dozy and schere de vere and pennsylvania dutch and samuel stehman haldeman and noah webster and orthography

Before even turning to Schele de Vere's book on Americanisms, I thought I should first dispense with "brashy" and "broom." After all, these words appeared in the testimony of the experts about how wood breaks, and I want to make sure I know what they mean. Brashy means, "of the nature of brash; broken, crumbly, fragmentary." From 1722 we have, "I have eight or nine acres of brashy ground." The adjective was not limited in its use to wood or trees, as one could have "brashy" ice or sandstones. From 1878: "The ice was of a soft 'brashy' nature...from one to three feet in thickness." I suppose a current synonym for this kind of ice would be "slushy" or "chopped." But I had to retreat further to brash, which the OED identifies as perhaps a corrupt form of the French breche and means "a mass or heap of fragments," and can be applied to loose or broken rock; rubble; fragments of crushed ice or "refuse boughs or branches, hedge clippings, twigs." Thus, we can see how brashy and dozy could be use synonymously with respect to wood. Such wood is dead or decaying.

Sweeping over to Broom

When we take a little detour over to broom, a word used in the testimony of one expert (as described in the previous essay) to contrast with "dozy" and "brashy," we discover how slippery language really is. If wood "brooms" up it is supposed to "sliver" or "splinter." This is healthy or good wood. At least that was the way the word was used by the expert. But I searched the OED in vain for the meaning of "broom" as "to sliver." Here is what I found. To broom means to "sweep with a broom" as in "The feeble old woman was brooming the floor" or "to bream a ship." The latter means to wash by burning." From a 1707 dictionary we have "The brooming of a ship meant in old time the burning of the filth from its side." So, I decided to see if the noun "broom" might give me some insight into the notion of brooming as "slivering" or "splintering" (i.e., a sign of healthy wood). The word seems to be related to bramble or a thorny shrub, hence the "broom tree" under which Jonah sought refuge from the burning sun. So, we might infer from this that "to broom" might be to become pointed and sharp, even though the broom tree isn't necessarily sharp. Thus, I am a little confused here. But, going on further, we know that a broom is a "besom," or an implement for sweeping, and this can be made of twigs or sticks. Oops, this gets us back to one meaning of brash, doesn't it, even though "broom" as a verb is supposed to be the oppposite of brashy or dozy. Well, the concepts are tolerably clear, even if the words aren't crystal clear. But, as we say in law, if the words are clear enough for liability to be established, that is all we lawyers are interested in...

Americanisms

The first appearance of dozy as "decayed," attested by the OED, was in Schele de Vere's 1872 book Americanisms. I managed to track down this perfectly delightful book, and here is what I found. This 666-page book (maybe THIS BOOK is the Antichrist), has this to say on p. 464:

"Dozy and dozied are said in Pennsylvania of timber beginning to decay and unfit for use, while the decay is yet hardly perceptible, but the timber already brittle."

Reading this definition made me want to go down two roads at the same time. First, I said to myself, "Wouldn't it be great to walk through some of de Vere's Americanisms and see what they meant and it they might be recognizable today? But then, I decided to go the other route. For at the end of the quotation was the following in parentheses--"(S.S. Haldeman). That is all it said, and, of course it made me want to learn something about this S. S. Haldeman.

After I read about him I am almost ashamed to say that I didn't know of him before now. Samuel Stehman Haldeman (1812-1880) was a distinguished malacologist (mollusks), conchologist, zoologist and, after returning to his native PA from Delaware in 1868, the first chairman of the Department of Comparative Philology at the University of Pennsylvania. An excellent biographical sketch is here. As early as 1844, however, in his article "Remarks on Zoological Nomenclature," he indicated his interests in the study of philology. Even though he didn't turn to philology officially until 1868, his 1858 article entitled "Analytic Orthography," was awarded the Trevelyan prize by the Phonetic Society of Great Britain. Thus, he was instrumental in developing the modern discipline of spelling, and as early as 1838 he corresponded with Noah Webster about his dictionaries. By the early 1870s spelling was all the rage, and in 1875 he was appointed to a committee of the American Philological Association (he was president of the Association in 1869) with a charge to review Noah Webster's new spelling and to determine the need for spelling changes. The committe concluded that reform was necessary and recommended the change in spelling of the following 11 words, which change was endorsed by the Spelling Reform Association.* This association formed as a result of a meeting of an International

[* The words were ar, catalog, definit, gard, giv, hav, infinit, liv, tho, thru, wisht.]

Convention for the Amendment of English Orthography during the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.

Because Haldeman lived in Eastern Pennsylvania (and earlier in his life he had gone to Dickenson University), he was especially aware of the language of that area, publishing Pennsylvania Dutch: A Dialect of South German with an Infusion of English (1872) as well as other books on etymology and orthography.

Conclusion

So, I am in the funny but not altogether unusual position at the end of this essay. I began with law, the discipline that currently pays my bills, and then I took a detour through words, continuing through biography, and ending up with spelling, the last of which I have spend my last two years focused upon as I participate annually (because I have not yet won!) in the National Senior Spelling Bee in Cheyenne, WY. How is that for full circle?

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