A Rare Medium

"All through the night he was lost in spells and incantations, and at dawn the malign spirit in possession of the girl transferred itself to a medium. Assisted now by his favorite disciple, the bishop tried all manner of spells toward identifying the source of the trouble; and finally the spirit, hidden for so long, was forced to announce itself. 'You think it is this I have come for?' it shouted. 'No, no. I was once a monk myself, and I obeyed all the rules; but I took away a grudge that kept me tied to the world, and I wandered here and wandered there, and found a house full of beautiful girls. One of them died, and this one wanted to die too. She said so, every day and every night. I saw my chance and took hold of her one dark night when she was alone. But Our Lady of Hatsuse was on her side through it all, and now I have lost out to His Reverance. I shall leave you.' 'Who is that addresses us?' But the medium was tiring rapidly and no more information was forthcoming."

Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji (10th Century).

Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker.

Pretty Punk

A prostitute.

“I may grace her with the name of a Curtizan, a Backslider, a Prostitution, or such a Toy, but when all comes to all, 'tis but a plaine Pung.”

Thomas Middleton, Michaelmas Term (1607).

On a scale of 1 to 10: 1.

Beefeaters

The Yeoman of the Guard in the household of the Sovereign of Great Britain. A well-fed menial.

"Is not there a sort of employment, sir, called--beefeating? If your lordship please to make me a beefeater."

Henry Fielding, Pasquin (1736)

Naperers

The person in charge of the royal table linen.

"My Lady Hinchingbroke I cannot say is a beauty, nor ugly, but is altogether a comely lady enough and seems very good-humoured, and I mighty glad of the occasion of seeing her before to-morrow. Thence home, and there find one laying of my napkins against to-morrow in figures of all sorts, which is mighty pretty; and it seems it is his trade and he gets much money by it, and do now and then furnish tables with plate and linen for a feast at so much, and a trade I could not have thought of. Thence I to Mrs. Turner and did get her to go along with me to the French pewterer's, and there did buy some new pewter against to-morrow; and thence to White Hall to have got a cook of her acquaintance, the best in England, as she says."

Samuel Pepys, Diary (March 13, 1668)

Fowlers

Someone who hunts wild birds, whether for sport or food, especially one who uses nets.

"A bleary-eyed fowler, trust not, though he weep."

John Lydgate, Minor Poems (1430)

Marauders and Pillagers

A soldier who lives off of plunder taken from people defeated in battle.

"To be a Marauder and Pillager upon the street and field of human credit and reputation is worse than to turn common padders."

R. Ferguson, View of an Ecclesiastick in his socks and buskins (1698)

Criers

One appointed in a town or community to make public announcements. A common or town crier. An auctioneer. A hawker.

"'You know how long I have been without news of my runaway slave girl. So you simply must make a public announcement offering a reward to the person who finds her, and insist on my orders being obeyed at once. Her person must be accurately described so that nobody will be able to plead ignorance as an excuse for harbouring her. Here is her dossier; Psyche is the name, and all particulars are included.' She handed him a little book and immediately went home. Mercury did as he was told. He went from country to country crying out: 'Oyez, oyez! If any person can apprehend and seize the person of a runaway princess, one of the Lady Venus's slave-girls, by name PSYCHE, or give any information that will lead to her discovery, let such a person go to Mercury, Town-crier of Heaven, in his temple just outside the precincts of Our Lady of the Myrtles, Aventine Hill, Rome. The reward offered is as follows: seven sweet kisses from the mouth of the said Venus herself, and one exquisitely delicious thrust of her honeyed tongue between his pursed lips.'"

Apuleius, The Golden Ass, (2nd Century A.D.)

[translation by Robert Graves]

Remittance Men

Someone paid by his or her family to go away (and stay away).

"Harry Cram has never worked a day in his life," said Williams. "He's one of the first remittance men to come to the low country. His family sends his monthly checks from Philadelphia with the understanding he'll never go back there, and he leads a life of high style--traveling around the world, hunting, drinking, and playing polo. He's a wild man, completely charming."

John Berendt, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994)

Bounty Jumpers

To get people to join the military, at times a certain amount of cash, called a bounty, has been offered new recruits. A bounty jumper takes the money, later sneaking off to re-enlist elsewhere, where he can pocket another bounty.

"Bringing into the service many 'bounty-jumpers' who enlisted merely for money, and soon deserted to enlist again."

Thomas Higginson, Young folks' history of the United States (1875)

Badgers

A traveling middleman who buys such things as fish, butter, cheese, and corn from their producers and resells them. A hawker.

"Badger, a huckster; a man who goes about the country with ass and panniers, to buy up butter, eggs, and fruit, which he will sell at a near market-town; and before shops were common in every village, he dealt in needles, thread, trimmings, and the like, for which he was open to exchange."

John C. Atkinson, Glossary of the Cleveland dialect (1868)

Harpists

Someone who plays the harp.

"We went to Fuller's (the famous place for ale), but they have none but what was in the vat. After that to Poole's, a tavern in the town, where we drank, and so to boat again, and went to the Assistance, where we were treated very civilly by the captain, and he did give us such music upon the harp by a fellow that he keeps on board that I never expect to hear the like again, yet he is a drunken simple fellow to look on as any I ever saw."

Samuel Pepys, Diary (April 30, 1660)

Oyster Shuckers

“May I say that I am perhaps the best lawyer on the Eastern Shore? Perhaps I shouldn’t, for you’ll take the statement as self-praise. If I thought the practice of law absolutely important, then my statement would indeed be as much a boast as a description; but truthfully I consider advocacy, jurisprudence, even justice, to have no more intrinsic importance than, say, oyster-shucking. And you’d understand, wouldn’t you, that if a man like myself asserted with a smile that he was the peninsula’s best oyster shucker (I’m not), or cigarette roller, or pinball-machine tilter, he’d not be guilty of prideful boasting? It requires small subtlety to grasp that, I think.”

John Barth, The Floating Opera (1956).

Yeoman's Service

A servant in a royal or nobleman's household, ranking between a sergeant and a groom. Used to designate their more specific duties with such titles as:

yeoman of the bottles,
yeoman of the buttery,
yeoman of the cellar,
yeoman of the chamber,
yeoman of the crown,
yeoman of the ewery,
yeoman of the horse,
yeoman for the household,
yeoman of the larder,
yeoman for the mouth,
yeoman of the revels,
yeoman of the robes,
yeoman of the sauces,
yeoman of the stable,
yeoman of the stirrup,
yeoman of the tents, and
yeoman of the wardrobe (OED).

"I once did hold it a baseness to write fair;
but Sir now, it did me Yeoman's service."

Shakespeare, Hamlet (1602)

Zany

A comedian who assists a clown or acrobat, and who imitates and exaggerates whatever his master does (from the name of the servants who act as clowns in the Commedia dell' arte).

"Some carry-tale, some please-man, some slight Zanie,
That knows the trick To make my Lady laugh."

Shakespeare, Love's Labours Lost (1588).

Tramplers

A go-between. An attorney.

“The trampler is in haste,
O clear the way,
Takes fees with both hands
cause he cannot stay.”

J. Taylor, Water Cormorant (1630).

Leading a Monkey Through the Streets

"The heart of his nonconformity was not, however, his exoticism. It was his adherence to the way of the townspeople and his belief that, in the cities at least, successful businessmen were the real aristocrats, while high birth and military prowess counted for little. This belief is expressed in one way by what he says in the Treasury for the Ages: 'It makes no difference whether a man is of humble birth or of fine lineage. The geneologies of townspeople are written in dollars and cents. A man who traces his ancestry to Fujiwara Kamatari [a noble of the highest court rank] but who lives impoverished in the city will be worse off than one who leads a monkey through the streets to earn his living.'"

William Theodore De Bary in the introduction to Ihara Saikaku, Five Women Who Loved Love (1686).

Lady Murasaki on Living by the Lute

Any musician playing in hope of a handout.

"Sending to the house on the hill for a lute and a thirteen-stringed koto, the old man now seemed to change roles and become one of these priestly medicants who make their living by the lute. He played a most interesting and affecting strain. Genji played a few notes on the thirteen-stringed koto which the old man pressed on him and was thought an uncommonly impressive performer on both sorts of koto. Even the most ordinary music can seem remarkable if the time and place are right; and here on the wide seacoast, open far into the distance, the groves seemed to come alive in colors richer than the bloom of spring or the change of autumn, and the calls of the water rails were as if they were pounding on the door and demanding to be admitted."

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

[Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker]

Gunrunners

A gun smuggler and supplier.

“It held some newspaper clippings, the oldest dated ten years back, the youngest eight months. I read them through, passing each one to the swarthy man as I finished it. Tom-Tom Carey was written down in them as soldier of fortune, gunrunner, seal poacher, smuggler, and pirate. But it was all alleged, supposed and suspected. He had been captured variously but never convicted of anything. ‘They don’t treat me right,’ he complained placidly when we were through reading.”

Dashiell Hammett, $106,000 Blood Money (1924).

Tuckers

A cloth dresser or finisher, especially one who stretches cloth that comes from a weaver. A fuller. Someone who teases or burls cloth.

"Wool could not be spun without being combed in oil; nor would it take the dye when woven, unless divested of the oil. This is the proper business of the Fuller, provincially called, the Tucker."

Nathaniel Whittock, The complete book of trades (1837).

Scratchers

A forger.

"A professional forgery gang consists of: First, a capitalist or backer; second, the actual forger, who is known among his associates as the 'scratcher'."

North American Review (1894).

Mummy Makers

Someone who preserves a body for burial as the ancient Egyptians did. The Egyptians preserved bodies by the use of bitumen, spices, gums, natron, honey, etc. In the more expensive forms of embalming, the body was cut open and filled with preservatives, after the viscera were separately preserved in canopic jars (Webster's).

"It is better to think out one true thought,
than to mummy our benumbed souls
with the circumvolutions of twenty thousand books."

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Some account of the Greek Christian Poets (1842).

A Shocker

Someone who piles up sheaves into shocks.

"Some o'er the rustling scythe go bending on; And shockers follow where their toils have gone."

John Clare, The shepherd's calendar (1827).

Predators' Balls

Mill-ken: A thief who breaks into houses.

“The same capacity which qualifies a Mill-ken to arrive at any degrees of eminence would likewise raise a man in what the world esteem a more honourable calling.”

Henry Fielding, The Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great (1743).

Scale of 1 to 10... 3. (See Snudge.)

O. Henry on Stenographers

Someone skilled in writing shorthand and taking dictation.

“The (so-called) Vallambrosa Apartment-House is not an apartment-house. It is composed of two old-fashioned, brownstone-front residences welded into one. The parlor floor of one side is gay with the wraps and headgear of a modiste; the other is lugubrious with the sophistical promises and grisly display of a painless dentist. You may have a room there for two dollars a week or you may have one for twenty dollars. Among the Vallambrosa’s roomers are stenographers, musicians, brokers, shop-girls, space-rate writers, art students, wire-tappers, and other people who lean far over the banister-rail when the door-bell rings.”

O. Henry, The Third Ingredient (1908).

Judicial Nippers

A thief or pickpocket.

"He that could take a peece of sylver out of the purse without the noyse of any of the bells, he was adjudged a judiciall Nypper."

Fleetwood in Sir Henry Ellis' Original Letters (1585)

A Hierarchy of Respect Among Craftsmen

An artisan. Someone who creates any handiwork. An artist.

"Many craftsmen did not possess extensive capital resources; a study of Cairo has shown that a considerable proportion of the shops and workshops were owned by large merchants or by religious foundations. They could enjoy prestige, however, as a stable population pursuing honourable trades in accordance with generally accepted codes of honesty and decent workmanship. There was a hierarchy of respect in the crafts, ranging from work in precious metals, paper and perfume, down to such 'unclean' crafts as tanning, dyeing, and butchering."

Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (1991).

Poetasters

A bad poet. A dogged composer of doggerel.

"How these authors magnify their office!
One dishonest plumber
does more harm than a hundred poetasters."

--Augustine Birrell.

Ropers and the Well-Woven Rope

Someone who makes or looks after ropes.

"Money stored up is every man's master, or slave. A well-woven rope ought to follow and not lead the way."

Horace, Epistle to Aristius Fuscus (21 B.C.)

Colet

An acolyte.

"Fyrst benet, than colet, subdecon, deacon, and than preest."

William Caxton, The cronicles of Englond (1480).

Story-tellers

Someone who recites stories, legends, and romances, publicly, for money.

"I have always felt that the art of telling a story consists in so stimulating the listener's imagination that he drowns himself in his own reveries long before the end. The best stories I have heard were pointless, the best books those whose plot I can never remember, the best individuals those whom I never get anywhere with. Though it has been practiced on me time and again I never cease to marvel how it happens that, with certain individuals whom I know, within a few minutes after greeting them we are embarked on an endless voyage comparable in feeling and trajectory only to the deep middle dream which the practiced dreamer slips into like a bone into its socket."

Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi (1941).

Mudlarks

Someone who scavenges in the mud for salvageable material.

"Mudlarks, so called from their being accustomed to prowl about, at low water, under the quarter of West India ships under pretence of grubbing in the mud for old ropes, iron, etc., but whose chief object was to receive and conceal small bags of sugar, coffee, etc. which they conveyed to such houses as they were directed, and for which services they generally received a share of the booty."

Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis (1796).

Expensive and Conceited Exorcists

“Blood is adhesive. In a hotel it is like a curse. It is a taint that never goes away. For selfish reasons I was glad that the murder of Amo Ferretti was not committed in my hotel. Murders leave a sweetly poisonous smell that lingers, and any hotel unlucky enough to be the setting for a murder ceases to be a hotel and is known only as the scene of the crime, vicious and provocative, attracting all the wrong people, photographers and thrill seekers. The hotel never gets its reputation back, even after the charade of the most elaborate and noisy purification ceremonies, the howling monks, the gongs, the firecrackers, the tossing of salt, the prayers, the expensive and conceited exorcists.”

Paul Theroux, Hotel Honolulu (2001).

The Salt Burners' Fires

Someone who boils sea water to obtain the salt.

"'There on the shore, the salt burners' fires await me.
Will their smoke be as the smoke over Toribe Moor?
Is this the parting at dawn we are always hearing of?
No doubt there are those who know.'

'I have always hated the word "farewell,"' said Saisho,
whose grief seemed quite unfeigned.
'And our farewells today are unlike any others.'"

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

Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker.

First One Over the Wall

In a battle, the first soldier to scale the enemy's fortification.

"All rewards and signes of honour, as the Civicke garland, The murall wreath, the enemies Prime horse, To him alone are proper."

Philip Massinger, The Picture (1629).

Gestures

"The gestures of an adult are those of a carpenter, the gestures of an infant those of a mason."

--Malcolm de Chazal.

Bellmen

A kind of town crier, who announced each passing hour in the night by ringing a bell and calling out the hour.

“None can forever conceal the truth. If the bellman is dead the wind will toll the bell.”

Bernard Malamud, The Fixer (1966).

A Daring Hero

"The virtues of industry and frugality can easily be corrupted to make men overscrupulous and stingy, as in the example of Moemon, who economized on his coat sleeves, would not buy a hat when he came of age to wear one, and slept with an abacus under his pillow to keep track of the money he made in dreams. But, somewhat like Gengobei, Moemon is one minute a ridiculous clerk and the next a daring hero who runs off with the most beautiful lady in town."

Wm. Theodore De Bary in the introduction to Ahira Saikaku, Five Women Who Loved Love (1686).

Arch Makers

Originally, a Roman worker who specialized in building rounded vaults or archways, arches being a Roman invention.

"The great latifundia had their own ceramic workshops producing pots for everyday use (opus doliare). Artistic pottery, on the other hand, was made in the towns, especially in Arezzo where production was constantly on the increase, but also at Mutina (Modena), Pollentia, Cumae, Capua, Rhegium and others. There were also many brick factories, for bricks were widely used for building in the Italian towns. The various crafts of the building trade were also to a large extent differentiated into lime burners (calcis coctores), masons (structores), makers of arches (arcuarii), builders of interior walls (parietarii), plasterers (albatrii) and many others."

Claude Mossé, The Ancient World of Work (1969)

[Translated by Janet Lloyd].

Senators

A legislator in ancient Rome.

"'To go to bed with your worthy host's wife would be a disgraceful failure in good manners. On the other hand, there's no reason why you shouldn't try to seduce Fotis; the girl is not only beautiful, lively and amusing but already half in love with you. Last night when you went to bed, she led you to your room, turned your sheets down, tucked you tenderly in, then gave you a charming good-night kiss and showed quite plainly how sorry she was to leave you. Remember how she kept stopping on her way to the door and looking back at you? The very best of luck to you, then, Lucius; but, whatever may come of it, good or bad, my advice is: go for Fotis.' My mind was now made up, and when I reached Milo's house I marched in as confidently as a Senator leading the Ayes into the division lobby."

Apuleius, The Golden Ass, (2nd Century A.D.)

[translated by Robert Graves].