Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore. Elizabeth Mary Wright
and berry, because eaten with young geese as sauce].’ Modern philologists, however, scorn this simple solution, and referring us to a French original, they say gooseberry is a corruption of *groise-berry, or *grose-berry. In Marshall’s Rural Economy of Yorkshire (1796) we find the form grossberry, and this gross- is the same as the element gros- in French groseille, a gooseberry. The Scotch form is groset. The pronunciation cowcumber (gen. dial. use in Sc. Irel. Eng.) for cucumber was early recognized as corrupt. A paragraph in a book called The English Physitian Enlarged (seventeenth century) is entitled: ‘Cucumers, or (according to the pronuntiation of the Vulgar) cowcumbers.’ Other examples from various dialects are: ash-falt for asphalt; brown-kitus, brown-titus, brown-typhus for bronchitis; chiny oysters (Wil.) for China asters; Polly Andrews (Glo. Wil.) for polyanthus; rosydendrum (Chs.) for rhododendron; curly-flower (Lin.) for cauliflower; fair-maid (Cor.) for fumade, fumadoe, a cured (formerly smoked) pilchard, Sp. fumado, smoked; hairy-sipples for erysipelas; the janders (many dials.) for jaundice; a-kingbow, king-bow (Som.), for akimbo; pockmanteau (Sc. Nhb. Lin.) for portmanteau, but the substitution of pock- for port-is probably due to association of meaning with pock, a bag, sack, or wallet; airy-mouse, hairy-mouse, raw-mouse (Hmp. I.W. Wil.), rye-mouse (Glo. Wil.), for rear-mouse, the bat, O.E. hrēre-mūs; screwmatic (War. Nrf.) for rheumatic; tooth-and-egg (Nhb. Lan. Der. Not. Lin.) for tutenag, an alloy of copper, zinc, and nickel. Years ago—years and years and donkey’s ears, as the saying is—when motor-cars were yet unborn, and when even tram-cars were unknown to country children, I can remember my father trying to explain to the little carol-singers at Christmastime, that they had introduced a corrupt reading into the text of their carol, when they sang:
The moon and the stars
Stopped their fiery ears,
And listened while Gabriel spoke.
‘The rustic Etymologer
Now and then we meet with a deliberate attempt on the part of dialect speakers themselves to explain the mysteries of word-derivation. The writer of a book entitled The Folk and their Word-Lore tells of ‘the rustic etymologer’ who explained that the reason why partridges are so called is ‘because … they love to lie between the furrows of ploughed land, and so part the ridges’. Further, he tells us that: ‘a cottager lamenting that one of a litter of puppies had a hare-lip (divided like that of the hare), or, as she pronounced it, air-lip, explained that it was so called because it admitted the air through the cleft, which prevented the little creature sucking properly.’ But these are not the folk who are responsible for the absurd popular etymology which associates the modern colloquial and slang use of the word lark with the O.E. lāc sb., joyous activity, sport, lācan vb., to play, and with the dialect lake (Sc. Nhb. Dur. Cum. Wm. Yks. Lan. Chs. Der. Not. Lin. Glo.), to play, sport, amuse oneself. This error is the invention of non-philological people who speak standard English. It could not have been propounded by any one who uses the word lake, nor by any one who understands English philology. O.E. lācan would have given in standard English, and in most of the above-mentioned dialects, a form loke, and under no circumstances could it have acquired the r. Apparently to lark is a verb made from the substantive lark, the bird. O.E. lācan has died out, but its Scandinavian cognate O.N. leika, to play, sport, remains in the dialect form lake.
For mere distortion and mispronunciation a good illustration is the variety of dialect shapes which the word breakfast assumes, such as: bracksus, brecksus, brockwist, buckwhist, &c. A remark often heard in Ireland is: Well, I have the price av me supper now, an’ God is good for the brukwust. Dacious (Lin. Som.), impudent, rude, is an aphetic form of audacious, e.g. Of all th’daacious lads I iver seed oor Sarah’s Bill’s th’daaciousest. Demic (Yks. Not. Lin.), the potato-disease, is an aphetic form of epidemic; similarly pisle (Yks.), a narration of any kind, is an aphetic form of epistle. Obstropolous, a corruption of obstreperous, and obligate for oblige, are in general dialect use in Scotland, Ireland, and England.
CHAPTER V
ARCHAIC LITERARY WORDS IN THE DIALECTS
The linguistic importance of the dialect-vocabulary for the study of our English language and literature in its earlier periods cannot be over-estimated, for herein is preserved a wealth of historical words familiar to us in our older literature, but lost to our standard speech. Numbers of words used by Chaucer and the early Middle English poets, by Shakespeare, and by the translators of the Bible, which are now treated as archaisms to be explained in footnotes and appendices to the text, still live and move and have their being among our rural population to-day. Take for illustration this line from the Middle English alliterative poem, Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight (l. 2003):
Þe snawe snitered ful snart, þat snayped þe wylde.
‘Attercop’ and ‘Bairn’
The three principal words have disappeared from the literary language, and to give an exact rendering of these two brief sentences we should have to paraphrase them something like this: The snow, full keenly cold, blew on the biting blast, which pinched the deer with frost. But if we turn to the dialects, there we find all three: snitter (Sh.I. Yks.), to snow, sb. a biting blast; snar, snarry (Cum. Yks.), cold, piercing; snape (n.Cy. Dur. Lakel. Cum. Yks. Lan. Chs. Stf. Der. Lin. War. Shr.), to check, restrain, &c. The difference between snart and snar is accounted for by the fact that it is a Norse word. An adjective in Norse takes a t in the neuter, and this t not being recognized on these shores as an inflexional ending was sometimes adopted into English as if it belonged to the stem of the word, as for example in the literary words scant, want, athwart, cp. Icel. snarr, swift, keen, neut. snart. Many a delightful old word which ran away from a public career a century or two ago, and left no address, may thus be discovered in its country retreat, hale and hearty yet, though hoary with age. It is hard to make a choice among so many, especially where the chosen must be few, but the following may perhaps serve as representatives of the remainder: attercop (Sc. Irel. Nhb. Cum. Wm. Yks. Lan. Chs. Wil.), a spider. This was in Old English attorcoppe, a spider, from ātor, attor, poison, and coppe, which probably means head, the old idea being that spiders were poisonous insects. In the M.E. poem The Owl and the Nightingale (c. 1225), the owl taunts the nightingale with eating ‘nothing but attercops, and foul flies, and worms’. Wyclif (1382) has: ‘The eiren [eggs] of edderes thei tobreeken, and the webbis of an attercop thei wouen,’ Isaiah lix. 5. Bairn or barn (Sc. Irel. and all the n. counties to Chs. Der. Lin.), a child, O.E. bearn, a child, a son or daughter, M.E. barn or bern. Owing to its use among educated Scotch people, this word has gained some footing in our colloquial speech, and it has always had a place in poetical diction, but its real stronghold is Scotland and the North. Perhaps no other word breathes such a spirit of human love and tenderness as this does. How infinitely superior is the barns to our commonplace the kids; or a bit bairn, or bairnie to that objectionable term a kiddie! Pillow-bere (Irel. n.Cy. Yks. Chs. Der. Lin. Shr. e.An. Ken. Sus. Som. Cor.), a pillow-case. We read of Chaucer’s ‘gentil Pardoner’ that:
… in his male he hadde a pilwebeer,
Which that, he seide, was oure lady veyl.
Prologue, ll. 694, 695.
The word also occurs in several of the wills published in Wells Wills, by F. W. Weaver, 1890, as, for instance, in that of Juliane Webbe, of Swainswick, dated Jan. 11, 1533: ‘Julian Woodman vj shepe, a cowe &c. a salteseller, a knede cover, a stand, my ijⁿᵈ apparell of my body, a flockebed &c. ij pelowberys.’ Char, or chare (many dials.), an errand, a turn of work, an odd job, O.E. cerr, a turn, temporis spatium. We retain the word in the compound charwoman, and in a disguised form in ajar, which literally means on the turn. An old