The Boy Friend

The show is from the 1950s, but meant to recall the musicals of the 20s, especially "The Girl Friend." Linguistic note, that girl friend and boy friend were written as two words because the accent was on the second word of the phrase through the 20s. It is uncertain when the backshift of accent to say BOY-friend first happened, but it is heard often by WWII, and is consistently written as one word by that point.

The old roue Lord Brockhurst is comic relief in a show that is already light. It all comes right in the end, as the unacceptable poor boy the heroine has fallen in love with turns out to be the long-lost son of Lord and Lady Brockhurst after all. 

This might be a high school production, which would be impressive. I heard years ago that the show is fun to do and inexpensive, and thus still common in high schools. An added plus is that it has many more roles for girls, which can be hard to find.

Covid

Still at 1,000+deaths a day on weekdays, though the full-week average is a little less than that. New cases dropped even more this week. As I have mentioned, it is over because we call it over, not because it really is - yet I don't say that is wrong.

One of the granddaughters has covid for a second time, pretty soon after the first one, illustrating that neither vaccine nor natural immunity nor both together is foolproof. We have a family Zoom call with everyone around the world (spanning ten time zones) today and I will get a count how many of the 17 of us have had covid. It's more than half, anyway.

There has been some flurry because cases are up in China, which does not have a lot of herd immunity.  I don't think much will come of it, because they will do whatever it takes to their citizens to contain it. They don't look at individual rights the way that we do. 

Update: 10 out of 17 have had it. 4 of the remaining 7 have frequent exposure to lots of people. We'll see.

Figuratively Insane

There is apparently* a T-shirt reading "Misuse of 'literally'** makes me figuratively*** insane." I understand and practically**** approve.

I could keep expanding this with actually, really (rilly), truly, very (verily), and a few others, but the humor of the footnotes is just about exhausted. I counted and think I could have gotten up to ************* for examples, but point taken, amiright? We aren't actually, really, literally dying of thirst when we are very thirsty. But that turn of phrase is not unusual. We turn something meaning truthfully, actually, literally, into simple intensifiers all the time. And there are nuances.  Actually is what is called a counter-expectational, in that not only does "He actually bought every quart of vanilla ice cream in the store" mean that he truly did that, but that it is the sort of thing one would not have anticipated.

My point is not merely that this has happened to other words in English, but that it always happens to words like this. I have done my time objecting to the figurative use of literally, and I know the frustration of looking at it and thinking "But that's not what the word actually MEANS." Yet it has been going on a long time, and we are now late in the process.  A radio listener complained to CS Lewis in the 40s that he had used "literally" in such a way, and Lewis was appalled and apologised. "You cannot possibly upbraid me in this matter more than I do myself." This is not a battle we can win. We can only fight a rearguard action keeping our preferred meaning in some currency as long as is possible.

The same is true of irregardless, which yes, is redundant and ungainly. Yet because English came to foolishly forbid double negatives because of Robert Lowth (again) in the 18th C, who just thought we should not have those because they felt wrong to him, people have been sneaking them in ever since, as a means of emphasis. I never use irregardless myself - I am part of the resistance seeking to slow such changes.  But all these changes will sound less wrong to a new generation, until we who complain about "literally," or "irregardless" will be the butt of humor. Can you believe that 150 years ago some stuffy people objected to them? Lowth insisted that "chicken" was the plural of "chick," for example. I mentioned this in some detail recently. 

I don't mind being a dinosaur, and admit to a certain conceit about it.   That I avoid certain usages says something about me that I like. Yet I also have the recognition that language always changes, and it is not that young people today are so sloppy and ill-taught, but that forbidden usages become discouraged usages become less-preferred usages become colloquial usages become informal usages become simply usages. The kids are alright.  They are just at a different point on the long line.

Young people should know their audience, though, and whether they are going to get a whoopie pie or not from their choices. Choose what hills you want to die on.

* apparent+ly, meaning "appear, come into sight" from Latin via Old French meaning to come forth, be visible and -ly, related to "lich" and "like," meaning body, corpse and body, form, in Proto-Germanic, possibly very similar in PIE but uncertain. AD&D players and Tolkien fans will recognise "lich" as a type of undead, still similar to humans in form, but essentially***** animated corpses.

** literal+ly meaning "by the letter" +"like," (above). By the natural meaning, not mystical or allegorical. 

*** figurative+ly, from Latin figurare, to form or shape via Late Latin and Old French, which is in turn from PIE *dheigh to form or shape, and the root of surprising words such as dairy, dough, effigy, lady, + ly (again, as above. This will be the last time I mention that for -ly,-like)

****practic+al+ly meaning method, use, from applied, fit for use, ultimately from PIE "per(h) accomplish, go through plus -al of, like, plus -ly. Later came to mean "as good as," and then "almost."

****essentia(l) + -ly being, essence, ultimately from PIE "es-" to be.

Basketball Addition

I know even less than usual about the NCAA tournament going into this year.  But last year I used the Georgia Tech math department's Bayesian logic site to fill out my bracket, and finished in the 90th percentile.  If I had switched only the final game, I would have hit 99th percentile.  And I know nothing.  So I will do something like that this year. 

We recently had family discussions about Wordle and its offshoots, which reinforced to me that I care much more about the statistical patterns and the strategy questions than the actual games.  So too here. Filling out a bracket based on the math gives one a framework to have a rooting interest in the tournament and a launch point for discussions at work for the yearly office pool. You can pick up info about team strengths and weaknesses quickly if you have any framework at all to start with.

Tech's math nerds have Gonzaga-Arizona 1-2, so I'm starting there, and waiting for the brackets. Should be fun.

William & Mary Basketball

I follow sports less every year, even though it is a great topic of conversation with sons in general, and one in particular. This year I checked in on William & Mary basketball about once a month, as I usually do.  In many years over the last two decades they have had a creditable team that just might do well in the Colonial Athletic Association to have a shot at an upset and finally get into the NCAA tournament.  They are one of those few Division I teams that have never made the tournament lo these many years. It usually gets a mention every March which five are left. They have been quite close a few times.

It did not look encouraging at any time I checked in this year. And when late in the season they, the second-to-last-place team in the quite minor CAA, lost to the last-place team 62-28, I knew getting lucky in the tournament was not going to be in the cards either.  They were out in the first round.

I did have one ace in the hole - which turned out to be more like a jack in the hole - that their best player last year had transferred as a graduate student (law school) to University of Minnesota, which does go to the NCAA tournament sometimes. But Luke Loewe had what may have been his worst game of the season in the first round of the tournament, the last game of his career, and the Golden Gophers were out as well. 

Next year does not look encouraging either. When I check in on the Tribe (who might be the Gryphons by next year) in December I am not expecting much.

Dr Boli

 From Dr. Boli's Celebrated Magazine.

He has more like this.

Thank you to commenter James of I Don't Know, But...

Crows Again

Crows are attacking the solar panels in Japan.  With stones. So they have trained falcons to keep away the crows.

I'm unsure who I am rooting for here.

Never Say No

Even though I expressed doubt about the principle in the comments under So Covid is Over, it is something that is culturally insisted on. And either way, it's a good song.

 

I saw my father do the show in 1974. He played Mortimer, and it was far better than anything I had ever done, even though I was majoring in Theatre & Speech.

Narrowing It Down

The Hippo, the local arts, restaurant, and activities newspaper did an interview with the most recent intern at the SEE Science Center (started almost forty years ago by inventor Dean Kamen) Vick Mahindru, a sophomore at West High School. Third question:

Do you have any ideas about what you would like to study or pursue as a career in the future?

Yes, after my experience with this internship, and with multiple extracurricular activities, I am trying to narrow it down [based on] my interests and skills to a couple of career fields, such as engineering, medical, software engineering, orthodontics, real estate, nanotechnology engineering, Lego design, [a field that's] music related, and the CIA.

Yes, I think you do need to narrow it down Vick, but I can relate. I might have given a very similar answer myself as a sophomore.

Fill 'er Up! Part II

I wrote Fill 'er Up! on Monday. Has Joe Biden really proved me right this quickly? Without even any intermediaries?

The Past Was Not Conservative

This interesting post over at Grim's is already off the sidebar, so I highlight it for you. We have covered some of this concept and data, but the linked article is much more thorough, and has lots of straightforward graphs.  I like graphs.

Parroting

The complaint was about standardised testing, and how relying on it just encourages kids to parrot information back. Because usual suspects. It makes the schools teach to the test...the wealthy kids can get test prep...it doesn't test how you think, really... Someone has a startup developing a new test that is more like a problem-solving video game. They interviewed lots of people. The last interview was with the president of the American Psychological Association who told his own story about having test anxiety as a boy, then getting a C in his first college psychology course, and comparing notes with Philip Zimbardo, who also got a C in his first course, and then announcing that the tests were destructive and limiting and it was important for kids to know that you can be anything you want if you really desire it and are willing to work for it.  

That's when I suddenly thought "You have simply exchanged parroting information for parroting the correct attitude."  I thought of Freddie deBoer's work, which I have discussed a few times, that this "you can do anything" myth is so central to the mindset of education, and educational psychology, that they cannot endure to have it undermined.  

I realised that everyone else they had been interviewing was doing the same thing, deploring the parroting of information while applauding the parroting of the correct attitudes. What is your job as the president of the APA (remember there are at least two APA's), after all? You have to be the face of the organisation, making sure that you look like the real experts.  You have to make sure it keeps up with trends and doesn't fall out of step with the Zeitgeist. It is a job of social and cultural sensitivity more than intellectual attainment. The softer the science, the more the PhD (PsyD, EdD, etc) is a measure of perseverance and reading the times and individuals in authority over you. 

Test anxiety might be a real thing, but it has proven quite difficult to identify and measure. I know at least some people i have known personally at work who have claimed it, and I have come to think "No, you just ain't that smart." But anxiety is real, and screwing up a test with it sounds plausible, so I don't toss it completely.

The new test design begins by claiming that the old paper and pencil tests only measure one small part of full intelligence, with an implication that it's not a very important part either. They claim that employers want something that measures the other kinds of intelligence as well, like empathy, and creativity, and collaboration. These qualities kept coming up. I thought "Really? Employers are telling you they want to know more about empathy?" I didn't later have the inspiration that HR departments might indeed be telling them that, because they are forever dealing with difficult people who are making life difficult for everyone else, and HR believes that if they only had some empathy it would fix that.  That could be. Good luck measuring it on a test. Same for creativity. Lots of people have tried to dream up ways to measure that over the years. I don't know of any tests that are successful.  I took one once, of listing as many uses for a brick as you could think of in one minute.  I can also speak fast and blew off the scale.  Highest score they'd seen. And your point? That is truly a "So what?" moment.

Collaboration is increasingly important, even in hard sciences where the ideal used to be the lone genius. I entirely agree. Of all the work that I did over the years, the times I was able to take dysfunctional teams with talented people and get them working together with joy and camaraderie were my proudest moments. I got very good at it. (I had more fun at the really brilliant team that already had joy and camaraderie and I only had to do some basic bits to keep things moving, but that's a different story.) It is important, and may indeed be more important than the (supposedly) narrow type of intelligence the SAT measures. I just don't see how you are going to measure that on a test. 

And why would you want to, when you can get real-world observations of whether someone is playing nice or not? Isn't that better?  I think it is the same as above about empathy, that people see that they are spending far too much time getting talented people to just f-in' get along and not be dicks, and want to have some number or short eval they can look at on an application to stay away from them.  Some threshold number for hiring. 

Well fine.  But now you are just trying to measure a bunch of stuff at once and blaming the one test you have in the arsenal that measures a clear straightforward thing and does it pretty well. The SAT achievement tests in specialties actually are achievement as much as aptitude, showing how much Spanish or Physics you know.  The SAT remains an aptitude test, whatever people call it. If you want to say that your college has decided that collaboration and citizenship are more important, I think that's fine.  You may be right.  Go for it. But then own that, that you are dropping one type of measurable excellence because you don't care about it.

If you really think that how you play the game is more important, then don't keep score. And don't complain that others are keeping score.

Candor

I heard again for the millionth time someone exulting over the cute thing that some child had said that by claiming that the wonderful thing about children is that they are so honest. They're not honest. Children actually fib quite a bit.  What they are is candid, usually because they haven't picked up enough of the rules of social interaction to know that "there are things we just don't say, dear." Sometimes candor is welcome, pointing out the obvious that adults are evading.  More often, it is hurtful and awkward and involves having to apologise for them to a person who tries to laugh and say "That's all right.  It's no secret that I'm fat/old/black/foreign/disfigured/tatooed."

Similarly, "Can I be honest with you?" means may I be candid. Honesty is the best policy, but candor is mixed.

So Covid Is Over

At least, that's what I hear, and what I am likely to be told - again - at several sites on my sidebar when I go over today. 

The two people in my family who just tested positive might say differently of course. Perhaps I should call them and tell them that they can't possibly have covid.  Covid is over. All the best people are telling me that. Fortunately, my two are both young and starting from good health, so we are more in a "let's keep checking in on how they feel" rather than "worry about them" mode.  Either way we pray for them. Less fortunately, this involves one of them exposing an unvaccinated household member to the disease. Her biological father is schizophrenic and believes terrible things about the vaccines, because of course he does.  He believes all the crazy things. My friend from work who believed in the New World Order and Trilateralist conspiracies and offered a couple of different nominations for who the Antichrist is, including (of course) one of the popes and (of course) Henry Kissinger at one point, of course believed something else was afoot when covid came upon the scene. In her case, she believed it was a coverup for all the people that 5G is killing. So you tell me. What does she believe about the vaccines? Yes, of course she does. I don't know it in detail as I only got it secondhand from a coworker I still occasionally hear from.

Whatever comes along next she will have a paranoid conspiracy about as well, as will the schizophrenic dad, above.  The only question will be whether it is the standard common conspiracy or some variant picked up from their idiosyncratic circle. I used to feel relieved that my friend at least had not descended to making the Jews one of the centers of the conspiracy, but of course that was too good to be true.  She later married an older independent fundamentalist preacher from Georgia who had that old-line set of ideas about Jews. (Jimmy Carter had them as well, but modified them to fit modern liberal sensibilities.  He never lost them, though. Jews are supposed to succeed only when they are holy and righteous and let God do their fighting for them.  They shouldn't be warlike.  That's why they need to be dragged to the negotiating table over and over and made to give stuff up.) Anyway, she decided after listening to him that the current Jews aren't the real Jews that we read about in the Bible.  He believes the Khazar Hypothesis, which I spent some time shooting down before. 

It's not just paranoia, of course.  We believe what we believe in general and then force whatever comes along to fit into it.  It's easy to see in others. No matter what happens, she believes America is/was wrong. Everything is imperialism, or racism. And of course some things are, and some things are mixed, and some things aren't those at all.  No matter. Or, people believe that They just delight in making other people do things. So they find it everywhere and it is their go-to explanation. They believe it about everything new that comes down the pike. It has some truth, of course. People who go into government tend to believe that it's okay for governments to tell people what to do. But sometimes, just maybe, people go into public health because their main goal is for the public to be healthier.  Just a thought. They might be wrong.  They might be too willing to lean on people or hedge them in or make it hard not to go along, and thus need to be reined in. Sure. And here's the tricky part. Keeping people alive might be more valuable than reining those folks in. Maybe they aren't just waiting to rule the world and giving them an inch means they will take a mile. It is at least a view that many people in this democratic society hold. You can make an argument for it. Even if these are competing values that must be balanced, as most of us think, there's no guarantee you've got the right balance yourself. 

Some folks are just cynical about anything, others are too willing to embrace something new. Some believe hard work will solve most things, others believe it's all luck and connections. Just know who you are and try to make allowances.

The latest popular idea is to make fun of those who still want to wear masks, and this from supposed libertarians who think that people should be able to do what they want.  I don't mask much myself, but I am fine with those who do.  They may have medical compromise, or be in frequent contact with others who have no freedom to just get sick. One of the families that still masks at church (including a young person! How ridiculous! Because everyone knows there's no real danger...) is the family of an Urgent Care doc. Oh. Gee. Ya didn't think of that, didja. Or maybe some maskers are just nervous sorts. Please do not protest to me that these are people who are trying to make you do things like wear masks. Mostly not. Some of them are, but that's not who you are making fun of. I did very well on those SAT questions of reading a paragraph for its main idea. We are so much better than all you fools in other places.  We're just smarter. I am not impressed with the argument "But I'm not making them do anything.  And we should make fun of foolishness.  I am free to do that. It's good for them and for society." Well yes you are of course free to do that, but that doesn't make it good that you are childish and petty. It's social pressure to make them get into line with what you like.

I'd just let it go, but you're going to do it again next time as well.

Sports Optimism

 I love Key and Peele

Information at the Polls

I brought a slip of paper to the local elections to remind me who I had decided to vote for for Selectmen and School Board. After an evening's research and some discussion with my wife and son, I apparently decided to vote for bananas, 2% milk, and chicken broth.

Conflict History

A friend thought I might be interested because two of my sons and one of my daughters-in-law went to Asbury, which is in Wilmore and where the first speaker is a professor. It's a small town, pretty much dominated by the college. The second speaker is from Gordon-Conwell, much closer to here and where some of the denomination's pastors in this area studied.  Our church has two at the moment.

The idea that the Russian Orthodox Church in contrast to the Eastern Orthodox in other countries, actually encourages this sort of megalomania was a new idea to me. Putin himself seems to have a non-doctrinal attachment to the Russian Orthodox Church, associating it with Eternal Russia or Greater Russia and cultural history. That the Orthodox Church there has not condemned the invasion nor even offered cautions, only encouragement, may come from the years of being actively discouraged with only the tightly-controlled few under communism and being unwilling to jeopardised the somewhat-enhanced status now. Or it just may be generations of tight control over who can be priests and what they can do or say that has bred a religious culture even more tied to national aspiration than happens in other places.

I had run across the knowledge  that historically it was Russia that was the satellite of Ukraine, especially Kiev, but I had not tied it into the church history so tightly.

The information about the distinction in prepositions in Russian between talking about another country versus referring to a region was also unknown to me.  Our language does not control or channel our thought, but it does reflect it.  Sometimes people reveal more to you than they would wish with their language choices.

Post 8300 - School Advocate

Reading the campaign materials for this year's town elections, I came across several where the candidate claimed to have been a school advocate. These seemed to be women, and overlapped with children with an autism diagnosis. My immediate image was of going into the school to advocate for programming or testing for their child and having expanded that to advocating for other children, either individually at their IEP's, through helping their parents, or advocating for enhanced programming or better treatment for that group. or for special needs in general.  That's what being a school advocate used to mean, isn't it?

This seems to be different.  This might be "Going to school board meetings to tell people my opinions," mostly recently about school policies concerning vaccines. That's a citizen right, but it seems to be an expansion of that meaning, an attempt to clothe one's personal politicking in the garb of volunteer work. I can see how a person could quickly talk themselves into that, because it is advocating for something to do with the schools. However, as at least one also sells natural products and identifies herself as a medical professional - she used to be a medical lab tech before she started the product business a decade ago, but you have to dig to find that - it looks even less like how I used to view the term.

We ran across quite a few of the first kind in the mental health biz working with children: CASA volunteers, mothers whose own special needs children had grown out of the school system but stayed on to help others, and professionals from organisations or agencies trained to know how to put requests and knowing the laws around special needs to demand services when necessary. This would be different.

Is this a thing now, FB mom groups rebranding themselves as school advocates, or is this just a small sample size and coincidence locally?

Fill 'er up!

I finally had to go over $4/gallon today.  I might not mind so much if I thought it was because we were no longer buying from the Russians in protest. That may still be come, though Democratic strategists may calculate that there are more votes in prices not rising any more than in boycotting Russia. 

I worry that time will get bent in retrospect by those who wish to deceive us and that will be the claim in years to come - that the price went up because of Russia. I have been disheartened over my lifetime watching such things happen, of a claim being put forward very quickly, even when everyone knows it doesn't fit the facts, but the untruth just not being mentioned by important news sources after the first few days of headlines, allowing the false narrative to gradually creep in, until it is just accepted wisdom even a very few years later.  How many people now remember that there were two SCOTUS decisions in Bush v. Gore in 2000, with the vote on what I consider the greater one 7-2, and only the second, lesser one going 5-4. "Everyone knows" the vote was 5-4 according to party that appointed each justice. (Oversimplified: 7-2 that Equal Protection was being violated because the methods were different in various counties: 5-4 whether there was enough time for a manual recount. One can disagree with both or either, but the fact of two separate decisions, one very strongly in favor of Bush, has been buried in favor of the single 5-4 narrative.) 

It is widely believed that the kids stopped the Vietnam war with their protests.  Noble kids.  Teach your parents well! The truth is that the older people were, the less likely they were to approve of the war, as far back as 1965. It sometimes hit 2-1 margins in the early years; well into 1969 more than 50% of people under 30 approved of the war. Even at that, it dipped below 50 for a couple of years after. But don't get in the way of a good myth. 

I sometimes think that nearly everything widely believed about the Clinton administration is reversed. They started early and then their people went into media. The usual pattern was brief moments of truth to establish cred, followed by years of not mentioning the bad stuff and gradually turning it around. After all, old guys like me die off eventually, and we are disbelieved long before that. The pattern of disbelief includes the social belief that what we are saying is unpopular and not believed by young people anymore. While that is seldom fully articulated, you can trace it fairly easily once you know to look for it. Terms like "dead-ender" start popping up.  Move On.

You will know whether blaming gas prices on not buying Russian oil is the game plan pretty soon.  It will start pretty quickly, and contain a counter-attack "I thought you were the ones who wanted us to boycott Russia! But now that it costs you a few cents per gallon you don't care about the Ukrainian people anymore?" This can easily happen even when memories are supposedly fresh. Not many will believe it, but it doesn't take many.  As long as the truth is not mentioned, it doesn't have to be denied for a long time. The nutcases and corrupt (and that is true left, right, and center) can keep the lie alive for years, simmering in the background. It can boil later.  We'll see.

Dutch-Scots-English

In tracing one's ancestry, one is sometimes working from fairly definitive documents, such as a census record or a wedding record in a town book, showing the place of birth and parents for both bride and groom. Yet there are degrees of reliability here. If Sarah Richardson and John Hoyt are the listed parents of the bride you are quickly up against which Sarah and John are these? There are a few in the area born about a generation earlier. It wasn't that long ago when surnames especially were written by sound, so various county clerks might write Moore, Moor, or Moar. This gets very crazy in Scandinavia once you get past 200 years ago. Ingeborg Jonasdotter - okay, we're looking for a guy named Jonas Something 20-40 years before that. I hit a point of enough uncertainty that I mark it (cap), as in Anna Carlsdotter (cap) b. about 1707, Sweden. It's my signal to myself, and to those reading my info who know that convention, that I have gone as far as I think I reliably can, so that even if there are hints from the site about possible mother or father, I didn't think them strong enough to keep going. 300 years before your own birth you have about 1000 ancestors, after all, and there is little point wasting energy tracking back 200 years worth of people who may not be your ancestors. (Which is, frankly, the problem right from the start anyway. We never 100% know, even with good documents. There are non-paternity events. We used to think these were a whopping 10%, and you will still see that number. But we have since found that these vary by culture, and 1-10% would be a more accurate statement.)

One might regard the tracing someone else did, usually a great boon that they have done the work for you, with sudden suspicion if they are accepting some very unlikely event. It's not impossible for a 16 y/o Puritan male to be marrying a 38 y/o female, but it's darn unlikely.  It's unlikely for him to be marrying anyone at his age, except in the first two generations here. I once encountered an elegant, full tracing with lots of siblings included, which I relied on for some additions to my own tree - until I came across the assertion that a person had been born in Connecticut in 1607. It put everything else in question.

I was tracing a Scots line of my wife's and hit a supposed Dutchman. That's quite possible, but crossing into other countries always increases the chance that someone just got it plain wrong, or someone is hiding something. The other possibility was a Pole, even more unlikely. I put a cap on it.

Yet in recent reading I learned that there was not merely lots of trade between the Holland district of the Netherlands and both England and Scotland, there were mercenaries galore. They liked hiring each other, having a fair bit of mutual trust. We make much of the idea that mercenary soldiers would work for whoever paid them, but that is oversimple. You don't want to shell out money on distant unknown troops when you have people nearby who share enemies with you and perhaps you have fought with before. Sometimes mercenaries were resettled after a conflict was over, and the north of England and lowland Scotland were emptier - and apparently to the liking of the Dutch mercenaries. The Scottish surname Fleming comes from these resettled Dutchmen, as Flemish was an interchangeable term at the time.

There was a time, in fact, when almost half the words coming into English from Dutch...

Tangent I: Dutch and Low German were so closely related then (and even now, I hear) that they are used interchangeably when discussing early English.  On the Continent the distinction is finer. Notice that we are seeing Lowlands, Low Countries, Netherlands, Low German in this discussion. This is not accidental.  These were the maritime, market, and trading areas with the most mutual contact.

Back in line: ...came in via Scots...

Tangent II: Scots is not Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language, but a Germanic sister-language to English, also descended from Early Middle English. It is also called Lowland Scots.You will hear it called a dialect, because of the old rule of applying mutual intelligibility to the dialect/language divide, but the trend now is to allow political and cultural considerations to be part of the distinction.  Increasingly, if a people wants to call their dialect a language, everyone including the linguists goes along with it. Arguments ensue. The more common or powerful language-speakers consider everything a dialect of theirs, the beleaguered* minorities tend to insist on being seen as separate. 

Back in line again:  ...such as scone (unsurprising), croon, and dollar.  Military words such as duffel and knapsack likely also came in from Dutch via Scots. I often have that "oh yeah" sense when learning that some English word comes from Dutch. They look like Dutch words, I just never noticed until someone pointed it out.

*Also a Dutch word.