TWYCHILD

The entries in this book are generally quite long, a page or two, so I am partial to the shorter ones due to my own laziness. But this word is both interesting and relatively brief in definition.

TWYCHILD

An elderly man or woman, undoubtedly inspired by Shakespeare's description of the "seven ages" of man from As You Like It. After reflecting upon old age, the bard concluded:

Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness, and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Twychild meant literally "twice a child," from twy, "twice," and was pronounced "twichel" for verbal economy. John Davies wrote of this stage of life considered to herald the beginning of the end, in his 1612 Muse's Sacrifice: "Man growne twy-childe is at door of death." Later in the seventeenth century, English poet John Milton, inspired by Shakespeare's comments regarding age, concluded in his masterpiece Paradise Regained, "The child is father of the man."



from Forgotten English by Jeffrey Kacirk