‘Rollicking time,’ sang my husband to the tune of ‘Mull of Kintyre’. He had been amused to hear of this misapprehension of the lyrics and smugly enjoyed it not being his mistake for a change.
That kind of mull is a Gaelic word meaning ‘bare headland’. I think it is related to the Welsh word for a bare hill, moel, which Gerard Manley Hopkins used, with initial mutation, as voel in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’.
That is all very well, but I have been annoyed recently by people saying that they want to mull things. I don’t mean wine, but possibilities. I would say ‘mull things over’. Why can’t everyone else?
But the history of mull is fearfully complicated and obscure for such a little word. The Oxford English Dictionary distinguishes four main meanings for the verb and 11 for the noun, some related.
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