A professional singer who entertains people at social gatherings. A wandering musician. A minstrel.
"Bledgaret passede alle his predecessoures in musik and in melodie, so that he was i-cleped god of glee men."
John De Trevisa, Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden (1387).
An officer in the army or navy who pays troops or workmen.
"Both good and evil are sure paymasters at the last."
Bishop Joseph Hall, Contemplations (1615).
A delegate, ambassador, or messenger. An ecclesiastic with the authority to represent the Pope.
"He suffered the legates from Utrecht to return with their heads upon their shoulders."
John Motley, The Rise of the Dutch Republic (1855).
A chief, president, superintendent, ruler, manager, or overseer, in religious, military, educational, and secular settings. An officer charged wtih apprehending, imprisoning, and punishing miscreants.
"Among the apprehenders, the chief are called Provosts, and they of old had power to hang vagabonds."
Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary (1617).
A prostitute for whom the street serves as a drafty reception hall.
"On rainy night thy breath blows chill
In the street-walker's dripping hair."
Buchanan, Poems, Pan Epilogue (1870).
Someone who navigates a scow, which is a wide, flat boat with square ends used for transporting material.
"He raged and stormed so (he was crossing the river at the time) that I judged it made him blind, because he ran over the steering-oar of a trading scow. Of course the traders sent up a volley of red-hot profanity. Never was a man so grateful as Mr. Bixby was; because he was brimful, and here were subjects who could talk back. He threw open a window, thrust his head out, and such an irruption followed as I never had heard before. The fainter and farther away the scowmen's curses drifted, the higher Mr. Bixby lifted his voice and the weightier his adjectives grew. When he closed the window he was empty. You could have drawn a seine through his system and not caught curses enough to disturb your mother with."
Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883).
In a religious hierarchy, the archbishop is the leader of a phalanx of bishops and their subordinates. Only capable of moving diagonally.
“It is a matter of temperament and belief whether you read this list with respect or with boredom; whether you look upon an archbishop’s hat as a crown or as an extinguisher. If, like the present reviewer, you are ready to hold the simple faith that the outer order corresponds to the inner—that a vicar is a good man, a canon a better man, and an archbishop the best man of all—you will find the study of the Archbishop’s life one of extreme fascination. He has turned aside from poetry and philosophy and law, and specialized in virtue. He has dedicated himself to the service of the Divine. His spiritual proficiency has been such that he has developed from deacon to dean, from dean to bishop, and from bishop to archbishop in the short space of twenty years. As there are only two archbishops in the whole of England the inference seems to be that he is the second best man in England; his hat is the proof of it. Even in a material sense his hat was one of the largest; it was larger than Mr. Gladstone’s; larger than Thackeray’s; larger than Dickens’; it was in fact, so his hatter told him and we are inclined to agree, an ‘eight full.’”
Virginia Woolf, “Outlines,” The Common Reader (1925).
A municipal magistrate in certain towns, as Bordeaux. A member of a company or corporation, sworn to see that nothing is done against its statutes (OED).
“After his return from Italy and his marriage, Pierre began a political career in Bordeaux. He was elected jurat and provost in 1530, then deputy mayor in 1537, and finally mayor in 1554. This period saw difficult times in the city: a new local tax on salt in 1548 inspired riots, which ‘France’ punished by stripping Bordeaux of many legal rights. As mayor, Pierre did what he could to restore its fortunes, but the privileges came back slowly. The stress damaged his health. Just as his tales of war atrocities may have put Montaigne off the military life, so the sight of Pierre’s exhaustion encouraged him to keep more distance from the job when he too became mayor of Bordeaux some thirty years later.”
Sarah Bakewell, How to Live or A Life of Montaigne (2010).
A woman hired by the day to come in and do odd jobs about the house.
“No such restraints were laid on Dostoevsky. It is all the same to him whether you are noble or simple, a tramp or a great lady. Whoever you are, you are the vessel of this perplexed liquid, this cloudy, yeasty, precious stuff, the soul. The soul is not restrained by barriers. It overflows, it floods, it mingles with the souls of others. The simple story of a bank clerk who could not pay for a bottle of wine spreads, before we know what is happening, into the lives of his father-in-law and the five mistresses whom his father-in-law treated abominably, and the postman’s life, and the charwoman’s, and the Princesses’ who lodged in the same block of flats; for nothing is outside Dostoevsky’s province; and when he is tired, he does not stop, he goes on. He cannot restrain himself. Out it tumbles upon us, hot, scalding, mixed, marvelous, terrible, oppressive—the human soul.”
Virginia Woolf, “The Russian Point of View,” The Common Reader (1925).
An animal hounder and bouncer.
“The document read: ‘This will certify that the bearer of same, Comrade Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov, is the director of the sub-section for purging the city of Moscow of stray animals (cats, etc.) of the Moscow Communal Property Adminstration.’
"‘I see,’ Philip Philippovich said with difficulty. ‘And who arranged this for you? However, I can easily guess it myself.’
"‘Well, yes, it was Shvonder,’ replied Sharikov.
"‘And may I inquire, what is this nauseating smell that you are spreading?’
"Sharikov sniffed his jacket with a worried air. ‘Well, what can you do, it smells… Naturally—it’s the profession. We choked them and choked them yesterday… Cats.’”
Mikhail Bulgakov, Heart of a Dog (1925).
Someone who makes or sells candles.
“He feared the prison would go badly for him and it went badly at once. It’s my luck, he thought bitterly. What do they say?—‘If I dealt in candles the sun wouldn’t set.’ Instead, I’m Yakov Fixer and it sets each hour on the stroke. I’m the kind of man who finds it perilous to be alive. One thing I must learn is to say less—much less, or I’ll ruin myself. As it is I’m already ruined.”
Bernard Malamud, The Fixer (1966).
"Who must die must die in the dark, even though he sells candles."
--Colombian proverb.
Someone who writes the story of his or her own life.
“But the publicity of the stage and the perpetual presence of a second person were hostile to that growing consciousness of one’s self, that brooding in solitude over the mysteries of the soul, which, as the years went by, sought expression and found a champion in the sublime genius of Sir Thomas Browne. His immense egotism has paved the way for all psychological novelists, autobiographers, confession-mongers, and dealers in the curious shades of our private life.”
Virginia Woolf, “The Elizabethan Lumber Room,” The Common Reader (1925).
“By writing so openly about his everyday observations and inner life, Montaigne was breaking a taboo. You were not supposed to record yourself in a book, only your great deeds, if you had any. The few Renaissance autobiographies so far written, such as Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita sua and Girolamo Cardano’s De vita propria, had been left unpublished largely for this reason. St. Augustine had written about himself, but as a spiritual exercise and to document his search for God, not to celebrate the wonders of being Augustine. Montaigne did celebrate being Montaigne. This disturbed some readers. The classical scholar Joseph Justus Scaliger was especially annoyed about Montaigne’s revelation, in his later edition of 1588, that he preferred white wine to red. (Actually Scaliger was oversimplifying. Montaigne tells us that he changed his tastes from red to white, then back to red, then to white again.) Pierre Dupuy, another scholar, asked, ‘Who the hell wants to know what he liked?’ Naturally it annoyed Pascal and Malebranche too; Malebranche called it ‘effrontery,’ and Pascal thought Montaigne should have been told to stop.”
Sarah Bakewell, How to Live or A Life of Montaigne (2010).
Someone who dives for sponges. Someone who lives off of others' generosity. A parasite.
"And of all the deeds which win praise, isn't war the seed and source? But what is more foolish than to embark on a struggle of this kind for some reason or other when it does more harm than good to either side? For those who fall in battle, like the men of Megara, are 'of no acount'. When the mail-clad ranks confront each other and the trumptets 'blare out their harsh note', what use, I ask you, are those wise men who are worn out with their studies and can scarcely draw breath now their blood is thin and cold? The need is for stout and sturdy fellows with all the daring possible and the minimum of brain. Of course some may prefer a soldier like Demonsthenes, who took Archilochus' advice and had scarcely glimpsed the enemy before he threw away his shield and fled, as cowardly in battle as he was skilled in speechmaking. People say that judgment matters most in war, and so it does for a general, I agree, but it's a soldier's judgment, not a philosopher's. Otherwise it's the spongers, pimps, robbers, murderers, peasants, morons, debtors, and that sort of scum of the earth who provide the glories of war, not the philosophers and their midnight oil."
Erasmus, Praise of Folly (1509)
[translated by Betty Radice, notes by A. H. T. Levi (1993)].
