Word: spitted
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Joel Chandler Harris Jr. (TIME, Oct. 11, p. 6) will consult some standard works on the English language he will find information which will assist him in "keeping the records straight" concerning "spit an' image" (see my letter, TIME, Sept...
...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...
...should be fairly clear from the foregoing that "spit an' image" has not "originated among the darkies of the South," as Mr. Harris and many other TIME readers who have written to me believe, as a corruption of "spirit and image." It is an old English, if not indeed European, colloquialism, quite independent of the American Negro...
Awed, TIME concedes that the weight of evidence lies with Anthropologist White; reaffirms its decision to use the form "spit-&-image" when occasion demands; drops this controversy...