A recent article in the English newspaper, the Telepgraph, offered a great many subsitutes for the nominative form of the F word. Included in the author's list was "gobeen." I have been unable to locate a citation to this word. Help?

Do you think it might have been a misspelling of "gombeen"? Dredging up my Irish ancestry and the little I've learned about it, this is an Irish word which I think means lending at exorbitant interest rates, but for which the meaning has moved to anyone who rips you off. The "gombeen man" is/was the rent-collector, I believe. Gombeen is/was used as an epithet, although not, as far as I'm aware, as a substitute for the 'f' word. The Irish are very good at using that, too. Really, really good emphasis!

Think CapK has nailed it. The worst epithet my Grandmother McDermott (nee Galvin) would use was to call someone "a wee gombeen man."
wow

The gombeen man was the local usurer. It derives ultimately from cambium, the Latin word for change in the sense of exchange.

I can easily see it's application to the local landlord, of course, since there's the pejoraive sesne of bloodsucker.

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--

Helen mentioned that the brothers Grimm had nothing on the Irish-- their fairy tales are tame

I wonder if NicholasW or any of the other philologists (archaic but euphonious, so I don't give a damn), could confirm or deny my understanding that the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm were more an excercise in documenting linguistics patterns, and shifts therein, than an attempt to entertain children. I also remember reading somewhere that Jakob and Wilhelm bowdlerised the stories a little after the first edition, apparently so that parents didn't have to worry about their own little Hansels und Gretels coming up to them after reading Sleeping Beauty and pleading: "Mutti, Vati what is necrophilia?"

My copy of Grimm's proclaims that upon "moving to Berlin in 1841, the professors Grimm began their massive dictionary of the German language. Jacob Grimm is still acknowledged as one of the leading philologists of his century." It also mentions the "science of comparative folklore" but unfortunately gives little explanation.

I also remember reading that most fairy tales were cleaned up so that they could be palatable to modern parents. I have one book wherein the fairy tales appear in their original state - NOT always nice and pretty with Disney-like endings.

or any of the other philologists

I have competitors?

'Fraid I can't help you. I can tell you about Grimm's law cos that's proper philology.