In one respect, however, he treated his men splendidly. Wanting his Eleventh Hussars to be the spiffiest regiment in the Queen’s army, Cardigan spent an estimated ten thousand pounds a year of his personal fortune outfitting them. Reportedly, this included a knitted, button-down vest of Cardigan’s own invention that he and his men wore under their battle uniforms to stave off the Crimean cold. Whether true or the fantasy of an enterprising sweater salesman, the story was widely believed, and with everyone wanting to copy the heroes of the Light Brigade the cardigan became the fashion of the day.
What would Mr. Rogers have done without them?
ce·re·al n. 1. An edible grain, or the plant from which it comes. 2. A mass-produced breakfast food, generally served suspended in a bowl of milk.
Though little considered nowadays, Ceres was among the more venerated Roman gods. As goddess of the crops, she was especially associated with grains and was thus the go-to deity for people looking to avert famine. Cereal originally referred to anything that had to do with Ceres but narrowed in meaning to “of grains” or grain itself, at least until a guy named Kellogg came along.
Dr. John Kellogg ran a peculiar sort of health spa that promoted the Sylvester Graham–inspired dietary principles of the Seventh Day Adventists (see graham cracker). At the Battle Creek Sanitarium patients consumed a lot of nuts but no alcohol or tobacco and exercised vigorously. They also became intimately acquainted with Dr. Kellogg’s enema machine, a device that swiftly pumped gallons of water up the paying guests’ bowels, followed by a half-pint chaser of yogurt, “thus planting the protective germs where they are most needed and may render most effective service.” Modern research is just now coming around to certain of Kellogg’s theories on intestinal flora; coupled with his balanced, high-fiber diet, the doctor might seem like a visionary. His sexual beliefs, however, made him a quack.
“Neither the plague, nor war, nor small-pox, nor similar diseases, have produced results so disastrous to humanity as the pernicious habit of onanism.”
To do the widest possible good, Kellogg got into the business of manufacturing bland, masturbation-suppressing breakfast cereal. The concept of breakfast cereal had been created in 1863 when Kellogg’s rival James Caleb Jackson introduced Granula to the world. Made from graham flour, Granula was like Grape-Nuts, except even worse; you had to soak the stuff overnight just to make it edible. Improving upon Jackson’s idea, Kellogg invented the cereal flake and went into business with his little brother Will selling boxes of the stuff. When Will suggested putting some sugar on the cereal so people might actually want to eat it, John was horrified. More businessman than idealist, Will set off on his own in 1906 and founded the company that would become Kellogg’s, and within three years was selling millions of boxes of his sweetly delicious Toasted Corn Flakes.
Disappointingly for John, breakfast cereal did little to arrest practice of the “solitary vice,” and he’d cringe at the ten-billion-dollar-a-year corn-and-sugar-peddling conglomerate that he unwittingly set into motion. There may still be hope for those yogurt enemas, though.
chau·vin·ism n. 1. Fanatical patriotism. 2. Belief in the superiority of one’s own gender, again, usually male.
Nicolas Chauvin served in both the Army of the First Republic and Napoleon’s Grand Armée. He was wounded seventeen times, leaving him severely disfigured and maimed. That didn’t dampen his fighting spirit, though; Chauvin remained a jingoistic patriot and die-hard supporter of Napoleon through every hardship. His loyalty paid off when the emperor personally presented Chauvin with the Saber of Honor and a pension of two hundred francs. In later, less nationalistic days, Chauvin’s blind loyalty led to his becoming the butt of sarcasm in various snarky French plays.
The inability of historians to turn up any details on Chauvin’s life in the public record has led to the suggestion that he is a purely mythical figure, which for poor Monsieur Chauvin would be the final indignity.
com·stock·ery n. Fanatical desire to censor on moral grounds.
If Thomas Bowdler was a harbinger of the prudish Victorian era, Anthony Comstock represented the age in its fullest flower. The McCarthy of the Cold War against sin, Comstock served in the Union infantry, where he objected to the incessant cursing of his fellow soldiers, then moved to New York City, where he found himself further appalled. All around this modern Gomorrah were prostitution, pornography, and explicit ads for birth control, the very existence of which Comstock believed “promoted lust.”
But when you’re in a new town there’s no need to feel down, and Comstock found the place he could go: the YMCA. The YMCA was then still very much the Young Men’s Christian Association; Comstock, already tipping off police to illegal pornography, greatly impressed its leaders, who invited him to join their Society for the Suppression of Vice.
In 1872, Mr. Comstock went to Washington. He lobbied Congress to pass what would become known as the first Comstock Law, an act that criminalized the mailing and interstate transportation of “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material, contraceptives included. Each offense was punishable by a minimum of six months’ hard prison labor. Furthermore, Comstock was made a special agent of the Postal Service and given the right to carry a gun and arrest people, which he did with gusto.
This self-declared “weeder in God’s garden” would go on to achieve thousands of convictions during a career that stretched into the twentieth century, for which he attracted many admirers (including a certain cereal-pioneering antionanist). While Comstock did do unquestionable good in prosecuting public frauds, his most attention-grabbing campaigns were those aimed at political activists and artists. In 1905, however, an artist-activist bit back when George Bernard Shaw coined a term for America’s censorship movement.
“Comstockery is the world’s standing joke at the expense of the United States. Europe likes to hear of such things. It confirms the deep-seated conviction of the Old World that America is a provincial place, a second-rate country-town civilization after all.”
In retaliation, Comstock vowed to investigate the “Irish smut dealer” and directed police to the New York premiere of Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, resulting in the arrest of most of those involved and shuttering the production, thereby ensuring the play’s future popularity. (Shaw’s biggest obscenity controversy was still to come; see pygmalion.)
FAHRENHEIT VS. CELSIUS
In 1714, German physicist Gabriel Fahrenheit made a scale for measuring temperature using mercury in an enclosed glass tube, creating the first modern thermometer. His system enjoyed wide popularity until a Swedish astronomer by the name of Anders Celsius proposed his Johnny-come-lately thermometer in a paper he presented to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1742. With its simplistic 0º–100º freeze-boil metric and the appeal of a new thing, Celsius’s centigrade scale caught on. In 1948, it was renamed for the man who invented it, and with the ensuing march of the metric system across the globe, Celsius knocked Fahrenheit off thermometers just about everywhere but in the United States, which, along with a few other bastions of free thought such as Myanmar, remains steadfast in refusing to accept a soulless measurement system. Mr. Fahrenheit would applaud.
(Incidentally, Celsius originally had 0º and not 100º representing the boiling point, but Carolus Linnaeus did his fellow Swede a solid by reversing the scale. In a way Linnaeus was returning a favor: For a time Anders’s uncle Olof Celsius had given the botanist a place to crash when he was hard up for money.)
crap·per n. A toilet; also, in phr. “crapper material,” a book or magazine meant to be read in the bathroom, e.g., this one.
Thomas Crapper is a man yet to receive his due. Most reputable arbiters of etymology deem urban legend the idea that he had anything to do with the word crapper. To be sure, the term crap predates Mr. Crapper. Crappa was a medieval Latin term meaning “chaff,” from which developed many variations, all generally meaning something leftover or garbagey. Crapper as a last name similarly has agricultural roots: It is
a variation on cropper.
The first usage of crap in regards to shit is recorded in 1846, too early for it to have anything to do with Thomas Crapper, who was not yet ten. Young Crapper, however, would grow up to be an early purveyor of the flush toilet. His London firm manufactured thousands of such toilets, all emphatically marked crapper’s. American servicemen visiting London during the Great War thought this was the funniest damn thing they had ever seen, and, according to one theory, brought back home with them a new word.
It does seem fair to question, however, just how a plumbing-fixtures manufacturer came by so serendipitous a surname. Fate? Or was it a case of nominative determinism, in which Thomas’s surname steered him into his life’s work? Or did Thomas choose the name Crapper for professional advantage? Now that would show some serious dedication to marketing.
cur·ry fa·vor v. To kiss ass.
Fauvel was a horse who decided it was high time to move out of the barn and into the master’s house. With the assistance of Dame Fortune, his wish came true; rather than be satisfied, however, Fauvel developed a thirst for power, and powerful he became. His fame spread—an animal in such a position must have been an important lord indeed—and the most important noblemen and church grandees from all over the land came to pay homage. In the presence of the great Fauvel, they bowed down to the horse and groomed him, showing that such people will do anything, no matter how humiliating, to gain favor.
The fable of Fauvel—an allegory for the corruption of church and state—first appeared in France in the early 1300s. Authored anonymously for political reasons, the Roman de Fauvel followed in the tradition of beast epics such as the Roman de Renart, albeit satirically. As for the character of Fauvel, the fauve-colored ass or horse had long symbolized hypocrisy, assumedly not owing to the Bambi-like hue itself but to the similarity between fauve and another French word, faus—modern faux—from the same root as the English false. Lest anyone miss the point, the author provided an acrostic explanation for the name in his poem, listing among the horse’s attributes Flatterie, Avarice (greed), Vilenie (guile), Variété (inconstancy), Envie, and Lâcheté (cowardice). This, of course, spells Favvel, but u’s and v’s were used interchangeably back then so it didn’t matter.
But why is it “to curry favor” and not “to groom Fauvel”? Curry is a defunct synonym for groom, though not defunct entirely, which anyone who’s ever currycombed a horse will know. As for Fauvel becoming favor, well, it just made more sense that way, especially to someone unfamiliar with the story. Another example of this type of folk etymology is bridegroom, once bridegome. Gome originally meant man (it is a cognate of the Latin homo) but fell out of use shortly after Chaucer’s day. Groom, before becoming horse-specific, signified a male servant of any kind, making it a perfectly apt replacement for its archaic near homonym.
Del·a·ware n. 1. A river in the northeastern U.S.
2. A Native American tribe. 3. A small, insignificant U.S. state.
Baron Thomas West De La Warre, freshly appointed governor of the Jamestown colony, landed on the Virginia coast in 1610 to find that the settlers there had had enough of this New World crap and were heading home to England. De La Warre ordered their ship turned around, assuring them that under his regime the settlers wouldn’t have so much to worry about. The local Powhatan tribe, however, would. The chief of the Powhatans had gone to war against the settlers (his daughter Pocahontas’s fondness for them be damned), an act the new governor for life set about punishing by raiding Native American villages, burning down houses and crops, stealing food, and kidnapping children. These were Irish tactics, skills De La Warre had honed putting down revolts on the Emerald Isle. They soon just became American tactics, and the process of freeing the land of its home braves was underway.
die·sel n. 1. A type of fuel. 2. An engine designed to run on said fuel. 3. A rusting, homely, hard-to-start car from the 1970s.
For those of you who blame 9/11 on George Bush and believe the Kennedy assassination was orchestrated by the military-industrial complex, I present to you Rudolf Diesel.
In 1897, Diesel unveiled a 25-horsepower engine revolutionary in its simplicity and superior efficiency. Diesel engines soon were everywhere, and Rudolf became wealthy off the royalties. Although he had investigated fuel sources such as ammonia steam, coal dust, and vegetable oil, Diesel settled on liquid petroleum to power his creation. However, at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris a diesel engine was run using peanut oil, a demonstration commissioned by the French, who were lacking in oil fields but had peanuts in abundance. Nothing came of the experiment, but in 1912 Diesel reflected back on the event, drawing conclusions that sound shockingly modern.
The fact that fat oils from vegetable sources can be used may seem insignificant today, but such oils . . . make it certain that motor-power can still be produced from the heat of the sun, which is always available for agricultural purposes, even when all our natural stores of solid and liquid fuels are exhausted.
A year later, Diesel was dead. Was it an accident, suicide, or assassination? Here are the facts:
On September 29, 1913, Diesel boarded an overnight boat from Antwerp to London and was last seen going on deck around ten P.M. When attendants came to his cabin at six fifteen the next morning to wake him, the engineer was gone, his bed not slept in. Ten days later, Diesel’s bloated body was found floating in the English Channel. The official cause of death was accidental drowning, but Diesel had suffered from mental breakdowns and economic setbacks, so suicide seemed a plausible alternative. Conspiracies, however, were shouted immediately across newspaper headlines. The British Secret Service murdered him to steal U-boat secrets, they said, or the Germans did him in to protect those secrets, or—most tantalizingly—the assassination was carried out by the titans of the oil trusts out of fear Diesel would put them out of business.
Here’s to hoping that his engine—or something else— soon does.
BREEDS APART
Jack Russell was called the Sporting Parson because, while he may have been a reverend, his true calling was the hunt. Back in his final year at Oxford, Russell came across a milkman with his doggie in tow, a white terrier with charming tan spots about her eyes and ears. Smitten, Russell bought little Trump on the spot. To his delight, Trump made a splendid hunting companion, gifted especially in rooting foxes out of their dens, and he used her to mother the breed that would take his name. The Jack Russell exemplifies all things terrier—tenacity, feisty aggressiveness, and intelligence— and takes those traits to the extreme.
Louis Dobermann wanted an extreme sort of dog himself—extremely terrifying. Dobermann’s motives were partly professional, the industrious German being a night watchman and tax collector, dangerous jobs both. However, it was in his third capacity, as town dogcatcher, that he had access to the breeds he needed to get the right mix of temperament, appearance, and that all-important size. It is unknown exactly which breeds Dobermann made use of, but somewhere in the genetic stew were the German pinscher, German shepherd, Great Dane, and rottweiler, which should give you some idea of the kind of animal he was aiming for. The result of Dobermann’s efforts was Bismarck, the ultimate Hund from Hell, a black bitch whose offspring were a major hit with the German people.
dra·co·ni·an adj. Cruel, harsh, severe.
Draco was an Athenian lawmaker who drew up a seriously nasty penal code sometime around 621 B.C. The crotchety Draco was pro–death penalty to the extreme: Among qualifying offenses under his edicts were murder, treason, sacrilege, petty theft, and “idleness.” When questioned if maybe death wasn’t a bit too harsh for petty crimes, Draco reportedly said the real shame was that he couldn’t prescribe anything worse for the bigger ones.
Draco’s laws were posted for all to see on axones, wooden pyramids that spun around like magazine racks. For people to know what the laws even were was an innovation back then, let alone to have them written down. This benevolent reform notwithstanding, Draco and his laws were intensely hated.
dunce n. A dullard; a dolt; a dum-dum. Duh.
John Duns Scotus was a Scottish theologian and one the most influential thinkers of the Middle Ages. An ardent follower of Saint Francis, Duns Scotus spent his career at the universities of Oxford, Paris, and Cologne. He provided the definitive argument on the then culture-war issue of the Immaculate Conception, after which it became Catholic dogma that Mary was conceived without sin. For his delicately shaded approach to this and similar difficult issues he earned the nickname Doctor Subtilis, and his theories held sway from his 1308 death through the end of the Middle Ages.
Duns Scotus’s followers, the Scotists, dominated theology until another gang of scholars, the Thomists (after Thomas Aquinas), encroached on their turf. These new philosophers ridiculed the hairsplitting sophistry of Dr. Subtilis and his Dunsmen, who were impervious to learning anything new and different. The Scotists reacted reactionarily, resisting any change that threatened their preeminence. But their creed lost cred, and in the intellectual rumble of the Renaissance the elegant theories of Duns Scotus were knifed on account of his blockhead followers, and so to be called a dunce became the worst insult a would-be man of letters could receive, the irony of which would have been painfully obvious to Dr. Subtilis, if not the Dunsmen themselves.*
frick and frack n. 1. A closely linked or inseparable pair. 2. A couple of morons.
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