[Loch-ruadh] Re: Loch-ruadh digest, Vol 1 #351 - 9 msgs

[Sonja Crocker]

Greetings!

Here I am again.  I have been out of touch with everyone and I am sorry.  If it isn't one thing, it is another.  We all missed the last meeting due to illness.  Ragnar, the kids, and I all had severe cases of bronchitis.  Now there is a stomach virus going around.  I have been spared so far, thank goodness.  Well, we are going to try to make Baronial.  That is if we are still in good health and the kids are able to stay with Nana and Papa.

I received a great present for Christmas and I thought that I would share it with you.  It is the 365-day calendar of Vanishing Bocabulary and Folklore for 2002 by Jaffrey Kacirk.  I will try to post the word/phrase of the day.  We will see how it goes, time permitting.  Here goes:

The word of the day is:
barking irons

Pistols, from their explosion resembling the bow-wow, or barking of a dog.  Ireland.
--Capt. Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1811

Birthday of English playwright Ben Jonson (1574-1637), who  was once cleared of a muder charge after killing a man in a duel.  He pleaded "benefit of clergy," a bizarre Church-devised legal loophole inspired by I Chronicles, 16:22: "Touch not mine anointed [ones], and do my prophets no harm."  This trial maneuver, granted to accused felons who were able to read Latin, originally favored only the clergy but was later employed by educated laymen such as Jonson.  In the late eighteenth century, the heyday of pistol-dueling, theological writer Sydney Smith defended the practice in some circumstances, arguing that "Dueling, though barbarous in civilized [society], is a highly civilized institution among barbarous people, and when compared to assassination is a prodigious victory gained over human passions."

If you want any of the previous words of the year, please email me and I will send them to you.  I have them all transcribed in a text file.

Yours in the Dream,

Ly Cait O'Hara,
Ragnar of Loch Ruadh,
Meaghan, and Iain
--

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