ucational activities reach far beyond
Tallapoosa County, and far beyond the confines of his State, for he has
educated me. He has made me see the light.

"I want to straighten you out," he wrote, kindly. "We never use
'you-all' in the singular. Not even the most ignorant do so. But, as you
know," (Ah, that was mercifully said!) "there are some peculiar, almost
unexplainable, shades of meaning in local idioms of speech, which are
not easy for a stranger to understand. I have a friend who was reared in
Milwaukee and is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, who tells me
he would have argued the 'you-all' point with all comers for some years
following his taking up his residence here, but he is at this time as
ready as I to deny the allegation and 'chaw the alligator.'

"When your young lady, in Virginia, asked, 'Do you-all take sugar?' she
mentally included Mr. Morgan, and perhaps all other Yankees. I would ask
my local grocer, 'Will you-all sell me some sugar this morning?' meaning
his establishment, collectively, although I addressed him personally;
but I would _not_ ask my only servant, 'Have you-all milked the cow?'"

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: "C^{y}ar" and "g^{y}arden." I am told that in years gone by
the "vanishing _