“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 doña or donna a trifle anglicized in pronunciation. 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 sashiate (French chassé), used in calling figures at the country dances.
There is something intrinsically, stubbornly English in the nature of the mountaineer: he will assimilate 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 title linkister or link’ster, by some lin-gis-ter.
Many other old-fashioned 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 circumstances of backwoods life. When maize has passed 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-fashioned 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.