Martha Hatfield, a child twelve years old in Sept. 1652, who pretended to have visions "concerning Christ, faith, and other subjects." She was a second edition of the "holy maid of Kent."
THE ETYMOLOGY OF THE WORD "AWKWARD."
Most persons who have given their attention to the formation of words, and have employed their leisure in endeavouring to trace them to their source, must have remarked that there are many words in the English language which show on the part of learned philologists, the compilers of dictionaries, either a strange deficiency in reading, or a want of acquaintance with the older tongues: or perhaps, if we must find an excuse for them, a habit of "nodding."
The word awkward is one of these. Skinner's account is as follows:
"Ineptus, ἀμφαριστερός, præposterus, ab A.-S. æþerd perversus; hoc ab æ præp. loquelari negativa privativa, et weard, versus."
Johnson follows Skinner, interpreting awkward in the same way, and with the same derivation; but unfortunately he had met with the little word awk, and, not caring to inquire into the origin of it, as it seemed so plain, he explains it as "a barbarous contraction of awkward," giving the following example from L'Estrange:
"We have heard as arrant jingling in the pulpits as the steeples; and the professors ringing as awk as the bells to give notice of the conflagration."
Now the real state of the case is, that just as forward and backward are correlatives, so also are toward and awkward. We speak of a toward child as one who is quick and ready and apt; while, by an awkward one, we mean precisely the contrary. By the former we imply a disposition or readiness to press on to the mark; by the latter, that which is averse to it, and fails of the right way. Parallel instances, though of course not corresponding in meaning, are found in the Latin adversus, reversus, inversus, aversus.
The term awkward is compounded of the two A.-S. words aweg or awæg (which is itself made up of a, from, and wæg, a way), meaning away, out: "auferendi vim habet," says Bosworth, of which we have an instance in aweg weorpan, to throw away; and weard, toward, as in hamweard, homewards. We thus have the correlatives to-weard and aweg-weard, with the same termination, but with prefixes of exactly opposite meanings. In the latter word, the prefix would naturally come to be pronounced as one syllable, and the g as naturally converted into k.