Monday 24 September 2012

Quillet

It's always good to come across a new word, especially if it has some music in it, and depths of meaning. Today I happened upon 'quillet', which was a new one on me. Its earliest meaning is the obvious one of a small quill or something similarly tubular, but it then took off on a parallel course, Latin-derived, to mean a verbal nicety, a fine distinction, a quibble, apparently from 'quiddity' via 'quillity'. There it is in Love's Labour's Lost - 'Some tricks, some quillets, how to cheat the devil'. But from before Shakespeare's time comes the meaning of a narrow field or strip of land, the sense in which the word is still used in the West Country, especially Cornwall. There, the little sheltered fields of flowers - Cornish violets, pinks, daffodils, anemones, often grown commercially - still go by the name of quillets. This is somehow good to know. Or perhaps it's just me...

6 comments:

  1. excellent new word, thanks Nige! (and i'm cornish and have never once heard it used - perhaps it's a west cornish thing)

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  2. It is good to know...

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  3. And there was a nice picture there of a flowery Cornish field - but it's gone. Why's that? It's still 'there' theoretically...

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  4. there's a wood fair in chapel lawn, shropshire this weekend where a community group has just bought a quillet of the ancient Brineddin Wood

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  5. BBC Radio 4 programme this morning (12/10/2012) on the "Flower Fields Of Cornwall" used the term "quillet". I remember seeing the remnants of one or two in the 1960s near St Ives. Still a few violets growing in them.

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  6. Wodehouse uses the expression 'quillet of the law'. Utilising the first sense.

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