Thing Not To Do Today: lurch.

 These times are not cheerful, and so although my first thought upon coming across the word lurch was of Ted Cassidy's character in The Addams Family:

Lurch is on the right. He's here with Jackie Coogan's Uncle Fester

 my next was a reaction to it.

Thus sings Ariel, the (sometimes) invisible sprite in The Tempest:

Come unto these yellow sands,

And then take hands:

Courtsied when you have and kiss'd

The wild waves whist,

Foot it featly here and there;

And, sweet sprites, the burthen bear.

Ariel by Henry Fuseli

That's a vision of paradise from where I'm sitting. But still, I saw a robin with some moss in its beak the other day: summer is coming, and one day we will take hands and dance again.

But for now it's a steady march along the narrow path to better things, and no lurching wildly to left or right into the path of lurking evils.

Well, here's hoping.

Thing Not To Do Today: lurch. We've only had this word in English since the 1780s. It might be from the nautical term lee-larches, which is what happens when a large wave hits a ship when it's sailing with the wind in a high sea and tips it suddenly over to one side. Or it might come from the French lacher, to let go. The Latin laxus means loose.