“Down killik” is used impartially on arrival at the fishing grounds or at home after a voyage—the “killik” being a stone anchor for small craft or for nets. (A “killy-claw” is of wood with the stone in the middle.) You may hear an old fisherman say of his retirement from the long warfare with the sea for a living: “My killiks are down; my boat is moored.” One of them who was blind in his left eye, said as he lay dying, referring to his own soul: “She’s on her last tack, heading for I don’t know where: the port light is out, and the starboard is getting very dim.” A few minutes later he passed away.
The ordinary talk is full of poetry. “If I could only rig up a derrick, now, to hoist me over the fore part of the winter,” an old salt will say, “wi’ the help o’ God and a sou’westerly wind and a few swyles I could last till the spring.” By “swyles,” of course, he means “seals.” A man’s a man when he has killed his seal. Seal-meat is an anti-scorbutic, and the sealers present the “paws,” or flippers, as great delicacies to their friends. A “big feed” is a “scoff.” Sealing brings men together in conviviality and comaraderie, and it is the great ambition of most of the youth of Newfoundland to “go to the ice.” Many are the stowaways aboard the sealing craft. If a man goes “half his hand” it means he gets half his catch for his labour.
“Seal” is pronounced “swyle,” “syle,” or “swoyle” and Swale Island also takes its name from this most important mammal. Seals wandering in search of their blow-holes have been found as far as six or seven miles inland.
As might be expected, there survives in the vernacular—especially of the older people—many words and phrases that smack of their English dialect origin, and words that were the English undefiled of Chaucer’s or Shakespeare’s day. Certain proper names represent a curious conversion of a French name no longer understood.
In Dorsetshire dialect v is used for f, and in Newfoundland one hears “fir” pronounced “vir” or “var.” Firewood is “vir-wood.” Women who are “vuzzing up their vires” are fussing (making ready) their fires. We have “it wouldn’t be vitty” in place of “it wouldn’t be fitting.” A pig “veers”; it does not farrow. The use of “thiccy” for “this” is familiar to readers of “Lorna Doone.” “The big spuds are not very jonnick yet” means that the potatoes are not well done. If something “hatches” in your “glutch,” it catches in your throat. Blizzard is a word not used, and a lass at school, confusing it with gizzard, said it meant the insides of a hen. The remains of birds or of animals are the “rames.” “O yes you, I ’low” is a common form of agreement. To be photographed is to be “skitched off,” and of snapshots it is sometimes said by an old fisherman to a “kodak fiend”: “I heard ye firin’ of ’em.”
“Cass ’n goo,” for “can’t you go” may be heard at Notre Dame Bay, as well as “biss ’n gwine” for “aren’t you going?” and “thees cass’n do it” for “thee can’t do it.” The berries called “harts” (whorts) are, I presume, the “hurts” of Surrey.
A vivid toast for a sealer going to the icefields was “Bloody decks to ’im!”
When bad weather is brewing, “We’re going to have dirt” is a common expression.
A fisherman who had hooked a queer creature that must have been first cousin to the sea-serpent said, “It had a head like a hulf, a neck like a harse; I cut the line and let it go to hell.”
Here is a puzzler: “Did ye come on skits or on cart and dogs?” That means, “Did you come on skates or on a dog-sledge?” Dog-cat is a dog-sledge. Cat is short for catamaran, which is not a sea-boat but a land-sledge, so that when you hear it said: “He’s taken his dog and his cat and gone to the woods” you may know that it means “He’s taken his dog and his sledge.”