Home > The Magazine > Columnists

Saturday 4 July 2009

Subscribe now

Dare to dream and make your ultimate trip a reality

The latest culture as recommended by our staff

Liz Anderson

Liz Suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

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’.

1 | 2 Next page

More articles from: Dot Wordsworth | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment

Subscribe Now 12 issues for £12 in the UK : Gift subscriptions : Overseas subscriptions

Post this entry to: del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Another Voice

Matthew Parris

It is good that MPs have second jobs — but they should share the proceeds

Ancient & Modern

Peter Jones

Peter Jones looks into some classical apophthegms

Status Anxiety

Toby Young

‘Hyper-parenting’ may be bad — but look what happened when I tried the alternative

The Wiki Man

Rory Sutherland

A fortnightly column on technology and the web

Standing Room

Sarah Standing

When I was young, being given ‘options’ was a treat.

Insanity has always been integral to New Labour

Martin Bright

Martin Bright says that the party labels its enemies as ‘mad’ for Freudian reasons: ‘projecting’ its own collective and individual mental disorders upon foes and rebels alike

All the stalkers you see are desperate marketing men

Catherine Blyth

This will be the Year of the Nosy Parker, says Catherine Blyth: researchers chasing dwindling custom desperate to find out what is going on inside our heads