Sunday, March 22, 2009

Non-Moby-Dictionary

Some words culled from Thomas Morton's New English Canaan:

sleech, n.
1. Mud deposited by the sea or a river; soil composed of this.

2. A stretch of mud on a shore.

Hence sleechy a., slimy, muddy.


clunch, n.
1. A lump, a heavy and unshapely mass.
(Known only in mod. dialect, but prob. of considerable age.) [So EFris. klunt.]

2. A lumpish fellow, a clown, boor, lout. Cf. CLOD, CLOT. Obs. exc. dial. [So EFris. klunt.]

3. A (clumsy) hand, ‘fist’. Obs. [? Influenced by CLUTCH, or by CLENCH (see CLUNCH v.); but cf. EFris. klunt a clumsy, clodhopping foot.]

[ed. note: lumpish!]

cark, v.
1.
trans. To load, burden; also, to charge or impose as a charge upon. Obs.

2. To burden with care, burden as care does; to worry, harass, vex, trouble. (Mostly in pa. pple.) Obs. or arch.; but see CARKING ppl. a.

3. intr. To be anxious, be full of anxious thought, fret oneself; to labour anxiously, to toil and moil. Obs. or arch.

4. In weakened sense (cf. CARE v.): To take thought or care, busy oneself. Obs.


A sentence: "Don't cark me with that sleechy clunch."

4 comments:

  1. The clunch was carking about the sleech.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Clunching sleech instigated the cark.

    ReplyDelete
  3. First read this stuff and thought it was all just some attempt to mulct me with a canard. Some fact checking and I'm now heartened to know otherwise. Blog is shaping up nicely. Could use more puns from Nina, but otherwise its a good blog.

    ReplyDelete