[Loch-Ruadh] forgotten English

[Madelina de Lindesay]

Well, I was out sick several days and go behind on sending these:

Multiplying Medicine - The elixir of the alchemists, used in "making" and "multiplying" gold; 'Measure for Measure.' 
[From] 'multiplie', to make gold and silver.

Thursday, January 13, 1404 - the transmuting of baser metals into gold, known as alchemy, was formally prohibited in England.  Despite the official ban, monarchs including Queen Elizabeth hedged their bets, employing alchemists into the seventeenth century in a futile attempt to bolster royal treasuries.  Francis Bacon, a contemporary of the queen, took a more pragmatic view of this pseudoscience, writing:  "Alchemy may be compared to the man who told his sons of gold buried somewhere in his vineyard, where they by digging found no gold but by turning up the mould about the roots of their vines procured a plentiful vintage.  So the search and endeavors to make gold have brought many useful inventions and instructive experiments to light."
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swilling - Drunken.  Said of a man who drinks till the liquor can be heard swilling about in his stomach.  
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jurr - The noise a small waterfall makes when it falls amongst loose stones and gravel. - John Mactaggart's 'Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia', 1824

Gravel Day - Until the mid-1800s, this observance at some Boston-area colleges enabled students to forgo lectures for a day of hauling and spreading fresh gravel on campus walkways.  Van Randolph's 'Down in the Holler:  A Gallery of  Ozark Folk Speech (1953) offered some insights into the word 'gravel':  "Many expressions and allusions link the noun 'gravel' with sexual contact.  Ask a hillman where he is going and he replies, 'To git some gravel for my goose,' meaning that he is in search of sexual satisfaction.  When a widow marries, the neighbors say, 'Florrie has throwed away her 'gravel-medicine', a play upon the notion that frequent sexual intercourse cures diseases of the female kidney and bladder.  To speak of a man's 'turning over the gravels' means that he is full of vigor - one who can uninate with such force that the stream of urine scatters pebbles.... Because of these and other set phrases and axioms, the word 'gravel' must be used rather carefully in mixed crowds."
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arrow-headers
The making of arrowheads formerly constituted a separate trade.
Feast day of St. Sebastian (January 20), a patron of archers.  According to Edward's 'Dictionary of Curious Matters' (1882), the word 'score' developed a specialized sense among archers, used especially in relation to their shooting prowess:  "the word 'score' in the language of archers meant twenty yards, and a 'mark of twelve score' meant a mark or target placed 240 yards away.  Shakespeare in '2 Henry IV' makes Falstaff praise Old Double as a good shot in the following words:  "He would have 'clapped i' the clout [hit a bull's eye] at twelve score, and carried you a forehand shaft at fourteen'."  These seem incredible distances, but Drayton in 'Polyolbion', speaking of Robin Hood and his men, says, 'At marks full forty score they used to prick and rove.'  About 1400, 'to score' meant to notch a stick in order to remember a number; after twenty nicks, that portion was cut off and retained.  Four centuries ago, 'score' could be used to refer to twenty pounds when weighing cattle, as in "so much per 'score'."

Well, that's enough for now.  More later.

Madelina