raddle me this

[hutch at bewellnet.com]

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2001 Mar 23 - 15:38
Jed Hartman <logos at kith.org>
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>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..."

And this second-to-last meaning explains where I got *my* definition. I had seen the word before, generally in the sense of "her raddled face" referring to elderly women (most often, now that I think of it, over-the-hill prostitutes). Without ever having actually looked it up, I assumed it meant 'wrinkled' or 'cracked' (which is where I came up with my definition). Instead, it refers to 'excessively or badly rouged'. I was close, but no cigar.

BB,
Hutch