Note 14 — Chapter V · The Fenodyree and his Friends

Lastly, the fact that a curse is a species of prayer, to wit, a prayer for evil to follow, is well exemplified in Manx by the same words, gwee14, plural gwecaghyn, meaning both kinds of prayer. Thus I found myself stumbling several times, in reading through the Psalms in Manx, from not bearing in mind the sinister meaning of these words; for example in Psalm xiv. 6, where we have Ta ’n beeal oc lane dy ghweeaghyn as dy herriuid, which I mechanically construed to mean ‘Their mouth is full of praying and bitterness,’ instead of ‘cursing and bitterness’; and so in other cases, such as Ps. x. 7, and cix. 27.