Noise (Hastings' Dictionary)

This subst. is no longer used of music in a good or neutral sense, as we find it in Ps 33% ‘Play skilfully with a loud noise.’ Cf. Bunyan, PP, 206: ‘Mercy. Hark, don’t you hear a Noise? Curis. Yes, ’tis as I believe, a Noise of Musick, for joy that we are here’; Ps 475, Pr. Bk. ‘God is gone up with a merry noise’; and Milton, At a ‘olemn Music, line 18— ‘That we on earth with undiscording voice May rightly answer that melodious noise.’ The verb ‘to noise’ is no longer in use.

It occurs five times in AV: Jos 6” ‘His fame was noised throughout all the country’ (RV ‘his fame was in all the land’); Jth 10 ‘Her coming was noised among the tents’; Mk 2! ‘It was noised that he was in the house’ ; Lk 1% ‘All these say- ings were noised abroad’; Ac 2° ‘When this was noised abroad’ (RV ‘when this sound was heard’). Ci. Mt 955 Tind. ‘ And this was noysed through out NOISOME all that lande’; 28" Tind.

‘And this sayinge is noysed amonge the Jewes unto this daye’; and Hacket in Life of Abp. Williams (referring to Dr. Collins), ‘His works in print against Eudaemon and Fitzherbert, sons of Anak among the Jesuits, do noise him far and wide.’ J. HASTINGS. NOISOME is a shortened form of ‘annoy-some.’ And ‘annoy’ is regarded by Skeat and Murray (after Diez) as formed (through the Fr.) from the Lat. in odio.

The phrase est mihi in odio, ‘it is hateful to me,’ became contracted to inodio, which was regarded as a subst., ‘hate,’ ‘annoyance.’ In AV the word is used of weeds (Job 31%"), pestilence (Ps 91°), beasts (Ezk 1418. 21), a smell (2 Mac 9°), and a sore (Rev 167), and the meaning is always trouble- some, not as now loathsome.* ench (On AV o, NT, p. 47) says that in the beginning of the 17t cent. the word was acquiring its mod.

meaning, and on that account Tindale’s rendering of 1 Ti 6° ‘They that wilbe ryche, faule into temptacion and snares, and into many folysshe and noysome lustes,’ which all the versions till 1611 (except the Rhemish) accepted, was changed in AV into ‘ hurt- ful lusts.’ In the Act of Henry vim.

prohibiting the use of Tindale’s version (1543) it is stated to be requisite that the land be purged ‘of all such bookes, writinges, sermones, disputacions, argu- mentes, balades, plaies, rimes, songs, teachinges and instructions, as be pestiferous and noysome.’ Tindale speaks of the flies in the Egyptian plague as ‘noysom’ (Ex 85). Cranmer’s meaning is the same when he writes to Henry vit. (Works, i.

160), ‘I was purposed this week according to m duties to have waited upon yom Grace, but Ἷ am so vexed with a catarrh and a rheum in my head, that not only it should be dangerous «unto me, but also noisome unto your Grace, Ὁ reason of extreme coughing and excreations whic I cannot eschew.

’ But Fuller (Holy State, 305) is more modern : ‘ When the soul (the best perfume of the body) is departed from it, it becomes so noysome a carcasse, that should I make a descrip- tion of the lothsomnesse thereof, some dainty dames would hold their noses in reading it.’ J. HASTINGS.