Martin Fone's Blog, page 200
March 16, 2020
You’re Having A Laugh – Part Thirty Seven
The Kittanning baldness epidemic of 1926
Even at my age I’m blessed with a full head of hair, although it is going a rather distinguished shade of grey at a faster rate than I would have hoped. Fortunately, baldness is not really on my radar screen, but I can imagine the horror when chaps, particularly at the younger end of the age spectrum, realise that the top of their head is beginning to be exposed to public gaze. There, but for the grace of God, go I.
On January 17, 1926 the New York Times ran a story from their correspondent in the Pennsylvanian town of Kittanning which would have put the willies up all young men with a full head of hair. Headlined “mysterious germ makes 300 bald”, its leading sentence reported that “a strange malady, which so far has defied diagnosis by physicians and scalp experts is rapidly denuding the heads of the town’s young men of hair”. A meeting of doctors, it reported, had claimed that they had upwards of 300 men between the ages of 19 and 30 reporting signs of premature baldness.
The cause of the sudden loss of hair was not known, barber’s itch, some form of ringworm or other scalp disease often spread by unsterilized barber’s equipment, was ruled out, and the medics advised the young men not to wear hats, to expose their heads to the rays of the sun, and to apply plenty of elbow grease to their scalps. And there was me thinking that men wore hats because they were bald, not that wearing a hat made them bald.
The story crossed the States and was picked up by the Los Angeles Times which two days later, and acknowledging the New York Times as their source, reported that a “mysterious germ makes 300 bald”. Their take on the hair disaster mirrored their primary source.
But one man’s disaster is another’s opportunity. The town experienced “a great influx of hair tonic salesmen which the widely circulated story has brought about. Manufacturers of sure-cure for baldness and hair restorers have descended in hordes”. So concerned were the town’s authorities that Kittanning would gain a reputation for being known as alopecia-central that they issued a speedy rebuttal of the story. True enough, twelve young men in the town had recently gone to the doctors complaining about losing their hair in patches. The medics weren’t too sure what the cause was and put it down to “a disturbance of nerves at the root of the hair” but, perhaps, was just a surge of testosterone, which can affect hair.
The local newspaper, Simpson’s Daily Leader-Times, duly reported on the phenomenon, stating that 12 young men had suffered this mysterious hair loss. But twelve smacks a bit of a dog bites man story and by the time it had got into the hands of the big dailies, twelve had been inflated to 300 to make a bit more of a story. Who said fake news is a modern phenomenon?
This wasn’t the first time that the New York Times had run a story about an epidemic of hair loss. In its edition of September 15, 1901, its correspondent going by the nom-de-plume of Spectator wrote. “European women who are resident in Japan must live in a state of constant dread. For, according to reports from that country, they may at any time lose that greatly valued possession – their hair”. It went on to report that an epidemic of hair loss was sweeping the country, affecting women and men alike.
Once again, numbers had been greatly exaggerated. There had been a flare-up of secondary syphilis in Japan at the time and one of the consequences, for some sufferers at lease, is patchy baldness. Perhaps this also was the cause of the baldness in Kittanning and everyone was too coy to admit it/ Who knows?
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If you enjoyed this, check out Fifty Scams and Hoaxes by Martin Fone
https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/business/fifty-scams-and-hoaxes/
March 15, 2020
Error Of The Week (8)
For a couple of years Caelie Wilkes from Mendocino County in California had been proud of her potted succulent. She watered it regularly, positioned it in a place where it got plenty of sunshine and even washed its leaves. The pictures I have seen of it are impressive with a perfect shape and beautiful colouring.
Disaster struck when Caelie decided to repot it. Removing the plant from its pot she was astonished to find that it was a plastic replica, sitting on a Styrofoam bed with sand glued to the top.
Artificial flowers have come on leaps and bounds and to the untrained eye, at least for a moment, they can appear to be the real deal. They don’t grow though, and if she washed the leaves, surely she would have realised that they were plastic.
Caelie, though, was mortified, claiming that “these last two years have been a lie”.
A first world problem, for sure, but it is California.
March 14, 2020
Typo Of The Week
If you lead a busy life and have a dog, you could do with a helping hand. This line of thought led Lucy Hignett from Thorndon in Suffolk to set up her own dog walking and pet sitting company called Lead The Way.
In an effort to drum up custom, she placed an advert offering her services in the local Parish magazine. Very commendable, you will agree.
The advert offers dog and cat visits, including play, feeding and lots of TLC. That is for certain as somewhere between her placing the advert and it going out in print, her primary skill had been changed from dog walker to dog w**ker.
The editor of the organ has apologised profusely but poor Lucy has been inundated with what she termed “disgusting” messages.
Still, looking on the bright side, there is no such thing as bad publicity, or so they say.
March 13, 2020
What Is The Origin Of (273)?…
The devil to pay
One of the intriguing things about etymological researches is how many who engage in this rather dry but enlightening pursuit seem desperate to find an origin to a phrase which is other than what might be termed the bleedin’ obvious. Take the devil to pay, for instance, which signifies that there will be serious trouble if something happens. Why shouldn’t the devil in the phrase be Satan?
The devil, the personification of evil, has been in popular culture since at least Biblical days and is someone’s whose wiles all God-fearing people should shun, like Christ did after fasting for forty nights and forty days. Our phrase first crops up in a manuscript dating from 1481 in which the anonymous scribe wrote, “it would be better to stay at home/ than to serve here to pay the devil”. There is no question that the devil here who might otherwise be pacified, the original definition of pay and later extending to the idea of pacifying creditors by paying up, is none other than Satan.
It was not until the early 18th century that the phrase cropped up again, for example in Thomas Brown’s Letters from the Dead to the Living, published in 1707; “we knew we should have the Devil to pay one time or other, and now you see like honest men we have pawn’d our Souls for the whole Reckoning”.
The satirist, Jonathan Swift, was fond of the phrase, adding and all as an intensifier to give the phrase additional emphasis. In a letter to Esther Johnson dated September 28, 1711 he wrote, “The earl of Stafford is to go soon to Holland, and let them know what we have been doing and then there will be the devil and all to pay”. On November 17th that year he wrote, “this being queen Elizabeth’s birth-day, we have the Devil and all to do among us” and in 1738, fearing the wrath of his wife, he penned, “I must be with my Wife on Tuesday, or there will be the Devil and all to pay”.
A variant was to substitute the Devil with the name of his natural habitat. This variant, possibly for the purpose of preserving the metre, was deployed in Joseph Lewis’ The miscellaneous and whimsical lucubrations of Lancelot Poverty-Struck from 1758; “before that either gain’d the Day/ By Heaven! There was Hell to pay”. Another variation was devil to pay and no pitch hot. This was recorded and explained by Alexander Hamilton in his Gentleman’s Progress of 1744 in which the Scot regaled his readers of his travels including a visit to New York. There he met a man whose speech was peppered with proverbs, including “the devil to pay and no pitch hot?” which he helpfully defined as “An interrogatory adage metaphorically derived from the manner of sailors who pay their ship’s bottoms with pitch”.
Francis Grose, in his A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue from 1788 helpfully defined the nautical connotations of the verb to pay. “To smear over. To pay the bottom of a ship or boat; to smear it over with pitch”. The nautical duo, William Smyth and Edward Belcher, shed light on the term devil, defining it in their The Sailor’s Word-Book of 1867 as “the seam which margins the water-ways…why only caulkers can tell, who perhaps found it sometimes difficult for their tools”.
These later usages have led some to draw two conclusions; that the devil refers to a seam on the water-level of a ship and that the devil to pay is an abbreviation of the devil to pay and no pitch hot. I don’t think we need to jump to this conclusion. The devil to pay was already in use and well attested before the nautical version came upon the scene and it is clear that the devil concerned was Satan. The later phrase may simply have a separate origin or, more likely, the devil in it really was Satan and that some clever Dick decided to crowbar a nautical context on to it.
Who knows?
March 11, 2020
Book Corner – March 2020 (2)
The Code of the Woosters – P G Wodehouse
The seventh in the series of books featuring Bertram Wilberforce Wooster and his inscrutable gentleman’s personal gentleman, Reginald Jeeves, it was published in 1938 and in my view the best of the lot. That’s saying something as any Wodehouse cannot fail to lift the jaundiced spirit of the reader and put a smile on their face, but this is the bee’s knees.
One of the qualities of a timeless classic is that a reader from any period can find something which resonates with them. For me in these parlous political times, there is the oafish figure of Sir Roderick Spode, the self-proclaimed leader of the Black Shorts, clearly an allusion to Oswald Mosely. What resonated with me was Wodehouse’s take on the Voice of the People. “The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting “Heil, Spode!” and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: “Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?” Never a truer word.
The plot is as usual convoluted and involves Bertie visiting Totleigh Towers, the country residence of Sir Watkyn Bassett, uncle of Madeline. Bertie is persuaded to visit, against his better judgment as he has previous with Sir Watkyn having appeared before him on a charge of pinching a policeman’s helmet, an encounter that left him £5 lighter in the pocket, on a double mission – to save his chum Gussie Finknottle’s impending nuptials with Madeline and to steal a silver cow creamer that his uncle wants.
There are many twists and turns and Bertie is in danger of being married to both Madeline and Stiffy Byng, who has an on-off relationship with another of his pals, the curate “Stinker” Pinker. Sir Watkyn, given Bertie’s previous, suspects that he is there solely to steal the creamer. Initially, he dragoons the violent Spode to keep a watch on proceedings but Bertie has his number, courtesy of some dirt that Jeeves from his network of gentlemen’s gentlemen has been able to unearth, and so has to resort to the local policeman, Oates. Oates, inevitably, has his helmet stolen and Wooster is the number one suspect.
Suffice it to say, that the superior intellect of Jeeves manages to cut through this Gordian knot and peace and tranquillity is restored. There is a lot of fun to be had in getting there.
Wonderfully eccentric and preposterous as the plots are, what makes a Wodehouse book so special, and this one in particular, is his marvellous use of language. He is on fire with his one-liners, any one of which I would have been proud of penning. Take these for example:
“He paused and swallowed convulsively, like a Pekingese taking a pill”.
“She was fully aware that she was doing something that even by female standards was raw, but she didn’t care”.
“It was a confusion of ideas between him and one of the lions he was hunting in Kenya that had caused A. B. Spottsworth to make the obituary column. He thought the lion was dead, and the lion thought it wasn’t.”
“I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled. “
“Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them. “
The leitmotif of this marvellous book and hence the title is the code of honour by which the Woosters conduct themselves. As Bertie says, “One doesn’t want to make a song and dance about one’s ancient lineage, of course, but after all the Woosters did come over with the conqueror and were extremely pally with him.” A wonderful, uplifting book and one of Wodehouse’s best.
March 10, 2020
Festival Of The Week
One festival that goes with a bang is the Feast of San Juan de la Vega held every February in the eponymous town in Mexico and dubbed the world’s most dangerous festival. The festival is held in honour of St John who is said to have assisted a wealthy miner and rancher by the name of Juan de la Vega recover his gold which was taken by bandits.
The highlight of the event is where participants take sledgehammers packed with a mix of sulphur and chlorate on the end of the head and strike them against a piece of metal rail track. The result is a big bang and a cloud of smoke, the force of the explosion is sometimes so strong that it flings contestants backwards.
This year only 43 were injured, one serious enough to be stretchered off to hospital with leg injuries. Around 6,000 attended this year, along with 100 police to keep an eye on proceedings and a panoply of medical staff. In 2008 50 spectators were injured by shrapnel so it is not an event for the faint hearted.
Here’s some footage of the crazy event
https://videos.metro.co.uk/video/met/2020/02/26/5994008019911920537/640x360_MP4_5994008019911920537.mp4
March 9, 2020
The Streets Of London – Part One Hundred And Four
Hare Place, EC4
Today Hare Place is not much to look at, a little side alley which runs from the southern side of Fleet Street into Old Mitre Court, a matter of a few yards. I used to walk through the alley on my way to El Vino’s which fronts on to Fleet Street and runs along Hare Place. The wine bar had a seedy feel to it, at least in the first decade of the 21st century, its heyday long past, when journalists from the Fleet Street would congregate. There were still some old telephones in situ down which, I fondly imagined, some correspondent would file their copy to an eager sub-editor before settling back down to their glass of wine.
El Vino’s in Fleet Street was one of five established in London by Alfred Bower, a free vintner which meant that he was able to sell wine without the need to hold a licence. This loophole in the law was not closed until as recently as 2005. The interior of the Fleet Street bar was full of mirrors which made it seem roomier than it actually was, a testament to its former life when it was a Hall of Mirrors. I had always put any visual distortions down to the amount of wine I had consumed but it may have been the mirrors, after all.
The bars originally traded under Bowers’ own name but in 1915 he developed some political ambitions, wishing to become Lord Mayor of London and sought election as an Alderman. He was informed, discretely as was the custom in those days, that if he sought political office, he would need to stop trading in the City as Bower’s. El Vino was the registered trademark of the firm’s sherries and so, in 1923, the bars were rebranded as such. Bower achieved his ambition, becoming Lord Mayor between 1924 and 1925. In 2015 El Vino’s were taken over by Davy’s.
Hare Place is now what is left of a much longer street, Hare Alley, which ran along the boundary between the Serjeant’s Inn on Fleet Street to some buildings at its western end. It may have taken its name, as the nearby Hare Court does, from Sir Nicholas Hare, a Master of the Rolls from 1553 to 1557. There were two inns of the Serjeants-at-Law in London, one dating from 1416 in Chancery Lane and the other in Fleet Street, occupied from 1443. The Serjeants, an order of elite barristers, surrendered their lease on the Fleet Street premises in 1730 when the two inns merged. In 1737 the lease was acquired by the Amicable Society for a Perpetual Assurance Office, the world’s first life insurance company.
As is the way with life insurance companies, they built a rather splendid headquarters on the site, designed by Robert Adams. It was destroyed during the blitz in 1941 as was much of the surrounding area. The Serjeants sold their Chancery Lane premises in 1877 and although the order was not formally dissolved then, the members divvied up the proceeds between them, the last member, Lord Lindley dying in 1921.
The post-Second World War development of the area was not kind to Hare Place, the expansion of Mitre Court encroaching considerably on its turf, leaving it as the small ginnel that it is today. But for me it has a special place in my heart, as I raced up it in eager anticipation of a piece of El Vino’s delicious Dundee cake, washed down by a glass (or two) of Tokaji.
March 8, 2020
Clock Of The Week
I spotted this clock in a charity shop, Oxfam, I think, in Weybridge. Unfortunately, it was not for sale. What is the square root of frustration?
March 7, 2020
Pasty Of The Week
For pasty lovers the Eden Project located near St Blazey in Cornwall was the place to be last Saturday. Hosting the World Pasty Championships for the ninth time, the hotly-contested competition attracted entries from bakers, professional and amateur, young and old alike. A panel of around 40 judges had the task of munching their way through nearly 200 pasties.
Cornwall’s famous export has moved on a tad since it was the staple fare of miners in the area. A proper pasty could withstand a plummet down a mineshaft and the pastry rim was designed to give the hungry miner something to hold on to while he wolfed it down. Given his hands were grimy with coal dust it is unlikely he ate that bit. Trendy pasties come with an array of fillings, not just the meaty gristle and potatoes that Cornish shopkeepers delight in selling to emmets.
Take the winner of the Open Savoury Company category, Rowe’s Cornish Bakery. Their winning entry was a chicken, leek, potato and onion pasty whilst Nick Brown from Liskeard won the Open Savoury competition for Professionals with a ham hock, cheddar and apple chutney affair. Jan Micallef from Sheffield was even more adventurous, winning the Amateur Open Savoury competition with a goat’s cheese, pear, shallot and walnut pasty.
For the record, The Phat Pasty Company from Newport Pagnell in Buckinghamshire won the Pasty Company award, David Timmins from St Columb’s Road in Cornwall the Cornish Pasty Professional prize for the third time, and eight-year-old Daisy Lovejoy from Plymouth, whose speciality is a lasagne pasty, won the junior crown. And fastest crimper? That honour went to Jonathan Roseyear from Foxhole.
There’s more to a pasty than meat and two veg, it would seem.
March 6, 2020
What Is The Origin Of (272)?…
Hem and haw
One of the many attributes a politician needs to get to the top of what is a slippery pole is the ability to deflect a question, keeping their options open and issuing a cloud of words that obfuscates the simple fact that they have not addressed the question. Perhaps W.B Yeats was right when he observed in his poem, The Second Coming, that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”. To hem and haw is to speak hesitantly or indecisively, usually with lots of ums and erms interspersing the trickle of discernible words.
The two verbs conjoined by and both had independent existences before they came together. Hem is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as “an interjectional utterance like a slight half cough, used to attract attention, give warning, or express doubt or hesitation”. It is what grammarians call an echoic verb, one that imitates the sound itself, in this instance of someone clearing their throat as if to speak. It has lent itself to the word ahem, which is used as a more polite way to clear one’s throat, either preparatory to speech or to warn someone of your presence.
Haw also echoes the sound it represents, defined by the OED as “an expression of hesitation”. It is one of those nothing words that pepper people’s daily speech, like, uh, um, huh, a verbal stopgap to allow someone to gather their thoughts and continue with whatever it is they have to say.
Perhaps it was inevitable that the two should have been put together, suggesting the impression of someone clearing their throat and gathering their thoughts before launching into the next part of their dialogue. One of the characters in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, dating from the late 14th century, is described as someone who “hewed” and “gan to hum”. John Palsgrave, an English priest and compiler of his Lesclarcissement de la langue francyose from 1530, in which he sought to explain to his English readers the intricacies of the French tongue, was probably the first to put the two elements together; “he hummeth and heath and wyll nat come out withall”.
The English language was even more fluid in those days than it is now and variants such as hum and haw or um and ah or hem and hawke began to appear. It seemed that you could perm any two from the collection and the meaning would remain the same. In American English hem and haw is more common whereas in English as spoken in Blighty we seem to prefer hum and haw.
Jonathan Swift, in his 1728 poem called My Lady’s Lamentation used hum and haw, albeit the other way round, for the purposes of the rhyme; “he haws and he hums./ At last out it comes”. A meeting with royalty may be a justifiable occasion for a bit of hemming and hawing. In this instance from 1786 it clearly had the desired effect; “I hemmed and hawed…but the Queen stopped reading”.
Haw also has the sense, at least these days, of a rather lofty, affected way of speaking. It is no coincidence that this was reflected in the British nickname of Lord Haw-Haw given to William Joyce who broadcast regularly to these shores at the behest of Hitler during the Second World War.
At least, someone who hems and haws is perhaps giving some careful consideration to what they are saying, which can’t be a bad thing, unless they are a politician, of course.
