Word of the Week: Palliards

Those whose fathers were clapperdogens, or beggars born, and who themselves follows the same trade: the female sort beg with a number of children, borrowing them, if they have not a sufficient number of their own, and making them cry by pinching in order to excite charity; the males make artificial sores on different parts of their bodies, to move compassion.

From: Captain Grose's 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue

***News Just In!***
I'm glad to see that Johnson's Tercentenary Year is getting a shout-out from bloggers. Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (where I studied, briefly, in 1997) is doing a fantastic word-a-day dictionary blog. This is how it describes the project:

In celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of Johnson’s birth in 1709, a definition from the first edition of the dictionary will be posted each day for readers’ lexiconic delight, beginning on January 1, 2009. Words will be taken from the annotated proof copy of the first edition, extra-illustrated with Johnson’s and his helpers’ manuscript corrections, which is held in the collections of Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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