To-morrow is Christmas Day, sir.
Cp. ‘Hunting thee hence with hunt’s up to the day,’ Rom. and Jul. III. v. 34. From the derived sense of tumult, outcry, has been developed a verb used in the Lake District in the meaning of to scold, rate, abuse, e.g. He’ll hunsip thi fer thi pains. But, lest this list become wearisomely long, it shall close with the time-worn interjectional phrase: Adone, cease, leave off, cp. ‘Therefore ha’ done with words,’ T. Shrew, III. ii. 118.
Dr. Johnson’s Testimony
Dr. Johnson bears his testimony to Shakespeare’s knowledge of dialect and colloquial speech in the Preface to the Dictionary: ‘If the language of theology were extracted from Hooker and the translation of the Bible; the terms of natural knowledge from Bacon; the phrases of policy, war, and navigation from Raleigh; the dialect of poetry and fiction from Spenser and Sidney; and the diction of common life from Shakespeare, few ideas would be lost to mankind, for want of English words, in which they might be expressed.’ But the Dictionary ‘was intended primarily to furnish a standard of polite usage, suitable for the classic ideals of the new age’ (v. Six Essays on Johnson, by Walter Raleigh, p. 82). Johnson, therefore, though he incorporated this ‘diction of common life’, did not hesitate to sit in judgment upon it when he thought fit. Take for example the phrase to make bold, which appears in the Dictionary thus: ‘to make bold. To take freedoms: a phrase not grammatical, though common. To be bold is better; as, I was bold to speak.
I have made bold to send to your wife;
My suit is, that she will to Desdemona
Procure me some access. Shakesp. Othello.’
Johnson’s Dictionary
(This—it may be mentioned in passing—is one of the cases where Johnson is quoting from memory, rather than from a printed text, as is shown by slight verbal inaccuracies, v. Oth. III. i. 35.) Or again: ‘To have rather. [This is, I think, a barbarous expression of late intrusion into our language, for which it is better to say will rather.]’ It is a very common phrase in Shakespeare, though Johnson does not here cite his authority.
Johnson’s Dialect