Let slip the dogs of war

Here’s something I didn’t know until this evening.  Havoc can be used as a verb. I havoc, he havocs, we have been havocking, we all havocked.  It means to devastate, to lay waste to, as in ‘they havocked the city’.

To ‘cry havoc’, as Mark Antony suggests may be appropriate in Julius Caesar,  comes from the old French crier havot, which means, basically, to order an army to lay waste and plunder.

So now you know.  I hope that one of the reasons you read this blog is to learn new words for use in day-to-day conversation.  What will you havoc today?

And there’s a gold star for anybody who can suggest why I might have been thinking about havoc at this particular time…

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2 Comments

Dangit. Even when just reading your post and the playing I had trouble figuring out it.

We’re now safely past this being a spoiler in any time zone, so I can say that ‘havoc’ was the solution to Wordle that day.

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