The 19th century produced a great many new English words from popular speech or slang. You might be able to get a handle on general attitudes in the US population around 1850 by studying the words that arose because, evidently, people needed them. There was certainly a healthy disrespect for pompous, overly wordy talk, not to mention pomposity itself. “Stuffed shirt” and “stuck-up” are two epithets from that era that are still in use, as is the slightly stranger “highfalutin.”
One oddity about “highfalutin” is that it is not, as many often believe, actually “highfaluting” — it’s not a verb created out of “high” and an activity known as “faluting”. There are some ideas about its origin that do try to trace it back to something like that; one idea is that “falutin” comes from “fluting” and is based on the flute-like voices of pretentious rich people. This is probably nonsense; there’s no evidence that the upper class in 19th-Century America affected artificially high voices.
Another possibility is that “highfalutin” comes from “high-flown” or “high-flying”. If you’re lording it over other people, you’re assuming your status has been raised (or theirs lowered), so you might be “flying high” over them. The term “high-flown” has also been applied to exaggerated rhetoric and behavior, so maybe there’s a grain of truth in this one.
There’s even been a theory suggested that “highfalutin” originally defined a very good grade of flour used for baking excellent bread, and it’s a distortion of “high gluten.” Flour high in gluten is said to make better bread, but this theory really seems little more than a guess.
There may be some more highfalutin theories about “highfalutin” out there, but it will take a lot of gumption to uncover them. “Gumption,” by the way, is another word that sort of arose in the 1800s. “Sort of” because the word existed about a century earlier in some English and Scottish dialects, where it meant “common sense.” Two things happened to “gumption” in the 1800s, probably around the same time. The meaning changed to something more like motivation or drive (“If they show pluck and gumption, they get promoted” — 1889), and it left local dialects behind to enter common, widespread usage. The 1889 meaning of “gumption”, which is basically “showing initiative”, still remains today.
“Gumption” has clearer origins than “highfalutin”; it probably comes from the Middle English word “gome” (smart), which might come from the Old Norse word “gaumr.” There’s another, pretty rare derivative of “gome” in English: “gormless.” If you’re “gormless,” it’s the opposite of being smart; the “gormless” have no clue. The positive sense of the word, which might have been “gome” or “gorm” in modern English, either never existed or has disappeared without a trace — so while we can say we’re gormless about “highfalutin,” we can’t say we’re “gorm” about “gumption.” Well, I suppose we could try, but that would be a pretty highfalutin way to put it.
