AMERICA TO-DAY
certainly, to treat ever as an affix, and to mistake the first two words of 'What ever are you doing?'" for the one word "whatever"; but to suppose the "ever" meaningless and inert is to overlook a clearly marked and very useful gradation of emphasis. "What are you doing?" expresses simple curiosity; "What ever are you doing?" expresses surprise; "What the devil are you doing?" expresses anger—we need not run farther up the scale. Nor is this use of "ever" an innovation, licentious or otherwise. "Ever" has for centuries been employed as an intensive particle after the interrogative pronouns and adverbs how, who, what, where, why. For instance, in The World of Wonders (1607), "I shall desire him to consider how ever it was possible to get an answer from these priests."
One of the most remarkable paragraphs in Mr. Tucker's book is that in which he proves "the greater permanence and steadiness of our American speech as compared with that of the mother country" by going through Halliwell's Dictionary of Archaisms and Provincialisms and picking out 76 words which Halliwell regards as obsolete, but which in America are all alive and kicking. (The vulgarism is mine, not Mr. Tucker's.) Now as a matter of fact not one of these words is really obsolete in England, and most of them are in everyday use; for instance, adze, affectation, agape, to age, air (appearance), appellant, apple-pie order, baker's dozen, bamboozle, bay window, between whiles,
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