774-1: Feedback, notes and comments

Halt Numerous readers noted the continuing use of compounds of this term, such as halting, as in halting speech.

Others commented in terms such as those of Richard R Losch: "Is it possible that in earlier times lame meant completely crippled, as opposed to halt, merely somewhat impaired?" There's something in this. Many dictionaries in essence equate the terms, defining halt as meaning lame. But, in an entry written a century ago, the Oxford English Dictionary defines one meaning of lame as "disabled in the foot or leg, so as to walk haltingly or be unable to walk", a higher level of disability than just a limp. Dr Johnson, in his Dictionary of 1755, says likewise that halt means "to be lame"; however, he defines lame as "crippled; disabled in the limbs", again a more severe affliction than the way that halt seems to have been used.

In this connection, I've since found a very much earlier use of the phrase halt and lame in Cursor Mundi, a Northumbrian poem of the fourteenth century. The OED says that lame in those days could mean disabled in any part of the body, not merely the legs, which suggests that the phrase then did imply two different conditions. Over time, as halt and lame became a set phrase, we may guess that the difference in meaning between its two words lessened and it became similar in type to repetitive expressions such as kith and kin and time and tide (in the latter, tide means a season or moment in time, as in eventide).

More pottering (or puttering) about Following last week's piece, several readers asked whether the putter spelling had a connection with the golf club called a putter. It doesn't. Putter in this sense derives directly from the verb putt, which is a variant form of put.

While looking into potter/putter, some unsystematic investigations in dictionaries had turned up an old English dialect sense that stood apart from the others: to trample in soft mud. In the eastern US many years ago, it was a boy's sport of trying to run on broken ice without falling in the water. I was delighted to learn from the Dictionary of American Regional English that in Rhode Island within living memory pieces of ice floating on salt water were given the name of bandudelums.