Ruination & Despair

The recent media obsession with the story of “balloon boy” Falcon Heene seems as good an excuse as any to have a look at the use of bird names for people. Although more common overall than fabric names, most examples from this group are quite rare. (Continue reading . . .)

Given that it would never occur to most of us to name our children after fabrics, the number of documented fabric names is remarkable. Though never common, these names occurred most often in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, between roughly 1880 and 1920. The impulse behind them was presumably similar to the one behind the fashion for flower and gemstone names at that time. (Continue reading . . .)

God save me from a red-haired Lombard, from a black-haired German, from a fair-haired Spaniard, or from a Fleming of whatever hair-color.

Source: Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1988), 57, 166.

I hate to intrude on Dr. Hurlbutt’s territory here, but the logs of our webmaster, Caligula, have recorded the names of what seem to me to be some rather peculiarly named localities, from which visits to our site have originated. For example:

• Apalachicola, Florida
• Floyds Knobs, Indiana
• Swampscott, Massachusetts
• King of Prussia, Pennsylvania
• Spartanburg, South Carolina
• Flower Mound, Texas
• Sugar Land, Texas
• Broken Arrow, Oklahoma
• Bullhead City, Arizona
• Horseheads, New York
• Horse Cave, Kentucky
• Bat Cave, North Carolina

Frankly it is also at least a little disconcerting to encounter a visit from:

• Dachau, Bavaria, Germany

“… I resolved, if possible, to get to the ship; so I pulled off my clothes … and took [to] the water. … [Once aboard] I went to the bread-room and filled my pockets with biscuit …”

  —  Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719).

Today is the 100th anniversary of the first airplane flight across the English Channel. On July 25, 1909, French aviator Louis Blériot coaxed his fragile wood-and-canvas monoplane to cover the distance from Les Baraques, near Calais, to a field near Dover Castle (where it crash-landed) in under thirty-seven minutes.

In response, the Russian imperial secret police quickly formed a “Special Commission on the Means of Battling the Possible Implementation of Criminal Designs with the Assistance of Aeronautical Machines,” with an eye to thwarting air-minded revolutionary terrorists.

Source: Scott W. Palmer, Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia (Cambridge, 2006), 11, 15-16.

It was a cough that carried him off.
It was a coffin they carried him off in.

    — Greenwich, Massachusetts

Stranger weep, for at the age of seven
Little Willie went to Heaven.

      To which has been added:

Cheer up, Stranger, who can tell?
Willie may have gone to Hell.

      — Ireland

Here lies the body
of Samuel Young
Who came here and died
For the benefit of his health.

      — Isle of Wight

        Erected to the memory of
                  John Phillips
                Accidentally shot
As a mark of affection by his brother

      — Ulster

Once I Wasn’t.
Then I Was.
Now I ain’t Again.

      — Lee County, Mississippi

Source: Philip Reder, comp., Epitaphs (London, 1969).

In 1539, the parish clerk of Hastings demanded that the New Testament be burned as heretical, after he read in 1 Corinthians 9:5 that the apostles had wives, a pernicious notion he considered to undermine the compulsory celibacy of the clergy.

Source: David Daniell, The Bible in English (2003), 269.

Seen along the way:

Fingerboard Road
Dinner Bell Road
Pig’s Ear Road
Licking Creek
Big Savage Mountain
Negro Mountain

And of course:

God’s Ark of Safety (“Noah’s Ark Being Rebuilt Here!”)

Oswald: What dost thou know me for?

Earl of Kent: A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stockinged knave; a lily-liver’d, action-taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deny the least syllable of thy addition.

  —  William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act II, Scene 2.

“No dancing, clamouring, quarrelling, fisticuffings or indulging in excessive drinking and creating disturbances in public places for the sake of keeping a peaceful and comfortable environment. Guests are not permitted to bring pets and poultry into the hotel.”

 — Notice posted in a hotel room in Beijing, China, as reported in Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See (1990), p. 140.

In Act II, Scene 1, of Shakespeare’s Othello, Iago entertains Desdemona and Emilia with a teasing rant against the fair sex, in the course of which he asserts that “You are … / … / Players in your housewifery, and housewives in your beds.” Unfortunately the pun is lost on a modern audience, since housewife no longer has the secondary meaning of “hussy” it once did (the evidence of ABC’s popular Desperate Housewives notwithstanding). What Iago is alleging is that women are idle in their housekeeping and sluts in the bedroom. This sort of thing qualifies as fairly standard Elizabethan banter between the sexes. Desdemona, with her “O, fie upon thee, slanderer!”, only pretends to be offended, and Iago replies by improvising a couplet: “Nay, it is true, or else I am a Turk, / You rise to play, and go to bed to work.” (Continue reading . . .)