Flaubert on Critics

Someone who sells written reviews of books, art works, theater plays, and concerts.

Critic: "Always prominent. Besides, reputed to know everything, to be aware of everything, to have read everything and seen everything. When one displeases you, call him Aristarchus, or a eunuch."

Flaubert, Dictionary of Platitudes (1880).

[Translation by J. I. Rodale (1954).]

Philosophers and Folly

"Even the father of the gods and king of men who makes the whole of Olympus tremble when he bows his head has to lay aside that triple forked thunderbolt of his and that grim Titanic visage with which he can terrify all the gods whenever he chooses, and humble himself to put on a different mask, like an actor, if he ever wants to do what he always is doing, that is, 'to make a child'. And the stoics, as we know, claim to be most like the gods. But give me a man who is a stoic three or four or if you like six hundred times over, and he too, even if he keeps his beard as a mark of wisdom, though he shares it with the goat, will have to swallow his pride, smooth out his frown, shake off his rigid principles, and be fond and foolish for a while. In fact, if the philosopher ever wants to be a father it's me he has to call on -- yes, me."

Erasmus, Praise of Folly (1509)

[translated by Betty Radice, notes by A. H. T. Levi (1993)].

A Little Shaver

"His master's grief now, once his joy,

Here lies Pantagathus, a boy

So dexterous one could never feel

The touch when his tonsorial steel

Trimmed the unruly hairs or sheared

The stubble of a stubborn beard.

Earth, treat him, as is only right,

As gently as his hand was light."

Martial, The Epigrams (85 AD).

Truster

A creditor.

"Bankrupts, out with your Knives,

And Cut your Trusters throates."

Shakespeare, Timon of Athens (1607).

Satirist

Someone who uses humor to write nonfiction.

"Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459) spent his life as a layman in the service of the Roman Curia and unearthed unknown manuscripts of many important ancient authors. He was devoted to classical studies but, like many of the humanists, also wrote works of history. His collections of largely indecent satirical material known as the Facetiae and aimed particularly at monks and priests was widely translated by 1500."

Erasmus, Praise of Folly (1509)

[translated by Betty Radice, notes by A. H. T. Levi (1993)].

Lady-in-waiting

A female attendant to a princess or queen.

"Indeed it quite swarmed with ladies-in-waiting. Yet she could not forget that strange encounter with Genji, and it was on her initiative that they still kept up a secret correspondence."

Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji (11th Century).

[Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker.]

Dowser

A water diviner. Someone who finds sources of water by using a divining rod.

"The dry summer of 1893 brought the Divining Rod forward. 'Dowsers' sought for water with the mystic 'twig', and, very often, found it."

The Daily News (1894).

All is Incongruous

"There seems to be an unalterable contradiction between the human mind and its employments. How can a soul be a merchant? What relation to an immortal being have the price of linseed, the tare on tallow, or the brokerage on hemp? Can an undying creature debit petty expenses and charge for carriage paid? The soul ties its shoes; the mind washes its hands in a basin. All is incongruous."

--Walter Bagehot

Fortuneteller

Someone who predicts what will happen to a person in the future.

"My master stayed a few days at this place, where the public were very kind to them: in particular they made a good deal of money by professing to tell fortunes. Between them these pious frauds composed an all-purpose oracle for the Goddess to deliver by their mouths, and used it to cheat a great many people who came to consult her on all sorts of questions. It ran: 'Yoke the oxen, plough the land; High the golden grain will stand.' Suppose that a man came to ask the Goddess whether he ought to marry. The answer was plain: he ought to take on the yoke of matrimony and raise a fine crop of children. Or suppose that he wanted to know whether he ought to buy land: the yoked oxen and the good harvests were quite to the point. Or suppose it was about going on a business trip: the oxen, the least restless of all beasts, were to be yoked and the golden grain spelt a prosperous return. Or suppose a soldier was warned for active service, or a constable ordered to join in the pursuit of bandits: the priests explained the oracle as meaning that he should put the necks of his enemies under the yoke and reap a rich harvest when the time came for the loot, or booty, to be divided among the victors. They certainly reaped a rich harvest by this dishonest way of foretelling the future, but one day they grew tired of perpetual enquiries for which they had only one stock answer, and we went on again at nightfall."

Apuleius, The Golden Ass, 2nd Century A.D.

[translated by Robert Graves].

Rag and Bone Picker

A scavenger who picks through garbage for rags or other things worth salvaging.

"Ragpicker's disease: (Med.) Anthrax, usually pulmonary, occurring in ragpickers and ragsorters, because of the inhalation of anthrax spores."

Webster's Unabridged Dictionary

Piss Prophet

A physician who diagnosed a patient's condition by inspecting his urine.

"Now would I willingly demand of the most cunning Pisse-prophet, what could he have found out by either of these urines?"

James Hart, The Anatomie of Urines (1625).

Charon the Ferryman

Someone who navigates or maintains a ferryboat. Someone who transports passengers by boat.

"Then hurry forward until you reach the river of the dead, where Charon will at once ask you for his fee and ferry you across in his patched boat among crowds of ghosts. It seems that the God Avarice lives thereabouts, because neither Charon nor his great father Pluto does anything for nothing. (A poor man on the point of death is expected to have his passage-fee ready; but if he can't get hold of a coin, he isn't allowed to achieve true death, but must wander about disconsolately forever on this side of Styx.) Anyhow, give the dirty ruffian one of your coins, but let him take it from your mouth, not from your hand. While you are being ferried across the sluggish stream, the corpse of an old man will float by; he will raise a putrid hand and beg you to haul him into the boat. But you must be careful not to yield to any feeling of pity for him; that is forbidden."

Apuleius, The Golden Ass, 2nd Century A.D.

[translated by Robert Graves].

Sniggler

Someone who catches eels by dangling bait in front of the holes where they hide or by shoving a baited hook into their lair.

"Like an eel in a wall, politely declining a sniggler's offer of a lobworm."

Joseph T. Hewlett, Peter Priggins, the college scout (1840).

Seamstress

A woman who sews seams or does plain sewing (as opposed to decorative embroidery) for a living.

"The lower orders were represented, each according to his or her occupation: the miner, the rope-maker, the woodcutter, the seamstress, the hairdresser and a fisherman, hopelessly drunk. Shepherds trilled at their flutes. A Turk puffed a hookah. There were Tartars, Malabars, Circassians and Chinese sages with wispy beards and songbirds perched on their fingers. A party of freemasons scrutinised a globe. A pilgrim bore his staff and scallop-shell, and an endlessly grieving Mater Dolorosa sat next to a disconsolate nun."

Bruce Chatwin, Utz, (1988).

Hatter

Someone who produces hats or sells them.

"As he opened the door of the room where the Italian girls sat making hats, he could see them; could hear them; they were rubbing wires among coloured beads in saucers; they were turning buckram shapes this way and that; the table was all strewn with feathers, spangles, silks, ribbons; scissors were rapping on the table; but something failed him; he could not feel. Still, scissors rapping, girls laughing, hats being made protected him; he was assured of safety; he had a refuge. But he could not sit there all night. There were moments of waking in the early morning. The bed was falling; he was falling. Oh for the scissors and the lamplight and the buckram shapes! He asked Lucrezia to marry him, the younger of the two, the gay, the frivolous, with those little artist's fingers that she would hold up and say 'It is all in them.' Silk, feathers, what not were alive to them."

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925).

Salter

A manufacturer or dealer in salt. Someone who salts bodies in embalming.

"The old brick salt-warehouses clustered at the upper end of the city [New Orleans] looked as they had always looked: warehouses which had had a kind of Aladdin's lamp experience, however, since I had seen them; for when the war broke out the proprietor went to bed one night leaving them packed with thousands of sacks of vulgar salt, worth a couple of dollars a sack, and got up in the morning and found his mountain of salt turned into a mountain of gold, so to speak, so suddenly and to so dizzy a height had the war news sent up the price of the article."

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883).

Penny-a-liner

A hack writer. A writer who is paid a penny a line, and who therefore writes in an inflated style, to fill as much of the blank page as possible.

"Dr. Johnson has been down the street many a time with ragged shoes, and a bundle of penny-a-lining for the Gent's Magazine."

William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis (1849).

Lexicographer

A writer of dictionaries.

"A harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words."

Samuel Johnson, Dictionary (1755).

Ironmonger

Someone who sells wares made of iron.

“Life was often worse in Glasgow. Families huddled in piles of rags and straw in unheated tenement flats. Children froze in their sleep. The sky was thin smoke and the sewers overflowed. Glasgow’s leading products were ships, locomotives, and vast clouds of eyewatering stench. The city’s stink surpassed even that of Edinburgh, the capital known as “Auld Reekie” for its septic odor. Yet the metropolis was glorious, too, in the way that a blast furnace is glorious: noisy, dirty, and Promethean. Forty years before, Glasgow’s foundries had produced 25,000 tons of iron in a year. The total was now more than 500,000 tons. This one city produced more iron than all of England.”

Kevin Cook, Tommy’s Honor (2007).

The Etruscan Haruspex

An ancient fortune-teller who interprets various natural signs, including the meaning to be divined from the entrails of sacrificial animals.

"A diviner or soothsayer of a class originally Etruscan, but early introduced into Rome, though not as official priests of the state religion. The divinations of the haruspex comprised interpretation of lightning and natural prodigies, and especially extispicium, or inspection of the entrails of sacrificial victims."

Webster's Unabridged Dictionary

A Sailor's Life

"'Yes,' he says, kind of pretty-well-satisfied like. 'I'm the captain and the owner and the mate and the pilot and watchman and head deck hand; and sometimes I'm the freight and passengers. I ain't as rich as old Jim Hornback, and I can't be so blame' generous and good to Tom, Dick, and Harry as what he is, and slam around money the way he does; but I've told him a many a time 't I wouldn't trade places with him; for, says I, a sailor's life's the life for me, and I'm derned if I'd live two mile out o' town, where there ain't nothing ever goin' on, not for all his spondulicks and as much more on top of it.'"

Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (1884).

Freemason

A skilled stone mason, who moved freely about to work on important construction projects.

"Freemason: A member of a certain class of skilled workers in stone, in the 14th and following centuries often mentioned in contradistinction to 'rough masons', 'ligiers', etc. They travelled from place to place, finding employment where important buildings were being erected, and had a system of secret signs and passwords, by which a craftsman who had been admitted on giving evidence of competent skill could be recognized."

Oxford English Dictionary

Poulterer

A dealer in poultry.

“Let Butchers, Poultrers, Fishmongers contend, Each his owne Trade in what he can defend.”

John Penkethman, Artachthos; or a new booke declaring the assise or weight of bread (1638).

Thunder Guards

"The Thunder Guards are awe-inspiring when they appear during a violent thunder-storm. The Major and Middle Captains and the other officers of the two Guards divisions make a delightful sight as they post themselves next to the lattices in the Palace. When the thunder has abated, one of the Major Captains orders the soldiers to 'go up' or 'go down'."

Sei Shonagon, "The Thunder Guards Are Awe-Inspiring," The Pillow Book (11th Century).

Will Rogers on Veterinarians

A doctor who specializes in treating animals.

“Personally, I have always felt that the best doctor in the world is the veterinarian. He can’t ask his patients what is the matter—he’s got to just know.”

Will Rogers, Wise and Witty Sayings of a Great American Humorist (1969).