‘Si s’en parti CHAUT PAS’

Like for as is never used in New England, but is universal in the South and West.  It has on its side the authority of two kings (ego sum rex Romanorum et supra grammaticam), Henry VIII. and Charles I. This were ample, without throwing into the scale the scholar and poet Daniel. Them was used as a nominative by the majesty of Edward VI., by Sir P. Hoby, and by Lord Paget (in Froude’s ’History’).  I have never seen any passage adduced where guess was used as the Yankee uses it.  The word was familiar in the mouths of our ancestors, but with a different shade of meaning from that we have given it, which is something like rather think, though the Yankee implies a confident certainty by it when he says, ‘I guess I du!’ There are two examples in Otway, one of which (’So in the struggle, I guess the note was lost’) perhaps might serve our purpose, and Coleridge’s

  ’I guess ‘twas fearful there to see’

certainly comes very near.  But I have a higher authority than either in Selden, who, in one of his notes to the ‘Polyolbion,’ writes, ’The first inventor of them (I guess you dislike not the addition) was one Berthold Swartz.’  Here he must mean by it, ‘I take it for granted.’  Robert Greene, in his ‘Quip for an Upstart Courtier,’ makes Cloth-breeches say, ’but I gesse your maistership never tried what true honor meant.’  In this case the word seems to be used with a meaning precisely like that which we give it.  Another peculiarity almost as prominent is the beginning sentences, especially in answer to questions, with ‘well.’  Put before such a phrase as ‘How d’e do?’ it is commonly short, and has the sound of it wul, but in reply it is deliberative, and the various shades of meaning which can be conveyed by difference of intonation, and by prolonging or abbreviating, I should vainly attempt to describe.  I have heard ooa-ahl, wahl, ahl, wal and something nearly approaching the sound of the le in able.  Sometimes before ‘I’ it dwindles to a mere l, as ‘’l I dunno.’  A friend of mine (why should I not please myself, though I displease him, by brightening my page with the initials of the most exquisite of humorists, J.H.?) told me that he once heard five ‘wells,’ like pioneers, precede the answer to an inquiry about the price of land.  The first was the ordinary wul, in deference to custom; the second, the long, perpending ooahl, with a falling inflection of the voice; the third, the same, but with the voice rising, as if in despair of a conclusion, into a plaintively nasal whine; the fourth, wulh, ending in the aspirate of a sigh; and then, fifth, came a short, sharp wal, showing that a conclusion had been reached.  I have used this latter form in the ‘Biglow Papers,’ because, if enough nasality be added, it represents most nearly the average sound of what I may call the interjection.