26 BEACH-LA-MAR. 
because of labial difficulty the resultant vowel would be in confusion 
with the prepositional 7. For these, and probably as well for reasons 
which have been found to exist in similar conditions far remote from 
the Pacific, the contributing sailors have expressed the conditional 
by suppose, which may become s’ pose or ’pose. It has attained such 
wide currency in so many jargon tongues that these two citations of 
if in the room of suppose suggest rather the ignorant learning of the 
reporters. 
Among the paradeictics of prepositional employment by far the 
greatest use is made of along, belong, long. Evidently they derive 
from the same source; certainly long does derive equally from along 
and belong. It is possible that along and belong were independent 
contributions to the jargon vocabulary, but the three are now found 
so freely interchanging that this point, no matter of great importance, 
is impossible of settlement. The three cover, among others, every 
prepositional sense, so that little occasion arises for our other prepo- 
sitions. This is a little strange in the case of in and of. If these very 
common prepositions were subjected to the usual island abrasion 
of final consonants the result would be the vowels z and o; and almost 
from one end of the Pacific to the other 7 means 77 and o means of. 
Our records show us but a single instance of the use of to, and in that 
instance we may rest very sure that to is not regarded as paradeictic 
but as one of the three syllables of a command speech unit in which 
the syntax is as little comprehended as is the theology. 
The demonstratives in’ Beach-la-mar number eighteen; but the 
bulk of the burden is borne by three personal pronouns and one which 
we designate demonstrative, namely me, you, him, and that. Some 
few of the citations show inflectional forms of these pronouns, yet 
they rest on doubtful authority and are not demanded by the canons 
of the best jargon. It may seem to us somewhat more tidy to remark 
to a casual cannibal “I say,’’ but he will much better comprehend the 
locution me speak. With us there is something urgent, something 
insistent about that oblique case of the first person singular. Me 
seems a stouter word than J; given the least encouragement it pops 
into places where it finds that it must not trespass under penalty of 
the law grammatical. We must not say “‘he is better than me,”’ yet 
wedo. We must not say “itis me,’ yet we do; and when brought to 
book for our offense we envy the French who can happily be correct 
and ungrammatical with their c’est moi, or we look with pious longing 
at the Society of Friends in the very next pronoun where grammar is 
swallowed up in faith and thee religiously serves as the subject of a 
verb. But given a distant sea, where the laws of Lindley Murray 
have no currency and the writ grammatical does not run, it is inter- 
esting to see with what vigor me becomes subject and forgets its 
accusative origin in the joy of new life. 
