Augury

Was the cascade of water that made the Commons suspend its sitting an omen or augury? When I asked that in conversation last week, a friend of my husband said that ‘strictly speaking’, augury is to do with divination from the behaviour of birds. I’ve since discovered that even more strictly speaking, it isn’t.

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Matthew Lynn

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Dear old Isidore of Seville reckoned that auspices are avium aspicia, examination of birds. Augury, he says, is one kind of such divination, since auguria comes from avium garria, ‘chattering of birds’, or else augurium comes from avegerium, because aves gerunt, birds reveal.  Sir Thomas Browne, who lived 1,000 years later, warns against Isidore because, though he wrote an ‘accurate’ work on etymology, he also gave the ‘received natures’ of things he mentions, assenting to ‘common opinions and authors which have delivered them’.