There are, however, some Western, and more especially some Southern words which never became domiciled in New England. The word allow or ’low, in the sense of declare or state, is one of these, and Bret Harte often used it. “Then she ’lowed I’d better git up and git, and shet the door to. Then I ’lowed she might tell me what was up—through the door.”
And here is another example:—
“Rowley Meade—him ez hed his skelp pulled over his eyes at one stroke, foolin’ with a she-bear over on Black Mountain—allows it would be rather monotonous in him attemptin’ any familiarities with her.”
(“Rowley Meade,” by the way, is an example of Bret Harte’s felicity in the choice of names. No common fate could be reserved for one bearing a name like that.)
Lowell employs the word allow in its corrupted sense in the “Biglow Papers”; but he adds in a footnote that it was a use not of New England, but of the Southern and Middle States; and to prove the antiquity of the corruption he cites an instance of it in Hakluyt under the date of 1558.
“Cahoots” is another example. When the warlike Jim Hooker said to Clarence, “Young fel, you and me are cahoots in this thing,” he was using a common Western expression derived remotely from the old English word cahoot, signifying a company or partnership, but not known, it is believed, in New England.
“When we rose the hill,” “put to” (i. e. harness) the horse, “cavortin’ round here in the dew,” and “What yer yawpin’ at ther’?” are found in almost every State, East or West. But “I ain’t kicked a fut sens I left Mizzouri” is a Southern expression. “Blue mange” for blanc mange is probably original with Bret Harte.
One of Bret Harte’s most effective dialect words is “gait” in the sense of habit, or manner. “He never sat down to a square meal but what he said, ‘If old Uncle Quince was only here now, boys, I’d die happy.’ I leave it to you, gentlemen, if that wasn’t Jackson Wells’s gait all the time.” And Rupert Filgee, impatient at Uncle Ben Dabney’s destructive use of pens, exclaimed, “Look here, what you want ain’t a pen, but a clothes-pin and split nail! That’ll about jibe with your dilikit gait.”
“Gait” is a very old term in thieves’ lingo, meaning occupation or calling, from which the transition to “habit” is easy; and it is interesting to observe that in one place Bret Harte uses the word in a sense which is about half-way between the two meanings. Thus, when Mr. McKinstry was severely wounded in the duel, he apologized for requesting the attendance of a physician by saying, “I don’t gin’rally use a doctor, but this yer is suthin’ outside the old woman’s regular gait.” Bret Harte’s adoption of the word as a Pioneer expression is confirmed by Richard Malcolm Johnston, the recognized authority on Georgia dialect, for he makes one of his characters say:—
“After she got married, seem like he got more and more restless and fidgety in his mind, and in his gaits in general.”