n
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.