, /cat-boat/ and /pungy/, not to recall /batteau/ and /canoe/. According to a recent historian of the American merchant marine,[20] the first schooner ever seen was launched at Gloucester, Mass., in 1713. The word, it appears, was originally spelled /scooner/. /To scoon/ was a verb borrowed by the New Englanders from some Scotch dialect, and meant to skim or skip across the water like a flat stone. As the first schooner left the ways and glided out into Gloucester harbor, an enraptured spectator shouted: "Oh, see how she scoons!" "A /scooner/ let her be!" replied Captain Andrew Robinson, her [Pg048] builder--and all boats of her peculiar and novel fore-and-aft rig took the name thereafter. The Dutch mariners borrowed the term and changed the spelling, and this change was soon accepted in America. The Scotch root came from the Norse /skunna/, to hasten, and there are analogues in Icelandic, Anglo-Saxon and Old High German. The origin of /cat-boat/ and /pungy/ I have been unable to determine. Perhaps the latter is related in some way to /pung/, a one-horse sled or wagon. /Pung/ was once widely used in the United States, but of late it has sunk to the estate of a New England provincialism. Longfellow used it, and in 1857 a writer in the /Knickerbocker Magazine/ reported that /pungs/ filled Broadway, in New York, after a snow-storm.
Most of these new words, of course, produced derivatives, for example, /to stack hay/, /to shingle/, /to shuck/ (/i. e./, corn), /to trail/ and /to caucus/. /Backwoods/ immediately begat /backwoodsman/ and was itself turned into a common adjective. The colonists, indeed, showed a beautiful disregard of linguistic nicety. At an early date they shortened the English law-phrase, /to convey by deed/, to the simple verb, /to deed/. Pickering protested against this as a barbarism, and argued that no self-respecting law-writer would employ it, but all the same it was firmly entrenched in the common speech and it has remained there to this day. /To table/, for /to lay on the table/, came in at the same time, and so did various forms represented by /bindery/, for /bookbinder's shop/. /To tomahawk/ appeared before 1650, and /to scalp/ must have followed soon after. Within the next century and a half they were reinforced by many other such new verbs, and by such adjectives made of nouns as /no-account/ and /one-horse/, and such nouns made of verbs as /carry-all/ and /goner/, and such adverbs as /no-how/. In particular, the manufacture of new verbs went on at a rapid pace. In his letter to Webster in 1789, Franklin denounced /to advocate/, /to progress/, and /to oppose/--a vain enterprise, for all of them are now in perfectly good usage. /To advocate/, indeed, was used by Thomas Nashe in 1589, and by John Milton half a century later, but it seems to have been reinvented in America. In 1822 and again in 1838 Robert Southey, then poet laureate, led two belated attacks upon it, as a barbarous Americanism, but [Pg049] its obvious usefulness preserved it, and it remains in good usage on both sides of the Atlantic today--one of the earliest of the English borrowings from America. In the end, indeed, even so ardent a purist as Richard Grant White adopted it, as he did /to placate/.[21]