rhyming-ware
Mar. 27th, 2009 07:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
prettygoodwordIt's Forgotten English Friday!
rhyming-ware - Composition in rhyme; poetry. —John Jamieson's Etymological Scottish Dictionary, 1808
A quick search finds a couple uses by Burns as well as other Scotts writers, which leads one to wonder if usage ever crept south. In context, it usually refers to occasional verse tossed off for social or epistolary purposes. Because of this, you get a bonus word:
cutler's poetry - Doggerel verse; from the lines formerly engraved on knife blades. Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice (1596) —Albert Hyamson's Dictionary of English Phrases, 1922
Per Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, "Knives had, at one time, a distich inscribed on the blade by means of aqua fortis." Shakespeare's use is in act V, scene I:
rhyming-ware - Composition in rhyme; poetry. —John Jamieson's Etymological Scottish Dictionary, 1808
A quick search finds a couple uses by Burns as well as other Scotts writers, which leads one to wonder if usage ever crept south. In context, it usually refers to occasional verse tossed off for social or epistolary purposes. Because of this, you get a bonus word:
cutler's poetry - Doggerel verse; from the lines formerly engraved on knife blades. Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice (1596) —Albert Hyamson's Dictionary of English Phrases, 1922
Per Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, "Knives had, at one time, a distich inscribed on the blade by means of aqua fortis." Shakespeare's use is in act V, scene I:
GRATIANO: About a hoop of gold, a paltry ring---L.
That she did give me, whose posy was
For all the world like cutler's poetry
Upon a knife, 'Love me, and leave me not.'
