Camaraderie is a wonderful thing, I suppose. I was reading Hugh Trevor-Roper's The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century (which is available for free from the wonderful folks at the Online Library of Liberty), and I came across an unfamiliar word: lampadophory. I used the not-so-trusty-but-incredibly-handy Oxford New American dictionary on my computer. Not terribly surprisingly, it was not there. So, I googled it, but while I was waiting for the page to load, I realized my folly-- why bother to google it, I *know* that I'm going to look it up in the OED, no matter what I find on the internet. But, in a strange coincidence, the first hit for the word was this blog post that was about the process of reading Trevor-Roper in the library, and wondering what this strange word meant. Well, I now know that I am not the only one who stumbled on this particular word!
Oh, and for all the people who might stumble on this page while looking up 'lampadophory' while they too are reading Trevor-Roper, the word comes from the Greek lampadedromy:
A torch-race; a race (on foot or horseback) in which a lighted torch was passed from hand to hand.
There, saved you a trip.
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