s hardly literary
English before Carlyle. It is now quite familiar--

"Thriftless, shiftless, _feckless_."
(Mr LLOYD GEORGE, 1st Nov. 1911.)

There is a certain appropriateness in the fact that almost the first
writer to use it was James I. It is for _effectless_. I never heard of a
_week-end_ till I paid a visit to Lancashire in 1883. It has long since
invaded the whole island. An old _geezer_ has a modern sound, but it is
the medieval _guiser_, _guisard_, mummer, which has persisted in dialect
and re-entered the language.

[Page Heading: WORDS DUE TO ACCIDENT]

The fortunes of a word are sometimes determined by accident. _Glamour_
(see p. 145) was popularised by Scott, who found it in old ballad
literature. _Grail_, the holy dish at the Last Supper, would be much
less familiar but for Tennyson. _Mascot_, from a Provencal word meaning
sorcerer, dates from Audran's operetta _La Mascotte_ (1880). _Jingo_
first appears in conjurors' jargon of the 17th century. It has been
conjectured to represent Basque _jinko_, God, picked up by sailors. If
this is the case, it is probably the only pure Basque word in English.
The Ingoldsby derivation from St Gengulphus--

"Sometimes styled 'The Living _Jingo_,' from the great tenaciousness
of vitality exhibited by his severed members,"

is of course a joke. In 1878, when war with Russia seemed imminent, a
music-hall singer, the Great Macdermott, delighted large audiences
with--

"We don't want to fight, but, by _Jingo_, if we do,
We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too."

Hence the name _jingo_ applied to that ultra-patriotic section of the
population which, in war-time, attends to the shouting.[12] Fr.
_chauvin_, a jingo, is the name of a real Napoleonic veteran introduced
into Scribe's play _Le Soldat Laboureur_. _Barracking_ is known to us
only through the visits of English cricket teams to Australia. It is
said to come from a native Australian word meaning derision. The
American _caucus_ was first applied (1878) by Lord Beaconsfield to the
Birmingham Six Hundred. In 18th-century American it means meeting or
discussion. It is probably connected with a North American Indian
(Algonkin) word meaning counsellor, an etymology supported by that of
_pow-wow_, a palaver or confab, which is the Algonkin for a
medicine-man. With these words may be mentioned _Tammany_, now used of a
famous political body,