Hospodar

Meaning "lord," a title used by the governors of Walachia and Moldavia.

"Sounds well in a sentence apropos of 'the Eastern question.'"

("This was the title of the Sultan-appointed princes and governors of Moldavia and Wallachia from the fifteenth century till the end of the Crimean war. The congress that met in Paris in 1856 to settle various questions involved in the terms for the peace treaty recognized the independence of these countries, proclaimed their union, abolished the title and rule of the hospodars, and substituted a constitutional form of government.")

Flaubert, Dictionary of Platitudes (1880).

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

Brewer

Someone who makes malt liquors. A beer maker.

"Brewers by retailing filthy Thames water, come in a few years to be worth forty or fifty thousand pound."

Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse his supplication to the divell (1592).

Joyce on Chemists

An alchemist. A scientist specializing in chemistry. A pharmacist or druggist.

“The chemist turned back page after page. Sandy shrivelled smell he seems to have. Shrunken skull. And old. Quest for the philosopher’s stone. The alchemists. Drugs age you after mental excitement. Lethargy then. Why? Reaction. A lifetime in a night. Gradually changes your character. Living all the day among herbs, ointments, disinfectants. All his alabaster lilypots. Mortar and pestle. Aq. Dist. Fol. Laur. Te Virid. Smell almost cure you like the dentist’s doorbell. Doctor Whack. He ought to physic himself a bit. Electuary or emulsion. The first fellow that picked an herb to cure himself had a bit of pluck. Simples. Want to be careful. Enough stuff here to chloroform you. Test: turns blue litmus paper red. Chloroform. Overdose of laudanum. Sleeping draughts. Lovephiltres. Paragoric poppysyrup bad for cough. Clogs the pores or the phlegm. Poisons the only cures. Remedy where you least expect it. Clever of nature.”

James Joyce, Ulysses (1914-1921).

Franklin

A class of landowners of free but not noble birth, in social or class rank to be found way back when just below the gentry.

"Proverbs may be called the truest Franklins or freeholders of a country."

James Howell, Lexicon Tetraglotton, an English-French-Italian-Spanish dictionary (1660).

Boatswain

A warrant officer on a war vessel who is in charge of cables, cordage, rigging, and anchors. A superior seaman with similar responsibilities on some merchant ships.

"And while they were debating it, the Boatswain of the ship did bring us out of the kettle a piece of hot salt beef and some brown bread and brandy; and there we did make a little meal, but so good as I never would desire to eat better meat while I live, only I would have cleaner dishes."

Samuel Pepys, Diary (March 25, 1669).

Madam

A woman who runs a brothel.

April 1943, Paris: “I shall remember for the rest of my life those hours spent with four jaded tarts, so worn out and disenchanted they didn’t even bother with make-up any more. They were expecting to have to evacuate the area at any moment. They were much more interested in getting some sleep than in turning a trick, and none of my guys was in the mood for any fun and games. They sat there quietly drinking Moselle wine. There was a general air of melancholy, which even affected the madam, who out of despair stood her round. Everyone was isolated with his or her own memories. And it was at that moment, as though through a mist, a greenish cloud which does not deceive, that I saw four of the ten faces turn a pearly grey, become attenuated, spare, translucent, then blurred. I even scribbled on the tablecloth some fragments of a poem: ‘Yes, I see you marked out beforehand/ My brothers on this last morning…’”

Jacques Yonnet, Paris Noir: The Secret History of a City (1954).

[Translated by Christine Donougher]

Serf

"A person in a condition of servitude or modified slavery, distinguished from what is properly called 'slavery' in that the services due to the master, and his power of disposal of his 'serf' are more or less limited by law or custom; In the 17th-18th century used (after French example) with reference to the contemporary condition of the lower class of cultivators of the soil in various countries of Europe, especially in parts of Germany, in Denmark, Poland, and Russia; chiefly with reference to Russia, where the serfs were not emancipated until 1861, while elsewhere in Europe serfdom ceased to exist early in the 19th century." (OED)

“All night the cell was crowded with prisoners who had lived and died there. They were broken-faced, greenish-gray men, with haunted eyes, scarred shaved heads and ragged bodies, crowding the cell. Many stared wordlessly at the fixer and he at them, their eyes lit with longing for life. If one disappeared two appeared in his place. So many prisoners, thought the prisoner, it’s a country of prisoners. They’ve freed the serfs, or so they say, but not the innocent prisoners. He beheld long lines of them, gaunt-eyed men with starved mouths, lines stretching through the thick walls to impoverished cities, the vast empty steppe, great snowy virgin forests, to the shabby wooden work camps in Siberia.”

Bernard Malamud, The Fixer (1966).

Shaver

An extortioner. A swindler. A plunderer.

"A shaver of young Gentlemen, before ever a haire peepe out of their chinnes: and these are Usurers."

Thomas Dekker, The Seven Deadly Sins of London (1606).

Skinner

Someone who prepares animal skins for further use or sale.

“Away over there, the Gobelins Factory, Collège Estienne, the metro shunting yards. A little closer to hand, the furniture warehouse. And here, the streets lined with low buildings, with their reassuring names: Rue des Cordelières, Rue des Marmousets, Passage Moret. The stones are light-coloured, the couryards deep and spacious from which outside staircases of mahogany wood give access to the first floors. Many artisans seem to have inherited—and continue to practise—skills of bygone days: skinners, bookbinders, illuminators, lithographers. The pace is slower here than elsewhere. The faces of the people express a quiet and industrious patience.”

Jacques Yonnet, Paris Noir: The Secret History of a City (1954).

[Translated by Christine Donougher]

A Few Selected Costermongers

An appleseller. A fruiterer, especially one that sold his fruit in the open street. A barrowman.

“‘Good night’s rest!’ said Eustace. ‘My dear old chap, you don’t for a moment imagine that we are dreaming of going to bed to-night, do you?’

"I suppose the fact of the matter is, I’m not the man I was. I mean, these all-night vigils don’t seem to fascinate me as they used to a few years ago. I can remember the time, when I was up at Oxford, when a Covent Garden ball till six in the morning, with breakfast at the Hammams and probably a free fight with a few selected costermongers to follow, seemed to me what the doctor ordered. But nowadays two o’clock is about my limit; and by two o’clock the twins were just settling down and beginning to go nicely. As far as I can remember, we went on from Ciro’s to play chemmy with some fellows I don’t recall having met before, and it must have been about nine in the morning when we fetched up again at the flat. By which time, I’m bound to admit, as far as I was concerned the first careless freshness was beginning to wear off a bit.”

P. G. Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves (1923).

Erasmus on Proverb-writers

Someone who writes or collects proverbs.

"I can hardly believe that there will be anyone so unfair (and yet I think in the future there will be) as to expect even eloquence from a Dutchman, i.e. a Bœotian or worse, and I am not joking--and in a work which is entirely directed to teaching, and teaching things like these, not unworthy of notice, but so tiny, so humble, that not only do they not attract ornaments of speech and fluent writing but repel everything of the sort. In a medley like this, with the constant enumeration of the names of authors, even modest ones, which I had to persevere in with dull stolidity for the sake of teaching, with the frequent interspersion of Greek and the recurring translations, what room was there for brilliance or elegance, or for maintaining the style, or for flow of oratory? Tully does not require eloquence from a philosopher, and is anyone going to ask it from a proverb-writer? Seneca never recommends it except when it comes easily or is there of its own accord, so as to treat great subjects in the great manner, and if I were to pretend to the paraphernalia of the Rhetors would it not be a case for quoting the proverb about 'Perfume in the pease-porridge'?"

Erasmus, Adages ("Herculei Labores") (1508).

[translated by Margaret Mann Phillips (1967)].

Custodier of the Links

A golf course grounds keeper.

“But as Custodier of the Links, as Tom was officially called, he was in hard fact the keeper of a dilapidated green. The links had deteriorated since Allan Robertson’s death five years before, a slide that continued through the unhappy tenures of Watty Alexander and Alexander Herd. After Herd quit there was no greenkeeper at all for more than a year. By the time Tom arrived, cows grazed fairways gouged by cleeks. The putting-greens, too small for the traffic they endured now that golf was ever more popular, were bumpy and brown; many were as rough as the fairways and teeing-grounds. Women dried and bleached their wash by draping it on whin bushes near Swillican Burn. Horsemen, shepherds, and seaweed-pickers crossed the line of play, stamping the links with hoofprints and barrow tracks. At the Heathery Hole, bits of shell deflected putts on a bare, brown putting-green. One of Tom’s first moves was getting the cattle off his turf. With aid from influential R&A members, he established a new local law: Cows could graze on public land except on the golf links.”

Kevin Cook, Tommy’s Honor (2007).

Patron

In ancient Rome, wealthy Romans who paid their impecunious dependents, known as clients, a daily stipend. In France, the boss.

“Hostage taking of this kind has become more or less routine here, kidnapping the boss being to the French economic crisis what firing the employees was to the American one. Over the past few years a number of French bosses, including some at Moët et Chandon, have been held hostage. There’s actually a nice word for telling the patron to go to his room and stay there: He is merely being ‘sequestered,’ which, as euphemisms go, seems a fair trade for the Anglo-Saxon downsizing.”

Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon (2000).

Byron on the Gondolier

A boatman who rows passengers through Venice standing in a gondola.

"In Venice Tasso's echoes are no more,

And silent rows the songless gondolier."

George Gordon Byron, Childe Harolde's Pilgrimage (1818).

Esquire

A young man of gentle birth, who as an aspirant to knighthood, attended upon a knight, carried his shield, and rendered him other services.

"At the age of twelve or thirteen more serious things would begin to occupy the boy's time. Instead of spending many hours in the lady's bower he would be mainly engaged in his lord's affairs, such as the 'manage' of the horse, the complicated ritual of the hunt, the care of hounds and of hawks and how to look after his master's armour and weapons. When his lord rode out he would attend him and would await anxiously while the outcome of the battle or the tourney was uncertain. At home he would greet the guests on their arrival, showing them to their quarters, waiting on their needs and proving himself to be a young man of quality as he ministered to them. By the cultivation of his abilities in these ways he hoped to deserve his title of esquire, and could look forward to further chances of showing valour and gentleness in war and peace and to advancement in his career."

Six Medieval Men & Women, "Sir John Fastolf," H. S. Bennett (1955).

Higgler

Someone who higgles or chaffers in bargaining. A haggler. An itinerant dealer, especially a carrier or huckster who buys up poultry and dairy produce, and other supplies, and exchanges them for petty commodities from the shops in town.

"He was a foot-higgler now, having been obliged to sell his horse, and he travelled with a basket on his arm."

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891).

Raftsman

Someone who transports goods or people by raft.

"We slept most all day, and started out at night, a little ways behind a monstrous long raft that was as long going by as a procession. She had four long sweeps at each end, so we judged she carried as many as thirty men, likely. She had five big wigwams aboard, wide apart, and an open campfire in the middle, and a tall flagpole at each end. There was a power of style about her. It amounted to something being a raftsman on such a craft as that."

Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn (1884).