Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
Dr Jamieson, an authority every way entitled to attention on such a
subject, gives a double signification of Fogie:--"1. A term used to
denote an invalid or garrison soldier. 2. A man pithless and infirm from
advanced age." He derives it, with his usual accuracy and acuteness,
from the Suio-Gothic, in which the word "fogde," he tells us, meant
"formerly one who had the charge of a garrison, but is now much declined
in its meaning, as being applied to stewards, beadles," &c. The worthy
doctor seems unconscious of the aid he might have derived from the fact,
that the foreign term Fogde, or Vogt, is a corruption of the Latin
_advocatus_; but he struggles with a laudable and natural feeling to
maintain the dignity of the Fogie, as originally indicating among
ourselves some important officer, such as the governor of a garrison,
and we trust that further research may bring to light some confirmation
of that conjecture. Indeed it may be observed, that there are instances
among us where Fogies are in use to be termed Governors. But we are
bound to say, that there are other linguists who refer the word to a
less elevated source--some connecting it with the term _fog_ or foggage,
meaning a second grass or aftermath, not quite so rich or nourishing as
the first growth; others, pointing at a kind of inferior bee, which
receives the name of _Foggie_ from its finding its nest among fog or
moss; and others uncivilly insinuating that the Latin _fucus_, a drone,
is the origin of the appellation.
While we protest against a supposed acquiescence in these more
derogatory etymologies, we feel that it would be improper and premature
at this stage to attempt the solution of so important a question as that
at which we have thus glanced, and of which the elaborate discussion may
form one of the earliest subjects for a prize essay to be proposed by
the Club, and will doubtless fill many a learned page of the Fogie
Transactions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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