lief - From Ulster to America
Source: From Ulster to America: The Scotch-Irish Heritage of American English
Author: Michael Montgomery
Comments: From Ulster to America recounts the lasting impact eighteenth-century settlers from Ulster have made on the development of the English language of the United States. The book documents over 500 vocabulary items contributed to American English by these ‘Scotch-Irish’ settlers. Each ‘shared’ term with its meaning is authenticated by quotations from both sides of the Atlantic. This searchable online version of his book takes its text from the dictionary part of the second edition published by the Ullans Press in 2017.
lief, leave, leeve, liefer, live adv Gladly, willingly, likely, rather (especially in phrases as as lief, just as lief, just as leave + verb). [originally would lief/liefer ‘would gladly’, but the auxiliary has been contracted and usually lost completely; lief is now confused with leave ‘permission, liberty’; oed lief adv B ‘dearly, gladly, willingly’ c1250→; snd lief II adv ‘gladly, willingly’ 1724→; dare lief adv ‘willingly, soon’ chiefly Northeast, Midland]
Ulst.:
1910 Joyce English in Ireland 286 = willing: ‘I had as lief be working as not’; ‘I had liefer’ (I had rather).
1935 MacManus Bold Blades 1 Uncle Donal, I’d liefer stay at home with you, all the time.
1937 Rowley Tales of Mourne 49 ‘Here’s a companion I’d liefer have nor any woman’, and he pulled a flute out of his hip-pocket.
1942 Bangor Words 49 = willingly, rather: ‘I had a lief not go’.
1953 Traynor Donegal Glossary 169 liefer = more willingly, rather.
1964 Braidwood Ulster/Elizabethan English 102 Lief (Old English leof ‘dear’, cf German lieb) still survives in Ulster … in the adverb phrase I had as lief, e.g. ‘I’d as lief go without’. This is common Elizabethan and Jacobean English, probably best-known from Hamlet’s advice to the players: ‘I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines’ (3.2.4).
1991 O’Kane You Don’t Say 85 = to be willing to, to prefer: ‘I’d as lief be working today as sitting here lookin’ at the sea’.
U.S.:
1835 Longstreet Georgia Scenes 29 He just as live go agin the house with you.
1899 Green Virginia Word-Book 218 leeve = willingly, a word of indifference: ‘I’d as leeve go as stay’.
1904-07 Kephart Notebooks 2:642 Liefer as not, that’s not so.
1994 Montgomery Coll I’d just as lief hear a sow rub her ass as to hear a pianner.
Purchase From Ulster to America
The second, revised edition of Michael Montgomery’s From Ulster to America is now available here:
From Ulster to America: The Scotch-Irish Heritage of American English (Europe)
From Ulster to America: The Scotch-Irish Heritage of American English (North America)
