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: "C^{y}ar" and "g^{y}arden." 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.
Other expressions which struck me as being characteristic of the South
are "stop by," as for instance, "I will stop by for you," meaning, "I
will call for you in passing"; "don't guess," as "I don't guess I'll
come"; and "Yes indeedy!" which seems to be a kind of emphatic "Yes
indeed."
"As I look back over the old South," said one white-haired Virginian,
"there were two things it was above. One was accounts and the other was
grammar. Tradesmen in prosperous neighborhoods were always in distress
because of the long credits, though gambling debts were, of course,
always punctiliously paid. As to the English spoken in old Virginia--and
indeed in the whole South--there is absolutely no doubt that its
softness and its peculiarities in pronunciation are due to the influence
of the negro voice and speech on the white race. Some of the young
people seem to wish to dispute this, but we older ones used to take the
view--half humorously, of course--that if a Southerner spoke perfect
English, it showed he wasn't a gentleman; "that he hadn't been raised
with niggers around him.""
"Oh, you shouldn't tell him that!" broke in a lady who was present.
"Why not?" demanded the old gentleman.
"He'll print it!" she said.
"Well," he answered, "ain't it true? What's the harm in it?"
"There!" she exclaimed. "You said '_ain't_.' He'll print that Virginians
say 'ain't'!"
"Well," he answered, "I reckon we do, don't we?"
She laughed and gave up. "I remember," she told me, "the very spot on
the turnpike going out to Ripon, where I made up my mind to break myself
of saying 'ain't.' But I want to tell you that we are talking much
better English than we used to. Even the negroes are. You don't hear
many white people saying 'gwine' for 'going' any more, for instance, and
the young people don't say 'set' for 'sit' and 'git' for 'get,' as their
fathers did."
"I've heard folks say, though," put in the old gentleman, "that they'd
ruther speak like a Virginian than speak correctly. The old talk was
pretty nice, after all. I don't hold to all these new improvements.
They've been going too far in this Commonwealth."
"What have they been doing?" I asked.
"Doing!" he returned, "Why, they're gradually taking the cuspidors out
of the church pews!"
Before the question of dialect is dropped, it should be said that those
who do not believe the soft southern pronunciation is derived from
negroes, can make out an interesting case. If, they ask, the negro has
corrupted the English of the South, why is it that he has not also
corrupted the language of the West Indies--British and French? French
negroes speak like French persons of white blood, and British West
Indian negroes often speak the cockney dialect, without a trace of
"nigger." Moreover, it is pointed out that in southern countries, the
world over, there is a tendency to soften the harsh sounds of language,
to elide, and drop out consonants. The Andalusians speak a Spanish
comparable in many of its peculiarities with the English of our own
South, and the south-Italians exhibit similar dialectic traits. Nor do
the parallels between the north and south of Spain and Italy, and of the
United States, end there. The north-Italians and north-Spaniards are the
"Yankees" of their respective countries--the shrewd, cold business
people--whereas the south-Italians and south-Spaniards are more poetic,
more dashing, more temperamental. The merchants are of the north of
Spain, but the dancers and bull-fighters are Andalusians. And just as
our Americans of the North admire the lazy dialect of the South, so the
north-Spaniards admire the dialect of Andalusia, and even imitate it
because they think it has a fashionable sound--quite as British
fashionables cultivate the habit of dropping final _g_'s, as in
"huntin'" for "hunting."
Virginia, more than any other State I know of, feels its entity as a
State. If you meet a Virginian traveling outside his State, and ask
where he is from, he will not mention the name of the city in which he
resides, but will reply: "I'm from Va'ginia." If, on the other hand, you
are in Virginia, and ask him the same question, he will proudly reply:
"I'm from Fauquier," or "I'm from Westmoreland," or whatever the name of
his county may be. The chances are, also, that his trunks and traveling
bags will be marked with his initials, followed not by the name of his
town, but by the abbreviation, "Va."
I was told of one old unreconstructed Virginian who had to go to Boston
on business. The gentleman he went to see there was exceedingly polite
to him, asking him to his house, putting him up at his club, and showing
him innumerable courtesies. The old Confederate, writing to his wife,
indicated his amazement: "Although he is not a Virginian," he declared,
"I must confess that he lives like a gentleman."
The name of his Bostonian acquaintance was John Quincy Adams.
I heard this story from a northern lady who has a country place near a
small town in Virginia. In the North this lady's family is far from
being unknown, but in Virginia, she assured me, all persons originating
outside the State are looked upon as vague beings without "family."
"They seem to think," she said, "that Northerners have no parents--that
they are made chemically."
This does not imply, however, that well-bred Northerners are excluded
from society. Even if they are well off they may get into society; for
though money does not count in one's favor in such a town, it does not
count against one. The social requirement of the place is simple. If
people are "nice people," that is enough.
Of course, however, it is one thing to be admitted to Virginia society
and another to belong to it by right. A case in point is that of a lady
visiting in a Virginia city who, while calling at the house of some
"F.F.V's," was asked by a little girl, the daughter of the house, where
she had been born.
"Mawtha," said the little girl's mother, after the caller had departed,
"you must not ask people where they were bo'n. If they were bo'n in
Va'ginia they will tell you so without asking, and if they weren't bo'n
in Va'ginia it's very embarrassing."
Some of the old families of the inner circle are in a tragic state of
decay, owing to inbreeding; others, in a more wholesome physical and
mental condition, are perpetually wrestling with the heritage of poverty
left over from the War--"too proud to whitewash and too poor to
paint"--clinging desperately to the old acres, and to the old houses
which are like beautiful, tired ancestral ghosts.
Until a few years ago the one resource of Virginian gentlewomen in need
of funds was to take boarders, but more lately the daughters of
distinguished but poverty-stricken families have found that they may
work in offices. Thus, in the town of which I speak, several ladies who
are very much "in society," support themselves by entertaining "paying
guests," while others are stenographers. The former, I was told, by the
way, make it a practice to avoid first-hand business contacts with their
guests by sending them their bills through the mail, and requiring that
response be made by means of the same impersonal channel.