Forgotten English: June 7th - June 12th
Monday's forgotten word:
Puss-gentleman (noun) - (1) A gentleman perfumed with civet. --Sir James Murray's New English Dictionary, 1909 (2) An effeminate dandy. --William Whitney's Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia, 1889 (3) I cannot talk with civet in the room, / A fine puss-gentleman that's all perfume. --William Cowper's Conversation, 1781
Birthday of George "Beau" Brummell (1778-1840), the infamous English dandy who inherited a sizable fortune, and used it up becoming a fashion trendsetter during the Regency period. Typical of Brummell's style of communication, he once passed around a particularly well-crafted snuffbox for a dinner party to admire. One guest was unable to open the lid and attempted to do so using a dessert knife. Feeling anxious that the man not damage the stylish box, yet bound by his vanity to express himself with an air of utmost gentility, he instead addressed the host, saying, "Will you be good enough to tell your friend that my snuff-box is not an oyster?" Brummell died penniless in a lunatic asylum in Calais, where he had fled in 1816 to avoid paying his gambling debts.
Tuesday's:
Chirogymnast (noun) - A mechanical apparatus for the exercising of a pianist's fingers; from Greek cheir, the hand, and gymnastes, a gymnast. --T. Ellwood Zell's Popular Encyclopedia of Knowledge and Language, 1871
200th Birthday of Robert Schumann (1810-1856), German romantic composer, who damaged his right hand using a homemade middle-finger prosthesis. This device was intended to quickly improve his technique by strengthening and, it was hoped, even lengthening that digit by holding it straight as the other fingers moved normally on the keyboard.
This setback was certainly a loss to his concertgoing contemporaries, as his piano-playing career was quickly ended. But the injury was a tremendous benefit to subsequent generations of music-lovers, who have since enjoyed the compositions Schumann created in lieu of giving performances. Unlike such gifted prodigies as Mozart, Schumann's compositional skills were hardly apparent in his early twenties when this mishap occurred, as we sense from this humble excerpt from a letter he wrote to his mother in 1830: "Now and then I discover that I have imagination and perhaps a turn for creating things myself."
Wednesday's:
Hatchetation (noun) - Carry Nation referred to her program [of saloon distruction, often with a hatchet] as "hatchetation." --Marjorie Tallman's Dictionary of American Folklore, 1959
Birth of a Nation - Anti-alcohol crusader Carry Nation was born in Gerrard County, Kentucky, on this date in 1846. After losing her first husband to the evils of drink, the Bible-toting champion of temperance legislation heard a voice after a prayer meeting tell her, "Take something in your hands and throw it at those places and smash them." Without hesitation, she traveled twenty miles from her home in Medicine Rock, Kansas, on June 7, 1900, two days before her 54th birthday, to the town of Kiowa. There she unloaded her wagonful of rocks by angrily throwing them through the windows of Dobson's Saloon. She then blessed the shell-shocked proprietor, saying "God be with you." When word of this event spread, Nation was invited by timid but concerned prohibitionists in neighboring communities to "deliver" their towns, which she gladly did. She then began using her trademark hatchet in raids on the bigger towns of Wichita and Topeka, inspiring similar uprisings among her followers. According to the activist's wishes, her tombstone inscription read "She Hath Done What She Could."
Thursday's:
Quarrel (noun) - (1) A square of window glass, properly one placed diagonally; anciently, a diamond-shaped pane of glass. Hence the cant term, quarrel-picker, a glazier. --James Halliwell's Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, 1855 (2) Adopted from Old French quarrel, medieval Latin quadrus, a square. --Sir James Murray's New English Dictionary, 1914 (3) This old word is still sometimes heard in New England among the illiterate. --John Pickering's Vocabulary of the United States, 1816
London's Crystal Palace Completed - On this date in 1854, the rebuilding of the Crystal Palace was completed in Sydenham, in southeastern London. This remarkable building had originally been constructed for the London World's Fair in 1851 and then moved. Consisting of more than a million square feet of glass and totaling about 293,000 panes, the building housed more than 14,000 exhibitors. During its two years in Hyde Park, the Crystal Palace formed the nucleus of the exhibition and attracted over six million visitors between May and October 1851--as many as 93,000 at a time, according to John Timbs' Curiosities of London (1855).
Friday's:
Glonders (pl. noun) - (1) The sulks; a bad temper; frowns. --Alexander Warrack's Scots Dialect Dictionary, 1911 (2) In the glonders, in a state of ill humour, to be pouting. --John Jamieson's Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, 1808
Pouting with Princes - On this date in 1727, England's George II succeeded his father, George I, as king. Records indicate that both moody George II and later his loony son George III, when each functioned as the Prince of Wales before ascending to the throne, would commonly retreat to the Hanover family estate, located in what is today London's bustling Leicester Square, after quarreling with their fathers. As a result, Leicester Square, today's bustling West End hub of half-price theater ticket offices and entertainment venues, became known at that time as the "pouting place of princes."
In the mid-1700s, the Leicester Square district also featured the Leverian Museum. According to John Timbs' Curiosities of London (1855), this mostly natural history museum was fated to be "won by lottery and removed to Blackfriars Road, where it was dispersed by auction in 1806." It contained "curiosities from New Zealand and the Pacific, specimens of rare plants, zoophytes, minerals, fossils, costumes, amphibia, and preserved birds, quadrupeds, and fish."
Saturday's:
Nigrification (noun) - The act of making black; from Latin niger, black, and facio, to make. --Rev. John Boag's Imperial Lexicon of the English Language, c. 1850
A Bloody Mistake - On June 12, 1667, only forty years after William Harvey described the circulation of blood, the physician of France's Louis XIV, Jean-Baptiste Denis, performed Europe's first successful blood transfusion, transferring a calf's blood to a violent 15-year-old who had been setting houses on fire.
The medical paradigm then known as Vitalism pretended that blood brought with it the characteristics of the donor. So a docile or "innocent" animal was considered an appropriate donor that would "allay the heat" of the boy's madness. The patient, of course, responded by cooling down as he slipped into severe shock while his body rid itself of the invading blood cells. But because of his age and health the boy survived, although his urine turned black from his kidneys' frantic expulsion of foreign matter.
Oxford University researchers were outraged--not because of the experiment's barbarity but because they felt that the French had stolen their research work. At that time, blood was transferred directly from one vein to another, a technique that continued right up into the 20th century.