ESTOVERS
An ancient right to take timber for certain purposes.This is one of the rights that were granted to some tenants under the medieval feudal system; it allowed them to take wood from the estates of the manor. It has almost totally died out except as a esoteric historical term, though a very few people still retain the right, for example in the ancient New Forest in southern England (which was indeed once new, but that was shortly after the Norman Conquest, more than 900 years ago). It’s usually described as the right to take dead wood for fuel. This was certainly one of its meanings (though the supposed rule that you were allowed to take dead branches “by hook or by crook", that is, by using only a blunt instrument to pull down dead wood, is almost certainly a folk etymology, as even the earliest recorded examples of that phrase have it in the modern sense of "by any means possible").
However, estovers was a much broader term than that. It encompassed any legitimate cutting of timber, for a variety of purposes. Before the word came into the language in the thirteenth century, such a right was usually called a
boot or a
bote, from Old English
bot, an expiation, compensation or remedy, literally a making better. (Our fossil phrase
to boot, as well as or in addition to, comes from the same source.) In this situation it meant something useful or profitable. Examples were
housebote, the right to take timber with which to repair your house;
haybote or
hedgebote, to repair fences, and
ploughbote, to repair agricultural implements. Another was
firebote, which was the one that referred specifically to fuel.
Estovers is from Old French
estovoir, to be necessary. So they were literally the necessities allowed by law. In later centuries, the term was extended to refer to an allowance of food and clothing to imprisoned felons, and to a pension given to a widow.
ALEXIPHARMIC
Having the quality or nature of an antidote to poison.
The word was introduced into English in the seventeenth century in the now obsolete form
alexipharmac, a noun meaning "an antidote against poison". This comes directly from a Greek word which is a compound of
alexein, "to ward off", and
pharmakon, "poison". This word
alexipharmac was so often used attributively that users came to think it was an adjective, and so decided it ought to be spelled with the
–ic ending instead. The Greek prefix
alexi– is rare in English, turning up only in words such as
alexipyretic, “helping against fever";
alexiteric, “having the power to ward off contagion"; and
alexin, an obsolete word for what is now called a complement, a system of proteins in the blood, particularly one which guards against infection.
Pharmakon could mean a drug as well as a poison (a disturbing equation of ideas to the modern mind), and is much more familiar as the origin of our words in
pharmaco– such as
pharmacology.
QUINCUNX
Five objects arranged so that four are at the corners of a square or rectangle and the fifth is at its centre.
Take a look at a dice "a die if you’re American), or the five of a suit of cards. In each case the dots or pips are arranged in this distinctive shape.
The word comes to us from Latin, in which it literally means "five twelfths", from
quinque, five, plus
uncia, a twelfth. The latter word, by the way, is also the source of our
inch and of
ounce "there are sixteen ounces to the pound that is used in some countries today, but that’s a medieval innovation—the troy pound employed for precious metals and gems keeps the older twelve ounces). The Romans used
quincunx as a symbol or marker for five-twelfths of an
as, the latter being a Roman copper coin which at one time weighed twelve ounces (which could be classed as an item of small change only if you are halfway to being a giant).
Learned Englishmen brought it into the language in the seventeenth century to refer to things arranged in this characteristic way. An early user was Sir Thomas Browne, in his
Garden of Cyrus of 1658; this is a work of fantasy in which he traces the history of horticulture down to the time of the Persian King Cyrus. The king is credited with having been the first to plant trees in a quincunx, though Browne claimed to have discovered that it also appeared in the hanging gardens of Babylon. The diarist John Evelyn soon followed Sir Thomas’s lead—in his book on orcharding,
Pomona, he suggested it was a convenient way to lay out apple or pear trees. At about the same period,
quincunx began to be used in astrology to refer to an aspect of planets that are five signs of the zodiac apart (out of the twelve).
If you need the adjective "although hardly anyone ever does), it’s quincuncial.
YCLEPT
By the name of; called.
Once this was the standard way of forming the past participle of the verb
clepe, to call (or, more strictly, its Old English precursor,
cleopian). For the past few hundred years it has only turned up as a deliberately archaic form, mostly in poetry, or as light relief. It surfaces occasionally as ponderous humour in journalistic pieces, as here in the
Jerusalem Post in 1997 (the name of the writer has been suppressed to protect the guilty): "The caption under the photo of the unfortunately yclept basketball player just makes matters worse: "David Putz dribbles away...' ". Such poppings-up are frequent enough that the word appears in most dictionaries today, even though it died out in the north of England about 1200 and lingered in the south and east only a little longer. It has been outside the mainstream of English for so long that the person credited with popularising it again "Gavin Douglas, a Scots poet and divine), wrote around the end of the fifteenth century. The initial
y was once the standard way of marking the past participle:
yclensed,
yfastened,
ypunched, and dozens of others. It was the Old English equivalent of a form which still exists, for example, as
ge– in modern German. Advice to budding writers: best avoided!
DISCOMBOBULATE
To confuse, upset or disconcert.
Another fine example of the speech of the wild frontier of the US of A, this came to life sometime in the 1830s. Whose invention it was we have no idea, except that he shared the bombastic, super-confident attitude towards language that also bequeathed us (among others)
absquatulate,
bloviate,
hornswoggle and
sockdolager.
It has much about it of the itinerant pedlar, whose qualifications were principally a persuasive manner, the self-assurance of a man who has seen every sort of reluctant customer and charmed them all, and a vocabulary he had enlarged by gross disfigurement of innocent elements of the English language. In this case, the original seems to have been
discompose or
discomfit. In the early days, it sometimes appeared as
discombobracate or
discomboberate.
Here’s an example of a snake-oil salesman at work in 1860 (except that he was praising the water from the Louisville artesian well rather than any manufactured remedy). It was said to have been taken down verbatim: "It discomboberates inflammatory rheumatism, sore eyes, scrofula, dyspepsia, and leaves you harmonious without any defalcation, as harmonious systematically as a young dove".
Worth a dollar a drop ...
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