Winter sports

The twenty-second entry is o ringue de gelo, and an English reader who works the first noun out from the look of it arrives at the wrong word. We call the sheet of ice a « rink », and « rink » is not « ring ». « Ring » is Old English hring, a circle, and it gives the boxing ring and the circus ring, both of which really are round. « Rink » came to us from Scots, where it named the course marked out for a contest — first for riders, later for the stones of a curling match — and behind the Scots word stands Old French renc, a row or a rank of men drawn up. That same renc gave English « rank », the line soldiers stand in, and « range », the stretch of ground a thing is spread over. So a skater is not on a circle at all: she is on a measured strip, and the name remembers the marking out rather than the shape. O ringue sits far closer to « ring », which is exactly why o ringue de gelo looks translatable and is not.