The logic of that
reproach baffles me utterly.
[R.B.]
* * * * *
SOME LEXICAL MATTERS
FAST = QUICK OR FIRM
'An Old Cricketer' writes:
'After reading your remarks on the ambiguity of the word _fast_ (Tract
III, p. 12) I read in the report of a Lancashire cricket match that
_Makepeace was the only batsman who was fast-footed_. But for the
context and my knowledge of the game I should have concluded that
Makepeace kept his feet immovably on the crease; but the very opposite
was intended. At school we used to translate [Greek: podas [^o]kus
Achilleus] "swift-footed Achilles", and I took that to mean that Achilles
was a sprinter. I suppose _quick-footed_ would be the epithet for
Makepeace.'
SPRINTER is a good word, though _Sprinting Achilles_ could not be
recommended.
BRATTLE
A correspondent from Newcastle writes advocating the recognition
of the word _brattle_ as descriptive of thunder. It is a good old
echo-word used by Dunbar and Douglas and Burns and by modern English
writers. It is familiar through the first stanza of Burns's poem 'To a
Mouse'.
Wee sleekit cow'rin tim'rous beastie,
O what a panic's in thy breastie.
Thou need na start awa sae hasty
Wi' bickering brattle....
which is not suggestive of thunder. The _N.E.D._ explains this as 'to
run with brattling feet, to scamper'.
In Burns's 'A Winter Night', it is the noisy confusion of _biting
Boreas_ in the bare trees and bushes:
I thought me on the ourie cattle
Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle
O' winter war.
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