‘eldorado’, ‘embargo’, ‘flotilla’, ‘gala’, ‘grandee’, ‘grenade’,
‘guerilla’, ‘hooker’{20}, ‘infanta’, ‘jennet’, ‘junto’, ‘merino’,
‘mosquito’, ‘mulatto’, ‘negro’, ‘olio’, ‘ombre’, ‘palaver’, ‘parade’,
‘parasol’, ‘parroquet’, ‘peccadillo’, ‘picaroon’, ‘platina’, ‘poncho’,
‘punctilio’, (for a long time spelt ‘puntillo’, in English books),
‘quinine’, ‘reformado’, ‘savannah’, ‘serenade’, ‘sherry’, ‘stampede’,
‘stoccado’, ‘strappado’, ‘tornado’, ‘vanilla’, ‘verandah’. ‘Buffalo’
also is Spanish; ‘buff’ or ‘buffle’ being the proper English word;
‘caprice’ too we probably obtained rather from Spain than Italy, as we
find it written ‘capricho’ by those who used it first. Other Spanish
words, once familiar, are now extinct. ‘Punctilio’ lives on, but not
‘punto’, which occurs in Bacon. ‘Privado’, signifying a prince’s
favourite, one admitted to his _privacy_ (no uncommon word in Jeremy
Taylor and Fuller), has quite disappeared; so too has ‘quirpo’
(cuerpo), the name given to a jacket fitting close to the _body_;
‘quellio’ (cuello), a ruff or _neck_-collar; and ‘matachin’, the title
of a sword-dance; these are all frequent in our early dramatists; and
‘flota’ was the constant name of the treasure-fleet from the Indies.
‘Intermess’ is employed by Evelyn, and is the Spanish ‘entremes’,
though not recognized as such in our dictionaries. ‘Mandarin’ and
‘marmalade’ are our only Portuguese words I can call to mind. A good
many of our sea-terms are Dutch, as ‘sloop’, ‘schooner’, ‘yacht’,
‘boom’, ‘skipper’, ‘tafferel’, ‘to smuggle’; ‘to wear’, in the sense
of veer, as when we say ‘_to wear_ a ship’; ‘skates’, too, and
‘stiver’, are Dutch. Celtic _things_ are for the most part designated
among us by Celtic words; such as ‘bard’, ‘kilt’, ‘clan’, ‘pibroch’,
‘plaid’, ‘reel’. Nor only such as these, which are all of them
comparatively of modern introduction, but a considerable number, how
large a number is yet a very unsettled question, of words which at a
much earlier date found admission into our tongue, are derived from
this quarter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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