Words from the Diaries of North Carolina Students

Abstract

AMONG the documents in the Southern Historical Collection in the library of the University of North Carolina is a group of midnineteenth-century student diaries which contain a number of expressions that are of lexical importance. The diaries of William Sydney Mullen (WSM), 1840-45; John Lawrence Dusenbury (JLD), 1841; Henry Y. Webb (HYW), 1842-47; Thomas Miles Garrett (TMG), 1849-50; George N. Thompson (GNT), 1851; and Henry A. London, Jr. (HAL), 1862-63-all native North Carolinians-were written while they were students at the University. Most of the diary material deals with everyday college events and the students' personal lives; however, several of the students discussed their views on politics, on current events, on literary works, and on miscellaneous intellectual subjects. One of them, Thomas Miles Garrett, wrote on July 4, 1849, a rather long essay on freedom. As might be expected, much of the language used in the diaries consists of colloquial and slang expressions. All such words and phrases which were considered unusual were jotted down and later checked in the New English Dictionary and the New English Dictionary Supplement (NED), the English Dialect Dictionary (EDD), the Dictionary of American English (DAE), Harold Wentworth's American Dialect Dictionary (ADD), Webster's New International Dictionary (WNI), and in the lists in H. L. Mencken's The American Language and its two supplements. All words which were adequately handled by these works were discarded. This left a fair number of expressions which are not recorded in the historical dictionaries, or which predate the earliest dictionary illustrations or postdate the latest ones. All of these are listed below. Where words have been defined or illustrated in any of the dictionaries, comments to that effect have been made under the several entries.