Happy Birthday, emsworth!

[the_gneech]

For your present, here's today's Forgotten English!

strump
To tread heavily or pace about; whence, probably, strumpet, a street walker.

--Charles Mackay's Lost Beauties of the English Language, 1874

Death of William Prynne (1600-1669),
author of Histro-Mastix: The Scourge of Players (1633), a work containing a condemnation of the theater that proved to be his costliest lapse of judgement: "It hath evermore been the notorious badge of prostituted strumpets and the lewdest harlots to ramble abroad to playhouses, whither no honest, chaste, or sober girls or women, but only branded whores and infamous adulteresses did usually resort in ancient times." Prynne was imprisoned for six years because Charles I's queen consort, Henrietta Maria, who had once taken part in a performance at court, read this as an assault on her virtue. Prynne's French contemporary Blaise Pascal took a similar position but used a milder tone: "All the chiefest forms of amusement endanger Christian life, but of all those devised by the world, none is so worrisome as the Theatre."

Remember kids, being happy or having fun is eeeevil.

-The Gneech

Comments

[ben-mouse.livejournal.com]

Well... after considering Mel Gibson, Paris Hilton and "Girls Gone Wild," one -could- make an argument for the dangers of the "theater." But alas and then again, perhaps these are only symtoms of a greater malady...

[the-gneech.livejournal.com]

That's just the dangers of dumbasses. It's not Theater's fault!

-TG

[cyberhorn.livejournal.com]

evil is FUN so it works! coool makes notes for future refrence

[hossblacksilver.livejournal.com]

No, good is more fun than evil and I can prove it with a two point argument.

1. "Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." Dark Helmet
2. Ignorance is bliss.

[cyberhorn.livejournal.com]

chuckle but being evil you can play being good and enjoy both sides