Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 2.djvu/347

 io" s. ii. OCT. s, 1904.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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much puzzled on hearing of " a oatet place," and did not find out for some time after- wards that oatet was the way of pronouncing altered. Thus smoulder has become smother (with long o as in so), as " the fire smothers." Verbs usually keep the termination in -en, as liven* singen, ivanten. Maken, with short a, is softened into main, as when it is said of untidy boys that "they main some work an' a'." Archaic forms survive in many words, as feld, field, or feldina, lying in a field, as when oats have had "too much folding." Green is pronounced grane, wheel is whale, feed is fade, and so on. Ten is pronounced tane ; a road is a rade, as to " go the gain rade." Light, not heavy, is leyt. A measure is a mizzer ; the miners had a mizzering-day. The older people say nawcht for night, coming near to the German Nacht. In most words the guttural sound of ch is rare, though it never becomes sh. It is sounded like the ch in church. I have a book, printed in 1726, which belonged to an ancestress of mine who was born and lived in the Peak. In it she has written :

When upon a thought of whether Or not your burn'd, The nicter upon the point The more easealy your turn'd.

She was sister of Dr. Charles Balguy, who in 1741 translated the 'Decameron,' and in 1733 she ran away to be married. Now if nigher could be pronounced nicter at this period, one may judge how strong the guttural ch must have been. A plant is sometimes spoken of as feminine, as " she wa' a little bit of a plant last year." Rabbit is pronounced rappit ; a rappit-howt is a rabbit's burrow.

Having now been able to consult the 'New English Dictionary ' and the ' English Dialect Dictionary,' I am not so likely to mention words which are recorded in them, though I ought to say that two sections of the latter work were missing from the library in which I consulted it. To turn again to farming words, the first furrow made in ploughing is called the neivun, and the second the by. Dr. Sweet in his 'A.-S. Dictionary' marks niwung, a rudiment, as a word "formed in slavish imitation of Latin." It may be a good Eng- lish word for all that. When the wheat crop is backward in spring, and turns yellow from want of moisture, they say that it flecks. I am told that " lay ground generally flecks," and that ' * the crop begins a-fleckin' when it is short of manure." "16 never flecks," they say, "but when it is two or three inches high." The time when the crop flecks is in May, and these lines are said :

He that looks at his corn in May Goes weeping away ; He that looks again in June Goes home singing a merry tune. The word seems to be the M.E. flecchen, from Lat. flectere, to turn. When stalks of wheat have been blown across each other by the wind, so that it is not easy to mow them, they are said to be crawdelt. This seems to be identical with the dialectal croodle, to cower down, but the word is here used in another and perhaps older sense. It means entangled. I heard two men bargaining about the cost of mowing a hayfielo, when one of them said he would do it, including. th' hackins, for five shillings. The hacking- ground is the ditch or steep bank at the border of a field, which cannot be mown by the machine or even cut by the scythe in the usual way. The process of cutting the grass on the hacking-ground is called dodging, and the man who does the work is said not to mow it, but to dodge it. This may be the oldest sense of that obscure word, and it seems that hacking and dodging have here the same meaning. If you watch a man as he is dodging you will see that the work is not easy to do, for, to say nothing of the steep bank, a fallen stone here or a bush there impedes the scythe. Animals are said to trashel or trassel, i.e., trample on, the grass. To fettle often means to fetch, as to " fettle oats out of a field." In the 'E.D.D.' the word is derived from M.E. fetlen, to make ready. It is more likely to be the frequentative of the M.E. feten, to fetch. When they fettle the dirt out of the nooks of houses before the wakes they fetch it out. Where the under- lying rocks are of limestone the fields are waterless, so that the cattle have to drink from artificial dawms or domes. These are- shaped like a basin or an inverted bell; they are perfectly round, and are from ten to twenty feet in diameter. They are lined with stone and puddled with clay. They are also called meres. Shullings are groats : " some calls 'em oats, an' some calls 'em shullins." " Groats," I was told, " are shulled oats." To shull is to shed: "cows shull their hair about March." Endaways means always, as " fowls in a garden are tiresome endaways." The field scabious (Scabiosa arvensis) is called odod, the first o being sounded as in so.

When the moon is surrounded by a halo of mist or cloud they say that "the moon wades- in weather," and that rain is coming. This phrase is often used, and it never varies in form, though I have once heard it applied to the sun, as " the sun wades in weather." A similar expression occurs in the A.-S. poem on 'The right at Finnesburg': "nuscyneS