Carolyn: I take “accidential” as portmanteau for “essential accidental.”
We mathematicians prefer “martingales” to “nightingales”:
Martingale (probability theory), a stochastic process in which the conditional expectation of the next value, given the current and preceding values, is the current value
Any questions?
skb
On 27/02/2009 15:32, "Carolyn Kunin" <chaiselongue@EARTHLINK.NET> wrote:
> Oh, dear. I'm miserable with crosswords. But I do at least get the
> musical part (accidentals = sharps & flats). If there are no typos,
> what is an "accidential"?
>
> Was there a Nightingale ode? - - but the only Derzhavin nightingale I
> find in my anthology is "Solovey vo sne" (a short poem). Or could
> there an ode to an Ostrich?!
>
> Alexey?
>
> Carolyn
>
> p.s. The famous ode to a nightingale is of course Keats's - - here he
> is in W J Neatby's illustration:
>