Again, as an example of phrases used by our Elizabethan poets, preserved only by our peasantry, though in good use in America, take the word “bottom,” so common throughout the Forest, meaning a valley, glen, or glade. Beaumont and Fletcher and Shakspeare frequently employ it. Even Milton, in Paradise Regained, says—
“But cottage, herd, or sheepcote, none he saw,
Only in a bottom saw a pleasant grove.”
(Book ii. 289.)
In his Comus, too, we find him using the compound “bottom-glade,” just as the Americans speak to this day of the “bottom-lands” of the Ohio, and our own peasants of Slufter Bottom, and Longslade Bottom, in the New Forest.
“Heft,” too, is another similar instance of an Old-English word in good use in America and to be found in the best American authors, but here in England only employed by our rustics. To “heft” (from hebban, with the inflexions, hefest, “hefð,” still used), signifies to lift, with the implied meaning of weighing. So, “to heft the bee-pots,” is to lift them in order to feel how much honey they contain. The substantive “heft” is used for weight, as, “the heft of the branches.”
Again, also, the good Old-English word “loute” (lutan), to bend, bow, and so to touch the hat, to be heard every day in the Forest, though nearly forgotten elsewhere in England, may be found in Longfellow’s Children of the Lord’s Supper:—
“as oft as they named the Redeemer,
Lowly louted the boys, and lowly the maidens all courtesied.”
In fact, one-half of the words which are considered Americanisms are good Old-English words, which we have been foolish enough to discard.