766-1: Feedback, notes and comments

Gremial Dan Perlman commented, "It was a surprise to see gremial referred to as a rare word. Here in South America, I see it every day. But that's in Spanish, in which historically it refers to a guild: professional, trade, academic or wizardly. Today both words are used to refer primarily to trade unions and professional associations." Erik Midelfort noted that Gremium exists in German in the sense of a board, panel, or committee. Both languages have acquired their terms from the same Latin sources as our gremial. Patrick Martin added, "I seem to remember from my Oxford days 50 years ago that a 'gremial member of the House' meant a Student (Fellow) of Christ Church who had also been an undergraduate there. Since then I have always referred to any cat we owned whose mother we had also owned as a gremial cat or kitten."

Mike Brian commented that the Latin root of gremial is especially associated with this time of year through a traditional Christmas carol, In Dulci Jubilo (In Sweet Rejoicing). This was originally a macaronic composition in German and Latin, still widely known in an English rendering of the German by Robert Lucas de Pearsall: "In dulci jubilo / Let us our homage shew; / Our heart's joy reclineth / In praesepio / And like a bright star shineth, / Matris in gremio. / Alpha es et O." Matris in gremio may be translated as "in the mother's lap".

New words in French Several readers felt I had strained too hard to find an origin for the neologism bête seller in the phrase bête noire. It would have been simpler, they felt, to seek it in the common slang sense of bête for a person who is stupid, like a dumb animal.

Weight The Reverend Carl Bowers wrote, "I doubt that the opinion sense of weigh in derives from boxers weighing in before a fight, since that procedure is to meet an objective standard; a boxer who is overweight for a weight classification is disqualified from competing. More likely it derives from adding one's weight to one side of a contest, either as opinion or argument added to one side of the scales of debate, or physically as for example adding one's weight to one team in a tug-of-war."