The anonymous writer of “Pioneer Annals” (1875), a rare pamphlet that contains much invaluable matter relating to the occupation of the White Water Valley, speaks of the prevalence of Carolina Quakers among the first settlers of that region, and remarks that when newcomers were asked where they came from, the answer would be “Guilford County, near Clemmens’s Store”; or “Beard’s Hatter-shop”; “Dobson’s Cross Roads”; or “Deep-River Settlement of Friends.” The same writer gives a dialect note which illustrates the ephemeral character of idiom. _Sleys_ (slays) was a term applied by the Carolinians to the reeds used by them in their home-made looms. A Carolina emigrant bound for Indiana stopped at Cincinnati and offered to sell a supply of these. It was in August, and the storekeeper knew but one word having the same sound, sleighs, which were not used in Cincinnati in midsummer. His ironical comment almost led to a personal encounter before the Carolinian could explain. John V. Hadley states in his “Seven Months a Prisoner” that “Guilford County” and “Jamestown” (North Carolina) were household words in many families of Hendricks County (Indiana), where he lived. At Jamestown, on his way to Libby Prison, he was accosted by a citizen who asked whether a former neighbor who had moved to Indiana, but still owned property in North Carolina, had not enlisted in the Union army, the purpose of the inquiry being to obtain testimony on which to confiscate his estate. The circulation of newly coined words has been so rapid in late years, owing to the increase of communication between different parts of the country, and to dissemination by the newspapers, that few useful words originating obscurely are likely to remain local. Lowell amused himself by tracing to unassailable English sources terms that were assumed to be essentially American; and if Chaucer and the Elizabethans may be invoked against our rural communities, the word-hunter’s sport has grown much simpler when he may cite a usage in one State to disestablish the priority claimed for it in another. There is risk in all efforts to connect novel words with particular communities, no matter how carefully it may be done, and it is becoming more and more difficult to separate real dialect from slang. Lists of unusual words that have been reported to the American Dialect Society afford interesting instances of the danger of accepting terms as local which are really in general use. The word _rambunctious_, reported from New York State as expressing impudence and forwardness, cannot be peculiar to that region,[20] for it is used in Indiana in identically the same sense. Other words, collected through the same agency and common in Indiana, are: _scads_, reported from Missouri, signifying a great quantity; and _sight_, meaning a large amount, noted in New England and New York. _Great hand for_, meaning a _penchant_, traced from Maine to Ohio, may be followed also into Indiana, but this, like _druthers_,