on college reunions

if you’re an insufferable gossip-monger like me and get your jollies from discussing the latest romps of your former classmates to other former classmates, then you will enjoy ephraim eliot’s account of what happened to all his buddies in the harvard graduating class of 1780.

eliot spares nobody (even himself) and were i to identify with anyone from this list, it would be poor daniel sargent who was more interested in greasing his (presumably luxorious) hair than committing himself to scholarship.

here follows an edited verstion of eliot’s private report, entitled: some account of my classmates in college who graduated in 1780

• Philip Draper : rusticated from the former class. Had capacity, but was a Rascal.
• Ephhaim Eliot: a scholar below mediocrity — never was well fitted for college — not being design’d for a public education, push’d in, because there was a suspension of business owing to war in 1776, but jogg’d along unnotic’d and made a good apothecary. Became paralytic.
• Aahon Hastings: good at classics; became insane & died miserable.
• James Hewes smuggled into the class without residence or rank in it at the time of graduating, to the disgrace of the government. A contemptible lawyer — very immoral & despised in society.
• Jacob Kimball: an elegant scholar at entrance. Time being on his hands, & having nothing to employ him, he fell a sacrifice to a parcel of unprincipled gamblers who swindled him. Was a great scientist, psalm singer & composer, in that branch of music. Became a dissipated sot.
• Joseph Prince: excellent scholar but unfortunate in life. Was burnt to death in the State of Maine.
• Daniel Sargent: Taken in to add to numbers in 1776. Never had an idea in his life, except to grease his hair and clean his buckles.
• Jesse Thomas: studied physic, went to Maine to practice, where he was probably murder’d to get posession of money.
• James True: a steady, clever man, and somewhat of a scholar, when he entered. Became deranged in mind, and died crazy. Followed no business.

my takeaway: maine was not the place to be in the late 18th century.

words wholly unrelated

mystic & mystic, (connecticut)

i’ve been at submarine school for the last week in mystic, connecticut. while i can’t disclose the confidential information that i’ve been learning, i did happen upon a rather unexpected bit of disinformation: the town of mystic has nothing to do with mysticism.

as towns go, the per capita mysteriousness of mystic lies somewhere between its rival new england seaport towns: newport, rhode island (not mysterious) and amity, massachusetts (somewhat mysterious). so why the misleading name? was it to attract tourists? was it to help launch a pizza empire and subsequently invite julia roberts to its town hall? was it to discourage soviet submarine spies? was it (like providence, rhode island) to lure the faithful?

the answer is none of the above. in this case, mystic comes from the pequot word “missi-tuk”, meaning “a large river whose waters are driven into waves by tides or wind.” early settlers stole it from the native americans? sounds a lot like the rest of american history.

if cleopatra were a scent, what scent would she be?

according to basenotes.net, the online social network for people who love smells, here are some possible candidates for cleopatra in odor form:

• l’occitane’s eau d’iparie
• jasmine and sandalwood
• pink pepper + wormwood + clove + french labdanum + oak moss + styrax + leather
• hermès’ eau de nil
• papyrus reed
• oil of lily
• a blend of cinnamon, myrrh, cardamom, saffron, frankincense and calamus,
• opium
• estée lauder’s youth dew

i am not making this stuff up, people. this is real.

the firebrand of the universe

the other day, a grubby street urchin called me father and i looked him up and down and was like, “you don’t have my menacing cheekbones and stag-like glutes. ‘tis certain i am no sire of yours, despite my aptitude for philandering.” and as i was sprinting away (in next season’s most fashionable sandalware), he called, “begging your pardon sir, ‘twas a religious title in reference to your new post as universal philosopher of absolute reality.”

now that i am an ordained member of a belief-less, church-styled corporation, people are giving me all kinds of nicknames. lately it has been rev which is short for reverend but also in reference to my ritualistic muscle flexing before running up a steep hill. My sandal-shiner calls me mahatma, this poxy chocolatier on newbury street calls me archbishop, and my neolithic lover, wertuff the pungent, calls me (quite correctly) your potency.

in celebration of nicknames of all sorts, i give you a few notable ones that start with the letter f.

• Le Fainéant: (French, “The Sluggard “). Louis V, King of France (966-87).
• The Fair Quakeress: Hannah Lightfoot, whom George III is said to have married when he was Prince of Wales (1759).
• The Farmer King: George III of England (1738-1820) on account of his simple appearance and manners. He is said to have actually derived profit from a farm near Windsor.
• The Father of Burlesque Poetry: Arnaud de Villeneuve, a distinguished French chemist, astrologer and theologian (1238-1314).
• The Firebrand of the Universe: Tamerlane, a Tartar conqueror (1333-1405). Also the Prince of Destruction.
• The Flour City: The city of Rochester, New York.
• The Flying Highwayman: William Harrow, a notorious highwayman, executed at Hertford, March 28, 1763. So called from his habit of leaping his horse over turnpikes when pursued.
• Foul-Weather Jack: Admiral John Byron, a British naval officer (1723-86), from his bad fortune at sea.
• The French Dickens: Alphonse Daudet, a French humorist and novelist (1840-97).
• Der Fürstenbund: (German, “The League of the German Princes”).

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source: a dictionary of names, nicknames, and surnames by edward latham (1904).

words dubiously unrelated

from time to time, several junior ragbag word sleuths send me the hot lead on words and their etymology—and cutso-paste-o i launch these discoveries into cyberspace to the delight of at least seventeen people.

though it’s great to have a legion of lapdogs do my dirty work while i make turf donuts on my neighbour’s lawn with baronessa alessandra (my bitching pontiac), i *occasionally* have to verify these claims to see if they fit my very loose editorial standards. most do, but here are two pairs of words—billed as wholly unrelated—which are probably not so.

passion fruit & passion

an anonymous tipster wrote in to tell me that our favourite jamba juice ingredient is not related to the feeling that we get in our brains and in our underpants when we watch dr. quinn medicine woman and see jane seymour riding bareback across the colorado countryside. instead, the passion of passion fruit is actually related to mel gibson’s braveheart ii: the passion of the christ. it is true that missionaries believed the fruit bore an uncanny resemblance to the wounds of jesus christ <gross> and called it passion after the narrative of his suffering. however, the passion of jesus and the passion for jane are actually very related etymologically, as passion which originally meant “intense suffering” has come to mean an “intense feeling.” 

the cat’s pajamas & cats

someone wrote in to tell me that the idiom, the cat’s pajamas became popular after an 18th century tailor named e.b. katz started sewing silken pajamas for the stars—that the phrase was once katz’ pajamas. well i got news for you pal, wiktionary disagrees:

In the 1920s the word cat was used as a term to describe the unconventional flappers from the jazz era. This was combined with the word pyjamas (a relatively new fashion in the 1920s) to form a phrase used to describe something that is the best at what it does, thus making it highly sought and desirable. Similar phrases that didn’t endure: the eel’s ankle, the elephant’s instep, and the snake’s hip.

even though wiktionary once reported that the sum-total of all human knowledge about the word ambidextrous was “doug k. is a supreme homo,” i am inclined to agree—because there are no citations of the phrase from before the 1920s much less the 1700s—that the cat of cat’s pajamas is related to the andrew lloyd webber musical and not some idiot tailor.

“she can read novels and milk cows”

It was generally believed in bygone days that in this country a husband might lawfully sell his wife to another man, provided he conducted the transaction in some public place and delivered her to the purchaser with a halter about her neck.

as first lines go, this is perhaps one of the oddest. the only problem is that it’s not actually the first line, nor is it from a novel—it’s from a history book written in 1892. 

the book details several quaint customs of england’s past—one of them, apparently is the selling of wives. consider the following account which is amusing if read as a black comedy and savage if read as an historical narrative*: 

At Carlisle, on the 7th of April, 1832, the sale of a woman brought together a great number of people. The event was announced by the bellman, and at noon, Joseph Thomson, a farmer, who had been married for three years, placed his wife in a chair, with a halter round her neck. He delivered the following amusing address :— “Gentlemen, I have to offer to your notice my wife, Mary Anne Thomson, otherwise Williams, whom I mean to sell to the highest and fairest bidder. Gentlemen, it is her wish as well as mine to part for ever. She has been to me only a born serpent. I took her for my comfort and the good of my home ; but she became my tormentor, a domestic curse, a night invasion, and a daily plague.

“Gentleman, I speak truth from my heart when I beg that we may be delivered from troublesome wives and frolicsome women! Avoid them as you would a mad dog, a roaring lion, a loaded pistol, cholera morbus, Mount Etna, or any other pestilential thing in nature.

“Now I have shown you the dark side of my wife, and told you her faults and failings, I will introduce the bright and sunny side of her, and explain her qualifications and goodness.

“She can read novels and milk cows; she can laugh and weep with the same ease that you could take a glass of ale when thirsty. 

She can make butter and scold the maid; she can sing Moore’s melodies and plait her frills and caps; she cannot make rum, gin, or whiskey, but she is a good judge of the quality, from long experience in tasting them. I therefore offer her with all her perfections and imperfections for the sum of fifty shillings.”

No one seemed in a hurry to purchase Mrs. Thomson, and the seller had to wait about an hour for a customer. Eventually, a man named Henry Mears bought her for twenty shillings and a Newfoundland dog. The report of the proceedings concludes by stating that “they parted in perfect good temper—Mears and the woman going one way, Thomson and the dog another.”

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*disclaimer: this is [at least] the eighties and raynor ganan is down with the ladies.  what is shocking about these accounts is not only how barbarous they were for the seventeenth century but how indifferently they were reported on at the end of the nineteenth. this being the reveille of the 21st century, i will state for the historical record that the sale of a spouse is abominable though temporarily swapping one based upon the drawing of a random car key is considered a friday night entertainment in certain subcultures.

the cost of a grill in the year 600

i had to go back to the salon this morning because my bro-zilian wax didn’t take. and while maiko poured boiling wax over my exposed gonads, i pored through more medieval royal decrees. this time it was æthelberht of kent’s laws from the year 600, the earliest written code in any germanic language.

æthelberht’s code established a series of fines for all kinds of personal injuries. here is what he thinks that your teeth are worth:

for breaking a man’s front tooth: 6 shillings
for breaking a man’s molar: 1 shilling
for breaking a man’s canine tooth: 6 shillings

however, æthelberht’s people petitioned their king saying that the molar is basically a double tooth and that it is very serviceable besides. the goodly king listened to his subjects and decided to raise the price of a molar to 15 shillings.

assuming the anglo-saxon dentists categorised the biscuspid as a molar, this means that if a rowdy saxon hooligan got into the age-old quarrel with his neighbour about who was a bigger hunk—the michael j. fox teen wolf or the jason bateman teen wolf—and busted every single last one of his teeth, he would owe him £4 and 12 shillings before æthelberht changed the law and (an astounding) £18 and 12 shillings after.

adjusted for inflation and the weakening pound, this works out to just about 78¢ in modern u.s. currency.

monopoly men

i was getting a bro-zilian wax yesterday in preparation for the big brazil v. chee-lay soccer match and reading through tudor-era royal charters when i came across a few interesting deets. apparently, the monarch had the power to grant legal monopolies to a group of her cronies. thus, queen elizabeth could—say—give bill gates an exclusive license for making operating systems or allow mark cuban to be the owner of every basketball team in the nba. here are a few of elizabeth’s buddies and the industry in which she granted them a monopoly:

• flask making · reynold hexton (15 year grant)
• transporting shreds of woolen cloth · symon farmer (21 year grant)
• anniseed importing ·  robert alexander (21 year grant)
• buying linen rags · john spilman
• selling felt hats · [name redacted]
• transporting ashes and old shoes · ede schets (7 year grant)
• licensing taverns · sir walter raleigh

i can only imagine my delight upon learning that the virgin queen had decided to give me exclusive rights to the transportation of ashes and old shoes!!!! think of all the glittering guineas that would soon be lining the ganan coffers! think of all the comely wenches that would sit on my lap in taverns despite all my small pox sores! think of how my status would elevate amongst my peer group. who is raynor ganan? raynor ganan is the baron of ashes and old shoes—an industry that will no doubt flourish well into the next millennium.