Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 9.djvu/327

 1'J S. IX. OCT. 1, 1921.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 265 Kr)p.aTis are on the side of the moderns for whom, clematis is only a barbarism. But derivations do not always rule ; and arbutus is it still never Latin* ; at least in Ireland? People half long to be contrary ; as in popular traditional Scotland and Ireland. Indeed, the modern annotator of to-day, while noting that many instances of con- trary occur in seventeenth-century verse and that is the only pronunication in Bailey (d. 1742) ; though Sheridan's ' Dictionary,' 1780, has only contrary adds, " still univer- sal (sic), in uneducated speech." What good, trying to grumble at our contrary nearly cont'ry ? And does a Poet Laureate of the hour protest so, in his ' Demeter,' 1899 : "Now Fate, that look'd contrary (?) hath fulfill'd"? And in his i Elegy,' 1890: " By faint contrary wind stay'd in her cruise." Spenser could not have found ex- pression otherwise for his sea troubles, thinking of : two billows in the Irish sounds Forcibly driven with contrary tides. The contemporary Shakespeare has nearly always contrary. But not in ' Hamlet's ' Player King's " Our wills and fates do so contrary run " (III. ii. 221). It is true, in such adverbial use as that, the old has more prevailed. A vagary only, in ' N.E.D.,' quoting ' Paradise Lost,' vi. 614 : Flew off, and into strange vagaries fell ; yet quoting also, perhaps against itself, .Massinger's 1629 ' Picture,' V. iii. : An old bachelor as 1 am . . . . . . is not troubled With these fine vagaries. And nigh two hundred years later, Kirke White, ' To Contemplation ' : I alone A wayward youth, misled by Fancy's vagaries Remained settled. Quandary may be quandary, say modern dictionaries. Half the modern dictionaries have still artisan, which, one is told from Scotland, when anglior Anglia (and in despite of an Edinburgh professor), is only uneducated and " popular " now Marlowe's (otherwise meant, indeed) : O what a world of profit and delight, Is promised to the studious artizdn. (Faustus,' Li.) and so heard, artisan, by much educated southron manhood now. Morris, in ' Jason/ ii. 865 : Also we need a cunning artizdn. I heard ' Comus ' played about 1900 ; and ! the infamous elder brother made that modern rubbish, out of the high romance in Milton's huge forests and unharboured heaths, Infamous hills, and sandy perilous wilds. It were almost glorious to be " infamous." Then in America you would still offer a bouquet. Bret Harte (1839-1902) made its t hit, in ' A Newport Romance ' : The delicate odour of mignonette, The ghost of a dead and gone bouquet f Is all that tells of her story. Joyce's (1910) 'English as we speak it I in Ireland ' * (p. 101) had remarked : " The general English tendency is to put back the j accent as far from the end of the word as I possible. But among our people there is I a contrary tendency to throw forward the ! accent ; as in excellent, his Excellency- arbutus, committee,^ hereditary. J Telemdchus though so grand, Ere the sceptre reached his band. (' Old Irish Folk Song ' (sic).) ... I heard one of the old schoolmasters reading out, in his grandiloquent way, for i chapel gate after Mass, the subjects he j could teach ; among which, ... * the ! vibrations of the swinging penjoolumsS The same fine old scholarly pedant remarked that our neighbourhood was a very moun- tadnyus locality. A little later on in my life, when I had written some pieces in high-flowTi English, one of these school- masters a much lower class man than the last said to me by way of compliment : " The great Nassau " was heard in the days after the deeds which made him glorious, pious, and immortal, in a toast. Mayo so it was shouted in our early days in Dublin streets, when the Earl of May6 was murdered in India ; and when an apparition was bruited, at Knock, in " Every one but a Latin scholar " (so suggests, in 1918, one such, from Cambridge), " T think, says arbutus : this is due to System zicartg. I say arbutus now." f As in un-English-educated Scotland. J Joyce might add for Ireland : admiralty + mayoralty, casualty, assets, lamentable, interval? proceeds which last, half the English dictionaries are for and smallpox, and exquisite, irrefutable,, inexplicable, obligatory. " Here lies what once was Matthew Prior, The son of Adam and Eve ; Can Bourbon or Nassau claim higher ? "
 * excellency in Johnson Nassaii Street,
 * the people grouped around Ardpatrick
 * You have a fine vocabullery .' '
 * Longmans, Green and Co.