The Brine-Wet Sleeve of the Fishwife

A woman who works on the sea's edge, engaged in the catching, gutting, and selling of fish.

“Is it drier, my sleeve, than the brine-wet sleeve of the fishwife? Sodden it is, from the waves upon which it floats.” 

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

[Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker.] 

Czar, according to Flaubert

Emperor or Empress of Russia, before the 1917 Revolution. 

"Pronounce 'tsar' and every now and then 'autocrat.'" 

Flaubert, Dictionary of Platitudes (1880). 

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

F. Scott Fitzgerald on the Hotel Manager's Smile

The one keeping the hotel staff and the paying customers in line. 

“And a smile—ah, I would get me a smile. I’m still working on that smile. It is to combine the best qualities of a hotel manager, an experienced old social weasel, a head-master on visitors’ day, a colored elevator man, a pansy pulling a profile, a producer getting stuff at half its market value, a trained nurse coming on a new job, a body-vender in her first rotogravure, a hopeful extra swept near the camera, a ballet dancer with an infected toe, and of course the great beam of loving kindness common to all those from Washington to Beverly Hills who must exist by virtue of the contorted pan.” 

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (1945).

The Greatest Cutters

Someone who cuts wood, marble, clothes, animals, and other things; also applied to some rioting weavers in 1769. 

"What would people have said if he had sent the products of the greatest cutters and weavers in the land? And so, with his usual care and sobriety, he had had a collection neither extravagant nor mean put together, including a robe woven especially for Nakanokimi, and damasks and other fineries. He too was the spoiled pet of the great, his manner so proud that some might have called it aloof and arrogant, his tastes such as might, at times, have seemed overrefined. The Eighth Prince's mountain dwelling, its solitude and melancholy, had wrought a great change in him and led him to an awareness of the tears of ordinary life. In rather sad ways the prince had been of service!" 

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

[Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker.] 

The Devil Playeth the Cook

A womper-upper.

"The Italian by-word, the woman is the fire, the man is the roast meate, in commeth the devile, and he playeth the cooke." 

William Fulbrecke, The pandectes of the law of nations (1602).

Bondsman

A serf, villein, or slave. As far as "professions" go, the worst.  

"To Sleep I give my powers away; 

My will is bondsman to the dark." 

Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam (1850).

One-Legg'd Cantor

A singer. 

"Stanza's which halt and hobble as lamely as that one-legg'd cantor that sings them." 

Richard Brathwait, Whimzies (1631).

The Sorcerer and a Single Drop of Ink

Someone who purports to practice magic or to see what remains invisible to the rest of us. 

"With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal far-reaching visions of the past." 

George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859). 

Novelist

Confabulator, inventor, plotter, hallucinator, lucubrator. 

"The business of the novelist is not to chronicle great events but to make small ones interesting." 

--Arthur Schopenhauer. 

(Quoted in The Viking Book of Aphorisms, A Personal Selection by W. H. Auden and Louis Kronenberger (1962).)