Curiously enough, this widely dispersed and highly savory dialect--already, as I shall show, come to a certain grammatical regularity--has attracted the professional writers of the country almost as little as it has attracted the philologists. There are foreshadowings of it in "Huckleberry Finn," in "The Biglow Papers" and even in the rough humor of the period that began with J. C. Neal and company and ended with Artemus Ward and Josh Billings, but in those early days it had not yet come to full flower; it wanted the influence of the later immigrations to take on its present character. The enormous dialect literature of twenty years ago left it almost untouched. Localisms were explored diligently, but the general dialect went virtually unobserved. It is not in "Chimmie Fadden"; it is not in [Pg191] "David Harum"; it is not even in the pre-fable stories of George Ade, perhaps the most acute observer of average, undistinguished American types, urban and rustic, that American literature has yet produced. The business of reducing it to print had to wait for Ring W. Lardner, a Chicago newspaper reporter. In his grotesque tales of base-ball players, so immediately and so deservedly successful and now so widely imitated,[18] Lardner reports the common speech not only with humor, but also with the utmost accuracy. The observations of Charters and his associates are here reinforced by the sharp ear of one specially competent, and the result is a mine of authentic American.
In a single story by Lardner, in truth, it is usually possible to discover examples of almost every logical and grammatical peculiarity of the emerging language, and he always resists very stoutly the temptation to overdo the thing. Here, for example, are a few typical sentences from "The Busher's Honeymoon":[19]
I and Florrie /was/ married the day before yesterday just /like/ I told you we /was/ going to be.... You /was/ wise to get married in Bedford, where /not nothing/ is nearly half so dear.... The sum of what I have /wrote/ down is $29.40.... Allen told me I /should ought/ to give the priest $5.... I never /seen/ him before.... I didn't used to eat /no/ lunch in the playing season except when I /knowed/ I was not going to work.... I guess the meals /has/ cost me all together about $1.50, and I have /eat/ very little myself....