Yes-- een is an irish diminutive (as in smithereens, and any number of girls names, kathleen, eileen, maureen, etc) and a gob is a monster in the shape of mouth-- who devorers.-- The bogey man would come into your room at night and drag you off to the bog, and a gobeen would eat you alive--(the brothers grim had nothing on the irish-- their fairy tame are tame compared to what await a irish child who was bad! No friendly woodsman to kill of the mean wolf-- the bogeyman and gobeen always survived to come again...)

So its pretty easy to see how it got applied to money lenders and landlord/rent collectors... they kept coming back too--


my other obsession