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from a northern English dialectal term lake/laik(“to play”) (around 1300, from Old Norseleika(“to play (as opposed to work)”)), with an intrusive -r- as is common in southern British dialects; or
a shortening of skylark (1809), sailors' slang, "play roughly in the rigging of a ship", because the common European larks were proverbial for high-flying; Dutch has a similar idea in speelvogel(“playbird, a person of markedly playful nature”).
“Oh, dear, no,” said the young Englishman; “my cousin was coming over on some business, so I just came across, at an hour’s notice, for the lark.”
2011 August 4, Stephen Holden, “Stoned Archive: Wild Ride Of the Merry Pranksters”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
Thanks partly to Tom Wolfe’s raised-eyebrow account, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” that bohemian lark has been retrospectively hailed as the flash point of the emerging hippie counterculture.
2018 November, Alexis C. Madrigal, “The Dangers of YouTube for Young Children”, in The Atlantic:
What began as a lark has grown into something very, very big, inflating the company’s ambitions.
doolittle.[…] [T]hanks to your silly joking, he leaves me a share in his Pre-digested Cheese Trust worth three thousand a year on condition that I lecture for his Wannafeller Moral Reform World League as often as they ask me up to six times a year. / higgins. The devil he does! Whew! [Brightening suddenly] What a lark!
[T]hey laugh at us old boys,” thought old Pendennis. And he was not far wrong; the times and manners which he admired were pretty nearly gone—the gay young men “larked” him irreverently […]
[…] the porter at the rail-road had seen a scuffle; or when he found it was likely to bring him in as a witness, then it might not have been a scuffle, only a little larking[…]
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