The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1902-06-16
AS TO LoAFER.
The Probable Derivation Of This
Much Used Term.
Chicago Inter Ocean

81 object" said Cecil Rhodes i'm the
part Of his will dealing with his Dalham
hall estate, ito an expectaut heir develop
ing into a lCafeT." Then he added pro-
visions TO prevent any loafer from sue
ceeding 10 the property Whereupon the
London Chronicle remarks:
The question of the derivation of that
word ioafer, which Mr.. Rhodes win is
likely TO elevate from the slang dictiOn-
airy. is already getting acute The word
is Spanish, and ike 'galoot and Others
came from Mexico through Texas and the
States. II Is the America BiZed form OF
,gauoterO'-an idle, lazy VagabOnd-pass
ing, as any student Of Bartlett knows
through 'gloferO' and 'glOfer 10 lOfer.
and ending Up with the pretense Of hav-
Ing something English about IL. as loaf
era man who has no Causal connection
with the loaf he does not earn"
All Of which exhibits ignorance of the
mother tongue and native reliance on
BaFtletts coCksure assertions in his so
called dictionary Of Americanisms
While we hesitate 10 assert that there
Is no such word as 'gallOferO" in Span
ish, the latest edition OF FalezqueZ does
not contain il or anything like IT, though
that work pays special attention TO Amer
ican-Spanish dialects. Nor did 'loa fer
come into our speech from the southwest
but first appeared on the Atlantic coast.
The earliest traceable use Of loaf in
print Is In the New York Commercial Ad-
vertiser whose Washington correspond
ent, in December, 1876, wrote: THE senate
has loafed away the week" Then came
Walt Whitman, in 1855, with his: Il loafe
and invite my soul. ] lean and loafe al
my ease. Then Lowell used the word
In his "Biglow Papers and IN the intro
duCtion to the second series IN 1857 wrote:
To loaf: This, I think. is unquestiou-
ably German. Laufen' is pronounced
lOfen' in some parts Of Germany and ]
once heard one German student say 20
another: Ich lauf' hier bis du wider
kehFest' and he began to saunter I'D and
down-in short, to loaf
So far. we might infer that the word
was picked up by their neighbors from the
passed into American" English. But In
1852 Henry Kingsley used Ii in his "Ra-
Yenshoe, and in 1873 William Black used
it IN his Princess Of Thule as follows
"Shoeblacks are compelled to a great
deal of unavoidable loafing. but certain
ly this one lOafed rather energeucally."
How can you go down TO the beach by
yourself among all those loafing vaga-
bOnds?"
We might suppose that kingsley and
Black borrowed the word from America
were not Black a Scotsman and Kings
ley a long resident in Scotland and "A
Free Kirk Journalist. But the German
''laufen' has the same root as the Eng
lsh leap. with its ancient past tense tens
"lope,' and in Scots many old
English forms are preserved. The
Scottish "land-lOuper' Is the same
as Lord Bacon's "land-IODer" aud
both mean vaErant or 'loafer" In the
sense OF tramp" Hence il is quite pos
sible that in both america and England
"lOafer' Is merely a revival Of an old
English form. stimulated here by the
provincial German 'lOfen" and ''iofer
and in Britain by the persistence of the
Scottish form Of topper
At all events. I'm both countries. the
word was felt 10 meet a need. As Pro-
fessOr Matthews Of the old Chicago uni
Versity pointed out in one Of his ESSAYS.
about 1870. loafer is more than Iounger.
"A gentleman, he said. I'm effect. may
lounge. but he does not loaf A vagabond
idler lOafs a. well as lounges
Hence, Cecil Rhodes will can not Gle
vate "lOafer' from the slang dictionary
IL never WAS slang but always a word
OF good TeutOnic stock. probably of good
British breeding Certainly for more
than thirty years IL has been good Eng
lish.