A locution prevails in the Southern and Middle States which is so curious that, though never heard in New England, I will give a few lines to its discussion, the more readily because it is extinct elsewhere.  I mean the use of allow in the sense of affirm, as ’I allow that’s a good horse.’  I find the word so used in 1558 by Anthony Jenkinson in Hakluyt:  ’Corne they sowe not, neither doe eate any bread, mocking the Christians for the same, and disabling our strengthe, saying we live by eating the toppe of a weede, and drinke a drinke made of the same, allowing theyr great devouring of flesh and drinking of milke to be the increase of theyr strength.’  That is, they undervalued our strength, and affirmed their own to be the result of a certain diet.  In another passage of the same narrative the word has its more common meaning of approving or praising:  ’The said king, much allowing this declaration, said.’  Ducange quotes Bracton sub voce ADLOCARE for the meaning ’to admit as proved,’ and the transition from this to ‘affirm,’ is by no means violent.  Izaak Walton has ’Lebault allows waterfrogs to be good meat,’ and here the word is equivalent to affirms.  At the same time, when we consider some of the meanings of allow in old English, and of allouer in old French, and also remember that the verbs prize and praise are from one root, I think we must admit allaudare to a share in the paternity of allow.  The sentence from Hakluyt would read equally well, ’contemning our strengthe, ... and praising (or valuing) their great eating of flesh as the cause of their increase in strength.’  After all, if we confine ourselves to allocare, it may turn out that the word was somewhere and somewhen used for to bet, analogously to put up, put down, post (cf.  Spanish apostar), and the like.  I hear boys in the street continually saying, ‘I bet that’s a good horse,’ or what not, meaning by no means to risk anything beyond their opinion in the matter.

The word improve, in the sense of to ‘occupy, make use of, employ,’ as Dr. Pickering defines it, he long ago proved to be no neologism.  He would have done better, I think, had he substituted profit by for employ.  He cites Dr. Franklin as saying that the word had never, so far as he knew, been used in New England before he left it in 1723, except in Dr. Mather’s ‘Bemarkable Providences,’ which he oddly calls a ‘very old book.’  Franklin, as Dr. Pickering goes on to show, was mistaken.

Mr. Bartlett in his ‘Dictionary’ merely abridges Pickering.  Both of them should have confined the application of the word to material things, its extension to which is all that is peculiar in the supposed American use of it.  For surely ‘Complete Letter-Writers’ have been ’improving this opportunity’ time out of mind.  I will illustrate the word a little further, because Pickering cites no English authorities.  Skelton has a passage in his ‘Phyllyp Sparowe,’ which I quote the rather as it contains also the word allowed and as it distinguishes improve from employ:—­