Whuh? And More Longfellow

Under a spreading chestnut-tree, 
The village smithy stands

I've long feared or suspected that I have an unusual number of scraps of verse in my head: rarely complete memorized poems, but many little pieces here and there. These opening lines of Longfellow's "The Village Blacksmith" certainly stand as one example. I don't know where or when I learned these lines for sure, although I suspect it was at home, rather than at school.

In a book I recently purchased in a box lot (A J Demarest and William M Van Sickle, New Education Readers: A Synthetic and Phonic Word Method [NY: American Book Company, 1901]), I was pleased to run across a former student's slightly mis-remembered version of these lines, written, perhaps as a pen-trial, in the upper margin of page 25:

Longfellow probably chose "under," rather than "beneath," for metrical reasons: to begin the line with an inverted foot. But Katherine Corrigan, of Fredericktown, Ohio, who seems to have penned this version (according to other writing in the book), has produced a normal iamb here, regularizing the meter of the line a bit. The other changes are also not at all unusual for memorized verse, I think, although she must not have memorized much more of the poem than I have: "stood" would fail to rhyme only a couple of lines further on.

But I was, I can admit, wonderfully amused by the numerous examples of "huh" also written onto this page, perhaps as a kind of commentary upon the lines of Helen Hunt Jackson's "October's Bright Blue Weather," which is the printed text.

Even more remarkable and amusing was what I took for "whuh," accompanying the "huh"s. In fact, I wondered if this could be an early attestation of "whuh," which seems to me a quite modern expression, one that might also be spelled "whaa?" or the like. An expression of befuddled puzzlement, over and above what might be communicated by "what?"

I wondered how long "whuh" had been around, and in a burst of enthusiasm, I typed "whuh" in Google's "Ngram viewer" with the following result:


This was quite astonishing to me, but some digital looking around helped to clarify things, at least in part. First, in the 17th and 18th centuries, "whuh" was apparently an alternative spelling for "whew"; also, Google's OCR software seems to have sometimes misread "which" as "whuh."  In the early twentieth century, "whuh" shows up a fair number of times in representations of African-American English.

But Katherine Corrigan's "whuh" didn't seem to be any of those, especially since it was so closely linked to all these examples of "huh."

Then, I took a closer look, and realized that maybe I should read it as "uhuh," rather than "whuh."

But, even so, this first example in my book looks almost like it has a question mark, as does the "huh" above it. Almost, I say, because it's not exactly clear.

I am sorry to say that all my practice in (medieval) paleography hasn't been much help in deciding whether this is "whuh" or "uhuh." And thus all my crazy eagerness to find the earliest attestation of "whuh" has not been rewarded, either. It probably is "uhuh" here, after all.

I did, by the way, check the OED. Both "uh-uh" and "uh-huh", as it happens, are first attested in 1924, in what looks like a journal, Dial[ect] Notes; Katherine Corrigan's handwriting in this book appears to date from either 1929 or 1932. The OED's second attestation for "uh-uh", for what it's worth, is from Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, in 1930. 

But part me of is content to imagine that she has written "whuh" after all, even if I cannot prove it.