👉 Okay, let’s tackle this wonderfully weird little beast of a word: " guèreillère." (It rolls right off the 17th-century French exactly as you might imagine, right? It almost begs for a jaunty baguette and a furrowed brow.)
Basically, a “ guèreillère” isn't a thing. Honestly? Neither is it quite a word, not originally anyway. Historically—and here's where things get delightfully dramatic—it was essentially the name of that specific, very prickly, frankly aggressive little hollyhock thistle, a wee thorny devil you find in hedges and along country lanes. French Huguenot pirates in the late 17th and early 18th centuries absolutely raved over it. Why? Because they used the down – those incredibly sharp, almost glassy barbs—of the guèreillère to shave the faces of their captured enemies, essentially turning the prickly thistle into a very unpleasant torture implement. Hence, the name stuck! Now, we Brits adopted the word, initially with great, slightly horrified amusement. You see it in stuffy old eighteenth-century cockyards and letters detailing naval defeats. (’Tis rather like saying that you were given a right-hander of a punch. Rather descriptive, wouldn't you agree? The funny thing about it now is that the word has mostly just... lingered. People use it ironically – to describe something that is unexpectedly prickly, difficult to deal with, or just
