I am told that once again EU bureaucrats have been pestering the English Turf Club to get rid of their miles and furlongs; and once again, I am happy to relate, they have been sent packing. The Rowley Mile stays and the Derby distance remains at a mile and four furlongs.
Furlong comes from a very ancient root common to most of the Aryan tongues. In English the earliest form of the word was furh, a furrow; furlang in Old English was simply a long furrow.
Commonage in Anglo-Saxon villages was divided into long narrow strips, and every freeman would be given an equal number of these, not usually all together. The theory was that 10 strips comprised an acre, and every strip was 10 times as long as it was broad, making its length, which was the length of the furrow, 220 yards.
I myself remember furrows in West Cork being measured in spades (five and a half feet or two paces; Irish ramhainn). Have they conformed, I wonder?
From the racecourse to the sea. John Byrne of Drimnagh wants to know where the term plain sailing comes from. The landlubber's ignorance of the origin of this phrase has given us the spelling plain when it should be plane.
To chart a voyage on a flat sheet must lead to distortion, and the sailor who uses a flat chart for voyages other than short ones must make calculations to allow for the difference between his chart and the curved globe.
A short trip would pose no major problems: this would be plane sailing, sailing using a plane chart, uncorrected. By the way, both plain and plane come from the same Latin word, planus, flat.
Another valuable parcel of words has come my way from Jack Foley, of Corleagh, Cootehill, Co Cavan. One is suff. An old neighbour of mine used to express contempt for something by saying "suff on it" or "suff go deo on it."
Suff, I'd guess, is a Leitrim pronunciation of the Irish suth, given by Dinneen as a variant spelling of sugha, soot, both related to Old English and old Norse sot, to Old Slavonic sazda and to Old Irish suide.
Suth has been recorded in the English of Westmeath and suth in Roscommon. If you want to insult somebody, Dinneen suggests you try "a chiarog shughaidh - you sooty beetle, you contemptible worm".
Have a nice day.