/To haul/, in English, means to move by force or violence; in the colonies it came to mean to transport in a vehicle, and this meaning survives in sound American. /To jew/, in English, means to cheat; the colonists made it mean to haggle, and devised /to jew down/ to indicate an effort to work a reduction in price. /To heft/, in English, means to lift; the early Americans made it mean to weigh by lifting, and kept the idea of weighing in its derivatives, /e. g./, /hefty/. Finally, there is the familiar American misuse of /Miss/ or /Mis'/ for /Mrs./. It was so widespread by 1790 that on November 17 of that year Webster solemnly denounced it in the /American Mercury/. § 5 /Archaic English Words/--Most of the colonists who lived along the American seaboard in 1750 were the descendants of immigrants who had come in fully a century before; after the first settlements there had been much less fresh immigration than many latter-day writers have assumed. According to Prescott F. Hall, "the population of New England ... at the date of the Revolutionary War ... was produced out of an immigration of about 20,000 persons /who arrived before 1640/,"[33] and we have Franklin's authority for the statement that the total population of the colonies in 1751, then about 1,000,000, had been [Pg055] produced from an original immigration of less than 80,000.[34] Even at that early day, indeed, the colonists had begun to feel that they were distinctly separated, in culture and customs, from the mother-country,[35] and there were signs of the rise of a new native aristocracy, entirely distinct from the older aristocracy of the royal governors' courts.[36] The enormous difficulties of communication with England helped to foster this sense of separation. The round trip across the ocean occupied the better part of a year, and was hazardous and expensive; a colonist who had made it was a marked man,--as Hawthorne said, "the /petit-maître/ of the colonies." Nor was there any very extensive exchange of ideas, for though most of the books read in the colonies came from England, the great majority of the colonists, down to the middle of the century, seem to have read little save the Bible and biblical commentaries, and in the native literature of the time one seldom comes upon any reference to the English authors who were glorifying the period of the Restoration and the reign of Anne. Moreover, after 1760 the colonial eyes were upon France rather than upon England, and Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire and the Encyclopedists began to be familiar names to thousands who were scarcely aware of Addison and Steele, or even of the great Elizabethans.[37]