Prior rhymes
_fitting_
and _begetting_.
James Russell Lowell
, had long since died; the charm which the
imagination of Livy had thrown over the earlier annals of Rome had
ceased to shine on the details of almost contemporary history; and if
the flood of his eloquence still continued flowing, we can hardly
suppose that the stream was as rapid, as fresh, and as clear as ever. ' I
will not waste time in criticising the bad English or the mixture of
metaphor in these sentences, but will simply cite another from the same
author which is even worse. 'The shadowy phantom of the Republic
continued to flit before the eyes of the Caesar. There was still, he
apprehended, a germ of sentiment existing, on which a scion of his own
house, or even a stranger, might boldly throw himself and raise the
standard of patrician independence. ' Now a ghost may haunt a murderer,
but hardly, I should think, to scare him with the threat of taking a new
lease of its old tenement. And fancy the _scion_ of a _house_ in the act
of _throwing itself_ upon a _germ of sentiment_ to _raise a standard! _ I
am glad, since we have so much in the same kind to answer for, that this
bit of horticultural rhetoric is from beyond sea. I would not be
supposed to condemn truly imaginative prose. There is a simplicity of
splendor, no less than of plainness, and prose would be poor indeed if
it could not find a tongue for that meaning of the mind which is behind
the meaning of the words. It has sometimes seemed to me that in England
there was a growing tendency to curtail language into a mere
convenience, and to defecate it of all emotion as thoroughly as
algebraic signs. This has arisen, no doubt, in part from that healthy
national contempt of humbug which is characteristic of Englishmen, in
part from that sensitiveness to the ludicrous which makes them so shy of
expressing feeling, but in part also, it is to be feared, from a growing
distrust, one might almost say hatred, of whatever is super-material.
There is something sad in the scorn with which their journalists treat
the notion of there being such a thing as a national ideal, seeming
utterly to have forgotten that even in the affairs of this world the
imagination is as much matter-of-fact as the understanding. If we were
to trust the impression made on us by some of the cleverest and most
characteristic of their periodical literature, we should think England
hopelessly stranded on the good-humored cynicism of well-to-do
middle-age, and should fancy it an enchanted nation, doomed to sit
forever with its feet under the mahogany in that after-dinner mood which
follows conscientious repletion, and which it is ill-manners to disturb
with any topics more exciting than the quality of the wines. But there
are already symptoms that a large class of Englishmen are getting weary
of the dominion of consols and divine common-sense, and to believe that
eternal three per cent. is not the chief end of man, nor the highest and
only kind of interest to which the powers and opportunities of England
are entitled.
The quality of exaggeration has often been remarked on as typical of
American character, and especially o? American humor. In Dr. Petri's
_Gedrangtes Handbuch der Fremdworter_, we are told that the word
_humbug_ is commonly used for the exaggerations of the North-Americans.
To be sure, one would be tempted to think the dream of Columbus half
fulfilled, and that Europe had found in the West a nearer way to
Orientalism, at least in diction. But it seems tome that a great deal of
what is set down as mere extravagance is more fitly to be called
intensity and picturesqueness, symptoms ol the imaginative faculty in
full health and strength, though producing, as yet, only the raw and
formless material in which poetry is to work. By and by, perhaps, the
world will see it fashioned into poem and picture, and Europe, which
will be hard pushed for originality erelong, may have to thank us for a
new sensation. The French continue to find Shakespeare exaggerated
because he treated English just as our country-folk do when they speak
of a 'steep price,' or say that they 'freeze to' a thing. The first
postulate of an original literature is that a people should use their
language instinctively and unconsciously, as if it were a lively part of
their growth and personality, not as the mere torpid boon of education
or inheritance. Even Burns contrived to write very poor verse and prose
in English. Vulgarisms are often only poetry in the egg. The late Mr.
Horace Mann, in one of his public addresses, commented at some length on
the beauty and moral significance ol the French phrase _s'orienter_ and
called on his young friends to practise upon it in life. There was not a
Yankee in his audience whose problem had not always been to find out
what was _about east_, and to shape his course accordingly. This charm
which a familiar expression gains by being commented, as it were, and.
set in a new light by a foreign language, is curious and instructive. I
cannot help thinking that Mr. Matthew Arnold forgets this a little too
much sometimes when he writes of the beauties of French style. It would
not be hard to find in the works of French Academicians phrases as
coarse as those he cites from Burke, only they are veiled by the
unfamiliarity of the language. But, however this may be, it is certain
that poets and peasants please us in the same way by translating words
back again to their primal freshness, and infusing them with a
delightful strangeness which is anything but alienation. What, for
example, is Milton's '_edge_ of battle' but a doing into English of the
Latin _acies? Was die Gans gedacht das der Schwan vollbracht_, what the
goose but thought, that the swan full brought (or, to de-Saxonize it a
little, what the goose conceived, that the swan achieved), and it may
well be that the life, invention, and vigor shown by our popular speech,
and the freedom with which it is shaped to the instant want of those who
use it, are of the best omen for our having a swan at last. The part I
have taken on myself is that of the humbler bird.
But it is affirmed that there is something innately vulgar in the Yankee
dialect. M. Sainte-Beuve says, with his usual neatness: '_Je definis un
patois une ancienne langue qui a eu des malheurs, ou encore une langue
toute jeune st qui n'a pas fait fortune. _' The first part of his
definition applies to a dialect like the Provencal, the last to the
Tuscan before Dante had lifted it into a classic, and neither, it seems
to me, will quite fit a _patois/_, which is not properly a dialect, but
rather certain archaisms, proverbial phrases, and modes of
pronunciation, which maintain themselves among the uneducated side by
side with the finished and universally accepted language. Norman French,
for example, or Scotch down to the time of James VI. , could hardly be
called _patois_, while I should be half inclined to name the Yankee a
_lingo_ rather than a dialect. It has retained a few words now fallen
into disuse in the mother country, like to _tarry_, to _progress_,
_fleshy_, _fall_, and some others; it has changed the meaning of some,
as in _freshet_; and it has clung to what I suspect to have been the
broad Norman pronunciation of _e_ (which Moliere puts into the mouth of
his rustics) in such words as _sarvant_, _parfect_, _vartoo_, and the
like. It maintains something of the French sound of _a_ also in words
like _ch[)a]mber_, _d[)a]nger_ (though the latter had certainly begun to
take its present sound so early as 1636, when I find it sometimes spelt
_dainger_). But in general it may be said that nothing can be found in
it which does not still survive in some one or other of the English
provincial dialects. There is, perhaps, a single exception in the verb
to _sleeve_. To _sleeve_ silk means to divide or ravel out a thread of
silk with the point of a needle till it becomes _floss_. (A. S. _slefan_,
to _cleave_=divide. ) This, I think, explains the '_sleeveless_ errand'
in 'Troilus and Cressida' so inadequately, sometimes so ludicrously
darkened by the commentators. Is not a 'sleeveless errand' one that
cannot be unravelled, incomprehensible, and therefore bootless?
I am not speaking now of Americanisms properly so called, that is, of
words or phrases which have grown into use here either through
necessity, invention, or accident, such as a _carry_, a _one-horse
affair_, a _prairie_, to _vamose_. Even these are fewer than is
sometimes taken for granted. But I think some fair defence may be made
against the charge of vulgarity. Properly speaking, vulgarity is in the
thought, and not in the word or the way of pronouncing it. Modern
French, the most polite of languages, is barbarously vulgar if compared
with the Latin out of which it has been corrupted, or even with Italian.
There is a wider gap, and one implying greater boorishness, between
_ministerium_ and _metier_, or _sapiens_ and _sachant_, than between
_druv_ and _drove_ or _agin_ and _against_, which last is plainly an
arrant superlative. Our rustic _coverlid_ is nearer its French original
than the diminutive cover_let_, into which it has been ignorantly
corrupted in politer speech. I obtained from three cultivated Englishmen
at different times three diverse pronunciations of a single
word,--_cowcumber_, _coocumber_, and _cucumber_. Of these the first,
which is Yankee also, comes nearest to the nasality of _concombre_. Lord
Ossory assures us that Voltaire saw the best society in England, and
Voltaire tells his countrymen that _handkerchief_ was pronounced
_hankercher_. I find it so spelt in Hakluyt and elsewhere. This enormity
the Yankee still persists in, and as there is always a reason for such
deviations from the sound as represented by the spelling, may we not
suspect two sources of derivation, and find an ancestor for _kercher_
in _couverture_ rather than in _couvrechef_? And what greater phonetic
vagary (which Dryden, by the way, called _fegary_) in our _lingua
rustica_ than this _ker_ for _couvre_? I copy from the fly-leaves of my
books, where I have noted them from time to time, a few examples of
pronunciation and phrase which will show that the Yankee often has
antiquity and very respectable literary authority on his side. My list
might be largely increased by referring to glossaries, but to them eyery
one can go for himself, and I have gathered enough for my purpose.
I will take first those cases in which something like the French sound
has been preserved in certain single letters and diphthongs. And this
opens a curious question as to how long this Gallicism maintained itself
in England. Sometimes a divergence in pronunciation has given as two
words with different meanings, as in _genteel_ and _jaunty_, which I
find coming in toward the close of the seventeenth century, and wavering
between _genteel_ and _jantee_. It is usual in America to drop the _u_
in words ending in _our_--a very proper change recommended by Howell two
centuries ago, and carried out by him so far as his printers would
allow. This and the corresponding changes in _musique_, _musick_, and
the like, which he also advocated, show that in his time the French
accent indicated by the superfluous letters (for French had once nearly
as strong an accent as Italian) had gone out of use. There is plenty of
French accent down to the end of Elizabeth's reign. In Daniel we have
_riches'_ and _counsel'_, in Bishop Hall _comet'_, _chapelain_, in Donne
_pictures'_, _virtue'_, _presence'_, _mortal'_, _merit'_, _hainous'_,
_giant'_, with many more, and Marston's satires are full of them. The
two latter, however, are not to be relied on, as they may be suspected
of Chaucerizing. Herrick writes _baptime_. The tendency to throw the
accent backward began early. But the incongruities are perplexing, and
perhaps mark the period of transition. In Warner's 'Albion's England' we
have _creator'_ and _creature'_ side by side with the modern _creator_
and _creature_. _E'nvy_ and _e'nvying_ occur in Campion (1602), and yet
_envy'_ survived Milton. In some cases we have gone back again nearer to
the French, as in _rev'enue_ for _reven'ue_, I had been so used to
hearing _imbecile_ pronounced with the accent on the first syllable,
which is in accordance with the general tendency in such matters, that I
was surprised to find _imbec'ile_ in a verse of Wordsworth. The
dictionaries all give it so. I asked a highly cultivated Englishman, and
he declared for _imbeceel'_. In general it may be assumed that accent
will finally settle on the syllable dictated by greater ease and
therefore quickness of utterance. _Blas'-phemous_, for example, is more
rapidly pronounced than _blasphem'ous_, to which our Yankee clings,
following in this the usage of many of the older poets. _Amer'ican_ is
easier than _Ameri'can_, and therefore the false quantity has carried
the day, though the true one may be found in George Herbert, and even so
late as Cowley.
To come back to the matter in hand. Our 'uplandish man' retains the soft
or thin sound of the _u_ in some words, such as _rule_, _truth_
(sometimes also pronounced _tr[)u]th_, not _trooth_), while he says
_noo_ for _new_, and gives to _view_ and _few_ so indescribable a
mixture of the two sounds with a slight nasal tincture that it may be
called the Yankee shibboleth. Voltaire says that the English pronounce
_true_ as if it rhymed with _view_, and this is the sound our rustics
give to it. Spenser writes _deow_ (_dew_) which can only be pronounced
with the Yankee nasality. In _rule_ the least sound of _a_ precedes the
_u_. I find _reule_ in Pecock's 'Repressor. ' He probably pronounced it
_rayoole_, as the old French word from which it is derived was very
likely to be sounded at first, with a reminiscence of its original
_regula_. Tindal has _reuler_, and the Coventry Plays have _preudent_.
In the 'Parlyament of Byrdes' I find _reule_. As for _noo_, may it not
claim some sanction in its derivation, whether from _nouveau_ or _neuf_,
the ancient sound of which may very well have been _noof_, as nearer
_novus_? _Beef_ would seem more like to have come from _buffe_ than from
_boeuf_, unless the two were mere varieties of spelling. The Saxon _few_
may have caught enough from its French cousin _peu_ to claim the benefit
of the same doubt as to sound; and our slang phrase _a few_ (as 'I
licked him a few') may well appeal to _un peu_ for sense and authority.
Nay, might not _lick_ itself turn out to be the good old word _lam_ in
an English disguise, it the latter should claim descent as, perhaps, he
fairly might, from the Latin _lambere_? The New England _ferce_ for
_fierce_, and _perce_ for _pierce_ (sometimes heard as _fairce_ and
_pairce_), are also Norman. For its antiquity I cite the rhyme of _verse
and pierce_ in Chapman and Donne, and in some commendatory verses by a
Mr. Berkenhead before the poems of Francis Beaumont. Our _pairlous_ for
_perilous_ is of the same kind, and is nearer Shakespeare's _parlous_
than the modern pronunciation. One other Gallicism survives in our
pronunciation. Perhaps I should rather call it a semi-Gallicism, for it
is the result of a futile effort to reproduce a French sound with
English lips. Thus for _joint_, _employ_, _royal_, we have _jynt_,
_emply_, _r[)y]le_, the last differing only from _rile_ (_roil_) in a
prolongation of the _y_ sound. I find _royal_ so pronounced in the
'Mirror for Magistrates. ' In Walter de Biblesworth I find _solives_
Englished by _gistes_. This, it is true, may have been pronounced
_jeests_, but the pronunciation _jystes_ must have preceded the present
spelling, which was no doubt adopted after the radical meaning was
forgotten, as analogical with other words in _oi_. In the same way after
Norman-French influence had softened the _l_ out of _would_ (we already
find _woud_ for _veut_ in N. F. poems), _should_ followed the example,
and then an _l_ was foisted into _could_, where it does not belong, to
satisfy the logic of the eye, which has affected the pronunciation and
even the spelling of English more than is commonly supposed. I meet with
_eyster_ for _oyster_ as early as the fourteenth century. I find _viage_
in Bishop Hall and Middleton the dramatist, _bile_ for _boil_ in Donne
and Chrononhotonthologos, _line_ for _loin_ in Hall, _ryall_ and _chyse_
(for choice) _dystrye_ for _destroy_, in the Coventry Plays. In
Chapman's 'All Fools' is the misprint of _employ_ for _imply_, fairly
inferring an identity of sound in the last syllable. Indeed, this
pronunciation was habitual till after Pope, and Rogers tells us that the
elegant Gray said _naise_ for _noise_ just as our rustics still do. Our
_cornish_ (which I find also in Herrick) remembers the French better
than _cornice_ does. While clinging more closely to the Anglo-Saxon in
dropping the _g_ from the end of the present participle, the Yankee now
and then pleases himself with an experiment in French nasality in words
ending in _n_. It is not, so far as my experience goes, very common,
though it may formerly have been more so. _Capting_, for instance, I
never heard save in jest, the habitual form being _kepp'n_. But at any
rate it is no invention of ours. In that delightful old volume, 'Ane
Compendious Buke of Godly and Spirituall Songs,' in which I know not
whether the piety itself or the simplicity of its expression be more
charming, I find _burding_, _garding_, and _cousing_, and in the State
Trials _uncerting_ used by a gentleman. I confess that I like the _n_
better than _ng_.
Of Yankee preterites I find _risse_ and _rize_ for _rose_ in Beaumont
and Fletcher, Middleton and Dryden, _clim_ in Spenser, _chees_ (_chose_)
in Sir John Mandevil, _give_ (_gave_) in the Coventry Plays, _shet_
(_shut_) in Golding's Ovid, _het_ in Chapman and in Weever's Epitaphs,
_thriv_ and _smit_ in Drayton, _quit_ in Ben Jonson and Henry More, and
_pled_ in the Paston Letters, nay, even in the fastidious Landor. _Rid_
for _rode_ was anciently common. So likewise was _see_ for _saw_, but I
find it in no writer of authority (except Golding), unless Chaucer's
_seie_ and Gower's _sigh_ were, as I am inclined to think, so sounded.
_Shew_ is used by Hector Boece, Giles Fletcher, Drummond of Hawthornden,
and in the Paston Letters. Similar strong preterites, like _snew_,
_thew_, and even _mew_, are not without example. I find _sew_ for
_sewed_ in 'Piers Ploughman. ' Indeed, the anomalies in English
preterites are perplexing. We have probably transferred _flew_ from
_flow_ (as the preterite of which I have heard it) to _fly_ because we
had another preterite in _fled_. Of weak preterites the Yankee retains
_growed_, _blowed_, for which he has good authority, and less often
_knowed_. His _sot_ is merely a broad sounding of _sat_, no more
inelegant than the common _got_ for _gat_, which he further degrades
into _gut_. When he says _darst_, he uses a form as old as Chaucer.
The Yankee has retained something of the long sound of the _a_ in such
words as _axe_, _wax_, pronouncing them _exe_, _wex_ (shortened from
_aix_, _waix_). He also says _hev_ and _hed_ (_h[=a]ve_, _h[=a]d_ for
_have_ and _had_). In most cases he follows an Anglo-Saxon usage. In
_aix_ for _axle_ he certainly does. I find _wex_ and _aisches_ (_ashes_)
in Pecock, and _exe_ in the Paston Letters. Golding rhymes _wax_ with
_wexe_ and spells _challenge_ _chelenge_. Chaucer wrote _hendy_. Dryden
rhymes _can_ with _men_, as Mr. Biglow would. Alexander Gill, Milton's
teacher, in his 'Logonomia' cites _hez_ for _hath_ as peculiar to
Lincolnshire. I find _hayth_ in Collier's 'Bibliographical Account of
Early English Literature' under the date 1584, and Lord Cromwell so
wrote it. Sir Christopher Wren wrote _belcony_. Our _fect_ is only the
O. F. _faict_. _Thaim_ for _them_ was common in the sixteenth century. We
have an example of the same thing in the double form of the verb
_thrash_, _thresh_. While the New Englander cannot be brought to say
_instead_ for _instid_ (commonly _'stid_ where not the last word in a
sentence), he changes the _i_ into _e_ in _red_ for _rid_, _tell_ for
_till_, _hender_ for _hinder_, _rense_ for _rinse_. I find _red_ in the
old interlude of 'Thersytes,' _tell_ in a letter of Daborne to
Henslowe, and also, I shudder to mention it, in a letter of the great
Duchess of Marlborough, Atossa herself! It occurs twice in a single
verse of the Chester Plays,
'_Tell_ the day of dome, _tell_ the beames blow. '
From the word _blow_ (in another sense) is formed _blowth_, which I
heard again this summer after a long interval. Mr. Wright[24] explains it
as meaning 'a blossom. ' With us a single blossom is a _blow_, while
_blowth_ means the blossoming in general. A farmer would say that there
was a good blowth on his fruit-trees. The word retreats farther inland
and away from the railways, year by year. Wither rhymes _hinder_ with
_slender_, and Shakespeare and Lovelace have _renched_ for _rinsed_. In
'Gammer Gurton' and 'Mirror for Magistrates' is _sence_ for _since_;
Marlborough's Duchess so writes it, and Donne rhymes _since_ with
_Amiens_ and _patience_, Bishop Hall and Otway with _pretence_, Chapman
with _citizens_, Dryden with _providence_. Indeed, why should not
_sithence_ take that form? Dryden's wife (an earl's daughter) has _tell_
for _till_, Margaret, mother of Henry VII. , writes _seche_ for _such_,
and our _ef_ finds authority in the old form _yeffe_.
_E_ sometimes takes the place of _u_, as _jedge, tredge, bresh_. I find
_tredge_ in the interlude of 'Jack Jugler,' _bresh_ in a citation by
Collier from 'London Cries' of the middle of the seventeenth century,
and _resche_ for _rush_ (fifteenth century) in the very valuable 'Volume
of Vocabularies' edited by Mr. Wright. _Resce_ is one of the Anglo-Saxon
forms of the word in Bosworth's A. -S. Dictionary. Golding has _shet_.
The Yankee always shortens the _u_ in the ending _ture_, making _ventur,
natur, pictur_, and so on. This was common, also, among the educated of
the last generation. I am inclined to think it may have been once
universal, and I certainly think it more elegant than the vile _vencher,
naycher, pickcher_, that have taken its place, sounding like the
invention of a lexicographer to mitigate a sneeze. Nash in his 'Pierce
Penniless' has _ventur_, and so spells it, and I meet it also in
Spenser, Drayton, Ben Jonson, Herrick, and Prior. Spenser has
_tort'rest_, which can be contracted only from _tortur_ and not from
_torcher_. Quarles rhymes _nature_ with _creator_, and Dryden with
_satire_, which he doubtless pronounced according to its older form of
_satyr_. Quarles has also _torture_ and _mortar_. Mary Boleyn writes
_kreatur_. I find _pikter_ in Izaak Walton's autograph will.
I shall now give some examples which cannot so easily be ranked under
any special head. Gill charges the Eastern counties with _kiver_ for
_cover_, and _ta_, for _to_. The Yankee pronounces both _too_ and _to_
like _ta_ (like the _tou_ in _touch_) where they are not emphatic. When
they are, both become _tu_. In old spelling, _to_ is the common (and
indeed correct) form of _too_, which is only _to_ with the sense of _in
addition_. I suspect that the sound of our _too_ has caught something
from the French _tout_, and it is possible that the old _too too_ is not
a reduplication, but a reminiscence of the feminine form of the same
word (_toute_) as anciently pronounced, with the _e_ not yet silenced.
Gill gives a Northern origin to _geaun_ for _gown_ and _waund_ for
_wound_ (_vulnus_). Lovelace has _waund_, but
there is something too dreadful in suspecting Spenser (who _borealised_
in his pastorals) of having ever been guilty of _geaun! _ And yet some
delicate mouths even now are careful to observe the Hibernicism of
_ge-ard_ for _guard_, and _ge-url_ for _girl_. Sir Philip Sidney
(_credite posteri! _) wrote _furr_ for _far_. I would hardly have
believed it had I not seen it in _facsimile_. As some consolation, I
find _furder_ in Lord Bacon and Donne, and Wittier rhymes _far_ with
_cur_. The Yankee, who omits the final _d_ in many words, as do the
Scotch, makes up for it by adding one in _geound_. The purist does not
feel the loss of the _d_ sensibly in _lawn_ and _yon_, from the former
of which it has dropped again after a wrongful adoption (retained in
_laundry_), while it properly belongs to the latter. But what shall we
make of _git, yit_, and _yis_? I find _yis_ and _git_ in Warner's
'Albion's England,' _yet_ rhyming with _wit, admit_, and _fit_ in Donne,
with _wit_ in the 'Revenger's Tragedy,' Beaumont, and Suckling, with
_writ_ in Dryden, and latest of all with _wit_ in Sir Hanbury Williams.
Prior rhymes _fitting_ and _begetting_. Worse is to come. Among others,
Donne rhymes _again_ with _sin_, and Quarles repeatedly with _in_. _Ben_
for _been_, of which our dear Whittier is so fond, has the authority of
Sackville, 'Gammer Gurton' (the work of a bishop), Chapman, Dryden, and
many more, though _bin_ seems to have been the common form. Whittier's
accenting the first syllable of _rom'ance_ finds an accomplice in
Drayton among others, and, though manifestly wrong, is analogous with
_Rom'ans_. Of other Yankeeisms, whether of form or pronunciation, which
I have met with I add a few at random. Pecock writes _sowdiers (sogers,
soudoyers)_, and Chapman and Gill _sodder_. This absorption of the _l_
is common in various dialects, especially in the Scottish. Pecock writes
also _biyende_, and the authors of 'Jack Jugler' and 'Gammer Gurton'
_yender_. The Yankee includes '_yon_' in the same catagory, and says
'hither an' yen,' for 'to and fro. ' (Cf. German _jenseits_. ) Pecock and
plenty more have _wrastle_. Tindal has _agynste, gretter, shett, ondone,
debyte_, and _scace_. 'Jack Jugler' has _scacely_ (which I have often
heard, though _skurce_ is the common form), and Donne and Dryden make
_great_ rhyme with _set_. In the inscription on Caxton's tomb I find
_ynd_ for _end_, which the Yankee more often makes _eend_, still using
familiarly the old phrase 'right anend' for 'continuously. ' His 'stret
(straight) along' in the same sense, which I thought peculiar to him, I
find in Pecock. Tindal's _debyte_ for _deputy_ is so perfectly Yankee
that I could almost fancy the brave martyr to have been deacon of the
First Parish at Jaalam Centre. 'Jack Jugler' further gives us _playsent_
and _sartayne_. Dryden rhymes _certain_ with _parting_, and Chapman and
Ben Jonson use _certain_, as the Yankee always does, for _certainly_.
The 'Coventry Mysteries' have _occapied, massage, nateralle, materal
(material),_ and _meracles_,--all excellent Yankeeisms. In the 'Quatre
fils, Aymon' (1504),[25] is _vertus_ for _virtuous_. Thomas Fuller called
_volume vollum_, I suspect, for he spells it _volumne_. However, _per
contra_, Yankees habitually say _colume_ for _column_. Indeed, to
prove that our ancestors brought their pronunciation with them from the
Old Country, and have not wantonly debased their mother tongue, I need
only to cite the words _scriptur_, _Israll_, _athists_, and
_cherfulness_ from Governor Bradford's 'History. ' So the good man wrote
them, and so the good descendants of his fellow-exiles still pronounce
them. Brampton Gurdon writes _shet_ in a letter to Winthrop. _Purtend_
(_pretend_) has crept like a serpent into the 'Paradise Of Dainty
Devices;' _purvide_, which is not so bad, is in Chaucer. These, of
course, are universal vulgarisms, and not peculiar to the Yankee. Butler
has a Yankee phrase, and pronunciation too, in 'To which these
_carr'ings-on_ did tend. ' Langham or Laneham, who wrote an account of
the festivities at Kenilworth in honor of Queen Bess, and who evidently
tried to spell phonetically, makes _sorrows_ into _sororz_. Herrick
writes _hollow_ for _halloo_, and perhaps pronounced it (_horresco
suggerens_! ) _hollo_, as Yankees do. Why not, when it comes from _hola_?
I find _ffelaschyppe_ (fellowship) in the Coventry Plays. Spenser and
his queen neither of them scrupled to write _afore_, and the former
feels no inelegance even in _chaw_ and _idee_. _'Fore_ was common till
after Herrick. Dryden has _do's_ for _does_, and his wife spells _worse_
_wosce_. _Afeared_ was once universal. Warner has _ery_ for _ever a_;
nay, he also has illy, with which we were once ignorantly reproached by
persons more familiar with Murray's Grammar than with English
literature. And why not _illy_? Mr. Bartlett says it is 'a word used by
writers of an inferior class, who do not seem to perceive that _ill_ is
itself an adverb, without the termination _ly_,' and quotes Dr. Mosser,
President of Brown University, as asking triumphantly, 'Why don't you
say '_welly_? ' I should like to have had Dr. Messer answer his own
question. It would be truer to say that it was used by people who still
remembered that _ill_ was an adjective, the shortened form of _evil_,
out of which Shakespeare and the translators of the Bible ventured to
make _evilly_. This slurred _evil_ is 'the dram of _eale_' in 'Hamlet. '
I find, _illy_ in Warner. The objection to _illy_ is not an etymological
one, but simply that it is contrary to good usage,--a very sufficient
reason. _Ill_ as an adverb was at first a vulgarism, precisely like the
rustic's when he says, 'I was treated _bad_. ' May not the reason of this
exceptional form be looked for in that tendency to dodge what is hard to
pronounce, to which I have already alluded? If the letters were
distinctly uttered, as they should be, it would take too much time to
say _ill-ly_, _well-ly_, and it is to be observed that we have avoided
_smally_[26] and _tally_ in the same way, though we add _ish_ to them
without hesitation in _smallish_ and _tallish_. We have, to be sure,
_dully_ and _fully_, but for the one we prefer _stupidly_, and the other
(though this may have come from eliding the _y_ before _a_s) is giving
way to _full_. The uneducated, whose utterance is slower, still make
adverbs when they will by adding _like_ to all manner of adjectives. We
have had _big_ charged upon us, because we use it where an Englishman
would now use _great_. I fully admit that it were better to distinguish
between them, allowing to _big_ a certain contemptuous quality; but as
for authority, I want none better than that of Jeremy Taylor, who, in
his noble sermon 'On the Return of Prayer,' speaks of 'Jesus, whose
spirit was meek and gentle up to the greatness of the _biggest_
example. ' As for our double negative, I shall waste no time in quoting
instances of it, because it was once as universal in English as it still
is in the neo-Latin languages, where it does not strike us as vulgar. I
am not sure that the loss of it is not to be regretted. But surely I
shall admit the vulgarity of slurring or altogether eliding certain
terminal consonants? I admit that a clear and sharp-cut enunciation is
one of the crowning charms and elegances of speech. Words so uttered are
like coins fresh from the mint, compared with the worn and dingy drudges
of long service,--I do not mean American coins, for those look less
badly the more they lose of their original ugliness. No one is more
painfully conscious than I of the contrast between the rifle-crack of an
Englishman's _yes_ and _no_, and the wet-fuse drawl of the same
monosyllables in the mouths of my countrymen. But I do not find the
dropping of final consonants disagreeable in Allan Ramsay or Burns, nor
do I believe that our literary ancestors were sensible of that
inelegance in the fusing them together of which we are conscious. How
many educated men pronounce the _t_ in _chestnut_? how many say
_pentise_ for _penthouse_, as they should. When a Yankee skipper says
that he is "boun' for Gloster" (not Gloucester, with the leave of the
Universal Schoolmaster),[27] he but speaks like Chaucer or an old
ballad-singer, though they would have pronounced it _boon_. This is one
of the cases where the _d_ is surreptitious, and has been added in
compliment to the verb _bind_, with which it has nothing to do. If we
consider the root of the word (though of course I grant that every race
has a right to do what it will with what is so peculiarly its own as its
speech), the _d_ has no more right there than at the end of _gone_,
where it is often put by children, who are our best guides to the
sources of linguistic corruption, and the best teachers of its
processes. Cromwell, minister of Henry VIII. , writes _worle_ for world.
Chapman has _wan_ for _wand_, and _lawn_ has rightfully displaced
_laund_, though with no thought, I suspect, of etymology. Rogers tells
us that Lady Bathurst sent him some letters written to William III. by
Queen Mary, in which she addresses him as '_Dear Husban_. ' The old form
_expoun'_, which our farmers use, is more correct than the form with a
barbarous _d_ tacked on which has taken its place. Of the kind opposite
to this, like our _gownd_ for _gown_, and the London cockney's _wind_
for _wine_, I find _drownd_ for _drown_ in the 'Misfortunes of Arthur'
(1584) and in Swift. And, by the way, whence came the long sound of wind
which our poets still retain, and which survives in 'winding' a horn, a
totally different word from 'winding' a kite-string? We say _beh[=i]nd_
and _h[=i]nder_ (comparative) and yet to _h[)i]nder_. Shakespeare
pronounced _kind_ _k[)i]nd_, or what becomes of his play on that word
and _kin_ in 'Hamlet'? Nay, did he not even (shall I dare to hint it? )
drop the final _d_ as the Yankee still does? John Lilly plays in the
same way on _kindred_ and _kindness_.
But to come to some other ancient instances. Warner rhymes _bounds_ with
_crowns_, _grounds_ with _towns_, _text_ with _sex_, _worst_ with
_crust_, _interrupts_ with _cups_; Drayton, _defects_ with _sex_;
Chapman, _amends_ with _cleanse_; Webster, _defects_ with _checks_; Ben
Jonson, _minds_ with _combines_; Marston, _trust_ and _obsequious_,
_clothes_ and _shows_; Dryden gives the same sound to _clothes_, and has
also _minds_ with _designs_. Of course, I do not affirm that their ears
may not have told them that these were imperfect rhymes (though I am by
no means sure even of that), but they surely would never have tolerated
any such had they suspected the least vulgarity in them. Prior has the
rhyme _first_ and _trust_, but puts it into the mouth of a landlady.
Swift has _stunted_ and _burnt_ it, an intentionally imperfect rhyme, no
doubt, but which I cite as giving precisely the Yankee pronunciation of
_burned_. Donne couples in unhallowed wedlock _after_ and _matter_, thus
seeming to give to both the true Yankee sound; and it is not uncommon to
find _after_ and _daughter_. Worse than all, in one of Dodsley's Old
Plays we have _onions_ rhyming with _minions_,--I have tears in my eyes
while I record it. And yet what is viler than the universal _Misses_
(_Mrs. _) for _Mistress_? This was once a vulgarism, and in 'The Miseries
of Inforced Marriage' the rhyme (printed as prose in Dodsley's Old Plays
by Collier),
'To make my young _mistress_
Delighting in _kisses_,'
is put into the mouth of the clown. Our people say _Injun_ for _Indian_.
The tendency to make this change where _i_ follows _d_ is common. The
Italian _giorno_ and French _jour_ from _diurnus_ are familiar examples.
And yet _Injun_ is one of those depravations which the taste challenges
peremptorily, though it have the authority of Charles Cotton--who rhymes
'_Indies_' with '_cringes_'--and four English lexicographers, beginning
with Dr. Sheridan, bid us say _invidgeous_. Yet after all it is no worse
than the debasement which all our terminations in _tion_ and _tience_
have undergone, which yet we hear with _resignashun_ and _payshunce_,
though it might have aroused both _impat-i-ence_ and _in-dig-na-ti-on_
in Shakespeare's time. When George Herbert tells us that if the sermon
be dull,
'God takes a text and preacheth patience,'
the prolongation of the word seems to convey some hint at the
longanimity of the virtue. Consider what a poor curtal we have made of
Ocean. There was something of his heave and expanse in _o-ce-an_, and
Fletcher knew how to use it when he wrote so fine a verse as the second
of these, the best deep-sea verse I know,--
'In desperate storms stem with a little rudder
The tumbling ruins of the ocean. '
Oceanus was not then wholly shorn of his divine proportions, and our
modern _oshun_ sounds like the gush of small-beer in comparison. Some
other contractions of ours have a vulgar air about them. _More 'n_ for
_more than_, as one of the worst, may stand for a type of such. Yet our
old dramatists are full of such obscurations (elisions they can hardly
be called) of the _th_, making _whe'r_ of _whether_, _where_ of
_whither_, _here_ of _hither_, _bro'r_ of _brother_, _smo'r_ of
_smother_, _mo'r_ of _mother_, and so on. And dear Brer Rabbit, can I
forget him? Indeed, it is this that explains the word _rare_ (which has
Dryden's support), and which we say of meat where an Englishman would
use _underdone_. I do not believe, with the dictionaries, that it had
ever anything to do with the Icelandic _hrar_ (_raw_), as it plainly has
not in _rareripe_, which means earlier ripe,--President Lincoln said of
a precocious boy that 'he was a _rareripe_. ' And I do not believe it,
for this reason, that the earliest form of the word with us was, and the
commoner now in the inland parts still is, so far as I can discover,
_raredone_. Golding has 'egs reere-rosted,' which, whatever else it
mean, cannot mean _raw_-roasted, I find _rather_ as a monosyllable in
Donne, and still better, as giving the sound, rhyming with _fair_ in
Warner. There is an epigram of Sir Thomas Browne in which the words
_rather than_ make a monosyllable;--
'What furie is't to take Death's part
And rather than by Nature, die by Art! '
The contraction _more'n_ I find in the old play 'Fuimus Troes,' in a
verse where the measure is so strongly accented as to leave it beyond
doubt,--
'A golden crown whose heirs
More than half the world subdue. '
It may be, however, that the contraction is in 'th'orld. ' It is
unmistakable in the 'Second Maiden's Tragedy:'--
'It were but folly,
Dear soul, to boast of _more than_ I can perform. '
Is our _gin_ for _given_ more violent than _mar'l_ for _marvel_, which
was once common, and which I find as late as Herrick? Nay, Herrick has
_gin_ (spelling it _gen_), too, as do the Scotch, who agree with us
likewise in preferring _chimly_ to _chimney_.
I will now leave pronunciation and turn to words or phrases which have
been supposed peculiar to us, only pausing to pick up a single dropped
stitch, in the pronunciation of the word _supreme_, which I had thought
native till I found it in the well-languaged Daniel. I will begin with a
word of which I have never met with any example in any English writer of
authority. We express the first stage of withering in a green plant
suddenly cut down by the verb _to wilt_. It is, of course, own cousin of
the German _welken_, but I have never come upon it in literary use, and
my own books of reference give me faint help. Graff gives _welhen_,
_marcescere_, and refers to _weih_ (_weak_), and conjecturally to A. -S,
_hvelan_. The A. -S. _wealwian_ (_to wither_) is nearer, but not so near
as two words in the Icelandic, which perhaps put us on the track of its
ancestry,--_velgi_, _tepefacere_, (and _velki_, with the derivative)
meaning _contaminare_. _Wilt_, at any rate, is a good word, filling, as
it does, a sensible gap between drooping and withering, and the
imaginative phrase 'he wilted right down,' like 'he caved right in,' is
a true Americanism. _Wilt_ occurs in English provincial glossaries, but
is explained by _wither_, which with us it does not mean. We have a few
words such as _cache_, _cohog_, _carry_ (_portage_), _shoot_ (_chute_),
_timber_ (_forest_), _bushwhack_ (to pull a boat along by the bushes on
the edge of a stream), _buckeye_ (a picturesque word for the
horse-chestnut); but how many can we be said to have fairly brought into
the language, as Alexander Gill, who first mentions Americanisms, meant
it when he said, '_Sed et ab Americanis nonnulla mutuamur ut_ MAIZ _et_
CANOA'? Very few, I suspect, and those mostly by borrowing from the
French, German, Spanish, or Indian. [28] 'The Dipper,' for the 'Great
Bear,' strikes me as having a native air. _Bogus_, in the sense of
_worthless_, is undoubtedly ours, but is, I more than suspect, a
corruption of the French _bagasse_ (from low Latin _bagasea_), which
travelled up the Mississippi from New Orleans, where it was used for the
refuse of the sugar-cane. It is true, we have modified the meaning of
some words. We use _freshet_ in the sense of _flood_, for which I have
not chanced upon any authority. Our New England cross between Ancient
Pistol and Dugald Dalgetty, Captain Underhill, uses the word (1638) to
mean a _current_, and I do not recollect it elsewhere in that sense. I
therefore leave it with a? for future explorers. _Crick_ for _creek_ I
find in Captain John Smith and in the dedication of Fuller's 'Holy
Warre,' and _run_, meaning a _small stream_, in Waymouth's 'Voyage'
(1605). _Humans_ for _men_, which Mr. Bartlett includes in his
'Dictionary of Americanisms,' is Chapman's habitual phrase in his
translation of Homer. I find it also in the old play of 'The Hog hath
lost his Pearl. ' _Dogs_ for _andirons_ is still current in New England,
and in Walter de Biblesworth I find _chiens_ glossed in the margin by
_andirons_. _Gunning_ for _shooting_ is in Drayton. We once got credit
for the poetical word _fall_ for _autumn_, but Mr. Bartlett and the last
edition of Webster's Dictionary refer us to Dryden. It is even older,
for I find it in Drayton, and Bishop Hall has _autumn fall_. Middleton
plays upon the word: 'May'st thou have a reasonable good _spring_, for
thou art like to have many dangerous foul _falls_. ' Daniel does the
same, and Coleridge uses it as we do. Gray uses the archaism _picked_
for _peaked_, and the word _smudge_ (as our backwoodsmen do) for a
smothered fire. Lord Herbert of Cherbury (more properly perhaps than
even Sidney, the last _preux chevalier_) has 'the Emperor's folks' just
as a Yankee would say it. _Loan_ for _lend_, with which we have hitherto
been blackened, I must retort upon the mother island, for it appears so
long ago as in 'Albion's England. ' _Fleshy_, in the sense of _stout_,
may claim Ben Jonson's warrant, and I find it also so lately as in
Francklin's 'Lucian. ' _Chore_ is also Jonson's word, and I am inclined
to prefer it to _chare_ and _char_, because I think that I see a more
natural origin for it in the French _jour_--whence it might come to mean
a day's work, and thence a job--than anywhere else. [29] _At onst_ for _at
once_ I thought a corruption of our own, till I found it in the Chester
Plays. I am now inclined to suspect it no corruption at all, but only an
erratic and obsolete superlative _at onest_. _To progress_ was flung in
our teeth till Mr. Pickering retorted with Shakespeare's 'doth progress
down thy cheeks. ' I confess that I was never satisfied with this answer,
because the accent was different, and because the word might here be
reckoned a substantive quite as well as a verb. Mr. Bartlett (in his
dictionary above cited) adds a surrebutter in a verse from Ford's
'Broken Heart. ' Here the word is clearly a verb, but with the accent
unhappily still on the first syllable. Mr. Bartlett says that he
'cannot say whether the word was used in Bacon's time or not. ' It
certainly was, and with the accent we give to it. Ben Jonson, in the
'Alchemist,' had this verse,
'Progress so from extreme unto extreme,'
and Sir Philip Sidney,
'Progressing then from fair Turias' golden place. '
Surely we may now sleep in peace, and our English cousins will forgive
us, since we have cleared ourselves from any suspicion of originality in
the matter! Even after I had convinced myself that the chances were
desperately against our having invented any of the _Americanisms_ with
which we are _faulted_ and which we are in the habit of _voicing_, there
were one or two which had so prevailingly indigenous an accent as to
stagger me a little. One of these was 'the biggest _thing out_. ' Alas,
even this slender comfort is denied me. Old Gower has
'So harde an herte was none _oute_,'
and
'That such merveile was none _oute_. '
He also, by the way, says 'a _sighte_ of flowres' as naturally as our
up-country folk would say it. _Poor_ for _lean_, _thirds_ for _dower_,
and _dry_ for _thirsty_ I find in Middleton's plays. _Dry_ is also in
Skelton and in the 'World' (1754). In a note on Middleton, Mr. Dyce
thinks it needful to explain the phrase _I can't tell_ (universal in
America) by the gloss _I could not say_. Middleton also uses _sneeked_,
which I had believed an Americanism till I saw it there. It is, of
course, only another form of _snatch_, analogous to _theek_ and _thatch_
(cf. the proper names Dekker and Thacher), _break_ (_brack_) and
_breach_, _make_ (still common with us) and _match_. _'Long on_ for
_occasioned by_ ('who is this 'long on? ') occurs constantly in Gower and
likewise in Middleton. _'Cause why_ is in Chaucer. _Raising_ (an English
version of the French _leaven_) for _yeast_ is employed by Gayton in his
'Festivous Notes on Don Quixote. ' I have never seen an instance of our
New England word _emptins_ in the same sense, nor can I divine its
original. Gayton has _limekill_; also _shuts_ for _shutters_, and the
latter is used by Mrs. Hutchinson in her 'Life of Colonel Hutchinson. '
Bishop Hall, and Purchas in his 'Pilgrims,' have _chist_ for _chest_,
and it is certainly nearer _cista_, as well as to its form in the
Teutonic languages, whence probably we got it. We retain the old sound
from _cist_, but _chest_ is as old as Chaucer. Lovelace says _wropt_ for
_wrapt_. 'Musicianer' I had always associated with the militia-musters
of my boyhood, and too hastily concluded it an abomination of our own,
but Mr. Wright calls it a Norfolk word, and I find it to be as old as
1642 by an extract in Collier. 'Not worth the time of day,' had passed
with me for native till I saw it in Shakespeare's 'Pericles. ' For
_slick_ (which is only a shorter sound of _sleek_, like _crick_ and the
now universal _britches_ for _breeches_) I will only call Chapman and
Jonson. 'That's a sure card! ' and 'That's a stinger! ' both sound like
modern slang, but you will find the one in the old interlude of
'Thersytes' (1537), and the other in Middleton. 'Right here,' a favorite
phrase with our orators and with a certain class of our editors, turns
up _passim_ in the Chester and Coventry plays. Mr. Dickens found
something very ludicrous in what he considered our neologism _right
away_. But I find a phrase very like it, and which I would gladly
suspect to be a misprint for it, in 'Gammer Gurton:'--
'Lyght it and bring it _tite away_. '
But _tite_ is the true word in this case. After all, what is it but
another form of _straightway_? _Cussedness_, meaning _wickedness,
malignity_, and _cuss_, a sneaking, ill-natured fellow, in such phrases
as 'He done it out o' pure cussedness,' and 'He is a nateral cuss,' have
been commonly thought Yankeeisms.
imagination of Livy had thrown over the earlier annals of Rome had
ceased to shine on the details of almost contemporary history; and if
the flood of his eloquence still continued flowing, we can hardly
suppose that the stream was as rapid, as fresh, and as clear as ever. ' I
will not waste time in criticising the bad English or the mixture of
metaphor in these sentences, but will simply cite another from the same
author which is even worse. 'The shadowy phantom of the Republic
continued to flit before the eyes of the Caesar. There was still, he
apprehended, a germ of sentiment existing, on which a scion of his own
house, or even a stranger, might boldly throw himself and raise the
standard of patrician independence. ' Now a ghost may haunt a murderer,
but hardly, I should think, to scare him with the threat of taking a new
lease of its old tenement. And fancy the _scion_ of a _house_ in the act
of _throwing itself_ upon a _germ of sentiment_ to _raise a standard! _ I
am glad, since we have so much in the same kind to answer for, that this
bit of horticultural rhetoric is from beyond sea. I would not be
supposed to condemn truly imaginative prose. There is a simplicity of
splendor, no less than of plainness, and prose would be poor indeed if
it could not find a tongue for that meaning of the mind which is behind
the meaning of the words. It has sometimes seemed to me that in England
there was a growing tendency to curtail language into a mere
convenience, and to defecate it of all emotion as thoroughly as
algebraic signs. This has arisen, no doubt, in part from that healthy
national contempt of humbug which is characteristic of Englishmen, in
part from that sensitiveness to the ludicrous which makes them so shy of
expressing feeling, but in part also, it is to be feared, from a growing
distrust, one might almost say hatred, of whatever is super-material.
There is something sad in the scorn with which their journalists treat
the notion of there being such a thing as a national ideal, seeming
utterly to have forgotten that even in the affairs of this world the
imagination is as much matter-of-fact as the understanding. If we were
to trust the impression made on us by some of the cleverest and most
characteristic of their periodical literature, we should think England
hopelessly stranded on the good-humored cynicism of well-to-do
middle-age, and should fancy it an enchanted nation, doomed to sit
forever with its feet under the mahogany in that after-dinner mood which
follows conscientious repletion, and which it is ill-manners to disturb
with any topics more exciting than the quality of the wines. But there
are already symptoms that a large class of Englishmen are getting weary
of the dominion of consols and divine common-sense, and to believe that
eternal three per cent. is not the chief end of man, nor the highest and
only kind of interest to which the powers and opportunities of England
are entitled.
The quality of exaggeration has often been remarked on as typical of
American character, and especially o? American humor. In Dr. Petri's
_Gedrangtes Handbuch der Fremdworter_, we are told that the word
_humbug_ is commonly used for the exaggerations of the North-Americans.
To be sure, one would be tempted to think the dream of Columbus half
fulfilled, and that Europe had found in the West a nearer way to
Orientalism, at least in diction. But it seems tome that a great deal of
what is set down as mere extravagance is more fitly to be called
intensity and picturesqueness, symptoms ol the imaginative faculty in
full health and strength, though producing, as yet, only the raw and
formless material in which poetry is to work. By and by, perhaps, the
world will see it fashioned into poem and picture, and Europe, which
will be hard pushed for originality erelong, may have to thank us for a
new sensation. The French continue to find Shakespeare exaggerated
because he treated English just as our country-folk do when they speak
of a 'steep price,' or say that they 'freeze to' a thing. The first
postulate of an original literature is that a people should use their
language instinctively and unconsciously, as if it were a lively part of
their growth and personality, not as the mere torpid boon of education
or inheritance. Even Burns contrived to write very poor verse and prose
in English. Vulgarisms are often only poetry in the egg. The late Mr.
Horace Mann, in one of his public addresses, commented at some length on
the beauty and moral significance ol the French phrase _s'orienter_ and
called on his young friends to practise upon it in life. There was not a
Yankee in his audience whose problem had not always been to find out
what was _about east_, and to shape his course accordingly. This charm
which a familiar expression gains by being commented, as it were, and.
set in a new light by a foreign language, is curious and instructive. I
cannot help thinking that Mr. Matthew Arnold forgets this a little too
much sometimes when he writes of the beauties of French style. It would
not be hard to find in the works of French Academicians phrases as
coarse as those he cites from Burke, only they are veiled by the
unfamiliarity of the language. But, however this may be, it is certain
that poets and peasants please us in the same way by translating words
back again to their primal freshness, and infusing them with a
delightful strangeness which is anything but alienation. What, for
example, is Milton's '_edge_ of battle' but a doing into English of the
Latin _acies? Was die Gans gedacht das der Schwan vollbracht_, what the
goose but thought, that the swan full brought (or, to de-Saxonize it a
little, what the goose conceived, that the swan achieved), and it may
well be that the life, invention, and vigor shown by our popular speech,
and the freedom with which it is shaped to the instant want of those who
use it, are of the best omen for our having a swan at last. The part I
have taken on myself is that of the humbler bird.
But it is affirmed that there is something innately vulgar in the Yankee
dialect. M. Sainte-Beuve says, with his usual neatness: '_Je definis un
patois une ancienne langue qui a eu des malheurs, ou encore une langue
toute jeune st qui n'a pas fait fortune. _' The first part of his
definition applies to a dialect like the Provencal, the last to the
Tuscan before Dante had lifted it into a classic, and neither, it seems
to me, will quite fit a _patois/_, which is not properly a dialect, but
rather certain archaisms, proverbial phrases, and modes of
pronunciation, which maintain themselves among the uneducated side by
side with the finished and universally accepted language. Norman French,
for example, or Scotch down to the time of James VI. , could hardly be
called _patois_, while I should be half inclined to name the Yankee a
_lingo_ rather than a dialect. It has retained a few words now fallen
into disuse in the mother country, like to _tarry_, to _progress_,
_fleshy_, _fall_, and some others; it has changed the meaning of some,
as in _freshet_; and it has clung to what I suspect to have been the
broad Norman pronunciation of _e_ (which Moliere puts into the mouth of
his rustics) in such words as _sarvant_, _parfect_, _vartoo_, and the
like. It maintains something of the French sound of _a_ also in words
like _ch[)a]mber_, _d[)a]nger_ (though the latter had certainly begun to
take its present sound so early as 1636, when I find it sometimes spelt
_dainger_). But in general it may be said that nothing can be found in
it which does not still survive in some one or other of the English
provincial dialects. There is, perhaps, a single exception in the verb
to _sleeve_. To _sleeve_ silk means to divide or ravel out a thread of
silk with the point of a needle till it becomes _floss_. (A. S. _slefan_,
to _cleave_=divide. ) This, I think, explains the '_sleeveless_ errand'
in 'Troilus and Cressida' so inadequately, sometimes so ludicrously
darkened by the commentators. Is not a 'sleeveless errand' one that
cannot be unravelled, incomprehensible, and therefore bootless?
I am not speaking now of Americanisms properly so called, that is, of
words or phrases which have grown into use here either through
necessity, invention, or accident, such as a _carry_, a _one-horse
affair_, a _prairie_, to _vamose_. Even these are fewer than is
sometimes taken for granted. But I think some fair defence may be made
against the charge of vulgarity. Properly speaking, vulgarity is in the
thought, and not in the word or the way of pronouncing it. Modern
French, the most polite of languages, is barbarously vulgar if compared
with the Latin out of which it has been corrupted, or even with Italian.
There is a wider gap, and one implying greater boorishness, between
_ministerium_ and _metier_, or _sapiens_ and _sachant_, than between
_druv_ and _drove_ or _agin_ and _against_, which last is plainly an
arrant superlative. Our rustic _coverlid_ is nearer its French original
than the diminutive cover_let_, into which it has been ignorantly
corrupted in politer speech. I obtained from three cultivated Englishmen
at different times three diverse pronunciations of a single
word,--_cowcumber_, _coocumber_, and _cucumber_. Of these the first,
which is Yankee also, comes nearest to the nasality of _concombre_. Lord
Ossory assures us that Voltaire saw the best society in England, and
Voltaire tells his countrymen that _handkerchief_ was pronounced
_hankercher_. I find it so spelt in Hakluyt and elsewhere. This enormity
the Yankee still persists in, and as there is always a reason for such
deviations from the sound as represented by the spelling, may we not
suspect two sources of derivation, and find an ancestor for _kercher_
in _couverture_ rather than in _couvrechef_? And what greater phonetic
vagary (which Dryden, by the way, called _fegary_) in our _lingua
rustica_ than this _ker_ for _couvre_? I copy from the fly-leaves of my
books, where I have noted them from time to time, a few examples of
pronunciation and phrase which will show that the Yankee often has
antiquity and very respectable literary authority on his side. My list
might be largely increased by referring to glossaries, but to them eyery
one can go for himself, and I have gathered enough for my purpose.
I will take first those cases in which something like the French sound
has been preserved in certain single letters and diphthongs. And this
opens a curious question as to how long this Gallicism maintained itself
in England. Sometimes a divergence in pronunciation has given as two
words with different meanings, as in _genteel_ and _jaunty_, which I
find coming in toward the close of the seventeenth century, and wavering
between _genteel_ and _jantee_. It is usual in America to drop the _u_
in words ending in _our_--a very proper change recommended by Howell two
centuries ago, and carried out by him so far as his printers would
allow. This and the corresponding changes in _musique_, _musick_, and
the like, which he also advocated, show that in his time the French
accent indicated by the superfluous letters (for French had once nearly
as strong an accent as Italian) had gone out of use. There is plenty of
French accent down to the end of Elizabeth's reign. In Daniel we have
_riches'_ and _counsel'_, in Bishop Hall _comet'_, _chapelain_, in Donne
_pictures'_, _virtue'_, _presence'_, _mortal'_, _merit'_, _hainous'_,
_giant'_, with many more, and Marston's satires are full of them. The
two latter, however, are not to be relied on, as they may be suspected
of Chaucerizing. Herrick writes _baptime_. The tendency to throw the
accent backward began early. But the incongruities are perplexing, and
perhaps mark the period of transition. In Warner's 'Albion's England' we
have _creator'_ and _creature'_ side by side with the modern _creator_
and _creature_. _E'nvy_ and _e'nvying_ occur in Campion (1602), and yet
_envy'_ survived Milton. In some cases we have gone back again nearer to
the French, as in _rev'enue_ for _reven'ue_, I had been so used to
hearing _imbecile_ pronounced with the accent on the first syllable,
which is in accordance with the general tendency in such matters, that I
was surprised to find _imbec'ile_ in a verse of Wordsworth. The
dictionaries all give it so. I asked a highly cultivated Englishman, and
he declared for _imbeceel'_. In general it may be assumed that accent
will finally settle on the syllable dictated by greater ease and
therefore quickness of utterance. _Blas'-phemous_, for example, is more
rapidly pronounced than _blasphem'ous_, to which our Yankee clings,
following in this the usage of many of the older poets. _Amer'ican_ is
easier than _Ameri'can_, and therefore the false quantity has carried
the day, though the true one may be found in George Herbert, and even so
late as Cowley.
To come back to the matter in hand. Our 'uplandish man' retains the soft
or thin sound of the _u_ in some words, such as _rule_, _truth_
(sometimes also pronounced _tr[)u]th_, not _trooth_), while he says
_noo_ for _new_, and gives to _view_ and _few_ so indescribable a
mixture of the two sounds with a slight nasal tincture that it may be
called the Yankee shibboleth. Voltaire says that the English pronounce
_true_ as if it rhymed with _view_, and this is the sound our rustics
give to it. Spenser writes _deow_ (_dew_) which can only be pronounced
with the Yankee nasality. In _rule_ the least sound of _a_ precedes the
_u_. I find _reule_ in Pecock's 'Repressor. ' He probably pronounced it
_rayoole_, as the old French word from which it is derived was very
likely to be sounded at first, with a reminiscence of its original
_regula_. Tindal has _reuler_, and the Coventry Plays have _preudent_.
In the 'Parlyament of Byrdes' I find _reule_. As for _noo_, may it not
claim some sanction in its derivation, whether from _nouveau_ or _neuf_,
the ancient sound of which may very well have been _noof_, as nearer
_novus_? _Beef_ would seem more like to have come from _buffe_ than from
_boeuf_, unless the two were mere varieties of spelling. The Saxon _few_
may have caught enough from its French cousin _peu_ to claim the benefit
of the same doubt as to sound; and our slang phrase _a few_ (as 'I
licked him a few') may well appeal to _un peu_ for sense and authority.
Nay, might not _lick_ itself turn out to be the good old word _lam_ in
an English disguise, it the latter should claim descent as, perhaps, he
fairly might, from the Latin _lambere_? The New England _ferce_ for
_fierce_, and _perce_ for _pierce_ (sometimes heard as _fairce_ and
_pairce_), are also Norman. For its antiquity I cite the rhyme of _verse
and pierce_ in Chapman and Donne, and in some commendatory verses by a
Mr. Berkenhead before the poems of Francis Beaumont. Our _pairlous_ for
_perilous_ is of the same kind, and is nearer Shakespeare's _parlous_
than the modern pronunciation. One other Gallicism survives in our
pronunciation. Perhaps I should rather call it a semi-Gallicism, for it
is the result of a futile effort to reproduce a French sound with
English lips. Thus for _joint_, _employ_, _royal_, we have _jynt_,
_emply_, _r[)y]le_, the last differing only from _rile_ (_roil_) in a
prolongation of the _y_ sound. I find _royal_ so pronounced in the
'Mirror for Magistrates. ' In Walter de Biblesworth I find _solives_
Englished by _gistes_. This, it is true, may have been pronounced
_jeests_, but the pronunciation _jystes_ must have preceded the present
spelling, which was no doubt adopted after the radical meaning was
forgotten, as analogical with other words in _oi_. In the same way after
Norman-French influence had softened the _l_ out of _would_ (we already
find _woud_ for _veut_ in N. F. poems), _should_ followed the example,
and then an _l_ was foisted into _could_, where it does not belong, to
satisfy the logic of the eye, which has affected the pronunciation and
even the spelling of English more than is commonly supposed. I meet with
_eyster_ for _oyster_ as early as the fourteenth century. I find _viage_
in Bishop Hall and Middleton the dramatist, _bile_ for _boil_ in Donne
and Chrononhotonthologos, _line_ for _loin_ in Hall, _ryall_ and _chyse_
(for choice) _dystrye_ for _destroy_, in the Coventry Plays. In
Chapman's 'All Fools' is the misprint of _employ_ for _imply_, fairly
inferring an identity of sound in the last syllable. Indeed, this
pronunciation was habitual till after Pope, and Rogers tells us that the
elegant Gray said _naise_ for _noise_ just as our rustics still do. Our
_cornish_ (which I find also in Herrick) remembers the French better
than _cornice_ does. While clinging more closely to the Anglo-Saxon in
dropping the _g_ from the end of the present participle, the Yankee now
and then pleases himself with an experiment in French nasality in words
ending in _n_. It is not, so far as my experience goes, very common,
though it may formerly have been more so. _Capting_, for instance, I
never heard save in jest, the habitual form being _kepp'n_. But at any
rate it is no invention of ours. In that delightful old volume, 'Ane
Compendious Buke of Godly and Spirituall Songs,' in which I know not
whether the piety itself or the simplicity of its expression be more
charming, I find _burding_, _garding_, and _cousing_, and in the State
Trials _uncerting_ used by a gentleman. I confess that I like the _n_
better than _ng_.
Of Yankee preterites I find _risse_ and _rize_ for _rose_ in Beaumont
and Fletcher, Middleton and Dryden, _clim_ in Spenser, _chees_ (_chose_)
in Sir John Mandevil, _give_ (_gave_) in the Coventry Plays, _shet_
(_shut_) in Golding's Ovid, _het_ in Chapman and in Weever's Epitaphs,
_thriv_ and _smit_ in Drayton, _quit_ in Ben Jonson and Henry More, and
_pled_ in the Paston Letters, nay, even in the fastidious Landor. _Rid_
for _rode_ was anciently common. So likewise was _see_ for _saw_, but I
find it in no writer of authority (except Golding), unless Chaucer's
_seie_ and Gower's _sigh_ were, as I am inclined to think, so sounded.
_Shew_ is used by Hector Boece, Giles Fletcher, Drummond of Hawthornden,
and in the Paston Letters. Similar strong preterites, like _snew_,
_thew_, and even _mew_, are not without example. I find _sew_ for
_sewed_ in 'Piers Ploughman. ' Indeed, the anomalies in English
preterites are perplexing. We have probably transferred _flew_ from
_flow_ (as the preterite of which I have heard it) to _fly_ because we
had another preterite in _fled_. Of weak preterites the Yankee retains
_growed_, _blowed_, for which he has good authority, and less often
_knowed_. His _sot_ is merely a broad sounding of _sat_, no more
inelegant than the common _got_ for _gat_, which he further degrades
into _gut_. When he says _darst_, he uses a form as old as Chaucer.
The Yankee has retained something of the long sound of the _a_ in such
words as _axe_, _wax_, pronouncing them _exe_, _wex_ (shortened from
_aix_, _waix_). He also says _hev_ and _hed_ (_h[=a]ve_, _h[=a]d_ for
_have_ and _had_). In most cases he follows an Anglo-Saxon usage. In
_aix_ for _axle_ he certainly does. I find _wex_ and _aisches_ (_ashes_)
in Pecock, and _exe_ in the Paston Letters. Golding rhymes _wax_ with
_wexe_ and spells _challenge_ _chelenge_. Chaucer wrote _hendy_. Dryden
rhymes _can_ with _men_, as Mr. Biglow would. Alexander Gill, Milton's
teacher, in his 'Logonomia' cites _hez_ for _hath_ as peculiar to
Lincolnshire. I find _hayth_ in Collier's 'Bibliographical Account of
Early English Literature' under the date 1584, and Lord Cromwell so
wrote it. Sir Christopher Wren wrote _belcony_. Our _fect_ is only the
O. F. _faict_. _Thaim_ for _them_ was common in the sixteenth century. We
have an example of the same thing in the double form of the verb
_thrash_, _thresh_. While the New Englander cannot be brought to say
_instead_ for _instid_ (commonly _'stid_ where not the last word in a
sentence), he changes the _i_ into _e_ in _red_ for _rid_, _tell_ for
_till_, _hender_ for _hinder_, _rense_ for _rinse_. I find _red_ in the
old interlude of 'Thersytes,' _tell_ in a letter of Daborne to
Henslowe, and also, I shudder to mention it, in a letter of the great
Duchess of Marlborough, Atossa herself! It occurs twice in a single
verse of the Chester Plays,
'_Tell_ the day of dome, _tell_ the beames blow. '
From the word _blow_ (in another sense) is formed _blowth_, which I
heard again this summer after a long interval. Mr. Wright[24] explains it
as meaning 'a blossom. ' With us a single blossom is a _blow_, while
_blowth_ means the blossoming in general. A farmer would say that there
was a good blowth on his fruit-trees. The word retreats farther inland
and away from the railways, year by year. Wither rhymes _hinder_ with
_slender_, and Shakespeare and Lovelace have _renched_ for _rinsed_. In
'Gammer Gurton' and 'Mirror for Magistrates' is _sence_ for _since_;
Marlborough's Duchess so writes it, and Donne rhymes _since_ with
_Amiens_ and _patience_, Bishop Hall and Otway with _pretence_, Chapman
with _citizens_, Dryden with _providence_. Indeed, why should not
_sithence_ take that form? Dryden's wife (an earl's daughter) has _tell_
for _till_, Margaret, mother of Henry VII. , writes _seche_ for _such_,
and our _ef_ finds authority in the old form _yeffe_.
_E_ sometimes takes the place of _u_, as _jedge, tredge, bresh_. I find
_tredge_ in the interlude of 'Jack Jugler,' _bresh_ in a citation by
Collier from 'London Cries' of the middle of the seventeenth century,
and _resche_ for _rush_ (fifteenth century) in the very valuable 'Volume
of Vocabularies' edited by Mr. Wright. _Resce_ is one of the Anglo-Saxon
forms of the word in Bosworth's A. -S. Dictionary. Golding has _shet_.
The Yankee always shortens the _u_ in the ending _ture_, making _ventur,
natur, pictur_, and so on. This was common, also, among the educated of
the last generation. I am inclined to think it may have been once
universal, and I certainly think it more elegant than the vile _vencher,
naycher, pickcher_, that have taken its place, sounding like the
invention of a lexicographer to mitigate a sneeze. Nash in his 'Pierce
Penniless' has _ventur_, and so spells it, and I meet it also in
Spenser, Drayton, Ben Jonson, Herrick, and Prior. Spenser has
_tort'rest_, which can be contracted only from _tortur_ and not from
_torcher_. Quarles rhymes _nature_ with _creator_, and Dryden with
_satire_, which he doubtless pronounced according to its older form of
_satyr_. Quarles has also _torture_ and _mortar_. Mary Boleyn writes
_kreatur_. I find _pikter_ in Izaak Walton's autograph will.
I shall now give some examples which cannot so easily be ranked under
any special head. Gill charges the Eastern counties with _kiver_ for
_cover_, and _ta_, for _to_. The Yankee pronounces both _too_ and _to_
like _ta_ (like the _tou_ in _touch_) where they are not emphatic. When
they are, both become _tu_. In old spelling, _to_ is the common (and
indeed correct) form of _too_, which is only _to_ with the sense of _in
addition_. I suspect that the sound of our _too_ has caught something
from the French _tout_, and it is possible that the old _too too_ is not
a reduplication, but a reminiscence of the feminine form of the same
word (_toute_) as anciently pronounced, with the _e_ not yet silenced.
Gill gives a Northern origin to _geaun_ for _gown_ and _waund_ for
_wound_ (_vulnus_). Lovelace has _waund_, but
there is something too dreadful in suspecting Spenser (who _borealised_
in his pastorals) of having ever been guilty of _geaun! _ And yet some
delicate mouths even now are careful to observe the Hibernicism of
_ge-ard_ for _guard_, and _ge-url_ for _girl_. Sir Philip Sidney
(_credite posteri! _) wrote _furr_ for _far_. I would hardly have
believed it had I not seen it in _facsimile_. As some consolation, I
find _furder_ in Lord Bacon and Donne, and Wittier rhymes _far_ with
_cur_. The Yankee, who omits the final _d_ in many words, as do the
Scotch, makes up for it by adding one in _geound_. The purist does not
feel the loss of the _d_ sensibly in _lawn_ and _yon_, from the former
of which it has dropped again after a wrongful adoption (retained in
_laundry_), while it properly belongs to the latter. But what shall we
make of _git, yit_, and _yis_? I find _yis_ and _git_ in Warner's
'Albion's England,' _yet_ rhyming with _wit, admit_, and _fit_ in Donne,
with _wit_ in the 'Revenger's Tragedy,' Beaumont, and Suckling, with
_writ_ in Dryden, and latest of all with _wit_ in Sir Hanbury Williams.
Prior rhymes _fitting_ and _begetting_. Worse is to come. Among others,
Donne rhymes _again_ with _sin_, and Quarles repeatedly with _in_. _Ben_
for _been_, of which our dear Whittier is so fond, has the authority of
Sackville, 'Gammer Gurton' (the work of a bishop), Chapman, Dryden, and
many more, though _bin_ seems to have been the common form. Whittier's
accenting the first syllable of _rom'ance_ finds an accomplice in
Drayton among others, and, though manifestly wrong, is analogous with
_Rom'ans_. Of other Yankeeisms, whether of form or pronunciation, which
I have met with I add a few at random. Pecock writes _sowdiers (sogers,
soudoyers)_, and Chapman and Gill _sodder_. This absorption of the _l_
is common in various dialects, especially in the Scottish. Pecock writes
also _biyende_, and the authors of 'Jack Jugler' and 'Gammer Gurton'
_yender_. The Yankee includes '_yon_' in the same catagory, and says
'hither an' yen,' for 'to and fro. ' (Cf. German _jenseits_. ) Pecock and
plenty more have _wrastle_. Tindal has _agynste, gretter, shett, ondone,
debyte_, and _scace_. 'Jack Jugler' has _scacely_ (which I have often
heard, though _skurce_ is the common form), and Donne and Dryden make
_great_ rhyme with _set_. In the inscription on Caxton's tomb I find
_ynd_ for _end_, which the Yankee more often makes _eend_, still using
familiarly the old phrase 'right anend' for 'continuously. ' His 'stret
(straight) along' in the same sense, which I thought peculiar to him, I
find in Pecock. Tindal's _debyte_ for _deputy_ is so perfectly Yankee
that I could almost fancy the brave martyr to have been deacon of the
First Parish at Jaalam Centre. 'Jack Jugler' further gives us _playsent_
and _sartayne_. Dryden rhymes _certain_ with _parting_, and Chapman and
Ben Jonson use _certain_, as the Yankee always does, for _certainly_.
The 'Coventry Mysteries' have _occapied, massage, nateralle, materal
(material),_ and _meracles_,--all excellent Yankeeisms. In the 'Quatre
fils, Aymon' (1504),[25] is _vertus_ for _virtuous_. Thomas Fuller called
_volume vollum_, I suspect, for he spells it _volumne_. However, _per
contra_, Yankees habitually say _colume_ for _column_. Indeed, to
prove that our ancestors brought their pronunciation with them from the
Old Country, and have not wantonly debased their mother tongue, I need
only to cite the words _scriptur_, _Israll_, _athists_, and
_cherfulness_ from Governor Bradford's 'History. ' So the good man wrote
them, and so the good descendants of his fellow-exiles still pronounce
them. Brampton Gurdon writes _shet_ in a letter to Winthrop. _Purtend_
(_pretend_) has crept like a serpent into the 'Paradise Of Dainty
Devices;' _purvide_, which is not so bad, is in Chaucer. These, of
course, are universal vulgarisms, and not peculiar to the Yankee. Butler
has a Yankee phrase, and pronunciation too, in 'To which these
_carr'ings-on_ did tend. ' Langham or Laneham, who wrote an account of
the festivities at Kenilworth in honor of Queen Bess, and who evidently
tried to spell phonetically, makes _sorrows_ into _sororz_. Herrick
writes _hollow_ for _halloo_, and perhaps pronounced it (_horresco
suggerens_! ) _hollo_, as Yankees do. Why not, when it comes from _hola_?
I find _ffelaschyppe_ (fellowship) in the Coventry Plays. Spenser and
his queen neither of them scrupled to write _afore_, and the former
feels no inelegance even in _chaw_ and _idee_. _'Fore_ was common till
after Herrick. Dryden has _do's_ for _does_, and his wife spells _worse_
_wosce_. _Afeared_ was once universal. Warner has _ery_ for _ever a_;
nay, he also has illy, with which we were once ignorantly reproached by
persons more familiar with Murray's Grammar than with English
literature. And why not _illy_? Mr. Bartlett says it is 'a word used by
writers of an inferior class, who do not seem to perceive that _ill_ is
itself an adverb, without the termination _ly_,' and quotes Dr. Mosser,
President of Brown University, as asking triumphantly, 'Why don't you
say '_welly_? ' I should like to have had Dr. Messer answer his own
question. It would be truer to say that it was used by people who still
remembered that _ill_ was an adjective, the shortened form of _evil_,
out of which Shakespeare and the translators of the Bible ventured to
make _evilly_. This slurred _evil_ is 'the dram of _eale_' in 'Hamlet. '
I find, _illy_ in Warner. The objection to _illy_ is not an etymological
one, but simply that it is contrary to good usage,--a very sufficient
reason. _Ill_ as an adverb was at first a vulgarism, precisely like the
rustic's when he says, 'I was treated _bad_. ' May not the reason of this
exceptional form be looked for in that tendency to dodge what is hard to
pronounce, to which I have already alluded? If the letters were
distinctly uttered, as they should be, it would take too much time to
say _ill-ly_, _well-ly_, and it is to be observed that we have avoided
_smally_[26] and _tally_ in the same way, though we add _ish_ to them
without hesitation in _smallish_ and _tallish_. We have, to be sure,
_dully_ and _fully_, but for the one we prefer _stupidly_, and the other
(though this may have come from eliding the _y_ before _a_s) is giving
way to _full_. The uneducated, whose utterance is slower, still make
adverbs when they will by adding _like_ to all manner of adjectives. We
have had _big_ charged upon us, because we use it where an Englishman
would now use _great_. I fully admit that it were better to distinguish
between them, allowing to _big_ a certain contemptuous quality; but as
for authority, I want none better than that of Jeremy Taylor, who, in
his noble sermon 'On the Return of Prayer,' speaks of 'Jesus, whose
spirit was meek and gentle up to the greatness of the _biggest_
example. ' As for our double negative, I shall waste no time in quoting
instances of it, because it was once as universal in English as it still
is in the neo-Latin languages, where it does not strike us as vulgar. I
am not sure that the loss of it is not to be regretted. But surely I
shall admit the vulgarity of slurring or altogether eliding certain
terminal consonants? I admit that a clear and sharp-cut enunciation is
one of the crowning charms and elegances of speech. Words so uttered are
like coins fresh from the mint, compared with the worn and dingy drudges
of long service,--I do not mean American coins, for those look less
badly the more they lose of their original ugliness. No one is more
painfully conscious than I of the contrast between the rifle-crack of an
Englishman's _yes_ and _no_, and the wet-fuse drawl of the same
monosyllables in the mouths of my countrymen. But I do not find the
dropping of final consonants disagreeable in Allan Ramsay or Burns, nor
do I believe that our literary ancestors were sensible of that
inelegance in the fusing them together of which we are conscious. How
many educated men pronounce the _t_ in _chestnut_? how many say
_pentise_ for _penthouse_, as they should. When a Yankee skipper says
that he is "boun' for Gloster" (not Gloucester, with the leave of the
Universal Schoolmaster),[27] he but speaks like Chaucer or an old
ballad-singer, though they would have pronounced it _boon_. This is one
of the cases where the _d_ is surreptitious, and has been added in
compliment to the verb _bind_, with which it has nothing to do. If we
consider the root of the word (though of course I grant that every race
has a right to do what it will with what is so peculiarly its own as its
speech), the _d_ has no more right there than at the end of _gone_,
where it is often put by children, who are our best guides to the
sources of linguistic corruption, and the best teachers of its
processes. Cromwell, minister of Henry VIII. , writes _worle_ for world.
Chapman has _wan_ for _wand_, and _lawn_ has rightfully displaced
_laund_, though with no thought, I suspect, of etymology. Rogers tells
us that Lady Bathurst sent him some letters written to William III. by
Queen Mary, in which she addresses him as '_Dear Husban_. ' The old form
_expoun'_, which our farmers use, is more correct than the form with a
barbarous _d_ tacked on which has taken its place. Of the kind opposite
to this, like our _gownd_ for _gown_, and the London cockney's _wind_
for _wine_, I find _drownd_ for _drown_ in the 'Misfortunes of Arthur'
(1584) and in Swift. And, by the way, whence came the long sound of wind
which our poets still retain, and which survives in 'winding' a horn, a
totally different word from 'winding' a kite-string? We say _beh[=i]nd_
and _h[=i]nder_ (comparative) and yet to _h[)i]nder_. Shakespeare
pronounced _kind_ _k[)i]nd_, or what becomes of his play on that word
and _kin_ in 'Hamlet'? Nay, did he not even (shall I dare to hint it? )
drop the final _d_ as the Yankee still does? John Lilly plays in the
same way on _kindred_ and _kindness_.
But to come to some other ancient instances. Warner rhymes _bounds_ with
_crowns_, _grounds_ with _towns_, _text_ with _sex_, _worst_ with
_crust_, _interrupts_ with _cups_; Drayton, _defects_ with _sex_;
Chapman, _amends_ with _cleanse_; Webster, _defects_ with _checks_; Ben
Jonson, _minds_ with _combines_; Marston, _trust_ and _obsequious_,
_clothes_ and _shows_; Dryden gives the same sound to _clothes_, and has
also _minds_ with _designs_. Of course, I do not affirm that their ears
may not have told them that these were imperfect rhymes (though I am by
no means sure even of that), but they surely would never have tolerated
any such had they suspected the least vulgarity in them. Prior has the
rhyme _first_ and _trust_, but puts it into the mouth of a landlady.
Swift has _stunted_ and _burnt_ it, an intentionally imperfect rhyme, no
doubt, but which I cite as giving precisely the Yankee pronunciation of
_burned_. Donne couples in unhallowed wedlock _after_ and _matter_, thus
seeming to give to both the true Yankee sound; and it is not uncommon to
find _after_ and _daughter_. Worse than all, in one of Dodsley's Old
Plays we have _onions_ rhyming with _minions_,--I have tears in my eyes
while I record it. And yet what is viler than the universal _Misses_
(_Mrs. _) for _Mistress_? This was once a vulgarism, and in 'The Miseries
of Inforced Marriage' the rhyme (printed as prose in Dodsley's Old Plays
by Collier),
'To make my young _mistress_
Delighting in _kisses_,'
is put into the mouth of the clown. Our people say _Injun_ for _Indian_.
The tendency to make this change where _i_ follows _d_ is common. The
Italian _giorno_ and French _jour_ from _diurnus_ are familiar examples.
And yet _Injun_ is one of those depravations which the taste challenges
peremptorily, though it have the authority of Charles Cotton--who rhymes
'_Indies_' with '_cringes_'--and four English lexicographers, beginning
with Dr. Sheridan, bid us say _invidgeous_. Yet after all it is no worse
than the debasement which all our terminations in _tion_ and _tience_
have undergone, which yet we hear with _resignashun_ and _payshunce_,
though it might have aroused both _impat-i-ence_ and _in-dig-na-ti-on_
in Shakespeare's time. When George Herbert tells us that if the sermon
be dull,
'God takes a text and preacheth patience,'
the prolongation of the word seems to convey some hint at the
longanimity of the virtue. Consider what a poor curtal we have made of
Ocean. There was something of his heave and expanse in _o-ce-an_, and
Fletcher knew how to use it when he wrote so fine a verse as the second
of these, the best deep-sea verse I know,--
'In desperate storms stem with a little rudder
The tumbling ruins of the ocean. '
Oceanus was not then wholly shorn of his divine proportions, and our
modern _oshun_ sounds like the gush of small-beer in comparison. Some
other contractions of ours have a vulgar air about them. _More 'n_ for
_more than_, as one of the worst, may stand for a type of such. Yet our
old dramatists are full of such obscurations (elisions they can hardly
be called) of the _th_, making _whe'r_ of _whether_, _where_ of
_whither_, _here_ of _hither_, _bro'r_ of _brother_, _smo'r_ of
_smother_, _mo'r_ of _mother_, and so on. And dear Brer Rabbit, can I
forget him? Indeed, it is this that explains the word _rare_ (which has
Dryden's support), and which we say of meat where an Englishman would
use _underdone_. I do not believe, with the dictionaries, that it had
ever anything to do with the Icelandic _hrar_ (_raw_), as it plainly has
not in _rareripe_, which means earlier ripe,--President Lincoln said of
a precocious boy that 'he was a _rareripe_. ' And I do not believe it,
for this reason, that the earliest form of the word with us was, and the
commoner now in the inland parts still is, so far as I can discover,
_raredone_. Golding has 'egs reere-rosted,' which, whatever else it
mean, cannot mean _raw_-roasted, I find _rather_ as a monosyllable in
Donne, and still better, as giving the sound, rhyming with _fair_ in
Warner. There is an epigram of Sir Thomas Browne in which the words
_rather than_ make a monosyllable;--
'What furie is't to take Death's part
And rather than by Nature, die by Art! '
The contraction _more'n_ I find in the old play 'Fuimus Troes,' in a
verse where the measure is so strongly accented as to leave it beyond
doubt,--
'A golden crown whose heirs
More than half the world subdue. '
It may be, however, that the contraction is in 'th'orld. ' It is
unmistakable in the 'Second Maiden's Tragedy:'--
'It were but folly,
Dear soul, to boast of _more than_ I can perform. '
Is our _gin_ for _given_ more violent than _mar'l_ for _marvel_, which
was once common, and which I find as late as Herrick? Nay, Herrick has
_gin_ (spelling it _gen_), too, as do the Scotch, who agree with us
likewise in preferring _chimly_ to _chimney_.
I will now leave pronunciation and turn to words or phrases which have
been supposed peculiar to us, only pausing to pick up a single dropped
stitch, in the pronunciation of the word _supreme_, which I had thought
native till I found it in the well-languaged Daniel. I will begin with a
word of which I have never met with any example in any English writer of
authority. We express the first stage of withering in a green plant
suddenly cut down by the verb _to wilt_. It is, of course, own cousin of
the German _welken_, but I have never come upon it in literary use, and
my own books of reference give me faint help. Graff gives _welhen_,
_marcescere_, and refers to _weih_ (_weak_), and conjecturally to A. -S,
_hvelan_. The A. -S. _wealwian_ (_to wither_) is nearer, but not so near
as two words in the Icelandic, which perhaps put us on the track of its
ancestry,--_velgi_, _tepefacere_, (and _velki_, with the derivative)
meaning _contaminare_. _Wilt_, at any rate, is a good word, filling, as
it does, a sensible gap between drooping and withering, and the
imaginative phrase 'he wilted right down,' like 'he caved right in,' is
a true Americanism. _Wilt_ occurs in English provincial glossaries, but
is explained by _wither_, which with us it does not mean. We have a few
words such as _cache_, _cohog_, _carry_ (_portage_), _shoot_ (_chute_),
_timber_ (_forest_), _bushwhack_ (to pull a boat along by the bushes on
the edge of a stream), _buckeye_ (a picturesque word for the
horse-chestnut); but how many can we be said to have fairly brought into
the language, as Alexander Gill, who first mentions Americanisms, meant
it when he said, '_Sed et ab Americanis nonnulla mutuamur ut_ MAIZ _et_
CANOA'? Very few, I suspect, and those mostly by borrowing from the
French, German, Spanish, or Indian. [28] 'The Dipper,' for the 'Great
Bear,' strikes me as having a native air. _Bogus_, in the sense of
_worthless_, is undoubtedly ours, but is, I more than suspect, a
corruption of the French _bagasse_ (from low Latin _bagasea_), which
travelled up the Mississippi from New Orleans, where it was used for the
refuse of the sugar-cane. It is true, we have modified the meaning of
some words. We use _freshet_ in the sense of _flood_, for which I have
not chanced upon any authority. Our New England cross between Ancient
Pistol and Dugald Dalgetty, Captain Underhill, uses the word (1638) to
mean a _current_, and I do not recollect it elsewhere in that sense. I
therefore leave it with a? for future explorers. _Crick_ for _creek_ I
find in Captain John Smith and in the dedication of Fuller's 'Holy
Warre,' and _run_, meaning a _small stream_, in Waymouth's 'Voyage'
(1605). _Humans_ for _men_, which Mr. Bartlett includes in his
'Dictionary of Americanisms,' is Chapman's habitual phrase in his
translation of Homer. I find it also in the old play of 'The Hog hath
lost his Pearl. ' _Dogs_ for _andirons_ is still current in New England,
and in Walter de Biblesworth I find _chiens_ glossed in the margin by
_andirons_. _Gunning_ for _shooting_ is in Drayton. We once got credit
for the poetical word _fall_ for _autumn_, but Mr. Bartlett and the last
edition of Webster's Dictionary refer us to Dryden. It is even older,
for I find it in Drayton, and Bishop Hall has _autumn fall_. Middleton
plays upon the word: 'May'st thou have a reasonable good _spring_, for
thou art like to have many dangerous foul _falls_. ' Daniel does the
same, and Coleridge uses it as we do. Gray uses the archaism _picked_
for _peaked_, and the word _smudge_ (as our backwoodsmen do) for a
smothered fire. Lord Herbert of Cherbury (more properly perhaps than
even Sidney, the last _preux chevalier_) has 'the Emperor's folks' just
as a Yankee would say it. _Loan_ for _lend_, with which we have hitherto
been blackened, I must retort upon the mother island, for it appears so
long ago as in 'Albion's England. ' _Fleshy_, in the sense of _stout_,
may claim Ben Jonson's warrant, and I find it also so lately as in
Francklin's 'Lucian. ' _Chore_ is also Jonson's word, and I am inclined
to prefer it to _chare_ and _char_, because I think that I see a more
natural origin for it in the French _jour_--whence it might come to mean
a day's work, and thence a job--than anywhere else. [29] _At onst_ for _at
once_ I thought a corruption of our own, till I found it in the Chester
Plays. I am now inclined to suspect it no corruption at all, but only an
erratic and obsolete superlative _at onest_. _To progress_ was flung in
our teeth till Mr. Pickering retorted with Shakespeare's 'doth progress
down thy cheeks. ' I confess that I was never satisfied with this answer,
because the accent was different, and because the word might here be
reckoned a substantive quite as well as a verb. Mr. Bartlett (in his
dictionary above cited) adds a surrebutter in a verse from Ford's
'Broken Heart. ' Here the word is clearly a verb, but with the accent
unhappily still on the first syllable. Mr. Bartlett says that he
'cannot say whether the word was used in Bacon's time or not. ' It
certainly was, and with the accent we give to it. Ben Jonson, in the
'Alchemist,' had this verse,
'Progress so from extreme unto extreme,'
and Sir Philip Sidney,
'Progressing then from fair Turias' golden place. '
Surely we may now sleep in peace, and our English cousins will forgive
us, since we have cleared ourselves from any suspicion of originality in
the matter! Even after I had convinced myself that the chances were
desperately against our having invented any of the _Americanisms_ with
which we are _faulted_ and which we are in the habit of _voicing_, there
were one or two which had so prevailingly indigenous an accent as to
stagger me a little. One of these was 'the biggest _thing out_. ' Alas,
even this slender comfort is denied me. Old Gower has
'So harde an herte was none _oute_,'
and
'That such merveile was none _oute_. '
He also, by the way, says 'a _sighte_ of flowres' as naturally as our
up-country folk would say it. _Poor_ for _lean_, _thirds_ for _dower_,
and _dry_ for _thirsty_ I find in Middleton's plays. _Dry_ is also in
Skelton and in the 'World' (1754). In a note on Middleton, Mr. Dyce
thinks it needful to explain the phrase _I can't tell_ (universal in
America) by the gloss _I could not say_. Middleton also uses _sneeked_,
which I had believed an Americanism till I saw it there. It is, of
course, only another form of _snatch_, analogous to _theek_ and _thatch_
(cf. the proper names Dekker and Thacher), _break_ (_brack_) and
_breach_, _make_ (still common with us) and _match_. _'Long on_ for
_occasioned by_ ('who is this 'long on? ') occurs constantly in Gower and
likewise in Middleton. _'Cause why_ is in Chaucer. _Raising_ (an English
version of the French _leaven_) for _yeast_ is employed by Gayton in his
'Festivous Notes on Don Quixote. ' I have never seen an instance of our
New England word _emptins_ in the same sense, nor can I divine its
original. Gayton has _limekill_; also _shuts_ for _shutters_, and the
latter is used by Mrs. Hutchinson in her 'Life of Colonel Hutchinson. '
Bishop Hall, and Purchas in his 'Pilgrims,' have _chist_ for _chest_,
and it is certainly nearer _cista_, as well as to its form in the
Teutonic languages, whence probably we got it. We retain the old sound
from _cist_, but _chest_ is as old as Chaucer. Lovelace says _wropt_ for
_wrapt_. 'Musicianer' I had always associated with the militia-musters
of my boyhood, and too hastily concluded it an abomination of our own,
but Mr. Wright calls it a Norfolk word, and I find it to be as old as
1642 by an extract in Collier. 'Not worth the time of day,' had passed
with me for native till I saw it in Shakespeare's 'Pericles. ' For
_slick_ (which is only a shorter sound of _sleek_, like _crick_ and the
now universal _britches_ for _breeches_) I will only call Chapman and
Jonson. 'That's a sure card! ' and 'That's a stinger! ' both sound like
modern slang, but you will find the one in the old interlude of
'Thersytes' (1537), and the other in Middleton. 'Right here,' a favorite
phrase with our orators and with a certain class of our editors, turns
up _passim_ in the Chester and Coventry plays. Mr. Dickens found
something very ludicrous in what he considered our neologism _right
away_. But I find a phrase very like it, and which I would gladly
suspect to be a misprint for it, in 'Gammer Gurton:'--
'Lyght it and bring it _tite away_. '
But _tite_ is the true word in this case. After all, what is it but
another form of _straightway_? _Cussedness_, meaning _wickedness,
malignity_, and _cuss_, a sneaking, ill-natured fellow, in such phrases
as 'He done it out o' pure cussedness,' and 'He is a nateral cuss,' have
been commonly thought Yankeeisms.
