The first recorded use of the word fleur-de-lis in English was in 752 as "flour-de-lys", and refers to the Iris rather than the heraldic device. Both the word and the device have a long and interesting history, including over a dozen variants of the spelling, and the fact that the fleur-de-lis as a sign of England's claim to the nation of France was taken out of the Royal Standard as late as 1801, by George III. I had decided to use a Unicode symbol as miscoranda's latest logo, and U+269C (also known as "FLEUR-DE-LIS", to give it its full unicode name) fit the bill wonderfully, notwithstanding strong competition from U+3020, U+2604, and, since it's winter, U+2603.
Though fleur-de-lys has quite a few spelling variants, it doesn't come anywhere near to popinjay, the old word for a parrot, which could variously be papageye, papeiai, papeiaie, papeiay, papeigai, papeioy, papengay, papenioye, papgay, papiaye, papingeay, papiniay, papyniay, popegaye, popeiay, popeiaye, popengay, popingay, popyngay, and so on. The form "popyngay" looks rather close to puffin, which seems like a reasonable cognate given that puffins are the parrots of the sea, but the OED is rather unsure about the word puffin. It first appeared in 1337 as poffoun, but since the word is from Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly there is some hint of a Celtic origin for the word. Indeed, Andrew Breeze noted recently in Notes and Queries that Breton has "pochan" as a cognate, reinforcing that theory.
Both popinjay and puffin are, this week (of 2006-01-02), free to look up in the OED through the BBC's Balderdash and Piffle series. On the back of that, Kragen Sitaker mentioned his OED Interface using the old public domain version of the dictionary from back when it was called "A new English dictionary on historical principles; founded mainly on the materials collected by the Philological society". Daniel Biddle found the term ablewhackets, also spelled abelwhackets, therein, which is a kind of card game that sailors used to play where the loser was beaten by a knotted handkerchief.
Speaking of sailor's knots, Mark Shoulson discovered the word "cuntlines" in Ashley's Book of Knots (it's also in Steel's Elements and Practice of Rigging and Seamanship), which refers to the grooves in a rope as it's twisted around. This word is of uncertain derivation, though the prefix cunt- is a variant of cont- which may be a variant of cant in its original sense of nook, which gave to "one of the side-pieces in the head of a cask" and some other nautical derivations.
To complete the symbolry, the current favicon for miscoranda is taken from the header of page 149 of the First Folio of Shakespeare, i.e. the italic M in "A Midſommer nights Dreame." It's been enhanced a little to change the background from beige to white and adjust the weight of the character, but otherwise it's per the original. The odd thing about it is that it looks very modern, even when you try to forget that it was cut in 1623 or before. So I uploaded the heading of page 149 from the First Folio, and then ran it through What The Font?, the online font identifier program. At first it replied "Bad WTF response: (empty) Last request: SEARCH 0000044f43bcbb83000c562b00004316 30 200 2 ? 10 [etc.]", so I thought that perhaps the font was too ancient after all, but on a retry it came up with the fairly close Van Dijck MT Italic, the too modern but still beautiful Baskerville Nr1 SB-Ita, and the not so good match but still very antiquarian looking P22 Mayflower Italic Regular.
