FIFA thinks snoods could be a danger to players' necks

[James Harbeck]

>  > 'snood' sort of hair-net
>
>This word was commonly used with roughly that meaning - a kind of
>not-necessarily-net-like doodad worn by women on their heads to keep
>their (natural) hair in place - During The War (WWII) and later.

James Joyce wrote a poem published in 1907 in which a snood figures
prominently:

Bid Adieu to Maidenhood

Bid adieu, adieu, adieu,
Bid adieu to girlish days,
Happy Love is come to woo
Thee and woo thy girlish ways-
The zone that doth become thee fair,
The snood upon thy yellow hair,

When thou hast heard his name upon
The bugles of the cherubim
Begin thou softly to unzone
Thy girlish bosom unto him
And softly to undo the snood
That is the sign of maidenhood.

----

When I first read the poem, as a late-teenage undregraduate, I knew a
snood as a net for the hair at the back, as you say; I note a comment
on http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/bid-adieu-to-maidenhood/ from
someone who says it is "apparently a ribbon or band worn in Scotland
by unmarried women," a definition he may have gotten from the OED,
since it gives that as the older sense, and the bag-like net as more
recent. On the other hand, he may have gotten it from Walter Scott,
as http://www.james-joyce-music.com/song01_lyrics.html quotes from an
explanatory note in Scott's _Lady of the Lake_: "The snood, or
riband, with which a Scottish lass braided her hair, had an
emblematical signification, and applied to her maiden character."

It seems _snood_ has stood in for a few sorts of odds and sods!
Thanks for the tip-off on this latest...

James Harbeck.

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