This irresistible tendency to indistinctness and loss is not, however, wholly bad; for it has at the same time largely contributed, especially in English, to such a simplification of grammatical inflexions as certainly has the practical convenience of giving us less to learn.  But in addition to this decay in the forms of words, we have also to reckon with a depreciation or weakening of the ideas they express.  Many words become so hackneyed as to be no longer impressive.  As late as in 1820, Keats could say, in stanza 6 of his poem of Isabella, that “His heart beat awfully against his side”; but at the present day the word awfully is suggestive of schoolboys’ slang.  It is here that we may well have the benefit of the principle of “dialectic regeneration.”  We shall often do well to borrow from our dialects many terms that are still fresh and racy, and instinct with a full significance.  Tennyson was well aware of this, and not only wrote several poems wholly in the Lincolnshire dialect, but introduced dialect words elsewhere.  Thus in The Voyage of Maeldune, he has the striking line:  “Our voices were thinner and fainter than any flittermouse-shriek.”  In at least sixteen dialects a flittermouse means “a bat.”

I have mentioned Tennyson in this connexion because he was a careful student of English, not only in its dialectal but also in its older forms.  But, as a matter of fact, nearly all our chief writers have recognised the value of dialectal words.  Tennyson was not the first to use the above word.  Near the end of the Second Act of his Sad Shepherd, Ben Jonson speaks of: 

  Green-bellied snakes, blue fire-drakes in the sky,
  And giddy flitter-mice with leather wings.

Similarly, there are plenty of “provincialisms” in Shakespeare.  In an interesting book entitled Shakespeare, his Birthplace and its Neighbourhood, by J.R.  Wise, there is a chapter on “The Provincialisms of Shakespeare,” from which I beg leave to give a short extract by way of specimen.

“There is the expressive compound ‘blood-boltered’ in Macbeth (Act IV, Sc. 1), which the critics have all thought meant simply blood-stained.  Miss Baker, in her Glossary of Northamptonshire Words, first pointed out that ‘bolter’ was peculiarly a Warwickshire word, signifying to clot, collect, or cake, as snow does in a horse’s hoof, thus giving the phrase a far greater intensity of meaning.  And Steevens, too, first noticed that in the expression in The Winter’s Tale (Act III, Sc. 3), ’Is it a boy or a child?’—­where, by the way, every actor tries to make a point, and the audience invariably laughs—­the word ‘child’ is used, as is sometimes the case in the midland districts, as synonymous with girl; which is plainly its meaning in this passage, although the speaker has used it just before in its more common sense of either a boy or a girl.”

In fact, the English Dialect Dictionary cites