As anyone who has read my work knows, I love American slang and traditional, rhetorical English in almost equal parts. I also love how tricky and elusive that slang can be, as British writers such as Dickens and Trollope discovered when they tried to imitate it in their novels. The dialogue in the American sections of Martin Chuzzlewit is clumsy and embarrassing, so much so that I usually skip those chapters when I reread the novel. Given Dickens's perfect ear for English vernacular speech, I'm intrigued by how tone deaf he was to the rhythm of American constructions, not to mention their metaphorical "logic."

When I came across the following passage about the development of the American idiom (it's from Paul Johnson's The Birth of the Modern: World Society, 1815-1830), I instantly began yearning for Twain.

Cocktail dates from 1806: in 1822 a Kentucky breakfast was defined as "three cocktails and a chaw of terbacker." Barroom came in 1807; mint julep, in 1809; and a long drink, in 1828. There were borrowings from the Dutch, such as boss, and many more from the French, both Canadian and in Louisiana: depot, rapids, prairie, shanty, chute, cache, crevasse. From the Spanish another large crop, including mustang (1808), ranch (1808), sombrero (1823), patio (1827), corral (1829), and lasso (1831). The Americans used obsolete English words like talented, as well as pure neologisms like obligate. The adopted the German word dumm, which became dumb, meaning stupid. They were beginning to adopt Negro words and to coin a good many terms springing from their own political customs--not only caucus but mass meeting, for instance. There were settler's words like lot and squatter. There was also the beginning of a dangerous talent for euphemism: help as the democratic term for servant.

The journals of the great expedition carried out by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in 1804-06, from Saint Louis across the Rockies to the Columbia River and the Pacific, published in 1814, introduced a wide range of terms never before heard in Britain: portage, raccoon, groundhog, grizzly bear, backtrack, medicine man, huckleberry, war party, running time, overnight, overall, rattlesnake, bowery, and moose, as well as adding new variant meanings to old English terms, such as snag, stone, suit, bar, brand, bluff, fix, hump, knob, creek, and settlement. Above all, there was the fertile American capacity to coin phrases and amalgams: It was the Americans, not the English, oddly enough, who invented keep a stiff upper lip (1815), plus fly off the handle (1825), get religion (1826), knock-down (1832), stay on the fence (1828), in cahoots (1829), horse sense (1832), and barking up the wrong tree (1833), plus a variety of less-datable expressions like hold on, let on, take on, cave in, flunk out, and stave off. As early as the 1820s Americans were trying to get the hang of a thing and insisting there's no two ways about it.