Happy Birthday, mooivos!

[the_gneech]

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

Gabriel's hounds
At Wednesbury, the colliers going to their pits early in the morning hear the noise of a "pack of hounds" in the air, to which they give the name Gabriel's hounds, though the more sober and judicious take them only to be wild geese making this noise in their flight.

--White Kennett's Lansdowne Manuscript of Provincial Words, c. 1700

These phantom hounds, jet black and breathing flames ... frequent bleak and dreary moors on tempestuous nights, and woe betide the unlucky wretch who chances to cross their path.

--E. M. Wright's Rustic Speech and Folklore, 1914

Gabriel-ratchet, a name for a yelping sound at night, like the cry of hounds.

--Rev. John Atkinson's Forty Years in a Moorland Parish, 1891

Feast Day of St. Dominic,
a patron of astronomers. Reginald Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) commented on diverse bogeymen of his time: "[They] have so frayed us with bull-beggars, witches, urchins, elves, hags, satyrs, pans, faunes, sylvans ... the spoorney, nymphs, changelings, incubus ... the man in the oke, the hell-waine, and such other bugbears that we were afraid of our own shadowes."

Sounds like an average day in a D&D campaign.

My late uncle Pat (the archetypal Irish Catholic priest if ever there was one) was called Dominic in his parish, actually. I used to call up there occasionally and ask for Patrick Eagan, only to have them say, "Who? Oh, you mean Father Dominic!" Used to confuse the heck out of me ... and to a certain extent it still does.

-The Gneech

Comments

[laurie-robey.livejournal.com]

Yes, indeed, happy birthday Mooivos!

[xolo.livejournal.com]

Gabriel-ratchet, a name for a yelping sound at night, like the cry of hounds.

Some days you go reading through a friend's friendlist, and obtain random enlightenment on something that's been a puzzle for 30 years :)

[melchar.livejournal.com]

Heh heh, people in my campaign world -hate- hellwaines. I enjoyed that passage and stat'd up each of those monsters - and some are very successful in intimidating the PCs.