No More Learning

It is always worth while to note down the erratic words or phrases which
one meets with in any dialect. They may throw light on the meaning of
other words, on the relationship of languages, or even on history
itself. In so composite a language as ours they often supply a different
form to express a different shade of meaning, as in _viol_ and _fiddle_,
_thrid_ and _thread_, _smother_ and _smoulder_, where the _l_ has crept
in by a false analogy with _would_. We have given back to England the
excellent adjective _lengthy_, formed honestly like _earthy, drouthy_,
and others, thus enabling their journalists to characterize our
President's messages by a word civilly compromising between _long_ and
_tedious_, so as not to endanger the peace of the two countries by
wounding our national sensitiveness to British criticism. Let me give
two curious examples of the antiseptic property of dialects at which I
have already glanced. Dante has _dindi_ as a childish or low word for
_danari_ (money), and in Shropshire small Roman coins are still dug up
which the peasants call _dinders_. This can hardly be a chance
coincidence, but seems rather to carry the word back to the Roman
soldiery. So our farmers say _chuk, chuk_, to their pigs, and _ciacco_
is one of the Italian words for _hog_. When a countryman tells us that
he 'fell _all of a heap_,' I cannot help thinking that he unconsciously
points to an affinity between our word _tumble_, and the Latin
_tumulus_, that is older than most others. I believe that words, or even
the mere intonation of them, have an astonishing vitality and power of
propagation by the root, like the gardener's pest, quitch-grass,[31]
while the application or combination of them may be new. It is in these
last that my countrymen seem to me full of humor, invention, quickness
of wit, and that sense of subtle analogy which needs only refining to
become fancy and imagination. Prosaic as American life seems in many of
its aspects to a European, bleak and bare as it is on the side of
tradition, and utterly orphaned of the solemn inspiration of antiquity,
I cannot help thinking that the ordinary talk of unlettered men among us
is fuller of metaphor and of phrases that suggest lively images than
that of any other people I have seen. Very many such will be found in
Mr. Bartlett's book, though his short list of proverbs at the end seem
to me, with one or two exceptions, as un-American as possible. Most of
them have no character at all but coarseness, and are quite too
long-skirted for working proverbs, in which language always 'takes off
its coat to it,' as a Yankee would say.
There are plenty that have a
more native and puckery flavor, seedlings from the old stock often, and
yet new varieties. One hears such not seldom among us Easterners, and
the West would yield many more. 'Mean enough to steal acorns from a
blind hog;' 'Cold as the north side of a Jenooary gravestone by
starlight;' 'Hungry as a graven image;' 'Pop'lar as a hen with one
chicken;' 'A hen's time ain't much;' 'Quicker 'n greased lightnin';'
'Ther's sech a thing ez bein' _tu_' (our Yankee paraphrase of [Greek:
maeden agan]); hence the phrase _tooin' round_, meaning a supererogatory
activity like that of flies; 'Stingy enough to skim his milk at both
eends;' 'Hot as the Devil's kitchen;' 'Handy as a pocket in a shirt;'
'He's a whole team and the dog under the wagon;' 'All deacons are good,
but there's odds in deacons' (to _deacon_ berries is to put the largest
atop); 'So thievish they hev to take in their stone walls nights;'[32]
may serve as specimens. 'I take my tea _barfoot_,' said a backwoodsman
when asked if he would have cream and sugar. (I find _barfoot_, by the
way, in the Coventry Plays. ) A man speaking to me once of a very rocky
clearing said, 'Stone's got a pretty heavy mortgage on that land,' and I
overheard a guide in the woods say to his companions who were urging him
to sing, 'Wal, I _did_ sing once, but toons gut invented, an' thet spilt
my trade. ' Whoever has driven over a stream by a bridge made of _slabs_
will feel the picturesque force of the epithet _slab-bridged_ applied to
a fellow of shaky character. Almost every county has some good
die-sinker in phrase, whose mintage passes into the currency of the
whole neighborhood. Such a one described the county jail (the one stone
building where all the dwellings are of wood) as 'the house whose
underpinnin' come up to the eaves,' and called hell 'the place where
they didn't rake up their fires nights. ' I once asked a stage-driver if
the other side of a hill were as steep as the one we were climbing:
'Steep? chain lightnin' couldn' go down it 'thout puttin' the shoe on! '
And this brings me back to the exaggeration of which I spoke before. To
me there is something very taking in the negro 'so black that charcoal
made a chalk-mark on him,' and the wooden shingle 'painted so like
marble that it sank in water,' as if its very consciousness or its
vanity had been overpersuaded by the cunning of the painter. I heard a
man, in order to give a notion of some very cold weather, say to another
that a certain Joe, who had been taking mercury, found a lump of
quicksilver in each boot, when he went home to dinner. This power of
rapidly dramatizing a dry fact into flesh and blood and the vivid
conception of Joe as a human thermometer strike me as showing a poetic
sense that may be refined into faculty. At any rate there is humor here,
and not mere quickness of wit,--the deeper and not the shallower
quality.