821-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

Defenestration Readers pointed out that I had omitted to note that there had been a defenestration in Prague in 1419 before the famous one of 1618 and that there have been others during the Communist era when dissidents suffered that fate, the best known being that of Jan Masaryk in 1948.

Cal White, Mitch Marks and Ant Allan all mentioned that they’d first come across the word in The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch, one of the Tales from the White Hart written by Arthur C Clarke: “All we know is that she went out of the apartment window, and of course it could have been an accident — but there was no way of asking her, as the Inches lived four storeys up. I know that defenestration is usually deliberate, and the Coroner had some pointed words to say on the subject.”

“As you will likely be told by other computer-literate readers,” emailed Al Sharka, “defenestration (as a pun) also refers to the removal of the default Microsoft Windows operating system that comes bundled with your PC, usually to install some version of Linux instead.”

Whale of a time Many subscribers mentioned that a big spender at a casino is known as a whale, presumably from the size of his wallet. The verbal use of whale, to beat or flog (as in whaling the tar out of somebody), which others asked about, has a different origin. It’s a variant spelling of the old verb wale, to mark the flesh with the streaks or ridges once called wales (not whales, let alone Wales), which survives for the ridges on corduroy, as in wide-wale corduroy. These days, we commonly spell wales as weals.