Page:The New Forest - its history and its scenery.djvu/208

Rh As might be expected, from what we have seen of the population of the Forest, the Romance element in its provincialisms is very small. Some few words, such as "merry," for a cherry; "fogey," for passionate; "futy," for foolish; "rue," for a hedge; "glutch," to stifle a sob—have crept in, besides such Forest terms as verderer, regarder, agister, agistment, &c, but the majority are Teutonic. Old-English inflexions, too, still remain. Such plurals as placen, housen, peasen, gripen, fuzzen, ashen, hosen, as we find the word in Daniel, ch. iii. v. 21; such perfects as crope, from creep; lod, from lead; fotch, from fetch; and such phrases as "thissum" ("þissum"), and "thic" for that, are daily to be heard.

Let us, for instance, take the adjective vinney, evidently from the Old-English finie, signifying, in the first place, mouldy; and since mould is generally blue or purplish, it had gradually attached to it the signification of colour. Thus we find the mouldy cheese not only named "vinney," but a roan heifer called a "vinney heifer." The most singular part, however, as exemplifying the changes of words, remains to be told. Since cheese, from its colour, was called "vinney," the word was applied to some particular cheese, which was mouldier and bluer than others, and the adjective was thus changed into a substantive. And we now have "vinney," and the tautology, "blue vinney," as the names of a particular kind of cheese as distinguished from the other local cheeses, known as "ommary" and "rammel."

So also with the word "charm," or rather "churm," signifying, in the first place, noise or disturbance, from the Old-English cyrm. We meet it every day in the common Forest 190