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alike could not but protest against the solecism; for in poetry absolute precision of utterance is clearly indispensable. But in everyday speech a certain amount of colloquialism is inevitable. Let him whose own enunciation is chemically free from localism or slovenliness cast the first stone even at "mebbe" and "ruther." A curious American colloquialism, of which I certainly cannot see the advantage, in the substitution of "yep," or "yup" for "yes," and of "nope" for "no." No doubt we have in England the coster's "yuss;" but one hears even educated Americans now and then using "yep," or some other corruption of "yes," scarcely to be indicated by the ordinary alphabetical symbols. It seems to me a pity. Much more respectable in point of antiquity is the habit which obtains to some extent even among educated Americans, of saying "somewheres" and "a long ways." Here the "s" is an old case-ending, an adverbial genitive. "He goes out nights," too, on which Mr. Andrew Lang is so severe, is a form as old as the language and older. I turn to Dr. Leon Kellner's _Historical English Syntax_ (p. 119) and find that the Gothic for "at night" was "nahts," and that the form (with its correlative "days ") runs through old Norse, old Saxon, old English, and middle English: for instance, "dages endi nahtes" _(Heliand)_, "daeges and nihtes" _(Beowulf)_, "daeies and nihtes" (Layamon), all meaning "by day and by night." In all, or almost all, words ending in "ward," the genitive inflection, according to modern English practice, can either be retained or dropped at will. It is a mere pedantry to declare "toward" better English than "towards," "upward" than "upwards." Thus we see that here again there is neither logical principle nor consistent practice to be invoked. At the same time, as "somewheres" has become irremediably a vulgarism in England, it would, I think, be a graceful concession on the part of educated Americans to drop the "s." After all, "somewhere" does not jar in America, and "somewheres" very distinctly jars in England. An insidious laxity of pronunciation (rather than of grammar), which is taking great hold in America, is the total omission of the "had" or "have," in such phrases as "You'd better," "we've got to." Mr. Howells's Willis Campbell, a witty and cultivated Bostonian, says, in _The Albany Depot_, "I guess we better get out of here;" Mr. Ade's Artie, a Chicago clerk, says, "I got a boost in my pay," meaning "
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