I lapped up Liza Picard’s Dr Johnson’s London on holiday, and now someone (not my husband) has given me her Restoration London for Christmas.
In a small section on the words used in the Restoration period, she brings in two expressions that she has come across in contemporary books, not in secondary sources such as dictionaries. The first is ‘hoping to cure himself with the hair of the dog that bit him’, said of a man with a hangover going to the bottle again. This was in Dr Willis’s Oxford Casebook, she says. Is that Dr Thomas Willis (1621-75)?
No doubt it was in use in his time, for John Heywood, writing in 1546, has: ‘I praie the leat me and my felowe have a heare of the dog that bote us last nyght.’ (I like bote as the past tense of bite.)
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