Last Friday, I decided to make a weekly contribution to the blog in the form of a Phrase or word history plucked out of a dictionary I own. This is the giant Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: 17th Edition revised by John Ayto. It's a delightful book which provides you with a list of more than a million words and phrases and their roots, along with stories that may be associated with them.
The idea is to open the book to a random page, and select one eye-catching entry to post about, every Friday. I'll learn something new, the book will do more than sit on my shelf gathering dust and I'll get to post a little something without spending a lot of time and effort on it - I'm suffering from a serious lack of either of those things.
Here goes nothing, today's entry is -
FINGER. The old names for the five fingers are:
(1) Thuma (Old English), the thumb.
(2) Towcher (Middle English, 'toucher'), foreman or pointer. This was called the scite-finger ('shooting finger') by the Anglo-Saxons. It is now usually known as the first finger or forefinger, or the index finger because it is used for pointing.
(3) Long-man, long-finger or middle finger.
(4) Lec-man or ring-finger. The former means the 'medical finger' (literally 'leech finger') and the latter is the Roman digitus annularis, called by the Anglo-Saxons the gold finger. This finger is used as the ring finger (also annular finger) in the belief that a nerve ran through it to the heart. Hence the Greeks and Romans called it the medical finger, and used it for stirring mixtures under the notion that that it would give instant warning to the heart if it came into contact with anything noxious. It is still a popular superstition that it is bad to rub ointment or scratch the skin with any other finger.
(5) Little man or little finger: The Anglo-Saxons called it the ear-finger, because it is the one used to poke inside the ear when it tickles or to worm out the wax. It is also known as the auricular finger.
And that's it for today. Have a happy weekend!
