COUNTRY LIFE

I WISH the old word ‘fall’ could again be used instead of ‘autumn’., for it has always been used in our own West Country. I have a long memory reaching to the ’fifties, and can certainly aver that the word ‘autumn’ was never used by the country folk at all; it was always ‘last fall’ or ‘come next fall’, and this is in a neighbourhood where Americanisms had never penetrated, and where the pure Saxon plurals still existed, even unto the ’nineties, of housen for houses, rosen for roses, lambren for lambs, and many other curious old words now, alas, obsolete.