 Welcome to the endless knowing. Today's words are quack salver and toad eater. Quack salver, from which we get the more familiar quack, a medical charlatan, comes to English from Dutch, the salver part being obviously related to salve meaning ointment. The quack part comes either from a root meaning scrap rubbish, so junk medicine, or from quacken meaning to croak or quack, imitative of the sound of a duck or frog. Here used of the hard sales pitch and is comparable to similar words in many other languages, such as Latin coaxare and Greek coax, famously used in Aristophanes the Frogs, a satire about poets in the underworld. And speaking of quacks and frogs, toad eater, from which we get toad eat, originally referred to the assistant of a medical charlatan who would pretend to eat a toad, which were thought to be poisonous, only to be miraculously cured by the quack salver's junk medicine. Eventually the word broadened in sense to refer to a servile sycophant first attested in a letter by gothic writer Horace Walpole. Lord Edgecombe's place is destined to Harry Vane, Pultney's toad eater. The first to use the shortened form was future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli in his first novel Vivienne Gray. You know what a toad he is? That agreeable animal which you meet every day in civilized society. The novel contained in part a thinly veiled satirical account of his spectacularly unsuccessful attempt with famous publisher Jean Murray, known for publishing, among others, Lord Byron and Jane Austen, at starting a newspaper that folded almost as soon as it started. Not surprisingly quack salver is found in a satirical work too. Stephen Gawson's 1579 attack on poets and playwrights. School of abuse containing a pleasant invective against poets, pipers, players, gestures, and such like caterpillars of the Commonwealth. A quack salver's budget of filthy receipts. The second citation for the word quack salver in the Oxford English dictionary demonstrates a variation on the toad eater ploy. The quack salvers in Germany swallow spiders in open assemblies to show the virtue of their confections. It's from a work called Ulysses upon Ajax, probably written by avid gardener and keen experimenter with various manure's Hugh Platt, as a satirical response to John Harrington's equally satirical 1596 work, a new discourse on a stale subject called the metamorphosis of Ajax, which though ostensibly about Harrington's invention of the flush toilet, was actually a coded attack on the monarchy. Ajax, or Ajakes, you see, is a slang term for toilet. So what does all this satire and excrement tell us? That then, as now, a quack is full of it.