Local inflection

{Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886} wrote about nature, love, life, death, humanity’s relation with God — matters that from time to time occupy the thoughts of all thinking people. But her approach was always that of a New England villager…She wrote that she saw “New Englandly,’’ and she might just as accurately have expressed herself with another coinage, “Amherstly.’’

— From The New England Town in Fact and Fiction, by Perry D. Westbrook (1989)