Today's Word "Rigmarole"
Published in Vocabulary
rigmarole \RIG-meh-rol\ (noun) - 1 : Rambling, disconnected speech; 2 : red tape, complicated procedure or process.
"What she really meant was not all the rigmarole of turning the futon into a bed but the secondary rigmarole of putting a sheet down..." -- Edward Docx, 'Pravda'
Today's word is an alteration of obsolete ragman roll "catalog" from the name of a scroll used in Ragman('s) Roll, a game in which objects on strings were pulled from a scroll, sometimes to gamble, sometimes for fun. The name may ultimately come from Ragemon le bon "Ragemon the Good," the title of a collection of poems about a character of that name. The original meaning of "rigmarole" was simply a long list, a catalog. Now, "roll" comes from Latin rotula "little wheel" (from rota "wheel") via Old French roler "to roll." Clearly "rotate," "rotary," "rotunda" and several other words go back to "rota" but so does "rodeo," the Spanish word for "detour, roundup" derived from rodear "to twist, wind about" from rueda "wheel, ring," a natural descendent of Latin rota.
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