If you are young, you might not ever have heard of the term: hither, thither and yon. But I am not young and did hear this occasionally from old people when I was young. It was used in the old days. You know, the “good old days.” Do you really want to go back to the “good” old days? When there were no antibiotic medicines, so if you got an infection, it could easily lead to widespread infection in your body and death. When if you got cancer, you died, but they gave you opium or morphine or lots of booze towards the end of your life? What about good old-time language, like hither, thither and yon? In case you wonder why I care about old-time language, I came across some recently on the website for the Windham Mill Museum. Please look it up on your trusty computer. Once you have the website go to the top of the screen (this is drafted for old people like me) and click on history. Then click on A Historical Atlas of Windham, CT, a CT Mill Town. Up will come page 15 of the 70 page history shown at this site. Page 15 shows a map called Settling Joshua’s Tract/Windham, 1675-1700. Under the map it says that this map comes from Ellen Larned’s History of Windham County. I have that two volume publication, but the map is not in there. I asked an historian, and he answered that only the original publication of Larned’s work in 1874 has it, not the modern publications. Huh. Is that because they changed the names of places on that map? After all, on the map there is a place called Hither Place. That is now known as Windham Center. I checked the meaning of Hither. It means here. Apparently, the guy who drafted this map lived in a place not yet officially named, so he just named the place here/hither. I asked an historian about Ponde Place. He told me that’s now known as Mansfield. I did NOT ask him about the place on the map named The Crotch, out of fear that this history treatise had been confused with a medical/anatomical chart. Even if there was a geographical place called The Crotch, those Puritanical Congregationalists might well have drowned it with the Willimantic Reservoir, so no one could look for it anymore.
I want to know whether there was a place in Windham called Thither. That means there. And where is the place or person called yon? Yon means that person or thing. So in the 1600’s if you pointed to some guy in a line and asked your friend who is yon man, your friend might have answered with the guy’s name, if he knew. Today you would ask who is that, and your friend would give the name, and you’d yell, Yo Juan, not Yon.
Frankly, I think modern times with modern medicine and household appliances, like hot running water, washing machines and dryers, air conditioning and good heating systems, are much nicer than living in the old days. In the 1970’s I visited a place in Greene, Rhode Island that was for sale. It had been a dairy farm from the time it was built 200 years earlier and had been in the same family for all those years. The men in the family had never allowed any electricity to be installed. The water came from a type of well I had never seen before, called a well sweep. Instead of a bucket on a chain that you lowered into the well, there was a very long wooden rod with a bucket suspended from one end. Can’t picture it? Ask Google. Anyway, the family that bought this antique farm were from Providence, and they informed the local natives that they would use it as a summer campsite. Hmmmm. I’d love to sneak back there and see if the women in the family insisted on electricity, flush toilets (not outhouses), heat, etc.
As for old-time language, I think here, there and everywhere is a lot more descriptive than hither, thither and yon.
Angela Hawkins Fichter