A few more forgotten words

NOVILUNAR: Pertaining to the new moon; [from] Latin novus, new, and luna, the moon.
-Rev. John Boag's Imperial Lexicon, c. 1850

Yesterday was the first new moon of 2006.

Customs of the Year's First New Moon
Look at the first new moon of the year through a silk handkerchief which has never been washed. As many moons as you see throughthe handkerchief(the threads multiplying the vision) so many years will pass ere you are married. But it is unlucky to see the new moonthrough a window pane....At the first appearance of the first new moon of the year, go out in the evening, standing over spars of a gate or stile, and looking on the moon, repeat:

All hail to the moon, all hail to thee,
I prythee, good moon, reveal to me
This night who my husband shall be.

You will dream that night of your future husband. This rite is practised too in Sussex, where they say alsothat if you can catch a falling leaf you will hae 12 months of happiness.

-William Henderson's Folk-lore of the Northern Counties of England, 1879.

LUNTING: Walking and smoking a pipe.

-John Mactaggart's Scottish Gallovidian Encylopedia, 1824

CALIFORNIA WIDOW: A married woman whose husband is away from her for any extended period; a "grass widow" in the least offensive sense of that term. The expression dates from the period of the California "gold fever," when so many men went West, leaving their wives and families behind them.

-John Farmer's Americanisms Old and New, 1889

Gold Fever

On January 24, 1848, gold was found on a site along the American River, near Sacramento, where the emigrant entrepreneur Johann Sutter was building a sawmill. This discovery would seem to have secured the financial futureof the German-born Sutter, who also owned a store, several other buildings and a sizeable ranch nearby. Instead, it prompted the exodus of many of his employees, who eagerly traded in their mundane existencefor the seeming promise of riches in the first wave of what became the California Gold Rush. Sutter's various operations were further disrupted by the hordes of footloose fortune-seekers who swarmed over his lands. He was forced to file bankruptcy in 1852 and later moved to the East.