'Nothing So Much as Mincing Poetry'

While reading the history plays again, I’ve been keeping a list of peculiar, amusing, exotic-sounding words, and words I don’t remember having encountered before. I love these choice little discoveries. My only disappointment is that such words are virtually unusable. They would be gibberish to most people, whether in writing or speech, and would end up sounding pretentious and incoherent. Here’s a passage from Henry IV, Part 1 (Act 3, Scene 1), in which Hotspur is complaining about Owen Glendower’s bloviation:

 

“Sometime he angers me

With telling me of the moldwarp and the ant,

Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies,

And of a dragon and a finless fish,

A clip-winged griffin and a moulten raven,

A couching lion and a ramping cat,

And such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff

As puts me from my faith.”

 

Translation into modern English: “He talks too much.” Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary identifies skimble-skamble as an adjective meaning “wandering; wild,” but dismisses it as “cant.” The OED says it’s an adjective, noun and adverb and defines it in the first case as “confused, incoherent, nonsensical, rubbishy.” In other words, a highly useful word, with many applications, that won’t be used. The OED cites later uses by Lord Byron, John Ruskin and John Motley in The Rise of the Dutch Republic. Moldwarp, by the way, refers to Talpa europaea, the European mole. In the same act, Hotspur reacts to Glendower boasting that he “gave the tongue a helpful ornament,” while making fun of “mincing poetry”:

 

“I had rather be a kitten and cry ‘mew’

Than one of these same meter balladmongers.

I had rather hear a brazen can’stick turned,

Or a dry wheel grate on the axletree,

And that would set my teeth nothing an edge,

Nothing so much as mincing poetry.

’Tis like the forced gait of a shuffling nag.”