Yarr! It Be rowyn's Berfday, Mateys!
Avast, wench! For ye birthday booty, ye get today's Fergotten English, ahoy!
Well, I'll be keelhauled. Does
sirfox know about this?
-The Gneech, me hearties
PS: Avast, ye scuppers! It's D. H. Laarrrrwrence's berfday as well!
cucurbitula
A glass vessel which, having its air rarified, gives room for that contained in the part to which it is applied to expand itself, and bring with it such humours as it is involved in.--Daniel Fenning's Royal English Dictionary, 1775
The curcubitula cruenta is designed to draw blood. The cucurbitula sicca is for dry-cupping, and is a local vacuum apparatus. The cucurbitula cum ferro is armed with iron.--Edward Lloyd's Encyclopaedic Dictionary, 1895
Feast Day of St. Januarius,
an Italian patron of phlebotomists, who attained sainthood after it was reported, on this date in 1389, that a vial of his coagulated blood had liquefied and bubbled. Under the definition of phlebotomie in An English Expositor (1616), John Bullokar offered this ludicrous explanation for the practice of bleeding: "Phisitions, as it is written, learned this practice first of a beast called hyppopotamus, living in the river Nilus, which being of a raucous nature and therefore often overchared with much eating, is wont to seeke in the banks for some sharp stub of a reede; upon which pricking his leg he thereby easeth his full body, stopping the bleeding afterward with mud."
Well, I'll be keelhauled. Does
-The Gneech, me hearties
PS: Avast, ye scuppers! It's D. H. Laarrrrwrence's berfday as well!