Pleasant gales. Following up the comment last week by Pat Spaeth about a poem with the line “A pleasant gale is on our lee”, arguing that there can be no such thing as a pleasant gale at sea, readers pointed out that the meaning of gale hasn’t always been the same as our modern one. The Oxford English Dictionary notes Dr Johnson’s definition, “a wind not tempestuous, but stronger than a breeze”, and records that in poetical language it could mean a gentle breeze. Several readers mentioned a well-known example in Alexander Pope’s poem Summer: “Where-e’er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade”. The OED also has several early examples in seafaring contexts of pleasant gale. In An Accidence, a book for young seamen of 1626, John Smith gave a set of names for winds of increasing strength: “A calme, a brese, a fresh gayle, a pleasant gayle, a stiffe gayle”. John Robertson’s The Elements of Navigation of 1772 asserted that “A common brisk gale is about 15 miles an hour.” On the Beaufort scale, a moderate gale (force 7) is at least twice that speed and a whole gale (force 10) averages about 60 mph, which seems to confirm that a gale now blows more fiercely than it used to.

Blooper. As expected, readers corrected my knowledge of baseball. Professor Laurence Horn emailed from Yale: “Not to rub it in, but your modesty about your baseball expertise is, I fear, as well-deserved as it is becoming. A blooper (aka Texas leaguer) is not an embarrassing error for the fielders, or at least not necessarily.” Richard Hershberger explained, “It is a poorly hit weak fly ball that ordinarily would be easily caught, but through luck lands where no fielder can reach it. The embarrassment is to the batter, as nobody makes such a hit on purpose. The embarrassment is, however, considerably lessened by getting on base safely.”

Jeremy Shaw and Roger Johnson asked about the closely similar but independently created bloomer, known in Britain and Australia, though now rather dated. The evidence suggests that it appeared in Australia in the late nineteenth century as a contraction of blooming error, where blooming is a much older euphemism for bloody. Its earliest record is in the Dictionary of Slang, Jargon and Cant by Albert Barrère and Charles Godfrey Leland, published in Edinburgh in 1889. They say that it began as Australian prison slang.

Véraison. I made a minor blooper or bloomer myself last week by suggesting that the creation of véraison was influenced by raisin, grape. Readers told me that the word is indeed derived from the obsolete French verb vérir, as I explained, but by adding the agent suffix -aison. Any similarity to raisin is accidental.