Washington Irving and Frontier Speech

T HE REPUTATION OF Washington Irving as a staunch defender of conservative British usage has delayed proper recognition of his taste for word study and his varied contributions to the American language. Even in his earliest works, such as the egregious Salmagundi papers (1807-1808),1 Irving revealed himself as a connoisseur of curious terms, place names, and etymologiesnot to mention puns. In later years, as a mature writer, he supplemented the national word stock by the liberal use of now-familiar Spanish words and names in his histories, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) and A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada (1829), and of specialized frontier terms in his popular volumes on the West. Yet the influential judgment that Irving was an Anglomaniac of great earnestness, 2 as Mencken piquantly phrased it, seems either to discount or to defy these and other plain instances of his uncensorious attitude toward portions of the evolving American idiom. A re-examination of his linguistic beliefs and habits is thus necessary in order to define and account for his views on the relative merits of the

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