When she came out, she looked as pale and as bleak as one that were laid out dead.—Foxe, Book of Martyrs; The Escape of Agnes Wardall.
And as I looked forth, I beheld a pale horse, whom I took for the universal synagogue of hypocrites, pale as men without health, and bleak as men without that fresh spirit of life which is in Christ Jesus.—Bale, The Image of Both Churches, P. S. p. 321.
Blunderbuss. In the 17th and 18th centuries a man who blunders in his work, does it in a boisterous violent way; transferred from the name given to a short, wide-mouthed, noisy gun. [This word for a gun is due to the Dutch donderbus, i.e. thunder-gun, perverted in form from sense association with blunder, perhaps with allusion to its random, casual firing.]
We could now wish we had a discreet and intelligent adversary, and not such a hare-brained blunderbuss as you, to deal with.—Milton, A Defence of the People of England, Preface.
Jacob, the scourge of grammar, mark with awe,
Nor less revere him, blunderbuss of law.
Pope, Dunciad, b. iii. 150.
| Boistous, | } |
| Boisterous. |
The sense of noisy, turbulent, blustering, is a later superaddition on ‘boisterous,’ or ‘boistous,’ as was its earlier form. Of old it meant no more than rude, rough, strong, uncompliant; thus the ‘boisterous wind’ of Matt. xiv. 30, is simply a violent wind, ἄνεμος ἰσχυρός in the original.
No man putteth a clout of buystous clothe [panni rudis, Vulg.] into an elde clothing.—Matt. ix. 16. Wiclif.