The Language of Bill Arp

T HE LETTERS OF BILL ARP, by the Georgia humorist Charles Henry Smith, have been recognized as an appealing expression of the Southern point of view during the Civil War, the Reconstruction, and the later nineteenth century. They also have been noted as a source of authentic language and lore from northwestern Georgia. The following list grew out of the preparation of James C. Austin's Bill Arp (New York: Twayne, 1970). Smith was the son of a New England merchant who moved to Georgia about 1817. Born in 1826 in Lawrenceville, Smith later moved to Rome and then to Cartersville. Until his death in 1903, he was a resident of north Georgia, having left the region only for occasional trips for pleasure or for lecturing or because of military duties or the necessity of moving his family during the Civil War. He attended Franklin College (later the University of Georgia) in Athens for almost four years, and in 1850 he was admitted to the Georgia bar. As a circuit lawyer, he swapped stories and witticisms with all classes. After service in the Confederate Army, he spent the remainder of his long life as successively a merchant, a politician, a farmer, and a writer. The Bill Arp letters, begun during the heat of secession in 1861, had tremendous local popularity. Published in the Rome Courier and other Southern papers, and as far away as the New York Metropolitan Record and the Detroit Free Press, they helped Southern morale and expressed Southern viewpoints. From 1878 to 1903, they appeared regularly in the Atlanta Constitution as the genial philosophizing of an old-fashioned farmer. The object of the list that follows is to present a sampling of the linguistic features of the Bill Arp letters. The sampling is intended as a representative cross section of the complete Bill Arp letters as published in book form. Because much of the deliberate misspelling and dialect spelling was eliminated in the book publications, one of the letters as it originally appeared in the Atlanta Southern Confederacy in 1863 has been included as a source. The citations in the list are selected from a word-by-word consideration of all recognizable deviations from standard English in that letter and in about twenty pages from each of the five books listed below, plus random selections from many more pages. The twenty-page portions were chosen to represent the chronological changes that occurred in the writing, the differences due to different media of publication, and the obvious fluctuation of the literary