But to look now nearer home for our examples. The little raisins brought from Greece, which play so important a part in one of the national dishes of England, the Christmas plum-pudding, used to be called ‘corinths’; and so you would find them in mercantile lists of a hundred years ago: either that for the most part they were shipped from Corinth, the principal commercial city in Greece, or because they grew in large abundance in the immediate district round about it. Their likeness in shape and size and general appearance to our own currants, working together with the ignorance of the great majority of English people about any such place as Corinth, soon brought the name ‘corinths’ into ‘currants’, which now with a certain unfitness they bear; being not currants at all, but dried grapes, though grapes of diminutive size{ 260}.
‘_Court_-cards’, that is, the king, queen, and knave in each suit, were once ‘coat-cards’{ 261}; having their name from the long splendid ‘coat’ (vestis talaris) with which they were arrayed. Probably ‘coat’ after a while did not perfectly convey its original meaning and intention; being no more in common use for the long garment reaching down to the heels; and then ‘coat’ was easily exchanged for ‘court’, as the word is now both spelt and pronounced, seeing that nowhere so fitly as in a Court should such splendidly arrayed personages be found. A public house in the neighbourhood of London having a few years since for its sign “The George _Canning_” is already “The George and _Cannon_”,--so rapidly do these transformations proceed, so soon is that forgotten which we suppose would never be forgotten. “Welsh _rarebit_” becomes “Welsh _rabbit_”{ 262}; and ‘_farced_’ or stuffed ‘meat’ becomes “forced meat”. Even the mere determination to make a word _look_ English, to put it into an English shape, without thereby so much as seeming to attain any result in the way of etymology, this is very often sufficient to bring about a change in its spelling, and even in its form{ 263}. It is thus that ‘sipahi’ has become ‘sepoy’; and only so could ‘weissager’ have taken its present form of ‘wiseacre’{ 264}.
It is not very uncommon for a word, while it is derived from one word, to receive a certain impulse and modification from another. This extends sometimes beyond the spelling, and in cases where it does so, would hardly belong to our present theme. Still I may notice an instance or two. Thus our ‘obsequies’ is the Latin ‘exequiæ’, but formed under a certain impulse of ‘obsequium’, and seeking to express and include the observant honour of that word. ‘To refuse’ is ‘recusare’, while yet it has derived the ‘f’ of its second syllable from ‘refutare’; it is a medley of the two{ 265}. The French ‘rame’, an oar, is ‘remus’, but that modified by an unconscious recollection of ‘ramus’. ‘Orange’ is no doubt a Persian word, which has reached us through the Arabic, and which the Spanish ‘naranja’ more nearly represents than any form of it existing in the other languages of Europe. But what so natural as to think of the orange as the _golden_ fruit, especially when the “_aurea_ mala” of the Hesperides were familiar to all antiquity? There cannot be a doubt that ‘aurum’, ‘oro’, ‘or’, made themselves felt in the shapes which the word assumed in the languages of the West, and that here we have the explanation of the change in the first syllable, as in the low Latin ‘aurantium’, ‘orangia’, and in the French ‘orange’, which has given us our own.