Neil:
> So they must suck the winde, right? To get it in their bodies?
>
> I'd be stunned if Chapman had used "windfuckers" in his Iliad, given its
> evidently vernacular pejorative connections. So if his bird is
>
> "laboriously ingrossing al the air with his
> luxurious ambition"
Except the reference is to Chapman's +Preface+ to the Iliad -- he could be
pretty crude and brutal there. Dissolve the public and elect another one.
But been a time since I read that. Both Chapman and Jonson, contemplating
how The Public Didn't Understand Them could become ... relaxed. Abusive.
Colloquial.
> He probably isn't "fucking" the air, is he. He's "sucking" it -
> "ingrossing" it into his body.
The EMEDD gives this:
"wind" near "fuck"
(1) Florio (Florio 1598 @ 20662737)
Succhia capra, a kinde of bird which is said to suck a goates vdder. Some
haue taken it for the winde-fucker.
(2) Florio (Florio 1598 @ 20663300)
Succhié llo, an augre, a percer, a wimblet, a gimblet, a boarer, a forcet.
Also a kind of little pipe or flute. Also a bird called a winde-fucker.
(3) Cotgrave (Cotgrave 1611 @ 29795458)
Crecerelle: [f.] [A Rattle, or Clacke for children to play with; also, a
Destrell, Fleingall, or Fuck winde.]
End of data
Now that still leaves a problem -- you've made a good case for ALL the
wind-fucker examples in the OED being misreadings of the long "s". But
Florio and Cotgrave? Could be the same thing -- I don't really know how
accurate the transcriptions for the EMEDD are, but on the whole, they seem
to be OK.
On the other hand, I'd agree, "wind-sucker" makes more intuitive sense to me
than "wind-fucker".
Dunno ...
> The 1620 ed. of The Silent Woman on EEBO shows a pretty inconclusive
> <f>/<s> character,
Why am I not surprised? <g>
> and if the usage wasn't common in the 1720s
If you take the EMEDD at face-value, Florio uses it twice in 1598.
> the error
> in reading windfuckers for windsuckers, as I would have it, goes back to
> the printers misreading of the MS. Proof-readers would easily have missed
> the error, given the ambiguity of the long <s> character.
Ouch!!! That raises yet ANOTHER issue -- was the long/short ess distinction
MS as well as print? That +had+ actually occurred to me, but buggered if I
was going to try to chase it -- paleography's not my field.
[Though Jonson did, unusually for his time, proof his books carefully.]
> All of which is to say, that the citations in the OED are by no means
> conclusive, to my mind. But I still should've checked the definition.
Yes and yes ... <g>
Look, I'll try and put this into some sort of order and dump it on a couple
of academic [spit] lists (18L, Ficino), and see what emerges. I'll even do
it this such away that I almost seem like a Real Academic.
If it were 150 years later, Rictor Norton could prolly quote us
chapter-and-verse for this, but pre-1600, even Rictor goes a bit fuzzy.
[Sorry, folks, this reference will make sense to Neil if to no one else.]
Robin
{But what the hell, are we at least agreed that the Silent Woman
"wind-whatever" is a reference to a kestrel? And not some sort of spavined
horse? Or is THAT still up for grabs? <g again>
R2.}
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