On Tue, 11 Mar 2003, M J wrote: #I cannot for the life of me fit "Sethra Lavode" and "nymph" in the #same sentence without cracking the hell up. Aren't nymphs supposed #to be a lot more... um... pastel-ish than The Dark Lady of Dzur #Mountain? Victorian. Like "fairies in the bottom of my garden". -- Hmm, OED citations show this implication, at least, back as far as Spenser, c1586. I suppose the ancient Greeks might have thought of some of those spirits as alluring, but I don't think the association is, as it were, built into the classic definition. Drop the word "nymph" and think of "oread" as meaning 'spirit of a mountain'. -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and Philological Busybody a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel