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Whether any of them have by this means renewed their life would be an interesting subject of inquiry; it is said that at Eton the good old word usher, used first only for humorous effect, has now found its way back into the common and colloquial speech of the school. V. Dialectal and Popular Words.
In spite of the almost unvarying praise which has been lavished upon this 'Scots pastoral, and even though the characters may have some points of humanity in common with actual Lothian rustics, the whole composition of the piece can scarcely be pronounced less artificial than that of the Arcadian drama itself, and the play has undoubtedly shared in the exaggerated esteem which has fallen to the lot of dialectal literature generally.
'No hedger brished nor scythesman swung'. and 'The morning hedger with his brishing-hook'. These two lines explain the word #brish#. O.E.D. gives brish as dialectal of brush, and so E.D.D. has the verb to brush as dialect for trimming a tree or hedge. Brush is a difficult homophone, and it would be useful to have one of its derivative meanings separated off as brish.
What goes far towards justifying Jonson's acrimony is the wanton confusion of different dialectal forms; the indiscriminate use for the mere sake of archaism of such variants as 'gate' beside the usual 'goat, of 'sike' and 'sich' beside 'such'; the coining of words like 'stanck, apparently from the Italian stanco; and lastly, the introduction of forms which owe their origin to mere etymological ignorance, for instance, 'yede' as an infinitive, 'behight' in the same sense as the simple verb, 'betight, 'gride, and many others all of which do not tend to produce the homely effect of mother English, but reek of all that is pedantic and unnatural.
Edmund Blunden, has lately published a volume in which this particular element of dialectal and obsolescent words is very prominent, it will be suitable to our general purpose to consider it as a practical experiment and examine the results.
But the differences are dialectal only, like the differences which the discovery of the Moabite Stone has shown to have existed between the languages of Moab and Israel. How the Israelites came to adopt "the language of Canaan" is a question into which we cannot here enter.
But there are many others which might with advantage be given a larger currency. This process of dialectal regeneration, as it is called, has been greatly aided in the past by men of letters, who have given a literary standing to the useful and picturesque vocabulary of their unlettered neighbours, and thus helped to reinforce with vivid terms our somewhat abstract and faded standard speech.
#Sheal# is a homophone, 1. a shepherd's hut or shanty; 2. a peascod or seed-shell. Of the first, shiel and shieling are common forms; the second is dialectal; E.D.D. gives #shealing# as the husk of seeds. If this be the meaning in our quotation, the appearance described is unrecognized by the present annotator.
'The damp gust makes the ivy whir', whir rhyming here with executioner. If churn is anywhere dialectal for churr, it must have come from the common mistake of substituting a familiar for an unknown word: and this is the worst way of making homophones. 'goistering daws'.
Most of these representations, at any rate in the earlier years with which we are concerned, were short realistic farces of low life composed in dialectal verse.
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