Mind your language
`YOU'VE MADE your point,' said Jeremy Paxman or one of his disciples on Newsnight. It made me jump a little because my husband has been trying to interest me in falconry, and I had got as far as learning that when a hawk makes her point she rises in the air over the spot where her quarry is hiding.
Everyone loves hawks for their beau- ty, though I suppose that their use to catch prey is as open to objection as fox-hunting. Shakespeare is full of terms from falconry, and even scholas- tic Hopkins made a kestrel the subject of one of his most successful sonnets, `The Windhover'.
But just as sailors explain every figure of speech in maritime terms, and car- penters regard Hamlet's hawk and handsaw as a reference to the tools of their mystery, so falconers see their art behind every common word. In one of his sonnets of desolation does Hopkins, with the phrase 'pitched past pitch of grief, have in mind the pitch — the height to which the hawk rises in the air while waiting for game to be flushed? No, of course not.
To a falconer a cadger is the man who carries the wooden frame on which hawks are carried to the field. A pelt is the body of any quarry killed by a hawk. The cere is the naked skin above the beak (from cera, the Latin for 'wax', not searian, the Old English 'to dry', as with the sere leaf).
A hawk puts away her crop when her food passes into her stomach; she is a good footer when she is adept at the kill; she rings when she spirals upward on her sails or wings. Her sleep is jonk, her feathers are mended by imping, she is laid low by the throat disease ft-ounce, she binds when she takes a bird in the air and clings to it; at the end of her jesses is a silver varvel inscribed with her owner's name.
As with any esoteric language, the vocabulary of falconry is a maze for the outsider. I expect by every post a letter telling me I have got it all wrong.
Dot Wordsworth
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