 And today's quick and quirky word is scatch. Scatches are stilts for walking in swampy or dirty places such as on a farm without getting your shoes all mucky, used from the 16th to the 19th centuries. I guess scatches would save you from an earlier meaning of poaching, related to poke, making slow progress due to sinking into muddy ground. Apparently the entire town of Laund in France went about their swampy countryside on such stilts in the 19th century. The word scatch comes from French escache, or échasse, which is either related to the same root as shake, in the sense of moving quickly, or to the same root as shank, since they are, after all, leg extensions. This French word also came into Dutch as shots, where it somehow transferred its sense to refer to skates instead. A bit similar I suppose. And when the exiled followers of Charles II, who are hiding out in Holland, returned to England during the Restoration in the 17th century, they brought skating back with them, along with the word, which became skates, now re-analyzed as a plural word in English. Of course there are other unrelated skates in English, the fish from Old Norse Skata, and skate as a short variant of blather skate, or blather skite, meaning a blustering talker of nonsense. The skate or skite of that word comes from the Proto-Indo-European root ské, meaning cut or split, which also gives us quite a large number of words, including another piece of winter sporting equipment, ski, as well as, well, shit, which you certainly wouldn't want to poach in on a mucky farm, so thank goodness for those sketches.