or rehabilitation in our practical
vocabulary should be not only a good word in itself, but should fall into
some definite place and relieve and enrich our speech by its usefulness.
It is evident that no one person can be expected to supply a full list of
such words, but on the other hand there must be very many of our members
who could contribute one or two; and such contributions are invited.

Exempli gratia. Here are two words with very different titles and claims,
_nesh_ and _hyppish_.

_Nesh_, which has two columns in the Oxford Dictionary, begins in A.D.
888, and is still heartily alive in Yorks. and North Derbyshire, where it
is used in the sense of being _oversensitive to pain and especially to
cold_. In this special signification, to which it has locally settled down
after a thousand years of experience, it has no rival; and its restoration
to our domestic vocabulary would probably have a wholesome moral and
physical effect on our children.

_Hyppish_ is the Englished form of hypochondriacal, its suffix carrying
its usual diminutive value, so that its meaning is 'somewhat
hypochondriacal'. Berkeley, Gray, and Swift used _hyps_ or _the hyp_ for
hypochondriasis, and the adjective was apparently common. It would seem
that _hypochondria_ was then spoken, as _hypocrisy_ still is, with the
correct and pleasant short vowels of the Greek prefix, not as now with a
long alien diphthong _haipo-_. It was presumably this short y that
accidentally killed _hyppish_; for the word _hipped_ was used of a horse
lamed in the hip, and alongside of this _hipped_, and maybe attracted by
it, an adjective _hypt_ arose. When once _hyp_ and _hypt_ were confounded
with _hip_ and _hipped_, _hyppish_ would suffer and lose definition. But
_hypt_ and _hipped_ combined forces, and were probably even from the first
in their present uncertain condition, for when nowadays a man says that he
is _hipped_, he has no definite notion of what he means except that he is
in some way, either in his loins or mind incapacitated and out of sorts.
Whether _hypt_ and _hipped_ have mortally wounded each other or are still
fighting in the dark may be open to discussion: _hyppish_ has now a fair
field, and if people would know what the word means, it might be restored,
like _nesh_, to useful domestic activity.

6. The example given of the word _fast_ on p. 12 suggests another matter
to which attention might be paid. If one looks up any word in the Oxford
Dicti