FOOTNOTES
[128] [Apparently a slip for ‘ebb’]
[129] It is still used in prose as late as the age of Henry VIII; see the State Papers, vol. viii. p. 247. It was the latest survivor of a whole group or family of words which continued much longer in Scotland than with us; of which some perhaps continue there still; these are but a few of them; ‘wanthrift’ for extravagance; ‘wanluck’, misfortune; ‘wanlust’, languor; ‘wanwit’, folly; ‘wangrace’, wickedness; ‘wantrust’ (Chaucer), distrust, [Also ‘wan-ton’, devoid of breeding (towen). Compare German wahn-sinn, insanity, and wahn-witz.]
[130] We must not suppose that this still survives in ‘girfalcon’; which wholly belongs to the Latin element of the language; being the later Latin ‘gyrofalco’, and that, “a gyrando, quia diu gyrando acriter prædam insequitur”.
[131] [‘Heft’, from ‘heave’ (Winter’s Tale, ii. 1, 45), is widely diffused in the Three Kingdoms and in America. See E.D.D. s.v.]
[132] “Some hot-spurs there were that gave counsel to go against them with all their forces, and to fright and terrify them, if they made slow haste”. (Holland’s Livy, p. 922.)
[133] State Papers, vol. vi. p. 534.
[134] [‘Malinger’, French malingre (mistakenly derived above), stands for old French mal-heingre (maliciously or falsely ill, feigning sickness), which is from Latin male aeger, with an intrusive n—Scheler.]
[135] [To which the late Boer War contributed many more, such as ‘kopje’, ‘trek’, ‘slim’, ‘veldt’, etc.]
[136] The only two writers of whom I am aware as subsequently using this word are, both writing in Ireland and of Irish matters, Spenser and Swift. The passages are both quoted in Richardson’s Dictionary. [‘Bawn’ stands for the Irish ba-dhun (not bábhun, as in N.E.D.), or bo-dhun, literally ‘cow-fortress’, a cattle enclosure (Irish bo, a cow). See P. W. Joyce, Irish Names of Places, 1st ser. p. 297.]
[137] There is an excellent account of this “refugee French” in Weiss’ History of the Protestant Refugees of France.
[138] [Thus the Shakespearian word renege (Latin renegare), to deny (Lear ii, 2) still lives in the mouths of the Irish peasantry. I have heard a farmer’s wife denounce those who “renege [renaig] their religion”.]
[139] With all its severity, there is some truth in Ben Johnson’s observation: “Spenser, in affecting the ancients, writ no language”. In this matter, however, Ben Jonson was at one with him; for he does not hesitate to express his strong regret that this form has not been retained. “The persons plural” he says (English Grammar, c. 17), “keep the termination of the first person singular. In former times, till about the reign of King Henry VIII, they were wont to be formed by adding en; thus, loven, sayen, complainen. But now (whatsoever is the cause) it hath quite grown out of use, and that other so generally prevailed, that I dare not presume to set this afoot again; albeit (to tell you my opinion) I am persuaded that the lack hereof, well considered, will be found a great blemish to our tongue. For seeing time and person be as it were the right and left hand of a verb, what can the maiming bring else, but a lameness to the whole body”?
[140] [The two words are often popularly confounded. When a good woman said “I’m afeerd”, Mr. Pickwick exclaimed “Afraid”! (Pickwick Papers, ch. v.). Chaucer, instructively, uses both in the one sentence, “This wyf was not affered ne affrayed” (Shipman’s Tale, l. 400).]
[141] Génin (Récréations Philologiques, vol. i. p. 71) says to the same effect: “Il n’y a guères de faute de Français, je dis faute générale, accréditée, qui n’ait sa raison d’être, et ne pût au besoin produire ses lettres de noblesse; et souvent mieux en règle que celles des locutions qui ont usurpé leur place au soleil”.
[142] A single proof may in each case suffice:
“Our wills and fates do so contráry run”.—Shakespeare.
“Ne let mischiévous witches with their charms”.—Spenser.
“O argument blasphémous, false and proud”.—Milton.
[These archaisms are still current in Ireland.]
[143] I cannot doubt that this form which our country people in Hampshire, as in many other parts, always employ, either retains the original pronunciation, our received one being a modern corruption; or else, as is more probable, that we have made a confusion between two originally different words, from which they have kept clear. Thus in Howell’s Vocabulary, 1659, and in Cotgrave’s French and English Dictionary both words occur: “nuncion or nuncheon, the afternoon’s repast”, (cf. Hudibras, i. 1, 346: “They took their breakfasts or their nuncheons”), and “lunchion, a big piece” i.e. of bread; for both give the old French ‘caribot’, which has this meaning, as the equivalent of ‘luncheon’. It is clear that in this sense of lump or ‘big piece’ Gay uses ‘luncheon’:
“When hungry thou stood’st staring like an oaf,
I sliced the luncheon from the barley loaf”;
and Miss Baker in her Northamptonshire Glossary explains ‘lunch’ as “a large lump of bread, or other edible; ‘He helped himself to a good lunch of cake’”. We may note further that this ‘nuntion’ may possibly put us on the right track for arriving at the etymology of the word. Richardson has called attention to the fact that it is spelt “noon-shun” in Browne’s Pastorals, which must at least suggest as possible and plausible that the ‘nuntion’ was originally applied to the labourer’s slight meal, to which he withdrew for the shunning of the heat of the middle noon: especially when in Lancashire we find a word of similar formation, ‘noon-scape’, and in Norfolk ‘noon-miss’, for the time when labourers rest after dinner. [It really stands for the older English none-schenche, i.e. ‘noon-skink’ or noon-drink (see Skeat, Etym. Dict., s.v.), correlative to ‘noon-meat’ or ‘nam-met’.] It is at any rate certain that the dignity to which ‘lunch’ or ‘luncheon’ has now arrived, as when we read in the newspapers of a “magnificent luncheon”, is altogether modern; the word belonged a century ago to rustic life, and in literature had not travelled beyond the “hobnailed pastorals” which professed to describe that life.
[144] See it so written, Holland’s Pliny, vol. ii. p. 428, and often.
[145] As a proof of the excellent service which an accurate acquaintance with provincial usages may render in the investigation of the innumerable perplexing phenomena of the English language, I would refer to the admirable article On English Pronouns Personal in Transactions of the Philological Society, vol. i. p. 277.
[146] [We now have the good fortune to possess a complete collection of this valuable class of words in the splendid “English Dialect Dictionary”, edited by Professor Joseph Wright of Oxford, which is an essential supplement to all existing dictionaries of our language.]
[147] This last very curious usage, which served as a kind of stepping-stone to ‘its’, and of which another example occurs in the Geneva Version (Acts xii. 10), and three or four in Shakespeare, has been abundantly illustrated by those who have lately written on the early history of the word ‘its’; thus see Craik, On the English of Shakespeare, p. 91; Marsh, Manual of the English Language (Eng. Edit.), p. 278; Transactions of the Philological Society, vol. 1. p. 280; and my book On the Authorized Version of the New Testament, p. 59.
[148] Thus Fuller (Pisgah Sight of Palestine, vol. ii. p. 190): “Sure I am this city [the New Jerusalem] as presented by the prophet, was fairer, finer, slicker, smoother, more exact, than any fabric the earth afforded”.
[149] [In the United States ‘plunder’ is used for personal effects, baggage and luggage (Webster). This is not noticed in the E.D.D.]
[150] [But we have acquired, in some quarters, the abomination ‘an invite’.]
[151] How many words modern French has lost which are most vigorous and admirable, the absence of which can only now be supplied by a circumlocution or by some less excellent word—‘Oseur’, ‘affranchisseur’ (Amyot), ‘mépriseur’, ‘murmurateur’, ‘blandisseur’ (Bossuet), ‘abuseur’ (Rabelais), ‘désabusement’, ‘rancœur’, are all obsolete at the present. So ‘désaimer’, to cease to love (‘disamare’ in Italian), ‘guirlander’, ‘stériliser’, ‘blandissant’, ‘ordonnément’ (Montaigne), with innumerable others.
[152] [It has now attained a fair currency.]
[153] [‘Gainly’ is still used by nineteenth century writers, 1855-86; see N.E.D.]
[154] [‘Dehort’ has been used in modern times by Southey (Letters, 1825, iii, 462), and Cheyne (Isaiah, introd. 1882, xx.)—N.E.D.]
[155] [Tennyson has endeavoured to resuscitate the word—“Rathe she rose”—Lancelot and Elaine—but with no great success.]
[156] For other passages in which ‘rathest’ occurs, see the State Papers, vol. ii. pp. 92, 170.
[157] [‘Buxom’ for old English buc-sum or buch-sum, i.e. ‘bow-some’, yielding, compliant, obedient. “Sara was buxom to Abraham”, 1 Pet. iii, 6 (xiv. Cent. Version, ed. Pawes, p. 216).]
[158] [‘Lissome’ for lithe-some, like Wessex blissom for blithe-some. Tennyson has “as lissome as a hazel wand”—The Brook, l. 70.]
[159] Jamieson’s Dictionary gives a large number of words with this termination which I should suppose were always peculiar to Scotland, as ‘bangsome’, i.e. quarrelsome, ‘freaksome’, ‘drysome’, ‘grousome’ (the German ‘grausam’) [Now in common use as ‘gruesome’.]
[160] [A list of some of these reduplicated words was given by Dr. Booth in his “Analytical Dictionary of the English Language”, 1835; but a full collection of nearly six hundred was published by Mr. H. B. Wheatley in the Transactions of the Philological Society for 1865.]
[161] Many languages have groups of words formed upon the same scheme, although, singularly enough, they are altogether absent from the Anglo-Saxon. (J. Grimm, Deutsche Gramm., vol. ii. p. 976). The Spaniards have a great many very expressive words of this formation. Thus with allusion to the great struggle in which Christian Spain was engaged for so many centuries, a vaunting braggart is a ‘matamoros’, a ‘slaymoor’; he is a ‘matasiete’, a ‘slayseven’; a ‘perdonavidas’, a ‘sparelives’. Others may be added to these, as ‘azotacalles’, ‘picapleytos’, ‘saltaparedes’, ‘rompeesquinas’, ‘ganapan’, ‘cascatreguas’.
[162] [This stands for ‘peak-goose’ (peek goos in Ascham, Scholemaster, 1570, p. 54, ed. Arber), a goose that peaks or pines, used for a sickly, delicate person, and a simpleton. In Chapman, Cotgrave and others it appears as ‘pea-goose’.]
[163] The mistake is far earlier; long before Cowper wrote the sound suggested first this sense, and then this spelling. Thus Stanihurst, Description of Ireland, p. 28: “They are taken for no better than rakehels, or the devil’s black guard”; and often elsewhere.
[164] [i.e. in Joshua Sylvester’s translation of “Du Bartas, his Diuine Weekes and Workes”, 1621.]
[165] As not, however, turning on a very coarse matter, and illustrating the subject with infinite wit and humour, I might refer the Spanish scholar to the discussion between Don Quixote and his squire on the dismissal of ‘regoldar’, from the language of good society, and the substitution of ‘erutar’ in its room (Don Quixote, 4. 7. 43). In a letter of Cicero to Pætus (Fam. ix. 22) there is a subtle and interesting disquisition on forbidden words, and their philosophy.
[166] Literature of Greece, p. 5.
[167] [Notwithstanding the analogous instance of ‘abbess’ for ‘abbatess’ this account of ‘lass’ must be abandoned. It is the old English lasce (akin to Swedish lösk), meaning (1) one free or disengaged, (2) an unmarried girl (N.E.D.)]
[168] In Cotgrave’s Dictionary I find ‘praiseress’, ‘commendress’, ‘fluteress’, ‘possesseress’, ‘loveress’, but have never met them in use.
[169] On this termination see J. Grimm, Deutsche Gramm., vol. ii. p. 134; vol. iii. p. 339.
[170] [The Knightes Tale, ed. Skeat, l. 2017.]
[171] [Yes; so in N.E.D.]
[172] I am indebted for these last four to a Nominale in the National Antiquities, vol. i. p. 216.
[173] The earliest example which Richardson gives of ‘seamstress’ is from Gay, of ‘songstress’, from Thomson. I find however ‘sempstress’ in the translation of Olearius’ Voyages and Travels, 1669, p. 43. It is quite certain that as late as Ben Jonson, ‘seamster’ and ‘songster’ expressed the female seamer and singer; a single passage from his Masque of Christmas is evidence to this. One of the children of Christmas there is “Wassel, like a neat sempster and songster; her page bearing a brown bowl”. Compare a passage from Holland’s Leaguer, 1632: “A tyre-woman of phantastical ornaments, a sempster for ruffes, cuffes, smocks and waistcoats”.
[174] This was about the time of Henry VIII. In proof of the confusion which reigned on the subject in Shakespeare’s time, see his use of ‘spinster’ as—‘spinner’, the man spinning, Henry VIII, Act. i. Sc. 2; and I have no doubt that it is the same in Othello, Act i. Sc. 1. And a little later, in Howell’s Vocabulary, 1659, ‘spinner’ and ‘spinster’ are both referred to the male sex, and the barbarous ‘spinstress’ invented for the female.
[175] I have included ‘huckster’, as will be observed, in this list. I certainly cannot produce any passage in which it is employed as the female pedlar. We have only, however, to keep in mind the existence of the verb ‘to huck’, in the sense of to peddle (it is used by Bishop Andrews), and at the same time not to let the present spelling of ‘hawker’ mislead us, and we shall confidently recognize ‘hucker’ (the German ‘höker’ or ‘höcker’), in hawker, that is, the man who ‘hucks’, ‘hawks’, or peddles, as in ‘huckster’ the female who does the same. When therefore Howell and others employ ‘hucksteress’, they fall into the same barbarous excess of expression, whereof we are all guilty, when we use ‘seamstress’ and ‘songstress’.—The note stood thus in the third edition. Since that was published, I have met in the Nominale referred to p. 155, the following, “hæc auxiatrix, a hukster”. [Huckster, xiii. cent. huccster, it may be noted is an older word in the language than hukker (hucker) and to huck, both first appearing in the xiv. cent. N.E.D.]
[176] [Preserved in the surnames Baxter and Brewster. See C. W. Bardsley, English Surnames, 2nd ed. 364, 379.]
[177] Notes and Queries, No. 157.
[178] [‘Welkin’ is possibly a plural, but in Anglo-Saxon wolcen is a cloud, and the plural wolcnu.]
[179] When Wallis wrote, it was only beginning to be forgotten that ‘chick’ was the singular, and ‘chicken’ the plural: “Sunt qui dicunt in singulari ‘chicken’, et in plurali ‘chickens’”; and even now the words are in many country parts correctly employed. In Sussex, a correspondent writes, they would as soon think of saying ‘oxens’ as ‘chickens’. [‘Chicken’ is properly a singular, old English cicen, the -en being a diminutival, not a plural, suffix (as in ‘kitten’, ‘maiden’). Thus ‘chicken’ was originally ‘a little chuck’ (or cock), out of which ‘chick’ was afterwards developed.]
[180] See Chaucer’s Romaunt of the Rose, 1032, where Richesse, “an high lady of great noblesse”, is one of the persons of the allegory; and compare Rev. xviii. 17, Authorized Version. This has so entirely escaped the knowledge of Ben Jonson, English scholar as he was, that in his Grammar he cites ‘riches’ as an example of an English word wanting a singular.
“Set shallow brooks to surging seas,
An orient pearl to a white pease”.
Puttenham.
[182] [‘Eaves’ (old English efes) from which an imaginary singular ‘eave’ has sometimes been evolved, as when Tennyson speaks of a ‘cottage-eave’ (In Memoriam, civ.), and Cotgrave of ‘an house-eave’.]
[183] It is curious that despite of this protest, one of his plays has for its name, Sejanus his Fall.
[184] Even this does not startle Addison, or cause him any misgiving; on the contrary he boldly asserts (Spectator, No. 135), “The same single letter ‘s’ on many occasions does the office of a whole word, and represents the ‘his’ or ‘her’ of our forefathers”.
[185] Nothing can be better than the way in which Wallis disposes of this scheme, although less successful in showing what this ‘s’ does mean than in showing what it cannot mean (Gramm. Ling. Anglic., c. 5); Qui autem arbitrantur illud s, loco his adjunctum esse (priori scilicet parte per aphæresim abscissâ), ideoque apostrophi notam semper vel pingendam esse, vel saltem subintelligendam, omnino errant. Quamvis enim non negem quin apostrophi nota commode nonnunquam affigi possit, ut ipsius litteræ s usus distinctius, ubi opus est, percipiatur; ita tamen semper fieri debere, aut etiam ideo fieri quia vocem his innuat, omnino nego. Adjungitur enim et fœminarum nominibus propriis, et substantivis pluralibus, ubi vox his sine solœcismo locum habere non potest: atque etiam in possessivis ours, yours, theirs, hers, ubi vocem his innui nemo somniaret.
[186] See the proofs in Marsh’s Manual of the English Language, English Edit., pp. 280, 293.
[187] I cannot think that it would exceed the authority of our University Presses, if this were removed from the Prayer Books which they put forth, as certainly it is supprest by many of the clergy in the reading. Such a liberty they have already assumed with the Bible. In all earlier editions of the Authorized Version it stood at 1 Kin. xv. 24: “Nevertheless Asa his heart was perfect with the Lord”; it is “Asa’s heart” now. In the same way “Mordecai his matters” (Esth. iii. 4) has been silently changed into “Mordecai’s matters”; and in some modern editions, but not in all, “Holofernes his head” (Judith xiii. 9) into “Holofernes’ head”.
[188] In a good note on the matter, p. 6, in the Comprehensive Grammar prefixed to his Dictionary, London, 1775.
[189] See Grimm. Deut. Gramm., vol. ii. pp. 609, 944.
[190] The existence of ‘stony’—‘lapidosus’, ‘steinig’, does not make ‘stonen’—‘lapideus’, ‘steinern’, superfluous, any more than ‘earthy’ makes ‘earthen’. That part of the field in which the good seed withered so quickly (Matt. xiii. 5) was ‘stony’. The vessels which held the water that Christ turned into wine (John iii. 6) were ‘stonen’.
[191] J. Grimm (Deutsche Gramm. vol. i, p. 1040): Dass die starke form die ältere, kräftigere, innere; die schwache die spätere, gehemmtere und mehr äusserliche sey, leuchtet ein. Elsewhere, speaking generally of inflections by internal vowel change, he characterizes them as a ‘chief beauty’ (hauptschönheit) of the Teutonic languages. Marsh (Manual of the English Language, p. 233, English ed.) protests, though, as it seems to me, on no sufficient grounds, against these terms ‘strong’ and ‘weak’, as themselves fanciful and inappropriate.
[192] The entire ignorance as to the past historic evolution of the language, with which some have undertaken to write about it, is curious. Thus the author of Observations upon the English Language, without date, but published about 1730, treats all these strong præterites as of recent introduction, counting ‘knew’ to have lately expelled ‘knowed’, ‘rose’ to have acted the same part toward ‘rised’, and of course esteeming them as so many barbarous violations of the laws of the language; and concluding with the warning that “great care must be taken to prevent their increase”!!—p. 24. Cobbett does not fall into this absurdity, yet proposes in his English Grammar, that they should all be abolished as inconvenient. [Now many others are rapidly becoming obsolescent. How seldom do we hear ‘drank’, ‘shrank’, ‘sprang’, ‘stank’.]
[193] J. Grimm (Deutsche Gramm. vol. i. p. 839): “Die starke flexion stufenweise versinkt und ausstirbt, die schwache aber um sich greift”. Cf. i. 994, 1040; ii. 5; iv. 509.
[194] [See also J. C. Hare, Two Essays in Eng. Philology i. 47-56.]
[195] Thus Wallis (Gramm. Ling. Anglic., 1654): Singulari numero siquis alium compellet, vel dedignantis illud esse solet, vel familiariter blandientis. [For a good discussion of the old use of ‘thou’, see the Hares, Guesses at Truth, 1847, pp. 169-90. Even at the present day a Wessex matron has been known to resent the too familiar address of an inferior with the words, “Who bist thou a-theein’ of”? (The Spectator, 1904, Sept. 3, p. 319).]
[196] What the actual position of the compellation ‘thou’ was at that time, we may perhaps best learn from this passage in Fuller’s Church History, Dedication of Book vii.: “In opposition whereunto [i.e. to the Quaker usage] we maintain that thou from superiors to inferiors is proper, as a sign of command; from equals to equals is passable, as a note of familiarity; but from inferiors to superiors, if proceeding from ignorance, hath a smack of clownishness; if from affectation, a tone of contempt”.
[197] See on this subject of the dropping of grammatical gender, Pott, Etymologische Forschungen, part 2, pp. 404, sqq.