Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 6.djvu/447

 n» s. vi. NOV. id, i9oo.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 371 Shakespeare assumes'the noise. In 'Julius Csesar,' II. ii. 22, one of the phenomena of the wonderful time is The noise of battle hurtled in the air. In 'As You Like It' IV. iii. 133, the conflict of Orlando with the lioness aroused the sleeping Oliver, whose own account of the matter is in these words :— And nature, stronger than his just occasion, Made him give battle to the lioness, Who quickly fell before him : in which hurtling From miserable slumber I awak'd. Altogether, as a word to describe the Boreal is race—so mobile that they "shift ere you can point their place," so constantly suggesting the ideas of encounter and collision that the observer seems to hear them clash and crash —'"hurtle" is singularly well adapted. In the 'Noctes Ambrosiante,' ii. 306, the Ettrick Shepherd is made to employ "rustling" in reference to the Aurora Borealis, and, apart from "hurtling," it would be probably difficult to select a more felicitous epithet for the purpose. Comparing himself, as he fre- quently does in the course of a symposium, with Ramsay, Burns, and Cunningham, the Shepherd, after acknowledging that before his day his three predecessors "were the tria lumina Scotorum of our northern sky," bursts thus into glorious self-assertiveness :— "But I, sir, I am the great flashing, rustling Aurora Borealis. that gars a' the Three 'pale their ineffectual fires in my electrical blnze, till the een o" our millions are dazzled wi' the coruscations; and earth wonders, and o' its wonderin finds no end, at the troublous glory o' the incomprehensible heaven." THOMAS BAYNE. "SHIMMOZZEL" (9th S. vi. 206).—This is generally explained as a hybrid, composed of German schfimm, " bad," and Hebrew mozzle, "luck." I follow the example set me and spell phonetically. MR. BRESLAR says _ he has never caught sight of this word in print. I have met with it several times in fiction. It occurs, for instance, in a book published this year, 'From the Front,' p. 183, in a chapter called " A Jaunt with a Handy Man " : " We might look on this little chimozzle as a kind of misunderstanding." It may occasion- ally be heard in music-hall songs. The whole question of the Hebrew words which have passed through Yiddish into English is a most interesting one, and practically virgin soil. The ' H.E.D.' gives only one Yiddish word,, namely gonvjth, a pickpocket. It omits the related goniva, a stolen article, whence goniva-dtii/er, a " fence," a receiver of stolen goods. The fascinating point about these Anglo-Yiddish terms is the extra- ordinary changes they undergo in meaning. Take fftoful, ^>BB>, which must be one of the most familiar, as I have come across it within the last few months in no less than four novels, 'In London's Heart,''Fast and Loose,' 'The Scarlet City,' and ' The Brand of the Broad Arrow.' This Biblical Hebrew word is applied in London to a hansom cab. The highly respectable Hebrew word merloker, rot^D) has come to mean, in the jargon of Petticoat Lane, a second-hand silk hat. A greater fall is that of the word caser, iro, once reserved by the Cabbalists to designate an emanation of the Deity, now employed in London street slang for a bad crown piece. JAMES PL ATT, Jun. COUNTING ANOTHER'S BUTTONS (9th S. v. 496; vi. 30, 273).—The "formula" (as your correspondent at the last reference ex- presses it) used in play among schoolboys in my younger days for the purpose of ascer- taining not the then character, but the future calling or destiny of the one whose buttons were counted, was "Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, apothecary, ploughboy, thief." I re- member that the same was also then used by boys in some other game unconnected with the "counting" of another's buttons, but with the like object. W. I. R, V. SERJEANT HAWKINS (9th S. vi. 188, 250, 274). —There is an odd error in Zouch's ' Life of Izaak Walton' (Lond., 1826). p. 63, where tho serjeant is confused with the William Haw- kins who was Walton's grandson and Bishop Ken's great-nephew, executor, and earliest biographer. They were unquestionably dis- tinct persons. Trie latter was the only son of William Hawkins, Prebendary of Win- chester 1662-91, and Anne, daughter of Izaak Walton, who, according to Anderdon's ' Life of Ken, were married in 1676. He was bap- tized in Winchester Cathedral on 24 Feb- ruary, 1678/9, and was probably the Win- chester scholar referred to ante, p. 250. He died-at Salisbury, 29 November, 1748: M.I. in Salisbury Cathedral. His father and he seem to me to bo confused in Foster's ' AlumniOxonienses, 1500-1714,'p. 677, Nos. 19 and 22, with another pair, father and son, both also named William Hawkins, of whom the elder was Prebendary of Norwich 1667-83. This Norwich prebendary married Edith Joliffe in 1670 (see Harl. Soc. Pub., vol. xxiii. p. 179), and they apparently buried a son Richard at Great Cressingham, Norfolk, 21 September, 1677 (see Bloraefjeld and Parkins's 'Norfolk,' folio ed., vol. iii. p. 431).