[152] [It has now attained a fair currency.]
[153] [‘Gainly’ is still used by nineteenth century writers, 1855-86; see N.E.D.]
[154] [‘Dehort’ has been used in modern times by Southey (Letters, 1825, iii, 462), and Cheyne (Isaiah, introd. 1882, xx.)—N.E.D.]
[155] [Tennyson has endeavoured to resuscitate the word—“Rathe she rose”—Lancelot and Elaine—but with no great success.]
[156] For other passages in which ‘rathest’ occurs, see the State Papers, vol. ii. pp. 92, 170.
[157] [‘Buxom’ for old English buc-sum or buch-sum, i.e. ‘bow-some’, yielding, compliant, obedient. “Sara was buxom to Abraham”, 1 Pet. iii, 6 (xiv. Cent. Version, ed. Pawes, p. 216).]
[158] [‘Lissome’ for lithe-some, like Wessex blissom for blithe-some. Tennyson has “as lissome as a hazel wand”—The Brook, l. 70.]
[159] Jamieson’s Dictionary gives a large number of words with this termination which I should suppose were always peculiar to Scotland, as ‘bangsome’, i.e. quarrelsome, ‘freaksome’, ‘drysome’, ‘grousome’ (the German ‘grausam’) [Now in common use as ‘gruesome’.]
[160] [A list of some of these reduplicated words was given by Dr. Booth in his “Analytical Dictionary of the English Language”, 1835; but a full collection of nearly six hundred was published by Mr. H. B. Wheatley in the Transactions of the Philological Society for 1865.]
[161] Many languages have groups of words formed upon the same scheme, although, singularly enough, they are altogether absent from the Anglo-Saxon. (J. Grimm, Deutsche Gramm., vol. ii. p. 976). The Spaniards have a great many very expressive words of this formation. Thus with allusion to the great struggle in which Christian Spain was engaged for so many centuries, a vaunting braggart is a ‘matamoros’, a ‘slaymoor’; he is a ‘matasiete’, a ‘slayseven’; a ‘perdonavidas’, a ‘sparelives’. Others may be added to these, as ‘azotacalles’, ‘picapleytos’, ‘saltaparedes’, ‘rompeesquinas’, ‘ganapan’, ‘cascatreguas’.