Spot the Frippet: rigmarole.

 I heard the other day (on the podcast The Rest Is History, as it happens) about a board game based on the World War II campaign in North Africa. The game requires (as I remember it) ten players, is expected to take over a thousand hours to complete, and has a hilarious feature whereby each turn a player takes causes 3% of his fuel supply to evaporate (unless he's British because apparently the British stored their fuel differently from the rest).

Personally, the prospect of taking part in such a game is enough to make me grow a moustache, change my name, and emigrate. I mean, can you imagine the rule book? What a lot of rigmarole that must be!

But even without war-gaming, the world is full of rigmarole. Anything you buy that needs to be plugged in, like a hairdryer, say, comes with, what, ten pages of safety advice? 

Even a tin of soup is covered in warnings and instructions and nutritional charts and serving instructions.

Today I plan to buy a sledgehammer. I'm hoping that it doesn't come with a load of rigmarole about only hitting things you want to break.

But I wouldn't count on it.

Spot the Frippet: rigmarole. Rigmarole is everywhere, both in writing and spoken (the gabbled bit at the end of an advert for any kind of investment is an example). 

Rigmarole can also mean a long chunk of confused or essentially meaningless speech. For that I recommend listening to a politician.

Or, indeed, a critic.

Pleasingly, the word rigmarole might actually derive from the instructions for a game, a mediaeval one where the characters are introduced in rhyme on a scroll of paper. The first such character was Ragemon le bon (Ragemon the good), and all that stuff was written on Ragemon's roll.

On the other hand,the word rigmarole might derive from the statute of Rageman, who was the pope's representative in Scotland, who did everything he could to induce the clergy give a true account of their incomes for tax purposes.