"Stram" and The Feast Day of St. Didier

From Forgotten English . . .

Stram

Any sudden, loud and quick sound; so to stram the doors means to shut them with noise and violence. Hence, a bold and unexpected lie that greatly surprises the hearer is called a strammer, and hence also to strammer means to tell great and notorious lies.

Frederick Elworthy’s Specimens of English Dialects; Devonshire Glossary, 1879

The Feast Day of St. Didier

Let me be the first to wish each of my readers a happy feast day of St. Didier!

St. Didier was invoked to protect against liars. A story is told about a preacher who concluded his sermon one Sunday by instructing his congregation to read Mark 17 as background for his next sermon, whose topic would be insincerity. The following week, when he asked how many had read the biblical passage in question, most of the congregants’ hands immediately went up. The preacher looked both shocked and determined, “You are just the people I want to talk to,” he declared, “as there is no ‘Chapter 17’ of Mark!”