Auk's dimber tip to all flash coves

Roy C. Lackey · 19 Jul 2009, 20:01 · from 2009-July.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Sun, 19 Jul 2009 15:01:24 -0500
Subject: (urth) Auk's dimber tip to all flash coves
References: <cbf55b100907090958g76c30a74wc96e9961cea9f66a at mail.gmail.com><44fb53d10907092123s5cc08821y5d88fe9e22031f17 at mail.gmail.com><cbf55b100907100516i520f2ceej7fd4d3d29ae0010a at mail.gmail.com><44fb53d10907101630y29f084f2j44d44fc0a77c58f9 at mail.gmail.com><cbf55b100907101953r25b14411me72992aa10875490 at mail.gmail.com><4A5A5ADD.3090003 at hyraxes.com>
	<cbf55b100907190043nf13f393ye32bb326f7909db0 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <001e01ca08ab$b48f4b00$61d04a0c@rclackey>

Gwern Branwen quoted and wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 12, 2009 at 5:51 PM, Dave Lebling wrote:
> > My recollection is that "hoppy" was from the green uniforms of the
Vironese
> > police (by analogy with frogs).
> >
> > I forget where "limer" and "mews" are used but they are perfectly good
(if
> > obscure) words. Limers are mentioned in books about the English
underclass
> > (Kellow Chesney's "The Victorian Underworld" is a good one -- Neil
Gaiman
> > recommends it and it's fascinating), where the word refers to people who
> > catch birds using birdlime. "Hornboy" and "bucky" are not even
completely
> > obsolete today, if I twig their meanings ("catamite" and "buddy"
> > respectively).
>
> Hm. I didn't catch the roots for limer or bucky. Maybe a Lexicon
> Urthus is in order for the Long Sun/Short Sun books?

As Dave said, "mews" and "limer" are just obscure words. I recall that the
mews of a stable near the Inn of Lost Loves was where the ostler Trudo kept
his belongings and may have slept: "Trudo's gone, cook says. She was out
fetchin' water water 'cause the girl was gone, and seen him runnin' off, and
his things is gone from the mews too." (SHADOW, chap. XXVI)

Also, Wolfe had a limer as a character in "Our Neighbour by David
Copperfield" (ENDANGERED SPECIES) who talked about how lime was used to
catch birds: "But I liked him and I used to set by him, and it was him that
taught me how to lime the birds."

-Roy

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net