sweasel.com

Clementide (The Feast of St. Clement): https://aleteia.org/2024/11/21/recovering-the-forgotten-feast-of-clementide/

Let there be cake: https://www.catholicculture.org/Culture/LiturgicalYear/recipes/view.cfm?id=1168

Hastings… as in “Battle of …”?

Interesting! Up until just now, the only Hastings I knew of was Captain Arthur J. M. Hastings, OBE, Hercule Poirot’s BFF.

I am thankful for William and Hastings as it’s likely I wouldn’t be me. My ancestors were Flemish merchants and mercenaries that went over with William (or after William)😋

So hurrah for the win at Hastings!

This probably saved me from having a perhaps more appropriate surname like VanderLoony or Vandertwit.

The seaside town is the last place in England where the tradition is still upheld. It will see a man dressed as a blacksmith and woman depicting Saint Catherine, processing around the old fishing quarter of Hastings accompanied by an entourage of enthusiastic followers.

Imma gonna take a wild stab at it and say they were trying to verbify the word ‘procession’. It takes a lot of gumption to just go and make up a word. Harumpf!

The internet has made us even more stupid.
Go look up the old oath “Damn your eyes”, a common old phrase for Biblically inclined folks not to invoke the creator’s name “in vain” (another rant altogether) while wishing someone off to perdition. Common as ever in sea shanties or period journals and literature.
You will be inundated with references to Etta James, page after page, as though the woman invented the phrase.
So if you don’t know better, you’re about to be badly informed by the all knowing powers of the internet.

Grok sez-

The phrase “damn your eyes” originated as an 18th-century English imprecation or curse, used to express extreme anger, contempt, or impatience toward someone.

It essentially functions as a more targeted variant of “damn you,” invoking damnation specifically on the person’s eyes—possibly drawing from the metaphorical idea that the eyes are “windows to the soul,” thus indirectly cursing the soul itself.

The expression’s earliest attested use, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, appears in Laurence Sterne’s novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1761), where it is described as “the lowest oath of a scavenger” in a satirical ranking of oaths from the noble (“By the splendour of God,” attributed to William the Conqueror) down to the vulgar.

This suggests it was associated with lower-class or coarse language at the time.By the 19th century, the phrase evolved in nautical slang to describe a “damn-your-eyes” as a nickname for a flashy, ostentatious, or reckless person, often a sailor who dressed sharply or acted boldly.

It appears in folk songs like the ballad “Sam Hall,” where the condemned protagonist repeatedly uses it to curse those around him, reinforcing its role as a vehement expression of defiance or rage.

Over time, it has softened in modern usage but retains its historical flavor in literature and period pieces.

Indeed! This is what I anticipated, and received, somewhere way (way way way way) down the list of Etta James references.
It’s a perfectly wonderful curse in my opinion and reminds me of my Yankee Grandfather occasionally referring to me as “You damn fool” generally in the context of “Get down off that barn rafter you damn fool!”