Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into History

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

c. After the city of Cologne, Germany, where it was created.

  8. COMB

  a. The first were comb and brush “combinations.”

  b. After British dandy John Breck, the duke of Combs.

  c. The ancient Indo-European word “gombhos” for “teeth.”

  Jungle Book author Rudyard Kipling would write with only black ink.

  1-b. Aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) is a man-made variation of an ancient remedy. It was rediscovered in 1893 by a German chemist who was looking for something to relieve his father’s arthritis pain. Chemists at Bayer (yes, Bayer) in Dusseldorf knew a winner when they saw one, and took the “a” from “acetyl,” the “spir” from “spirea,” and tacked on the “in” for good measure. In 1921, in a court decision, it lost its trademarked status.

  2-c. From the Latin, that simple. But one interesting story concerns a pharmacist named Max Kiss, who added chocolate to a chemical laxative and marketed it under the name Bo-Bo. Someone, thank goodness, told him it was too close to “poo-poo,” so he changed the name to a contraction for “Excellent Laxative,” or ExLax.

  3-a. In the fall, long after it’s lost every leaf and is presumed dead, this woody shrub produces yellow flowers; for this reason it was thought to be magic. In fact Native-American witch hazel twigs have long been used as divining rods for finding water. American Indian tribes taught the colonists how to use the plant to soothe cuts and abrasions.

  4-a. The name is derived from an abbreviation of the chemical name.

  5-a. Why its earliest derivation meant “to trickle,” it’s hard to say, except that soap and water have been best buds for as long as we can remember.

  6-b. In 1870s England, Hindu fashions, art, and phrases were all the rage, so British hairdressers added the word to their vocabularies.

  7-c. An Italian barber, Jean-Baptiste Farina, was living in Cologne, Germany, when he developed a concoction of lemon spirits, orange bitters, and bergamot oil. It was the first “eau de Cologne,” or “water of Cologne,” later shortened to just plain old “cologne.”

  8-c. The first combs were dried backbones and jawbones (or “gombhos”) of fish, as depicted in 6,000-year-old cave art, and found in later Egyptian tombs.

  The Old Farmer’s Almanac is North America’s oldest continuously published periodical.

  THE LONGBOW: NOT FOR SISSIES

  * * *

  A longbow, properly used, is still a heck of a weapon.

  THE DAWN OF THE EMPIRE

  Back in its day, roughly the 13th to 16th centuries, it wasn’t just a weapon, it was the weapon, the Über-tool of any serious arsenal. Probably invented in Germany or Scandinavia, the longbow traveled to Wales and then England, making that country a superpower in Europe, much to the surprise of the Continentals, especially the French. More on that in a minute.

  THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT

  Right now, let’s concentrate on the actual longbow itself. Historians debate on the original length of the longbow, but it was generally considered to be no less than five feet. Ideally, the bow was as tall or maybe just a little taller than the person wielding it, and made from yew, a type of wood known for its elasticity.

  A MANLY MAN’S WEAPON

  The longbow was not an easy weapon to master. The “pull” of a longbow, the amount of force needed to stretch the bowstring back to where it needed to be, was between 80 and 110 pounds; it’s a heck of an aerobic exercise, a fact which I’m sure generations of English longbowmen appreciated. Back in the 14th century, stair-stepping to the oldies was not considered manly.

  ATTACHED AT THE HIP

  You put your whole body into being a longbowman, and I don’t mean this metaphorically. Skeletons of longbow archers show signs of deformation consistent with the use of the bow: A spine curved in the direction of the pull arm, arm bones thick with compression, and coarsened bones in the fingers used to yank back the bowstring. It wasn’t just a weapon, it was a way of life.

  THE LONGBOW IN ACTION

  The good news was that all that work paid off in the long run. An experienced longbowman could hit a target with killing force 200 yards out. He could fire six to ten times in a minute, a rate of fire that no practical weapon would match well into the 19th century. A longbow arrow wouldn’t just bounce off a knight’s armor—it would go right through, spearing the knight inside like a crab impaled on a pick. Get a couple of thousand longbowmen together, point them at an equal or greater number of knights in armor, and what you’ve got, friends, is a massacre.

  Canada didn’t become a completely independent country until 1982.

  80 YEARS OF LESSONS. . .

  This fact the French learned—or more to the point, didn’t learn—in three major battles that defined the Hundred Years’ War:

  1. The Battle of Crécy

  The first of these is the Battle of Crécy, in 1346. The English came to the party with 10,000 archers and 4,000 men-at-arms (or, in modern terminology, “grunts”). The French had 12,000 men-at-arms and backup from cavalry. In this battle, the French kept driving up the middle of the English forces with their horses and knights; the bad news was that the English longbowmen were on the sides, picking them off as they came. It was a slaughter. The French lost 1,500 knights and King Phillip VI himself was wounded. The lesson: Watch out for those longbowmen, they’ll get you bad.

  2. The Battle of Poitiers

  Flash forward 20 years to the Battle of Poitiers. The French had the numbers, but the English had the archers and the terrain (thickets and marshes) on their side; when the dim-witted French lumbered in with horses and heavy armor, the longbowmen picked them off like wolves going after crippled sheep. This time the French king wasn’t wounded, he was taken prisoner.

  3. The Battle of Agincourt

  Leap another 60 years or so to perhaps the greatest single example of the superiority of the English longbowmen and the incredible military incompetence of the French in dealing with them: the fabled Battle of Agincourt, October 25, 1415. King Henry V of England, with 5,000 sick and wounded troops, was desperately trying to drag his troops back to England, when he ran smack dab into 30,000 French, fresh and spoiling for a fight. He and his exhausted crew were in deep foie gras, and would have been—should have been—brutally defeated, had not the French made an amazing tactical blunder, namely, picking Agincourt as the locale.

  Only one divorced man has become president of the U.S.—Ronald Reagan.

  3a. The Set-Up

  The field was more or less a narrow channel between two stands of forest; in order for the French to get at the English, they’d basically have to funnel their vast forces into a bottleneck. They would thus lose both the advantage of their huge number of troops, who would be unable to perform any large-scale maneuvers, and of their cavalry, who would have to wade through throngs of their own men-at-arms. As an added bonus, long rains in the days before the battle made the field of Agincourt a mudpit—not optimal cavalry ground. The bottleneck served the English longbowmen admirably as well, however. By concentrating their forces, the French made them incredibly easy to hit with longbow fire.

  3b. The Massacre

  The French funneled into Agincourt and died by the thousands, pincushioned with arrows from 5,000 English longbows. And while the English losses were not so light as Shakespeare indicated in Henry V (in which the dead were tallied at 25, not counting the occasional nobleman), they were nevertheless spectacularly low—something on the order of 500 compared to the French tally of at least 6,000 (1,500 of whom were knights in armor). The reason they were so low, of course, is that the longbowmen did all the heavy lifting; by the time Henry ordered his men-at-arms into the fray, the French were already decimated and in chaos. Agincourt won the French crown for Henry, and rightfully so.

  THE LONGBOW’S LAST FLING

  As for the longbow, its military service came to an end at the end of the 16th century not because it was obsolete as a weapon—in the late 1500s there was still no weapon that could beat its co
mbination of power, accuracy, and rate of fire—but because there were too few people taking up archery as a profession. The longbow didn’t fail us, we failed it.

  To be, or not to be: that is the question:

  Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

  The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

  Or to take arms against a sea of troubles. . .(Hamlet III.i)

  Before becoming leader of Solidarity, Lech Walesa was a shipyard electrician.

  AN 1844 FLIGHT OVER THE ATLANTIC? WHO SAID SO!

  * * *

  An extraordinary ballooning story that demonstrates the truly amazing power of hot air.

  On April 13, 1844, the New York Sun announced the first transatlantic balloon flight. Seems a Mr. Monck Mason, and his crew in Wales, tried to cross the English Channel, got caught in a strong wind, and landed in South Carolina! The story described the pioneering balloon in great detail, including a discussion of the use of ballast and even data on the amount of gas used.

  THE SUN WAS HOT

  When the balloon story appeared, an author named Edgar Allan Poe was anxious to buy a copy of the Sun, but he couldn’t even get near the building where the paper was published, the crowds were so thick. People paid outrageous prices for a copy of the paper, and crooked newsboys made huge profits. The unlucky Mr. Poe couldn’t get his hands on a single copy.

  THE BALLOON BURSTS

  On April 15, the Sun had to admit that the story was all hot air. Their mail came in without a single mention of the landing of a balloon. In fact, there would be no successful transatlantic balloon flight until 1919. All the same, the Sun story got a lot of details right in their story. A Mr. Monck Mason crossed the English Channel by balloon in 1837, and his craft was like the one described in the story. Even more surprising, when someone actually did make the transatlantic crossing, the return flight took exactly the length of time the Sun article had announced—“seventy-five hours from shore to shore!”

  WHODUNNIT?

  The author of the hoax knew newspapers like the Sun wanted to be first with a story. Since there was no telephone or telegraph available to confirm the facts, the newspaper would print first and worry about mistakes later. The author was also someone who knew a lot about science and knew how to tell a convincing tale. He was Edgar Allan Poe.

  In 1978, John Paul II became the first non-Italian pope since 1522.

  WHY-DUNNIT?

  Poe’s total wealth amounted to less than $5 at the time. (Even in 1844 that was chump change.) He and his family had just moved to New York, and Poe had a sick wife and her mother to support. They’d found rooms in a house that the author described as “old and buggy.” Aside from an obvious need for money, Poe also loved literary pranks. He’d been fascinated by a hoax about an astronomer with a powerful new telescope who had supposedly spotted human-like creatures (with fur and bat wings) living on the moon.

  HE DUNNIT AGAIN

  The “balloon hoax” wasn’t Poe’s last little joke. In 1845, he published another article entitled “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” which convinced many readers that hypnotism enabled people to communicate with the dead. Poe may have been famous for stories about premature burials and noblemen walled up alive, but he was only writing what his readers liked best. Edgar wasn’t nearly as gloomy as he’s usually made out to be. He loved a good laugh—especially at someone else’s expense.

  ELEMENTARY, MY DEAR WATSON

  Believe it or not, the world’s most famous detective never spoke the line for which he is most remembered. In only two of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories does he even come close. In 1893’s “The Crooked Man,” Holmes makes his usual array of deductive conclusions, to which his assistant Dr. Watson exclaims, “Excellent!” Holmes’s one-word reply is “Elementary.” In “A Case of Identity,” Holmes says, “All this is amusing, though rather elementary, but I must go back to business, Watson.”

  It was Samuel Prescott, not Paul Revere, who finished the midnight ride.

  THEM’S FIGHTIN’ WORDS: IN THE TRENCHES

  * * *

  In World War I thousands of miles of trenches held thousands of troops in a four-year-long stalemate.

  Of course, the use of trenches to conceal military forces predates 1914 by a long, long time, and in fact, they were called “trenches” from about 1500 on. But their use in World War I, where they far exceeded any prior deployment, gave our language a number of lasting terms.

  in the trenches

  During the war being in the trenches meant being in action. The same thing today is meant by the term, that is, actively working at something. Thus, “He spent years in the trenches before they made him president of the company.”

  digging in

  After the trenches were dug, soldiers on both sides lived in them for months on end, with neither side advancing or retreating measurably. From this, digging in acquired the meaning of standing firm in one’s position or views.

  foxhole

  In addition to very long trenches, soldiers occasionally used a small slit trench that housed one or a few men. Although it was used much more rarely, the name given it, foxhole, survived. It was to play a much larger role in subsequent wars.

  trench coat

  The trenches were frequently, if not always, wet. Consequently, the officers wore long waterproof coats, or trench coats, a noun later applied to and still used for similar civilian raincoats.

  trench mouth

  The long months in the trenches took a terrible toll on a soldier’s health. One condition that afflicted many of them was trench mouth (formerly called Vincent’s disease), characterized by painful, bleeding gums and bad breath. It was caused by poor oral hygiene and nutrition, heavy smoking, and stress—all conditions endemic in the trenches. Today trench mouth is readily treated with dental care and antibiotics.

  Sandford Fleming, who designed Canada’s first stamp, also devised time zones.

  shell shock

  In addition to physical ailments, soldiers frequently suffered from nervous conditions. One was an acute stress syndrome resulting from exposure to constant shelling by the enemy and therefore called shell shock. It was thought to be caused by both the noise of the artillery and the constant fear it engendered. Today this term is still loosely used to describe the after-effects of any traumatic experience, as in, “That series of lousy boyfriends gave her a bad case of shell shock.”

  screaming-meemies

  A similar expression is screaming meemies, a term that was coined for German artillery shells that emitted an exceptionally high-pitched whine before exploding. The term was later used to describe a state of extreme nervousness, bordering on hysteria.

  over the top

  When ordered to advance, the soldiers climbed over the parapet of front-line trenches to attack the enemy’s front line. The “top” referred both to the trench’s top and to the open no-man’s-land between them and the enemy. After the war, the term survived, assisted by Arthur Guy Empey’s use of the term as the title for his popular World War I account. In civilian use it was extended to mean taking the final plunge and doing something dangerous or notable.

  no-man’s-land

  Although no-man’s-land dates from the 1300s, when it meant the waste ground between two kingdoms, it didn’t take on its military meaning until World War I, when it was applied to the territory between the thousands of miles of Allied and German trenches. This area, a virtually stationary battle line for three years, was covered with barbed wire and pitted with shell holes made by the artillery of both sides. Since then, this term also has been used loosely to describe an indefinite situation where one is neither here nor there.

  France has been ruled by Charles the Fat, the Bold, the Simple, and the Well-Served.

  tripwire

  Troops who advanced close to the German line often had to cut through a wire that had been strung to set off a trap or an alarm. The soldiers called it a tripwire, because it was meant literally to tri
p them up. Later the term was used to signify anything that might trip someone up, as in a New York Times headline on October 7, 1997, “Looking for Tripwires, Ickes Heads to the Witness Stand.” (The term today is also employed for a small military force used as a first line of defense.)

  various (now politically incorrect) names for the enemy

  During this period the traditional offensive slang for a German was kraut, an abbreviation for what was regarded as a quintessential German food, sauerkraut. Another was Heinie, an abbreviation for the common German name Heinrich. A third was Jerry, either derived from the British nickname for chamber pots (which the German helmets resembled), or a shortening of “German.” These terms survived, on a small scale, but again came into wider use during World War II, when Germany was again the enemy of the Allies.