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Flunkeys and lackeys two centuries ago

In An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology, I called William L. Blackley’s 1869 book Word Gossip singularly uninformative, and I am sorry for that remark. One consolation is that when we are young and say something inappropriate or wrong, we fear swift retribution. But with age, most of us realize that the chance of being noticed (whatever we publish) is close to zero and lose no sleep over the mishap. Yet I am indeed sorry that I based a negative opinion of a respectable work on the basis of several unfortunate pages and will now discuss a few things that may be of interest to the readers of this blog.

The Reverend William Lewery Blackley (1830-1902) was an active parish priest in Ireland, a well-known (successful!) social reformer, and the author of many books. Unfortunately, I could not find his portrait on the Internet. By way of compensation, we featured an anonymous parish priest in the header. Blackley knew German and French very well and must have had a good command of Swedish. His education as a prospective churchman presupposed a study of Greek and Latin (and most probably, of Hebrew). Incidentally, quite a few British churchmen were linguists. Thus, the great Walter William Skeat was an Anglican deacon, but he could not function in that capacity because of problems with his voice, while being a professor at Cambridge did not require too much lecturing. (What a contrast! Today’s linguists may not be moderately proficient in any language except their own, while professors teach a good deal as a matter of course.)

Word Gossip was “a series of [fifteen] familiar essays on words and their peculiarities” that first appeared in Churchman’s Shilling Magazine and were published in book form in 1869 by Longmans, Green and Co. (London). In the introduction we read: “The kind reception accorded to the matter of the following pages on its appearance this year [1868] in successive numbers of ‘Churchman’s Shilling Magazine’ had induced me to republish it in a collected form.” I am aware of a single review of the book (in the Athenæum), but there must have been others, and perhaps letters from the readers.

Thoughts (very sensible thoughts) on etymology are strewn all over the volume of 234 pages. However, only the last two chapters deal directly with words of disputed origin. Blackley was aware of the linguistic literature of his time and of some old dictionaries, and since he was fluent in German, he did not miss German books on language history (a rare case in England before the days of Henry Sweet and Skeat, though German colleagues sometimes reproached even Skeat for not paying enough attention to their contributions), but surprisingly, he missed Jacob Grimm and remained unaware of the gigantic progress made by historical linguistics between the 1820s and his time. Therefore, even in 1868 his conclusions were of some interest only to the extent that they did not depend on the progress of Indo-European linguistics.

English (like every other European language) is full of native and borrowed words that appeared in print late, and one does not have to be a comparative linguist to discover their origin. Two such English words are flunkey “man in livery; obsequious person” and lackey “footman, valet.” The words are near-synonyms, and neither (especially lackey) is heard or seen too often. Lackey occurred at one time as a term of political abuse; for instance, the phrase the lackeys of the bourgeoisie was much in use in certain circles. Flunkey surfaced in the eighteenth century, and lackey in the sixteenth.

Both words are “of uncertain origin.” Blackley argued that at one time, they must have been applied primarily to soldiers, or rather mercenaries, for which reason they still “retain a contemptuous signification.” He referred to French flanqueur: “It means one who fights on the flank, a skirmisher.” In English, flunkey first meant “a liveried servant” and only later “toady.” Whether correct or not, Blackley’s guess is reasonable, and our best authorities have nothing to add to it. He also had an alternative hypothesis of the origin of flunkey, which I’ll skip, as well as a few fanciful etymologies of this word, not worthy of mention. Incidentally, those who coined the verb flunk don’t seem to have had flunkeys in view.

Lackey is a still harder word. Its Romance source began with the vowel a, which perhaps points to this noun’s Arabic origin, a- being part of the definite article. The Arabic home of lackey was suggested long ago, but the true etymon remains hidden. Blackley refused to go to Arabic and cited Latin laqueus “a rope with a slip knot, and especially a noose used for hanging.” The way from “criminal” to “hanging,” he said, is short. He also mentioned German Strick and Strang, both of which so often meant “rope, used to bind and hang criminals” that Strick became a common epithet “for a good-for-nothing dissipated fellow.” 

Blackley derived both flunkey and lackey from the names of despised mercenaries. His etymology of lackey does not go too far, but I find all the old conjectures worth knowing. Though quite often they are obviously wrong, a certain idea or association may inspire a better approach to the problem. Such at least has been my experience. Not all that is wrong is nonsense. The idea that in researching the origin of lackey we should turn to military terms is, most likely, correct, because in the fifteenth century, a certain class of soldiers, especially crossbowmen, was called alagues, alacays, or lacays. Arabic luk‘a means “worthless, servile; slave.” Skeat gravitated toward the Arabic hypothesis but added: “This is a guess; it is much disputed.” Yet this guess sounds no less probable than a direct derivation from Italian leccare or German lecken “to lick.” As mentioned above, our best authorities prefer to say almost nothing about the etymology of lackey, which is a pity.

The last word I’ll mention here, bat-fowling, is unknown to me, and it is probably unknown to most of our readers. The OED cites no contemporary examples. Bat-fowling means “catching birds at night by dazing and then netting them.” Blackley was sure that throughout England (!), “people said bat-folding, and for good reason…. The instrument in question is a net stretched upon a rood frame, consisting of two parts which, when opened out, are about of the same shape as a large paper kite, or a gigantic racket, or bat, and is hinged at the top, the ends at the bottom being in the operator’s hands.” I wonder whether those remarks deserve the attention of our lexicographers. Anyway, reading Blackley’s book is what my students call fun. Very much in accordance with the remarks about bat-fowling, I’ll cite the title of Chapter 1: “On Word Hunting in General.” Word hunting, by day or at night, is a noble pursuit.

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In full swing

First, my thanks to those who commented on my previous post. One comment in the busy exchange was negative: the correspondent likes some of those turns of speech I dislike. That’s fine, but I want to defend myself against the reproach that my subject should be limited to etymology. I receive questions from all over the world about usage and occasionally answer them in this blog. The title “Oxford Etymologist” does not tie me exclusively to word origins.

I have no theory for why people say something like do it real quick and she sings beautiful. German or Yiddish, as the comment suggests? Or a product of natural development? German/Yiddish usage also needs an explanation. Finally, I congratulate our reader who keeps a dictionary of Wellerisms on his desk. Our culture of reading classical literature is dying (none of the hundreds of students I have taught has read The Pickwick Papers). Yet I believe that Dickens will be the last to go downhill.

And now back to my main theme. I received a letter with a question about the etymology of swag “booty; cockiness, etc.” The reader complained that dictionaries have nothing to say about the origin of this word. She is quite right. I discussed sw-words almost exactly a year ago (see the post for June 19, 2024) and will try to repeat myself as little as possible.

In 1992, I wrote a paper, titled “The Dregs of English Etymology.” Among other things, it contained a list of about a thousand words whose origin was said to be unknown in the 1985 edition of The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Compiling such a list proved to be a much less straightforward task than I had expected, because the text contains numerous phrases like of uncertain, doubtful, dubious, disputable origin, obscurely related, and so forth. Are they polite synonyms for “origin unknown”?

In any case, the many senses of swag have been traced quite well. Some occurred in the 14^th century, while others, like “booty,” turned up in texts almost the day before yesterday. There is no way of deciding whether we are witnessing a long continuous history of one word, or if the sound complex swag was like an empty box, ready to acquire almost any sense with which speakers chose to endow it. Norwegian svagga “to sway” is cited in some dictionaries, but it is a rare (dialectal?) verb, and nothing points to its being the source of English swag. Incidentally, sway also sounds very much like swag.

Swag has as many lookalikes as senses, and this is the main problem with it. Here are some sw-verbs from my list of words of unknown origin (the numbers in parentheses refer to the century of their first attestation in texts): swank (20) “to behave ostentatiously” (apparently, little known in American English); swash (16) “to dash violently, etc.” (said to be sound-imitative like clash, dash, lash, and mash); another swash (17) “inclined obliquely to the axis of the work (in turning),” and swizzle ~ switchel (19) “an alcoholic drink.” The material at my disposal is richer, but going over lists of verbs (mainly verbs) is boring. Anyway, one looks at swing, switch, swipe, swither “to hesitate,” swoon, and quite a few other more or less similar words and gets the impression that all of them refer to some quick or erratic movement and are in some vague way related. There is a special term for groups like sw -, namely, phonestheme. The term was coined by John Rupert Firth, a renowned British scholar.

The presence of the phonestheme cannot be predicted, and the same sound group (here, sw) occurs in words in which it evokes no association with movement. Think of swamp, swan, swain, swear, sweat, sweet, and swine. But what about swap, sway, swim, swirl, and swoon? Sw- does suggest a swinging, swaying movement (hence swag and swagger). There is no law, but a tendency is apparent.

Some connections have to be restituted by historians. Thus, German schwach means “weak,” not “swinging,” but the verb sweken once meant both “to become weak” and “to swing.” Swinging, it appears, led to being weak. While German im Schwange sein “to be in vogue” obviously refers to swinging, German schwanger “pregnant” is believed to be a different word. Why so? Pregnancy is a temporary state, isn’t it? Cannot it then be related to the many nouns and verbs with more or less the same reference?

Having reached this state of uncertainty, we come across swoon. The word has been known since the thirteenth century, and it once had g in the root (the verb –swogan existed). A similar-sounding German verb meant “to sigh.” The origin of swoon is said to be unknown. Really? Perhaps there is nothing to know. If we ignore the details, we may agree that being in a swoon, like being pregnant, is a temporary state! When things are up in the air, the phonestheme sw– comes in handy—unfortunately, too handy.

Even so, we need not treat our discovery with too much suspicion. When our authorities say that the origin of sway is obscure, perhaps we should say that the obscurity is a product of our striving for perfection. The OED quotes a 1598 statement that swagger was “created as it were by a natural Prosopopeia [here: without any known source], without etimologie or deriuation (sic).” I am inclined to say that that’s all there is to it. Swap, sway and swag are, rather probably, rootless sound-symbolic or/and sound-imitative formations, produced “instinctively,” as older scholars used to say. It is now believed that the human language emerged about 230,000 years ago. I am rather suspicious of exact numbers in this matter, but let us agree that the date is in principle realistic. As soon as people learned to produce the sounds needed for expressing their emotions, they began to say something like swap and swag.

Such English words often have cognates in closely related Germanic languages and sometimes in Latin, Greek, and non-Indo-European languages. Their common origin in Scandinavian and English or Dutch and English may mean that they are considerably older than the date of their first appearance in texts. Borrowing is also probable, but the main question is their distant origin, rather than their later history. Here is just one, almost random, example that shows how loose ties among such words may be. A Gothic verb that meant “to rejoice” (Gothic was recorded in the fourth century and is a dead Germanic language) has several related forms. In Old English it meant “to resound,” in Old Saxon, “to roar” (just one step from “rejoice” to “roar” and “resound”), but in Old Icelandic, “to splash.” Splashing is not too noisy. One would not be surprised if such a word acquired the sense “water”! Obviously, there once was a sound-imitative word with the phonestheme sw-, which developed in several ways.

Take your swag and go home with the swagger of a winner.

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Doppelganger names

We often think of personal names as specific to an individual, and sometimes they are. Yet often they are not. After all, the same individual may go by more than one name. Consider secret identities, for example. Superman is also Clark Kent (and Kal-El, his Kryptonian birthname), Wonder Woman is also Diana Prince (and Princess Diana of Paradise Island), and so on. Pen names and stage names are the literary equivalent of superhero secret identities: Samuel Clements becomes Mark Twain, Mary Ann Evans becomes George Eliot, Eric Arthur Blair becomes George Orwell, Marguerite Annie Johnson becomes Maya Angelou, Daniel Handler becomes Lemony Snicket, and Belcalis Almánzar becomes Cardi B. If someone is referred to by their less familiar name, we may not understand who is being mentioned. And, less famously, an individual’s name may have more than one variant, depending on the use of initials, diminutives, marital surnames, or gender transitioning. And in the legal system, there are any number of anonymized or unknown John Does and Jane Does (as well as Richard Roes, Jane Roes, and Mary Moes).

The opposite situation can easily arise as well, and here is where we find doppelganger names. Sometimes different people have the same name or similar ones, creating potential confusion. There are, after all, two Saint Augustines (one the 4^th century bishop of Hippo, the other the 6^th century monk who became Archbishop of Canterbury), two presidents named George Bush, two William Pitts (the Elder and the Younger), two Oliver Wendell Holmeses (one a physician-poet and one a Supreme Court Justice), two Hank Williamses, and two Frankensteins (the doctor and the monster), among many others. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, there is a pair of Cinnas, and the poet Cinna is fatally mistaken for Cinna the conspirator.

Doppelganger names have real-world consequences in today’s surveillance-minded world. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. federal government instituted something called the No-Fly List, which was a list of people prohibited from boarding commercial aircrafts in or into United States. The No-Fly List and similar watch lists are controversial, and one of the points of controversy has to do with so-called false positives. These arise when a prohibited individual or an individual flagged for additional screening has the same name as an unlucky innocent traveler. The late Massachusetts Senator Edward M. (Ted) Kennedy ran into this situation when the name “T Kennedy” appeared on the list. Kennedy was told that the name “T Kennedy” had once been used as the alias of a person on a screening list. The vagueness of the listed “T Kennedy” subjected the well-known politician to repeated travel delays.

The practice of naming boats and ships also sometimes results in different vessels having doppelganger names. A pair of such ships named Peerless was involved in a famous misunderstanding routinely taught in law schools: the 1864 case involved a lawsuit brought by a man named William Raffles against Daniel Wichelhaus and Gustav Busch. Wichelhaus and Busch had made a contract for cotton arriving from Mumbai (then called Bombay) on a ship named Peerless. It turned out that there were two ships called Peerless—and both were travelling from Mumbai to Liverpool, but at different times.

Wichelhaus and Busch said the Peerless intended in the contract was the ship that had set off in October, but their shipment of cotton arrived later on the other Peerless, which had left Mumbai in December. Wichelhaus and Busch refused to pay for the delivery, so William Raffles sued, arguing that the cotton had arrived on the Peerless as the contract stated. However, the English Court of Exchequer declined to enforce the agreement because the reference to a ship called Peerless was ambiguous.

The Raffles case might seem like a unique misunderstanding—a historical oddity—but it was followed by (and cited in) an 1869 Massachusetts case, Kyle v. Kavanagh. This time the dispute was about the sale of property “on Prospect Street” in Waltham, Massachusetts. However, there were two Prospect Streets in the town. The court’s instructions to the jury explained that: “[I]f the defendant was negotiating for one thing and the plaintiff was selling another thing, and if their minds did not agree as to the subject matter of the sale,” they could not be said to have made a contract.

Sometimes a rose is not just a rose.

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The words we use

The town where I live has a good newspaper. From time to time, it gives advice to its readers for avoiding language mistakes and for speaking correct English. Today’s post has been inspired by a column by Gary Gilson the Minnesota Star Tribune published about two years ago. It is amusing to compare his advice and the advice I constantly give to my correspondents from all over the world.

Number One on his and my list is the use of buzzwords. People are formulaic creatures, they like cliches as much as being fiercely individual. Some phrases are unavoidable. We cannot substitute anything for Good morning, thank you very much, please sit down, don’t worry, and their likes. It is less obvious whether we should say have a nice weekend every time we part on Friday. But the real problem is with important-sounding phrases that once were new but have lost their freshness from overuse. When I am promised unswerving support or a thought-provoking story, I no longer expect either assistance or excitement.

Likewise, when I write letters of recommendation for my former students, I wonder whether I should say that their research is interdisciplinary. The epithet has been trodden to death and means nothing. Though it takes years for a budding scholar (sorry for this phrase) to master the chosen area and though not everybody succeeds, at twenty-eight, one is supposed to be a giant astride at least two oceans. But if I don’t mention the applicant’s interdisciplinary greatness, this will be noticed and remembered! Everybody is interdisciplinary, and everybody needs a job. I weep but walk in step. Rest assured: my recommendations are always thought-provoking, and I promise my proteges unswerving support.

Not only epithets like glamorous, fascinating, and mature have been worn thin. Even worse are some adverbs. One shudders at abominations like free gift, future prospects, final outcome, exact opposites, and the most precious gem of them all: honest truth. Those who cannot be smart often try to look or sound smart. One of the ways of impressing an interlocutor is to speak long and say little. At this point in time is of course weightier than now or at present, and utilize eclipses the modest monosyllabic use.

Language changes, and the avant-garde variety always sounds like an abomination to the cultured group. When all pedants die out, the “progressives” begin to guard their norm, which has now become conservative! Here is a curious example. In German, gut means both good and well, that is, adverbs lack a suffix like –ly. But I have heard someone saying on the radio: “She sings beautiful.” My neighbor suggested that we ride real quick. This is pure German. To be sure, fast is both an adverb and an adjective (we drive a fast car fast). Is English progressing in the direction of German? Perhaps.

One example I cited in some older post, but my students keep reminding me of this phenomenon. “The mood of the stories are gloomy.” Judging by this ineradicable feature of even graduate students’ style, American English has established a rule: make the verb agree with the closest noun, rather than with the subject. Should we bother? Yes, for the time being. But one day, this usage may become the norm. Incidentally, here is a sentence from a paper by a distinguished British philologist: “The small corpus of nineteen… epigraphical inscriptions… do not correspond very well, in either the date or their geographical distribution…” I understand the British collective in my family are early risers, and the couple were seldom seen together, but the corpus are? Yet I am more troubled by sentences like “They invited my wife and I,” because I cannot explain what analogy produces such phrases. However, we do say “Yes, this is me” and don’t worry.

One of the oldest chestnuts is: “I insist on Mrs. Smith appearing.” Obviously, it should be “Mrs. Smith’s.” But the tug of war between those construction has been going on for two centuries (at least). A grammarian will have no trouble parsing either variant. Yet the speaking community has never had any interest in linguists’ opinions.

A special problem is language and social engineering. Every time I write is not and does not, the computer suggests isn’t and doesn’t. Who programmed it to promote the conversational variants of such forms? I am immune to my computer’s bidding, but many others, especially insecure foreign speakers, will probably obey the command. I wince at constructions like “When someone asks you for help, never send them without assistance.” This usage was imposed on us for two reasons. “Him or her” is bulky,” and the older him is sexist. Yet I constantly see sentences like “It is the viewer’s opinion that matters, and we cannot ignore her reaction,” as though her is less sexist than his. Medication is expected to cure, rather than kill.

My final example has been trodden to death. Everybody fights the phrase very unique. The correspondent of the newspaper I referred to as an inspiration of this essay began his notes with the appeal: “Avoid very unique!” Some people don’t understand that unique means “one of a kind” and take it for a synonym of rare. The misunderstanding is sad, but in the history of language, such events cause astounding changes. Words for “bad” begin to mean “good,” and the other way round. Everything depends on whether any given speaker prefers to be conservative and resist change or is happy to swim with the current. If one day, unique loses its ties with the idea of uniqueness, the avant-garde usage will become neutral. Incidentally, the adverb very is rarely needed. It, too, has lost its freshness, and that is why people often say very, very. Ours is a community of overstatement. Editors used to call very a four-letter word, which it certainly is.

NOTE. During the summer months, the blog will keep appearing but not always with the same regularity as usual.

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A vicious beehive

One more Spelling Bee is behind us, and one more benighted youngster took the cake. In the final round, he spelled the word éclaircissement “making an obscure subject clear” correctly. He is thirteen years old, he has been playing this game for seven years, and he was the runner up in 2024. According to his statement, he spent five to six hours daily on weekdays and seven to eight hours on weekends studying the dictionary for unfamiliar words. Moreover, he has been practicing this thing for the last seven years, that is, almost since his kindergarten days. I am of course sorry for the kid, because I am not a fan of child abuse and because I know that one can be young only once. Rather long ago, I already spewed my contempt and ire at Spelling Bee, and I remember that my pamphlet did not produce the slightest stir. But as Cyrano de Bergerac said on a different occasion: “One does not always fight to win.” That is why I’ll once again return to Spelling Bee, Spelling Reform, and Walter William Skeat.

Learning the spelling of the words one will never use or even encounter looks like an unprofitable occupation. I suspect that the hero of this year’s contest does not read or speak French (there was no time to learn it). What then is the use of knowing the word éclaircissement? He also spelled Chaldee, Symlin, olona, and adytum correctly. The website says that after winning the prize, he collapsed with excitement and fatigue. And the admiring people who would not hurt a tadpole watched and applauded.

English spelling is irrational and tough, but why should our youngsters know how to spell olona? Wouldn’t it have been more profitable to read Shakespeare, Dickens, and Mark Twain (not of course for five or six hours a day) and come across all kinds of unfamiliar language in them: obsolete but interesting nouns and verbs used in the days of Queen Elizabeth I, the British slang of Artful Dodger, and some medieval vocabulary occurring in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court? What a feast of words! Our winner could have learned French and even Latin, or (since he knew how to spell Chaldee) even Hebrew.

English speakers are poor spellers (and for good reason), and considering the fact that most schools in the United States do not teach grammar, this fact should not surprise anyone. My undergraduate students need a semester to learn the difference between the present and the past participle and the mysteries of subordinate clauses. But spelling stopped bothering them long ago, because today, the spell checker does all the work for them. It dutifully changes the inveterate occurance to occurrence and sometimes knows the difference between principle and principal. A spelling bee might sound like a clever idea in the early twentieth century, but nowadays, it has degraded into an ignoble sport. Let me add that this is my opinion, and if someone happens to express indignation at being exposed to it, all the blame goes to me, rather than to Oxford University Press, on whose site this blog appears every Wednesday.

The first Spelling Bee seems to go back to 1908. Below I will discuss a booklet on Spelling Reform, published almost at that time (in 1906). By the way, the origin of bee in spelling bee has never been explained to everybody’s satisfaction. Bee is a word of unknown etymology. It first surfaced in the US at the end of the eighteenth century and meant “a social gathering.” Perhaps it is the same word as the name of the insect: bees, as everybody knows, are great “gatherers.” In Derby, Whitby, and their likes, –by once meant “town; dwelling.” By(e) “cowstall,” with its variant bee, is still known in British dialects. Could this bee mean both “gathering place” and “the company gathered in it,” like court and forum? Just guessing.

Before the First World War, it seems that English spelling would soon be reformed, partly because several famous people supported the idea. On May 2, 1906, Walter W. Skeat gave a talk at the British Academy, and in the same year, a brochure with that speech was published by Oxford University Press. He explained why English spelling is so erratic and what progress philology had made by the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1908 (again the same date!), The English Spelling Society was founded. It advocated “simplified spelling,” The society still exists and is quite active. Today, philology enjoys no prestige, courses in the history of language (even of the English language) have fallen into desuetude, and a graduate student interested in this subject will find neither an adviser nor a job. But English spelling is still a nightmare to millions of native speakers and foreigners.

Below, I’ll only list Skeat’s suggestions, without discussing them. There are twelve of them. Skeat followed Henry Sweet, another great contemporary of his. 1. Abolish silent e, where it is useless (spell hav, giv, abuv, cum “come,” solv, freez, adz, ax). As we know, adz and ax are accepted variants in the US. 2. In the same spirit, write litl, promis, activ, therefor (in today’s spelling, therefore and the rare therefor are different words). 3. The use of ea for short e is absurd and troublesome. Write medow, brekfast, hed, as well as lepard, jepardy (the horror of it! Our beloved Jeopardy!), and also peeple. 4. The use of ie for ee is unhistorical and should be discontinued. Thus, acheev, beleev, cheef, feeld.

5. The Tudor (fifteenth-century) form oo should be restored in words like improov, looz, moov. 6. Norman scribes, while producing their manuscripts, had trouble with um, but there is no reason why we should avoid cumfort, cumpany, cum “come,” munk, muney, and cuver. 7. Skeat suggested curage, cuzin, flurish, and touch. His spelling labor, honor, harbor will not shock anyone in the US, but some of Skeat’s contemporaries feared looking like Americans. Times change (don’t they?), and some people change with them.

I’ll skip 8 and go directly to 9. Get rid of useless double letters. Thus, eg, od, ful, stif, batl, wrigl, traveler. (Needless to say, traveler is now the only American spelling.) 10. Skeat suggested abolishing b in debt, lamb, limb, numb, and thumb. 11. Ache and anchor should become ake and anker. 12. Here are a few verbal forms: puld, lookt, slipt.

At the end of his presentation, Skeat, as always, berated the ignorance and laziness of his countrymen, be it in language history or phonetics. I wonder what he would have said if he found himself in a modern college. He had no illusions about the future, and yet he thought he saw a glimmer of hope in some actions at Oxford and Cambridge. Of course, he could not predict that soon after his death in 1912, the world would collapse and, in a way, never recover. But we are still alive, and English is now a world language. Millions of children at home and in the great world around learn English and curse wright (God forbid, not write or right!), doubt, choir, and occurrence. Have I made myself clear? Was my éclaircissement lucid enough? If so, I am happy, because never in the world would I have been able to win the most modest prize in a deadly fight against bees.

_{Featured image: giant honey bee by Dinesh Valke. CC-BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.}

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