s: we-all and you-all
in Kentucky, we-uns and you-uns in Carolina and Tennessee. (I have even
heard such locution as this: "Let's we-uns all go over to youerunses
house.") Such usages are regarded generally as mere barbarisms, and so
they are in English, but Miss Murfree cites correlatives in the Romance
languages: French _nous autres_, Italian _noi altri_, Spanish
_nosotros_.

The mountaineers have some queer ways of intensifying expression. "I'd
_tell_ a man," with the stress as here indicated, is simply a strong
affirmative. "We had one more _time_" means a rousing good time.
"P'int-blank" is a superlative or an epithet: "We jist p'int-blank got
it to do." "Well, p'int-blank, if they ever come back again, I'll move!"

A double negative is so common that it may be crowded into a single
word: "I did it the unthoughtless of anything I ever done in my life."
Triple negatives are easy: "I ain't got nary none." A mountaineer can
accomplish the quadruple: "That boy ain't never done nothin' nohow."
Yea, even the quintuple: "I ain't never seen no men-folks of no kind do
no washin'."

On the other hand, the veriest illiterates often startle a stranger by
glib use of some word that most of us picked up in school or seldom use
informally. "I can make a hunderd pound o' pork outen that hog--tutor it
jist right." "Them clouds denote rain." "She's so dilitary!" "They stood
thar and caviled about it." "That exceeds the measure." "Old Tom is
blind, but he can discern when the sun is shinin'." "Jerry proffered to
fix the gun for me." I had supposed that the words cuckold and moon-calf
had none but literary usage in America, but we often hear them in the
mountains, cuckold being employed both as verb and as noun, and
moon-calf in its baldly literal sense that would make Prospero's taunt
to Caliban a superlative insult.

Our highlander often speaks in Elizabethan or Chaucerian or even
pre-Chaucerian terms. His pronoun hit antedates English itself, being
the Anglo-Saxon neuter of he. Ey God, a favorite expletive, is the
original of egad, and goes back of Chaucer. Ax for ask and kag for keg
were the primitive and legitimate forms, which we trace as far as the
time of Layamon. When the mountain boy challenges his mate: "I dar ye--I
ain't afeared!" his verb and participle are of the same ancient and
sterling rank. Afore, atwixt, awar, heap o' folks, peart, up and done
it, usen for used, all these everyday expressions of the backwoods we