Maunderer

A beggar.

"I am a maunderer upon the pad I confesse."

Thomas Middleton & T. Dekker, The Roaring Girle, or Moll Cut purse (1611).

Dragoon

A soldier on horse who dismounted to fight, armed with a gun that spits fire (like a dragon).

"These founders of the House of Lords were greedy and ferocious Dragoons, the sons of greedy and ferocious pirates."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits (1856).

Ratcatcher

An exterminator of rats. Someone whose job is to catch rats.

"Societies for the suppression of vice: Beginning with the best intentions in the world, such societies must in all probability degenerate into a receptacle for every species of tittle-tattle, impertinence and malice. Men whose trade is rat-catching love to catch rats; the bug-destroyer seizes on his bug with delight; and the suppressor is gratified by finding his vice. The last soon becomes a mere tradesman like the others; none of them moralize, or lament that their respective evils should exist in the world. The public feeling is swallowed up in the pursuit of a daily occupation, and in the display of a technical skill."

--Sydney Smith.

A Paltry Alderman

A local magistrate. A warden of a guild.

"He was a pirate with a tremendous and sanguinary history; and as long as he preserved upspotted, in retirement, the dignity of his name and the grandeur of his ancient calling, homage and reverence were his from high and low; but when at last he descended into politics and became a paltry alderman, the public 'shook' him, and turned aside and wept. When he died, they set up a monument over him; and little by little he has come into respect again; but it is respect for the pirate, not the alderman. To-day the loyal and generous remember only what he was, and charitably forget what he became."

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883).

Hand

Anyone who performs some sort of manual labor (i.e., manipulates matter with the hands; works with one's hands). Also, a sailor.

"Near 2,000 hands are said to be employed here in the manufactory of shalloons, tammies and serges."

English Gazette (1778).

Smith or Farrier

One who shoes horses. A horse doctor.

"An excellent Smith or Farryer who shall ever be furnished with Horseshoes, nayles, and drugges, both for inward and outward applycations."

Francis Markham, Five decades of epistles of Warre 1632.

Roofer

Someone who repairs or constructs roofs.

“I’ve had to dig with my fingernails for a living. What can anybody do without capital? What they can do I can do but it’s not much. I fix what’s broken—except in the heart. In this shtetl everything is falling apart—who bothers with leaks in his roof if he’s peeking through the cracks to spy on God? And who can pay to have it fixed let’s say he wants it, which he doesn’t. If he does, half the time I work for nothing. If I’m lucky, a dish of noodles. Opportunity here is born dead.”

Bernard Malamud, The Fixer (1966).

Ice-Cream Seller

“’There’s some one who’s pleased with himself,” she thought, as she saw a fat, rubicund gentleman coming towards her. He took her for an acquaintance, and lifted his glossy hat above his bald, glossy head, and then perceived his mistake. ‘He thought he knew me. Well, he knows me as well as any one in the world knows me. I don’t know myself. I know my appetites, as the French say. They want that dirty ice-cream, that they do know for certain,’ she thought, looking at two boys stopping an ice-cream seller, who took a barrel off his head and began wiping his perspiring face with a towel.’We all want what is sweet and nice. If not sweetmeats, then dirty ice.’” Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877).

Kerouac on the Satrap

Under the ancient Persian monarchy, a governor of one of the provinces. A subordinate ruler.

"CODY: There was then talk of a certain Roger Boncoeur who started at Cape Cod, Provincetown Bohemian summers, walking the roads by night; and ended walking all over America in the night with a candle in his hand; later he went mad, or it simplified itself into something practical like a brakeman's lantern and some walking shoes and gear; or, really now, I can't tell; then his kid brother was it? Ben Boncoeur, that with fevered brow came runnning back from Mexico in dusty coaches of the Ferrocarril Mexicano, with a bomber like a hyacinth bough wrapped around his sculptured waits, waist, like a seraph, a satrap, a molasses black strap, a roach to kill a vulture, a mighty boomblast joint, the hugest hunk of Swaziland boom ever assembled in the history of the Paleontological Museum, or was it the Herbivorous? no, the, why of course, the goddamned, ah, the damn, old, museum there, you know the one I--the Botanical Gardens swimmingpool or whatever, the Botany Tie, the Botany Too, the Botanical Weed Garden and now everybody's left me fuddling in my own foolish thoughts, well that's all I've got left and if the Lord will be patient I shall again try to resume my narrative without suffering everyone to terrible and foolified hangups."

Jack Kerouac, Visions of Cody (1951).

Mahajun

A moneylender, banker, or merchant.

"Down there lives a Mahajun--my father gave him a bill,

I have paid the knave thrice over, and here I'm paying him still.

He shows me a long stamp paper, and must have my land--must he?

If I were twenty years younger, he should get six feet by three"

A. C. Lyall, Old Pindaree (1861).

Mountebank

A hawker of quack medicines and nostrums who attracts customers with stories, jokes, or tricks (American Heritage).

"Along with them

They brought one Pinch, a hungry lean-faced villain,

A mere anatomy, a mountebank,

A threadbare juggler, and a fortune-teller,

A needy, hollow-eyed, sharp-looking wretch,

a living dead man. This pernicious slave,

Forsooth, took on him as a conjurer,

And gazing in mine eyes, feeling my pulse,

And with no face, as 'twere, out-facing me,

Cries out, I was possessed."

William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors (1594).

Conductor

The person who ran the public baths in ancient Rome.

"Antonius from his success and high reputation was observed of all. He had hastened to the baths to wash off the blood; and when he found fault with the temperature of the water, an answer was heard, 'that it would soon be warm enough.' Thus the words of a slave brought on him the whole odium of having given the signal for firing the town, which was indeed already in flames."

Tacitus, Histories (100 AD).

Poet

"Even the stoics don't despise pleasure, though they are careful to conceal their real feelings, and tear it to pieces in public with their incessant outcry, so that once they have frightened everyone else off they can enjoy it more freely themselves. I'd just like them to tell me if there's any part of life which isn't dreary, unpleasant, graceless, stupid, and tedious unless you add pleasure, the seasoning of folly. I've proof enough in Sophocles, a poet who can never be adequately praised, who pays me a really splendid tribute in the line 'For ignorance provides the happiest life.'"

Erasmus, Praise of Folly (1509)

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

Jack Pudding

A clown or buffoon, especially one who works for a mountebank.

"The Junto-men, the Hocus-Pocusses, the State-Mountebanks, with their Zanyes and Jack-puddings!"

Clement Walker, History of Independency (1648).

Flaubert on Tenors, Baritones, and Bassos

Someone who can play an instrument with no hands.

"Every morning they gulp a fresh-laid egg to polish their voices. A tenor always has a charming and tender voice, a baritone a congenial and sonorous organ, and a basso a powerful emission."

Gustave Flaubert, Dictionary of Platitudes (1880).

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

Judge

A legal expert authorized to decide cases in a court of law.

"Take for example some merchant, soldier, or judge who believes he has only to give up a single tiny coin from his pile of plunder to purify once and for all the entire Lernean morass he has made of his life. All his perjury, lust, drunkenness, quarrels, killings, frauds, perfidy, and treachery he believes can be somehow paid off by agreement, and paid off in such a way that he's now free to start afresh on a new round of sin."

Erasmus, Praise of Folly (1509)

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

Middleman

A broker. A go-between. Someone through whose hands goods pass en route from the producer to the consumer.

"On the outside, life goes on in Florida courtesy of middlemen who bring in things that people are willing to pay a premium to obtain. Acapulco, Tijuana, Freeport, Miami--it doesn't matter where the pimping happens. Mr. Vee in his nostalgic moments tells me Havana used to be like that, a city of touts and pimps--the fat young men in sunglasses parked at a corner in an idling Buick, waiting for a payoff, a delivery, a contact. Havana has shifted its corporate headquarters. Beirut has come west. And now, it's Miami that gives me warm memories of always-Christmas Saigon."

Bharati Mukherjee, The Middleman and Other Stories (1988).

Ice Cream Vendor

As skilled with a scoop as they may be, their knuckles are always in need of licking.

"All Neapolitans."

Flaubert, Dictionary of Platitudes (1880).

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

Lawgiver

Someone with the authority to create the laws of a community.

"When they have done with masters, the state again compels them to learn the laws, and live after the pattern which they furnish, and not after their own fancies; and just as in learning to write, the writing-master first draws lines with a style for the use of the young beginner, and gives him the tablet and makes him follow the lines, so the city draws the laws, which were the invention of good lawgivers living in the olden time; these are given to the young man, in order to guide him in his conduct whether he is commanding or obeying; and he who transgresses them is to be corrected, or, in other words, called to account, which is a term used not only in your country, but also in many others, seeing that justice calls men to account. Now when there is all this care about virtue private and public, why, Socrates, do you still wonder and doubt whether virtue can be taught? Cease to wonder, for the opposite would be far more surprising. But why then do the sons of good fathers often turn out ill?"

Plato, Protagoras (5th century B.C.)

[translated by Benjamin Jowett].