Haggard Hawks and Paltry Poltroons Quotes

“The earliest recorded use of the word freelance in English comes from Sir Walter Scott’s classic novel Ivanhoe, written in 1819.”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Haggard Hawks and Paltry Poltroons: The Origins of English in Ten Words

“shelvy, meaning ‘of different levels’ (The Merry Wives of Windsor, III. v). 6.”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Haggard Hawks and Paltry Poltroons: The Origins of English in Ten Words

“bushy’ or ‘covered in vegetation’. It is derived from the Old English dialect word bosk, referring to a bush or thicket, with the addition of the suffix -y to form an adjective.”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Haggard Hawks and Paltry Poltroons: The Origins of English in Ten Words

“Shakespeare accounts for just over 33,000 references in the OED (5 per cent of which are from Hamlet alone) of which some 1,500 provide the first recorded use of a word in the English language, and a further 8,000 provide the first record of an existing word being used in a new sense or context. Although it cannot be said that Shakespeare personally created all of these new words and senses (his works merely provide their first written evidence), nonetheless his linguistic creativity is clear.”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Haggard Hawks and Paltry Poltroons: The Origins of English in Ten Words

“both zed and zee were used interchangeably in both British and American English, alongside a whole host of other more outlandish names for Z including izzard, shard, ezod and uzzard, all of which have long since fallen out of use. Of the two, zed is the earlier, derived at length from the name of the equivalent Greek letter zeta and first attested in written”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Haggard Hawks and Paltry Poltroons: The Origins of English in Ten Words

“pass for Buncombe’ both became popular catchphrases in the 1830s. Eventually, the word itself came to be used as a general term for nonsense or waffling talk in the 1860s, with the abbreviated form bunk developing around 1900, and the verb debunk first recorded in 1923.”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Haggard Hawks and Paltry Poltroons: The Origins of English in Ten Words

“coach was first recorded in English as coche in the mid-1500s. It derives via French from the Hungarian word kocsi, which is in turn taken from the name of the town of Kocs, roughly 50 km (30 miles) west of Budapest, where this style of carriage is thought to have first been manufactured in the fifteenth century.”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Haggard Hawks and Paltry Poltroons: The Origins of English in Ten Words

“Cynics are believed to have derived their name from that of the Cynosarges, a famous public gymnasium (an outdoor place of learning) on the outskirts of Athens, where Antisthenes is known to have once taught. According to legend, the Cynosarges itself is named after the Greek for ‘white dog’, kynos argos, as it was supposedly founded on the site of an ancient shrine built where a magnificent white dog dropped a chunk of meat it had stolen from a sacrificial offering. 6.”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Haggard Hawks and Paltry Poltroons: The Origins of English in Ten Words

“much more familiar imperial system (a troy pound, for instance, contains twelve ounces rather than sixteen), the troy system itself is of uncertain origin, but its name is believed to derive from the French market town of Troyes, south-east of Paris, where the system was presumably first used.”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Haggard Hawks and Paltry Poltroons: The Origins of English in Ten Words

“referring to the Limousin region of central France. It is thought that when the first limousine cars were produced, the outer covering of the passenger compartment so resembled the hoods of Limousin shepherds that the word stuck and eventually evolved the meaning by which it is most familiar today.”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Haggard Hawks and Paltry Poltroons: The Origins of English in Ten Words

“denim takes its name from the two-word French phrase de Nîmes, making mention of the city in the south of France where it was first made.”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Haggard Hawks and Paltry Poltroons: The Origins of English in Ten Words

“a pithivier is a rich puff-pastry tart of almond paste and cream, named after the town of Pithiviers outside Paris;”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Haggard Hawks and Paltry Poltroons: The Origins of English in Ten Words

“brummagem has been used since the mid-seventeenth century in English to describe anything inauthentic or counterfeit,”
― Paul Anthony Jones, Haggard Hawks and Paltry Poltroons: The Origins of English in Ten Words