90 SCOTCH NAMES OF NATIVE WILD FLOWERS. 



Bere or barley — a pure Saxon word — (Hordeum vulgare) was 

 formerly used as an article of food — " bannocks of bere meal and 

 bannocks of barley" — but is now chiefly used to manufacture 

 the national drink, "barley bree." 



Tall oat-grass (Avena elatior) has tuberous roots, and from 

 this peculiarity it takes its Scotch name of arnut or earthnut. 

 Bunium flexuosum takes the same name. The former is distin- 

 guished by the name swines' arnuts, while the latter was called 

 (and is still called) lousy or lizzie arnuts, from a belief that it 

 tended to breed tick or sheep lice on the flocks that fed on the 

 pastures where it grew. 



The name and locality of bent-grass (Agrostis) — " the bent so 

 brown " — are derived from the Saxon biendse, meaning a rush. 

 For good or evil a man is known by the company he keeps. So 

 also it would seem are grasses. Bent-grass is the grass that keeps 

 such low company as carices and rushes. 



Field brome-grass (Bromus arvensis) has two names — first, 

 sleepies, from its supposed soporific qualities, constituting it an 

 ancient Scotch chloroform, a feeble foreshadow of Simpson's 

 famous discovery; and second, goose-corn, i,e. % feeding for the 

 goose, a fowl much commoner with us in ancient times than at 

 present. Scott refers to this former prevalence of the goose in the 

 last canto of Marmion. The word corn was originally used to 

 designate anything small, round, and hard. A corn on the foot 

 is the same word, and in an old Scandinavian poem hail is 

 called " cold corn." 



Couch-grass {Triticum repens) has also a double name — first, 

 pirl-grass, from pry I, a needle, so named from its short, stiff, 

 prickly awns (when it has any) ; and second, quicken grass, from 

 quick, living, the opposite of dead. It is indeed a quick or lively 

 grass. Let it once be settled in a corner of cultivated ground, 

 and it is so tenacious of life that it will defy every effort even of 

 the spade to uproot it. 



The poas or meadow-grasses go by the general name of pounce, 

 from puntr, the name used in Iceland still for these grasses. 



All the Avenas or wild-oats are called oncorn or uncorn. The 

 prefix on or un was formerly much used in Scotch, and our ancestors 

 employed it in a very cannie, characteristic fashion. A Scotsman 

 of the old school would never dream of saying a man or woman 



