An 18th Century Urban Dictionary

A friend recently clued me in to the existence of a valuable reference for reenactors, historians and anyone who’s interested in the common language of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Francis Grose, esq’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published in 1785, and went through many editions. Below is an example hosted on archive.org from 1823:

Some of my favorite phrases or terms from early 19th century Britain include…

“All Nations” A composition of all the different spirits sold in a dram-shop, collected in a vessel into which the drainings of the bottles and quartern pots are emptied.

“Ambassador of Morocco” A shoemaker.

“Bug Hunter” An upholsterer.

“To dance upon nothing” To be hanged.

“Firing a Gun” Introducing a story by head and shoulders. A man, wanting to tell a particular story, said to the company, “Hark; did you not hear a gun?—but now we are talking of a gun, I will tell you the story of one.”

“Flam” A lie or sham story: also, a single stroke on a drum. To flam; to hum, to amuse, to deceive. Flim flams; idle stories."

“Gingerbread Work” Gilding and carving; these terms are particularly applied, by seamen on board Newcastle colliers, to the decorations of the sterns and quarters of West-Indiamen, which they have the greatest pleasure in defacing.

“Hen House” A house where the woman rules; called also a she house, and hen frigate: the latter, a sea phrase, originally applied to a ship, the captain of which had his wife on board, supposed to command him.

“High Jinks” A gambler at dice, who, having a strong head, drinks to intoxicate his adversary, or pigeon.

“Huzza” Said to have been originally the cry of the huzzars, or Hungarian light horse; but now the national shout of the English, both civil and military: in the sea phrase termed a cheer; to give three cheers being to huzza thrice.

“Rabbit Catcher” A midwife.

“Rag Carrier” An ensign (!).

“Rollers” Horse and foot patrol, who parade the roads round about London during the night, for the prevention of robberies.

“Turnpike-Man” A parson; because the clergy collect their tolls at our entrance into and exit from the world.

“Used Up” Killed; a military saying, originating from a message sent by the late General Guise, on the expedition at Carthagena, where he desired the commander-in-chief to order him some more grenadiers, for those he had were all used up.

“Wife” A fetter fixed to one leg.

There’s even a 19th century English version of Fight Club (!)

P.C. Pugilistic Club; a society of gentlemen, founded in 1814, expressly for the purpose of keeping alive the principles of courage and hardihood which have distinguished the British character, and to check the progress of that effeminacy which wealth is apt to produce. Men of rank, associating together, learn to prize the native and acquired powers of human nature. The incitement which they produce to noble deeds of hardihood and bravery,and the high respectability which they confer by the patronage of their rank and fortune, is of inestimable benefit. This club consists of about 120 subscribers.

Of course, there are probably more different terms for prostitutes than for any other person or thing listed in this book. See Barber’s Chair, Public Ledger, etc. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of an American version of this book. The diverse and sprawling geographical regions of the early United States gave rise to heterogeneous dialects and slang. It's hard to say which English phrases and vulgar words would have been uttered on the streets of say, Pittsburgh or Cincinnati during the War of 1812.

American soldiers developed their own slang. "Uncle Sam", the famous term for government supplies and equipment, supposedly came from an Army contractor in upper state New York named Samuel Wilson. However, Kentucky militia soldiers crossing the Ohio River at Newport, KY used the term as early as 1814. Another great term comes from the siege of Fort Erie that summer, when British round shot was tumbling dangerously through the American encampment. Every time a near miss rolled past, some wag would announce: "that went as swiftly as any goose egg!" For some reason, the goose egg did not last as long in the popular lexicon as Uncle Sam did...

Pepys' Blog

Samuel Pepys (pronounced "peeps") was a Chief Secretary to the Admiralty and MP during the reign of King Charles II. He's best known to posterity for keeping a daily journal that reveals a lot about Restoration-era London. Phil Gyford began posting the daily entries from this diary online in 2003 (starting with 1 January 1660 on 1 January 2003). You can follow them here. It's pretty neat to get daily blog posts from the 17th Century. I wonder if something similar could be done with Twitter... Historical telegrams perhaps?

Dune copy book

I've been listening to the unabridged audiobook Children of Dune, one of the sequels that Frank Herbert wrote for his epic novel Dune. The entire series as Herbert wrote it spanned nearly 5500 years and dealt with human evolution, the nature of religion, ecology, and society. Each chapter in the novels is headed by a excerpt from a book within the Dune universe, creating a kind of meta-library of imaginary works.

Many of these quotes can be found here:

Above all else, the mentat must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The mentat-generalist, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in his universe. He must remain capable of saying: "There's no real mystery about this at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we'll correct that when we come to it." The mentat-generalist must understand that anything which we can identify as our universe is merely a part of larger phenomena. But the expert looks backward; he looks into the narrow standards of his own specialty. The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles, knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop. It is to the characteristics of change itself that the mentat-generalist must look. There can be no permanent catalogue of such change, no handbook or manual. You must look at it with as few preconceptions as possible, asking yourself: "Now what is this thing doing?"

  --The Mentat Handbook

 Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, "I am not the kind of person I want to be." It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied. 

Last words of Toure Bomoko, in "Appendix II: The Religion of Dune"

"You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.

Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, testing Paul Atreides with the Gom Jabbar.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear.

Devil’s Dictionary-- Diary

From the Devil’s Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce:

DIARY, n. A daily record of that part of one's life, which he can relate to himself without blushing.

Hearst kept a diary wherein were writ All that he had of wisdom and of wit. So the Recording Angel, when Hearst died, Erased all entries of his own and cried: "I'll judge you by your diary." Said Hearst: "Thank you; 'twill show you I am Saint the First" -- Straightway producing, jubilant and proud, That record from a pocket in his shroud. The Angel slowly turned the pages o'er, Each stupid line of which he knew before, Glooming and gleaming as by turns he hit On Shallow sentiment and stolen wit; Then gravely closed the book and gave it back. "My friend, you've wandered from your proper track: You'd never be content this side the tomb -- For big ideas Heaven has little room, And Hell's no latitude for making mirth," He said, and kicked the fellow back to earth.

"The Mad Philosopher"

 

(It’s true, I keep a diary and consistently omit all the things which I would blush to have others read--- or my mind whitewashes the memory for me. So instead of the stupid or thoughtless or rather, course things we do that pass the small moments of the day, my diary merely records what I think about things when the nib meets the paper: of course its a departure from reality, and an exercise in self-gratification to boot.

But in the end, what should I strive to record in my diary? Certainly not just important things, since life is mainly made up of ordinary, boring moments. Certainly not every mundane thing that comes to mind, since that would be of no interest. Perhaps, what I like to read in journals that have come down to us from the past: interesting things, and the flavor of daily life. Especially the latter, since in time all our world will fade away, and be replaced by new things.)

Humanism

Listening to an audio book this afternoon regarding the Enlightenment, I realized that I have not distinguished in my thought between several flavors or definitions of humanism. There is, of course, the modern sense of humanism being theories or doctrines “which take human experience as the starting point for man’s knowledge of himself and the work of God and Nature.” (New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought sv. Humanism).

However, the term was first coined in 1808 by F.J. Niethammer to describe the study of the classics, “the revival of which had been one of the distinguishing features of the Italian Renaissance, later spreading to the rest of Europe as ‘the New Learning’.” (Ibid.) So there is another sense of the word humanism, which basically describes the humanities. Wikipedia.org’s article concerning humanism includes this interesting section on the importance of sources:

The humanists' close study of Latin literary texts soon enabled them to discern historical differences in the writing styles of different periods. By analogy with what they saw as decline of Latin, they applied the principle of ad fontes, or back to the sources, across broad areas of learning, seeking out manuscripts of Patristic literature as well as pagan authors. In 1439, while employed in Naples at the court of Alfonso V of Aragon (at the time engaged in a dispute with the Papal States) the humanist Lorenzo Valla used stylistic textual analysis, now called philology, to prove that the Donation of Constantine, which purported to confer temporal powers on the Pope of Rome, was an eighth-century forgery.^[24] For the next 70 years, however, neither Valla nor any of his contemporaries thought to apply the techniques of philology to other controversial manuscripts in this way. Instead, after the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Turks in 1453, which brought a flood of Greek Orthodox refugees to Italy, humanist scholars increasingly turned to the study of Neoplatonism and Hermeticism, hoping to bridge the differences between the Greek and Roman Churches, and even between Christianity itself and the non-Christian world.^[25] The refugees brought with them Greek manuscripts, not only of Plato and Aristotle, but also of the Christian Gospels, previously unavailable in the Latin West. After 1517, when the new invention of printing made these texts widely available, the Dutch humanist Erasmus, who had studied Greek at the Venetian printing house of Aldus Manutius, began a philological analysis of the Gospels in the spirit of Valla, comparing the Greek originals with their Latin translations with a view to correcting errors and discrepancies in the latter. Erasmus, along with the French humanist Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples, began issuing new translations, laying the groundwork for the Protestant Reformation. Henceforth Renaissance humanism, particularly in the German North, became concerned with religion, while Italian and French humanism concentrated increasingly on scholarship and philology addressed to a narrow audience of specialists, studiously avoiding topics that might offend despotic rulers or which might be seen as corrosive of faith. After the Reformation, critical examination of the Bible did not resume until the advent of the so-called Higher criticsm of the 19th-century German Tübingen school.

I think the study of sources, and of how some of these manuscripts came to be saved and enshrined in the corpus of Western thought whilst others disappeared forever is very interesting. Kind of like peering at the source code of Western civilization.

Fake Journal Month and Meta-Fiction

International Fake Journal Month is an event sort of like National Novel Writing Month, but instead of completing a novel in a month (does anyone know someone who’s actually accomplished that?), participants create a fictional journal for the month of April. Often these journals have interesting stories going on, and incorporate sketches and other artwork chronicling the (fictional) authors’ life.

I’m a junkie for any kind of meta-fiction or “in-universe” publication, like the fake websites promoting Star Wars Episode II (which purported to be a news site from the Star Wars version of the Internet, the Holonet). I also have a “the lost journal of Indiana Jones” published in 2008 by Simon and Schuster, Inc. as a merchandised item for Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. In both cases, the “in-Universe” or meta-fictional items are more entertaining and interesting than the movies that they promote.

Another popular form of meta-fiction is the Alternate-Reality Game, or ARG. In this type of game, reality blends with fiction, as the participants hunt for fictional clues in the real world, calling phone numbers and even going to real-world locations to get more clues. Oftentimes ARGs turn out to be forms of viral marketing for new films or products.

Maybe, in our information-dense universe of the 21st Century, meta-data or meta-fiction has become the hallmark genre of our era. Of course, there are plenty of examples of meta-fiction from the past, such as the Necronomicon of H.P. Lovecraft’s horror stories. And sometimes, this meta-fiction is taken as reality: I’ve met individuals who honestly believe that the witch-cults and Necronomicon are real, and that Lovecraft was documenting, rather than inventing, his unnamable horrors.

Origin of the term “grey eminence”

From wikipedia.org:
An éminence grise (French for "grey eminence") is a powerful advisor or decision-maker who operates secretly or unofficially. This phrase originally referred to François Leclerc du Tremblay, the right-hand man of Cardinal Richelieu. Leclerc was a Capuchin friar who wore grey, or rather brown, robes. Brown or light brown (now called "beige") was called grey in that era.^{[citation needed]} The phrase "His Eminence" is used to address or reference a Cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church. Although Leclerc du Tremblay never achieved that rank, it is probable that those around him may have addressed him thus in reference to the considerable influence this "grey friar" held over "his Eminence the Cardinal". Aldous Huxley wrote an English biography of Leclerc entitled Grey Eminence, and there is also an 1873 painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme, "L'Éminence Grise," which depicts him descending the grand staircase of the Palais Cardinal.
A grey eminence may alternatively mean an elderly (grey-haired) individual who is eminent for accomplishments in the past, but today acts as an advisor rather than a principal actor, and may be politically influential as a consequence of his honored status. For example a distingushed retired physics professor; a politician who retired with a good reputation; etc.

New York Times: Philip K Dick's Exegesis.

Just read this piece in the New York Times about Houghton Mifflin Harcourts plans to publish the "Exegesis" of Philip K Dick. Dick experienced visions during the 1970s and this manuscript represents his attempt to digest what he saw. It should be quite interesting for fans of Dick's science fiction novels, and perhaps of fans of Biblical prophets like Daniel or L Ron Hubbard for the sake of comparison.

What is an exegesis? According to the Online Etymology Dictionary (Exegesis. Dictionary.com. Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper, Historian. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Exegesis [accessed: April 29, 2010]), it means "to explain, interpret" from the Greek word exegeisthai. I think exegesis has come to be associated with the exposition or explanation of big, profound things. 

Whilst looking for a picture of Philip K. Dick for this post, I came upon the wikimedia image of his android, a remote controlled replica made to resemble the author. Apparently it's head was lost in transit on America West Airlines, and has yet to be found!

Creation of the Novel

Luckily or shrewdly Cervantes had created a new form, which other authors could elaborate and embellish—a maquette for versions of the human comedy. Not only had he created a novel, he had created the Western novel… While Copernicus shifted our focus outward from the earth to the sun, Cervantes shifted our focus from the outer world inward to man.
The “novel,” from Italian novella (little new thing), though a modern successor to the epic and the romance, would not attract by its reciting of the traditional and the familiar. Instead, it aimed at surprise, suspense, and the unexpected. The novelist would play God on the landscape of his own creation.
From Daniel J. Boorstin, The Creators, Pages 306-7.
I often find myself picking up historical or intellectual surveys like Boorstin’s The Creators. Maybe I’m impatient and just like to cover a lot of ground when I read. Since Boorstin devotes about a chapter each to great figures like Cervantes and Milton, works like his are best for gaining a broad overview of a field like Western literature.
It’s interesting to note here, in particular, that what we know as the novel, and perhaps many other forms of prose fiction related to it, are descended from Cervantes’ original innovation. Maybe I’m mature enough to get around to reading Don Quixote. Someone once told me that you ought to read Don Quixote three times: once as a young person, once in middle age, and finally in old age. New meanings emerge with each reading. It’s worth a try I suppose.