an evening visit, a friendly social call.

Today, and for the past hundred years or so, the word has come to mean

a session of traditional music, storytelling, or dancing

all of which is these days often augmented (and often greatly improved by being so) with ample quantities of usquebaugh. Such gatherings are a lot of fun: most birthdays, bar-mitzvahs and even the coming holidays tend to pale beside a full-blown Highland ceilidh, though their hangovers are seldom so memorable.

As it happens the first sense of Job in English also stems from a surname. The Biblically-recorded patriarch of the land named Uz was named Iobe, and as the story has it, he was man revered for enduring poverty and privation. So legendary was his stoicism, indeed,  that his name - which since the 13th century has been given an affricative, and rendered as Job - has come to stand for a figure with endless patience and fortitude.

More commonly - though lexicographically a little more puzzling - the word job , without a capital initial, has also come to mean

A piece of work; esp. a small and discrete piece of work done as part of one's regular occupation or profession.

The first use of this sense is recorded in 1557. There is a continuing debate, however. It ranges around whether this word - of unknown origin, it has to be confessed - first strictly meant just a piece of work, or whether it meant a piece of the results of work. For there is sense, dating from three years later, 1560, where jobbe (as it was then spelled) came to be used to designate

 A cartload; the amount that a horse and cart can bring at one time

Scholars are still searching for which of these senses (and there are many more) truly came first. It is part of the great joy of the lexicographic art that so many still feel compelled to track down just what a well-known English word really meant, at the moment it was first gathered into our language.

That small controversy aside, one thing is for sure, however: in the nicest possible sense, Steve Jobs himself was indeed a piece of work, unique and unforgettable. Appositely named, maybe, though with a hint of an enduring enigma about him also.

disposed to go counter to what is demanded or what is reasonable; perverse, difficult to deal with, hard to please; refractory, ungovernable; also in the wider sense, bad, evilly-disposed, "naughty".

We've had violent and dreadful weather in the American north-east this past few days, as Hurricane Irene has swept through ungovernably, from the Carolinas to Vermont. It would be entirely proper to describe our weather as froward, much as Lord Russell was once described as "froward, arrogant and mutinous." Nasty, bad, ill-disposed - Lords and hurricanes, all of a piece.

a batrachian reptile (Siredon pisciforme, family Proteidae) found in Mexican lakes, resembling a salamander in appearance but, like all the Proteidae,retaining through life the gills of its young state.

And why batrachian? Dictionary definitions are not supposed to include words more complex than the one being defined, and I venture to suspect that few will know what batrachian means. Well, your misery is over: it is from the Greek word for frog - and it signifies in this case that the axolotl is froglike and does not, like a salamander, have a tail.

But these days also have a more formal name, to the religious and astronomically-minded. These are the canicular days, or

the days immediately preceding and following the heliacal (in modern times, according to some, the cosmical) rising of the Dog-Star (either Sirius or Procyon,) which is about the 11th August.

The canicular cycle is the ancient Egyptian period of 1,461 years of 365 days each (or 1,460 Julian years) - a period during which each of the 365 days would have passed through (or so the ancient Egyptians wrongly supposed)  all the seasons of a natural year.

a traitor to one's country: a collaborationist; esp. during the war of 1939-45

The parallels between the ultra-Nordic leanings of both Quisling and Breivik are startling - both serving as reminders of the capacity for extremism among peoples who believe themselves to belong to a racial stock displaying, as each would put it, purity.

Quisling - with the capital initial soon dropped - is a word fortunate in its sonorous appositeness, suggesting as it does a kind of slithery derangement. It was little surprise that the verb to quisle soon entered the English language, somewhat more so that a weird back-formed noun quisler was soon born - unneeded, since we already had quisling.

It seems doubtful that a word Breivik will ever enjoy popular currency. This young man's fate, if the courts find him guilty and sane, will most probably condemn him to prison for a very long while.  Vidkun Quisling, said by his supporters to be a gentle and intelligent man - and like Breivik, strikingly and disarmingly blond and handsome - was found guilty of treason in 1945, and shot.

to the religious sacrifice of other nations; a large number of animals offered or set apart for sacrifice

It is said that Pythagoras, normally a placid and animal-loving sort of chap, offered up a hecatomb on discovering that the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle was equal in area to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. Whether the outing of Rebekah Brooks is an equally profound event we will not know for a while; but the consequences are beginning to sound rather similar.

Hypotenuse, in case you wondered, comes from the Greek for stretching under - since it is the long stretch opposite the right angle.

Myrmidon, with an upper-case initial, is a long-forgotten word from ancient Greece which once signified

one of a warlike race of men inhabiting ancient Thessaly whom, according to the Homeric story, Achilles led to the siege of Troy.

All well and good - but hardly useful for describing an annoyingly efficient Constable Plod.  However, in today's English, and when spelled with a lowercase initial, the sibling-form of myrmidon has come to be

applied contemptuously to a policeman, bailiff or other inferior administrative officer of the law

which seems to be of far greater utility.

Far be it for us ever to suggest that an over-eager policeman might be an inferior officer of the law. But to term him a myrmidon! Why, he might even feel a little proud of himself - until, of course, he came home, removed his helmet and put down his truncheon, and turned to his dictionary...

the idolatrous worship of the Virgin Mary, attributed by opponents to Roman Catholics.

Mainstream Catholics, in common with most sensible Christians, take a dim view of the Mariolaters in their midst, and urge instead the rather more benign devotion to her memory displayed by the milder-mannered Marians. These men and women have tended to be regarded with a greater degree of tolerance - but also with some puzzled pity, it being generally difficult to explain the precise purpose of their attentions.

calm, quiet, peaceful and undisturbed

But otherwise he would be quite wrong.  Halcyon is the Greek word for kingfisher, and kingfishers were long thought to live in nests that floated on the surface of the sea. They did not breed during the stormy days of summertime, but waited for the traditional

fourteen days of calm weather, [which was] anciently believed to occur about the winter solstice

So halcyon days may well be calm; and the skies may well be blue; but they would also be perishingly cold - a time of year when kingfishers, unlike us,  have managed to come up with their peculiarly avian means of keeping warm.