He is one born among houses, in Greek,
"oi)kogene(s."

Erudition has also suggested Greek as the
origin of the American word whimsically used
for flight from battle in the recent civil war.
It tells us that the word probably was formed
by some professor at Harvard University out
of the Greek word skedao, to disperse; and
will have it that, where this verb is used in the
Odyssey, Minerva having said her say to
Ulysses, "skedaddled through the sky." We
also find in the Iliad an instance of skedaddling
from a fight. On the other hand, skedaddle is
said to be an old homely word of our own
northern dialect. A milkmaid in Dumfries,
who spills milk, is said to be skedaddling it.
And, in fact, we need not go for an origin to
the Greek skedao, when we have our own old
word sceadan (which is in Gothic skeidan, and
the modern German scheiden), meaning to divide
and separate. The real origin, however, of the
old Saxon provincialism is not even here, but
we shall take upon ourselves to find it partly in
the Anglo-Saxon sceót (pronounced skeót),
rapid motion. Sceotan is to move vehemently,
to shoot forward; that being, indeed, the first
sense of our word shoot. A Dumfries girl who
skedaddles her milk does so by over rapid
motion. Now, in the same old form of our
language that makes sceot rapid motion, adle
means disease, and sceot-adle—i.e. skedaddle—
would be a perfectly good compound to represent
the notion of a sort of bolting fever, a bad
habit of scudding away when one ought not.

Happily, nobody derives Buncombe from the
Greek. It is a county with an area of four
hundred and fifty square miles in the western
part of North Carolina. Some years ago the
member for that county rose in Congress and
talked nonsense for a considerable time. Member
after member left the hall, and the orator
told those who remained that they might as well
go too; he should speak for some time yet,
"but he was only talking for Buncombe."
Hence, in America, the name of Buncombe as
a byword for the wasting of time with talk
made for show, and not for use. Who would
deny that the word Platform, expressive of a
political stand-point, is a modern Americanism?
But it is older than the age of Queen Elizabeth.
In the comedy of " Grim, the Collier of Croydon,"
a plotter exclaims:

A sudden Platform comes into my mind.

Tarleton produced a piece called "The Platform
of the Seven Deadly Sins." The play of Sir J.
Oldcastle, by Drayton (1600), contains a passage
giving the word the precise signification it bears
at this day:

There is the Platform, and their bands, my lord,
Each severally subscribed to the same.

The whining, singing speech about religion, said
to be called cant from two Puritan ministers,
father and son, with the same name of Andrew
Cant, who lived in the reign of Charles the
Second, is more probably derived, like chant,
from cant, the root of the Latin word that means
to sing.

Fudge, which first took its place among good
English words in Goldsmith's Vicar of
Wakefield, was not a word of Goldsmith's coining.
In a pamphlet of Remarks on the Navy, 1700,
the word is traced to the name of a commander
of a merchantman who lived in the writer's
time. Captain Fudge, he says, " upon a return
from a voyage, however ill fraught soever his
ship was, always brought home his owners a
good stock of lies, so much so that now aboard
ship the sailors, when they hear a great lie
told, cry out, ' You Fudge it!'" We are sorry
to dispossess the captain, and to differ even
from so good an authority as Mr. Hensleigh
Wedgwood, who sees only in Fudge a provincial
French exclamation, Feuche, which answers to
our Pish. Fudge is, in fact, an ancient native
word, good Celtic for a lie. At this day, the
Welsh for a disguise or lie is Ffug, and the
verb, Ffugio, stands in the dictionary as meaning
"to delude, to feign, to dissemble, to
deceive, to deal hypocritically;" in short, to
Fudge, while Ffug-sanct—Fudge-saint—is the
essential part of the Welsh word for a hypocrite.

Indeed, there has been more and closer union
between Celts and Anglo-Saxons in this country
than until of late some people have believed,
and there is more trace of it in our language
than any one imagined twenty years ago. We
have accounted ourselves something apart from
the O's and the Macs. Disdainful of the
undistinguished Celt, Pinkerton said, " Show me a
great O, and I am done." The Irish O, or Oy,
is said to have meant grandson, and so meant
the old lady who is reported to have said, " Oi
have lived long enough to have a hundred
Oyes." The Welsh Ap, meaning son, prefixed
to Evan, becomes Bevan; Ap Henry becomes
Perry and Parry; Ap Howel, Powell; Ap
Hugh, Pugh; Ap Richard, Pritchard; Ap
Rhys, Price; Ap Roderick, Broderick and
Brodie; and there are plenty of them blended
past all disentanglement with those who talk
of themselves as purely Anglo-Saxon. Happy
it is for us, and good for our wits, that we
are so blended; it may calm the temper of
some controversies when we have more general
and thorough knowledge of the fact that a man
of pure and single race does not exist in
England, and probably not one among the educated
classes without Celtic blood in him.

Talking of education, how is it that generations
of the untaught send their descendants
down to us with names that to the polite eye
and ear often appear as vulgar as themselves?
Certain names we condemn at once as plebeian.
Very often they are stately names that have
been damaged by the spelling of untaught
possessors of them. Thus Taillefer reappears as
Tulliver, De Champ as Shands, Theobald as
Tipple, and Bellechère as Belcher, though that
last name, by the way, suggests the image of a
scholar and a gentleman. Of the same family
of Molineux, the educated line retains the