Lincoln Enslaved

On April 2, scores of students from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute swooped down on banks and stores in Troy, N.Y., demanded that bills from $5 to $100 be changed for pennies. By April 4, tellers and storekeepers became suspicious, but it was too late. The students had cornered the penny market, having collected 250,000 coppers. Sales had to be made in round sums or not at all. Next day, same students re-invaded Troy, gave merchants 75¢ and 25 pennies for every $1 purchase, announced they were ‘TaxCENTinels.’ Their aim is to make U.S. citizens tax-conscious by showing that hidden taxes amount to 25% of merchandise prices.

— Life, April 18, 1938

| Society

Customer Service

Some day you will move me almost to the verge of irritation by your chuckleheaded Goddamned fashion of shutting your Goddamned gas off without giving any notice to your Goddamned parishioners. Several times you have come within an ace of smothering half of this household in their beds & blowing up the other half by this idiotic, not to say criminal, custom of yours. And it has happened again to-day. Haven’t you a telephone?

— Letter from Mark Twain to the Hartford City Gas Light Company, Feb. 12, 1891

| Literature · Society

“The Wear of English Coins”

More than eleven thousand pounds sterling worth of silver is wasted every year in the course of the circulation of crowns, half-crowns, florins, shillings, and sixpences. One hundred sovereigns of the date of 1820, which were weighed in 1859 by Mr. Miller, showed a loss in weight through the wear of circulation which was estimated at £1 6s. 7d. There is, therefore, more waste produced in the circulation of gold and silver coins than is generally thought of. …

Mr. Miller some years ago made a number of precise experiments, from which it was ascertained that £100 worth of sovereigns lost £3 9s. 8.4d. of their value in a hundred years; similarly £100 worth of half-crowns lost £13 11s. 8.8d.; £100 worth of shillings, £36 14s. 3.1d.; and £100 worth of sixpences lost £50 18s. 9.8d. in value, or more than one-half in the hundred years.

– The World of Wonders, 1883

| Society

Tacet

When George Bernard Shaw was a music critic, he dined one evening at a restaurant with a mediocre orchestra.

Recognizing Shaw, the leader sent him a note asking what he would like them to play next.

Shaw replied, “Dominoes.”

| Literature · Society

A Xenophobe’s Gazetteer

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Favell_Lee_Mortimer.jpg

Evangelical author Favell Lee Mortimer (1802-1878) set foot only twice outside England, but that didn’t stop her from writing harrowing travel books for Victorian children. From The Countries of Europe Described (1850):

  • “There are not nearly as many thieves in Wales as there are in England.”
  • “[On Easter] the streets of Petersburgh are filled with staggering, reeling drunkards.”
  • “Nothing useful is well done in Sweden.”
  • “It is dreadful to think what a number of murders are committed in Italy.”
  • “The Greeks do not know how to bring up their children.”
  • “A great many people have coughs in Vienna, because the east wind blows very cold.”
  • “Though the Portuguese are indolent, like the Spaniards, they are not so grave, and sad, and silent.”
  • “The Hungarians are much wilder people than the Germans; they are not industrious; they do not know how to make things; most of them cannot read or write.”
  • “The greatest fault of the Norwegians is drunkenness.”
  • “The Poles love talking, and they speak so loud they almost scream; and they are proud of this, and say that the Germans are dumb.”
  • “Denmark is flat, but not nearly as flat as Holland, nor as damp, nor as ugly.”

“I do not mean to say that there are as many robbers in Sweden as in Sicily; there the robbers are seldom punished at all: in Sweden they are punished; but yet the rest of the people go on stealing.”

| Literature · Society

Fox in Stocks

In 2007, prison inmate Charles Jay Wolff sent a hard-boiled egg to U.S. District Court Judge James Muirhead in Concord, N.H.

Wolff, who was awaiting trial for sexual assault, said he was an Orthodox Jew and demanded a kosher diet.

In his judgment, Muirhead wrote:

I do not like eggs in the file.
I do not like them in any style.
I will not take them fried or boiled.
I will not take them poached or broiled.
I will not take them soft or scrambled,
Despite an argument well-rambled.
No fan I am of the egg at hand.
Destroy that egg! Today! Today!
Today I say!
Without delay!

“We’ve told him, if you don’t like the eggs, don’t eat them,” said Assistant Attorney General Andrew Livernois.

| Crime · Literature · Society

Certainly, Officer

It’s said that police sergeants in Leith, Scotland, used this tongue twister as a sobriety test:

The Leith police dismisseth us,
I’m thankful, sir, to say;
The Leith police dismisseth us,
They thought we sought to stay.
The Leith police dismisseth us,
We both sighed sighs apiece;
And the sigh that we sighed as we said goodbye
Was the size of the Leith police.

If you can’t say it, you’re drunk.

| Language · Society

A Field Guide

Medieval sportsmen invented collective nouns for everything from owls to otters. Less well known are the terms they invented for people — this list is taken from Joseph Strutt, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, 1801:

  • a state of princes
  • a skulk of thieves
  • an observance of hermits
  • a lying of pardoners
  • a subtlety of sergeants
  • a multiplying of husbands
  • an incredibility of cuckolds
  • a safeguard of porters
  • a stalk of foresters
  • a blast of hunters
  • a draught of butlers
  • a temperance of cooks
  • a melody of harpers
  • a poverty of pipers
  • a drunkenship of cobblers
  • a disguising of tailors
  • a wandering of tinkers
  • a malapertness of peddlers
  • a fighting of beggars
  • a blush of boys
  • a nonpatience of wives
  • a superfluity of nuns
  • a herd of harlots
| Language · Society