_Sky-larking_.--Nothing to do with _larks_ of any sort; still less the particular species, _alauda arvensis_. The word improperly spelt _l-a-r-k_, and banished to the slang regions of the English language, is the Anglo-Saxon _lác_ = _game_, or _sport_; wherein the a is sounded as in _father_ (not as in _farther_). _Lek_ = _game_, in the present Scandinavian languages. _Zachary Macaulay_ = _Zumalacarregui_; _Billy Ruffian_ = _Bellerophon_; _Sir Roger Dowlas_ = _Surajah Dowlah_, although so limited to the common soldiers and sailors, who first used them, as to be exploded vulgarisms rather than integral parts of the language, are examples of the same tendency towards the irregular accommodation of misunderstood foreign terms. _Birdbolt_.--An incorrect name for the _gadus lota_, or _eel-pout_, and a transformation of _barbote_. _Whistle-fish_.--The same for _gadus mustela_, or _weasel-fish_. _Liquorice_ = _glycyrrhiza_. _Wormwood_ = _weremuth_, is an instance of a word from the same language, in an antiquated shape, being equally transformed with a word of really foreign origin. § 89. Sometimes the transformation of the _name_ has engendered a change in the object to which it applies, or, at least, has evolved new ideas in connection with it. How easy for a person who used the words _beef-eater_, _sparrow-grass_, or _Jerusalem_, to believe that the officers designated by the former either eat or used to eat more beef than any other people, that the second word was the name for a _grass_ or herb of which _sparrows_ were fond; and that _Jerusalem_ artichokes came from Palestine. What has just been supposed has sometimes a real occurrence. To account for the name of _Shotover-hill_, I have heard that Little John _shot over_ it. Here the confusion, in order to set itself right, breeds a fiction. Again, in chess, the piece now called the _queen_, was originally the _elephant_. This was in Persian, _ferz_. In French it became _vierge_, which, in time, came to be mistaken for a derivative, and _virgo_ = _the virgin_, _the lady_, _the queen_. § 90. Sometimes, where the form of a word in respect to its _sound_ is not affected, a false spirit of accommodation introduces an unetymological _spelling_; as _frontispiece_, from _frontispecium_, _sovereign_, from _sovrano_, _colleague_ from _collega_, _lanthorn_ (old orthography) from _lanterna_. The value of forms like these consists in their showing that language is affected by false etymologies as well as by true ones. * * * * * § 91. In _lambkin_ and _lancet_, the final syllables (-kin and -et) have the same power. They both express the idea of smallness or diminutiveness. These words are but two out of a multitude, the one (_lamb_) being of Saxon, the other (_lance_) of Norman origin. The same is the case with the superadded syllables: -kin being Saxon; -et Norman. Now to add a Saxon termination to a Norman word, or _vice versâ_, is to corrupt the English language.