Posted on 09/10/2017 8:35:59 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A nice sharp kick to the shins with a smile.
Very nice, indeed.
A book reviewer regretted the author was not able to “winkle” an anecdote out of a famous raconteur.
A ground combat squad “winkled” the snipers out of their fortified hidey-holes.
And the Welsh street vendors were selling mussels, winkles, and eels. It turns out a winkle is a kind of bashful barnacle that has to be pushed or tweezed or squeezed out of its crevice. "Winkled into" a tight spot doesn't appear. Just "winkled out of."
My understanding of “to winkle” is that it meant to extract something difficult to extract. However, the usage in the article was the opposite, to hunker down in a position from which it would be difficult to extract one. So there’s a connection, but it’s kind of the opposite, like “cleave” and “cleave.” Or, one of those things where a person is using a word, but they don’t know what it means.
I could tell you my verbal SAT score, but that would be boring, so I’ll just say that almost everyone on Earth uses the English language in a way that causes me pain. It must be what Pat feels when people make math errors.
I used to be in the vocabulary category of “over 35,000 words” -— though I think such statistics may well be hooey.
I’ve lost some over the years.
But I’m keeping this one. It’s stuck in my brain crevices now. Winkled in. Or, better, not to be winkled out.
I think that in the verb category you’ll get more mileage from “winkle out” and variants. The noun “winkle” is a shellfish. Also, “winkel” in Dutch means “a shop,” which is weird then you consider how closely related English and Dutch are.
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