The ancient syllabic plural is preserved in beasties (horses), nesties, posties, trousies (these are not diminutives), and in that strange word dummerunses that I cited before.
Pleonasms are abundant. “I done done it” (have done it or did do it). “Durin’ the while.” “In this day and time.” “I thought it would surely, undoubtedly turn cold.” “A small, little bitty hole.” “Jane’s a tol’able big, large, fleshy woman.” “I ginerally, usually take a dram mornin’s.” “These ridges is might’ nigh straight up and down, and, as the feller said, perpendic’lar.”
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 pronouns: 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 washin’.”
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 shinin’.” “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 pronoun hit antedates English itself, being the Anglo-Saxon neuter of he. Ey God, 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 passed 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.”
Photo by Arthur Keith