Firmament. We now use ‘firmament’ only for that portion of the sky on all sides visible above the horizon, having gotten this application of the word from the Vulgate (Gen. i. 6), or at any rate from the Church Latin (‘firmamentum cæleste,’ Tertullian, De Bapt. 3), as that had derived it from the Septuagint. This by στερέωμα had sought to express the firmness and stability of the sky-tent, which phenomenally (and Scripture for the most part speaks phenomenally) is drawn over the earth; and to reproduce the force of the original Hebrew word,—in which, however, there is rather the notion of expansion than of firmness (see H. More, Defence of Cabbala, p. 60). But besides this use of ‘firmament,’ totally strange to the classical ‘firmamentum,’ being derived to us from the ecclesiastical employment of the word, there is also an occasional use of it by the scholarly writers of the seventeenth century in the original classical sense, as that which makes strong or confirms.
I thought it good to make a strong head or bank to rule and guide the course of the waters; by setting down this position or firmament, namely, that all knowledge is to be limited by religion, and to be referred to use and action.—Bacon, Of the Interpretation of Nature.
Religion is the ligature of all communities, and the firmament of laws.—Bishop Taylor, Ductor Dubitantium, iii. 3, 8.
Flicker. This, with its variant ‘flacker,’ can only be used now of the wavering motion of flames; but it was not so once.
But being made a swan,
With snowy feathers in the air to flicker he began.
Golding, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, b. vii.
And the Cherubins flackered with their wings, and lift themselves up from the earth.—Ezek. x. 19. Coverdale.
Flirt. This, or ‘flurt,’ as it used to be spelt, is a slightly contracted form of the French ‘fleureter,’ from ‘fleur,’ a flower, to flirt meaning to go as a bee from flower to flower, daintily sipping the sweets of one flower, and then passing on to another (see Cotgrave). At the same time much graver charges came to be often implied in the word than are implied at the present. See on it A. S. Palmer’s Leaves from a Word-hunter’s Note Book, pp. 33-40.
For why may not the mother be naught, a peevish, drunken flurt, a waspish choleric slut, a crazed piece, a fool, as soon as the nurse?—Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, part i. sect. 2.