Turn haunch-man into French and you get _flanquier_;
corrupt it back into Scotch and you have _flunky_. Whatever liberties
we take with French words, the Gauls have their revenge when they take
possession of an English one. We once saw an Avis of the police in
Paris, regulating _les chiens et les boule dogues_, dogs and bull-dogs.
Vocabularies of vulgarisms are of interest for the archaisms both of
language and pronunciation which we find in them. The dictionaries say
_coverlet_, as if the word were a diminutive; the rustic persists in
the termination _lid_, which points to the French _lit_, bed. On the
other hand, he still says _hankercher_, having been taught so by his
betters, though they have taken up the final _f_ again. Sewel, in the
Introduction to his Dutch Dictionary, 1691, gives _henketsjer_, and
Voltaire, forty years later, _hankercher_, as the received
pronunciation. Sewel tells us also that the significant _l_ was still
sounded in _would_ and _should_, as it still is by the peasantry in
many parts of England.
Mr. Swinton's book, the last on our list, is an entertaining one, and
gives proof of thought, though sometimes smothered in fine writing. It
is written altogether too loosely for a work on philology, one of the
exactest of sciences.
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