[Loch-Ruadh] Word of the Day, March 1, 2002
Cait O'Hara
lady_cait at lycos.com
Fri Mar 1 09:18:32 PST 2002
Starry-gazzy-pie
A pie made of [herring-like] pilchards and leeks, the heads of the pilchards appearing throughout the crust as if they were studying the sky.
-- James Halliwells Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, 1855
Fest Day of St. David, the patron saint of Wales. He cleverly employed leeks to defeat the fifth-century Saxons by fastening these members of the onion family to his warriors hats to distinguish them from their enemies in hand-to-hand combat. Heroics aside, William Turners Herbal (1568) cautioned would-be consumers of the leeks dark side: The leek breedeth wind and evil juice, and maketh heavy dreams; it stirreth a man to make water and is good for the belly. But if you would boil a leek in two waters, and afterwards steep it in cold water, it will be less windy than before. More recently, to eat the leek indicated the embarrassed retraction of a statement, much like eating crow, and was used in this regard in Shakespeares Henry V.
2,000,000,000 Web Pages--you only need 1. Save time with My Lycos.
http://my.lycos.com
More information about the Loch-Ruadh
mailing list