And that is the exact truth.

I was absolutely wrong. And though, having printed the ghastly falsehood in my original article, I can hardly hope now for absolution from the outraged South, I can at least retract, as I hereby do, and can, moreover, thank Mr. H. E. Jones, of Tallapoosa County, Alabama, for having saved me from a double sin; for had he not given me the simple illustration of the grocery store, I might have repeated, now, my earlier misstatement.

CHAPTER XX
IDIOMS AND ARISTOCRACY

Southerners have told me that they can tell from what part of the South a person comes, by his speech, just as an Easterner can distinguish, by the same means a New Englander, a New Yorker, a Middle-Westerner, and a Brooklynite. I cannot pretend to have become an authority upon southern dialect, but it is obvious to me that the speech of New Orleans is unlike that of Charleston, and that of Charleston unlike that of Virginia.

The chief characteristic of the Virginian dialect is the famous and fascinating localism which Professor C. Alphonso Smith has called the "vanishing y"—a y sound which causes words like "car" and "garden" to be pronounced "cyar" and "gyarden"—or, as Professor Smith prefers to indicate it: "Cyar" and "gyarden." I am told that in years gone by the "vanishing y" was common to all Virginians, but though it is still common enough among members of the old generation, and is used also by some young people—particularly, I fancy, young ladies, who realize its fetching quality—there can be no doubt that it is, in both senses, vanishing, and that not half the Virginians of the present day pronounce "cigar" as "segyar," "carpet" as "cya´pet," and "Carter," as "Cyahtah."

In Virginia and many other parts of the South one hears such words as "aunt" correctly pronounced with the broad a, and such words as "tube" and "new" properly given the full u sound (instead of "toobe," and "noo," as in some parts of the North); but, on the other hand, while the South gives the short o sound in such words as "log" and "fog," it invariably calls a dog a "dawg." "Your" is often pronounced "yore," "sure" as "shore," and, not infrequently, "to" as "toe."

The South also uses the word "carry" in a way that strikes Northerners as strange. If a Southerner offers to "carry" you to the station, or over his plantation, he does not signify that he intends to transport you by means of physical strength, but that he will escort you. If he "carries you to the run" you will find that the "run" is what Northerners call a creek; if to the "branch," or "dreen," that is what we call a brook.

This use of the word "carry," far from being a corruption, is pure old English, and is used in the Bible, and by Smollett, though it is amusing to note that the "Georgia Gazetteer" for 1837, mentions as a lamentable provincialism such an application of the word as "to carry (instead of lead) a horse to water." If the "Gazetteer" were indeed correct in this, then the Book of Genesis contains an American provincialism.

The customary use of the word in the North, as "to carry a cane, or a bag," is equally but no more correct than the southern usage. I am informed by Mr. W. T. Hall, Editor of the Dothan (Alabama) "Eagle," that the word used in his part of the country, as signifying "to bear on the back, or shoulder," is "tote." "Tote" is a word not altogether unknown in the North, and it has recently found its way into some dictionaries, though the old "Georgia Gazetteer" disapproved of it. Even this word has some excuse for being, in that it is a deformed member of a good family, having come from the Latin, tollit, been transformed into the early English "tolt," and thus into what I believe to be a purely American word.