Happy Birthday, chriscrosby!

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

gilravage
To hold a merry meeting, with noise and riot, but without doing injury to anyone. It seems generally, if not always, to include the idea of a wasteful use of food, and of intemperate use of strong drink. According to the first orthography, the term may have formed from gild, a society, a fraternity, and the verb to ravage, or from French ravager, the riotous meeting of a gild or fraternity. Could we suppose that the proper pronunciation were guleravage, it might be derived from French gueule, the mouth, the throat, also the stomach, conjoined with the verb already mentioned; to waste ... to gormandize.

--John Jamieson's Etymological Scottish Dictionary, 1808

Add Strong Drink to the Autumn Diet
In Via Recta: The Right Way of Living (1650), Thomas Venner recommended the following dietary changes: "In October and November, and likewise after the middle of September, according as you shall find the season to alter, you may begin to arme your body with stronger drinks against the cold of the ensuing winter, and to feed more liberally, and on stronger meats."

Full of wholesome advice, that Via Recta. I think I'll arme my body with some tea later this morning.

-The Gneech

MSTies!

THe MASteR comMAnds THat yoU clicK hERE!

-The Gneech

PS: I gather this has been around a while, but I only heard of it last weekend...

Fictionlet

"Cute," said Brigid. "Cute kid. Boy or girl?"

"One would presume so, anyway," said Greg.

Brenda laughed a light tinkle. "This is Chestina Elizabeth," she cooed, adjusting the infant's blanket again. "She was born eight weeks ago."

"Chestina?" said Brigid.

"Born? Willingly?" said Greg.

"What?" said Brenda.

"I must admit, I admire the heroic spirit of any baby born of their own volition. I sure wasn't."

Brigid looked sideways at him. "What are you going on about?"

"Well, the way I remember it is that I fought tooth and nail against the idea. 'You'll never take me alive!' about summed up my attitude. They eventually had to use drugs and a scalpel to get me out, and I put two interns down for the count."

The two women stood there and blinked at him. Greg shrugged. "Well, what can I say? I resented the whole thing. I wasn't even consulted! I wrote the doctor in charge a scathing letter of rebuke, once I could hold a crayon."

"What?" Brenda said again.

"Ignore him," Brigid said, patting Brenda's arm soothingly. "They just dropped him off the mother ship a few days ago, and he hasn't become acclimated to life on Earth yet."

-The Gneech

<-- previous B&G
next B&G -->

Ping huskyteer!

You need to see this, courtesy of exatron. Not sure if there is a UK version.

-TG