Feb. 12th, 2004 04:40 pm
Anyone need a new word?
The other night, I had a someone unsettling dream about a violent rivalry between neighbours. At one point, one was standing on a height and the other was climbing a steep wall to get at him. He had both hands over the top and was trying to hoist himself up. His opponent called this an attempt at "gleasing" (rhymes with "sleazing", not "leasing").
Upon waking, I resolved to look this up in the OED to see if it existed, but I didn't get around to it until today. glease is a variant spelling of the obsolete/dialectal verb glace meaning "To glance, glide; to move lightly or quickly". That's half the question answered; the other half is, is there already a verb in place which denotes the action described above? I'm especially looking at you spelunkers and rock climbers, who have verbs for all sorts of movements the rest of us don't perform often enough to name (like "chimneying").
Upon waking, I resolved to look this up in the OED to see if it existed, but I didn't get around to it until today. glease is a variant spelling of the obsolete/dialectal verb glace meaning "To glance, glide; to move lightly or quickly". That's half the question answered; the other half is, is there already a verb in place which denotes the action described above? I'm especially looking at you spelunkers and rock climbers, who have verbs for all sorts of movements the rest of us don't perform often enough to name (like "chimneying").