464: Pilliwinks Mar 16, 2016

Not just in English, but in every single other language, certain sounds and combinations thereof will almost certainly have some sort of connection to their meanings, the way that it is easy to guess which of these two teachers mean one in Jane Eyre: Miss Temple or Miss Scatchard. It may then come to a surprise to hear that ‘pilliwinks', a word that sounds childish, is a brutal torture devise found in Scotland, used for squeezing fingers between ever-compressing bars of metal.