I was reading a story in the Guardian about the British government's reaction to the latest IRA announcement*, and I read: "No 10 has never resiled from its view that the IRA was involved in the bank robbery"
resiled?! What's this? Is the Grauniad** up to its old tricks? Apparently not: to resile is, inter alia, "to abjure: formally reject or disavow a formerly held belief, usually under pressure". Dates back to 1520-1530, from the French resilir and before that the Latin resilire, to spring back. Same root as resilient. And I'd never seen it before. Neat.
* The IRA is throwing a hissy fit because it was caught robbing banks, so it's withdrawing its commitment to decommission its weapons. Makes perfect sense....?
** I think it was Private Eye that dubbed the Guardian "the Grauniad" on account of its frequent typos.
Posted by geoff2 at February 2, 2005 11:04 PMHmm, very suspicious. I'm reading this as
"We're not decomissioning our weapons, because we've decided they might be useful in future bank robberies."I'm not impressed - worse still, are the Sinn Fein party, essentially backing up the IRAs position (as always) Posted by: Tim Foster at February 3, 2005 01:25 AM