Word: dialect
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...marching a mile ahead of his troops. First Soviet citizens to whom Snow spoke-a farmer and a local official-said cheerfully, "Hai p'a," which Snow thought meant "I'm afraid." Snow did not know what they were afraid of, finally discovered that in Shensi dialect "Hai p'a" means "I don't understand...
...partly to the stubborn stodginess of the Boers themselves, even more to their galumphing dialect, a certain drabness of atmosphere has beclouded every novel of the Cape Colony, from Olive Schreiner's Story Of An African Farm on down. Swift, even melodramatic though The Turning Wheels is, many a reader will come an early cropper over words like baas, kopje, kloof, veldt, mevrou, spruit* with which its text is besprinkled, over the de Jongs, Zwart Pietes, van der Bergs, van Reenens who make up its confusing cast of characters. But once these obstacles are hurdled, the surviving reader...
...English Dictionary, edited by Sir James A. H. Murray and others, under spit (Vol. IX, Pt. I, p. 628), he will find cited such English colloquialisms as: "you are a queer fellow-the very spit of your father." ... In The English Dialect Dictionary, edited by Joseph Wright, Ph.D., LL.D., Professor of Comparative Philology in the University of Oxford, under spit (Vol. V, pp. 669-670), he will find other examples of old English usage: "that barn's as like his fadder as an he'd been spit out of his mouth." . . . The same saying is to be found...
Turning to America, we find in Dialect Notes (Publications of the American Dialect Society), Vol. 1, Pt. 5, p. 232: "the ve'y spit an' image o' him," reported from Kentucky. . . . And, finally, in Uncle Remus, in "Mr. Rabbit Finds His Match At Last," Joel Chandler Harris (the distinguished father, I assume, of our present correspondent) writes: "He had a wife en th'ee chilluns ole Br'er Tarrypin did, en dey wuz all de ve'y spit en image er Je ole man." It will be noted that Mr. Harris indicated the omission...
...originated, I believe, among the darkies of the South and the correct phrasing-without dialect-is "spirit and image." It was originally used in speaking of some person whose father or mother had passed on-and the colored folks would say-"the very spi't an' image of his daddy...