Note 6 — Chapter I
Reading edition
Most bad English was once good English. Ketch was used by writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for catch. A New Hampshire magistrate in the seventeenth century spells it caitch, and probably pronounced it in that way. Ketch, a boat, was sometimes spelled catch by the first American colonists, and the far-fetched derivation of the word from the Turkish may be one of the fancies of etymologists.