Happy Birthday, galish!

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

putter-out
It was customary for those engaged in long expeditions to place out a sum of money on condition of receiving great interest for it at their return home. Of course if they returned not, the original deposit was forfeited. A very usual proportion was five-for-one, but it would be greater the more hazardous and long the voyage. John Taylor, called the "water-poet," appears to have taken several journeys upon this play, but when he returned he was unable to recover his money, though the sums were small and the persons who owed them rich. Hence his indignant satire, A Kicksie-winsie [1619]:
    These toylesome passage I undertooke,
    And gave out coyne, and many a hundred booke,
    Which these base mongrels too, and promis'd me
    To give me five for one, some four, some three;
    But now these hounds no other pay affords
    Than shifting, scornefull lookes, and scurvy words.

--Robert Nares's Glossary of the Works of English Authors, 1859

Feast Day of St. Gertrude of Nivelles,
a seventh-century patroness of travelers.

-The Gneech

Faster Than a Rolling "O"

o/`

He turned a dam -- A-LA-KA-ZAM!
into a dame!
But my friend Sam...
stayed just the same!

o/`

-The Gneech