Brecht on the Truth about Fishermen and Taxmen

Adepts at seeing what goes on below the surface.

"Deep, the student, came to Mr. Keuner, the thinking man, and said: 'I want to know the truth.'
'Which truth? The truth is well known. Do you want to know the truth about the fish trade? Or about the tax system? If, because they tell you the truth about the fish trade, you no longer pay a high price for their fish, you will never know the truth,' said Mr. Keuner."

Bertolt Brecht, Stories of Mr. Keuner (1965).

Emperor

Someone whose tendency toward self-aggrandizement snowballs. 

Fainall: “Well, sure if I should live to be rid of my wife, I should be a miserable man.”

Mrs. Marwood: “Aye!”

Fainall: “For having only that one hope, the accomplishment of it, of consequence, must put an end to all my hopes; and what a wretch is he who must survive his hopes! Nothing remains when that day comes, but to sit down and weep like Alexander, when he wanted other worlds to conquer.” 

William Congreve, The Way of the World (1700).

The Raftsmen Are (Sometimes) Not Bliged to Row

Someone who conveys goods or people by raft.

"A small current begins here, and the raftsmen are not bliged to row."

Charles Carroll, Journal during his mission to Canada (1776).

A Poor Man Hanging on to His Plow

A farmer who tills the earth with a plow.

"One such poor family was observed with a sympathetic eye by a contemporary, who tells us how as he went on his way he saw a poor man hanging on to his plough. His coat was of a poor stuff called 'cary'; his hood was full of holes and his hair stuck out of it. As he trod the soil his toes stuck out of his worn and thick-soled shoes; his hose hung about his hocks and he was beslobbered with mud from following the plough. His two mittens, scantily made of rough stuff, with worn-out fingers, were stiff with muck. Bemired with mud, almost up to his ankles, he drove four heifers before him that had become so feeble that men might count every rib, so sorry looking they were. Beside him walked his wife, carrying a long goad, her short dress tucked up high, with a winnowing-sheet round her as a protection against the cold weather. She was barefoot, so that the ice cut into her feet and made them bleed. At the end of the row was a little wooden bread-bowl which held a small child covered with rags and on one side of it stood the two-year old twins. They all sang one song that was pitiful to hear: they all cried the same cry--a note full of care. The poor man sighed deeply and said, 'Children, be still!'"

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

Twain on a Marshal of Many Talents

A stable man. Someone with police duties. The official on a ship who oversees the carrying out of punishments.

“Toward dawn we got under way again, and presently as we sat with raised curtains enjoying our early morning smoke and contemplating the first splendor of the rising sun as it swept down the long array of mountain peaks, flushing and gilding crag after crag and summit after summit, as if the invisible Creator reviewed his gray veterans and they saluted with a smile, we hove in sight of South Pass City. The hotelkeeper, the postmaster, the blacksmith, the mayor, the constable, the city marshal and the principal citizen and property holder, all came out and greeted us cheerily, and we gave him good day. He gave us a little Indian news, and a little Rocky Mountain news, and we gave him some plains information in return. He then retired to his lonely grandeur and we climbed on up among the bristling peaks and the ragged clouds. South Pass City consisted of four log cabins, one of which was unfinished, and the gentleman with all those offices and titles was the chiefest of the ten citizens of the place. Think of hotelkeeper, postmaster, blacksmith, mayor, constable, city marshal, and principal citizen all condensed into one person and crammed into one skin. Bemis said he was ‘a perfect Allen’s revolver of dignities.’ And he said that if he were to die as postmaster, or as blacksmith, or as postmaster and blacksmith both, the people might stand it, but if he were to die all over, it would be a frightful loss to the community.”

Mark Twain, Roughing It (1871).

Pickers and Pickers

Someone who picks or gathers fruit, flowers, roots, hops, cotton, potatoes, and other produce. Someone who picks through rags, refuse, and garbage, looking for things of some worth. A thief who makes off with anything that isn't nailed down.

“Forty-five thousand men and women subsisting on pickings from household rubbish. There are pickers and pickers, grades, aristocrats and plebeians in this profession as in every other.”

Daily News (1893).

Spinmeister

A dizzier.

“The importance of this story derives from the fact that the campaign of lying about Upton Sinclair was ordered by the biggest business men in California and paid for with millions of their dollars. It was carried out by the best newspaper brains, the best advertising brains, the best motion picture brains, the best political brains—so on all the way down the line. In putting the facts before the public I am not whining, or seeking sympathy; I am telling the people of California what was done to them by their big business masters; I am telling the people of the other forty-seven States, what they have to expect when their turn comes. For this old dying system has a great deal of vicious life in it yet. It will fight to its last gasp, and this is the way it will fight; all this bitter sneering, these slanders and forgeries, these cruel falsehoods taken up and repeated millions of times over, pounded into the feeble minds of poor people who are overworked and over-driven, and have very little education, and often no power to absorb education. If you take this book rightly you will consider it a textbook of military strategy; a book of maps and other data needed for the planning of forty-nine campaigns of the future: forty-eight of these to take our States out of the hands of organized greed and knavery, and the forty-ninth, the biggest of all, to take our nation out of the same hands.”

Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor and How I Got Licked (1934).

Lamb on Swineherd

A herder of pigs or hogs. A master of the swinish and porcine.

“The manuscript goes on to say, that the art of roasting, or rather broiling (which I take to be the elder brother) was accidentally discovered in the manner following. The swine-herd, Ho-ti, having gone out into the woods one morning, as his manner was, to collect mast for his hogs, left his cottage in the care of his eldest son Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who being fond of playing with fire, as younkers of his age commonly are, let some sparks escape into a bundle of straw, which kindling quickly, spread the conflagration over every part of their poor mansion, till it was reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry antediluvian make-shift of a building, you may think it), what was of much more importance, a fine litter of new-farrowed pigs, no less than nine in number, perished.”

Charles Lamb, The Essays of Elia, “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig” (1823).

Waterologer

A doctor who diagnoses maladies by inspecting a patient's urine.

"You must either pretend to be Waterologers, or Ass-trologers, or Piss-prophets, or Starr-Wizards."

The Quack's Academy or the Dunce's Directory (1678).

Haberdasher

Someone who sells caps and hats. Also someone who sells small sewing items, such as thread, tape, and ribbons.

"Haberdashers that sell french or milan cappes, glasses, Daggers, swerdes, girdles and such things."

A Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England (1550).

The Unlucky Scrubber

Someone who cleans with a scrub brush.

"Her floor is scoured every night,

after all are in bed but the unlucky scrubber, Betsy,

the maid of all work."

Mrs. Kirkland in Griswold Prose Writers of America (1839).

Quean

A harlot.

"All spent in a Taverne amongst a consort of queanes and fidlers."

Thomas Nashe, An Almond for a Parrot (1589).

Mad-doctor

Someone who treats the mentally ill.

"Clearheaded, logical men of sense, these mad-doctors."

William Schwenk Gilbert, Foggerty's Fairy and other tales (1881).

Douzeper

One of the twelve French peers or companions who formed a guard of honor for Charlemagne. Great nobles or knights.

"Big looking like a doughty Doucepere,

At last he thus: 'Thou clod of vilest clay,

I pardon yield, and with thy rudeness bear.'"

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (1590).

Pioneer

Foot soldiers who march ahead of the main army, equipped with pickaxes and shovels, to dig ditches, fell trees, build or repair roads, and generally to clear the way for the others to follow.

"To every thousand Souldiers, there be allotted one hundred pioneers, to be provided with Pickaxes, Shovels, Hatchets, Bills and the like."

Proclamation in Maldon Essex Borough Deeds (1626).

Radknight

A tenant who holds land on the condition of doing the landlord service on horseback.

"The Rad-knights, who by the tenure of their lands, were bound to ride with or for the lord, as often as his affairs required."

Thomas Pennant, A tour in Wales 1773 (1778-81).

Jack of All Trades

Expert of none.

"I know one 'jack-of-all-trades', scholar of Greek and Latin, mathematician, philosopher, doctor, all in princely style, a man already in his sixties, who has thrown up everything else and spent twenty years vexing and tormenting himself over grammar. He supposes he'd be perfectly happy if he were allowed to live long enough to define precisely how the eight parts of speech should be distinguished, something in which no one writing in Greek or Latin has ever managed to be entirely successful. And then if anyone treats a conjunction as a word with the force of an adverb, it's a thing to go to war about."

Erasmus, Praise of Folly, (1509)

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

Ruffian

A protector of prostitutes.

"The Common sorte lodge with baudes called Ruffians, to whom in Venice they pay of their gayne the fifth part."

Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary (1618).

Prompter

Someone who helps a speaker or performer by supplying him or her, when at a loss, with a word, phrase, name, or something to say. In the theater, someone hidden out of sight to help actors who have forgotten their lines.

"Everybody being more or less inaudible, with the solitary exception of the Prompter."

Francis Burnand, My Time and what I've done with it (1874).

Clerk of the Market

A royal officer attending at fairs and markets, to keep the standards of weights and measures, and punish misdemeanors therein.

"God is the principal clerk of the market, all the weights of the bag are his work."

Fuller, The holy and profane state (1642).

Nabob

A native deputy or viceroy in India. A governor of a province of the Mogul empire. Someone who returns to Europe from the East with great riches, hence, any man of great wealth (Webster's).

"The glorified spirit of a great statesman and philosopher dawdling, like a bilious old nabob at a watering place."

Thomas Macaulay, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, Southey's Colloquium (1830).

Copyist

Someone who makes copies of manuscripts by hand. A scribe.

"No one is claiming that anything in the holy scriptures is a lie, if that is the inference you draw, and none of this has anything to do with the personal conflict between Augustine and Jerome. But the truth demands, what is plain even for the blind to see, that there are often passages where the Greek has been badly translated because of the inexperience or carelessness of the translator, and often a true and faithful reading has been corrupted by uneducated copyists, something we see happening every day, or sometimes even altered by half-educated scribes not thinking what they do. Then who is giving his support to a lie--the man who corrects and restores these texts or the man who would rather accept an error than remove it?"

Erasmus, Letter to Maarten Van Dorp, (1515)

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

Snarer

Someone who sets traps to catch animals or human prey.

"He has broke through the net and left the snarer here herself entangled."

Thomas Middleton, More Dissemblers Besides Women (1622).