Turning aside from my current onslaught on STEAM amusements, of which there are about 90 right now, what is a hick?
H. L. Mencken once told a long and involved tale about how a
rather grand American lady had objected to the use of the word 'hick'. As
Mencken describes it, " . . . an American woman novelist, Roof by name,
dispatched a long letter to the Times, denouncing this hick as 'middle class'
slang from the West, hinting that such barbarisms were deliberately given
circulation by 'the German-speaking Jewish population of New York'."
This lady, if Mencken is to be believed, declared that her
own ancestors had travelled from Britain to America "in 1620", and
vowed her loyalty to "the King's English." Now it is important to
note here that Mencken was a master of the grand lie, and was responsible for
convincing most Americans in late 1917 that the first American bathtub was used
on the night of December 10, 1842, having been made for Adam Thompson of
Cincinnati. The tale was told with large amounts of circumstantial detail, and
by 1926, Mencken, alarmed at the way the story had travelled and multiplied,
confessed all.
Without this spreading of the tale, Mencken would never have
confessed, so when you read the detail Mencken offered about the origins of
'hick', it may be wise to keep this in mind. Mencken assures us that a William
Archer showed that that hick was actually perfectly sound English, and that it
could be found in Steele's comedy, The
Funeral. Moreover, says Mencken, a fortnight later, a Norwegian
philologist, S. N. Baral, wrote to say that hick was connected with the
Anglo-Saxon haeg, a menial or lout,
and that it had cognates in all the ancient Teutonic languages, and even in
Sanskrit!
Sadly, not one word of this can be confirmed. There is no
trace of S. N. Baral, the Old English haeg
is a border or hedge, the author called Roof also appears to have been
invented, so all in all, it would appear that Henry Mencken was up to his old
tricks. There was indeed a comedy by Richard Steele called The Funeral, but it
seems not to include the word in question.
According to the Oxford
English Dictionary, the word is a by-form of 'Richard', and it appears to
be more like Rube or Charlie or Guy, all names that can be used in a derogatory
way. The earliest record of it in use is in 1565, though the OED identifies it as being now a US
term.
There are probably more slang, regional and class-limited
words for a simple rustic than there are for anything other than fighting,
getting drunk, bodily eliminations or getting very friendly with members of the
opposite sex, the reason presumably being that townspeople needed a way of
telling each other that here was a naive individual, ripe for gulling,
plucking, or otherwise being taken advantage of.
According to those who know, the word has been known since
1565, but first appeared as an adjective in the Sinclair Lewis novel Main
Street, in 1920. There is a somewhat unreliable folk etymology that says in
rural areas of the USA, hickory sticks were used as teaching aids and
motivators, long after this cruel and unusual form of pedagogy had died out in
city schools.
I doubt it, and it never did
appear in the entertainment trade journal, Variety, in the
headline 'STIX NIX HIX PIX' over a story that people in the sticks or boondocks
were less than impressed by a movie, though the headline did in fact appear in
a movie, Yankee Doodle Dandy, in 1924. Not quite the same thing, but
that, combined with the Lewis use a few years earlier and Mencken's 1921
article on the word would seem to point at a World War I origin for the term as
a common expression.
