Lewis Carroll may have defined the word that way on one occasion, but Humpty Dumpty defined the word as "to go round and round like a gyroscope." And Humpty Dumpty was an expert on getting words to mean what you pay them to mean!

And William Butler Yeats said, in his poem The Second Coming, "Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer." So his meaning was clearly a spiral in which one turns.

Jacob

On Thu, Oct 29, 2015 at 7:44 PM, John Sweeney via Callers <callers@lists.sharedweight.net> wrote:

Sorry, but in 1855, in the magazine Misch-Masch, Lewis Carroll defined Gyre
as follows:
"Gyre, verb (derived from GYAOUR or GIAOUR, 'a dog'). To scratch like a
dog."

So, nope, nothing to do with gyration!

And, I have always understood it to be pronounced with a hard "g" as in
"give". My dictionary agrees with me. So, no doesn't sound like "gypsy".

Of course, you can still use the term and pronounce it "jire" (based on its
other definitions).

You see, words never mean what you think they do! :-)

Happy dancing,
John

John Sweeney, Dancer, England john@modernjive.com 01233 625 362
http://www.contrafusion.co.uk for Dancing in Kent

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