common green woodpecker is here, as in some other parts of England, called, from its loud shrill laugh, the "yaffingale." The goat-sucker, too, is the "jar-bird," so known from its jarring noise, which has made the Welsh name it the "wheelbird" (aderyn y droell), and the Warwickshire peasant the "spinning-jenny." In fact, a large number of birds in every language are thus called, and to this day in the cry of the peacock we may plainly hear its Greek name, ταῶς.
Of course, I need not say, we must be on our guard against adopting the onomatopoetic theory as explaining the origin of language. Within, however, certain limits, especially with a peculiar class of provincialisms, it gives us, as here, some aid.[1]
Again, as an example of phrases used by our Elizabethan poets, preserved only by our peasantry, though in good use in America, take the word "bottom," so common throughout the Forest, meaning a valley, glen, or glade. Beaumont and Fletcher and Shakspeare frequently employ it. Even Milton, in Paradise Regained, says—
Only in a bottom saw a pleasant grove."
In his Comus, too, we find him using the compound "bottomglade," just as the Americans speak to this day of the "bottomlands" of the Ohio, and our own peasants of Slufter Bottom, and Longslade Bottom, in the New Forest.
"Heft," too, is another similar instance of an Old-English word in good use in America and to be found in the best American authors, but here in England only employed by our
- ↑ See Müller's Science of Language, pp. 345-351; and compare Wedgewood, Dictionary of English Etymology, introduction, pp. 5-17.
