Word of the day

Early this morning, BH was reading in one of her books by Jane Duncan of dalliance, in the romantic sense of the word, the girlish sense of knights in shining armour dallying with their ladies in sunlit meadows, rather than just wasting time. We thought that the word was French, possibly originally on the lines of  'd'alliance'.

OED tells me that 'dally' comes from Old French, possibly via Anglo-French, by which is presumably meant the sort of French spoken by the aristocracy of early medieval England, say between 1066 and the arrival of English proper, some hundreds of years later.

But neither dally nor dalliance figure in either Harrap's or Littré and I learn from the former that one of the modern French equivalents is the quite different 'badiner', along with 'badine' and 'badinage'. 'Alliance' is a word in modern French which includes the sense of wedding ring along with the English senses of the word, so is about people joining together, but does not seem to be otherwise related to dalliance. But then, Littré is not in the same league as OED when it comes to etymology.

Merriam-Webster is strong on dally in the sense of wasting time in frivolity or idleness and it also adds the sense of hitching the hand end of one's lasso (or lariat) around one's saddle horn after one had got the other end around the neck of the animal - usually a cow or a horse - being restrained.

While at the top of of the Bing list we have a chap of whom I had not previously heard, one Matt Dillon, famous for having played the role of  Dallas 'Dally' Winston in the 1983 film 'The Outsiders'. As snapped above. A film of which I had not previously heard, but it must have been a big deal at the time.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Dillon. 

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outsiders_(film).