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Examples
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Don't you want to take er piert young fellow and teach 'im how to be er pilot?'
Mark Twain Archibald Henderson 1920
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Don't you want to take er piert young fellow and teach 'im how to be er pilot?'
Mark Twain Henderson, Archibald 1910
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But Tom, instead of going out to dinner at half-past eight at night, and to a ball at ten, and finishing off somewhere between twelve and four, went to bed at seven, when his master went to the public-house, and slept like a dead pig; for which reason he was as piert as a game-cock (who always gets up early to wake the maids), and just ready to get up when the fine gentlemen and ladies were just ready to go to bed.
The Water Babies 2007
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But Tom, instead of going out to dinner at half-past eight at night, and to a ball at ten, and finishing off somewhere between twelve and four, went to bed at seven, when his master went to the public-house, and slept like a dead pig; for which reason he was as piert as a game-cock (who always gets up early to wake the maids), and just ready to get up when the fine gentlemen and ladies were just ready to go to bed.
The Water-Babies Charles Kingsley 1847
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But Tom, instead of going out to dinner at half-past eight at night, and to a ball at ten, and finishing off somewhere between twelve and four, went to bed at seven, when his master went to the public-house, and slept like a dead pig; for which reason he was as piert as a game-cock (who always gets up early to wake the maids), and just ready to get up when the fine gentlemen and ladies were just ready to go to bed.
The Water-Babies A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby Charles Kingsley 1847
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Marster and ole Miss, and de chilluns and de young English lady what saved Pomp when de Yanks was raidin 'de place; but who am dat soldier-man lookin' so piert, and wid his hand wropped round a big sheet of paper? "
War-time sketches : historical and otherwise, Adelaide Stuart Dimitry 1911
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I should like you to pick me out a finer-limbed young fellow nor Master Godfrey -- one as 'ud knock you down easier, or 's more pleasanter looksed when he's piert and merry. "
Silas Marner (1885) 1861
renmama commented on the word piert
My mom used this word back in West Virginia, along with others like the Shakespearean "lief," as "I'd as lief go to the party as not." With piert, it was used in a cute way to mean "show off" or 'prissy." "You're acting/looking awfully piert, aren't you," and the inflection was usually a statement and not a question. I think a lot of the more isolated rural areas of the east maintained and kept alive the older English words into this century. Now, so many are consider archaic.
August 24, 2019