> And I was just told by my mother that my distant cousin's name is not
> "Tray," it is "Trey."
Makes sense, Kent, and confirms the link to the pooches in Lear.
"Trey" was an alternative spelling of "tray", the three on the die, and thus
the source of Christopher Walker's plausible suggestion that the dog in
question was the third of the litter.
> Me, I'm feeling somewhat like Yorick at present.
And I'm feeling like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, the one
played by James Stewart, not the one acted by John Wayne, as the dating
Hamlet part of my post to which you refer was Poached From Another.
The original phrase ran, "I dated Hamlet, but I'm not saying when,"
and appeared on the SHAKSPER list some time ago.
Right, that's my conscience clear, I'm no longer passing.
(Bloody union activists -- won't let you get away with anything.)
Oh also, in case the Yanks among us and those Brits too young to
remember missed this, there was a time, a very long time ago it seems now,
when the British Egg Marketing Board would stamp every egg with the image of
a Red Lion and a date, to confirm its integrity.
Contrawise, which Kent noticed but some Brits may have missed,
"yegg" is early twentieth century New York slang for a
gangster/enforcer/hardman. They speak in the continuous present (time
revisited) and can be found in the pages of Damon Runyon.
Robin
Uh oh, I seem to have yegg on my face. Got it a bit wrong above, but. Just
checked, and ...
YEGG n. [late 19C+] [US Und.] a thief, spec. a safe-cracker. [? John Yegg,
a contemporary villian and the first safebreaker to use nitroglycerine] --
Cassell/Slang
R.
