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Mind your language

Dot Wordsworth

Wednesday, 11th April 2007

I’ve been reading with unexpected pleasure The First English Dictionary (Bodleian, £12.99), an edition of a list of 2,500 ‘hard usual English words’ compiled by Robert Cawdrey and published in 1604.

He intended his book for ‘Ladies, Gentlewomen or any other unskilful persons’. The result is uneven. It would have been kinder of him not to give the meaning of carminate as ‘to card wool’, for even in his day it meant ‘to cause to break wind’ (the etymological reason being that medicine combed out wind as you’d comb wool). Aldous Huxley makes a joke in Crome Yellow of a poet who writes a line ‘And passion carminative as wine’, unaware of the true meaning, but that wasn’t Cawdrey’s fault.

Anyway, if those unskilful persons had not have heard that cider was a ‘drink made of apples’, surely they’d have learnt in church that cherubin is an ‘order of angels’, or heard that a cowslip was a ‘hearbe’.

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