Dog-cheap.—This has nothing to do with dogs. The first syllabic is god = good transposed, and the second the ch-p in chapman ( = merchant) cheap, and Eastcheap. In Sir J. Mandeville, we find god-kepe = good bargain.
Sky-larking.—Nothing to do with larks of any sort; still less the particular species, alauda arvensis. The word improperly spelt l-a-r-k, and banished to the slang regions of the English language, is the Anglo-Saxon lác = game, or sport; wherein the a is sounded as in father (not as in farther). Lek = game, in the present Scandinavian languages.
Zachary Macaulay = Zumalacarregui; Billy Ruffian = Bellerophon; Sir Roger Dowlas = Surajah Dowlah, although so limited to the common soldiers and sailors, who first used them, as to be exploded vulgarisms rather than integral parts of the language, are examples of the same tendency towards the irregular accommodation of misunderstood foreign terms.
Birdbolt.—An incorrect name for the gadus lota, or eel-pout, and a transformation of barbote.
Whistle-fish.—The same for gadus mustela, or weasel-fish.
Liquorice = glycyrrhiza.
Wormwood = weremuth, is an instance of a word from the same language, in an antiquated shape, being equally transformed with a word of really foreign origin.
[§ 89]. Sometimes the transformation of the name has engendered a change in the object to which it applies, or, at least, has evolved new ideas in connection with it. How easy for a person who used the words beef-eater,
sparrow-grass, or Jerusalem, to believe that the officers designated by the former either eat or used to eat more beef than any other people, that the second word was the name for a grass or herb of which sparrows were fond; and that Jerusalem artichokes came from Palestine.
What has just been supposed has sometimes a real occurrence. To account for the name of Shotover-hill, I have heard that Little John shot over it. Here the confusion, in order to set itself right, breeds a fiction. Again, in chess, the piece now called the queen, was originally the elephant. This was in Persian, ferz. In French it became vierge, which, in time, came to be mistaken for a derivative, and virgo = the virgin, the lady, the queen.