Or else the creators of these hardword books put forward explanations that were complex beyond endurance, as in a book called Glossographia by Thomas Blount, which offers as its definition of shrew: “a kind of Field-Mouse, which if he goes over a beasts back, will make him lame in the Chine; and if he bite, the beast swells to the heart, and dyes…. From hence came our English phrase, I beshrew thee, when we wish ill; and we call a curst woman a Shrew.”
