817-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

Bill Heritage gently chided me for a comment in my piece on the word pavonine: “You used the expression, ‘the blue of the peacock’s tail’. I know you are a stickler for accuracy yourself so I hope you will not mind my observation that the tail is predominantly green. It is the peacock’s head and neck that are iridescent blue.” Others noted that in Spanish pavo, from the Latin for a peacock, means a turkey, a curious shift of sense (peacock is pavo real where the second word means royal).

Ian Roberts noted that Saki (HH Monroe) uses pavonicide in a story in which a country house guest shoots a peacock (“Some hostesses, of course, will forgive anything, even unto pavonicide”). Saki’s character adds “is there such a word?” There may be, but nobody seems to have ever used it except Saki.

Several readers asked whether there’s a link between “pavonine” and the stately old dance called the pavane. J Hogan wrote, “Dance history has it that the pavane, which swept the Continent in the Middle Ages and beyond, was named after the peacock, whose strut had already inspired the Italian verb pavoneggiare for the kind of dainty striding best suited to display both dignity and fine voluminous robes at formal social events.” In this case, dance history and lexicography are at odds, since the view of the latter is that peacocks aren’t involved. The Oxford English Dictionary says, “this has previously been taken by many to be the etymology of the word, but is now generally rejected.” Instead, it suggests that pavane is from the Italian pavana, a rustic dance from the region of Padua.

Last week, I used paywall without any thought that it might be an unusual word for readers. Enough queries came in to show it wasn’t as widely known as I had assumed. A paywall prevents visitors who don’t have a subscription from accessing content on a website. It’s an obvious play on firewall, in the computing sense of security software that likewise prevents unauthorised access; in turn this derives from a wall or partition designed to inhibit or prevent the spread of fire. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first example of paywall is from 2004.