Yesterday I chanced upon this scrap of verse by Thomas Hood, a 19th-century British versifier. In 1830 Hood launched the Comic Annual, which I gather was a sort of 'zine for light verse, humor, and mild political lampoons. The year 1830 also marked the unlamented death of George IV, the Millard Fillmore of British kings.

Mizzled? That's a new one for me. My dictionary provides two definitions for mizzle. The first is a sort of precipitation, which I doubt I could distinguish from a drizzle. The second, characterized as both "chiefly Brit" and "origin unknown", says "to depart suddenly".

Well, there you go. I gather George IV's demise was quick.

This reminds me of a story I heard from a fellow I knew back in my chorus days, Mark something. We were discussing the phenomenon whereby a word is reasonably familiar to you from reading but you've never actually heard it pronounced. As a result you don't realize that you've been mispronouncing it in your head all these years till one day you (or someone else) happens to say it aloud, and confusion ensues.

Mark told of how, when he was a boy, for years he thought there was a word "misle", which he pronounced to rhyme with "reprisal" or "guys'll". He assumed it meant something like "to deceive", but he couldn't find it in the dictionary.

Eventually he figured it out when he realized that he had only seen the word in the past tense: misled.

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