Bushel. I was forcefully reminded of the logical gulf between some and none when dozens of readers told me that my assertion that nobody now used the bushel measure was quite wrong. The USA (to a lesser extent Canada) continues to use the bushel measure for grain, fruit and other commodities as well as the peck, a quarter of a bushel. Many subscribers reminded me of the Frank Loesser song lyric from Guys and Dolls, 1950, sung by a line of chorus girls: “I love you, a bushel and a peck ...”. And the expression hide one’s light under a bushel is much older than the King James Bible of 1611 — a similar version is in John Wycliffe’s bible of the late fourteenth century.

Epicaricacy. Nancy Spector of the Wordcraft website pointed out that I was wrong to say the word epicaricacy doesn’t appear in any of Nathan Bailey’s dictionaries. It is included in An Universal Etymological English Dictionary of 1721 but in the spelling epicharikaky. Ammon Shea, whom I doubted in my piece, tells me it’s also in John Ash’s New and Complete Dictionary of the English Language of 1775 and in A Dictionary of the Synonymous Words and Technical Terms in the English Language by James Leslie of 1806, both in the same spelling as in Bailey’s. The word appears several times in various works in the original Greek spelling; a writer on the Wordcraft site found it a century before Bailey in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy of 1621. It was familiar to Burton and other Greek scholars because Aristotle had used it.

Going away. It’s time that I took another holiday, it would seem. As it happens, I shall be away most of next week, 15-19 September. The next issue might be sent out late.