Sock. Hose. Stocking. However we define these related words today, or choose to use them interchangeably in a sentence, one thing is certain: originally they were not the items they are now. The sock, for instance, was a soft leather slipper worn by Roman women and effeminate men. Hose covered the leg but not the foot. The word “stocking” does not appear in the vocabulary of dress until the sixteenth century, and its evolution up the leg from the foot took hundreds of years.
The history of men’s and women’s “socks” begins with the birth of garments that were “put on” rather than merely “wrapped around.”
The first “put on” items were worn by Greek women around 600 B.C.: a low, soft sandal-like shoe that covered mainly the toes and heel. (See page 294.) Called a sykhos, it was considered a shameful article for a man to wear and became a favorite comic theater gimmick, guaranteed to win a male actor a laugh.
Roman women copied the Greek sykhos and Latinized its name to soccus. It, too, was donned by Roman mimes, making it for centuries standard comedy apparel, as baggy pants would later become the clown’s trademark.
The soccus sandal was the forerunner both of the word “sock” and of the modern midcalf sock. From Rome, the soft leather soccus traveled to the British Isles, where the Anglo-Saxons shortened its name to soc. And they discovered that a soft soc worn inside a coarse boot protected the foot from abrasion. Thus, from its home inside the boot, the soc was on its way to becoming the modern sock. Interestingly, the Roman soccus also traveled to Germany, where it was worn inside a boot, its spelling abbreviated to socc, which until the last century meant both cloth footwear and a lightweight shoe.
Hose. In ancient times in warm Mediterranean countries, men wore wraparound skirts, having no need for the leg protection of pants. In the colder climates of Northern Europe, though, Germanic tribes wore loose-fitting trousers reaching from waist to ankle and called heuse. For additional warmth, the fabric was commonly crisscrossed with rope from ankle to knee, to shield out drafts.
This style of pants was not unique to Northern Europeans. When Gaius Julius Caesar led his Roman legions in the first-century B.C. conquest of Gaul, his soldiers’ legs were protected from cold weather and the thorns and briers of northwestern forests by hosa—gathered leg coverings of cloth or leather worn beneath the short military tunic. The word hosa became “hose,” which for many centuries denoted gathered leg coverings that reached down only to the ankles.
Logically, it might seem that in time, leg hose were stitched to ankle socks to form a new item, stockings. However, that is not what happened. The forerunner of modern stockings are neither socks nor hose but, as we’re about to see, undones.
Stockings: 5th Century, Rome
By A.D. 100, the Romans had a cloth foot sock called an udo (plural, udones). The earliest mention of the garment is found in the works of the poet and epigrammatist M. Valerius Martialis, who wrote that in udones, the “feet will be able to take refuge in cloth made of goat’s hair.”
At that time, the udo fitted over the foot and shinbone. Within a period of one hundred years, Roman tailors had extended the udo up the leg to just above the knee, to be worn inside boots. Men who wore the stocking without boots were considered effeminate; and as these knee-length udones crept farther up the leg to cover the thigh, the stigma of effeminacy for men who sported them intensified.
Unfortunately, history does not record when and why the opprobrium of effeminacy attached to men wearing stockings disappeared. But it went slowly, over a period of one hundred years, and Catholic clergymen may well have been the pioneering trendsetters. The Church in the fourth century adopted above-the-knee stockings of white linen as part of a priest’s liturgical vestments. Fifth-century church mosaics display full-length stockings as the vogue among the clergy and laity of the Roman Empire.
Stockings had arrived and they were worn by men.
The popularity of form-fitting stockings grew in the eleventh century, and they became trousers known as “skin tights.” When William the Conqueror crossed the English Channel in 1066 and became the Norman king of England, he and his men introduced skin tights to the British Isles. And his son, William Rufus, wore French stocking pants (not much different in design from today’s panty hose) of such exorbitant cost that they were immortalized in a poem. By the fourteenth century, men’s tights so accurately revealed every contour of the leg, buttocks, and crotch that churchmen condemned them as immodest.
The rebellious nature of a group of fourteenth-century Venetian youths made stocking pants even more scandalous, splitting teenagers and parents into opposing camps.
A fraternity of men calling themselves La Compagna della Calza, or The Company of the Hose, wore short jackets, plumed hats, and motley skin tights, with each leg a different color. They presented public entertainments, masquerades, and concerts, and their brilliant outfits were copied by youths throughout Italy. “Young men,” complained one chronicler of the period, “are in the habit of shaving half their heads, and wearing a close-fitting cap.” And he reported that decent people found the “tight-fitting hose…to be positively immodest.” Even Geoffrey Chaucer commented critically on the attire of youth in The Canterbury Tales. Skin-tight, bicolored stockings may indeed have been the first rebellious fashion statement made by teenagers.
From a fourteenth-century British illustration of an attendant handing stocking to her mistress. It’s the first pictorial evidence of a woman wearing stockings.
The stockings discussed so far were worn by priests, warriors, and young men. When did women begin to roll on stockings?
Fashion historians are undecided. They believe that women wore stockings from about A.D. 600. But because long gowns concealed legs, there is scant evidence in paintings and illustrated manuscripts that, as one eighteenth-century writer expressed it, “women had legs.”
Among the earliest pictorial evidence of a woman in stockings is an illustrated 1306 British manuscript which depicts a lady in her boudoir, seated at the edge of the bed, with a servant handing her one of a pair of stockings. The other stocking is already on her leg. As for one of the earliest references to the garment in literature, Chaucer, in The Canterbury Tales, comments that the Wife of Bath wore stockings “of fine skarlet redde.”
Still, references to women’s stockings are extremely rare up until the sixteenth century. Female legs, though undoubtedly much admired in private, were something never to be mentioned in public. In the sixteenth century, a British gift of silk stockings for the queen of Spain was presented with full protocol to the Spanish ambassador, who drawing himself haughtily erect, proclaimed: “Take back thy stockings. And know, foolish sir, that the Queen of Spain hath no legs.”
In Queen Elizabeth’s England, women’s stockings fully enter history, and with fashion flair. In extant texts, stockings are described as colored “scarlet crimson” and “purple,” and as “beautified with exquisite embroideries and rare incisions of the cutters art.” In 1561, the third year of her reign, Elizabeth was presented with her first pair of knitted silk stockings, which converted her to silk to the exclusion of all other stocking fabrics for the remainder of her life.
It was also during Elizabeth’s reign that the Reverend William Lee, in 1589, invented the “loome” for machine-knitting stockings. The Reverend Lee wrote that for the first time, stockings were “knit on a machine, from a single thread, in a series of connected loops.” That year, the hosiery industry began.
Nylon Stockings: May 15, 1940, United States
Because of the public-relations fanfare surrounding the debut of nylon stockings, there is no ambiguity concerning their origin. Perhaps there should have been skepticism, though, of the early claim that a pair of stockings would “last forever.”
The story begins on October 27, 1938, when the Du Pont chemical company announced the development of a new synthetic material, nylon, “passing in strength and elasticity any previously known textile fibers.” On the one hand, the breakthroug
h meant that the hosiery industry would no longer be periodically jeopardized by shortages of raw silk for silk stockings. But manufacturers also feared that truly indestructible stockings would quickly bankrupt the industry.
While the “miracle yarn” was displayed at the 1939 World’s Fair, women across America eagerly awaited the new nylon stockings. Test wearers were quoted as saying the garments endured “unbelievable hours of performance.”
Du Pont had shipped selected hosiery manufacturers spools of nylon yarn, which they agreed to knit according to company specifications. The mills then allotted nylon stockings to certain stores, on the promise that none be sold before “Nylon Day,” slated as May 15 of that year, 1940.
The hysteria that had been mounting across the country erupted early on that mid-May morning. Newspapers reported that no consumer item in history ever caused such nationwide pandemonium. Women queued up hours before store doors opened. Hosiery departments were stampeded for their limited stock of nylon stockings. In many stores, near riots broke out. By the close of that year, three million dozen pairs of women’s nylons had been sold—and that number could have been significantly higher if more stockings were available.
At first, the miracle nylons did appear to be virtually indestructible. Certainly that was true in comparison to delicate silk stockings. And it was also true because, due to nylons’ scarcity, women doubtless treated the one or two pairs they managed to buy with greater care than they did silk stockings.
In a remarkably short time, silk stockings were virtually obsolete. And nylon stockings became simply “nylons.” Women after all had legs, and never before in history were they so publicly displayed and admired.
Sex-Related Words: Post-11th Century, England and France
With the conquest of England in 1066 by William of Normandy, the Anglo-Saxon language of the British Isles underwent several alterations. As the French-speaking Normans established themselves as the ruling caste, they treated the native Saxons and their language as inferior. Many Saxon words were regarded as crude simply because they were spoken by Saxons. Some of these words, once inoffensive, survived and passed eventually into English as coarse, impolite, or foul expressions. Etymologists list numerous examples of “polite” (Norman) and “impolite” (Saxon) words:
Norman Anglo-Saxon
Norman
Anglo-Saxon
Perspiration
Sweat
Dine
Eat
Deceased
Dead
Desire
Want
Urine
Piss
Excrement
Shit
The mother tongue of the twelve kings and queens from William I (who ruled from 1066 to 1087) to Richard II (from 1377 to 1399) was the Normans’ French, though the Anglo-Saxons’ English continued to be spoken. When the two tongues blended into a new language, Middle English, which became the official language of the court in 1362 and the language for teaching in the universities at Oxford and Cambridge in 1380, we inherited many double expressions. In addition to those listed above, the Norman “fornicate” came to be the respectable replacement for the Saxon “fuck,” which itself derived from the Old English word fokken, meaning “to beat against.”
The Normans, of course, had obtained their word “fornicate” from an earlier language, and etymologists trace the origin to fornix, Latin for a small, vaulted-ceiling basement room that could be rented for a night. For in Roman Christian times, prostitutes practiced their trade secretly in such underground rooms, much the way a modern prostitute might rent a motel room. Fornix first became a noun synonymous with “brothel,” then a verb meaning “to frequent a brothel,” fornicari, and finally the name of the activity conducted therein.
The word “prostitute” comes to us from the Latin prostitutus, meaning “offered for sale.” It not only reflects that a hooker charges for services, but as the verb “to prostitute,” connotes sacrificing one’s integrity for material gain. “Prostitute” was itself a euphemism for the Old English word “whore,” a term that once merely suggested desire.
“Hooker” is believed to be associated with General Joseph (“Fighting Joe”) Hooker of Civil War fame. To bolster the morale of his men, General Hooker is supposed to have allowed prostitutes access to his troops in camp, where they became known as “Hooker’s girls.” When a section of Washington was set aside for brothels, it acquired the name Hooker’s Division, and the local harlots became hookers.
The term “gay,” synonymous today with “homosexual,” dates back to thirteenth-century France, when gai referred to the “cult of courtly love” —that is, homosexual love—and a “lover” was a gaiol. Troubadour poetry of that period explicitly discusses this “cult” love. In the following centuries, the word was appropriated to describe first a prostitute, then any social undesirable, and lastly, in a homophobic British culture, to describe both homosexuality and the homosexual himself. Its first public use in the United States (aside from pornographic fiction) was in a 1939 Hollywood comedy, Bringing Up Baby, when Cary Grant, sporting a dress, exclaimed that he had “gone gay.”
Chapter 14
From the Magazine Rack
Magazines in America: 1741, New England
Newspapers were developed to appeal to the general public; magazines, on the other hand, were intended from the start to deliver more narrowly focused material to special-interest groups, and they experienced a difficult birth. In America, early magazines failed so quickly and frequently that the species was continually endangered, several times extinct.
The origin of the magazine, following the development of the printing press in fifteenth-century Germany, was straightforward: printed single-page leaflets expanded into multipage pamphlets that filled the middle ground between newspapers and books. History’s first magazine was the 1633 German periodical Erbauliche Monaths-Unterredungen, or Edifying Monthly Discussions, started by Johann Rist, a poet and theologian from Hamburg. Strongly reflecting its publisher’s dual vocations, the “monthly” appeared whenever Rist could spare the time to write and print it, and its edifying contents strictly embodied the author’s own views. It lasted, on and off, for five years—an eternity for early magazines.
Magazines for light reading, for diversion, and for exclusively female readership began appearing by the mid-seventeenth century. Two are notable for having established a format that survives to this day.
A 1672 French publication, Mercure Galant, combined poems, colorful anecdotes, feature articles, and gossip on the nobles at court. And in 1693, a British publisher took the bold step of introducing a magazine devoted to “the fairer sex.” Ladies’ Mercury offered advice on etiquette, courtship, and child rearing, plus embroidery patterns and home cosmetic preparations, along with dollops of light verse and heavy doses of gossip—a potpourri of how-tos, delights, and inessentials that could not be found in newspapers or books. The magazine found itself a niche and set forth a formula for imitators.
Magazines originated to fill the middle ground between newspapers and books.
While “penny weeklies” thrived in centuries-old Europe, in the nascent American colonies they encountered indifferent readership, reluctant authorship, and seemingly insurmountable circulation problems that turned many a weekly into a semiannual.
Due to competitive forces, America’s first two magazines, both political, were issued within three days of each other. In February 1741, Benjamin Franklin’s General Magazine, and Historical Chronicle, For all the British Plantations in America was narrowly beaten to publication by the rival effort of publisher Andrew Bradford: American Magazine, or A Monthly View of the Political State of the British Colonies. A fierce quarrel ensued and both Philadelphia periodicals quickly folded; Bradford’s after three months, Franklin’s after six.
Numerous other magazines were started—spanning spectrums from poetry to prose, fact to fiction, politics to how-to—and most of them failed. Noah Webster lamented in 17
88, “The expectation of failure is connected with the very name of a Magazine.” And the New-York Magazine, one of the longest-lived of the eighteenth-century ventures, went to its inevitable demise editorializing: “Shall every attempt of this nature desist in these States? Shall our country be stigmatised, odiously stigmatised, with want of taste for literature?”
Why such failure?
Three factors are to blame: broadly, the reader, the writer, and the mails.
The American reader: In 1741, the year Benjamin Franklin’s magazine debuted, the population of the colonies was only about one million, whites and blacks, many of both races illiterate. This sparse population was scattered over an area measuring more than twelve hundred miles north to south along the seaboard, and at some points, a thousand miles westward. And in most regions the roads were, as one publication stated, “wretched, not to say shameful.” Stagecoach travel between the major cities of Boston and New York took eight to ten days. Thus, it’s not surprising that during the eighteenth century, no American magazine achieved a readership higher than fifteen hundred; the average number of subscribers was about eight hundred.
The American writer: Only less discouraging than a small and scattered readership was the unwillingness of eighteenth-century writers to contribute to magazines, which they viewed as inferior to books and newspapers. Consequently, most of the early American magazines reprinted material from books, newspapers, and European magazines. As the editor of the moribund New-York Magazine bemoaned, “In the present state of this Western World, voluntary contributions are not to be depended on.”
The American mails: Horse-carried mail was of course faster than mail delivered by stagecoach, but magazines (and newspapers) in the eighteenth century were admitted to the mails only at the discretion of local postmasters. In fact, many of America’s early magazine publishers were postmasters, who readily franked their own products and banned those of competitors. This gave postmasters immense power over the press, and it led to corruption in political campaigns, forcing politicians to pay regional postmasters in order to appear in print. Even the honorable Benjamin Franklin, appointed postmaster of Philadelphia in 1737, discriminated in what publications his post riders could carry.
Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things Page 46