sense of doing anything with all one's powers;
all at one stroke; is called an Americanism, and
supposed to be a play of fancy in some
incomprehensible direction. But it went forth from
Scrooby with the Pilgrim Fathers, although how
we came by it had passed out of memory, till
Mr. Sabine Baring-Gould, three or four years
ago, found its original form among the
Icelanders, descended from those Norsemen who
of old made many settlements among us. This
hog has no more to do with bacon, than the old
sign of the Virgin's Greeting, the "Pige was
hael," has to do with its new form of the Pig
and Whistle. It is the pure Scandinavian
"högg" in the form " med höggi," which means
"all at once." In Iceland, Mr. Baring-Gould
found that we owed to the Scandinavians the
words brag, from bragth, rumour, renown;
chap, from kappi, a fighting-man; fellow, from
felag, a comrade, literally one who goes shares
in money; duffer (a stupid fellow), from dofi,
laziness; and ninny-hammer, from the negative
n prefixed to the old Norse word ein-hammer,
meaning one in his right senses—nein-hammer
being, therefore, one who is not in his right
senses. The Yorkshire Ridings (a corruption
of Thriddings, that is, Thirdings) correspond
to the divisions in South Norway, and our
sailors take many a word from the old Norsemen
and Danes, who made themselves a part of
us, and helped centuries ago to strengthen us
as a nation of seafarers. Nelson is Danish
Nielson, and our Nelson was born at the old
Danish Burnhamthorpe. The British fleet is
named from the Scandinavian flaade;
shipboard, from skibsborde; steersman, from
styrmand; wreck, from vrag. An earl was called
by our Anglo-Saxon forefathers an alderman,
earl by the Danes, who would have spoken as
we do of an earl in his yacht;—a jarl in his jagt,
they would have said. Wherever we find many
names of places ending, in the Danish way, with
-by and-thorpe, these Northmen once abounded.
Observe the ending of the name of Scrooby;
the Norse högg was naturalised in those parts.
And as there are hogs that are not hogs, so
there are old men that are not men. The old
native Celtic for a high rock, alt maen, comes
down to us as the Old Man of Coniston, the
Old Man of Hoy, in the Orkneys, a conspicuous
rock pyramid, fifteen hundred feet high. This
confusion of the old traditional word with the
nearest sense that could be made of it, in later
English is a common process. The sailor turns
his good ship the Bellerophon into the Billy
Ruffian; the girasole has become the Jerusalem
artichoke; the buffetier, a beefeater; dormeuse,
a dormouse; as the groom who had charge of
the two horses, Othello and Desdemona, called
them Old Fellow and Thursday Morning.
Tradition tells how Guy of Warwick gained
a mighty victory over a Dun Cow. It was the
Dena Gau, or Danish settlement, near Warwick.
Our town of Leighton Beau-désert has become
Leighton-Buzzard; and the brass eagle in the
lectern of the parish church has been shown to
strangers by a learned verger as the original
buzzard from which the town derived its name.
Philip the Second of Spain, who had been
married to Queen Mary of England, recollected in
Elizabeth's reign the names of the English
palaces; and on the side of a despatch from his
ambassador in London, telling him that Queen
Elizabeth was at the Palace of St. James's, he
thus scrawled his recollection of Whitehall:
"There is a park between it and the palace,
which is called Huytal; but why it is called
Huytal I am sure I don't know." Perhaps that
is not more of a puzzle than the version of the
name for an Englishman at Fort Vancouver.
He is called a Kintshosh—that is to say, a
"King George." The Indians in that
neighbourhood call an American a " Boston," and
have adopted, for best manners as a form of
salutation, the remarkable word, " Clakhohahyah."
The originators of that phrase had
observed that a distinguished trader named Clark
was always approached by his countrymen with
the exclamation, " Clark, how are you?" As
for that town which gives its name to the
American in these parts, it is another illustration
of the saying of Home Tooke concerning
words, that " letters, like soldiers, are very apt
to desert and drop off in a long march."
Boston is short for Botolph's ton, which is
short for Saint Bartholomew's Town. There is
a place named from a person. The same thing is
done when a person is named from a place; when,
for example, Sevenoaks is cut down into Snooks.

The part of London where bullion was
sheared or cut into shape before stamping
—Shere-monier's Lane—became first
Sheremonger's Lane, and eventually Sermon Lane,
because it was near Paternoster Row and Amen
Corner. So the part of London given to the
artisans who came to England after the loss of
Calais and its dependencies, was called Hames
et Guines, which, as it was near Tower Hill,
and a place of execution, came to be called
Hangman's Gains. The Hay Market stood
originally in Fenchurch-street. There never could
have been a " Fen" on such high ground; and
this thoroughfare owes its name to the French
word for Hay, " Foin." A sort of English is made
by the gardener, who calls one kind of cherry
the May Duke. It is the Médoc, a cherry
brought to us from Médoc, in the Gironde.
Cherry itself is named from a town on the
Black Sea. The name of the peach comes to us
through several languages from the word that
names its origin as a Persian fruit; and nectarine
is Persian for the Best, as the Best form
of peach. So some derive the bergamot from
Turkish Beg or Bey Armoud, the Prince of
Pears. Chestnuts are named from Castanea, in
Thessaly; filberts—avellana nuts—are nuts of
Abella, a town in Campania; avel-nut, vel-nut,
fil-nut, fil-but, filbert. The shallot—ascalonia—
is from Ascalon; spinach is Hispanicum, or, in
Arabic, Hispanach, the Spanish plant, as spaniel
is Spanish dog, the Spanish themselves having
once also been called Spaniels by the English.
Chocolate and cocoa are named from the
Mexican province of Choco; but the name of