The folk and their wordlore Author:Abram Smythe Palmer Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III POPULAR ETYMOLOGIES " As there is in the human mind a craving after etymology, a wish to find out, by fair means or foul, why such a thing shou... more »ld be called by such a name, it happens constantly that words are still further changed in order to make them intelligible once more; or, when two originally distinct words have actually run into one, some explanation is required and readily furnished, in order to remove the difficulty." l Peculiarly exposed to the attentions of popular etymology are those words which court its attack by wearing a foreign physiognomy. Such are long and learned words in -osity and -ation of classical origin; scientific and technical terms ; the names of diseases, and the botanical names of flowers. Under the former head might be ranged Miss Katies, Davie Dean's version of " mosquitoes " (Heart of Midlothian, ch. xviii.), otherwise Miss Kitties; Sam Weller's haveandis-carcass for habeas corpus; Costard's " ad dunghill, at the fingers' ends " (Love's Labour Lost, v. i. 80) for ad unguem; and the soldier's Corporal Forbes for cholera morbus. The extraordinary verbal complications thatdiseases undergo when they attack the poor are well known to every parson and district- visitor. They have been known to suffer from hairy sipples, green asthma and delicious beamends, when more educated persons have only had erysipelas, tenesmus and delirium tremens. So with them bronchitis becomes brown-crisis, or brown- typhus, or brown-creatures; pneumonia often changes into new ammonia; varicose veins become, naturally enough, very coarse veins, or, less probably, haricot veins ; information of the lungs is as common as inflammation. Amongst internal maladies have been reported a porpoise and a dissenter, which are supposed to have been nothing worse than a p...« less