It is unfortunate that there are so few trustworthy records of the early Southwestern speech, and that first and last bad grammar, reckless spelling, and the indiscriminate distribution of the printer’s apostrophe by writers who had no real knowledge to guide them, have served to create an erroneous impression of the illiteracy of the Indianians and their neighbors. It is likely that during the next quarter of a century the continued fusion of the various elements of Western population will create a dead level of speech, approximating accuracy, so that in a typical American State like Indiana local usages will disappear, and the only oddities discernible will be those of the well-nigh universal slang, which even now reach Colorado and California almost as soon as they are known at the Atlantic seaboard. At the South and in New England, where there is less mingling of elements, the old usages will probably endure much longer; and it is a fair assumption that in the Mississippi Valley and in the Trans-Missouri country, a normal American speech free of local idiosyncrasies will appear first. Our keen sense of humor and our love of the conveniences of speech are likely to continue to be national traits, leading to the creation and adoption of slang from time to time; but where a people imply quotation marks in all their lapses from propriety, they anticipate and destroy criticism. After all, there is nothing reprehensible in dialect, as we loosely use the word, or even in slang. Flexibility is necessary to the living language; and the word-hunter who really delights in his avocation, and is not limited in his researches to the remoter fields of classical philology, hearing in his daily walks and in the tranquil talk at peaceful inns the pungent or pictorial word that no lexicographer has yet detected, knows a joy that is greater than that of fly fishing or butterfly hunting. “No language,” writes Lowell, “after it has faded into diction, none that cannot suck up the feeding juices secreted for it in the rich mother-earth of common folk, can bring forth a sound and lusty book. True vigor and heartiness of phrase do not pass from page to page, but from man to man, where the brain is kindled and the lips suppled by downright living interests, and by passion in its very throe.” He continues: “Language is the soil of thought, and our own especially is a rich leaf-mould, the slow deposit of ages, the shed foliage of feeling, fancy, and imagination, which has suffered an earth change, that the vocal forest, as Howell called it, may clothe itself anew with living green.” And this suggests Horace’s words, in “Ars Poetica”:-- “Ut silvae foliis pronos mutantur in annos, Prima cadunt; ita verborum vetus interit aetas, Et juvenum ritu florent modo nata vigentque.”