Jo--while trying to look up raving mad, I did see this. You
had asked about this in a thread which I frankly don't feel
like searching for right now. I'll head back for r.m.
"Segue" was originally a technical musical term, drawn directly from the Italian "seguire" ("to follow"), and means to proceed from one movement of a composition to the next without pause. As a musical term it first appeared in English in 1740, but it wasn't until the early 1970's that the word was first used in a broader figurative sense. Hollywood was probably the source for the common usage of "segue," since film makers were among the first to borrow the word from musicians to describe a smooth transition from one scene or subject to another. It wasn't until this more general meaning of "segue" became popular that the word was really considered English and thus appeared in our dictionaries.