[TAG] English->American dictionary

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Mike Orr (mso at oz.net):

> Regarding bailey and Old Bailey (a courthouse in London, which I first
> encountered in _A Tale of Two Cities_), I had assumed they were
> related to bail/bailiff, and were called that for some unfathomable
> reason. But Webster's says bailey is "the outer wall or court of a
> medieval castle; term still kept in some proper names, as in Old
> Bailey". 

Oddly enough, on a recent unplanned trip to London, I found myself with
an entire afternoon in which my only obligation was to travel about 7 km
to Liverpool Street Station, so I did it by shank's mare[1] -- and one
of several places I stopped to gawk was the Old Bailey.

It's so named becase it was built _next to_ Old Bailey Street, which lay
just outside the perimeter wall -- the "bailey" -- of the mediaeval
walled city.  The original building fell to the Great Fire (1666), and
it's been rebuilt more or less completely several times since then.

I also dropped into Hyde Park, stopped at St. Paul's Cathedral (how
could I skip that?), wandered around the "City" legal district and 
the Barbican Centre, visited Dr Johnson's house, looked around the
Guildhall, and probably visited some other places I'm forgetting at the
moment.

(I had to make an unplanned side-trip into London from Glasgow because
my passport had vanished, and so I was obliged to visit the US Embassy
to get a new one.  The whole gory tale is here:
http://deirdre.net/posts/2005/08/glasgow-ricks-departure/ )

[1] Before you ask, it's an 18th C. Scottish tongue-in-cheek coinage.
"To shank it" meant "go on foot", borrowing from the English "shank" for
one's leg portion from ankle to knee:  The joke based on that expression
lay in referring to a "shank's nag" or "shank's mare" -- the mare of
your shank being your own foot, in the absence of more-luxurious
transportation.  A modern analogue would be when someone suggests I buy
some ludicrously expensive part for my bicycle to save weight, and I
rejoin that I'd be "better off concentrating on lightening the bike motor".

-- 
Cheers,             
Rick Moen                 Support your local medical examiner:  Die strangely.
rick at linuxmafia.com