redietz

"Mouton" is French for sheep. "Porc" is French for pig. "Boeuf" is French for cow. "Venison" is French for deer. After the conquest, the French speaking Normans got to eat meat; the Anglo-Saxons got to tend the animals. Our language reflects that social order, even if "mutton", "pork", and" beef" got Anglicized.

Yeah, it's pretty commonly used for that.

I agree. They also crush dry fly hackles.

The original feathers, yes. He suggests substitutes for most of them, such as Brahma hen for corncrake, woodcock for cuckoo, hen mallard for curlew. All the substitutes are legal, as I posted in the first place. (Also, coot hunting is legal here, no sub needed.)

Agreed. In fact, I would extend that to all written discourse. If you're sufficiently in control of yourself to be typing, there's no justification for exceptional language.

Which is exactly the point of having certain words "reserved" for those occasions. The use of proscribed words indicates strong emotion. Watching someone decapitated in front of your warrants "OMG!"; seeing a friend with a bad haircut doesn't, and using it for the latter just renders it less appropriate for the former -- "dilutes" as you put it.

Postage inside the US has become quite hit or miss in the last 12 months. I've had faster delivery times from England than from a town a couple of miles away. You could always start a swap.

Contrast indeed. Better known, more concise, and to me at least, far more useful.

Anything written by George Herter is going have lots of opinions.

IRL, conversations drift from topic to topic. It shouldn't be surprising that they do on-line as well.

I believe he was restricting it to hackled mayfly imitations. You can still add "wings" to spinners by simply using longer hackle and trimming top and bottom. (Or use soft hackles with floatant, as I do.) With stonefly and caddis imitations, a hair wing is often part of the what floats the fly, so it's there for a reason other than fooling fish. I often imitate both with either fore-and-aft flies, or bivisibles, neither of which have wings.

The only advantage to wings on a hackled fly is to make it easier for the angler to see. I do often add wings on patterns that traditionally have them for that reason, but most of the dries that I fish are wingless. Offsetting the "easier to see" advantage is that winged flies can land upside down. You won't find any real difference in catch rate.

And it's been like that since at least the 1600's (not just woolly buggers).

There is already a fly with that name, made with stacked maribou: Poodle The shown reminds me of Shenk's White Minnow, but articulated.

From a conversation I had with him at a show, Mr Wulff tied all the Wulff style patterns with a single upright wing when he was tying for himself. The split wing was only because customers wanted it -- it didn't add to the effectiveness of the fly. At the same show, he demonstrated tying a size 28 Royal Wulff without benefit of a vise.