Beginning alphabetically, the adjective
_ask_ is one of those grand old English monosyllables which convey the
sense in the sound, It speaks to you of a day in March, when the wind
is in the east, and all the clouds are of a dull slate colour, and the
roads are white, and the hedges black, and the fallows are dry and hard
as bricks, and a bitter, searching, piercing wind whistles at your
sealskins and Ulsters, your Lindseys and Jerseys, your foot-warmers and
muffatees, and you feel, with Miggs, "as though water were flowing
aperiently down your back," and sit shuddering--dithering (there's
another word rarely used, but with a sufficient amount of chilliness in
it to ice a bottle of champagne) "dithering in the _ask_, ungenial day."
Then I like _abear_ (the penultimate _a_ pronounced as _e_)--"I can't
abeer him"; _addled_--"Bill's addled noat a three week"; _agate_--"I see
you've agate on't"; _among-hands_--"Tom schemed to do it among-hands";
_all along of_--"It was all along of them 'osses"; etc.
Of B's there is a swarm: _beleddy_ (a corruption, as most men know, of
"by our lady"), and I can only notice a few of the Queens. _Botch_ is a
word which, though found in Shakespeare and Dryden, and other authors,
is rarely used by us; and yet, methinks, in these days, when the great
object seems to be to get quantity in place of quality, and to make as
much display as we can at the price--when so much is done by contract,
and there is, in consequence, strong temptation to daub with untempered
mortar, to use green timber, to put in bad material where it will not be
seen, the verb _to botch_ is only too appropriate to all such scampish
proceedings.
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