forgotten English words

It has been a long time since I've shared with you a sampling of forgotten English words pulled from the pages of my calendar. So here are some that caught my eye tonight.


doctor of skill: a physician.
-James Halliwell's Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, 1855.

On this date in 1895, the German physicist Wilhelm Konrad von Rontgen (1845-1923) accidentally discovered the electromagnetic rays he called X-rays, also initially known as Roentgen rays. A notion cropped up soon after their medical imaging application came into use that X-rays could project anatomical drawings directly into students' minds. It was also suggested that unscrupulous doctors used them to examine women through their clothes. In the early 1900's, bogus X-ray glasses were developed for this purpose, and the New Jersey legislature considered banning them. The glasses prompted a London clothing shop to sell lead- lined, X-ray-resistant women's undergarments. Elisabeth Celnart's The Gentleman and Lady's Book of Politeness (1855) offered the following bit of medical etiquette: "Everyone knows with what delicate precautions a physician ought to speak before the patient and... In what guarded terms he should at last disclose to them a fatal termination... Everybody knows also that however poignant may be the grief of patients, they ought never to let it appear in their conversations with the physician that they regard him as the cause of their affliction."


spelk: a splinter.
-Rev. John Boag's Imperial Lexicon, c. 1850.

The celebration of Crouchmas commemorates the discovery of the "True Cross" in AD 323. The holiday was observed from 1389-1573. Historians estimate that by the Reniassance, several tons of splinters supposedly from the cross on which Jesus was crucified had been distributed and enshrined across Europe. Christian forces going into battle often had bits of the Cross on hand as good luck charms and morale boosters. One common belief was that the Cross had been made from an elder tree, and so anyone who burned that wood for heat would suffer misfortune. Another belief was that quaking aspen leaves tremble because that tree had been used to make the Cross.

irrisory: addicted to laughing or sneezing.
-Daniel Lyons's Dictionary of the English Language, 1857.

heaven defend: Heaven forbid; Othello.
-Rev. Alexander Dyce's Glossary to the Works of Shakespeare, 1902.

beef-witted: having an inactive brain, thought to be from eating too much [beef].
-John Phin's Shakespeare Cyclopaedia and Glossary, 1902.

be blowed: You be blowed, or you go and be blowed, a vulgar form of refusal or dismissal, probably has a still coarser allusion underlying it, that of being "fly-blown," or rotting- that is, dying.
-A. Wallace's Popular Sayings Dissected, 1855.

Bostonian: It was indeed by the name of Bostonians that all Americans were known in France... Coffee houses took that name, and a game invented at that time, played with cards was called Boston, and is to this day [1830] exceedingly fashionable at Paris by that appellation.
-Samuel Breck's Recollections [and] Passages from His Notebooks, 1877.