This prefixed y is a mark of a very illiterate or antique form of the dialect. I have known “piece yarthen” used for “a piece of earthen” [ware], the preposition getting lost in the sound of the y. I leave it to etymologists to determine its relation to that ancient prefix that differentiates “earn” in one sense from “yearn.” But the article before a vowel may account for it if we consider it a corruption. “The earth” pronounced in a drawling way will produce “the yearth.” In the New York Documents is a letter from one Barnard Hodges, a settler in Delaware in the days of Governor Andros, whose spelling indicates a free use of the parasitic y. He writes “yunless,” “yeunder” (under), “yunderstanding,” “yeundertake,” and “yeouffeis” (office). ↩
Like many of the earmarks of this dialect, the verb “dog-on” came from Scotland, presumably by the way of the north of Ireland. A correspondent of The Nation calls attention to the use of “dagon” as Scotch dialect in Barrie’s Little Minister. On examining that story, I find that the word has precisely the sense of our Hoosier “dog-on,” which is to be pronounced broadly as a Hoosier pronounces dog—“daug-on.” If Mr. Barrie gives his a the broad sound, his “dagon” is nearly identical with “dog-on.” Here are some detached sentences from The Little Minister:
“Beattie spoke for more than himself when he said: ‘Dagon that Manse! I never gie a swear but there it is glowering at me.’ ”
“ ‘Dagon religion,’ Rob retorted fiercely; ‘ ’t spoils a’ thing.’ ”
“There was some angry muttering from the crowd, and young Charles Yuill exclaimed, ‘Dagon you, would you lord it ower us on weekdays as well as on Sabbaths?’ ”
“ ‘Have you on your Sabbath shoon or have you no on your Sabbath shoon?’ ‘Guid care you took I should ha’e the dagont things on!’ retorted the farmer.”
It will be seen that “dagont,” as used above, is the Scotch form of “dog-oned.” But Mr. Barrie uses the same form apparently for “dog-on it” in the following passage:
“Ay, there was Ruth when she was na wanted, but Ezra, dagont it looked as if Ezra had jumped clean out o’ the Bible!”
Strangely enough, this word as a verb is not to be found in Jamieson’s dictionary of the Scottish dialect, but Jamieson gives “dugon” as a noun. It is given in the supplement to Jamieson, however, as “dogon,” but still as a noun, with an ancient plural “dogonis.” It is explained as “a term of contempt.” The example cited by Jamieson is Hogg’s Winter Tales, I 292, and is as follows:
“What wad my father say if I were to marry a man that loot himsel’ be thrashed by Tommy Potts, a great supple wi’ a back nae stiffer than a willy brand? … When one comes to close quarters wi’ him he’s but a dugon.”
Halliwell and Wright give “dogon” as a noun, and mark it Anglo-Norman, but they apparently know it only from Jamieson and the supplement to Jamieson, where “dogguin” is cited from Cotgrave as meaning “a filthie old curre,” and “doguin” from Roquefort, defined by “brutal, currish” [hargneux]. A word with the same orthography, “doguin,” is still used in French for puppy. It is of course a question whether the noun “dogon” and its French antecedents are connected with the American verb “dog-on.” It is easy to conceive that such an epithet as “dogon” might get itself mixed up with the word dog, and so become an imprecation. For instance, a servant in the family of a friend of mine in Indiana, wishing to resign her place before the return of some daughters of the house whom she had never seen, announced that she was going to leave “before them dog-on girls got home.” Here the word might have been the old epithet, or an abbreviated participle. “Dogged” is apparently a corruption of dog-on in the phrase “I’ll be dogged.” I prefer “dog-on” to “dogone,” because in the dialect the sense of setting a dog on is frequently present to the speaker, though far enough away from the primitive sense of the word, perhaps. ↩
In naming the several parts of the Indian corn and the dishes made from it, the English language was put to many shifts. Such words as “tassel” and “silk” were poetically applied to the blossoms; “stalk,” “blade,” and “ear” were borrowed from other sorts of corn, and the Indian tongues were forced to pay tribute to name the dishes borrowed from the savages. From them we have “hominy,” “pone,” “supawn,” and “succotash.” For other nouns words were borrowed from English provincial dialects. “Shuck” is one of these. On the northern belt, shucks are the outer covering of nuts; in the middle and southern regions the word is applied to what in New England is called the husks of the corn. “Shuck,” however, is much more widely used than “husk” in colloquial speech—the farmers in more than half of the United States are hardly acquainted with the word “husk” as applied to the envelope of the ear. “Husk,” in the Middle States, and in some parts of the South and West, means the bran of the cornmeal, as notably in Davy Crockett’s verse:
“She sifted the meal, she gimme the hus’;
She baked the bread, she gimme the crus’;
She b’iled the meat, she gimme the bone;
She gimme a kick and sent me home.”
In parts of Virginia, before the war, the word “husk” or “hus’ ” meant the cob or spike of the corn. “I smack you over wid a cawn-hus’ ” is a threat I have often heard one negro boy make to another. “Cob” is provincial English for ear, and I have known “a cob of corn” used in Canada for an ear of Indian corn. While writing this note “a cob of Indian corn”—meaning an ear—appears in the report of an address by a distinguished man at a recent meeting of
