Mind Your Language | 27 December 2003

I’ve just looked up foxglove in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, not because I expected it to tell me the word’s origin, but because I hoped it would give a false origin. I love Brewer, but it tells the reader not the facts of history and etymology but what the widely educated High Victorian thought were the facts. This is very useful in understanding references in 19th-century books. To me it also means that an edition from the lifetime of E. Cobham Brewer (1810’97) is more valuable than a modern revision. One never knows with what shockingly correct facts the reviser has displaced former baseless myths and popular etymologies.

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Sure enough the 1895 edition (from the edition Brewer had revised in 1894 for ‘250) says foxglove is ‘either a corruption of Folk’s-glove, i.e.