John Shaw is a Scotsman who has lived here since the early 1950s. Now and again strange words from his youth come to his lips, and one of these is the adjective forgettil, forgetful. He also remembers his mother's forgetillness, forgetfulness, and wonders whether the words have any special historical significance.
The Scots dictionaries have the words, and they are old. Hampole has both in The Prickle of Conscience, written about 1330, a work frequently referred to by scholars of Northumbrian English: "He is forgetil"; "I kast it noght bihynd me in forgetilness". The adjective is from Old English forgietol, forgetful; the noun from forgietolnes, oblivion. Mr Shaw, who now lives in Bray, tells me that the use of these words were frowned on by the schools he attended in Aberdeen. It seems that the use of dialect is frowned on the world over, with the exception of Northern Ireland, where its use is, I'm told, now encouraged.
A long time ago I came across a word in a work by William Barnes, the Dorset poet, and it baffled me until the late W.B. Stanford, professor of Greek in Trinity, and my tutor, God help him, solved the problem for me. The work, which we could not find in any dictionary, was selemnic, and it meant "in a state of oblivion". It may have been a composition of the author's; if so, it was an inspired one.
Pausanias told this delightful story in the second century AD. It is set in the Northern Peloponnese. "Selemnus was a beautiful shepherd boy and Argyra was a lovely sea-nymph who fell in love with him. They say that she used to come from the sea to visit him and to sleep with him. But time took its toll on the beauty of the young shepherd; he no longer looked so beautiful, and the seanymph would visit him no more. So he lost his Argyra; so Aphrodite bestowed on him another favour, and the river forgot her. And I've heard that the water of Selemnos is equally good for a man or a woman to cure the wounds of love, and if you wash in its waters you'll forget the hurts and the pain. If there is truth in this, the water of Selemnos is worth more to mankind that all the money in the world."