‘How do we know,’ a grad professor once asked our class, ‘there are fairies in the glen?’
Before saying how that went … what would you say?
· ‘There are no such thing as fairies.’
· ‘What the heck is a glen?’
· ‘We don’t.’
The Google dictionary helpfully allows as how a ‘glen’ is ‘a narrow valley.’ Merriam-Webster online adds ‘hidden’ — ‘a narrow, hidden valley’ — which explains the ranch dressing. A website for Scotch notes the abundance of ‘Glen’ in brand names for this drink and adds, ‘There are a lot of hills in Scotland, so there are lots of glens.’ It says local defenders of the term once sued the Germans [those guys: always invading something, somewhere] in a European court for trying to use the word, and won. Well. the word is Gaelic after all.
OK, Scots Gaelic, via Middle English, says M-W, and ‘from Irish gleann, from Old Irish glenn.’
And we should be drinking Irish whiskey over Scotch, anyway.
But the fairies?
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