Made in U.S.A.

No matter how hard he tries, scholarly Dr. Mitford M. Mathews can never remember much about what he reads; he is too busy covering slips of paper with odd words that catch his eye. Over the past 25 years, he has jotted down 50,000 of them and filed them away for future reference. This week U.S. readers with $50 to spare will have a chance to judge the result: Lexicographer Mathews' two-volume Dictionary of Americanisms, the first dictionary of words coined by Americans.

Unlike the Oxford Dictionary of American English, which set out to record all words ever used by Americans (the project on which Editor Mathews served his apprenticeship), the Dictionary of Americanisms includes only those stamped unmistakably with the label "Made in U.S.A." To find them, Mathews plowed through the 100 volumes of the Colonial Records of New England, searched back issues of The New Yorker and TIME, followed Li'l Abner for months. He read the diaries of Cotton Mather and those of a Civil War housewife in Montgomery, Ala. He consulted scholars and experts, from H. L. (The American Language") Mencken down to a lifer in a federal prison who told him about the real McCoy (from the real Macao--the uncut heroin smuggled in from the Portuguese island colony of Macao.

Borrowing & Inventing. Hundreds of Americanisms, Mathews found, grew out of other languages. English-speaking settlers in the Spanish Southwest turned estampida into stampede, vamos into vamoose, and calabozo into calaboose. Alaskan settlers corrupted a powerful drink of the Hutsnuwu Indians into hooch, changed hiu muckamuck, the Chinook words meaning "plenty to eat," into a high-muck-a-muck, a "person of importance." From the German gunsmiths of Pennsylvania came rifle, probably out of riffel, the word for groove. The Dutch produced koekje (cookies); and their word for dung--pappekak--eventually turned into poppycock.

English-speaking Americans, however, were more than borrowers and corrupters. As the nation grew, the language grew too--adding pull up stakes and pony express, wistaria and widow's walk, freshman and flunk, sideburns (the cheek whiskers worn by Union Army General Ambrose Burnside) and bloomers (the billowing trousers worn by Feminist Amelia Bloomer). An erudite U.S. missionary named T. S. Savage first named the gorilla. His source: the Greek translation of the word that Hanno of Carthage used to describe the hostile and hairy creatures he met on his travels.

Misspelling & Reclaiming. U.S. men of letters, strangely enough, were responsible for few new words (though it was Washington Irving who first accused his countrymen of worshiping the almighty dollar, and Henry James who invented the ivory tower). In 1893 a Lafayette professor named F. A. March suggested that an execution in the newly invented electric chair be called electricute. A reporter misspelled it, and though scholars howled in protest, the word became electrocute for good.

In the course of his labors, Editor Mathews restored to a number of words their proper birthright. Though the Oxford Dictionary contends that demoralize is French, Mathews tracked it down to Noah Webster, who used it in a pamphlet on the French Revolution and carefully noted in the margin that he was coining the word. In his own dictionary, Webster also noted the word congressional. But since he attributed it to a man named Barlow, the Oxford editors assumed he meant the 17th Century English bishop. The word was proved an Americanism when Mathews unearthed a letter from Webster's old schoolmate Joel Barlow in which congressional appeared.

Editor Mathews also does his bit to settle a perennial argument over a unique American contribution--O.K. Some scholars have always insisted that the term originated with Andrew Jackson, a notoriously bad speller who was supposed to mark official documents O.K. for oll korrect. Woodrow Wilson used okeh on the theory that the word came from the Choctaw hoke, meaning "Yes, it is." Mathews' preference: that it sprang up first during the presidential campaign of 1840, when Van Buren's supporters organized a mysterious O.K. Club. The initials were those of Van Buren's home town: Old Kinderhook, N.Y.

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