
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 17, 1995                   TAG: 9505170062
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-4   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: FREDERICKSBURG                                LENGTH: Short

HISTORIAN RECALLS FORGOTTEN WORDS

They are words you might never hear, read or even say: words such as lazaretto and zoophorus. Obscure words all, they are exactly the kind of terms Carl R. Lounsbury was seeking.

Lounsbury, an architectural historian with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, has compiled 1,500 such words and terms - some of them plucked from the precipice of extinction - in a book of pre-19th Century terms.

Ashlar and ashler. Gula and gree. Rowlock and reglet.

The book, ``An Illustrated Glossary of Early Southern Architecture and Landscape,'' has won the Historic Preservation Book Prize for 1995. The award was established in 1988 by the Center for Historic Preservation at Mary Washington College.

The author limited references to those in use before the 1820s. He concentrated on the region bound by Delaware in the north, Georgia in the south and Kentucky and Tennessee in the west.

He turned up several regional variations.

Chickens in Virginia, for instance, lived in henhouses, but in South Carolina, they roosted in fowl houses or poultry houses.

In Colonial Virginia, people slipped into ``necessary houses'' to take care of personal needs. In Georgia and South Carolina, they went to the privy, while in some pockets of the South, they looked for a house of ease, office house, cloacina temple or little house.

by CNB