Melville's Contribution to English

Extract

The reader who turns to Herman Melville's works for the first time is likely to be struck by his many strange words and strange usages. This strangeness is not only because they come from the vocabularies of seamen and life in the southern Pacific, but also because many of them are forgotten Americanisms or revivals of Elizabethan and seventeenthcentury English terms. Melville seems to have had a notable memory for words. I have no doubt that if a comparison were made it would be found that he possessed one of the most individualized vocabularies among American writers of the nineteenth century, and that his influence has tended to preserve or revive many words which otherwise might have disappeared from American, and even English, usage. Such obvious Americanisms as “not to prick the buffalo” (i.e., “let sleeping dogs lie”) the revival of sea-beef (“pickled beef”), pitched (meaning “chosen”), bower (“to dwell”), and the creation of “Logan of the Woods” (“grizzly bear”), bedarned, carasposa, curios, and bosky, are typical of Melville's effort to seize upon every striking word or phrase that came his way.