The Hoosier Schoolmaster

Endnotes

“Aout” is not the common form of “out,” as it is in certain rustic New England regions. The vowel is here drawn in this way for imperative emphasis, and it occurs as a consequence of drawling speech. ↩
“ ’Nough said” is more than enough said for the French translator, who takes it apparently for a sort of barbarous negative and renders it, “I don’t like to speak to him.” I need hardly explain to any American reader that “enough said” implies the ending of all discussion by the acceptance of the proposition or challenge. ↩
“Durn’t,” “daren’t,” “dasent,” “dursent,” and “don’t dast” are forms of this variable negative heard in the folk-speech of various parts of the country. The tenses of this verb seem to have got hopelessly mixed long ago, even in literary use, and the speech of the people reflects the historic confusion. ↩
“To take a dare” is an expression used in senses diametrically opposed. Its common sense is that of the text. The man who refuses to accept a challenge is said to take a dare, and there is some implication of cowardice in the imputation. On the other hand, one who accepts a challenge is said also to take the dare. ↩
Most bad English was once good English. “Ketch” was used by writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for “catch.” A New Hampshire magistrate in the seventeenth century spells it “caitch,” and probably pronounced it in that way. “Ketch,” a boat, was sometimes spelled “catch” by the first American colonists, and the far-fetched derivation of the word from the Turkish may be one of the fancies of etymologists. ↩
The derivation of “raccoon” from the French raton, to which Mr. Skeat gives currency, still holds its place in some of our standard dictionaries. If American lexicographers would only read the literature of American settlement they would know that Mr. Skeat’s citation of a translation of Buffon is nearly two centuries too late. As early as 1612 Captain John Smith gives aroughcune as the aboriginal Virginia word, and more than one New England writer used “rackoon” a few years later. ↩
This prefixed y is a mark of a very illiterate or antique form of the dialect. I have known “piece yarthen” used for “a piece of earthen” [ware], the preposition getting lost in the sound of the y. I leave it to etymologists to determine its relation to that ancient prefix that differentiates “earn” in one sense from “yearn.” But the article before a vowel may account for it if we consider it a corruption. “The earth” pronounced in a drawling way will produce “the yearth.” In the New York Documents is a letter from one Barnard Hodges, a settler in Delaware in the days of Governor Andros, whose spelling indicates a free use of the parasitic y. He writes “yunless,” “yeunder” (under), “yunderstanding,” “yeundertake,” and “yeouffeis” (office). ↩
Like many of the earmarks of this dialect, the verb “dog-on” came from Scotland, presumably by the way of the north of Ireland. A correspondent of The Nation calls attention to the use of “dagon” as Scotch dialect in Barrie’s Little Minister. On examining that story, I find that the word has precisely the sense of our Hoosier “dog-on,” which is to be pronounced broadly as a Hoosier pronounces dog⁠—“daug-on.” If Mr. Barrie gives his a the broad sound, his “dagon” is nearly identical with “dog-on.” Here are some detached sentences from The Little Minister:

“Beattie spoke for more than himself when he said: ‘Dagon that Manse! I never gie a swear but there it is glowering at me.’ ”

“ ‘Dagon religion,’ Rob retorted fiercely; ‘ ’t spoils a’ thing.’ ”

“There was some angry muttering from the crowd, and young Charles Yuill exclaimed, ‘Dagon you, would you lord it ower us on weekdays as well as on Sabbaths?’ ”

“ ‘Have you on your Sabbath shoon or have you no on your Sabbath shoon?’ ‘Guid care you took I should ha’e the dagont things on!’ retorted the farmer.”

It will be seen that “dagont,” as used above, is the Scotch form of “dog-oned.” But Mr. Barrie uses the same form apparently for “dog-on it” in the following passage:

“Ay, there was Ruth when she was na wanted, but Ezra, dagont it looked as if Ezra had jumped clean out o’ the Bible!”

Strangely enough, this word as a verb is not to be found in Jamieson’s dictionary of the Scottish dialect, but Jamieson gives “dugon” as a noun. It is given in the supplement to Jamieson, however, as “dogon,” but still as a noun, with an ancient plural “dogonis.” It is explained as “a term of contempt.” The example cited by Jamieson is Hogg’s Winter Tales, I 292, and is as follows:

“What wad my father say if I were to marry a man that loot himsel’ be thrashed by Tommy Potts, a great supple wi’ a back nae stiffer than a willy brand?⁠ ⁠… When one comes to close quarters wi’ him he’s but a dugon.”

Halliwell and Wright give “dogon” as a noun, and mark it Anglo-Norman, but they apparently know it only from Jamieson and the supplement to Jamieson, where “dogguin” is cited from Cotgrave as meaning “a filthie old curre,” and “doguin” from Roquefort, defined by “brutal, currish” [hargneux]. A word with the same orthography, “doguin,” is still used in French for puppy. It is of course a question whether the noun “dogon” and its French antecedents are connected with the American verb “dog-on.” It is easy to conceive that such an epithet as “dogon” might get itself mixed up with the word dog, and so become an imprecation. For instance, a servant in the family of a friend of mine in Indiana, wishing to resign her place before the return of some daughters of the house whom she had never seen, announced that she was going to leave “before them dog-on girls got home.” Here the word might have been the old epithet, or an abbreviated participle. “Dogged” is apparently a corruption of dog-on in the phrase “I’ll be dogged.” I prefer “dog-on” to “dogone,” because in the dialect the sense of setting a dog on is frequently present to the speaker, though far enough away from the primitive sense of the word, perhaps. ↩
In naming the several parts of the Indian corn and the dishes made from it, the English language was put to many shifts. Such words as “tassel” and “silk” were poetically applied to the blossoms; “stalk,” “blade,” and “ear” were borrowed from other sorts of corn, and the Indian tongues were forced to pay tribute to name the dishes borrowed from the savages. From them we have “hominy,” “pone,” “supawn,” and “succotash.” For other nouns words were borrowed from English provincial dialects. “Shuck” is one of these. On the northern belt, shucks are the outer covering of nuts; in the middle and southern regions the word is applied to what in New England is called the husks of the corn. “Shuck,” however, is much more widely used than “husk” in colloquial speech⁠—the farmers in more than half of the United States are hardly acquainted with the word “husk” as applied to the envelope of the ear. “Husk,” in the Middle States, and in some parts of the South and West, means the bran of the cornmeal, as notably in Davy Crockett’s verse:

“She sifted the meal, she gimme the hus’;
She baked the bread, she gimme the crus’;
She b’iled the meat, she gimme the bone;
She gimme a kick and sent me home.”

In parts of Virginia, before the war, the word “husk” or “hus’ ” meant the cob or spike of the corn. “I smack you over wid a cawn-hus’ ” is a threat I have often heard one negro boy make to another. “Cob” is provincial English for ear, and I have known “a cob of corn” used in Canada for an ear of Indian corn. While writing this note “a cob of Indian corn”⁠—meaning an ear⁠—appears in the report of an address by a distinguished man at a recent meeting of the Royal Geographical Society. A lady tells me that she met, in the book of an English traveller, the remarkable statement that “the Americans are very fond of the young grain called cob.” These Indian-corn words have reached an accepted meaning after a competition. To “shell” corn, among the earliest settlers of Virginia, meant to take it out of the envelope, which was presumably called the shell. The analogy is with the shelling of pulse. ↩
This word “plunder” is probably from Pennsylvania, as it is exactly equivalent to the German word plunder, in the sense of household effects, the original meaning of the word in German. Any kind of baggage may be called “plunder,” but the most accepted sense is household goods. It is quite seriously used. I have seen bills of lading on the Western waters certifying that A. B. had shipped “1 lot of plunder;” that is, household goods. It is here used figuratively for goods in general. ↩
“Congress land” was the old designation for land owned by the government. Under the Confederation, the Congress was the government, and the forms of speech seem to have long retained the notion that what belonged to the United States was the property of Congress. ↩
The commonest use of the word “chunk” in the old days was for the ends of the sticks of cordwood burned in the great fireplaces. As the sticks burned in two, the chunks fell down or rolled back on the wall side of the andirons. By putting the chunks together, a new fire was set a-going without fresh wood. This use of the word is illustrated in a folk-rhyme or nursery jingle of the country which has neither sense nor elegance to recommend it:

“Old Mother Hunk
She got drunk
And fell in the fire
And kicked up a chunk.”

↩
“Peart” or peert is only another form of the old word pert⁠—probably an older form. Bartlett cites an example of “peart” as far back as Sir Philip Sidney; and Halliwell finds it in various English dialects. Davies, afterward president of Princeton College, describes Dr. Lardner, in 1754, as “a little pert old gent.” I do not know that Dr. Davies pronounced his “pert” as though it were “peart,” but he uses it in the sense it has in the text, viz., bright-witted, intelligent. The general sense of “peart” is lively, either in body or mind. ↩
Mr. Lowell suggested to me in 1869 that this word “ ’low” has no kinship with “allow,” but is an independent word for which he gave a Low Latin original of similar sound. I have not been able to trace any such word, but Mr. Lowell had so much linguistic knowledge of the out-of-the-way sort that it may be worth while to record his impression. Bartlett is wrong in defining this word, as he is usually in his attempts to explain dialect outside of New England. It does not mean “to declare, assert, maintain,” etc. It is nearly the equivalent of “guess” in the Northern and Middle States, and of “reckon” in the South. It agrees precisely with the New England “calk’late.” Like all the rest of these words it may have a strong sense by irony. When a man says, “I ’low that is a purty peart sort of a hoss,” he understates for the sake of emphasis. It is rarely or never “allow,” but simply “ ’low.” In common with “calk’late,” it has sometimes a sense of purpose or expectation, as when a man says, “I ’low to go to town to-morry.” ↩
No phrase of the Hoosier and Southwestern dialect is such a stumbling-block to the outsider as “right smart.” The writer from the North or East will generally use it wrongly. Mrs. Stowe says, “I sold right smart of eggs,” but the Hoosier woman as I knew her would have said “a right smart lot of eggs” or “a right smart of eggs,” using the article and understanding the noun. A farmer omitting the preposition boasts of having “raised right smart corn” this year. No expression could have a more vague sense than this. In the early settlement of Minnesota it was a custom of the land officers to require a residence of about ten days on “a claim” in order to the establishment of a preemption right. One of the receivers at a land office under Buchanan’s administration was a German of much intelligence who was very sensitive regarding his knowledge of English. “How long has the claimant lived on his claim?” he demanded of a Hoosier witness. “Oh, a right smart while,” was the reply. The receiver had not the faintest notion of the meaning of the answer, but fearing to betray his ignorance of English he allowed the land to be entered, though the claimant had spent but about two hours in residing on his quarter-section. ↩
Written in 1871. ↩
The original from which this character was drawn is here described accurately. The author now knows that such people are not to be put into books. They are not realistic enough. ↩
Absurd as this speech seems, it is a literal transcript of words spoken in the author’s presence by a woman who, like Miss Hawkins, was born in Massachusetts. ↩
When the first edition of this book appeared, the critic who analyzed the dialect in The Nation confessed that he did not know what to “crate” meant. It was a custom in the days of early Indiana barbarism for the youngsters of a village, on spying a sleeping drunkard, to hunt up a “queensware crate”⁠—one of the cages of round withes in which crockery was shipped. This was turned upside down over the inebriate, and loaded with logs or any other heavy articles that would make escape difficult when the poor wretch should come to himself. It was a sort of rude punishment for inebriety, and it afforded a frog-killing delight to those who executed justice. ↩
Even the Anti-means Baptists have suffered from the dire spirit of the age. They are today a very respectable body of people calling themselves “Primitive Baptists.” Perhaps the description in the text never applied to the whole denomination, but only to the Hardshells of certain localities. Some of these intensely conservative churches, I have reason to believe, were always composed of reputable people. But what is said above is not in the least exaggerated as a description of many of the churches in Indiana and Illinois. Their opposition to the temperance reformation was both theoretical and practical. A rather able minister of the denomination whom I knew as a boy used to lie in besotted drunkenness by the roadside. I am sorry to confess that he once represented the county in the State legislature. The piece of a sermon given in this chapter was heard near Cairo, Illinois, in the days before the war. Most of the preachers were illiterate farmers. I have heard one of them hold forth two hours at a stretch. But even in that day there were men among the Hardshells whose ability and character commanded respect. This was true, especially in Kentucky, where able men like the two Dudleys held to the Antinomian wing of their denomination. But the Hardshells are perceptibly less hard than they were. You may march at the rear of the column among Hunkers and Hardshells if you will, but you are obliged to march. Those who will not go voluntarily, the time-spirit, walking behind, prods onward with a goad. ↩
The elaborate etymological treatment of this word in its various forms in our best dictionary is a fine illustration of the fact that something more than scholarship is needed for penetrating the mysteries of current folk-speech. “Brash”⁠—often “bresh”⁠—in the sense of refuse, boughs of trees, is only another form of “brush”; the two are used as one word by the people. “Brash” in the sense of brittle has no conscious connection with the noun in popular usage, but it is accounted by the people the same word as “brash” in the sense of rash or impetuous. The suggestion in the Century Dictionary that the words spelled “brash” are of modern formation violates the soundest canon of antiquarian research, which is that a word phrase or custom widely diffused among plain or rustic people is of necessity of ancient origin. Now “brash,” the adjective, exists in both senses in two or three of the most widely separated dialects of the United States, and hence must have come from England. Indeed, it appears in Wright’s Dictionary of Provincial English in precisely the sense it has in the text. ↩
The total absence of the word “pail” not only from the dialect, but even from cultivated speech in the Southern and Border States until very recently, is a fact I leave to be explained on further investigation. The word is an old one and a good one, but I fancy that its use in England could not have been generally diffused in the seventeenth century. So a Hoosier or a Kentuckian never pared an apple, but peeled it. Much light might be thrown on the origin and history of our dialects by investigating their deficiencies. ↩
Some time after this book appeared Dr. Brown-Séquard announced his theory of the dual brain. A writer in an English magazine called attention to the fact that the discovery had been anticipated by an imaginative writer, and cited the passage in the text as proving that the author of The Hoosier Schoolmaster had outrun Dr. Brown-Séquard in perceiving the duality of the brain. It is a matter for surprise that an author, even an “imaginative” one, should have made so great a discovery without suspecting its meaning until it was explained by someone else. ↩
The reader may be interested to know that “Phil” was drawn from the life, as was old Mowley and in part “General Jackson” also. Between 1867 and 1870, I visited many jails and poorhouses with philanthropic purpose, publishing the results of my examination in some cases in The Chicago Tribune. Some of the abuses pointed out were reformed, others linger till this day, I believe. ↩
I have already mentioned the absence of “pail” and “pare” from the ancient Hoosier folk-speech. “Brook” is likewise absent. The illiterate Indiana countryman before the Civil War, let us say, had no pails, pared no apples, husked no corn, crossed no brooks. The same is true, I believe, of the South generally. As the first settlers on the Southern coast entered the land by the rivers, each smaller stream was regarded as a branch of the larger one. A small stream was therefore called a “branch.” The word brook was probably lost in the first generation. But a small stream is often called a “run” in the Middle and Southern belt. Halliwell gives “rundel” as used with the same signification in England, and he gives “ryn” in the same sense from an old manuscript. ↩
“Juberous” is in none of the vocabularies that I have seen. I once treated this word in print as an undoubted corruption of “dubious,” and when used subjectively it apparently feels the influence of dubious, as where one says: “I feel mighty juberous about it.” But it is much oftener applied as in the text to the object of fear, as “The bridge looks kind o’ juberous.” Halliwell gives the verb “juberd” and defines it as “to jeopard or endanger.” It is clearly a dialect form of “jeopard,” and I make no doubt that “juberous” is a dialect variation of “jeopardous,” occasionally used as a form of “dubious.” ↩
This form, “bagonet,” is not in the vocabularies, but it was spoken as I have written it. The Century Dictionary gives “bagnet,” and Halliwell and Wright both give “baginet” with the g soft apparently, though neither the one nor the other is very explicit in distinguishing transcriptions from old authors from phonetic spellings of dialect forms. I fancy that this “bagonet” is impossible as a corruption of “bayonet,” and that it points to some other derivation of that word than the doubtful one from “Bayonne.” ↩
Written in 1871. ↩