ON ERRATA RECEPTA. 317 



ON EBRATA RECEPTA, WRITTEN AND SPOKEN. 



BY THE REV. DR. SCADDING, 



IIBEARIAN OB THE CANADIAN IN8TIIUTB. 



{Continued from page 1.53.) 



III. FOREIGN WORDS ANGLICISED. 



1 . Anglicised French Words. 

 French Canadians, on straying westward into the Upper Canadian 

 settlements, used in former days sometimes to anglicise their names. 

 There are persons in Toronto, I think, now bearing the names of 

 Bishop and "Walker whose fathers were respectively called L'Eveque 

 and Marchant. In imagining, in the latter case, — doubtless from the 

 sound, — that Marchant was the participle of marcher, there was an 

 inadvertent return to the root-notion of marcher — which is mercari — 

 to go about on commercial errands — like the venturesome trader of 

 Horace, — 



" Jmpiger extremes currit mercator ad Indos. " 



Were the forefathers of any of our Cowpers, Coupers or Coopers, 

 tol-porteurs — impigri mercatores with a tray of wares suspended from 

 their necks (cols) ? (Comp. coup from colpo ) — There was once also 

 settled here a clever French machinist who, probably by some happy 

 mistake, bore the fine Latinized cognomen Columbus. 



In the familiar word shanty, from chantier, we have confounded the 

 timber-yard with its " office " — the log-covered area of the first clear- 

 ing in the forest, with the temporary hut for the shelter of the 

 chopper ; — for chantier is properly not a house at all, but an enclo- 

 sure where logs are piled, — A^ain, we f^all the little wicket for air in 

 our outer winter-windows, a tiret, even when it opens upon hinges, 

 the term implying a slide. — " Concession," as applied by us to the 

 subdivisions of a township, implies no longer what it did in the old 

 Lower Canadian feudal phraseology in which it originated. There, 

 it was the grant by the King of a seignorial domain for the tenure of 

 which certain acts of fealty and homage were to be performed, " pur- 

 suant to the custom of Paris." — In referring to the Speaker of the 

 House of Assembly, as M. VOrateur, we have to modify a good deal 

 our English notion of orator, freedom from rhetorical flourish and 



