Forgotten English: May 27th - June 1st
Monday's forgotten word:
Ettes (pl. noun) - Suffragettes; women organized for a political purpose.
--Maurice Weseen's Dictionary of American Slang, 1934
Birthday of Amelia Jenks Bloomer (1818-1894),
a demure American schoolteacher who became an activist for the abolition of slavery, temperance, and women's and children's rights movements. Her most enduring contribution to the plight of women came as a result of her articles in the women's newspaper The Lily, popularizing a comfortable new type of clothing introduced in the 1820s by Indiana's New Harmony utopian society. This practical wrist-to-ankle garment offered an alternative to the wasp-waist corsets, layers of petticoats, and long inconvenient skirts that women had long felt compelled to wear. It consisted of a loose bodice and a knee-length skirt worn over pantaloons. This fashion was quickly ridiculed by newspapers, social gatherings, and even from the pulpit as being libertine and immoral. Amelia sensed that the persistent criticism was distracting from more important issues, and she and some followers abandoned the distinctive dress.
But about 1851 others began to see "Amelia Bloomer's Costume" as a symbol of the women's movement. For the next century, the term "bloomers" denoted a woman's underwear or loose outer trousers.
Tuesday's:
Rorid (adjective) - (1) Dewy.
--Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828
(2) Rorigenous, produced of dew. Rorifluous, flowing with dew; adaptation of Latin rorifluus.
--Nathaniel Bailey's Etymological English Dictionary, 1749
(3) May-dew, dew of May, supposed to have the property of whitening linen, of preserving beauty, and of affording a red odiferous spirit by distillation.
--T. Ellwood Zell's Encyclopedia of Knowledge and Language, 1871
Collecting May Dew
In Edinburgh's Arthur's Seat, and throughout the British Isles, girls and even grown women carefully gathered May-dew from grass and plant leaves as late as the 1930s. Wielding sponges, flat scraping tools, and tiny reservoirs at dawn during the month of May, they did so in order to partake of dew's renowned cosmetic virtues. Even the well-educated were once convinced of its properties, as Samuel Pepys revealed in his diary entry for May 28, 1667: "After dinner, my wife away down with Jane and W. Hewer to Woolwich, in order to [get] a little ayre, and to lie there tonight, and so to gather May-dew tomorrow morning, which Mrs. Turner hath taught her is the only thing in the world to wash her face with; and I am contented with it."
Wednesday's:
Composuist (noun) - A writer, composer. This extraordinary word has been much used at some of our colleges, but seldom elsewhere. It is used in England among musicians.
--John Pickering's Words and Phrases . . . Peculiar to the United States, 1816
The Centennial of The Rite of Spring
On this date in 1913, Igor Stravinsky's once shockingly controversial ballet, Le Sacre du Printemps, opened in Paris, with Vaslav Nijinsky dancing the lead. The sensuality and dissonance of the score evoked whistles, howls, and catcalls, and eventually caused interruptions due to fistfights and pandemonium in the audience. Gendarmes were needed to restore order during the intermission, but only after Stravinsky had exited in disgust.
One music critic nicknamed it "Le Massacre du Printemps," while another, Carl Van Vechten, described the evening's events, including the unrestrained reaction of a gentleman sitting directly behind him: "The intense excitement under which he was laboring, thanks to the potent force of the music, betrayed itself presently when he began to beat rhythmically on the top of my head with his fists. My emotion was so great that I did not feel the blows for some time. They were perfectly synchronized with the beat of the music. When I did, I turned around. His apology was sincere. We had both been carried beyond ourselves."
Thursday's:
Hingkponk (noun) - An imposter; Lakeland, Westmoreland.
--Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary, 1896-1905
Death of Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593),
the English poet and playwright who, certain scholars and readers believe, authored some of the plays and sonnets of William Shakespeare. Born the same year as the Bard, this Cambridge-educated university wit worked in Queen Elizabeth's secret service, spying on Catholics and other potential subversives. He was arrested in England and charged with anti-religious incitement. According to official documents, he was fatally stabbed in a Deptford pub brawl while free on bail and hastily buried in a local "plague pit."
But one increasingly popular theory says that he staged his own death in order to neatly and permanently evade the wrath of religious and secular authorities, including torture. He then fled to a northern Italian city, such as Padua, Verona, or Venice, where some of Shakespeare's post-1593 plays are set. From this safe haven, as the theory goes, Marlowe sent plays and poetry back to England for the next two decades, and Shakespeare gladly passed these works off as his own.
Friday's:
Overmultitude (verb) - To exceed in number.
--Rev. John Boag's Imperial Lexicon of the English Language, c.1850
Birthday of Walt Whitman (1819-1892),
whose masterpiece of poetry, Leaves of Grass, was first published in 1855. In January 1882, shortly after he released a revised edition of Leaves of Grass, the Atlantic Monthly lambasted this American classic. Commenting on Whitman's lines, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes," the reviewer concluded scornfully, "But multitudinousness cannot make the spectacle of his morbidness any more acceptable. It cannot palliate the gross impropriety of which he is guilty, in publishing what is unfit for repetition; an impropriety doubled by the retention of this disgusting stuff in a new edition issued after many years, during which the author has had ample opportunity to free himself from his youthful crudities. Every one imbued with the 'primal sanities' must be revolted by this offense, and protest against it. Fortunately, however, the chief damage done will be to the author himself, who thus dishonors his own physical nature, for imperfect though the race is, it still remains so much purer than the stained and distorted reflection of its animalism in Leaves of Grass, that the book cannot attain to any very wide influence."
Saturday's:
Deterge (verb) - To wash off or out; chiefly in medical use, to clean away foul or offensive matter from the body. Hence, deterging, deterger, detergent, detersion. Detergency, detergent quality; cleansing power. Also, the process of cleansing a solid by means of a liquid.
--Sir James Murray's New English Dictionary, 1897
Sweetening Saturday
The first Saturday of June was an annual bathing day for some rural families in the British Isles into the 19th century. In Those Superstitions (1931) Charles Igglesden noted: "If two people wash in the same water at the same time it brings bad luck. During the [First World] War, when water was scarce, the risk was frequently taken, but not without leading to heated altercations between those who believed in the superstition and those who did not. An amusing incident was related to me by a sergeant. The battalion had just come out of the front line and the chance of a wash was possible in the cellars of a cluster of houses. Men cleansed themselves as best they could, but presently there was a heated dispute between two lads, one of whom had the audacity to start washing from the same water as the other. 'You'll bring bad luck to me, will you?' A blow was struck. It led to a scuffle, and the two combatants were hustled out of the cellar by their comrades."
At one time, many Bulgarian peasant women bathed only once - just before their weddings - and devout Spanish women only with the permission of their confessors.
All text © 2012 Jeffrey Kacirk