The Jeweller's Window

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30919, 27 November 1965, Page 5

The Jeweller's Window

(Specially written for “The Press” by ARNOLD WALL ] QORSE can arouse very different emotions in different people. Linnaeus falls on his knees before a flowering gorse - bush and thanks God for making it; a Canterbury fanner curses it heartily as it spreads on to his paddocks from its stronghold in the hedge.

In Britain it is called gorse, furze and whin. Gorse is in Anglo-Saxon gorst and in this form is a well-known surname. It is locally pronounced “goss" like “hoss” for horse. It appears in the names of Gorstly in Gloucestershire and Goscote in Staffordshire, but most placenames in Gos- come from “goose.” Furze gives its name to several villages—Farstly, Fersfield, Fersdon, Freseley. It is “fyrs” in Anglo-Saxon. “Whin” gives its name to Whinburgh in Norfolk and Whinnyriggs in Westmoreland. It is also, I think, in the surname Whineray, from whin and an old Norse word for a dell or nook.

“Whin” itself is probably of Norse originin medieval England gorse had a great reputation as firewood and it was considered that a gorse-covered hillside was a very valuable property growing as it often did on steep hillsides and in poor soils which were no good for anything else. But in New Zealand it was no doubt a mistake to use it as a hedge

plant and every fanner knows what a nuisance it can become if not severely controlled. 1 remember a particular hedge in South Canterbury which had been planted 40 years before I saw it. Many of the bushes had massive trunks nearly two feet in diameter and it was threatening to overrun the paddocks on both sides. So a man was engaged to destroy it and he proved to be the man who had originally planted it. This vigorous old fellow went at it with a gorse-knife and no other tool making an excellent job of destroying his own old handiwork.

By the way. this man was illiterate, but kept an account of his hours of work and of the materials he ordered for the new wire fence all in his head without any mistake. That is what you gain by not knowing how to read and write—an excellent memory. Worm A GRAPH showing the ups ' 1 and downs in meaning and status which have been the lot of the word "worm” might take very curious forms. The word was in AngloSaxon, and as “orm” in Old Norse, the name for a dragon or serpent. As late as Elizabethan times it could be used in Antony and Cleopatra as the asp in “the pretty worm of Nylus.” It became any creeping thing, reptile or insect. Then the earthworm, a symbol of humble or downtrodden status. Then a maggot or caterpillar. In popular belief in old times a dead body was supposed to be eaten by earthworms—“men have died and worms have eaten them"— and an unnamed Anglo-Saxon poet composed a very gruesome poem describing the fierce onslaught of the “worm" upon the human body.

The earthworm advanced quite suddenly into a new kind of public appraisal with the publication of Darwin's monumental work, 1881, on “The Formation of Vegetable Mould” through the action of earthworms—a far cry from “I am a worm and no man" —Psalms XXII, 6.

The combinations of “worm” are very numerous. Among them are “malt worm,” a weevil infesting malt and, figuratively, a “toper"; “worms’-meat” a man’s dead body; “tapeworm” an intestinal parasite: “bookworm,” literally a larva which attacks paper and, figuratively, a devoted reader; and “slow-worm” a sort of legless lizard which was apparently regarded as a poisonous snake, the “slow" being the old verb for “to strike, to slay” (but this i.s rather doubtful). “To worm” is a useful verb, you “worm” yourself into somebody’s favour. The Scandinavian form is “orm” and this was in use as a personal name in Old Norse. It appears as a surname with us and in such place-names as Ormsby, Ormsbrook, etc. Finally, “wormwood" has nothing to do with the worm being a corrupt form of Anglo-Saxon “wermod” supposed to have meant “cure the mind,” a specific in cases of mental disease. It is the same word as the French “vermouth.”