[Loch-Ruadh] Word of the Day, Feb. 23-24

[Sonja Crocker]

shrub

To reduce to poverty by winning someone's property in gaming.
-- James Halliwell's Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, 1855

Birthday of English diarist Samuel Pepys (1632-1703), who in early 1667 wrote; "Having it in my mind this Christmas to go to see the manner of the gaming at the groome-porter's [like a valet in the SCA]....I was mistaken in thinking to have seen gentlemen of quality playing there....To see how the dice will run good luck in one hand for half an hour together, and another have no good luck at all ... to hear their cursing and damning to no purpose, as one man being to throw a seven if he could and, failing do do it in a great many throws, cried he would be damned if ever he flung seven more while he lived, his dispair of throwing it being so great."