No More Learning

_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.