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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Q: What are people who have got into the loop?
Is Halliburton still floating on the gift of war, while the interloopers pick their noses and fling the contents on a gullible public?
AND YOU, DAVID, SURELY AN INTERLOOPER, HAVE WILLFULLY AND KNOWINGLY MEDDLED IN AFFAIRS WHICH ARE NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS FOR WHICH YOU HAVE NO RESPONSIBILITY
inter alia
There may be some inadvertent etymological shenanigans going on:
interloper
c.1590, “unauthorized trader trespassing on privileges of chartered companies,” probably from inter- “between” + -loper (from landloper “vagabond, adventurer,” also, according to Johnson, “a term of reproach used by seamen of those who pass their lives on shore”); perhaps a dialectal form of leap, or from M.Du. loper “runner, rover,” from lopen “to run.” General sense of “self-interested intruder” is from 1630s.
loop
late 14c., probably of Celtic origin (cf. Gael. lub “bend,” Ir. lubiam), influenced by O.N. hlaup “a leap, run”.
lope
“to run with long strides,” c.1825; earlier “to leap, jump, spring” (late 15c.), from O.N. hlaupa “to run, leap,” from same Gmc. root as leap and gallop.
All from www.etymonline.com
(‘Lopen’ seems to mean ‘walk/move in Dutch and ‘hardlopen’ is one word for ‘run’. I don’t know any Dutch.)
There’s this less plausible oddity from over a century ago:
Interloper is from the Dutch interlooper, a smuggler (loopen,
to run) ; one who enters, running (looping) between the customs
officers.
from “Words, facts, and phrases; a dictionary of curious, quaint, & out-of-the-way matters (1908)”
Not that modern coiners of ‘interlooper’ would have an inkling of any of this.
On the plain in Spain where it mainly rains.
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Interesting. I had fun running the various threads of this down. There are lots of simple misspellings of interloper as interlooper, without any change in meaning, but as you say, there are some who have inserted a loop in there. Here’s another suggestive one I found, from a soap opera site, about a dastard who the lowdown writers have made to insert himself between a couple:
I knowthe majority don’t feel the same way and I am going to get blasted for saying so but I like Ryder and don’t like that there making him the interlooper to kevin and Janna.
The quote from Johnson was intriguing. Surely Sam would never confuse a loper and a lubber? His dictionary has landloper but not landlubber.
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