Well, maybe... On Jan 25, 2008, at 5:47 AM, Stewart McCoy wrote:
> I have been told, I hope reliably, that, if, at the time of > Dowland, you wanted to attack an army of soldiers armed with > muskets, you would first send a small group of soldiers ahead to > draw their fire. Before the enemy could reload, the rest of your > army attacked them. Needless to say, the men in that small group > stood little chance of surviving. Perhaps you overestimate the accuracy of 16th-century muskets. The Oxford English Dictionary devotes about a column to "forlorne hope." It does indeed trace it to Dutch "verloren hoop", meaning "lost troop." But it referred to any advance detachment of troops. The OED cites an example of a "forlorne hope" with scaling ladders attacking a castle wall. These soldiers were not just musket-fodder, but were expected to accomplish something. Otherwise, they'd have left the ladders behind with the second wave. In Dowland's day it also had a looser meaning of "persons in a desperate condition." And, of course, it naturally developed the sense of "faint hope." The earliest such use in the OED is 1641, but I suspect it was current well before then. The OED relies on written examples (obviously) and is weighted toward printed ones. "Forlorne hope" in the sense of "faint hope" started as a mistake, much like "hopefully" used to mean "I hope," "beg the question" used to mean "pose the question" or "it's problematic" used to mean "it's a problem" are now, and such erroneous uses percolate a lot in spoken use before they make it to print in the new sense. So the Big D might have been using "Forlorne Hope" in the military sense, but he might have been using it in the sense of "hope against hope" or despairing hope that a modern person would assume. I suppose David Tayler will suggest that the title came from someone else entirely, along with half the piece. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
