130
NOTES AND QUERIES. [9 th s. vn. FEB. ie, 1901.
Waller which was settled in Kent in the four-
teenth century 1 Any details of these Kentish
Wallers before 1556 will be valued, including
the parentage and descent of their various
wives. I have copies of Berry's pedigrees of
Waller in his Kent and Hants genealogies.
H. M. BATSON. Hoe Benham, Newbury.
"NuNTY." I daresay there are many of your readers who have never heard of the word nunty. In dialect it is used in many parts of England from Northumberland to Sussex. It is known in Cumberland, York- shire, Nottinghamshire, the counties of Lin- coln, Leicester, Northampton, Warwick, Shropshire, in East Anglia and Kent. It is used in a bewildering number of senses which are difficult to refer to an original radical meaning. It is generally applied to dress, when it may mean stiff, formal, old-fashioned, precise, neat, trim, also dowdy, slovenly, shabby, scanty. It is also used of persons, when it may mean dapper, chubby, fat, stout, thickset, short ; or it may mean ill-tempered, angry, cross, sulky. It also has the meaning of handy, convenient, snug. Can any of your readers suggest what was the ground idea of this word nunty, which has such a surprising development of apparently contradictory senses 1 I can find no evidence that the word was ever used in literary English, nor can I find anything to illustrate it from the cognate languages. I should be glad to dis- cover the etymology of this Protean adjective.
A. L. MAYHEW.
Oxford.
NATURE MYTHS.
(9 th S. vi. 441 ; vii. 35.)
I WISH to add to CANON TAYLOR'S interest-
ing set of these one of the myth of Briareus,
which flashed upon me a few years ago as
I saw Briareus in the sky, brandishing his
score (" hundred " is merely a poetical exag-
geration) of long black arms out to the very
horizon, and obviously feeling for something
there with their flickering taper ends. Our
vulgar age calls him an Aurora Borealis. On
this occasion his body was exactly like that
of a giant cuttlefish slightly south-east of my
meridian, with streams of luminous sepia
pouring into his centre like torrents over a
precipice, and the waving arms, like those of
some titanic devil-fish, extended in every
direction across the sky to the limits of sight,
the finger-like ends " wiggling," as the boys
say, most suggestively. It was evident that
not all the gods on Olympus together could
have stood up against him, and apparently
he was reaching for them.
While on this subject, may I add that it seems to me Mr. Spencer takes a wrong view of the process involved, in disfavouring nature myths on the ground that they imply an in- tellectual curiosity about causes and effects which savages do not possess? The savage who saw what looked like a ship, a city, a monstrous beast or reptile, or a many-armed lively being reaching after some one or some- thing up in the sky, and called it the Argo, or Asgard, or the Chimsera, or Briareus, was not conscious of any abstruse logical process, or of any more intellectual curiosity than if he saw a new animal on the mountain side and called it by some new name to describe or identify it. He was simply naming a thing he supposed he saw ; he could hardly help trying to do it. What other explanation was there possible to him than that these were real objects, only far away and gigantic and supernatural 1 And once placed in the cate- gory of realities, what more natural and inevitable than for story-tellers to develope increasingly minute accounts of their rela- tions and adventures? these, of course, fol- lowing the form and fashion of the earthly experiences known to the relaters F. M.
" SHIMMOZZEL" (9 th S. vi. 266, 371 ; vii. 10). In his interesting letter at the last reference MR. DAVIS says, " Connexion between a cab and the Hebrew noun for blackguard is difficult to understand or follow." The explanation is given by Henry Mayhew in the third volume of his * London Labour and the London Poor,' p. 361. " The hansoms," he says, "are always called show/nils by the cabmen ; showfull in slang means counterfeit, and the shoivfull cabs are an infringement on Hansom's patent." Shoful is applied in English slang to other things besides cabs, but always with the same connotation of worthlessness It is applied to forged bank- notes ("shoful-finnufs" or "shoful-pennifs"), to bad money, to mock jewell-ery, to plate that masquerades as silver, to patched clothing, to a rackety beershop, to an unsteady woman, &c. JAS. PLATT, Jun.
CHAVASSE FAMILY (9 th S. vii. 48). In 1828 Thomas Chavasse was in practice as a surgeon at 23, Temple Row, Birmingham. This Thomas Chavasse was M.R.C.S.Eng. and L.S.A. 1822, F R.C.S. 1844. He subsequently lived at Wylde Green House, Birmingham, at which address his son (at present of 22, Temple Row, Birmingham) Thomas Frederick Chavasse
