I lost my husband on the way from Malabar. He is easily lost. We had been talking about the verb critique, which we neither much care for. But, in gathering ammunition, I’d come across this charming sentence from a book of voyages translated in 1598 by William Phillip. He referred to a ‘fruite which the Malabares and Portingales call Carambolas’.
Carambola, the fruit, might have given the Portuguese and Spanish the word carambola meaning ‘a cannon’ in billiards, cannon coming from carom, a reduction of...
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