words now fallen
into disuse in the mother country, like to _tarry_, to _progress_,
_fleshy_, _fall_, and some others; it has changed the meaning of some,
as in _freshet_; and it has clung to what I suspect to have been the
broad Norman pronunciation of _e_ (which Moliere puts into the mouth of
his rustics) in such words as _sarvant_, _parfect_, _vartoo_, and the
like. It maintains something of the French sound of _a_ also in words
like _ch[)a]mber_, _d[)a]nger_ (though the latter had certainly begun to
take its present sound so early as 1636, when I find it sometimes spelt
_dainger_). But in general it may be said that nothing can be found in
it which does not still survive in some one or other of the English
provincial dialects. There is, perhaps, a single exception in the verb
to _sleeve_. To _sleeve_ silk means to divide or ravel out a thread of
silk with the point of a needle till it becomes _floss_. (A.S. _slefan_,
to _cleave_=divide.) This, I think, explains the '_sleeveless_ errand'
in 'Troilus and Cressida' so inadequately, sometimes so ludicrously
darkened by the commentators. Is not a 'sleeveless errand' one that
cannot be unravelled, incomprehensible, and therefore bootless?

I am not speaking now of Americanisms properly so called, that is, of
words or phrases which have grown into use here either through
necessity, invention, or accident, such as a _carry_, a _one-horse
affair_, a _prairie_, to _vamose_. Even these are fewer than is
sometimes taken for granted. But I think some fair defence may be made
against the charge of vulgarity. Properly speaking, vulgarity is in the
thought, and not in the word or the way of pronouncing it. Modern
French, the most polite of languages, is barbarously vulgar if compared
with the Latin out of which it has been corrupted, or even with Italian.
There is a wider gap, and one implying greater boorishness, between
_ministerium_ and _metier_, or _sapiens_ and _sachant_, than between
_druv_ and _drove_ or _agin_ and _against_, which last is plainly an
arrant superlative. Our rustic _coverlid_ is nearer its French original
than the diminutive cover_let_, into which it has been ignorantly
corrupted in politer speech. I obtained from three cultivated Englishmen
at different times three diverse pronunciations of a single
word,--_cowcumber_, _coocumber_, and _cucumber_. Of these the first,
which is Yankee also, comes nearest to the nasality of _concombre_. Lord
Ossory assures us