ut to him in 'Henry Esmond,' confessed it to be an
anachronism. Mr. Bartlett refers to 'the old writers quoted in
Richardson's Dictionary' for 'different to,' though in my edition of
that work all the examples are with _from_. But I find _to_ used
invariably by Sir R. Hawkins in Hakluyt. _Banjo_ is a negro corruption
of O.E. _bandore_. _Bind-weed_ can hardly be modern, for _wood-bind_ is
old and radically right, intertwining itself through _bindan_ and
_windan_ with classic stems. _Bobolink_: is this a contraction for Bob
o' Lincoln? I find _bobolynes_, in one of the poems attributed to
Skelton, where it may be rendered _giddy-pate_, a term very fit for the
bird in his ecstasies. _Cruel_ for _great_ is in Hakluyt.
_Bowling-alley_ is in Nash's 'Pierce Pennilesse.' _Curious_, meaning
_nice_, occurs continually in old writers, and is as old as Pecock's
'Repressor.' _Droger_ is O.E. _drugger_. _Educational_ is in Burke.
_Feeze_ is only a form of _fizz_. _To fix_, in the American sense, I
find used by the Commissioners of the United Colonies so early as 1675,
'their arms well _fixed_ and fit for service.' _To take the foot in the
hand_ is German; so is to _go under_. _Gundalow_ is old; I find
_gundelo_ in Hakluyt, and _gundello_ in Booth's reprint of the folio
Shakespeare of 1623. _Gonoff_ is O.E. _gnoffe_. _Heap_ is in 'Piers
Ploughman' ('and other names _an heep_'), and in Hakluyt ('seeing such a
_heap_ of their enemies ready to devour them'). _To liquor_ is in the
'Puritan' ('call 'em in, and liquor 'em a little'). _To loaf_: this, I
think, is unquestionably German. _Laufen_ is pronounced _lofen_ in some
parts of Germany, and I once heard one German student say to another,
_Ich lauf_ (lofe) _hier bis du wiederkehrest_, and he began accordingly
to saunter up and down, in short, to _loaf_. _To mull_, Mr. Bartlett
says, means 'to soften, to dispirit,' and quotes from
'Margaret,'--'There has been a pretty considerable _mullin_ going on
among the doctors,'--where it surely cannot mean what he says it does.
We have always heard _mulling_ used for _stirring, bustling_, sometimes
in an underhand way. It is a metaphor derived probably from _mulling_
wine, and the word itself must be a corruption of _mell_, from O.F.
_mesler_. _Pair_ of stairs is in Hakluyt. _To pull up stakes_ is in
Curwen's Journal, and therefore pre-Revolutionary. I think I have met
with it earlier. _Raise_: under this word Mr. Bartlett omits 'to raise a
house,'