When a latest deteriorate of Glee began in April, an essay heralding a initial partial said, “Good things come to Gleeks who wait.”

This collapsing of Glee and geek into a singular word to news doctrinaire fans of a low-pitched comedy-drama is not new. What astounded me, on a coincidental initial reading of British censor Ivor Brown’s 1942 book A Word in Your Ear, is that “gleek” has a story eccentric of Glee.

As early as 1540, gleek referred to a jest, pretence or severe fun – what competence currently be called a snap or comic insult. “They durst not quarrel ne strike/ They feared of a gleke,” pronounced The Image of Ipocrysy, a 1540 poem attributed to English producer John Skelton.

The word was used for another 3 centuries, though by a 1900s had faded into a source of nostalgia. “Why has gleek for jest, both noun and noun, so mostly disappeared?” Brown wrote. “It is brusque and expressive.” He cites a thoroughfare from Shakespeare’s Henry V, in that Gower says to Pistol, “I have seen we gleeking and sorrowful during this lady twice or thrice.” Brown observed: “There is some punning indicate there, since a partial includes a constraint to eat a leek.”

Nobody is certain where gleek came from. Another clarity of a word, referring to a label game, subsequent from Old French glic, though a gleek as fun competence only have been a movement on glee. Another speculation is that it’s connected to glaik, that in a early 1500s meant a unwashed trick. To give a chairman a glaiks was to imitation him.

There is small joviality in a financial travails of Greece, though word play continues regardless. Consider Grexit, that sounds like an online brokerage or a hair color for greying men, though is in fact brief for Greek exit.

The beginning anxiety we could find was in a Feb. 6 Globe essay by Michael Babad, who attributed a tenure to Citigroup: “Citigroup analysts are warning of a rising hazard of Greece withdrawal a euro zone, so most so that they’ve dubbed it Grexit.” The tenure has held on. “While a contingency of a Grexit have risen,” pronounced a May 18 Weekly Market Insight news from a bank CIBC, “we are not there yet.”

The coining of Grexit contingency seem a vicious pretence of predestine to dual Indian entrepreneurs who a integrate of years ago devised GrexIt (upper-case i), an focus which, according to a 2010 essay in India’s PluGGd in, “lets we do a really elementary thing with your Google apps comment – share e-mail with colleagues.” Or, with a lower-case i, clap a financial fortitude of a world. GrexIt contingency feel it is being glaiked.

Sometimes a best approach to equivocate difficulty is to change a name. Last month’s necrology of Canadian stand scientist Dave Mallough remarkable his purpose in creation rapeseed oil easier to devour by a hybridization of rape, a member of a mustard family. In 1978, in partial endangered about rape’s organisation with passionate assault, Canada’s oil-seed attention transposed a word with a new coinage, “canola,” shaped from can (Canada), o (Latin oleum, oil) and l.a. (low acid).

But why, we competence ask, was a plant called rape in a initial place? It is a tighten relations of a turnip. The Latin word for turnip was rapum (feminine rapa). By contrast, a rape as passionate defilement derives from a Latin rapere, to seize and lift off, a clarity informed from a word rape and pillage.

Turnip was coined in a 1500s from spin (apparently reflecting a dull shape) and neep, a Old English word for turnip. Neep subsequent from a exemplary Latin napus, turnip. Oddly, however, a turnip bears a Latin sequence Brassica rapa, while rape, from rapum, bears a sequence Brassica napus.

Once again, a denunciation has been bopped on a conduct with a gleek club.