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made by the simple process of back formation, as, to resurrect, to excurt, to resolute, to burgle 18 and to enthuse. 19

Some of these inventions, after flourishing for a generation or more, were retired with blushes during the period of æsthetic consciousness following the Civil War, but a large number have survived to our own day, and are in good usage. Not even the most bilious purist would think of objecting to to affiliate, to endorse, to collide, to jeopardize, to predicate, to progress, to itemize, to resurrect or to Americanize today, and yet all of them gave grief to the judicious when they first appeared in the debates of Congress, brought there by statesmen from the backwoods. Nor to such simpler verbs of the period as to corner (i. e., the market), to boss and to lynch. 20 Nor perhaps to to boom, to boost, to kick (in the sense of to protest), to coast (on a sled), to engineer, to chink (i. e., logs), to feaze, to splurge, to bulldoze, to aggravate (in the sense of to anger), to yank and to crawfish. These verbs have entered into the very fibre of the American vulgate, and so have many nouns derived from them, e. g., boomer, boom-town, bouncer, kicker, kick, splurge, roller-coaster. A few of them, e. g., to collide and to feaze, were archaic English terms brought to new birth; a few others, e. g., to holler 21 and to muss, were obviously mere corruptions. But a good many others, e. g., to bulldoze, to hornswoggle and to scoot, were genuine inventions, and redolent of the soil.

With the new verbs came a great swarm of verb-phrases, some of

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