if a man called Waa (“crow”) departed this life, during the period of mourning for him nobody might call a crow a _waa_; everybody had to speak of the bird as a _narrapart_. When a person who rejoiced in the title of Ringtail Opossum (_weearn_) had gone the way of all flesh, his sorrowing relations and the tribe at large were bound for a time to refer to ringtail opossums by the more sonorous name of _manuungkuurt_. If the community were plunged in grief for the loss of a respected female who bore the honourable name of Turkey Bustard, the proper name for turkey bustards, which was _barrim barrim_, went out, and _tillit tilliitsh_ came in. And so _mutatis mutandis_ with the names of Black Cockatoo, Grey Duck, Gigantic Crane, Kangaroo, Eagle, Dingo, and the rest.(1365) (M216) A similar custom used to be constantly transforming the language of the Abipones of Paraguay, amongst whom, however, a word once abolished seems never to have been revived. New words, says the missionary Dobrizhoffer, sprang up every year like mushrooms in a night, because all words that resembled the names of the dead were abolished by proclamation and others coined in their place. The mint of words was in the hands of the old women of the tribe, and whatever term they stamped with their approval and put in circulation was immediately accepted without a murmur by high and low alike, and spread like wildfire through every camp and settlement of the tribe. You would be astonished, says the same missionary, to see how meekly the whole nation acquiesces in the decision of a withered old hag, and how completely the old familiar words fall instantly out of use and are never repeated either through force of habit or forgetfulness. In the seven years that Dobrizhoffer spent among these Indians the native word for jaguar was changed thrice, and the words for crocodile, thorn, and the slaughter of cattle underwent similar though less varied vicissitudes. As a result of this habit, the vocabularies of the missionaries teemed with erasures, old words having constantly to be struck out as obsolete and new ones inserted in their place.(1366) Similarly, a peculiar feature of the Comanche language is that a portion of the vocabulary is continually changing. If, for example, a person called Eagle or Bison dies, a new name is invented for the bird or beast, because it is forbidden to mention the name of any one who is dead.(1367) So amongst the Kiowa Indians all words that suggest the name of a deceased person are dropped for a term of years and other words are substituted for them. The old word may after the lapse of years be restored, but it often happens that the new one keeps its place and the original word is entirely forgotten. Old men sometimes remember as many as three different names which have been successively used for the same thing. The new word is commonly a novel combination of existing roots, or a novel use of a current word, rather than a deliberately invented term.(1368)