PATTERSON ON NEWFOUNDLAND DIALECT. Ixvii 



the words fine and finely to mean very much or very good. " We 

 enjoyed ourselves fine" " How are you to-day ? I'm fine." " He 

 is doing finely." This usage could not have been acquired by intercourse 

 with Scotch, as there are very few such on the island out of St. Johns. 

 The last two words are from the Latin and come into Old English 

 through the French, from which the use must have been separately 

 derived. 



III. 1 would now notice a number of words and phrases of a mis- 

 cellaneous character, that have been introduced in various ways, or have 

 arisen among the people through the circumstances of their lives. 



I have already mentioned that though a large proportion of the 

 population are of Irish descent, so as to affect the accent of the present 

 generation, yet their dialect draws few words from this source. There 

 are, however, some such. Thus we can scarcely mistake the origin of 

 the use of the term entirely at the end of a sentence to give force to it. 

 Then path, pronounced with the hard Irish th, was applied to a road or 

 even the streets of a town. Not long ago one might hear in St. Johns 

 of the "lower pat-h" or the " upper ^>a-/i." So the use of the term 

 gaffer, a contraction of yranfer, itself a corruption of grandfather, as 

 applied to children only, must have been derived from Ireland, in some 

 parts of which it is common. From that quarter also came, if I mistake 

 not, the use of the term boys in addressing men. It is used indeed to 

 some extent elsewhere. English commanders, either of vessels or 

 soldiers, use it when addressing their men in affectionate familiarity. 

 Shakespeare also has it : " Then to sea, boys," " Tempest," II. 2. But 

 the usage is specially characteristic of the Irish, and in Newfoundland 

 it is universal, in whatever men are employed, whether on board a vessel 

 or working on land. I believe that the use of the word rock, to denote a 

 stone of any size, even a pebble thrown by a boy, which is universal in 

 this island, is from the same quarter. 



From the long time that the French have been fishing on this coast^ 

 we might have expected that the language of the residents would have 

 received accessions from them. We find, however, only one or two 

 words that we can trace to this source. Thus the word pew, an instru- 

 ment consisting of a shaft with a sharp piece of iron like one prong of a 

 fork at the end of it, used for throwing fish from the boats on to the 

 stages, whence the verb to pew, to cast them up in this manner, seems to 

 be the French word pieu, which is defined as meaning a stake or pale, 



