Kecksies. These are the dry, hollow stalks of hemlock. In “Henry V.” (v. 2) Burgundy makes use of the word:
“and nothing teems,
But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs,
Losing both beauty and utility.”
It has been suggested[515] that kecksies may be a mistaken form of the plural kex; and that kex may have been formed from keck, something so dry that the eater would keck at it, or be unable to swallow it. The word is probably derived from the Welsh “cecys,” which is applied to several plants of the umbelliferous kind. Dr. Prior,[516] however, says that kecksies is from an old English word keek, or kike, retained in the northern counties in the sense of “peep” or “spy.”
Knotgrass.[517] The allusion to this plant in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (iii. 2)—
“Get you gone, you dwarf!
You minimus, of hindering knot-grass made;
You bead, you acorn!”—
refers to its supposed power of hindering the growth of any child or animal, when taken in an infusion, a notion alluded to by Beaumont and Fletcher (“Coxcombe,” ii. 2):
“We want a boy extremely for this function,
Kept under for a year with milk and knot-grass.”
In “The Knight of the Burning Pestle” (ii. 2) we read: “The child’s a fatherless child, and say they should put him into a strait pair of gaskins, ’twere worse than knot-grass; he would never grow after it.”
Lady-smocks. This plant is so called from the resemblance of its white flowers to little smocks hung out to dry (“Love’s Labour’s Lost,” v. 2), as they used to be at that season of the year especially
“When daisies pied, and violets blue,
And lady-smocks all silver white,
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue,
Do paint the meadows with delight.
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When shepherds pipe on oaten straws,
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And maidens bleach their summer smocks.”