PTO Editing

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"let it go – the" by e. e. cummings.

let it go – the
smashed word broken
open vow or
the oath cracked length
wise – let it go it
was sworn to
go

let them go – the
truthful liars and
the false fair friends
and the boths and
neithers – you must let them go they
were born
to go

let all go – the
big small middling
tall bigger really
the biggest and all
things – let all go
dear

so comes love

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Phoebe_DeVere Welcome to my channel! I explore the Shakespeare Authorship Question, presenting evidence, interviews, and insights supporting the theory that Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the true author behind the pen name "William Shakespeare". 🎭 Here you’ll find scholarly research made acces...

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sīþ, m/n.n: journey, voyage. (SEETH / ˈsiːθ)
Image: Bestiaire d’Amour; N Italy, c. 1290; Morgan Library & Museum, MS M.459, f. 18r. http://ica.themorgan.org/manuscript/page/35/145750

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Every time you say you've been 'fleeced' or paid 'through the nose,' you're quoting a medieval con artist. The scams are gone. The language stuck.

Medieval markets were a minefield of cheats, cheats who watered wine, shaved coins, and rigged scales in broad daylight. The swindles were so widespread that the language itself absorbed them. Here are 8 phrases we still use, and the crooks who put them in our mouths.

1. Paying Through the Nose
When the Danes taxed the Irish in the 9th century, anyone who refused reportedly had their nose slit. Whether that specific origin holds up is debated, but the phrase clearly carries the memory of extortion so brutal your face paid for it.

2. Above Board
Gamblers in taverns kept their hands above the table (the board) to prove they weren't swapping cards or dice underneath. Hands below the board meant you were cheating. Hands above meant you were honest, or at least pretending to be.

3. Being Fleeced
Wool was medieval England's oil, and dishonest merchants would soak fleeces in water to pump up the weight, or blend in inferior wool and sell it as prime stock. Getting fleeced meant getting robbed by someone who smiled while they did it.

4. A Baker's Dozen
English bakers who shorted customers on weight faced brutal penalties under the Assize of Bread, including pillorying. To stay safe, they threw in a 13th loaf. The phrase survives as a reminder that honesty was enforced with public humiliation.

5. Not Worth His Salt
Salt was a serious commodity, sometimes used to pay soldiers and workers. Dishonest sellers cut it with sand or chalk, and a worker who underperformed wasn't worth his salt.' The insult stuck long after salt stopped being currency.

6. Mind Your Ps and Qs
Tavern keepers chalked up pints and quarts on a board behind the bar, and both sides watched the tally like hawks. Customers accused publicans of padding the count. Publicans accused customers of skipping out. Everyone minded their Ps and Qs.

7. By Hook or by Crook
Peasants were often allowed to gather deadwood from lords' forests using a shepherd's crook or a billhook, nothing more. In practice, they used those tools to pull down living branches, too. Getting your firewood 'by hook or by crook' meant bending the rules until they broke.

8. Chiseling Someone
Coin clippers shaved slivers of silver off the edges of pennies with a chisel, then spent the coin at full value and melted the shavings. Edward I hanged clippers by the hundreds in 1278. The crime is dead. The verb is still with us.

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swān-gerēfa, m.n: an officer whose manages forests for the pasturing of swine and the use of wood. (SWAHN-yeh-RAY-vah / ˈswaːn-jɛ-ˌreː-va)
Image: Breviary; France (Metz), 1302/1303; British Library, Yates Thompson 8, f. 6r. https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/5/2/387 -sustainability-05-00387

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He was the most famous writer alive. He could have died rich, comfortable, and adored in a villa by the sea. Instead he chose a mosquito-infested swamp and an early grave in a foreign country's war.
His name was George Gordon — but the world knew him simply as Lord Byron. In the early 1800s, he was arguably the first modern celebrity: a poet whose verses and scandalous personal life had captured the imagination of all Europe. Women swooned over him. Men imitated him. Even a young American cadet named Edgar Allan Poe was so dazzled that he invented a fake story about running off to fight for Greece, just to seem more like his hero.
But Byron didn't invent his Greek adventure. He actually did it. And it killed him.
Byron was born in London in 1788 with a deformed foot that made him self-conscious his whole life. At ten, he unexpectedly inherited a title and a crumbling estate. He studied at Cambridge, took his seat in the House of Lords, and then set off on a grand tour of the Mediterranean that changed him forever. He fell in love with Greece — its sunshine, its people, its openness, so different from the cold formality of England. He swam across a treacherous strait just to relive an ancient myth. And he poured all of it into a poem, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, that made him instantly famous when it was published.
Fame, it turned out, was easy. It was everything else that troubled him.
Byron's private life was legendarily scandalous and controversial — enough that, at the height of his fame in 1816, mounting scandal and the collapse of his marriage drove him to leave England for good. He never returned. He drifted through Switzerland and Italy, writing, feuding, falling in and out of love, and growing restless and heavy with a sense that his best days were behind him. He lost his young daughter to a fever. He lost his close friend, the poet Percy Shelley, who drowned off the Italian coast. Death seemed to shadow him. "I have a presentiment that I shall die in Greece," he told a friend before he ever left.
Then Greece gave him something worth dying for.
The Greeks had risen up against centuries of Ottoman rule, and their fight for independence had captured the sympathy of educated Europe — in no small part because of writers like Byron himself, whose poetry had helped romanticize the Greek cause. In 1823, a London committee formed to aid the rebels asked Byron to serve as their agent. He agreed. He sailed for Greece, and he did not go as a mere symbol. He sent 4,000 pounds of his own money to fund the Greek fleet. He took personal command of a brigade of fierce Suliote fighters, drilling and paying them out of his own pocket. The celebrated hedonist chose to live like a soldier, in miserable, freezing, rainy conditions, alongside the ragged men he was trying to turn into an army.
Here is what most people miss: Byron was no naive dreamer chasing a fantasy. He saw the ugly reality clearly and stayed anyway. The Greek revolution was a mess of rival warlords who hated each other almost as much as they hated the Turks, and who refused to unite even against their common enemy. Byron was disgusted by the infighting and the corruption. He discovered that his own Suliote chieftains had padded their payrolls with soldiers who didn't exist, pocketing money meant for the fight. "I came here to join a nation, not a faction," he wrote angrily in his journal. He could have thrown up his hands and gone home. But he understood something deeper: that his very presence, his fame, and ultimately his sacrifice, might do more to unite Greece and rally the world to its side than any poem he could ever write. So he stayed, and kept trying to hold the fractured cause together.
It cost him everything. Already weakened by illness, Byron insisted on training in the cold and wet as he prepared his men for an assault on a Turkish stronghold. He caught a violent fever. And his doctors, following the disastrous medicine of the age, bled him with leeches until he had almost nothing left. On April 19, 1824, Lord Byron died at Missolonghi. He was 36 years old.
"Die I must," he said near the end. "Its loss I do not lament; for to terminate my wearisome existence I came to Greece. My wealth, my abilities, I devoted to her cause. There is my life to her."
Back home, England was uncomfortable with him even in death. He was refused burial in Westminster Abbey, and it took nearly a century and a half before a memorial to him was finally placed there.
But Greece never forgot. His death electrified the movement and helped draw the great powers into the war on Greece's side; within a few years, Greek independence was won. And to this day, Byron is a national hero there. Nearly every Greek town has a street named for him. Statues honor him across the country. Greeks still speak his name — "Lordos Viron" — with warmth and reverence, and still name their sons after the foreign poet who gave his life for their freedom.
A person can spend their whole life chasing glory in words, and find their truest meaning only in what they're finally willing to give away.