(We owe a debt of gratitude to Horace Kephart for his chapter in Our Southern Highlanders on mountain dialect as it was found about a century ago. We do greatly err if we automatically assume that the reason their speech sounded back-woodsy was entirely because of their academic ignorance. The truth of the matter is that many of their expressions were, like much else in their lives, the result of their severe isolation so that they were, in a very real sense, living a century or two in the past. What might have been regarded as quaint and archaic even in Kephart's day was actually very proper speech from several generations before.)
From Kephart's chapter on The Mountain Dialect:
A man said to me of three of our acquaintances: "There's been a fray on the river - I don't know how the fraction begun, but Os feathered into Dan and Phil, feedin' them lead." He meant fray in its original sense of deadly combat, as was fitting where two men were killed. Fraction for rupture is an archaic word, rare in literature, though we find it in Troilus and Cressida. "Feathered into them!" Where else can we hear today a phrase that passed out of standard English when "villainous saltpetre" supplanted the long-bow? It means to bury an arrow up to the feather, as when the old Chronicler Harrison says, "An other arrow should haue beene fethered in his bowels." . . .
Some highland usages that sound odd to us are really no more than the original and literal meanings, as budget for bag or parcel, hampered for shackled or jailed. When a mountain swain "carries his gal to meetin'" he is not performing so great an athletic feat as was reported by Benjamin Franklin, who said, "My father carried his wife with three children to New England" (from Pennsylvania).
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