-------- Original Message --------
Dear Carolyn,
Thanks for the "sharps and flats" part.
If it will help, Sergei Solvoiev (hence the nightingale)
mistyped "accidental" as "accidential" and mispelled
"acrostic" as "acrostich". (I must say that the spelling
"acrostic" is unfair to learners of English. The Russian
and French words make it obvious that the word comes from a
Greek original with a chi, and almost all such words have
a "ch" in English--but this one doesn't.) Dmitri Nabokov
distorted that further to "acrostrich". If there's a
solution, I don't see it; I think he was just playing
with words. And I think he was agreeing with Sergei that
it's doubtful that the acrostic was intentional.
I don't really associate ostriches with nightingales, but
maybe DN has sung Richard Strauss's setting of "Die Liebe
sass als Nachtigall".
Jerry Friedman