Folk-Etymology: A Dictionary of Verbal Corruptions or Words Perverted in Form or Meaning, by False Derivation or Mistaken Analogy

IT is extraordinary indeed that no book should have been written before on the precise lines of this useful and entertaining volume. Perhaps, however, the production of such a compendium of word-lore would have been impossible until the appearance of Murray and Bradley's still uncompleted New English Dictionary, and Wright's Dictionary of Dialect. In any case, Dr. Palmer deserves our gratitude. He has struck, as it seems to us, the right mean between the popular and the scientific.

The Old English (why Anglo-Saxon?) forms are quoted with an accuracy which was conspicuous by its absence in earlier attempts to popularize the study of philology, while at the same time the writer has wisely refrained from attempting to trace the relationship between the earlier forms through the ramifications of phonetic law, and has avoided those references to the mysteries of 'Lautverschiebung,' 'Ablaut,' and 'Umlaut,' with which the scientific philologist is prone to damp the ardour of the intelligent but unlearned reader.

The central object is well kept in view throughout—i.e. to show how the natural desire for uniformity (combined perhaps with the subtler intellectual pleasure of tracing or inventing analogies) leads to the defacement, often beyond recognition, of such words as are least comprehensible to the vulgar mind—notably of foreign words and names, to which a whole chapter is devoted.

One criticism suggests itself, i.e. that in classifying his material the author might have done well to draw a sharper line of demarcation between the half or wholly unconscious blunders of the vulgar, and the elaborate and would-be ingenious guesses of literary men whose linguistic science is not on a par with their zeal for etymology. Chaucer, Fuller and Ruskin are alike sinners in this respect. It is a curious fact that in the realm of philology, and especially of etymology, fools — or shall we rather say, heaven-born enthusiasts? — are so prone to rush in where the cautious students of the German school fear to tread. Were it not so, however, the study of language would be a duller thing than it is, and English readers would have missed the genuine treat that now awaits them in the perusal of Dr. Smythe Palmer's little book.

—The Church Quarterly Review, Volume 60 [1905]