Talk:afgod

Another cite
But the language is unclear because the occurrence is mentiony; it may not be English: - -sche (discuss) 18:55, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

RFV discussion: February–March 2023
This is a curious term. The etymology (which was also tagged for verification, by someone else) says this term seems to have been a calque [which seems like an error for "learned borrowing", it's not a calque if af- isn't English] of an Old English term which, however, seems to have been a modern English invention. Well! I only spotted two citations: one which glosses itself as referring to the dragon definition, and two near-identical copies of a text (one using the plural and one the singular) which gloss it as referring to the idol definition. - -sche (discuss) 10:38, 15 February 2023 (UTC)


 * This is indeed interesting. I noticed there was an OED reference at the bottom of the entry so I looked it up. (The reference for the etymology in our entry is the OED.) The earliest reference to afgod and afgodnes are in a glossary in a 1605 book by (under the name Richard Verstegan). Although Rowlands asserted the word was Old English no evidence of it has been found, and the OED suggests that while perhaps there was a manuscript that Rowlands referred to which is now lost, he could also have just assumed the word existed in OE based on the word afgod in Dutch (his grandfather was Dutch) or Old Saxon. Thereafter, afgod only next appears in 1769 in a text purporting to be from the 15th century written by the poet . Thereafter, there is a debate in the late 18th century about the meaning of the word used by Chatterton, and then it does not appear to be used any further. Disregarding the appearance of afgod in dictionaries and glossaries, it looks like the limited uses are in Chatterton's works and in the 18th-century discussions about the meaning of the word (which could be mentions). Afgodnes appears to only be attested in dictionaries and glossaries. — Sgconlaw (talk) 15:05, 15 February 2023 (UTC)


 * Is the letter in the 1769 Town and Country Magazine (see entry) the text by Chatterton? But that letter dates itself to the same year as it appeared in the magazine (1769). Is it one of the discussions of Chatterton, then? It does seem borderline between use and mention, though arguably just over the border in use territory. If we found at least one more cite, we might have enough to boil the entry down to one combined (perhaps non-gloss) sense, but I've only spotted the two. Is this the fake 15th century cite? If it's really from after 1500, I suppose it could be argued it's also a use, though then perhaps not independent of the Works of Chatterton cite. (Obviously, if kept, the entry would need to explain the erroneousness of the term better.) - -sche (discuss) 19:06, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
 * OED says the Town and Country quotation is "from a letter also attributed to Chatterton". Yes, that is the fake 15th-century cite; Thomas Chatterton notes that "He [Chatterton] was able to pass off his work as that of an imaginary 15th-century poet called Thomas Rowley, chiefly because few people at the time were familiar with medieval poetry". So it's looking very much like Rowlands may have mistakenly thought afgod was an English word, and then Chatterton (perhaps following Rowlands) used it in a fake 15th-century text and in references to that text, and subsequent 18th-century uses refer to Chatterton. — Sgconlaw (talk) 21:29, 15 February 2023 (UTC)
 * Fascinating. Well, I've corrected the metadata to attribute all the cites to Chatterton, and copied them over to the cites page in the expectation that this will fail, unless his word caught on with anyone else the OED missed. - -sche (discuss) 02:09, 8 March 2023 (UTC)


 * RFV-failed. - -sche (discuss) 19:34, 23 March 2023 (UTC)