(no subject)
I currently have 4 books and one CD in my Amazon shopping cart, and I was looking at Amazon's blurb for "The Page You Made," when it struck me that the top two items were The Road To Disunion, based on rahael's recommendation, and Donald E. Westlake's new Dortmunder caper, The Road To Ruin. I thought that was an interesting synchronicity, though not powerful enough to make me go crazy or anything. Instead, I will have to overstate the relevance of Nick Montfort's Twisty Little Passages, which, in juxtaposition with the others, suggests that while we may be headed to some bad ends, we're going to take our own sweet time getting there.
The CD is Prince's new Musicology; my unfortunate tendency, if left alone with a word, to pronounce it in an atrocious mock-French accent has led me to wonder about the etymology of ponce. My Oxford Shorter gives the derivation as "perhaps POUNCE," which I find inconclusive. Citations date back to the late 19th Century, when, rumor has it, at least one Prince of Wales was associating with prostitutes. Other princes may have been, for all I know, slightly effeminate. It's a tempting induction, suggesting that ponce might derive from "prince," but folk etymologies are often tempting, and always wrong.
The CD is Prince's new Musicology; my unfortunate tendency, if left alone with a word, to pronounce it in an atrocious mock-French accent has led me to wonder about the etymology of ponce. My Oxford Shorter gives the derivation as "perhaps POUNCE," which I find inconclusive. Citations date back to the late 19th Century, when, rumor has it, at least one Prince of Wales was associating with prostitutes. Other princes may have been, for all I know, slightly effeminate. It's a tempting induction, suggesting that ponce might derive from "prince," but folk etymologies are often tempting, and always wrong.