New Word to Me

A. Unabashed Pacifist –

Children for Peace:
Because we deserve it.
Because your wars hit us the hardest.
Because war is a horrible example for us.
Because war robs us of hope.
Because war is no way to live.
Because peace is better.

B. Unabashed Christian:

Holy One,

No one can match your peaceful landscapes.
Your hues of green and blue and brown and green and orange make a mellow contrast to warring colors of red, black and silver.
Paint our spirits in those mellow shades.
Amen

C. Un-quoting Jesus:

“I want you to remember my coming into the world by observing a season of excess and gluttony.”

[Not what He said to the disciples in the upper room, despite what the US economic system wants us to think.]

D. Blog: Weird Word of the Week

“Piepowder”

A travelling man, a wayfarer, an itinerant merchant or trader.

This ancient word was originally the Anglo-French pied-poudreux, meaning someone with dusty feet (in Scotland the term was sometimes translated into the delightfully Tolkienesque dustyfoot). This was a graphic description of the state of someone travelling about on the unmade roads of medieval England. The word was most often applied to itinerant merchants who toured the country to buy and sell at fairs. Many of these fairs had been established by royal charters that gave rights to lords of the manor or religious houses to charge taxes and tolls and to enforce them. The enforcement was carried out in a rough-and-ready way through courts of piepowder (in Scotland these were sometimes known as courts of dusty feet). These courts usually had jurisdiction over such matters as contracts, trespass and debts, and they sorted out trading disputes, punished theft and violence and did their best to keep order. Because few such fairs lasted more than three days, justice had to be swift and summary. The piepowder courts died out during the course of the nineteenth century along with the fairs that had brought them into being; the last is said to have been that in Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire, which last met in 1898.

[From Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words website.]