When I heard on the BBC that an organisation in St Petersburg named after St Basil the Great taught teenagers on probation the art of parkour I didn’t understand what was meant. Parkour is, I learn, a variant of free-running — moving rapidly and freely over or around the obstacles presented by an urban environment by running, jumping and climbing.
The word is French, though it doesn’t look it, being a respelling of parcours, ‘course’, here in the sense of ‘obstacle course’. In Romance languages, where k is alien, it has a trendy flavour. Spanish squatters call themselves okupistas instead of ocupistas.
Parcours has an amusing history not apparent in current usage. It derives from the late Latin percursus, which, about the time when William was conquering, meant ‘the right to drive pigs into a forest’.
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