[Loch-Ruadh] Word of the Day, April 10

[Cait O'Hara]

Holy-stone

A stone used with sand by seamen for cleaning the decks; to scrub with a holy-stone.
--W. & R. Chambers’s Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, 1877

A sandstone for scrubbing decks, so called from being originally used for Sunday cleaning, or obtained by plundering churchyards of their tombstones, or because the seamen have to go on their knees to use it…. Payer-book: a smaller hand-stone than that which sailors call[a] “bible.”  It is used to scrub in narrow crevices where a large holy-stone cannot be used.
-- Adm. William Smyth’s Sailor’s Word-book, 1867

Birthday of English author William Hazlitt (1778-1830), who wrote in his Characters of Shakespeare (1817):  “To be remembered after we are dead is but a poor recompense for being treated with contempt while we are living…. Those only deserve a monument who do not need one.”  A nautical “commandment” from what was known as the “Philadelphia Catechism” stated:
On six days shalt thou labour and do all that thou art able,
And on the seventh, holystone the deck and scrub the cable.


---
Never meddle in the affairs of dragons;
For you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.
-- Acacia



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