On 11/26/2012 6:18 AM, Greg McKenzie wrote:
A call like "angry robin," which is not descriptive, has no
information for first-timers.
You could certainly confuse everybody in the room by calling it "angry
robin", because even the people who know
the figure don't call it that. (You've referred to the figure this
way more than once; you're usually very clear about your word choices
but I can't figure out why you'd
choose to say "angry robin" rather than "mad robin".)
The figure is called "mad robin" because it's a variation on the
signature move in an English dance called "Mad Robin"; I'd always
imagined that this was Mad in the lightheartedly insane sense rather
than in the angry sense. There's a French source - which postdates the
English publication - which calls the dance "Madame Robin".
-- Alan
