Hearse began as a farm tool. The Old French herse was a harrow, a heavy frame of spikes dragged over a ploughed field to break up the clods, and at medieval funerals a frame shaped much like one was set over the coffin and stuck full of candles. The name stayed with the frame, then slid down to the bier beneath it, and by the 1640s it had moved to the carriage that took the coffin away. The harrow left one other descendant. To rehearse was to harrow again: to drag the spikes back over ground already turned and break it finer. So the actor going through the lines one more time and the long black car at the kerb are working the same field. Only one of them gets to go over it twice.