In the Forest, too, as in all other districts, a noticeable point is the number of words formed by the process of onomatopoieia. Thus, to take a few examples, we have the expressive verb to “scroop,” meaning to creak, or grate, as a door does on rusty hinges; and again the word “hooi,” applied to the wind whistling round a corner, or through the key-hole, making the sound correspond to the sense. It exactly represents the harsh creaking, as the Latin _susurrus_ and the ψιθύρισµα of Theocritus reflect the whisperings of the wind in the pines and poplars, resembling, as Tennyson says, “a noise of falling showers.” Again, such words as “clocking,” “gloxing,” applied to falling, gurgling water; “grizing,” and “snaggling,” said of a dog snarling; “whittering,” or “whickering”—exactly equivalent to the German _wiehern_—of a young colt’s neighing; “belloking,” of a cow’s lowing—are all here commonly used, and are similarly formed. Names of animals take their origin in the same way. The wry-neck, called the “barley-bird” in Wiltshire, and the “cuckoo’s mate” and “messenger” elsewhere, is in the Forest known as the “weet-bird,” from its peculiar cry of “weet;” which it will repeat at short intervals for an hour together. So, too, the common green woodpecker is here, as is in some other parts of England, called, from its loud shrill laugh, the “yaffingale.” The goat-sucker, too, is the “jar-bird,” so known from its jarring noise, which has made the Welsh peasant name it the “wheel-bird” (_aderyn y droell_), and the Warwickshire the “spinning-jenny.” In fact, a large number of birds in every language are thus called, and to this day in the cry of the peacock we may plainly hear its Greek name, ταῶς. Of course, we must be on our guard against adopting the onomatopoëtic theory as altogether explaining the origin of language. Within, however, certain limits, especially with a peculiar class of provincialisms, it gives us, as here, true aid.[228] Again, as an example of phrases used by our Elizabethan poets, preserved only by our peasantry, though in good use in America, take the word “bottom,” so common throughout the Forest, meaning a valley, glen, or glade. Beaumont and Fletcher and Shakspeare frequently employ it. Even Milton, in _Paradise Regained_, says— “But cottage, herd, or sheepcote, none he saw, Only in a bottom saw a pleasant grove.” (Book ii. 289.) In his _Comus_, too, we find him using the compound “bottom-glade,” just as the Americans speak to this day of the “bottom-lands” of the Ohio, and our own peasants of Slufter Bottom, and Longslade Bottom, in the New Forest.