 Welcome to the Endless Knot. Today I'm launching a new occasional series of short videos about the etymologies and early citations of weird and interesting words. Today's word is betwottled. Francis Gross's 1811 dictionary of the vulgar tongue defines betwottled as surprised, confounded, out of one's senses. The Oxford English dictionary's first citation for the word is from 1686, though no doubt it had already been around for a while. The first person to use it in print was one John Goad. Goad was the headmaster of Merchant Taylor School in London until he was dismissed due to his Catholic leanings. Goad published books on a number of topics including religion and the Latin language, but his magnum opus was a book on meteorology called Astro Meteorologica, or aphorisms and discourses of the body celestial, their natures and influences discovered from the variety of the alterations of the air collected from observation of 30 years, in which we get the aforementioned first citation. They are betwottled in their understandings. Goad's book was a last-ditch attempt at rescuing astrology from the scientific scrap heap, arguing for its use in predicting the weather. Yeah, no. Let's just say that Royal Society Bigwig Robert Hook was less than impressed with Goad's work, and it seems in the end it was Goad who was betwottled.