374 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences ^ Arts, and Letters. 



certain vein is called jugular — meaning pertaining to a yoke — 

 because near the yoke of the right and left ribs. Nostril is 

 nose^drill, for it pierces the nose as drills do rocks. Some of us 

 call a man supercilious and still have yet to learn the sense-mean- 

 ing of the word we use. It is brow-beating, or an action above 

 the eye-lids. The word was unknoAvn to both Shakespeare and 

 Solomon, yet both of them had the idea. ^^There is a genera- 

 tion," says one, "0 how lofty are their eyes and their eye-lids 

 are lifted up ;" and the other's words are : "Unknit that threat- 

 ening, unkind brow.'*' Artery etymologically is an air-tube, and 

 so perhaps was once pronounced airtery. K^o blood being found 

 in arteries after death it was natural, since nature abhors a 

 vacuum, to think those empty vessels to be air-pipes or ducts for 

 vital spirits which were an ethereal fluid quite distinct from that 

 in the veins. Shakespeare shared this error. "Plodding 

 poisons," he says, or according to some editions, "prisons up the 

 nimble spirits in the arteries." Muzzle is not a dignified 

 word for mouth but it has an origin and relations worth know* 

 ing. It means a biter and is cognate with morsel and remorse. 

 The letter d has dropped out of the middle of each (it being 

 hard to utter before s, as has been already stated), but it re- 

 mains in mordant. The mordant aids the biting of colors in: 

 dyeing. Muzzle is a biter, morsel is what is bitten, and remorse 

 is an after-bite, — the worst of all. Instead of transferring from 

 Latin the phrase "remorse of conscience" Anglo-Saxons trans- 

 lated it as the "Againbite of inwit," the title of an ancient 

 poem dating from the year 1340. Jaws would be a plainer 

 word if spelled now as it was in our Bible of 1611, that is- 

 chawes : "I mil put hooks in thy chawes." A doublet of jaws 

 is chops which is shortened from choppers. 



Eating tools lead us on to the scene of eating. The names 

 of things which meet our eyes at every meal-time often need 

 elucidation. Table ^ like cupboard meaning a mere board, 

 carries us back to prehistoric simplicity. Trencher used to 

 mean a square board, a shape still surviving in the compound 

 trencher-cap, which is equivalent to the shape of a plasterer's- 

 mortar-board. Dish, traceable to the classical discus or quoit, 

 which means something thrown, thanks to its circular shape,, 

 gave name to German tables and to English plates, at first to 



