Happy Birthday to babsbunny and <user site="livejournal.com" us

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

zarf
A cup-shaped holder for a hot coffee-cup ... usually of metal and of ornamental design.

--Sir James Murray's New English Dictionary, 1928

Feast Day of St. Drogo,
a twelfth-century shepherd who became a patron of coffeehouse owners, whose controversial shops were once regarded with suspicion. According to Edward Hatton's New View of London (1708), "the Inquest of St. Dunstan's in the West" investigated James Fair, a barber by London's Inner Temple Gate, "for making a sort of liquor called 'coffee,' to the great nuisance and prejudice of the neighborhood." Three decades earlier, women in London created a pamphlet to warn against the dangers of impotence posed by coffee consumption. After coffee's acceptance as a beverage following centuries of trial and error, the glossary of John Russell Lowell's Bigelow Papers (1882) described an American technique of improving its flavor and clarity by immersing fresh or preserved fish-skin into the brew. "But," Lowell remarked, "the practice is by no means confined to New England. In the country districts in England, dried fish-skin, newly broken egg-shells, &c. are still used for this purpose."

Zarf! Tross! HahaHAha!

Given some of the nonsensical invective spewed at Starbucks, I'd say the 'prejudice of the neighborhood' is still pretty common.

-The Gneech

Fictionlet

Brigid wished for what was probably the thousandth time that she'd brought some gloves; the black mud in this section of the impound yard was so slippery that it would be a great comfort to just be able to grab something solid to hold onto. But she was reluctant to touch anything, and the more twisted rusty metal and broken glass she saw, the more reluctant she got. "What are we doing here?" she muttered to herself. "I'm going to kill that guy."

This happy line of thought was interrupted by the rapid-fire crunch-crunch-crunch of somebody running on gravel. Brigid turned towards it just in time to see Greg come around a corner at top speed into the relatively bright area of the driveway illuminated by streetlights. "What the hell?" she managed to fire at him as he got closer.

"Après moi, le déluge!" Greg shouted as he ran past, not even turning to look at her. She would have stopped him to inquire just what he meant by that crack, when the night air was split by the ferocious hostile barking of what sounded like an army of dogs. It was at this stage she decided that the better part of valor was to get the hell out of Dodge.

-The Gneech

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Bonus! A FanFictionlet by lythandra!

Blacksburg

There's not a lot to say about today's Virginia Tech shooting that hasn't been said better by other people. I do want to mention, tho, for the benefit of those who know him, I called benbear and he's fine. The school where he works is a local community college basically "one small town over".

-The Gneech