798-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

Holiday break World Wide Words will not appear next week — my wife and I are taking a short trip away. The issue of 1 September is the next scheduled one.

Strickle Many readers noted that this tool resembled in function and name the strigil, one with a curved blade that Romans used in the baths to scrape dirt and sweat off their bodies. The similarity is misleading, as no link exists: strigil is from the Latin verb stringere, to touch lightly. The latter is the source of one old sense of the English word stricture, likewise to touch lightly. (Its other senses are from another Latin verb of the same spelling, meaning to bind tightly.)

Another word with similar associations is screed, a strip of wood or other material to set a level for laying concrete or applying plaster (we meet it more often in the sense of the result). This again has a different history: it once meant an edge or bordering strip, from which the current sense derives. It was earlier a strip or fragment cut or torn from a larger piece — the Old English original is also the source of shred.

Out of school A quotation of 1833 in the piece on talking out of school last week referred dismissively to “riding schools and schools for scandal”. The second allusion was obvious but the first puzzled me. I have led too sheltered a lexicographical life. Bruce Napier suggested riding school was a low slang term of the time for a brothel. This is supported by the related term riding academy being on record in this sense. And you may not know that a confusion between the two meanings of riding school was the basis of a South African film of 1981, Birds of Paradise.