lanterloo
Plurallanterloos (some meanings)
- 1A card game, widely played in 17th-century England, in which players took tricks with hands of three or five cards.
The museum's games night revived lanterloo, dealing each player five cards.
The tavern regulars passed long winter evenings at lanterloo, betting pennies on every trick.
Note
Like other names of card games it is uncountable: people played lanterloo or sat down to lanterloo, not a lanterloo. Its title is the same nonsense word as the meaningless refrain, taken from the chorus of a French song rather than from anything in the play.
- 2A chant or refrain made up of words that have no meaning.
As the night wore on, the fishermen fell into a droning lanterloo that kept time with the oars.
She hummed some half-remembered lanterloo from her childhood while she folded the laundry.
Note
The word began as a refrain itself: French lanturlu was the chorus of a 16th-century song, syllables made for singing rather than for sense. Thomas Pynchon revives it in V. (1963), where a helmsman sings a monotonous, Levantine lanterloo, and it still suits any droning chant whose words carry no meaning.
Practice
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Origin
From French lanturlu, which was originally the refrain of a 16th-century song.