"Owlglass, n." - Word of the Day from the OED

[Madeleine Maudlin]

People might not know this?  Dave M. links what I'm thinking about.  Within
a couple hours.


On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 12:40 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 9:15 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> .
> >> http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/135502
> >
> > Rachel Owlglass
> >
> > http://v.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Rachel_Owlglass
>
> On Monday, Nige devoted a post to the 101st birthday of Gypsy Rose Lee
> and used another word new to me – espieglerie. As he puts it: “What
> charm, what finesse, what espieglerie - what a dame!”
>
> The OED gives us “Frolicsomeness, roguishness,” and cites an 1816
> usage by Sir Walter Scott: “A pretty young woman with an air of
> espieglerie which became her very well.” The other usage dates from
> 1852, when Francis Edward Smedley writes: “Which act of
> un-English-woman-like espiéglerie must be set down to the score of a
> foreign education.” Both refer to women, the first with approval, the
> second with xenophobic distaste.
>
> The root is French, espiéglerie: “mischievousness, impishness,
> roguishness; piece of mischief, prank.” But the French is borrowed
> from the name of the trickster figure in German folklore, Till
> Eulenspiegel, the source of Strauss’ tone poem. In Ben Jonson’s The
> Alchemist (1610), Till makes his first appearance in English
> literature as “Howelglas” – that is, owl glass or, roughly,
> Eulenspiegel.
>
> http://evidenceanecdotal.blogspot.com/2012/01/etymological-opaqueness.html
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20120530/14dcb8f0/attachment.html>