Word: awkwardly
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Dates: during 1870-1879
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...William Gordon, Farmer Jonathan Hastings was a man from whom the students used to hire horses. He would use the expression, "A Yankee good horse," to denote an excellent good horse. The students gave him the name of Yankee Jon. Yankee became a by-word to denote a silly, awkward person, and being carried from college was thus circulated through the country, and was at length taken up and applied as a cant-word to New-Englanders in common, bearing with it a tinge of reproach, and has ultimately come to be used by foreigners in mentioning Americans when they...
...become the fashion of late years for our large city newspapers to treat their less pretentious neighbors of the country with a kind of complacent disdain. We frequently see in them sharp hits against their plodding contemporaries, for commonplace and awkward expressions, and general lack of brilliancy. Though this criticism is to a large extent just, there is one matter in which our great metropolitan journals need to look to themselves. It is indeed a fault which is exceedingly prevalent in the highest class of our newspapers. I refer to the continual use of certain words and phrases, perhaps rather...