Colonial American English: A Glossary (review)

340Reviews ('everlasting'), keethanlie ('apparently'), and owreset ('translate'), missing from the SND, are still missing. The CSD could prove to be a tombstone for a certain ideal form of Scots, but it has the potential to be a living record, evolving with the dialects and renewing for each generation of Lowlanders a sense of historical depth in the midst of present experience. Caroline Macafee University of Glasgow Colonial American English: A Glossary. Richard M. Lederer, Jr. Essex, Connecticut: A Verbatim Book, 1985. 267 pp. $24.95. The compiler of this handsome volume is a retired investment manager, the author of The Place-Names of Westchester County, New York (1978), and (the dust-jacket informs us) "Village Historian of Scarsdale, New York, where he lives." He has presented a dictionary of some 2,500 words he has encountered in his reading of works written in the British (but not the French or Spanish) colonies in the present-day United States between 1608 and 1783: "I have built this glossary by poring over patents, deeds, laws, newspapers, letters, memoirs, diaries, songs, plays and public records" (p. 7). His selections are, as he frankly states, "subjective,"' though he alleges that he has restricted himself to "only those words which appeared in Colonial usage and which are now obsolete or which had meanings then that are not known today" (p. 7). The last of these principles of selection results in the inclusion of entries that are still current in their "colonial senses" but not, apparently, known to the compiler (e.g., broomrape or tragacanth or trepan, found in every current desk dictionary). Pronunciation is "not within the purposes of this book" (p. 8), and the part-of-speech labels, rather irregularly omitted from many entries, provide no very useful insight into the grammar of the period (and some quotations illustrate uses that do not match the label Reviews34 1 provided). Having examined a variety of sources, many of which are listed in the bibliography (pp. 9-14), Lederer "culled" definitions from "Webster's New International Dictionary" (apparently both the second and third editions, though the latter, of course, routinely excludes words and senses that became obsolete before 1755), the OED, and the Dictionary of American English (whose co-editor is unfortunately listed as "Hurlbert" [p. 7] rather than "Hulbert"). To the definitions adapted from these dictionaries, he appends quotations but without specific citation to the bibliography or any other finding aid to their particular source. References to "a 17th-century cookbook" (s.v. morfew) or "a 1797 Boston newspaper" (s.v. moreen) or "a 1701 dictionary" (s.v. cracknel!) or to William Byrd or Benjamin Franklin (both frequently quoted) are so unspecific as to be unhelpful to the serious user of this work. When the same quotation appears for two entries but in a slightly different form (cf. calker and thrummy), one doubts the accuracy of the citation slips. An innovative feature of this work is the topical index to the vocabulary (pp. 251-67) listing words under such headings as "Law and Punishment" and "Military and Nautical." Consulting some of the entries for what the index calls Earthy Terms led to an amusing discovery about Lederer's defining style. Both pipe (sense 2) and yard are glossed as "A Penis," but oyster basket makes use of the definite article: "The female [sic] vagina; a place for depositing oysters, gobs of semen." Such a definition suggests, unintentionally perhaps, a bizarre image of life in Colonial America. At thrum 'to copulate', Lederer may have overlooked a genuine discovery since neither of the two citations in the OED is from an American source, and the word is not listed in the DAE or in Mathews' Dictionary ofAmericanisms. Unfortunately thrum is one of the few entries for which he has not provided an illustrative quotation. How useful will this work be to readers who share Lederer's interest in colonial history? The selection covering 1695 to 1720 from Samuel Sewall's Diary found in a current college-level anthology includes eight lexical footnotes; Lederer defines two of these words (one with a citation to Sewall): 342Reviews quarrel 'a square or diamond-shaped pane of glass' and sennight 'a...