Butler — Household Words: Their Etymology. 3Y1 



metlieir-stocks implies "upper-stocks and over-stocks which meant 

 trousers, — called knee-breeches because cut off at the knee, and 

 trunk-hose because covering the trunk of the body. Hose had 

 once a wider meaning including upper and nether stocks joined 

 in one single garment. St. Pantaloon was one of the patron 

 saints of the Venetians and so often gave them baptismal names 

 — all the more as his name means All-lion. Venetians were 

 hence nicknamed pantalooners as naturally an an Irishman is 

 styled Patrick. A variety of indispensables borrowed from 

 those pantalooners may at first have been known as pantaloon- 

 trousers, but could not fail to be shortened into pantaloon pure 

 .and simple, in accordance with a law which, reducing every 

 word to its lowest terms, has now left us only pants. But I 

 anust pass by dress thus briefly for it lies mostly beyond my 

 •research or power to explain. 



The members who make up the personnel of a household bear 

 names of more significance than is at once apparent. 



The name man meaning thinker shows him to have been from 

 the start egotistical, or he would not have arrogated such a 

 name. Wotnan, w^hich is wife-man, proclaims her if not a rib, 

 an adjunct or variation of the genus man. Wife w^hich has 

 been interpreted to mean timid as brides are, or inspired as the 

 wives of ancient Teutons were esteemed, or weaver as few 

 wives now are, more probably means merely woman, that is, 

 the woman of some particular mam A meaning dead in a sim- 

 ple word often survives in a compound. Husband is a house- 

 dweller — not a wanderer abroad. The termination hand in- 

 stead of its obvious sense is equivalent to hor or hour in neigh- 

 hor and the Africander Boer, which means settler, one who is 

 not a nomad. So Othello says in reference to his marriage, 



"But that I love the gentle Desdemona 

 I would not my unhoused free condition 

 Put into circumscription and confine."^ 



Mother, signifying the measurer^ defines her as the domestic 

 manager setting bounds to the household as she always must, 

 m.oulding it when most plastic, and creator of the mother-tongue 



^''Unhoused" is an Italian idiom equivalent to un-husbanded, and is held by 

 commentators as one of the best proofs of Shakespeare's acquaintance with the 

 Italian language. Othello, i. 2, 29. 



