Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/HBD

Text of article: HBD is a three letter acronym meaning "Here Be Dragons". This is reputed to have been written on ancient maps to demarcate uncharted territory.

Google shows several promising TLA possibilities for HBD, but "Here Be Dragons" is quite far down on the list. Author has a history of vandalism, so this is potentially an attempt at sneak vandalism. Delete - UtherSRG 14:42, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Delete: That's poo. "Here be dragons" is not something a literate Englishman would have written at any age. So, who would? Are cartographers educated? Yes, so not them. Are surveyors? Yes, so not them. The "here be dragons" meme (ugh!) is supposed to be something pirates wrote. Which pirates? Why fictional pirates, of course. The fact claims are piffle. Geogre 14:46, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Delete - sounds like nonsense - Tεx τ urε 17:22, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Besides, everyone knows that the correct and traditional phrase is "Here there be Dragons." Delete.-FZ 17:59, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Delete. http://www.maphist.nl/extra/herebedragons.html says that there are no known maps with the legend "here be dragons" (but one single known map that does say "Hic sunt dracones.") But the acronym HBD is surely private, or personal, or particular to some small ingroup. I don't think Geogre is right, though; I think "here be" is perfectly good archaic English. (I see we do have an article on Talk Like a Pirate Day). Cartographers did fill up the gaps with fanciful pictures, though; Swift wrote "So Geographers in Afric Maps/With savage pictures fill their gaps/And o'er uninhabitable downs/Place elephants for want of towns." Prior to widespread use of aerial photography for mapping circa the Second World War, maps really did have empty spaces on it. My wife went to school in a small town in the 1950s and the classroom maps were so old that the map of Africa really did have areas on them simply labelled "unexplored." Did I say delete? [[User:Dpbsmith|dpbsmith (talk)]] 18:51, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
- Of course they drew pictures. They also had "terra incognita," and they also had the habit, which Swift particularly found amusing, of locating mythical continents wherever no one had been. "New High Brasil" and "Ultima Thule" and "Hyperborea" were at the margins, wherever the map covered. Swift, in particular, thought this was a hoot, as he studied cartography (and laughed at it) for Gulliver. "Here be" is not regular English at any archaic period that I'm aware of, however. It's dialect, and hence the "pirate talk" of pseudo-Irish inflected English. To find pirates muttering like that, you've really got to get up pretty nearly to 20th century fiction, though. Contemporary accounts tended to either represent them as speaking gutter English or to rewrite them in high standard English. Geogre 20:58, 3 Aug 2004 (UTC)
An article on the phrase "here [there] be dragons" would be interesting. This ain't it. Delete. Sean Curtin