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Wright gives only the verb stolch 'to tread down, trample, to walk in the dirt'. The adjective is therefore primarily applicable to wet land that has become sodden and miry by being poached by cattle, and then to any ground in a similar condition. Since poach is a somewhat confused homophone, its adjective poachy has no chance against stolchy. 'I whirry through the dark'.
Burr occurs in these poems: 'There the live dimness burrs with droning glees'. #Burr# is, moreover, a bad homophone and cannot neglect possible distinctions: the Oxford Dictionary has eight entries of substantives under burr. Our author also uses whirr: 'And the bleak garrets' crevices Like whirring distaffs utter dread', and again of the noise of wind in ivy, on p. 54, and
#Sheal# is a homophone, 1. a shepherd's hut or shanty; 2. a peascod or seed-shell. Of the first, shiel and shieling are common forms; the second is dialectal; E.D.D. gives #shealing# as the husk of seeds. If this be the meaning in our quotation, the appearance described is unrecognized by the present annotator.
'No hedger brished nor scythesman swung'. and 'The morning hedger with his brishing-hook'. These two lines explain the word #brish#. O.E.D. gives brish as dialectal of brush, and so E.D.D. has the verb to brush as dialect for trimming a tree or hedge. Brush is a difficult homophone, and it would be useful to have one of its derivative meanings separated off as brish.
While the following seem to us incorrectly used: mumbling used of wings; the word is confined to the mouth whether as a manner of eating or of speaking: crunch where the frosts crunch the grass: whereas they only make it crunchable. maligns used as a neuter verb without precedent, chinked of light passing through a chink: and note the homophone chink, used of sound. And then the line
What seems clear about it is that the two contending pronunciations are homophones, one with latches the other with lashes. But there seems no propriety in the SS being changed to Z. The pronunciation látchess would save it from its awkward and absurd homophone latches, and would be in order with prowess, largess, noblesse, &c.
The English pronunciation of the letters of timbre is forbidden by its homophone a French girl collecting postage-stamps in England explained that she collected timberposts , whereas our English form of the French sound of the word would be approximately tamber; and this would be not only a good English-sounding word like amber and clamber, but would be like our tambour, which is tympanum, which again IS timbre.
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