by Nate Grosjean, Visitor Services Coordinator

Finding myself at something of a perpetual loss for words these days, I decided to visit the MHS reference room in search of some new (rather, quite old) words to liven up my vocabulary. Fortunately for me, the library has a number of works pertaining to American slang terms, colloquialisms, and dialects.

My favorite, John Russell Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms: A Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States, 3^rd ed., is a curious and complicated document. Published in 1860, just one year before the start of the Civil War, it draws together a wide range of phrases and expressions, from the botanical to the political to the whimsically unusual. Prior to its publication, Bartlett served for three years as “Commissioner on the Mexican Boundary,” a position which exposed him to the linguistic frontiers of south/western states like Texas, New Mexico, and California.

To illustrate his definitions, Bartlett included excerpts from a variety of sources from American literature, journalism, and print culture. Reading through this dictionary, one gets a sense of the many ways and spheres in which language developed: the project of creating a distinctly American language was entwined with the project of creating a distinctly American artistic and literary identity. Readers also get a hearty helping of intrigue, humor, and drama, and Bartlett’s best entries always include a story. Here are just a few!

“Acknowledge the corn. An expression of recent origin, which has now become very common. It means to confess or acknowledge a charge or imputation.”

Per the Pittsburgh Com. Advertiser, a man with two flatboats traveled to New Orleans “to try his fortune” selling corn and potatoes. Once there, he decided to go gambling (a beloved 19th-century vice), and lost spectacularly. Having no more money, he bet away his flatboats of corn and potatoes; only later did he learn that the flatboat of corn had sunk in the river. When his creditor arrived the next day to claim his winnings, the man craftily replied: “Stranger, I acknowledge the corn—take ‘em; but the potatoes you can’t have, by thunder!”

“Patent Safe Game or Operation. A system of trickery practised in our large cities on verdant gentlemen from the country.”

Citing Scientific American, Bartlett devotes almost two full pages to the explanation of this scheme. Three collaborators pose as a kind friend of the victim, the designer of a safe, and a cop. Their elaborate plot to rob their “Sucker” involves a small safe with a hidden compartment, a rigged gamble, a phony check, a chase sequence, and, of course, ample skullduggery. Sound complicated? It sure is! Read the full story at this link, complete with dramatic dialogue.

I’ll end with a selection of sounds from the dictionary. Onomatopoeia has a way of speaking for itself…

“Caswash! Dash! splash! The noise made by a body falling into the water. See cachunk.”

“Cachunk! A word like thump! describing the sound produced by the fall of a heavy body. Also written kerchunk! A number of fanciful onomatopoetic words of this sort are used in the South and West … These words are of recent origin.”

“Cawhalux! Whop! The noise made by a box on the ear.”

“Keslosh! Keswosh! Kewosh! Plash! Splash! The noise produced by a body falling flat into the water.”

“Kesouse! Souse! The noise made by a body falling from a small height into the water.”

“Keswollop! Flop! The noise made by a violent fall to the ground.”

---

Further Reading:

John Russell Bartlett. Dictionary of Americanisms: A Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States, 3^rd edition. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1860.

Historical Note on the John Russell Bartlett Papers, Rhode Island Historical Society, Manuscripts Division.

Mitford M. Mathews, A Dictionary of Americanisms On Historical Principles. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956.

Eric Partridge, ed. Paul Beale, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 8^th ed. New York: Macmillan, 1984.

By Meg Szydlik, Visitor Services Coordinator

Content warning: use of 19-century terminology to describe individuals with disabilities.

I’ve written before on Dorothea Dix’s writings regarding those she referred to as the “insane” here in Massachusetts. Since she was a very prolific writer and advocate in the 19^th century, I was curious what else the MHS had of hers. When exploring the MHS library catalog, Abigail, I found that we held three additional addresses to state legislatures—New York, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, out of the twelve total she wrote.

Curious if they were similar to her statement to the Massachusetts legislature, I examined their contents. And while each address was related to a different state and focused on slightly different arguments, her message of humanization and care is consistent throughout the four speeches. Her legacy in driving the creation of asylums and hospitals for disabled people, ultimately, is mixed, but her intentions are clear. She pulled no punches, saying that “God forgive me (if it was sinful,) the vehement indignation that rose towards the inhabitants of a city and county, who could suffer such abominations as these to exist;— towards all official persons holding direct or indirect responsibility, who could permit these brutalizing conditions of the most helpless of human beings.”

In her Memorial: To the Legislature of Massachusetts, Dix devoted a lot of time to the slow and careful unveiling of the ways the state, counties, and cities had failed the “insane” and the “idiots” (her terms, using the technical language of the 19th century). And there were many. She tracked the brutalization and cruelty exerted against people deemed insane, a thread that continued in her other texts as well, though none so intensely as in her statement to the Massachusetts legislature. The descriptions of cages, chains, beatings, and intentional isolation were meant to horrify and therefore motivate the different legislatures to make monumental policy changes. She called on the Massachusetts legislature to “commit to [the legislature] this sacred cause. Your action upon this subject will affect the present and future condition of hundreds of thousands.” This call-to-action rang across the states and even rings into today.

Her arguments were effective, particularly when it came to her calls for states and counties to open hospitals and asylums to care for disabled people, and they were heeded in state after state. Her position was certainly logical, since the primary institutions previously used for this purpose were jails and almshouses. She repeatedly argued that a hospital would allow those whose insanity was “curable”—and thus could be made into something palatable—to recover and become productive members of society.

It is interesting to read these arguments in favor of insane asylums and mental hospitals with the knowledge of what these institutions ultimately became. Her statements about almshouses in New York that “language is feeble to represent them, and the mind shudders with disgust and horror in the act of recalling the state of the unfortunate insane there incarcerated,” could also be said of many mental hospitals. Even the Metropolitan State Hospital here in Massachusetts has a long, ugly history of abuse, covered here by WBUR. Hospitals are just as dependent as other institutions on the ethics of those in charge, and, as Dix wrote, “if public institutions are not guarded from such shameful abuses, I do not know why they should not be fully exposed; what people are not careful to prevent, they must not be too delicate to hear declared.”

Well-meaning advocates, like Dorothea Dix, who do not actually involve the people who are having the experience, frequently have impacts they do not intend. “Nothing about us without us” remains a salient point, even today. I am confident that Dix would be truly horrified at the results of her advocacy for hospitals. Insane asylums being a regular feature in the horror genre does not come from nowhere, after all, and reports that come out of psych hospitals and other care institutions even today can feel uncomfortably similar to what Dix was trying to avoid. Studying Dix brings to mind things like the Disability Day of Mourning, which honors disabled people killed by their caretakers. The tragedy is that disabled people are still abused in many ways and ableism is alive and well. However, there has been a lot of incremental progress towards disabled people taking the agency so long denied to them, from laws like the Americans With Disabilities Act to more public knowledge and acceptance of mental illness and neurodivergence. I certainly hope we continue to move in that direction.