 Welcome to the Endless Knot. There's no new video today, well, other than this one, it's end of term and I'm swamped with marking. Instead, consider this your rain check, and there'll be a new video in two weeks. Oh, and by the way, do you know where the word rain check comes from? It's originally a baseball term, actually. When a game was cancelled midway through because of rain, the fans would get a rain check that would be a ticket for another future game. And it may surprise you to know that the term was first used at least as far back as the 1870s. Abner Powell, a minor league manager in New Orleans who was sometimes credited with inventing the rain check in the 1880s, actually started the practice of having a perforated stub of the original ticket count as the rain check to prevent people who had snuck into games without paying for also getting rain checks. Powell also apparently pioneered the use of tarpaulins to keep the field dry during rain delays. I guess he really didn't want to give away too many of those rain checks. By the 1950s, the term rain check had expanded to be used by retailers who ran out of a product, like a tarpaulin that's on sale, I suppose. The 17th century word tarpaulin comes from tar, related to the word tree, and paul from Latin polyum, meaning cloak, now commonly used in the figurative sense of a gloomy, cloak-like atmosphere, as in to cast a paul over something. Sailors would smear canvas coverings and even their clothing with tar to make them waterproof, and the sailors themselves came to be known as tarpaulins, or jacktars. But the figurative sense, to take a rain check, meaning to postpone something indefinitely while acknowledging the obligation or desire to carry through eventually, was already around at the turn of the century. And that's what I'll ask you to do for now, take a rain check, and in the meantime, why not watch one of my old videos that you might have missed. There's the ways of knowing playlist, a series of explorations of interconnections, metaphor and narrative, the foundations of many of my videos. Or if you're really longing for more etymology, try Album, the surprising classical origins of a seemingly modern word. So I hope it doesn't cast too much of a paul over your day, but take a rain check and I'll throw a tarpaulin over the etymologies, and I'll see you in two weeks with more etymological explorations and cultural connections.