The E-Sylum:  Volume 6, Number 11, March 16, 2003, Article 10

VLACK BOOK ON FRENCH COLONIAL COINS?

  The Spring 2003 issue of The C4 Newsletter, published by
  the Colonial Coin Collectors Club notes (on p37):

  "Heard on the grapevine: Bob Vlack's book dealing with
  French Colonial coins that circulated in North America is
  finally at the printer.  We await it with baited breath!"

  Does anyone have any further information on this book?
  Meanwhile, your Editor shall await with BATED breath...
  What BAIT would one use for a book, anyway?
  Library Paste...?

  Actually, by some accounts, "baited" is becoming a more
  accepted spelling in this context, so maybe your Editor is
  becoming a fossil himself.   From Michael Quinion's
  "World Wide Words" web site:

  "The correct and original form is bated breath, but the first
  word is now so rare that it only appears in this phrase.
  Because bated is archaic, the phrase bated breath is a
  linguistic fossil. As a result, people have begun to respell
  it as a word they do know (a process that linguists call folk
  etymology).

  Bated is an abbreviation of abated through loss of the first
  vowel, and which has the meaning ?reduced, lessened,
  lowered in force?.  So bated breath means that you almost
  stop breathing through terror, or awe, or extreme anticipation
  or anxiety."
  See http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-bat1.htm
  The item goes on to quote uses of the phrase in the works of
  Shakespeare and Mark Twain.

  For more information on C4, see their web site at
  http://www.colonialcoins.org/

  Wayne Homren, Editor

	coinbooks.org Web

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