Parlous, Perilous...

[David Morris]

So it is an archaic contraction with a humorous shading of a dreadful
state?  Cool.

On Mon, Dec 22, 2014 at 10:26 AM, jochen stremmel <jstremmel at gmail.com>
wrote:

> ORIGIN late Middle English: contraction of perilous.
>
> British Thesaurus:
> parlous
> adjective
> archaic or humorous the parlous state of the industry: bad, dire,
> dreadful, awful, terrible, appalling, frightful, grave, serious, desperate,
> precarious, uncertain, touch-and-go, difficult, unsafe, perilous,
> dangerous, risky; pitiful, wretched, sorry, poor, lamentable, woeful,
> hopeless; informal dicey, hairy, lousy; Brit. informal dodgy, chronic.
>
>
> 2014-12-22 16:57 GMT+01:00 David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>:
>
>> Let's call the whole thing off?
>>
>> A NYT editorial [
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/world/asia/chinese-annoyance-with-north-korea-bubbles-to-the-surface.html
>> ] this weekend used this phrase:
>>
>> "....The parlous state of the relationship between North Korea and China
>> was on display again Wednesday when Pyongyang commemorated the third
>> anniversary of the death of Kim Jong-il, the father of the current leader,
>> Kim Jong-un, and failed to invite a senior Chinese official."
>>
>> I'm not familiar with "parlous."  Is it reall just the same word,
>> different spelling, as "perilous?"
>> David Morris
>>
>
>
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