Misprision

 
Misprision is the neglect or wrongful execution of official duties or the concealment of another's crime.

Negative misprision is the concealment of treason or felony. By the common law of England it was the duty of every liege subject to inform the king's justices and other officers of the law of all treasons and felonies of which the informant had knowledge, and to bring the offender to justice by arrest.

Positive misprision is the doing of something which ought not to be done; or the commission of a serious offence falling short of treason or felony, in other words of a misdemeanour of a public character (e.g. maladministration of high officials, contempt of the sovereign or magistrates, &c.). To endeavour to dissuade a witness from giving evidence or to advise a prisoner to stand mute, used to be described as misprisions.

Under an Act of Parliament of 1534, misprision was the crime of refusing to swear an oath acknowledging the King as head of the church.
 

Exiguous

 
Exiguous means meagre, extremely scanty, or very small. It is pronounced Ex-IDG-u-us

"She saw the remains of the two women's exiguous meal."
 

Atavistic

 
The term atavism (derived from the Latin atavus, a great-grandfather's grandfather; more generally, an ancestor) denotes the tendency to revert to ancestral type. An atavism is an evolutionary throwback, such as traits reappearing which had disappeared generations ago.

Atavistic is the adjective from the noun atavism and is more commonly used. It refers to something being a throw-back to earlier times; to remote ancestry or to a primitive nature.

"The noise she made as she threw herself on the bed was atavistic."
 

Kercher

 
A kercher or kerchief was the name given in days gone by to a large square scarf worn over the head, with or without a hat underneath it. It probably came from the French couvre-chef. Although the word has now generally gone from the English language a relic survives in the name handkerchief - a small square piece of cloth used for wiping the eyes or nose or as a costume accessory.


Ion Andreescu - Peasant Woman with Green Kerchief
 

Hutch

 
Nowadays when we talk of a hutch we tend to think of a wooden box with a wire mesh front used as a cage for rabbits.

However, at one time, a hutch was any sort of large wooden box with a lid, for storing clothes or anything at all.
 

Heriot

 
The word heriot has now fallen out of use but at one time it meant a payment made to the overlord when a holding was inherited upon the death of the previous owner. Often this was the best animal but it might also be such things as a feather bed, a silver cup, etc. This was then usually bought back by the inheritor from the overlord for cash.
 

Flax

 
Flax and flaxen are words used to describe hair and relate to a pale yellowish gold or pale straw colour.

There is some balderdash written on the Internet. I may be guilty of some of it but in this case I'm thinking of the Wikipedia entry for Flax which says :-
Flax (also known as Light Goldenrod) is a pale yellowish-gray color named after flax seeds. It is similar to the color mustard.


Flax or flaxen is not named after the seeds of the plant Linum usitatissimum but after the plants themselves which are harvested and left to dry in the sun until a pale straw colour. And anyone who uses colours for anything will tell you straight off that pale straw and mustard are worlds apart, the latter being much darker.

Flax is one of the world's oldest cultivated plants. The soft but very strong fibres from the flax are used to create the material linen. The plant is also grown to create linseed oil but the form used for that purpose was evolved separately early on as the best fibre producing plants are not the best for producing high seed yields.
 

A Dark Horse

 
To refer to something or someone as a dark horse is to suggest they have come to prominence from relative obscurity. The phrase was originally used in relation to a real horse. It was not uncommon for horse owners to hide the potential of their best horses by keeping them hidden until the day of the race. A 'dark horse' was therefore one that wasn't known to the punters and was difficult to place odds on. The figurative use later spread to other fields and has come to apply to anyone who comes under scrutiny but is previously little known.

Benjamin Disraeli's novel The Young Duke, 1831, provides the earliest known example : "A dark horse, which had never been thought of ... rushed past the grand stand in sweeping triumph."
 

Home James and don't spare the horses.

 
This saying dates from 1870 or earlier but it was a song by that title in 1934 that gave the phrase a popular boost. One of the best known versions was sung by Elsie Carlisle with Ambrose's Orchestra c. 1934.

One story says the phrase was uttered by Queen Victoria, who had a driver named James Darling. She didn't want to call him "Darling," as custom would dictate, so she called him by his first name instead. I have no idea if this story is true, but I like it.

When I was young I was never sure whether the phrase was "Home James and don't spare the horses" or "Home James and don't spur the horses" - which, of course, would have had the opposite meaning.
 

Not my cup of tea

 
If something is not your cup of tea, you don't like it very much.

The positive version -- "He's my cup of tea" - has apparently been used since the late 1800s and the negative -- "It's not one's cup of tea" -- since the 1920s.'