Pilcher

A thief.

“Hang him, Pilcher, There’s nothing loves him:

his owne Cat cannot endure him.”

Women Pleas’d (1625).

Ostreiculturist

Someone who breeds or cultivates oysters.

"The sensation which has been caused in the ostricultural world in consequence of the introduction into our waters of Portuguese mollusca."

Daily Telegraph (1882).

Twain on Plumbers

Originally, someone who worked with lead, especially making and repairing lead pipes. Ancient Rome's reliance on lead pipes, and all that lead in its drinking water, is offered as one reason for its eventual decline and delirium.

“Thanksgiving Day. Let all give humble, hearty, and sincere thanks now, but the turkeys. In the island of Fiji they do not use turkeys; they use plumbers. It does not become you and me to sneer at Fiji. – Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar.”

Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894).

Juggler

Someone capable of tossing, catching, and keeping aloft a great number of objects at the same time. A skilled accountant.

"But after dinner was all our sport, when there come in a juggler, who indeed did shew us so good tricks as I have never seen in my life, I think, of legerdemaine, and such as my wife hath since seriously said that she would not believe but that he did them by the help of the devil."

Samuel Pepys, Diary (May 24, 1667).

"All the little tricks of finance which the expertest juggler of the treasury can practise."

Edmund Burke, Observations on the present State of the Nation (1769).

Twain and Tolstoy on Undertakers

Someone who arranges funerals. Also a term for a book-publisher, stage producer, contractor, or tax collector.

"If Emmeline Grangerford could make poetry like that before she was fourteen, there ain't no telling what she could 'a' done by and by. Buck said she could rattle off poetry like nothing. She didn't ever have to stop to think. He said she would slap down a line, and if she couldn't find anything to rhyme with it would just scratch it out and slap down another one, and go ahead. She warn't particular; she could write about anything you choose to give her to write about just so it was sadful. Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on hand with her 'tribute' before he was cold. She called them tributes. The neighbors said it was the doctor first, then Emmeline, then the undertaker--the undertaker never got in ahead of Emmeline but once, and then she hung fire on a rhyme for the dead person's name, which was Whistler. She warn't ever the same after that; she never complained, but she kinder pined away and did not live long."

Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (1884).

"When Lothario turns to God, the undertaker gets ready his bill."

--Leo Tolstoi.

Diplomat

A political go-between.

"Diplomacy: fine career, but bristling with difficulties, full of mysteries. Appropriate only for people of noble birth. Profession vague in meaning, but ranking above commerce. A diplomat always has shrewdness and insight."

Flaubert, Dictionary of Platitudes (1880).

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

“His office was in the heart of the Wall Street area—in that area’s most imposing structure, the New York Fed’s Florentine palazzo on Liberty Street—and his duties included serving as the government’s banker in all foreign dealings, so he and the new President were stuck with each other whether they liked it or not. A Yale and Harvard Law School graduate, a former legal secretary to the legendary Justice Holmes, a careful bureaucrat and a tactful diplomat, Harrison was a handsome, heavy-set, pipe-smoking, crinkly-eyed, confidence-inspiring sort of man—the more confidence-inspiring, perhaps, because he walked with a limp as a result of a childhood accident. He was destined over the months ahead to have his talent for diplomacy put to the comically excruciating test of adjudicating among Roosevelt and his wilder-eyed henchmen, the irascible commercial bankers of Wall Street, and the lordly central bankers of Europe.”

John Brooks, Once in Golconda (1970).

Tide-waiter

Someone who enforced customhouse regulations, boarding ships that arrived with the tide.

“These tidewaiters and surveyors plague us more with the French wines than the war did with the French privateers.”

George Farquhar, The Constant Couple (1700).

Leapers and Tumblers

A dancer.

"With a leaperesse, or tumbler, be thou not besy."

John Wyclif, Ecclesiastes (1382).

Putyer

A pimp or whoremonger.

"Ha what comyth this wenche here wyth this putyer in this contree?"

William Caxton, Six bookes of the Metamorphoses of Ovyde (1480).

Impresario

A fancy name for someone who puts on operas, concerts, or other public entertainment.

Of the Coney Island dance hall impresarios of the 19^th century: “How seriously all these men out in front of the dens take their vocations. They regard people with a voracious air, as if they contemplated any moment making a rush and a grab and mercilessly compelling a great expenditure. This scant and feeble crowd must madden them. When I first came to this part of the town I was astonished and delighted, for it was the nearest approach to a den of wolves that I had encountered since leaving the West.”

Stephen Crane, Other Writings About New York, “Coney Island’s Failing Days” (1894-6).

Troubadour

One of a class of lyric poets, living in southern France, eastern Spain, and northern Italy, from the 11th to the 13th centuries, who sang in Provençal (langue d'oc), chiefly of chivalry and gallantry, sometimes including wandering minstrels and jongleurs (OED).

“When in the twelfth century unsatisfied desire was placed by the troubadours of Provence in the centre of the poetic conception of love, an important turn in the history of civilization was effected. Antiquity, too, had sung the sufferings of love, but it had never conceived them save as the expectation of happiness or as its pitiful frustration. The sentimental point of Pyramus and Thisbe, of Cephalus and Procris, lies in their tragic end; in the heart-rending loss of a happiness already enjoyed.”

J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).

Screever

Someone who draws pictures or appeals on the sidewalk to solicit donations from passersby. Chalk it up to human ingenuity.

"The pavement artist, or 'scriever,' as he is called in the profession."

Marks, Pen & Pencil Sk. (1894).

Scriveners and the Lotus Sutra

A professional copyist. A notary. A clerk. A penman.

"For some years now she had had scriveners at work on the thousand copies of the Lotus Sutra that were to be her final offering to the Blessed One. They had their studios at Nijo, which she still thought of as home. Now the work was finished, and she made haste to get ready for the dedication."

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

[Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker.]

Claude Levi-Strauss on Painters

“And yet, artists have long been judged bytheir capacity to imitate reality to perfection—a criterion that still prevailed in our own culture until recently. The Greeks had a wealth of anecdotes to extol their painters: painted grapes that birds tried to peck at, equine images that horses mistook for their fellow creatures, and a painted curtain that the artist’s rival demanded be lifted in order to reveal the picture hidden beneath. Legend has credited Giotto and Rembrandt with the same sorts of feats, and the Chinese and Japanese had very similar myths concerning their own famous painters: painted horses that leave the picture at night to graze and dragons that fly into the air as the artist applies the finishing touch. In North America, the Plains tribes made a mistake in a similar vein when they first saw a white painter, Catlin, at work. He had drawn one of them in profile; another, no great friend of the first, cried out on seeing the picture that it proved the model was but half a man. A deadly fight ensued.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss, Look, Listen, Read (1993).

[Translated by Brian C. J. Singer.]

Peasant

A member of the class comprising small farmers and tenants, sharecroppers, and laborers on the land where these constitute the main labor force in agriculture (American Heritage).

"The peasant's ordinary days, however, were spent in steady labour on his own lands and on those of his lord. The rhythm of the seasons held him in thrall. Ceaselessly he laboured; preparing, planting, tending, reaping--round and round he went with the passage of the months."

Six Medieval Men & Women, "Richard Bradwater," H. S. Bennett (1955).

"As soon as you're born, they make you feel small

By giving you no time instead of it all,

Until the pain is so big you feel nothing at all.

A working-class hero is something to be.

A working-class hero is something to be.

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school.

They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool,

Until you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules.

(Refrain)

When they've tortured and scared you for 20-odd years,

Then they expect you to pick a career,

When you can't really function you're so full of fear.

(Refrain)

You've been doped with religion and sex and t.v.

And you think you're so clever and classless and free.

But you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see.

(Refrain)

There's room at the top they're telling you still.

But first you must learn to smile as you kill,

If you want to be like the folks on the hill.

(Refrain)

If you want to be a hero, well just follow me.

If you want to be a hero, well just follow me."

John Lennon, Working Class Hero (1970).