[Ads-l] Root of Pook?

[Flourish Klink]

Query: does this have anything to do with the classic prep nickname
"Pookie"?

On Wed, Sep 21, 2016 at 10:15 PM Dave Hause <dwhause at cablemo.net> wrote:

> Lobeline, Lobeline
> Meanest gal
> That I ever seen,
> No one else
> Could be as mean
> As that pure wicked
> Lobeline.
>
> Dave Hause
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: George Thompson
> Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2016 8:03 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: Root of Pook?
>
>       Last Week Mr. Thomas Brunton, his Wife and three or four more of his
> Family, in this City, had like to be poisoned by eating the Root of Pook,
> for Horse Radish; but by having the immediate Assistance of a Physician,
> they are now almost all recovered.
>       N-Y Mercury, March 26, 1764, p. 2, col. 2
> I don't see this elsewhere, and don't see it in the OED as such, but
> "pukeweed", below, sounds as if it might be a bad plant to eat by mistake.
>
> GAT
> pukeweed  n. *N. Amer.* (now *hist.*) Indian tobacco,  *Lobelia inflata*,
> an erect, usually branched herb bearing racemes of bluish-violet or white
> flowers, which yields the alkaloid lobeline and was formerly used as an
> emetic.
> 1830    C. S. Rafinesque *Med. Flora* 2.22   *Lobelia inflata.
> Names..Vulgar.* Indian Tobacco, Wild Tobacco, Emetic Weed, Puke Weed.
> 1925    *Sci. Monthly* Aug. 207   For lobelia or the puke weed Bartram made
> such remarkable claims that the passage is quoted verbatim.
> 1994    J. S. Haller *Med. Protestants* 41   Thomson established an
> alternative system of medical treatment. He depended most heavily on
> lobelia (his ‘pukeweed’).
>
> --
> George A. Thompson
> The Guy Who Still Looks Stuff Up in Books.
> Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern
> Univ. Pr., 1998.
>
> But when aroused at the Trump of Doom / Ye shall start, bold kings, from
> your lowly tomb. . . .
>
> L. H. Sigourney, "Burial of Mazeen", *Poems*.  Boston, 1827, p. 112
>
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