No More Learning

_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.