Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 6.djvu/123

 12 s. vi. APRIL 3, i92o.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

99

Comitatu de Niddesdale, Armigeri." He became advocate in 1772, was one of the principal Clerks of Session, and died in March, 1813. Besides the General he had, with other issue, Chas. Kirkpatrick Sharpe (1781-1851), the antiquary and wit, for whom see ' The Scottish Nation ' before referred to. Jane Higgins, the wife of the General, was daughter of Godfrey Higgins (ob. 1833) of Skellow Grange, near Don- caster, not Skelton Grange, as given by Hunter (see Burke' s ' Commoners,' vol. ii., p. 155, and ' The Landed Gentry,' 2nd, 3rd, and 4th eds).

For further information see the above authorities and ' Memoir respecting the Family of Kirkpatrick of Closeburn,' 1858. I have a reference to a Sharp pedigree in Stodart's ' Scottish Arms,' vol. ii., p. 369. CHAS. HALL CROUCH.

204 Hermon Hill, South Woodford.

Hoddam Castle (not Haddam), the house of the Sharpe family, of which the late Kirk- patrick Sharp is a well-known member, is not in Northumberland but over the border in Dumfries-shire, not far from Ecclefechan, the birthplace of Thomas Carlyle.

R. B R.

PSEUDONYMS (12 S. v. 293, 329). The author of ' From Sedan to Saarbruck, 1870,' is Lieut. Henry Knollys, Royal Artillery. He is still living and is now Colonel Sir Henry Knollys, K.C.V.O. J. H. LESLIE.

Gunnersholmej JVi e Ibourne Avenue, Sheffield.

" FRAY " : ARCHAIC MEANING OF THE WORD (12 S. vi. 41). I have succeeded in tracing another instance, though of later date.

1697, Dryden, ' ^Eneid,' vii. 737 :

Thus, when a black-brow'd gust begins to rise, White foam at first on the curl'd ocean fries.

As in the case of the quotation from Spenser, ' F. Q.,' II. xii. 45, fry has the meaning of "boil," " seethe," or "foam."

The modern equivalent is our word fry, to roast, adopted from F. fri-re ; Lat. frigere, to roast, fry.

As used by Lamb, then, in his letter to Coleridge.it means foam or spray the result of the agitation (frying), seething or boiling of the waves.

" Fray " is no mere slip of the pen and Lamb had every justification for its employ- ment and the substitution by editors of " spray " is quite uncalled for.

W. GERALD HARDING. Christ Chucch, Oxford.

$0t*S 0tt

French Terminologies in the Making. Studies in Conscious Contributions fo the Vocabulary. By Harvey J. Swann. (New York : Columbia University Press, 6s. 6<f.)

DR. SWANX here gives us a lively little work which, despite its conversational style and occasional flourishes of rhetoric, is in truth a careful and useful contribution to the study of the growth of vocabularies. He has chosen for his field of research those special vocabularies which have- grown up round novelties in the way of mechanical transport, and novelties in political ideas. He- starts with the terminology of the railroad : a group of words which has some considerable advantages over the others here dealt with, in that it is old enough to have gathered mellowness, and familiar enough to be woven into the very texture of the language. It is curious to realise that the- French equivalent for " railway " was some time- in establishing itself. The attempt to use ornieres for " rails " furnishes an interesting example of logic overturning convenience. The word gare illustrates a process which does not often come out so clearly to the light of day : that by which a desirable word is tried first in one extension then in another before its new significance is finally settled. It seems originally to have meant a bay (qolphe) in a waterway in which to moor craft out of the main channel ; and naturally in railway parlance first meant a " siding." Both English and French are poorer than Italian in having no- adjective to " railroad " and chemin de fer. Dr. Swann notes an attempt to naturalise ferroviario as ferroviaire.

The word-elements auto and aero have supplied' material for two good chapters not, it is plain, without some delving of the author's in out-of- the-way publications. He seems to find it wortb a moment's surprise that Latin should have- produced neither auto compounds, nor compounds made with a similar element of its own, and contrasts its poverty with the redundance in this respect of Greek. But the compound word is surely alien to the genius of the Latin language, just as modern tendencies notwithstanding it remains alien to the French. Dr. Swann is in- clined to think it was the word automate which carried the element auto, as it were alive in- " chrysalis form," over into modern speech.

With the element aero we come to a longer and fuller history. In aerostat it competed with' ballon and the ' Histoire et pratique de l'arosta- tion ' (being a translation of an English treatise) goes back to 1786. Aeronef was tried in 1864 as the name of an air-machine then being tested, and Dr. Swann has found it in La Nature of 1908 used of a " ballon dirigeable." There can seldom have been a more remarkable instance of helplessness^ in the matter of naming than the use of plus lourds que I'air as a substantive. It is to Alphonse Brown, in 1875, that we owe aeroplane ; but, new though the word is, and its history in print before us, it seems to have gathered to itself a small problem : is plane to be taken as derived from planer and the word thereby to be stamped a hybrid ? or is it derived direct from afp6Tr\a.vos, and so a good word ? Dr. Swann seems to be following most French authorities in accepting the former explanation.