Sticker

Someone who slaughters pigs with a knife or pries oysters open.

"Master Bardell the pig-butcher, and his foreman Samuel Slark, or, as he was more commonly called, Sam the Sticker."

Hood, Sk. Road, Sudden Death Wks. (1833).

Groom Porter

The court official in charge of gambling tables.

"By and by I met with Mr. Brisband, and having it in my mind this Christmas to go to see the manner of the gaming at the Groome-Porter's I did tell Brisband of it, and he did lead me thither: where, after staying an hour, they begun to play at about eight at night, where to see how differently one man took his losing from another, one cursing and swearing, and another only muttering and grumbling to himself, a third without any apparent discontent at all; to see how the dice will run good luck in one hand for half an hour together, and another have no good luck at all;... and lastly, to see the formality of the groome-porter, who is their judge of all disputes in play and all quarrels that may arise therein, and how his under-officers are there to observe true play at each table, and to give new dice, is a consideration I never could have thought had been in the world, had I not now seen it."

Samuel Pepys, Diary (January 1, 1668).

Corrodian

Someone who receives a pension of room, board, and other bare necessities upon retiring from the King's service.

"Since he tells us he had married for love, not for money, he and his wife lived as best they might in their 'smale cote', Hoccleve working by day at the office, and when hard pressed writing a poem in hope of reward. His youthful excesses seem to have damaged his health for a time, and for some five years he suffered from a 'wyld infirmyte' and was out of his mind. He recovered, and with sight impaired and mind enfeebled he struggled on until, after thirty-six years' service, in 1424, he was granted 'such sustenance yearly during his life in the Priory of Southwick, Hants, as Nicholas Mokknge, late master of St Lawrence in the Poultry, had'. The king was able to quarter him on the Priory in this manner since, in accordance with medieval practice, he had the right to pension off one of his servants in this way from time to time and the Priory was forced to find suitable accommodation for the corrodian, as he was called, as well as food, amenities and clothing. Unfortunately we do not know the details of Hoccleve's corrody, but in common with many others of the period we may assume that it provided lodging within or close to the precincts of the monastery for Hoccleve and his wife, together with a fixed daily allowance of ale and bread, and a dish of flesh or fish according to the day and season. In addition there were his allowances of wood and candles, yearly robes for himself and his wife and possibly a small grant of money."

Six Medieval Men & Women, "Thomas Hoccleve," H. S. Bennett (1955).

Catgut Spinner

Paradoxically, someone who uses the intestines of sheep, horse, or ass to make strings for musical instruments.

"William Burridge, Catgut-spinner."

London Gazette (1723).

Abbreviator

Someone who abbreviates, abridges, or shortens writing. An editor. An officer in the court of Rome, appointed as assistant to the vice-chancellor for drawing up the pope's briefs, and reducing petitions, when granted, into proper form for being converted into bulls (OED).

"The earliest mention made of abbreviators in the papal court is in one of the extravagantes of John XXII in 1317."

Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia; or, an universal dictionary of arts and sciences (1751).

Bargain-Hunter

Generally, an expert who has more time than money. A scavenger. Someone who picks over the remains of bankrupt enterprises, hoping to find something of value—for next to nothing.

“Indeed, one of the liveliest spots downtown in 1934 was a place called the ‘securities graveyard’—a room on Vesey Street where the auctioneering firm of Adrian H. Muller & Son regularly conducted public sales of huge blocks of worthless stock in bankrupt companies. A band of seedy bargain-hunters—the flotsam of wild optimism floating on the dark sea of depression—frequented the place, bidding minuscule sums for hundreds of thousands of shares that they hoped might somehow, sometime, be miraculously recalled to life. One of the band, an Englishman named Harold Deighton, always ritually bid one dollar for every lot offered, a hundred shares of this ruined company, a thousand shares of that. Sometimes his was the winning bid; but he never got rich."

John Brooks, Once in Golconda (1970).

Distiller

Someone who distills hard liquor.

“All through the years of Prohibition, the favorite bootleg drink in the New Jersey hills where he had his country estate was ‘Jersey Lightning,’ a harsh but authoritative applejack that had been distilled locally for generations before Prohibition and, of course, had continued to be produced massively though inconspicuously in those well-wooded hills and valleys—then still remarkably remote and unpopulated—without the blessing of law. Incredibly (or so we can say in hindsight), this urbane and sophisticated man came to believe that after repeal Jersey Lightning would capture the fancy of the whole country, and become a standard national drink like Scotch or bourbon; and to make it a still more attractive investment prospect, the stuff had the great commercial advantage of requiring very little aging to be potable, or as potable as it would ever be.”

John Brooks, Once in Golconda (1970).

Scullion

A domestic servant of the lowest rank in a household, performing menial tasks in the kitchen, such as scrubbing and cleaning.

"Away you Scullion, you Rampallian, you Fustillirian."

Shakespeare, Henry IV (1597).

Prytanis

A chief official or magistrate. A member of one of the ten sections into which the Athenian senate of five hundred was divided. Each section held the presidency of the senate for about one tenth of the year (Webster's).

"Now I observe that when we are met together in the assembly, and the matter in hand relates to building, the builders are summoned as advisers; when the question is one of ship-building, then the ship-wrights; and the like of other arts which they think capable of being taught and learned. And if some person offers to give them advice who is not supposed by them to have any skill in the art, even though he be good-looking, and rich, and noble, they will not listen to him, but laugh and hoot at him, until either he is clamoured down and retires of himself; or if he persist, he is dragged away or put out by the constables at the command of the prytanes. This is their way of behaving about professors of the arts.

But when the question is an affair of state, then everybody is free to have a say--carpenter, tinker, cobbler, sailor, passenger; rich and poor, high and low--any one who likes gets up, and no one reproaches him, as in the former case, with not having learned, and having no teacher, and yet giving advice; evidently because they are under the impression that this sort of knowledge cannot be taught. And not only is this true of the state, but of individuals; the best and wisest of our citizens are unable to impart their political wisdom to others: as for example, Pericles, the father of these young men, who gave them excellent instruction in all that could be learned from masters, in his own department of politics neither taught them, nor gave them teachers; but they were allowed to wander at their own free will in a sort of hope that they would light upon virtue of their own accord."

Plato, Protagoras (4th century B.C.)

[translated by Benjamin Jowett].

Helot

Serfs in ancient Sparta. Attached to the estates of the so-called "Spartiates," they had to share their harvest with the aforesaid landowners.

"The Spartan constitution depended upon social relations established once and for all: the 'Equals' each received an allotment of land cultivated by helots belonging to the community. These allotments were inalienable and nothing, in theory, could alter the original distribution made by the legendary Lycurgus. In actual fact, Spartan 'communism' was theoretical rather than real. The city would have had to cut itself off from the rest of the Greek world in order to maintain it. This was hardly possible, and from the fourth century B.C. onwards Sparta was the scene of disturbances caused by an increasingly unequal distribution of the land; in the third century attempts at 'revolution' even involved the helots. Needless to say, these proved abortive, and the Roman conquest of Greece in the second century ensured that they would remain impossible in the future."

Claude Mossé, The Ancient World of Work

[translated by Janet Lloyd] (1969).

Heaver

A stevedore. A dock worker who loads and unloads goods from ships.

"Labourers of the lowest class, ballast heavers, coal whippers."

Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1839).

Palmister

Someone who makes a living by telling people’s characters and fortunes by examining the palms of their hands. A chiromancer.

"It was then most of all that the idea of his being fated impressed itself on me, because it really seemed as though the giant were reading his own dreadful destiny in his hands, like a palmist, except that it was not written there in fine lines but carved in thick grease, in power cables, black brutal and irresistible.”

Michel Tournier, Gemini (1975).

Envoy

A messenger. A diplomat. Someone who is sent.

"One Musonius Rufus, a man of equestrian rank, strongly attached to the pursuit of philosophy and to the tenets of the Stoics, had joined the envoys. He mingled with the troops, and enlarging on the blessings of peace and the perils of war, began to admonish the armed crowd. Many thought it ridiculous; more thought it tiresome; some were ready to throw him down and trample him under foot, had he not yielded to the warnings of the more orderly and the threats of others, and ceased to display his ill-timed wisdom."

Tacitus, Histories (100 AD).

Stone Cutter

Someone who carves or cuts stone, shapes stone, or inscribes it.

“To five little stone lozenges, each about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of mine—who gave up trying to get a living exceedingly early in that universal struggle—I am indebted for a belief religiously entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of existence.”

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861).

Speculators

People who incur some risk buying and selling securities for their own account.

“As John T. Flynn was to put it a few years later, ‘The game of speculation is one played by some three or four thousand insiders and some half a million outsiders on terms of complete inequality.’ The outsiders, he said, ‘are permitted to see only a part of their own cards while their professional adversaries have access to the cards of all the players as well as their own.’”

John Brooks, Once in Golconda (1970).

A Kind of an Attorney

A legal advocate. Originally French, for someone one "turns to."

"Thence to Sir G. Carteret at his lodgings, who I perceive is mightily displeased with this new Treasury; and he hath reason, for it will eclipse him. He says, and I believe, that a great many persons at Court are angry at the rise of this Duncomb. He was a kind of an attorney: but for all this I believe this man will be a great man, in spite of all. Late to supper, and with great quiet to bed; finding by the balance of my account that I am creditor 6,900 pounds, for which the Lord of Heaven be praised!"

Samuel Pepys, Diary (May 31, 1667).