' But when he reached _Instilment_, his memory
became vague, and forgetting that he had already quoted the passage
under _Distilment_, he quoted it again as 'the leperous instilment'--a
reading which does not exist in any text of Shakspere, and was a mere
temporary hallucination of memory. There are some other curious
mistakes, which must, I suppose, have crept in either in the course of
transcription or of printing. As specimens I mention two, because they
have unfortunately perverted ordinary usage. The two words _Coco_ and
_Cocoa_--the former a Portuguese word[12], naming the _coco-nut_, the
fruit of a palm-tree; the latter a latinized form of _Cacao_, the
Aztec name of a Central American shrub, whence we have cocoa and
chocolate--were always distinguished down to Johnson's time, and were
in fact distinguished by Johnson himself in his own writings. His
account of these in the Dictionary is quoted from Miller's _Gardener's
Dictionary_ and Hill's _Materia Medica_, in which the former is spelt
_coco_ and the latter _cacao_ and _cocoa_. But in Johnson's Dictionary
the two words are by some accident run together under the heading
_cocoa_, with the disastrous result that modern vulgar usage mixes the
two up, spells the _coco-nut_, 'cocoa-' as if it were _co-co-a_, and
on the other hand pronounces _cocoa_, the cacao-bean and the beverage,
as if it were _coco_.
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