raddle me this

[Jed Hartman]

Apparently Eric and I are not the only ones who think someone can be
raddled with disease:

<http://www.sjhospice.org.uk/cancerherbs.htm>: "I bow in homage to Ella,
raddled with cancer, who prayed for a miracle and it came in the form of an
obscure herb brought to her from Jamaica, and her tumours disappeared."

My guess: "raddled" was originally used to refer to marked sheep, then to
anyone marked with dye (there's a Yeats occurrence, for example), then to
anyone marked as if with dye; hence "raddled with disease" would indicate
skin marking as if made by dye (which accounts for my thinking it meant
"mottled").  So then (much as happened with "career" and "careen") someone
misinterpreted the phrase (egged on by "riddled") and started using it to
mean "riddled."

Then there's this, from an interesting essay
<http://www.theonering.net/features/notes/note7.html> on Tolkien and
Stephen Donaldson:

>He may believe that saying a woman's hair is "raddled with honey-coloured
>streaks" sounds good in a complimentary passage, but "raddled" means
>"excessively or badly rouged," "dilapidated, unkempt..."



--jed