As Elsie will tell you, I am perennially interested in words. The other night, in the course of some bookcrawling. I came on dear old Mrs. Piozzi's report of the derivation of the word "bore"—bore, that is, in the sense of a human bore.
She says it comes from the action of a horse which is very heavy on the reins, so giving his weary rider the impression that he wants to bore into the ground with his nose.
Take it or leave it.
For myself, I am still open to be persuaded that "bore" derives from the Greek herein, the Latin boree, or the Saxon bower, each meaning "to bore"—but what can you expect with aeroplanes everywhere doing 400 miles an hour?
Showman in the "Daily Herald."
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.