Well may Coleridge enumerate among the pains
of the West Indies, 'the yawny-drawny way in which men converse.'
The soft, whining drawl is simply intolerable. Resemble the worst
Northern States woman's accent it may in some degree, but it has not
a grain of its vigour. A man tells you, 'if you can speer it, to
send a beerer with a bottle of bare,' and the clergyman excruciates
you by praying in church, 'Speer us, good Lord.' The English
pronunciation of A and E is in most words transposed. Barbados has a
considerable number of provincialisms of dialect. Some of these, as
the constant use of 'Mistress' for 'Mrs.,' are interesting as
archaisms, or words in use in the early days of the Colony, and which
have never died out of use. Others are Yankeeisms or vulgarisms;
others, again, such as the expression 'turning cuffums,' i.e.
summersets, from cuffums, a species of fish, seem to be of local
origin."
In a note hereto appended, the author gives a list of English words
of peculiar use and acceptation in Barbados.
[33] To the same effect writes Anthony Trollope:
"But if the black people differ from their brethren of the other
islands, so certainly do the white people.
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