Pitching kittles, streaming lakes, and nastier retinas |
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MOST POPULAR THIS WEEK A KITTLE OF PITCH Most popular on HH this week was the verb kittle-pitcher, meaning “to prevent someone from telling a boring or longwinded story by constantly interrupting them with pointless contradictions.” Over on Twitter, we illustrated that fact with an extract from a nineteenth century dictionary of “buckish slang” entitled Lexicon Balatronicum (“The Buffoon’s Dictionary”). But kittle-pitchering, alongside definitions like the one above, has been listed in similar slang glossaries since the mid 1700s. Etymologically, kittle-pitchering literally involves “pitching kittles” into a conversation in order to disrupt the flow. Pitching in this sense just means “throwing”, but kittles are little more puzzling. Quite literally, in fact. As a verb, kittle has a long history stretching back to the Old English period, when it originally meant “to tickle” (as it still does in some dialects of English, most notably Scots). Over the centuries, that meaning steadily broadened so that by the Middle English period kittle was being used more generally to mean “excite”, “rouse”, or “stir with emotion”. An adjective, kittle or kittlish, soon followed on and before long was being used to mean the likes of “ticklish”, “touchy”, “troublesome”, and eventually, “difficult to deal with”. That makes kittle-steps doddering, tottering, unsteady steps. Kittle-the-cout is a game in which a concealed handkerchief has to be found. And kittle-questions are difficult or perplexing questions or problems. Ultimately, kittling—or rather kittle-pitchering—someone in a conversation means confounding them with so many pointless questions that they eventually give up all hope of finishing their story. Elsewhere this week we found out: |
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POPULAR THIS WEEK STREAMLINES A curious etymological fact popped up on HH on Wednesday: a lake was originally a stream. Pithy little stop-you-in-your-tracks-how-can-that-be-right facts like these always go well on HH—so well, in fact that (Shameless Plug #452) you can read the stories behind 100 of them in The Accidental Dictionary. This lake vs. stream one didn’t make the final cut there, however, so here’s a bit more about it now. And brace yourselves—this one’s a bit complicated... Back in Old English there was a word, lacu, that was used to denote all kinds of different water features. The earliest of all of these to which the word referred was a stream: lacu has been tracked down to a document dating way back to the mid tenth century, which describes a group of people fording a stream somewhere along the banks of the Thames. Old English lacu has its origins on the continent: it is probably distantly related—via some impossibly ancient word root, denoting water or moisture—to words like leak, leech and leach. But at this point, we need to leave lacu to one side and fast forward to the Middle English period. It was around then that English picked up a word from French, lac, that meant “pool” or “pond”. Despite its similarity to the Old English lacu, French lac had its origins in Latin, and so was set apart from the Germanic origins of Old English. So that means that by the late eleventh century, there essentially existed two distinct words in English—lac and lacu—that had entirely different origins, but somewhat similar meanings, and even more similar spellings. As a result, things started to get a bit muddled. Before long, Old English lacu and French lac began to morph into and cross over one another, and their meanings and spellings began to become ever more alike. Eventually (for various etymological and phonological reasons too complicated to go into here) they both began to be spelled lake—and the word finally established itself in the language as just another word for a large, enclosed body of water. So that word lake we still use today? It essentially has two ancestors: one, an Old English word used that originally meant “stream”, the other a later French word of Latin origin that has always referred to enclosed pools or ponds. But that’s not to say that Old English lacu vanished completely from the language: as some of you pointed out on Twitter, the use of lake to mean “stream” can still be found in place names like Newlycombe Lake, in Dartmoor—which continues to surprise walkers and ramblers by being a small stream, not a lake. Just when things couldn't get any more complicated... |
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NEW ON INSTAGRAM HARD SCRABBLE If you follow Haggard Hawks on Instagram these days, earlier this week you might have spotted the fact that the most productive set of letters in a game of Scrabble is AEINRST, which can be used to spell at least nine 7-letter words. There’s a few things to clarify here. First of all, those nine words are anestri (the plural of anestrus, a break in the breeding cycle of certain mammals); antsier (i.e. “more antsy”); nastier (“more nasty”); ratines (the plural of ratiné, a type of coarse fabric); retinas (those light-sensitive membranes at the back of the eye); retains (“keeps”); retsina (a resin-flavoured wine from Greece); stainer (“that which stains”); and stearin (“an ester of stearic acid”, apparently). Those words are acceptable in all games of Scrabble, but if you play using the official UK word list (apologies US and Canada) then you can add resiant, an archaism meaning “dwelling” or “resident”, and starnie, a Scots dialect word for a little star, to the list. Secondly, by “most productive” what we really mean “most opportunities for a bingo” (a bingo, in Scrabble players’ terms, being a word that uses up all seven of your tiles in a single go, earning a bonus of 50 points). So there might be other combinations of tiles that might produce more words in general, but if you’re after as many 7-letter words as possible, AEINRST is your best bet. That being said, these are all low-scoring letters: all seven of the letters AEINRST are only worth one point, so even with your bingo bonus of 50 you’re probably not going to score much more than 70 or80 points by playing any of these. So if your definition of “most productive” is “highest scoring”, then your best bet is playing a word like jonquil (a daffodil), quetzal (a tropical bird), quartzy (resembling quartz) or muzjiks (Russian serfs)—the latter of which is said to be the highest scoring opening move in a game of Scrabble, worth an impressive 126 points. |
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AND FINALLY... ANAGRAMS No. 22 Four more tricky anagrams to round things off this week: each of the words below can be rearranged to spell another dictionary word. What are they? INTERIMS INTERDASH INTERCUT INTERLEAF Last week’s solution: ACTION, CACHETS, ACTIONED, CATCHIEST |
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