Your body is now wrapt in chest,
I pray to God to give your soul good rest.
Hawes, Pastime of Pleasure, cap. 14.
Chimney. This, which means now the gorge or vent of a furnace or fire, was once in frequent use for the furnace itself: in this more true to its origin; being derived from the Greek κάμινος, a furnace, as it passed into the Latin ‘caminus,’ whence the Late Latin caminata, a room with a stove, the French ‘cheminée.’ The fact that it is the ‘chimney,’ in the modern use of the word, which, creating a draught, alone gives activity or fierceness to the flame, probably explains the present limitation of the meaning of the word. In Scotland ‘chimney’ still is, or lately was, ‘the grate, or iron frame that holds the fire’ (Scoticisms, Edinburgh, 1787).
And hise feet [were] lijk to latoun as in a brennynge chymney.—Rev. i. 15. Wiclif.
The Son of Man shall send his angels, and shall gather all hindrances out of his kingdom and all that worketh unlawfulness, and shall cast them into the chimney of fire.—Matt. xiii. 50. Sir John Cheke.
Chivalry. It is a striking evidence of the extent to which in the feudal times the men-at-arms, the mounted knights, were esteemed as the army, while the footmen were regarded as little better than a supernumerary rabble,—another record of this contempt probably surviving at the other end in the word ‘infantry,’—that ‘chivalry,’ which of course is but a doublet of ‘cavalry,’ could once be used as convertible with army. It needed more than one Agincourt to teach that this was so no longer. ‘Knighthood’ in like manner is continually used by Wiclif as a rendering of ‘exercitus;’ thus Gen. xxi. 33.
Abymalach forsothe aroos, and Phicol, the prince of his chyvalrye [princeps exercitûs ejus, Vulg.], and turneden ayen into the loond of Palestynes.—Gen. xxi. 33. Wiclif.
Sobach, the prynce of chyvalrye [principem militiæ].—2 Kings x. 18. Wiclif.
Chouse. The history of the introduction of this word into the popular, or at all events the schoolboy, language of England, and the quarter from whence derived, are now sufficiently well known. A ‘chiaus,’ or interpreter, attached to the Turkish Embassy, in 1609 succeeded in defrauding the Turkish and Persian merchants resident in England of 4,000l. From the vast dimensions of the fraud, vast, that is, as men counted fraudulent vastness then, and the notoriety it acquired, a ‘chiaus’ (presently spelt ‘chouse’ to look more English) became equivalent to a swindler, and somewhat later to the act of swindling.[11] It is curious that a correspondent of Skinner (Etymologicon, 1671), though quite ignorant of this story, suggests a connexion between ‘chouse’ and the Turkish ‘chiaus.’ The quotation from Ben Jonson gives us the word in its passage from the old meaning to the new; while the ‘errant chouse’ in Butler’s Hudibras, iii. 1, 1249, is rather the cheated than the cheater.