From: tgpedersen
Message: 39354
Date: 2005-07-21
> At 9:39:45 AM on Wednesday, July 20, 2005, tgpedersen wrote:You're right; I read from 'Hence as a verb...'.
>
> > I came across English 'frolic', German 'frohlocken'. They
> > are obviously related, but the dictionaries I've consulted
> > don't seem to think so. English ones derive it from the
> > Dutch adj. 'vrolijk', which makes no sense; the first
> > attestations in English is as a verb, then as a noun.
>
> The first English attestation is as an *adjective*. OED2
> has this:
>
> 1538 BALE Thre Lawes 1794 And make frowlyke chere, with
> hey how fryska jolye!
> Thus, derivation from Dutch <vrolijk> (in Kilian <vrolick>)And not of the former?. The German adjective is 'fröhlich'. But
> makes perfectly good sense.
> The verb, according to the OED,
> is derived from the adjective, and the noun from one or the
> other. In connection with the verb it notes Flemish
> <frolicken> (in Kilian) and German <frohlocken>, commenting
> that the second element of the latter 'is of obscure
> origin'.
> > German ones analyse it as 'froh' + 'löcken' "jump"That might sound perfectly natural to the editors of OED2. I don't
> > (related to English 'lick' "beat, defeat" ?)
> OED2 takes this sense of <lick> to belong to the same word
> as 'to lap with the tongue'. There is also <to lick up (an
> enemy's forces> 'to destroy, annihilate', found in
> Coverdale's 1535 translation of Numbers xxii, 4, with
> further citations from 1548 and 1557, and <to lick of the
> whip> 'to have a taste of punishment, found ca.1460 in the
> form <Ye shal lik on the whyp>. Both are natural enough
> extensions of the basic meaning, and from there to <lick>
> 'beat, defeat' isn't a great step.
>