With the Winter Olympics getting under way in (currently snow-free) Vancouver, it is perhaps reasonable to include a word for the terror or delight of coming down a slope at great speed. The French verb dégringoler can be dusted off: from it the English have derived a noun that is much more commonly used in the figurative sense, to mean
a rapid descent; deterioration, decadence; change from bad to worse
So, from a 1959 issue of the magazine Encounter (which underwent its own dégringolade when it was found to be taking money from the CIA) we have "...the hero...underwent a convincing but totally unsensational degringolade, taking, not to drugs or drink, but to an increasing sluggishness." We do not know what then happened to the aforesaid hero. Encounter, however, went bust.
As we approach St. Valentine's Day, a nod to the romance industry. Our chosen word is of Italian origin, from the sixteenth century, and means very simply
a little love, a cupid
It claims common cause with amoret, which since 1651, and only in the plural, has signified
looks that inspire love; love-glances; "love tricks, dalliances"
Neither word has anything to do with that sickly-sweet concoction Amaretto di Saronno, much of which will nevertheless probably be consumed during dinners-for-two in the middle of the month.
On 25th January Scotsmen around the world will get together in inelegant scrimmages at which much haggis and even more whisky will be consumed, all to honor Caledonia's greatest poet, Robert Burns, born 251 years before on this very day.
Not a few of the diners will be wearing the filibeg - the skirted garment of tartan cloth known in English, and defined by the OED, simply as
the kilt
The Gaelic phrase feileadh-beag means, specifically, a little thing of pleats (or a thing of little pleats, no-one is quite sure).
Old-timers in Scotland like to think of the filibeg as the little kilt, a shorter garment that displays the knees in a manner never known to the warriors of long ago. A sudden breeze can run the risk of the wearer showing even more, of course, given the current fashion for wearing little, if anything, beneath.
