" No doubt we have in England the coster's "yuss;" but
one hears even educated Americans now and then using "yep," or some
other corruption of "yes," scarcely to be indicated by the ordinary
alphabetical symbols. It seems to me a pity.
Much more respectable in point of antiquity is the habit which obtains
to some extent even among educated Americans, of saying "somewheres" and
"a long ways." Here the "s" is an old case-ending, an adverbial
genitive. "He goes out nights," too, on which Mr. Andrew Lang is so
severe, is a form as old as the language and older. I turn to Dr. Leon
Kellner's _Historical English Syntax_ (p. 119) and find that the Gothic
for "at night" was "nahts," and that the form (with its correlative
"days ") runs through old Norse, old Saxon, old English, and middle
English: for instance, "dages endi nahtes" _(Heliand)_, "daeges and
nihtes" _(Beowulf)_, "daeies and nihtes" (Layamon), all meaning "by day
and by night." In all, or almost all, words ending in "ward," the
genitive inflection, according to modern English practice, can either be
retained or dropped at will. It is a mere pedantry to declare "toward"
better English than "towards," "upward" than "upwards.
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