[14] This word, which looks like an unsuccessful palindrome, belongs to the language of medieval magic. It seems to be artificially elaborated from ἀβραξάς, a word of Persian origin used by a sect of Greek gnostics. Its letters make up the magic number 365, supposed to represent the number of spirits subject to the supreme being.
[15] In coining vril Lytton probably had in mind Lat. vis, vires, power, or the adjective virilis.
CHAPTER II
WANDERINGS OF WORDS
In assigning to a word a foreign origin, it is necessary to show how contact between the two languages has taken place, or the particular reasons which have brought about the borrowing. A Chinese word cannot suddenly make its appearance in Anglo-Saxon, though it may quite well do so in modern English. No nautical terms have reached us from the coast of Bohemia (Winter's Tale, iii. 3), nor is the vocabulary of the wine trade enriched by Icelandic words. Although we have words from all the languages of Europe, our direct borrowings from some of them have been small. The majority of High German words in English have passed through Old French, and we have taken little from modern German. On the other hand, commerce has introduced a great many words from the old Low German dialects of the North Sea and the Baltic.
The Dutch[16] element in English supplies a useful object lesson on the way in which the borrowing of words naturally takes place. As a great naval power, the Dutch have contributed to our nautical vocabulary a number of words, many of which are easily recognised as near relations; such are boom (beam), skipper (shipper), orlop (over leap), the name given to a deck which "over-runs" the ship's hold. Yacht, properly a "hunting" ship, is cognate with Ger. Jagd, hunting, but has no English kin. Hexham has jaght, "zee-roovers schip, pinace, or pirats ship." The modern Dutch spelling is jacht. We should expect to find art terms from the country of Hobbema, Rubens, Vandyke, etc. See easel (p. [39]), etch (p. [133]), lay-figure (p. [166]), sketch (p. [22]). Landscape, earlier landskip, has the suffix which in English would be -ship. In the 16th century Camden speaks of "a landskip, as they call it." The Low Countries were for two centuries the cock-pit of Europe, and many military terms were brought back to England by Dugald Dalgetty and the armies which "swore terribly in Flanders." Such are cashier (p. [157]), forlorn hope (p. [129]), tattoo (p. [162]). Other interesting military words are leaguer (lair), recently re-introduced from South Africa as laager, and furlough. The latter word, formerly pronounced to rime with cough, is from Du. verlof (for leave); cf. archaic Ger. Verlaub, now replaced by Urlaub. Knapsack,[17] a food sack, comes from colloquial Du. knap, food, or what the Notts colliers call snap. We also find it called a snapsack. Both knap and snap contain the idea of "crunching"—
"I would she (Report) were as lying a gossip in that as ever knapped ginger."
(Merchant of Venice, iii. 1.)