STORY WORDS

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 189, 12 May 1928, Page 21

STORY WORDS

That inherently poetic word, “gossamer,” suggestive of airy illusiveness, is nevertheless of homely origin. The name seems to have been a combination of goose and summer, goose-summer, and. in Middle English was spelt “gossomer,” th. present use of the “a” being a corruption. At first the word is supposed to have signified an Indian or St. Martin’s summer, the time of year when geese are most used as food. It is during these warm periods in autumn that the gossamer or fine cobweb spun by small spiders on grass and low bushes is chiefly observed. Another explanation of the present meaning of "gossamer” is that the fine spider threads resemble the down of a goose (says the “Christian Science Monitor”). Many European lariguages have likewise adopted fanciful names to denote the filmy gossamer. In Germany the words, “madchensommer,” maiden-sum-mer, and “altweibcrsonmer,” old wives summer, are used to designate both the gossamer and the season of Indian summer, while “sommerfaden,” summer threads, is another name for the filaments. In the Dutch form of the word “kraanzomer,” cranes are substituted for geese, and this term probably owes its origin to the number of cranes seen flying south in autumn. As hns been the case with many another poetic word, the trade world seized upon the epithet “gossamer” as expressive of lightness. Thus in England the word was once used as a tradesman’s name for an extremely light make of silk hat. Later the term was applied jocularly to a hat in general. Dickens thus using the word in “Pickwick Papers” when Sam Weller says, “Every hole lets in some air . . . wentilation gossamer I calls it.” In the United States “gossamer” is employed to designate a thin waterproof material or a garment made of it as a raincoat.