Today is a day of thanksgiving for the Schwenckfelders of Pennsylvania. The celebration commemorates the anniversary of the day in 1734 when members of that religious sect formally expressed gratitude for deliverance from Old World persecution as they prepared to emigrate to the New World.

The shift from the Old World to the New also brought Schwenckfelders the opportunity to put their stamp on words from German origin. Today we give thanks to them, and to other speakers of Pennsylvania Dutch, for a few Americanisms.

The German settlers gave us such culinary delights as the molasses-rich shoofly pie and also funeral pie, a pie made of raisins traditionally served at funerals. The Pennsylvania Dutch gave us schnitz, a dish of sliced dried fruit, especially sliced dried apples, and schnitz and knepp, dried apples and dumplings boiled with or without smoked ham. And they gave us panhas and panhaus, alternative names for scrapple.

Although the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect term spritz moved into the general lexicon, another dialectal term did not: butterbread. As you might expect, butterbread simply refers to a piece of bread and butter.

Finally, we can thank the Pennsylvania Dutch for the words hex and hexafoos. To hex is to practice witchcraft, and a hexafoos (from hex meaning "witch" plus foos meaning foot) names the three-toed triangular mark put on some Pennsylvania barns either to keep evil spirits from the cattle or for decoration.