THO’ I hate to set out upon the principle of word-hunting, yet it always gives me pleasure when by accident I can trace the meaning of a word or phrase to its source, and pursue it through its various changes to its present date. The pleasure is still greater to mark the gradual refinement of language from obscurity and barbarism, until it arrives at precision and elegance. Our tongue, as every one knows, is a compound of many.——The pains which William the Conqueror took to graft his Norman French upon it, succeeded in many instances, and there are others where we may trace the dying away of the French by degrees, and the English resuming its old place. Chaucer in his character of the Monk, says

This is the remains of the French embonpoint, or as it was written then en bon point.——The phrase was wearing out in Chaucer’s time, the en bon being translated, and point preserved. Now, the whole is translated, and we say in good case, or plight.——You may find many other instances of this in the old poets.

“The days are now a cock-stride longer,” say the country-folks at Twelfth-day—and many have been the conjectures upon the derivation of this phrase (see the Gentleman’s Magazine). It is not cock-stride, but cock’s-tread. In the country, tread is pronounced trede, (not tred)—and in most of the western counties, Devonshire excepted, stride has more of the e than i in its sound.—But the impossibility of expressing by any known signs the different provincial modifications of the sound of the vowels, has occasioned some strange mistakes when people of one county endeavour to write down an expression used in another. Our old poets, who generally writ in the dialect of the province where they resided, and spelt as well as they could with their own country vowels, have given birth to much laughable criticism.

Help-mate is an odd corruption. In the Book of Genesis it is said, “it is not good for man to be alone, I will make an help meet for him”—that is an help, proper for him—meet is an adjective. But these two words, like the first man and his help, soon became one, and of late have been corrected into help-mate.

As I was reading John Struys’s voyages the other day, I thought I discovered the original of the word, and perhaps of the liquor, punch; which, if I am right, has nothing to do with that diverting personage in puppet-shews of the same name, from whom it is usually derived. Struys was at Gomroon in Persia, where he says, he drank——“A liquor much in use there, called pale punshen, being compounded of arak, sugar, and raisins, which is so bewitching that they cannot refrain from drinking it.” I really believe he forgot to mention the water—for how in such a climate as the southern part of Persia it was possible to drink undiluted arak, I have no conception. The raisins have given place, and very properly, to lemons. But I had better leave this to its own merits.—I am afraid it will not bear too minute an examination—remember it is only humbly offered together with the other conjectures of

Yours, &c.

As Struys’s Voyages is a scarce book, I might with great ease have practised the common trick of authors, and introduced water into the quotation without fear of discovery. It being supposed that few will give themselves the trouble to turn to the original book to examine extracts, authors have been made to give evidence to facts, “of which they nothing know,” and to support systems which never had existence, but in the imagination of the writer who presses them into his service.