We have not done yet with our national idioms.  In the seaboard towns nautical phrases make tarry the talk of the people.  “Where be you a-cruising to?” asks one Nantucket matron of her gossip.  “Sniver-dinner, I’m going to Egypt; Seth B. has brought a letter from Turkey-wowner to Old Nancy.”  “Dressed-to-death-and-drawers-empty, don’t you see we’re goin’ to have a squall?  You had better take in your stu’n’-sails.”  The good woman was dressed up, intending, “as soon as ever dinner was over,” to go, not to the land of the Pharaohs, but to the negro-quarter of the town, with a letter which “Seth B.” (her son, thus identified by his middle letter) had brought home from Talcahuana.

For the rural idioms we refer the reader to the late Sylvester Judd’s “Margaret” and “Richard Edney,” and to the Jack Downing Letters.

The town is not behind the country.  For, whatever is the current fancy, pugilism, fire-companies, racing, railway-building, or the opera, its idioms invade the talk.  The Almighty Dollar of our worship has more synonymes than the Roman Pantheon had divinities.  We are not “well-informed,” but “posted” or “posted up.”  We are not “hospitably entreated” any more, but “put through.”  We do not “meet with misadventure,” but “see the elephant,” which we often do through the Hibernian process of “fighting the tiger.”

Purists deplore this, but it is inevitable; and if one searches beneath the surface, there is often a curious deposit of meaning, sometimes auriferous enough to repay our use of cradle and rocker.  We “panned out,” the other day, a phrase which gave us great delight, and which illustrated a fact in New England history worth noting.  We were puzzling over the word “socdollager,” which Bartlett, we think, defines as “Anything very large and striking,”—­Anglice, a “whopper,”—­“also a peculiar fish-hook.”  The word first occurs in print, we believe, in Mr. Cooper’s “Home as Found,” applied to a patriarch among the white bass of Otsego Lake, which could never be captured.  We assumed at once that there was a latent reason for the term, and all at once it flashed upon us that it was a rough fisherman’s random-shot at the word “doxology.”  This, in New England congregations, as all know, was wont to be sung, or “j’ined in,” by the whole assembly, and given with particular emphasis, both because its words were familiar to all without book, and because it served instead of the chanted creed of their Anglican forefathers.  The last thing, after which nothing could properly follow, the most important and most conspicuous of all, it represented to our Yankee Walton the crowning hope of his life,—­the big bass, after taking which he might put hook-and-line on the shelf.  By a slight transposition, natural enough to untrained organs, “doxology” became “socdollager.”