![]() In one tale, a pair of the critters clung to each other for support as they wended their way to western territories in other stories, the lopsided gyascutus would topple off hillsides and be unable to stand up again. Thomas Lawson, Dagon’s Fall Before the Ark, 1679ĭefinition - an imaginary large four-legged beast with legs on one side longer than on the other for walking on hillsidesĭescribed as a "near relative of the Whang-Doodle and a distant cousin of the Snipe," the gyascutus made its first appearance in American newspapers in the 1840s, and has played a minor role in American folklore since then. This kind of Divination is (as 'tis said) much in use now in the Northern parts, by the frequenters of Horse Courses and Foot Races. Some Divined by Sieve and Shears hence Coscinomancy. In another (equally strange) version, a marble was placed on a red-hot ax the motion of the marble signaled guilt. If the ax moved at a particular name, that person was deemed guilty. Our ancestors used such methods of prognostication as coscinomancy (“divination by the mode of sieve and shears”), hepatoscopy (“divination by inspecting the liver of animals”), and the ever-reliable spatulamancy (“divination by means of an animal's shoulder blade”).Īnother ancient means of determining guilt, axinomancy involved balancing an ax on a post, and reading a list of names aloud. 1877ĭefinition - divination by means of the movements of an ax placed on a postĪnyone who doubts that the human race is getting better at this whole business of life need only take a few minutes to look over some of the ways our forebears had of figuring out what to do in the future. Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette (Sunderland, Eng.), 6 Dec. I am not, in the noble vernacular of Newcastle, going to set myself seriously to spanghew a paddock, but we sometimes hear the same hackneyed phrase about anonymous correspondents used by persons much better entitled to charitable correction. It's mostly used in Scotland and means "throw" or “jump.") ( Spang, by the way, is a verb in its own right. For example, one 19th century report refers to a particular horse's insistence on "spang-hewing" its riders. Please do not be mean to frogs.Īlthough it originally involved an unsavory pastime in which sticks were used to hurl frogs into the air, spanghew has had other meanings as well. This is a brief note, before getting into the particulars of this word, alerting all of our readers to the fact that while we may define words on the subject of frog-tossing, we are very much opposed to the practice of such. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.Definition - to throw violently into the air especially, to throw (a frog) into the air from the end of a stick Īnd if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter. Watch the animation by clicking the play button above. “On the one hand, I’m pulling these words out of obscurity and rescuing them from the murkier corners of the dictionary – then through Twitter, which is one of the most modern things going, at the opposite end of the dictionary from the 19th-Century scholars, people are using them. Jones wants to resurrect them, and he’s found a receptive audience on social media. We’ve picked 12 of our favourites for our animation looking at ‘lost words’ with surprising meanings.įrom ‘frowst’ – a 19th-Century slang word for ‘extra time spent in bed on a Sunday’ – to ‘shivviness’, ‘the uncomfortable feeling of wearing new underwear’, they’ve fallen out of use. It’s one of the words featured in his book The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities (published by Elliott & Thompson), compiling obscure terms Jones has found in long-forgotten lexicons and out-of-print dictionaries. “‘Mamamouchi’ is a delight to say out loud.” “I love finding words that are just beautiful as well as strange,” says self-confessed ‘word geek’ Paul Anthony Jones.
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