Our Southern Highlanders Part 20

Everywhere in the mountains we hear of biscuit-bread, ham-meat, rifle-gun, rock-clift, ridin'-critter, cow-brute, man-person, women-folks, preacher-man, granny-woman and neighbor-people. In this category belong the famous double-barreled p.r.o.nouns: we-all and you-all in Kentucky, we-uns and you-uns in Carolina and Tennessee. (I have even heard such locution as this: "Let's we-uns all go over to youerunses house.") Such usages are regarded generally as mere barbarisms, and so they are in English, but Miss Murfree cites correlatives in the Romance languages: French _nous autres_, Italian _noi altri_, Spanish _nosotros_.

The mountaineers have some queer ways of intensifying expression. "I'd _tell_ a man," with the stress as here indicated, is simply a strong affirmative. "We had one more _time_" means a rousing good time.

"P'int-blank" is a superlative or an epithet: "We jist p'int-blank got it to do." "Well, p'int-blank, if they ever come back again, I'll move!"

A double negative is so common that it may be crowded into a single word: "I did it the unthoughtless of anything I ever done in my life."

Triple negatives are easy: "I ain't got nary none." A mountaineer can accomplish the quadruple: "That boy ain't never done nothin' nohow."

Yea, even the quintuple: "I ain't never seen no men-folks of no kind do no was.h.i.+n'."

On the other hand, the veriest illiterates often startle a stranger by glib use of some word that most of us picked up in school or seldom use informally. "I can make a hunderd pound o' pork outen that hog--tutor it jist right." "Them clouds denote rain." "She's so dilitary!" "They stood thar and caviled about it." "That exceeds the measure." "Old Tom is blind, but he can discern when the sun is s.h.i.+nin'." "Jerry proffered to fix the gun for me." I had supposed that the words cuckold and moon-calf had none but literary usage in America, but we often hear them in the mountains, cuckold being employed both as verb and as noun, and moon-calf in its baldly literal sense that would make Prospero's taunt to Caliban a superlative insult.

Our highlander often speaks in Elizabethan or Chaucerian or even pre-Chaucerian terms. His p.r.o.noun hit antedates English itself, being the Anglo-Saxon neuter of he. Ey G.o.d, a favorite expletive, is the original of egad, and goes back of Chaucer. Ax for ask and kag for keg were the primitive and legitimate forms, which we trace as far as the time of Layamon. When the mountain boy challenges his mate: "I dar ye--I ain't afeared!" his verb and participle are of the same ancient and sterling rank. Afore, atwixt, awar, heap o' folks, peart, up and done it, usen for used, all these everyday expressions of the backwoods were contemporary with the _Canterbury Tales_.

A man said to me of three of our acquaintances: "There's been a fray on the river--I don't know how the fraction begun, but Os feathered into Dan and Phil, feedin' them lead." He meant fray in its original sense of deadly combat, as was fitting where two men were killed. Fraction for rupture is an archaic word, rare in literature, though we find it in _Troilus and Cressida_. "Feathered into them!" Where else can we hear to-day a phrase that pa.s.sed out of standard English when "villainous saltpetre" supplanted the long-bow? It means to bury an arrow up to the feather, as when the old chronicler Harrison says, "An other arrow should haue beene fethered in his bowels."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Photo by Arthur Keith

"Till the skyline blends with the sky itself."--Great Smokies. N. C.

from Mt. Collins.]

Our schoolmaster, composing a form of oath for the new mail-carrier, remarked: "Let me study this thing over; then I can edzact it"--a verb so rare and obsolete that we find it in no American dictionary, but only in Murray.

A remarkable word, common in the Smokies, is dauncy, defined for me as "mincy about eating," which is to say fastidious, over-nice. Dauncy probably is a variant of daunch, of which the _Oxford New English Dictionary_ cites but one example, from the _Townley Mysteries_ of _circa_ 1460.

A queer term used by Carolina mountaineers, without the faintest notion of its origin, is doney (long _o_) or doney-gal, meaning a sweetheart.

Its history is unique. British sailors of the olden time brought it to England from Spanish or Italian ports. Doney is simply _dona_ or _donna_ a trifle anglicized in p.r.o.nunciation. Odd, though, that it should be preserved in America by none but backwoodsmen whose ancestors for two centuries never saw the tides!

In the vocabulary of the mountaineers I have detected only three words of directly foreign origin. Doney is one. Another is kraut, which is the sole contribution to highland speech of those numerous Germans (mostly Pennsylvania Dutch) who joined the first settlers in this region, and whose descendants, under wondrously anglicized names, form to-day a considerable element of the highland population. The third is sas.h.i.+ate (French _cha.s.se_), used in calling figures at the country dances.

There is something intrinsically, stubbornly English in the nature of the mountaineer: he will a.s.similate nothing foreign. In the Smokies the Eastern Band of Cherokees still holds its ancient capital on the Okona Lufty River, and the whites mingle freely with these redskins, bearing them no such despite as they do negroes, but eating at the same table and admitting Indians to the white compartment of a Jim Crow car. Yet the mountain dialect contains not one word of Cherokee origin, albeit many of the whites can speak a little Cherokee.

In our county some Indians always appear at each term of court, and an interpreter must be engaged. He never goes by that name, but by the obsolete t.i.tle linkister or link'ster, by some lin-gis-ter.

Many other old-fas.h.i.+oned terms are preserved in Appalachia that sound delightfully quaint to strangers who never met them outside of books. A married woman is not addressed as Missis by the mountaineers, but as Mistress when they speak formally, and as Mis' or Miz' for a contraction. We will hear an aged man referred to as "old Grandsir'"

So-and-So. "Back this letter for me" is a phrase unchanged from the days before envelopes, when an address had to be written on the back of the letter itself. "Can I borry a race of ginger?" means the unground root--you will find the word in _A Winter's Tale_. "Them sorry fellers"

denotes scabby knaves, good-for-nothings. Sorry has no etymological connection with sorrow, but literally means sore-y, covered with sores, and the highlander sticks to its original import.

We have in the mountains many home-born words to fit the circ.u.mstances of backwoods life. When maize has pa.s.sed from the soft and milky stage of roasting-ears, but is not yet hard enough for grinding, the ears are grated into a soft meal and baked into delectable pones called gritted-bread.

In some places to-day we still find the ancient quern or hand-mill, jocularly called an armstrong-machine. Someone who irked from turning it invented the extraordinary improvement that goes by the name of pounding-mill. This consists of a pole pivoted horizontally on top of a post and free to move up and down like the walking-beam of an old-fas.h.i.+oned engine. To one end of this pole is attached a heavy pestle that works in a mortar underneath. At the other end is a box from which water flows from an elevated spout. When the box fills it will go down, lifting the pestle; then the water spills out and the pestle's weight lifts the box back again.

Who knows what a todd.i.c.k or taddle is? I did not until my friend Dargan reported it from the Nantahala. "Ben didn't git a full turn o' meal, but jest a todd.i.c.k." When a farmer goes to one of our little tub-mills, mentioned in previous chapters, he leaves a portion of the meal as toll.

This he measures out in a toll-dish or todd.i.c.k or taddle (the name varies with the locality) which the mill-owner left for that purpose.

Todd.i.c.k, then, is a small measure. A turn of meal is so called because "each man's corn is ground in turn--he waits his turn."

When one dines in a cabin back in the hills he will taste some strange dishes that go by still stranger names. Beans dried in the pod, then boiled "hull and all," are called leather-breeches (this is not slang, but the regular name). Green beans in the pod are called snaps; when sh.e.l.led they are shuck-beans. The old Germans taught their Scotch and English neighbors the merits of sc.r.a.pple, but here it is known as poor-do. Lath-open bread is made from biscuit dough, with soda and b.u.t.termilk, in the usual way, except that the shortening is worked in last. It is then baked in flat cakes, and has the peculiar property of parting readily into thin flakes when broken edgewise. I suppose that poor-do was originally poor-doin's, and lath-open bread denotes that it opens into lath-like strips. But etymology cannot be pushed recklessly in the mountains, and I offer these clews as a mere surmise.

Your hostess, proffering apple sauce, will ask, "Do you love sa.s.s?" I had to kick my chum Andy's s.h.i.+ns the first time he faced this question.

It is well for a traveler to be forewarned that the word love is commonly used here in the sense of like or relish.

If one is especially fond of a certain dish he declares that he is a fool about it. "I'm a plumb fool about pickle-beans." Conversely, "I ain't much of a fool about liver" is rather more than a hint of distaste. "I et me a bait" literally means a mere snack, but jocosely it may admit a hearty meal. If the provender be scant the hostess may say, "That's right at a smidgen," meaning little more than a mite; but if plenteous, then there are rimptions.

To "grabble 'taters" is to pick from a hill of new potatoes a few of the best, then smooth back the soil without disturbing the immature ones.

If the house be in disorder it is said to be all gormed or gaumed up, or things are just in a mommick.

When a man is tired he likely will call it worried; if in a hurry, he is in a swivvet; if nervous, he has the all-overs; if declining in health, he is on the down-go. If he and his neighbor dislike each other, there is a hardness between them; if they quarrel, it is a ruction, a rippit, a jower, or an upscuddle--so be it there are no fatalities which would amount to a real fray.

A choleric or fretful person is tetchious. Survigrous (ser-_vi_-grus) is a superlative of vigorous (here p.r.o.nounced _vi_-grus, with long _i_): as "a survigrous baby," "a most survigrous cusser." Bodaciously means bodily or entirely: "I'm bodaciously ruint" (seriously injured). "Sim greened him out bodaciously" (to green out or sap is to outwit in trade). To disfurnish or discon_fit_ means to incommode: "I hope it has not disconfit you very bad."

To shamp means to s.h.i.+ngle or trim one's hair. A b.a.s.t.a.r.d is a woods-colt or an outsider. Slaunchways denotes slanting, and si-G.o.dlin or si-antiG.o.dlin is out of plumb or out of square (fact.i.tious words, of course--mere nonsense terms, like catawampus).

Critter and beast are usually restricted to horse and mule, and brute to a bovine. A bull or boar is not to be mentioned as such in mixed company, but male-brute and male-hog are used as euphemisms.[9]

A female shoat is called a gilt. A spotted animal is said to be pieded (pied), and a striped one is listed. In the Smokies a toad is called a frog or a toad-frog, and a toadstool is a frog-stool. The woodp.e.c.k.e.r is turned around into a p.e.c.k.e.rwood, except that the giant woodp.e.c.k.e.r (here still a common bird) is known as a woodc.o.c.k or woodhen.

What the mountaineers call hemlock is the shrub leucothoe. The hemlock tree is named spruce-pine, while spruce is he-balsam, balsam itself is she-balsam, laurel is ivy, and rhododendron is laurel. In some places pine needles are called twinkles, and the locust insect is known as a ferro (Pharaoh?). A treetop left on the ground after logging is called the lap. Sobby wood means soggy or sodden, and the verb is to sob.

Evening, in the mountains, begins at noon instead of at sunset. Spell is used in the sense of while ("a good spell atterward") and soon for early ("a soon start in the morning"). The hillsmen say "a year come June,"

"Thursday 'twas a week ago," and "the year nineteen and eight."

Many common English words are used in peculiar senses by the mountain folk, as call for name or mention or occasion, clever for obliging, mimic or mock for resemble, a power or a sight for much, risin' for exceeding (also for inflammation), ruin for injure, scout for elude, stove for jabbed, surround for go around, word for phrase, take off for help yourself. Tale always means an idle or malicious report.

Some highland usages that sound odd to us are really no more than the original and literal meanings, as budget for bag or parcel, hampered for shackled or jailed. When a mountain swain "carries his gal to meetin'"

he is not performing so great an athletic feat as was reported by Benjamin Franklin, who said, "My father carried his wife with three children to New England" (from Pennsylvania).

A mountaineer does not throw a stone; he "flings a rock." He sharpens tools on a grindin'-rock or whet-rock. Tomato, cabbage, mola.s.ses and baking powder are used always as plural nouns. "Pa.s.s me them mola.s.ses."

"I'll have a few more of them cabbage." "How many bakin'-powders has you got?"

Many other peculiar words and phrases are explained in their proper place elsewhere in this volume.

The speech of the southern highlanders is alive with quaint idioms. "I swapped hosses, and I'll tell you fer why." "Your name ain't much common." "Who got to beat?" "You think me of it in the mornin'." "I 'low to go to town to-morrow." "The woman's aimin' to go to meetin'." "I had in head to plow to-day, but hit's come on to rain." "I've laid off and laid off to fix that fence." "Reckon Pete was knowin' to the sarc.u.mstance?" "I'll name it to Newt, if so be he's thar." "I knowed in reason she'd have the mullygrubs over them doin's." "You cain't handily blame her."

"Air ye plumb bereft?" "How come it was this: he done me dirt." "I ain't carin' which nor whether about it." "Sam went to Andrews or to Murphy, one." "I tuk my fut in my hand and lit out." "He lit a rag fer home."

"Don't much believe the wagon 'll come to-day." "Tain't powerful long to dinner, I don't reckon." "Phil's Ann give it out to each and every that Walt and Layunie 'd orter wed."

"Howdy, Tom: light and hitch."

"Reckon I'd better git on."

"Come in and set."

"Cain't stop long."

"Oh, set down and eat you some supper!"

"I've been."