As for how things went against General Lee: not well. The showdown between Hooker and the Gray Ghost at Chancellorsville became known as Lee’s Perfect Battle, if that gives you some idea of the outcome. After the defeat Hooker, like Burnside, offered his resignation to Lincoln with the expectation that it wouldn’t be accepted, and he, like Burnside, received an unpleasant surprise from Honest Abe.
hoo·li·gan n. A ruffian.
A fixture around Southwark, a nineteenth-century Irish slum in London, Patrick Hooligan worked as a bouncer at neighborhood pubs. He was better known, however, as the mentor of young hoodlums, whom he instructed in the arts of robbery and assault. One day, old Paddy got into an argument with a bobby, killed him, and dumped the body in a garbage cart. Hooligan was nabbed and died soon after in prison, but his life’s work was carried on by numerous London street gangs who bore his name and by soccer fans in stadiums across the land.
ja·cuz·zi n. A whirlpool bath. v. To take one.
In the beginning, Candido Jacuzzi just wanted to help his son. The poor boy suffered from severe rheumatoid arthritis and his only relief came from the hydrotherapy treatments he received at the hospital. In order to give his child round-the-clock whirlpool access, Jacuzzi developed a portable pump that could be placed into a bathtub. Being an engineer, he had the skills to do this; as co-owner of a Northern California manufacturing company, he had the capability. He and his six older brothers had started making aircraft equipment in 1915, but with the J-300 the Jacuzzis entered a new field.
Roy Jacuzzi had more vision than his uncle Candido and better marketing acumen. He smelled opportunity for the J-300 in late 1960s California and repackaged it as a stand-alone product he dubbed the Roman Bath. Sales were so good that a larger model, the Adonis, was introduced in 1970, followed by Jacuzzi’s great breakthrough, the multi-person Gemini unit, available in a wide array of colors and swanky styles.
Swinging changed forever.
jan·i·tor n. A man who pushes a cart of cleaning supplies down the halls of an institutional building.
Pity poor Janus, once the mightiest Roman deity of all. He was the father of the gods—until his worshippers fell all over themselves for the flashier, sexier Greek pantheon and left Janus to be god of doors. (Those who attended to him—that is, doorkeepers—were called janitors.) Janus was well suited to his task, at least, having a face on both the front and back of his head. Romans believed this also allowed the god to see into both the future and the past, and for this reason Janus presided over the month that opened and closed each year.
January was a late entry to the Roman calendar, added at the same time as February. For centuries there were only ten months, winter being deemed unworthy of month-hood since nothing grew then. With the exception of February, the first four of the original months were, like January, named after deities: March for Mars, April for Apru (an Etruscan borrowing of Aphrodite), May for Maia (a Roman earth goddess), and June for Juno ( Jupiter’s wife). The rest of the months were simply numbered, which—once the first of January was set as the official start to the year—created the odd situation of the ninth through twelfth months being named for the Latin numbers seven through ten, that is, September, October, November, December. And we would still have the summer months of Quintilis and Sextilis if not for a couple of emperors named Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus.
The Romans didn’t end with months when it came to honoring their deities. They believed that the planets represented gods who kept a rotating watch over the mortal coil as they crossed the sky. When the Romans adopted the seven-day week, they named the days after whichever god had the first shift of the morning. Conveniently, there were exactly seven planets according to ancient astronomy: Sol (the sun), Luna (the moon), Mars, Mercury, Jove (another name for Jupiter), Venus (or Venere), and Saturn.
A person’s temperament was believed to be shaped by whichever god ruled over his or her birth, making you either solar, lunar, martial, mercurial, jovial, venereal, or saturnine. The latter four adjectives remain consistent with their Latin meaning, with the exception of venereal, which, before it became inextricably linked with STDs, meant “inclined to be lascivious; addicted to venery or lust,” which is pretty much how it got to be inextricably linked with STDs in the first place.
jum·bo adj. Enormous; huge; really, really big.
One fine morning in 1861, a little elephant awoke expecting to spend another day munching grass on the sunny savannah. Alas, he never would again. Captured by exotic animal traders, the unwitting pachyderm was shipped off to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, where he spent the unhappy remainder of his calfhood. Skinny, sickly, and only four feet tall, he was unceremoniously swapped to the London Zoo for a rhinoceros.
Named Jumbo by his new zookeeper—it kind of sounded African—the elephant began to grow. And how could he not? His daily menu included two hundred pounds of hay, two bushels of oats, ten to fifteen loaves of bread, a barrel of potatoes ( Jumbo did not bant), a bunch of onions, and many, many barrels of water, with an additional one of whiskey or ale on occasion, for his health. Who says you eat better in Paris than in London?
Jumbo, now enormous, became a hit with the crowds. He’d snatch up coins and peanuts in his trunk and give rides to the kiddies for pocket change, including a couple of young tykes named Winnie Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt. And then a man took a ride on his back who knew he could charge a whole lot more than a few measly shillings for the Jumbo experience.
In 1881, Phineas T. Barnum expanded his circus from two to an unprecedented three rings. Needing a star, P. T. went out and bought seven tons of one. The outrage across Britannia was immediate and intense. Schoolchildren wrote letters of protest to Queen Victoria, who herself was outraged but couldn’t do anything to reverse the ten-thousand-dollar sale. The London Daily Telegraph bemoaned how poor Jumbo would have no more shady walks in the park and instead be forced to “amuse the Yankee mob.” The controversy resulted in a publicity bonanza for Barnum, who billed Jumbo as the largest elephant in the world. America was seized by Jumbomania. Every product imaginable was called Jumbo. There were Jumbo cigars, Jumbo trading cards, Jumbo fans—if something was big, it was Jumbo-sized! The new attraction sold more than a million dollars in tickets for Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth in the first year alone.
For Jumbo, stardom wasn’t that great. In a self-destructive burst reminiscent of so many later celebrities, Jumbo ran wild one day in Canada and was killed by a train. Some say he was drunk, others that he was in a blind rage, while Barnum, ever the master of spin, claimed Jumbo had been struck down while bravely rescuing a baby elephant, pushing the little fellow out of the way of the locomotive at the last instant.
le·o·tard n. A snugly fitting, stretchable one-piece garment worn by dancers, gymnasts, and 1980s exercise queens.
When Jumbo arrived in Paris, there was another kind of circus phenomenon underway. Jules Léotard, the son of a gymnasium owner, was a novice acrobat when he hit upon a brilliant idea: how about, instead of doing his routine on fixed bars, he did it on bars that swung? On November 12, 1859, at the tender age of twenty-one, Léotard made his public debut at the Cirque-Napoleon in Paris, and in a single performance created an art form. As if by magic he passed from one bar to the other, and even executed midair somersaults between them. With his lady-killing looks and birdlike abilities, Léotard became an international superstar, inspiring a Jumbo-like assortment of merchandise as well as the 1867 song “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.” For his shows, Léotard redesigned the standard acrobat’s maillot into a flesh-hugging one-piece that both allowed fluid motion and showed off his show-offable muscles. It became known as the leotard and quickly found use in other arenas, such as the ballet studios of Paris.
All this, and poor Jules died at thirty-one.
lynch v. To execute, esp. by hanging, without due process.
“If you were a settler there, and had no other law to defend you, you would be glad of the pr
otection of Judge Lynch,” Sir Charles Lyell reported in his 1849 book A Second Visit to the United States of North America. The Judge Lynch in question was a mythical figure on the frontier, the authority invoked in the meting out of justice where there was no authority, at least none that those doing the meting desired to consult.
The “Lynch law” brand of vigilantism justice was seen by many nineteenth-century folk as a positively good thing. In the early 1800s an old Virginia farmer named William Lynch took credit for having assembled the original Lynch men back in Revolutionary days; a 1780 compact later turned up explaining why. Citing bands of lawless malefactors who committed horse stealing, counterfeiting, and “other species of villainy,” Lynch and his fellow subscribers to the pact promised that “if they will not desist from their evil practices we will inflict such corporeal punishment on him or them, as to us shall seem adequate.” No bothersome interference from courts or judges needed.
Old Lynch was just the kind of redneck you’d expect to be behind the Lynch law. But there was another Lynch, a Quaker by the name of Charles, who might have been the original judge. The Quaker Lynch was a justice of the peace and militia leader in Revolutionary War Virginia who was involved in rounding up and arresting a ring of British sympathizers supposedly planning a loyalist uprising. The Tory prisoners were given summary trials and dealt sentences that included hanging and were retroactively approved by the state legislature a couple of years later, perhaps sowing the perception that Lynch laws had inherent legitimacy.
So which Lynch was it? Recent research points to Charles, who is on record for using both the terms “Lynch’s law” (1782) and “lynching” in reference to himself. As for William, he wouldn’t be the first guy to stretch the truth; today it might have netted him a book deal and a guest shot on Oprah. And as for the 1780 pact he and his men made, this agreement—quoted and reprinted far and wide over the years—was likely a hoax perpetrated by Edgar Allan Poe, in whose Southern Literary Messenger it first appeared.
mal·a·prop·ism n. An absurd masseuse of language.
Mrs. Malaprop was a character in The Rivals, a comedy that debuted on the London stage in 1775 and was a long-lived hit across the English-speaking world. The actresses who played Mrs. Malaprop would elicit peals of laughter from the audience with lines such as “He is the very pineapple of politeness!” or “I am sorry to say, Sir Anthony, that my affluence over my niece is very small.” (People would kind of laugh at anything back then.) The author, Richard Sheridan, modeled the character’s surname on the French word malapropos.
THE MILLINER’S TRADE
The top hat ushered in the modern era of men’s head wear with its introduction shortly before 1800. No man about town would go without one, but the problem was, they were so tall and unwieldy; what were you supposed to do with the hats once you took them off? With a few steel springs Frenchman Antoine Gibus rectified this problem, inventing the collapsible top hat, called an opera or crush hat, or a gibus.
William Coke II had a different solution: make the bloody thing shorter. Coke was sick and tired of all the goddamn tree branches knocking off his top hats when he took a horseback ride, so in 1850 he commissioned a more manageable and sturdier cap, which came to be known popularly as the bowler, after Thomas and William Bowler, the Southwark hatters who manufactured it. The name suited the hat and its bowllike shape, although the French, seeing a different silhouette, called it a chapeau melon.
In the U.S. the bowler was instead known as a derby, supposedly because Americans became aware of the style from English dandies attending the Epsom Derby. The derby was the premier event in horse racing, so much so that the name came to mean “race” in a variety of contexts, from Kentucky to roller. Its origin dates to a 1779 coin toss, when Edward Smith-Stanley, the twelfth Earl of Derby, flipped Sir Charles Bunbury for the honor. (Rollerbunbury, anyone?) Although to this day a fashion must among women in the Andes, the bowler/ derby eventually yielded to softer hats with manipulat-able crowns and brims.
Fédora debuted in 1882 with Sarah Bernhardt in the title role, a part written expressly for her by Victorien Sardou. Sardou and Bernhardt would work together many times, most famously in La Tosca (later adapted by Puccini), but it was the hat-wearing Princess Fédora Romanoff who set off a craze, as many a female fan of Bernhardt took to the streets sporting a fedora in a statement of both fashion and women’s liberation.
Similar to the fedora but with a narrower brim is the trilby, whose name also—bizarrely—derives from a play’s titular female character. The hat was worn in the first London production of Trilby, adapted from the hugely bestselling 1894 George Du Maurier novel of the same name. Set in bohemian 1850s Paris, the story follows the beautiful young artist’s model Trilby O’Ferrall as she falls under the control of the malicious, manipulative hypnotist Svengali. Normally, Trilby is tone-deaf, but under Svengali’s mesmeric spell, she becomes singing sensation La Svengali. It ends badly.
Baseball cap aside, the most American of headwear is the cowboy hat, aka the stetson, although upon its introduction John B. Stetson called his product “The Boss of the Plains.” Stetson recognized that a hat offering so much shade would provide welcome relief for the workingman out west. The stetson quickly became an indispensable part of the cowboy uniform and, in its ten-gallon variety, a symbol of Texas. If a man is “all hat and no cattle,” he’s wearing a stetson, even if only figuratively.
The need for shade on another frontier produced a different sort of hat. Improvised by British troops to keep the sun off their necks, the havelock is a cap with a hanging rear flap—think French Foreign Legion. The hat is named in homage to Major-General Sir Henry Havelock, who died of dysentery days after notching one of the most important British victories of the Indian Rebellion (a conflict previously known, when the winners named such things, as the Indian Mutiny).
Another military hat is the busby, by long-standing tradition said to be named after Dr. Richard Busby, a seventeenth-century headmaster so renowned for caning his charges that he appears in Alexander Pope’s Dunciad “Dropping with Infant’s blood.” Entering the lexicon as a “large bushy wig” (referring to the sadistic headmaster’s coif, perhaps?), the meaning of busby somehow switched reference to the tall and furry plumed hat of the much-copycatted Hungarian hussar.
Finally, there’s the tam-o’-shanter, worn by every bagpipe player you’ve ever seen, with the tartan pattern and the toorie on top. The classic Scottish bonnet is named after a 1790 poem by Robert Burns, known in Scotland simply as the Bard. (William who?) The brilliant Burns wrote in a mixture of English and Scots dialect, the latter evident in the title of his “Auld Lang Syne.” “Tam o’ Shanter” recounts the late-night drunken ride of its title character. “Inspiring bold John Barleycorn! What dangers thou canst make us scorn!” it goes, and as Tam nears the kirk, he happens upon a witches’ Sabbath. The party is in full swing, and Tam is particularly taken with the dancing of one scantily clad winsome witch: “[Tam] roars out, ‘Weel done, Cuttysark!’ And in an instant, all was dark.” The offended witches give chase, but just in time Tam’s horse, Meg, makes the Brig o’ Doon and the hellish legion vanishes, unable to cross the water.
(For those interested: Tam is a Scottish variant of Tom; o’ Shanter identifies his town of origin; a toorie is a pom-pom; auld lang syne means “old long since,” in the sense of “long ago”; a kirk is a church; “Weel done, Cutty-sark!” is akin to “Lookin’ good, Hotpants!,” cutty meaning short, as in cut off, and sark being Scots for shirt; and a brig is a bridge.)
mar·ti·net n. A merciless disciplinarian; a stickler for rules regardless of circumstance.
When Louis XIV ascended to the throne, French soldiery was a sorry lot. The ever-increasing importance of gunpowder-powered projectiles presented a particular challenge to the Gallic warrior, who exhibited a tendency to run the other way at the sound of it. The question was, How do you make men do something so stupid as hurl themselves headlong into a storm of canno
n and musket balls? The answer: Bring on Jean Martinet, the original drill instructor.
King Louis made Martinet, who showed his mettle whipping the Régiment du Roi into shape, inspector general of the infantry in 1667, convinced that Martinet’s extreme brand of drilling would turn his soldiers into the mindless lemmings he desired. With draconian severity, Martinet instilled discipline and efficiency while demanding absolute adherence to even the pettiest of rules, paving the way for the future Sergeant Hulkas of the world and turning the French infantry into a well-oiled machine—no mean feat. For this achievement Martinet gained fame across the continent and the enduring contempt of his men.
Martinet would not live long. The drillmaster was killed during the siege of Duisburg, when he was shot down by the “friendly fire” of his own perfectly trained, well-disciplined troops.
A last note. In French a martinet is a swallow, but also a kind of whip, similar to a cat-o’-nine-tails and excellent for scourging. Until recently, martinets were available in pet-supply stores in France but have since been removed as they were being used mostly on children. They do, however, remain top sellers in S&M shops. Speaking of which, see next.
mas·och·ism n. The urge to derive pleasure from abuse and humiliation as administered by another or oneself, or one’s sports team.
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was a writer in Hapsburg Austria of the generation that preceded Freud and Klimt. His signature work was Venus im Pelz (Venus in Furs), about a man who becomes obsessed with a woman named Wanda; the more he loves her, the more he wants to be degraded by her, to the point that he begs to become her legal slave. They sign a contract in which he promises to do whatever Wanda asks, with the singular condition that she always wear furs. Sadly for the hero, Wanda falls in love with another man who isn’t such a wuss.
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