‘Drummer,’ for a poor kind of drink. Seem:  it is habitual with the New-Englander to put this verb to strange uses, as ’I can’t seem to be suited,’ ‘I couldn’t seem to know him.’ Sidehill, for hillside. State-house:  this seems an Americanism, whether invented or derived from the Dutch Stad-huys, I know not. Strike and string; from the game of ninepins; to make a strike is to knock down all the pins with one ball, hence it has come to mean fortunate, successful. Swampers:  men who break out roads for lumberers. Tormented:  euphemism for damned, as, ‘not a tormented cent.’ Virginia fence, to make a:  to walk like a drunken man.

It is always worth while to note down the erratic words or phrases which one meets with in any dialect.  They may throw light on the meaning of other words, on the relationship of languages, or even on history itself.  In so composite a language as ours they often supply a different form to express a different shade of meaning, as in viol and fiddle, thrid and thread, smother and smoulder, where the l has crept in by a false analogy with would.  We have given back to England the excellent adjective lengthy, formed honestly like earthy, drouthy, and others, thus enabling their journalists to characterize our President’s messages by a word civilly compromising between long and tedious, so as not to endanger the peace of the two countries by wounding our national sensitiveness to British criticism.  Let me give two curious examples of the antiseptic property of dialects at which I have already glanced.  Dante has dindi as a childish or low word for danari (money), and in Shropshire small Roman coins are still dug up which the peasants call dinders.  This can hardly be a chance coincidence, but seems rather to carry the word back to the Roman soldiery.  So our farmers say chuk, chuk, to their pigs, and ciacco is one of the Italian words for hog.  When a countryman tells us that he ‘fell all of a heap,’ I cannot help thinking that he unconsciously points to an affinity between our word tumble, and the Latin tumulus, that is older than most others.  I believe that words, or even the mere intonation of them, have an astonishing vitality and power of propagation by the root, like the gardener’s pest, quitch-grass,[31] while the application or combination of them may be new.  It is in these last that my countrymen seem to me full of humor, invention, quickness of wit, and that sense of subtle analogy which needs only refining to become fancy and imagination.  Prosaic as American life seems in many of its aspects to a European, bleak and bare as it is on the side of tradition, and utterly orphaned of the solemn inspiration of antiquity, I cannot help thinking that the ordinary talk of unlettered