Through the glass ceiling again

Following the effort something over a month ago now, noticed at reference 3, just made it through our Scrabble ceiling this afternoon, clocking up a combined score of 603, with my winning, after taking a few penalty points off BH by going out, by a modest 35 points.

This despite my losing a go with 'quirt', which would have scored 72 - 'q' on double letter and 'quirt' on triple word  - which I had thought was a short bit of rope, something to do with Captain Hornblower's men of war. Checking with OED I find that the word comes from the southern part of the US where it is the name for a particular sort of whip, probably made with rawhide. Two meanings of this sort both qualified 'U.S.' and one other meaning qualified 'obs'. Having at first thought to allow my fine word, with BH not complaining, I decided in the end to withdraw it and miss a go. Apart from anything else, it would have set a bad precedent.

I associate to a phrase in reference 2, a story noticed at reference 3, about someone passing 'une heure cornélienne', when he had to chose between getting a good share of the dead lady's estate and giving Maigret evidence that said lady had murdered her property developer husband some 15 years previously. Simenon making quite frequent use in his Maigret stories of the fact that in France a criminal does not get any share of his or her victim's estate, whatever the testamentary arrangements might have been.

Littré does not include the word at all, but after a bit of poking around, I get to reference 4 which explains that the word does indeed come from Corneille, despite the wrong spelling, with Corneille being fond of plots where the hero has to make a difficult choice, perhaps between wife and country or between wife and daughter.

PS: thinking some more, the word could have come up in Hornblower, what with C.S. Forester being from the US. He may have used the word for something that petty officers kept order with, without knowing or thinking that the word did not fly in the Queen's English. Not that such use would affect the ruling.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/12/through-glass-ceiling.html.

Reference 2: Cécile est morte - Simenon - 1940. Volume X of the collected works.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/01/more-irritation.html.

Reference 4: https://www.expressio.fr/.