Trolley 621

Trolley 621, another medium sized trolley from the M&S food hall, was captured in the space between the old and the new, just below the orange dot in the middle of the snap from gmaps below.

A rather untidy area, with cars and food delivery scooters, plus assorted debris and rubbish. The sort of stuff that accumulates around the back. Otherwise, a fine old collection of rooves which one would hardly expect from street-side. The entrance to which one passes as one heads up Waterloo Road, towards the station, or towards TB, from the High Street.

PS 1: I had thought that 'rooves' was pedantic but correct, a thought not corroborated at reference 2, which claims that 'roofs' has been correct for centuries. Webster's gives a cross reference from rooves, without comment. While OED does not seem to cover the matter of the plural of roof in its otherwise substantial, four column, entry for the word at all - although both 'roofes' and 'rooves' are included in the variants listed at the head of the entry. Perhaps the point is that the 'f' of roof tends to be assimilated to a 'v' in the spoken plural. OED also points out that English is unusual in using the very old word roof as it does, with most of our neighbours using a word derived from thatch, as in the French 'toit'. Which may be an error as Littré talks of the Latin 'tectum', which does not seem to be their word for thatch at all. Bing GPT not very helpful on this occasion. Perhaps the Romans were not much into thatch? So I try Bard with the prompt 'what is the Latin word which best approximates to our word thatch, in the sense of roofing material', and he does quite well, giving me a selection of Latin words for the different sorts of thatch, according to the material used. Perhaps later, as an exercise, I will check his answer against a dictionary.

PS 2: I would have known what a 'toit' was had I read the word in a story. But going the other way, I had to look up the French for 'roof'.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/01/trolley-620.html.

Reference 2: https://writingexplained.org/roofs-vs-rooves. 

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