Mike dribbles away also

[Jim Strong]

--- Michael Eisenstadt <michaele@ando.pair.com> wrote:
> "due to my high crimes and misdemeanors, Fontaine M
> and others and a guy who you may not know yclept
> Jim Strong have set up a doppelgaenger maillist
> where there are many of original agl subscribers
> actively posting."
=======================
:yclept"
************

   Once this was the standard way of forming the past
participle of the verb clepe, to call (or, more
strictly, its Old English precursor, cleopian). For
the past few hundred years it has only turned up as a
deliberately archaic form, mostly in poetry, or as
light relief. It surfaces occasionally as ponderous
humour in journalistic pieces, as here in the
Jerusalem Post in 1997 (the name of the writer has
been suppressed to protect the guilty): “The caption
under the photo of the unfortunately yclept basketball
player just makes matters worse: ‘David Putz dribbles
away...’ ”. Such poppings-up are frequent enough that
the word appears in most dictionaries today, even
though it died out in the north of England about 1200
and lingered in the south and east only a little
longer. It has been outside the mainstream of English
for so long that the person credited with popularising
it again (Gavin Douglas, a Scots poet and divine),
wrote around the end of the fifteenth century. The
initial y was once the standard way of marking the
past participle: yclensed, yfastened, ypunched, and
dozens of others. It was the Old English equivalent of
a form which still exists, for example, as ge– in
modern German. Advice to budding writers: best avoided!