In Scotland, one of the popular names of the Angelica sylvestris is “aik-skeiters,” or “hear-skeiters,” because children shoot oats through the hollow stems, as peas are shot through a pea-shooter.  Then there is the goose-grass (Galium aparine), variously called goose-bill, beggar’s-lice, scratch-weed, and which has been designated blind-tongue, because “children with the leaves practise phlebotomy upon the tongue of those playmates who are simple enough to endure it,” a custom once very general in Scotland. [2]

The catkins of the willow are in some counties known as “goslings,” or “goslins,”—­children, says Halliwell, [3] sometimes playing with them by putting them in the fire and singeing them brown, repeating verses at the same time.  One of the names of the heath-pea (Lathyrus macrorrhizus) is liquory-knots, and school-boys in Berwickshire so call them, for when dried their taste is not unlike that of the real liquorice. [4] Again, a children’s name of common henbane (Hyoscyamus niger) is “loaves of bread,” an allusion to which is made by Clare in his “Shepherd’s Calendar":—­

      “Hunting from the stack-yard sod
  The stinking henbane’s belted pod,
  By youth’s warm fancies sweetly led
  To christen them his loaves of bread.”

A Worcestershire name for a horse-chestnut is the “oblionker tree.”  According to a correspondent of Notes and Queries (5th Ser. x. 177), in the autumn, when the chestnuts are falling from their trunks, boys thread them on string and play a “cob-nut” game with them.  When the striker is taking aim, and preparing for a shot at his adversary’s nut, he says:—­

  “Oblionker! 
  My first conker (conquer).”

The word oblionker apparently being a meaningless invention to rhyme with the word conquer, which has by degrees become applied to the fruit itself.

The wall peniterry (Parietaria officinalis) is known in Ireland as “peniterry,” and is thus described in “Father Connell, by the O’Hara Family” (chap, xii.):—­

“A weed called, locally at least, peniterry, to which the suddenly terrified [schoolboy] idler might run in his need, grasping it hard and threateningly, and repeating the following ’words of power’:—­

  ’Peniterry, peniterry, that grows by the wall,
  Save me from a whipping, or I’ll pull you roots and all.’”

Johnston, who has noticed so many odd superstitions, tells us that the tuberous ground-nut (Bunium flexuosum), which has various nicknames, such as “lousy,” “loozie,” or “lucie arnut,” is dug up by children who eat the roots, “but they are hindered from indulging to excess by a cherished belief that the luxury tends to generate vermin in the head.” [5]

An old rhyme often in years past used by country children when the daffodils made their annual appearance in early spring, was as follows:—­

  “Daff-a-down-dill
    Has now come to town,
  In a yellow petticoat
    And a green gown.”