This use of the word “carry,” far from being a corruption, is pure old English, and is used in the Bible, and by Smollett, though it is amusing to note that the “Georgia Gazetteer” for 1837, mentions as a lamentable provincialism such an application of the word as “to carry (instead of lead) a horse to water.”  If the “Gazetteer” were indeed correct in this, then the Book of Genesis contains an American provincialism.

The customary use of the word in the North, as “to carry a cane, or a bag,” is equally but no more correct than the southern usage.  I am informed by Mr. W.T.  Hall, Editor of the Dothan (Alabama) “Eagle,” that the word used in his part of the country, as signifying “to bear on the back, or shoulder,” is “tote.”  “Tote” is a word not altogether unknown in the North, and it has recently found its way into some dictionaries, though the old “Georgia Gazetteer” disapproved of it.  Even this word has some excuse for being, in that it is a deformed member of a good family, having come from the Latin, tollit, been transformed into the early English “tolt,” and thus into what I believe to be a purely American word.

Other expressions which struck me as being characteristic of the South are “stop by,” as for instance, “I will stop by for you,” meaning, “I will call for you in passing”; “don’t guess,” as “I don’t guess I’ll come”; and “Yes indeedy!” which seems to be a kind of emphatic “Yes indeed.”

“As I look back over the old South,” said one white-haired Virginian, “there were two things it was above.  One was accounts and the other was grammar.  Tradesmen in prosperous neighborhoods were always in distress because of the long credits, though gambling debts were, of course, always punctiliously paid.  As to the English spoken in old Virginia—­and indeed in the whole South—­there is absolutely no doubt that its softness and its peculiarities in pronunciation are due to the influence of the negro voice and speech on the white race.  Some of the young people seem to wish to dispute this, but we older ones used to take the view—­half humorously, of course—­that if a Southerner spoke perfect English, it showed he wasn’t a gentleman; “that he hadn’t been raised with niggers around him."”

“Oh, you shouldn’t tell him that!” broke in a lady who was present.

“Why not?” demanded the old gentleman.

“He’ll print it!” she said.

“Well,” he answered, “ain’t it true?  What’s the harm in it?”

“There!” she exclaimed.  “You said ‘ain’t.’  He’ll print that Virginians say ’ain’t’!”

“Well,” he answered, “I reckon we do, don’t we?”

She laughed and gave up.  “I remember,” she told me, “the very spot on the turnpike going out to Ripon, where I made up my mind to break myself of saying ‘ain’t.’  But I want to tell you that we are talking much better English than we used to.  Even the negroes are.  You don’t hear many white people saying ‘gwine’ for ‘going’ any more, for instance, and the young people don’t say ‘set’ for ‘sit’ and ‘git’ for ‘get,’ as their fathers did.”