Forgotten English
Have you ever sent a message via scandaroon, needed a nimgimmer, or fallen victim to bowelhive? Never heard of these terms? That's because they are a thing of the past. These words are alive and well, however, in Forgotten English, a charming collection of hundreds of archaic words, their definitions, and old-fashioned line drawings.\ For readers of Bill Bryson, Henry Beard, and Richard Lederer, Forgotten English is an eye-opening trip down a delightful etymological path. Readers learn that...
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A small, entertaining dictionary of words our language has lost.
Crapandina\ Early sixteenth-century name for a mineral, also known as a toad-stone or bufonite, to which extraordinary, if perhaps ironic, healing properties were attributed. The stone was supposed to be a "natural concretion" found in thehead of the common toad that acted as an antidote to poison. Thomas Lupton, in his 1579 A Thousand Notable Things, described how A toad-stone called crapandina, touching any part envenomed, hurt or stung, with rat, spider, waspe or any other venomous beast, ceases the paine or swelling thereof. He kindly informed his readers how to acquire this valuable stone:\ Put a great or overgrowne tode into an earthen potte,\ and put the same into an antes hyllocke, & cover the\ same with earth, which tode at length antes wyll eate,\ so that the bones of the toad and stone wyll be left in\ the potte.\ Dried toads were once found in home medicine cabinets in Devonshire, to be used for such purposes as making the following dropsy recipe from Elizabeth Wright's 1914 Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore: Take several large, fully-grown toads, place them ina vessel in which they can be burned without their ashes becoming mixed with any foreign matter. The odd belief in the efficacy of the crapandina is evident in the famous lines from Shakespeare's As You Like It:\ Sweet are the uses of adversity\ Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous\ Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.\ Copyright ) 1997 by Jeffrey Kacirk
