XP: Written Word/English Language&Reading Material

A quick OE D check also shows that the above derivation for love in tennis is also not true. I am now suspicious of all the rest, but some of them might be true.
 
Is there an attribution in there somewhere, or was all that content the product of Pete's own personal research?

What, pray tell, is the true derivation 'love' in tennis?
 
Love stands in for zero, because someone who plays when he can only score zero is playing for the love of the game. It doesn't sound likely to me, either, but so googling derivations tells me.
 
As best I can tell, the origin of "love" to describe a tennis score is lost to history. Note that the French, who invented the modern version of the game, say "zero"; it is a Britishism to say "love".
 
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
Google vs. Pete. Hm. Are you using the peer-reviewed version of Google?
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Google is just a search engine. It's where you land that matters. The sites I landed on reference the OED. I checked that as well, of course. Mind you the OED considers the extension of playing for love to score-keeping in tennis (and a number of other sports) as speculative. But I can't find a site that doesn't consider the oeuf story completely apocryphal.
 
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
Yes, I was thinking of Wikipedia. Typical. Thanks for clearing that up.

Still, the apocryphal derivation is irresistible.
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Wikipedia always needs to be cross-checked. But it is much better than its reputation, particularly if the issue is not controversial. I wouldn't necessarily depend on it for its account of the history of, say, the Palestinian Liberation movement. And I have run upon howlers such as the claim that people now take Josephus's references to Christ not to be a later counterfeit. But if you look up, say, who the Cardinal de Retz is, you will get a pretty accurate account.
 
Speaking of evolving word usage e.g. leveraging (verb), varietal (noun), dialoguing (verb) and the like!

It is a relatively young usage, but I'm seeing "silo" fairly often used lately as a verb e.g. to silo or to put into a single category. The usage does have a distinctive ring to it.

. . . . Pete
 
According to the OED, silo as a verb dates to 1883 (a relatively young usage from the perspective of the history of the language). Using the term as a metaphor for categorizing concepts or isolating non-agricultural things from each other does seem newer but it does show up in a fair number of online dictionaries, alas without dates of origin.
 
Collins Dictionary referred to silo as a verb as being a "new word" but perhaps they were just implying it was new to their dictionary (as of March, 2016).

I can't recall ever seeing the verb usage before just lately.

. . . . Pete
 
A book I'm reading A Gentleman in Moscow has had several references to mille-feuille...

From Wikipedia...

The mille-feuille (French pronunciation: ​[mil foej], "thousand-leaf"), vanilla slice, custard slice, also known as the Napoleon, is a French pastry whose exact origin is unknown. Its modern form was influenced by improvements made by Marie-Antoine Carême.

Traditionally, a mille-feuille is made up of three layers of puff pastry (pate feuilletée), alternating with two layers of pastry cream (crème patissière), but sometimes whipped cream or jam are substituted, when substituted with jam this is then called a Bavarian slice. The top pastry layer is dusted with confectioner's sugar, and sometimes cocoa, pastry crumbs, or pulverized seeds (e.g. roasted almonds). Alternatively the top is glazed with icing or fondant in alternating white (icing) and brown (chocolate) stripes, and combed.
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Interesting!

. . . . Pete
 
Talk about origin issues. I grew up eating Hungarian krémes, and in our family we called Napoleons colloquially krémes, long before I had heard of mille-feuille. Not at all clear the origin is French. Or Hungarian. Is it a near-Wellerism to state: it “is a French pastry whose origin is unknown”?
 
Any halfway decent pastry chef (including both me and my wife) can make mille feuilles. It's hardly recondite. It is a dough, not a completed pastry, though, despite the definition Peter found. Napoleon's are made with a mille feuille dough, but are otherwise just cream pastries. I don't know the origin of the cream pastry, but the name Napoleon I do expect originates in France. The name mille feuille certainly does.It means a thousand leaves and refers to the effect that comes with a certain method of kneading the butter into the flour that produces a very flaky pastry with the impression of innumerable thin layers.
 
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