Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 2.djvu/541

. ii. DEC. MO*.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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who died after a fall from his horse in 1698, is described as "honestis parentibus ortus," sprung from honest parents. And again, according to the * Dictionary of National Biography,' the Dean's son, a clergyman named Charles, who was born in 1666, died in 1735, and cannot therefore be identified with the Bradford worthy thirty-seven years earlier. It is, of course, just possible that the Dean called two of his sons Charles. Such examples do sometimes occur. But this does not help us much. According to the but they were Charles and Knightly. They were both in orders and held benefices in the Church of England. But the biographer says the elder was born fifteen and the younger twenty-two years after their father's death, and makes no attempt to account for so unusual an occurrence. W. J. L.
 * Dictionary,' the Dean had two sons, indeed,

GOING SHOPPING. It is gratifying to find that this enthralling amusement was not unknown to our ancestors, as may be gathered from an extract from an extremely quaint tract printed in London in 1764, entitled "A

Seasonable Alarm to the City of London

by Zachary Zeal, Gentleman." This satirical production deals with the pulling down of the tradesmen's signs and the paving of the streets with Scotch pebbles, and is a direct ancestor of a recent production entitled * The Unspeakable Scot.' On p. 13 occurs the fol- lowing note :

" Ladies are said to go a Shoping when, in the Forenoon, sick of themselves. They order the Coach, and driving from Shop to Shop, without the slightest intention of purchasing anything, they pester the Tradesman, by requiring him to shew them his Goods, at a great Expence of Time and Trouble For which, after their Departure, they sometimes receive not unmerited Benedictions."

J. ELIOT HODGKIN.

"NABOB." Why do our dictionaries, such as Ogilvie, and even the accurate * Hobson- Jobson,' condemn this as a "corruption"? The fact is that the Europeans in India, in this as in other cases, followed only too faith- fully the sounds they heard from natives. It is one of the peculiarities of our Aryan brothers in India that they mix up the sounds of l t; ?>, and w. The ordinary Hindi and Bengali speakers pronounce them all as //. One hears, for instance, Jieda for Veda, Bitbnu for Vishnu. AWs- for the Vaisya or trading caste. Similarly, Fallon, iii his Hindustani dictionary, 1879, the only one which marks the pronunciation, gives the actual living forms of the term under dis- cussion as "T'nv7A, imw'n'i; illiterate nafal/i." In short, our nabob is not a corruption of the

Persian navfib, but a replica of the vulgar Hindustani nabdb, which in turn is no cor- ruption, but a normal development.

JAS. PLATT, Jun.

OAKHAM CASTLE AND ITS HORSESHOES. (See 8 th S. xii. 226 ; 9 th S. v. 130 ; x. 357.) As an additional note on this subject I send the following cutting from the Daily Mail of 29 July:

" According to a very ancient custom, every peer passing through Oakham has to leave a horseshoe or its equivalent to be placed in the castle. The custodian has this week received horseshoes from the Duke of Westminster, the Marquis of London- derry. Earl Cadogan, the Earl of Mar and Kellie, Lord Leconfield, and Lord Barnard. There are 154 shoes now on the castle wall, including those given by the King, the Queen, and the Duke of Con- naught."

JOHN T. PAGE.

West Haddon, Northamptonshire.

"SARUM." It may be worth noting that the delusion that Sar, with a stroke through the tail of the r, stands for Saruni, can boast a respectable antiquity. The last volume published by the Yorkshire Archaeo- logical Society in their Record Series is 4 Yorkshire Church Notes, 1619-31, by lloger Dods worth.' On 20 November, 1620, that learned antiquary visited Cottingham Church, and copied the inscription on the monument of Nicholas de Luda. This is in rimed hexameters of sorts, the third and fourth of which run :

Porro vires Christi gestans dedit ecclesiarum Prebendas isti Beuerlaci quoque Sarum. As Nicholas died in 1383,* we may assume that the erroneous belief dates back to the fourteenth century. Q. V.

INDIAN LIFE IN FICTION. I have been reading lately 'Like Another Helen,' by S. C. Grier, an excellent novel, describing Anglo-Indian life in the time of the Black Hole and Plassey. The author has evidently- been a very careful student of Sir H. Yule's 4 Anglo-Indian Glossary,' but has fallen into- a few very natural errors, which 1 beg leave- to correct.

P. 189. "Cotwal" is explained as "katwal, the head of the town police." The word should be kottodl.

P. 196. "Mulchilka," an engagement, is explained &8=machalka. The word .should be mutchilka, Hindi muchalka. See Yule> under * Moochulka. 1

P. 232. "Seerpaw." The word is clearly explained by Yule. Hindi sar-a-jta, ** cap-a- pie."

fit. 200, and note.