serai: A kiss between Casey Connor and Zeke Tyler (PissSmaug)
serai ([personal profile] serai) wrote2006-02-14 02:14 pm

A query

This year, I acquired a flip-calendar called Forgotten English. One interesting, archaic word per day, along with its definition and a paragraph of relevant information pertaining to it. It's fascinating reading, and most informative.

Would there be any interest in my posting the Forgotten Word of the Day? I'm thinking hobbit writers might find it especially useful.

As a tease, here is the word for January 30:


Lunting

Walking and smoking a pipe. - John Mactaggart's Scottish Gallovidian Encyclopedia, 1824

Feast Day of St. Aldegard, a patron of those suffering from lung cancer. One misinformed eighteenth-century medico, identified only as a Dr. Forster, is quoted in William Hone's Every-day Book...of Popular Amusements (1826-27) as heartily commending the medicial use of smoking, especially during winter months, because it helped "guard against colds, and above all against the contagion of typhus and other fevers, which are apt to prevail in the early spring." He added: "Smoking tobacco is a very salutary practice in general, as well as being a preventive against infection in particular...Smoking is a custom which should be recommended in the close cottages of the poor, and in great populous towns liable to contagion." An anonymous poem of Forster's time echoed these sentiments:

Tobacco I love and tobacco I'll take,
And hope good tobacco I ne'er shall forsake.
'Tis drinking and wenching destroys still the creature,
But this noble fune does dry up ill nature.

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