Putrid can make some sense.
Shakespeare's Henry IV:
PRINCE HENRY
: I have procured thee, Jack, a charge of foot.
FALSTAFF
: I would it had been of horse. Where shall I find
one that can steal well? O for a fine thief, of the
age of two and twenty or thereabouts! I am
heinously unprovided. Well, God be thanked for
these rebels, they offend none but the virtuous: I
laud them, I praise them.
Falstaff speaks Kentish dialect, so for instance he voices final -s to -z. In some verbs [eː] had not yet become [iː] as we have them today.
Thus Falstaff puns here between horse/whores and steal/stale:
I would it had been of whores. Where shall I find
one that can stale well? O for a fine thief, of the
age of two and twenty or thereabouts!
'To stale' was to urinate, the meaning here being that his twenty-two-year-old was not afflicted with an STD.
So... stall being 'putrid' in the context of a pool of water is not an unthinkable connection.
On 20 Jun 2012, at 11:53, [log in to unmask] wrote:
> Keith's very learned pedantry doesn't get us much further. The sense 'putrid' may well be implied in 'stagnant'. -stall in combination with mere- is curious however. I seem to recollect that Karl Inge Sandred once wrote about worm-stall 'manger, cattle stll', but I don't have the reference. I'm sure Keith does, so he might follow it up.
>
> Captain Jack
>
> Von: Keith Briggs <[log in to unmask]>
> An: [log in to unmask]
> Betreff: [EPNL] mere-stall
> Datum: Wed, 20 Jun 2012 10:44:35 +0200
>
>
> I refer to PN Sa6:29, whereat mere-stall is said to mean 'putrid pond'. I wondered about the ‘putrid’, so I checked the reference given to PN Sa4:169. At that place a further reference is made to PN Ch5:ii (more precisely PN Ch5 (section 1:ii) p.281), in which seven Cheshire examples of mere-stall are said to mean 'a (stagnant) pool; a pond'. Nothing about 'putrid' is mentioned, and the compound is derived from mere1 'a pool'. A further reference is made by Dodgson to PN Ch3 158-9, 280. At 158-9 mere-stall is now derived from mere2 'a mare'! At 280-1 a compound le Horemerestall 1353 'muddy pool' is given, which looks like a possible source of Gelling's 'putrid', even though her Shropshire example does not have the hore- prefix. All rather confused! B-T Supp has one non-place-name instance.
>
> Keith
>
>
Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/
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