Stan Kelly-Bootle: Professor Boyd: many thanks for the perfectly valid
point about what VN meant by “stang.” And for repeating the excellent
advice: Always consult VN’s pet W2 (Webster II) first. That can often curtail
much idle speculation, source- & soul-searching, and VN-mind-reading. ..In
spite of many chatty cross-reference and usage guides, I don’t see a link from
rail to the synonym stang! Neither does the W2 stang entry link to rail. My
initial hunch of dialectal links with sting/stung is
confirmed
Stang, v. i. [Akin to sting; cf. Icel. stanga to
prick, to goad.] To shoot with pain. [Prov. Eng.]
More
research needed on other W2 entries that might link to stang = rail.
JM: After your curtailing railing
and many post-prandial soul-searching on my part, I selected one
of the examples, extracted from Robert Burns, from the list sent by Jim
Twiggs. It confirms your stinging intention:
I hope Nabokov didn't pronounce the word with a sound similar to "jungle"
(as it appears in the next verse).
On the whole, my vote goes to a reference that encompasses Jonathan
Swift's "Gulliver's Travels". We can even measure the height of the woods
surrounding poor Hazel:
These fields
were intermingled with woods of half a stang, {1} and the
tallest trees, as I could judge, appeared to be seven feet high.
—
Gulliver's
Travels A
stang is a pole or perch; sixteen feet and a half.
—
Gulliver's
Travels
(footnote)