Monday 13 February 2017

Don't You Dare Quisle

Ten digits? Check. A keyboard? Yes. Still there. Mental tranquility? Nope. Nowhere around here. There's just a little bit too much tiredness in the old head, and so this is going to be... strange. It's always strange when you don't have a theme or idea to jump upon. To one side, the Dice Tower's 'Top 10 Games With Exciting Endings' is running and adding multi-tasking to the procedure.

It has been two weeks of heavy board game research at this point, with more than a hundred reviews watched and read, and many decisions made. Why on Earth so much effort is being made, I have no idea, but that wish list on BoardGameGeek was really groaning under the weight of hundreds of items marked 'Thinking About It', and there is a trip to a board game shop coming up soon. Hurrah! (Is it still worth a hurrah if your budget is two paperclips and a giant picture of Captain Kirk?)

Have you ever quagswagged? Really? Are you bluffing? It's supposed to mean 'to shake to and fro', according to the Phrontistery, that repository of wonderful arcane words that are mostly disused. Does to quagswag mean to yourself shake or to shake someone of thing else? I have no idea. There is not that much information.

Here's a less obscure word, 'quisle', which adds much context to the word 'quisling'. Yes, 'to quisle' means to betray. Whenever you see the epithet 'quisling' you now have the meaning! Except... it doesn't have an origin. According to the dictionaries, the term 'quisling' doesn't come from 'quisle', but from a World War II collaborator actually named Quisling. How bizarre! Presumably the verb came after the noun, in a highly unusual turn...

O.

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