On Wednesday, in article

"David P" wrote:

In article ,
says...
On Wed, 11 Dec 2002 19:41:57 -0000, David P
wrote:

In article ,
says...
On Wed, 11 Dec 2002 14:04:58 GMT, "Michelle Fulton"
wrote:


"Torsten Brinch" wrote in message
.. .

has introgressed English to become 'floe', meaning sea ice.

I knew that! smacks self in head

concepts, going with the floe means going with
the ice.

An English tongued person might yield to associations from floe
to flee/fly/fled/flight, particularly when he is in a belligerent
state of mind, but again, flee/fly is an altogether different concept
than floe.


Any connection to the rhyme:
Flee Fly Floe Flumb I smell the blood of a Danish man?
vbg

Self evidently now, you just made it:-) The direct template of
this new expression would of course be King Lear,

My mind was drifting to Hamlet - it seemed somewhat more appropriate,
unless you were to prefer I identify you as Claudius? g

I am sure you also recognised my misquoting of the rhyme.

Philologically, there are traces of Old Friesian in all this, with some
masculine inflections mistakenly merged with the root form at some
intermediate point, and then suffering a confusing agglutination of a
conventional gender differentiation, which is disregarded in modern
English where the ancient doubling of the masculine form is now taken as
a gender-neutral default.


--
David G. Bell -- SF Fan, Filker, and Punslinger.

"Let me get this straight. You're the KGB's core AI, but you're afraid
of a copyright infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?"
From "Lobsters" by Charles Stross.