"The English language is extraordinarily adaptable and our tongue friendly and receptive to innovation and creativity. Speakers of American English have welcomed words and coined new ones for accuracy and for fun. Colonialism played its role in this capacity, of course. For instance, 700 years of colonial rule in Ireland gave Americans bog, whiskey, hooligan, shenanigans, and smithereens. If you say heaps of in place of a lot, you got it from droll Australians."
"American political campaigns have given us a wealth of words and clever slogans that sometimes rhymed playfully. Tippecanoe and Tyler Too takes some explaining now, as does Hurrah! Hurrah! The Country's Risin' for Henry Clay and Frelinghuysen."Just inside living memory, though, you may recall I Like Ike. Some feature jokes curled inside, like Abraham Lincoln's homespun advice to worried Republicans in 1864, Don't change horses mid-stream."
English shows high adaptability and welcomes innovations in vocabulary and creative coinage. American English incorporated borrowings from diverse languages through colonialism and cultural contact, including Irish words like bog, whiskey, hooligan, shenanigans, and smithereens, Australian heaps of, and Hindi jungle, shampoo, bandana, thug, and chutney. Political campaigns produced memorable rhyming slogans and jokey phrases such as Tippecanoe and Tyler Too, I Like Ike, Don't change horses mid-stream, Who but Hoover?, and Better a Third Termer than a Third Rater. Political discourse also generated metaphors and neologisms like loose cannon, lame duck, and gerrymandering, with historical origins tied to figures like Elbridge Gerry.
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