Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (66 page)

Sex-Related Words: Post-11th Century, England and France

With the conquest of England in 1066 by William of Normandy, the Anglo-Saxon language of the British Isles underwent several alterations. As the French-speaking Normans established themselves as the ruling caste, they treated the native Saxons and their language as inferior. Many Saxon words were regarded as crude simply because they were spoken by Saxons. Some of these words, once inoffensive, survived and passed eventually into English as coarse, impolite, or foul expressions. Etymologists list numerous examples of “polite” (Norman) and “impolite” (Saxon) words:

Norman Anglo-Saxon

The mother tongue of the twelve kings and queens from William I (who ruled from 1066 to 1087) to Richard II (from 1377 to 1399) was the Normans’ French, though the Anglo-Saxons’ English continued to be spoken. When the two tongues blended into a new language, Middle English, which became the official language of the court in 1362 and the language for teaching in the universities at Oxford and Cambridge in 1380, we inherited many double expressions. In addition to those listed above, the Norman “fornicate” came to be the respectable replacement for the Saxon “fuck,” which itself derived from the Old English word
fokken
, meaning “to beat against.”

The Normans, of course, had obtained their word “fornicate” from an earlier language, and etymologists trace the origin to
fornix
, Latin for a small, vaulted-ceiling basement room that could be rented for a night. For in Roman Christian times, prostitutes practiced their trade secretly in such underground rooms, much the way a modern prostitute might rent a motel room.
Fornix
first became a noun synonymous with “brothel,” then a verb meaning “to frequent a brothel,”
fornicari
, and finally the name of the activity conducted therein.

The word “prostitute” comes to us from the Latin
prostitutus
, meaning
“offered for sale.” It not only reflects that a hooker charges for services, but as the verb “to prostitute,” connotes sacrificing one’s integrity for material gain. “Prostitute” was itself a euphemism for the Old English word “whore,” a term that once merely suggested desire.

“Hooker” is believed to be associated with General Joseph (“Fighting Joe”) Hooker of Civil War fame. To bolster the morale of his men, General Hooker is supposed to have allowed prostitutes access to his troops in camp, where they became known as “Hooker’s girls.” When a section of Washington was set aside for brothels, it acquired the name Hooker’s Division, and the local harlots became hookers.

The term “gay,” synonymous today with “homosexual,” dates back to thirteenth-century France, when
gai
referred to the “cult of courtly love” —that is, homosexual love—and a “lover” was a
gaiol
. Troubadour poetry of that period explicitly discusses this “cult” love. In the following centuries, the word was appropriated to describe first a prostitute, then any social undesirable, and lastly, in a homophobic British culture, to describe both homosexuality and the homosexual himself. Its first public use in the United States (aside from pornographic fiction) was in a 1939 Hollywood comedy,
Bringing Up Baby
, when Cary Grant, sporting a dress, exclaimed that he had “gone gay.”

Chapter 14

From the Magazine Rack

Magazines in America: 1741, New England

Newspapers were developed to appeal to the general public; magazines, on the other hand, were intended from the start to deliver more narrowly focused material to special-interest groups, and they experienced a difficult birth. In America, early magazines failed so quickly and frequently that the species was continually endangered, several times extinct.

The origin of the magazine, following the development of the printing press in fifteenth-century Germany, was straightforward: printed single-page leaflets expanded into multipage pamphlets that filled the middle ground between newspapers and books. History’s first magazine was the 1633 German periodical
Erbauliche Monaths-Unterredungen
, or
Edifying Monthly Discussions
, started by Johann Rist, a poet and theologian from Hamburg. Strongly reflecting its publisher’s dual vocations, the “monthly” appeared whenever Rist could spare the time to write and print it, and its edifying contents strictly embodied the author’s own views. It lasted, on and off, for five years—an eternity for early magazines.

Magazines for light reading, for diversion, and for exclusively female readership began appearing by the mid-seventeenth century. Two are notable for having established a format that survives to this day.

A 1672 French publication,
Mercure Galant
, combined poems, colorful anecdotes, feature articles, and gossip on the nobles at court. And in 1693, a British publisher took the bold step of introducing a magazine devoted to “the fairer sex.”
Ladies’ Mercury
offered advice on etiquette, courtship,
and child rearing, plus embroidery patterns and home cosmetic preparations, along with dollops of light verse and heavy doses of gossip—a potpourri of how-tos, delights, and inessentials that could not be found in newspapers or books. The magazine found itself a niche and set forth a formula for imitators.

Magazines originated to fill the middle ground between newspapers and books
.

While “penny weeklies” thrived in centuries-old Europe, in the nascent American colonies they encountered indifferent readership, reluctant authorship, and seemingly insurmountable circulation problems that turned many a weekly into a semiannual.

Due to competitive forces, America’s first two magazines, both political, were issued within three days of each other. In February 1741, Benjamin Franklin’s
General Magazine, and Historical Chronicle, For all the British Plantations in America
was narrowly beaten to publication by the rival effort of publisher Andrew Bradford:
American Magazine, or A Monthly View of the Political State of the British Colonies
. A fierce quarrel ensued and both Philadelphia periodicals quickly folded; Bradford’s after three months, Franklin’s after six.

Numerous other magazines were started—spanning spectrums from poetry to prose, fact to fiction, politics to how-to—and most of them failed. Noah Webster lamented in 1788, “The expectation of failure is connected
with the very name of a Magazine.” And the
New-York Magazine
, one of the longest-lived of the eighteenth-century ventures, went to its inevitable demise editorializing: “Shall every attempt of this nature desist in these States? Shall our country be stigmatised, odiously stigmatised, with want of taste for literature?”

Why such failure?

Three factors are to blame: broadly, the reader, the writer, and the mails.

The American reader: In 1741, the year Benjamin Franklin’s magazine debuted, the population of the colonies was only about one million, whites and blacks, many of both races illiterate. This sparse population was scattered over an area measuring more than twelve hundred miles north to south along the seaboard, and at some points, a thousand miles westward. And in most regions the roads were, as one publication stated, “wretched, not to say shameful.” Stagecoach travel between the major cities of Boston and New York took eight to ten days. Thus, it’s not surprising that during the eighteenth century, no American magazine achieved a readership higher than fifteen hundred; the average number of subscribers was about eight hundred.

The American writer: Only less discouraging than a small and scattered readership was the unwillingness of eighteenth-century writers to contribute to magazines, which they viewed as inferior to books and newspapers. Consequently, most of the early American magazines reprinted material from books, newspapers, and European magazines. As the editor of the moribund
New-York Magazine
bemoaned, “In the present state of this Western World, voluntary contributions are not to be depended on.”

The American mails: Horse-carried mail was of course faster than mail delivered by stagecoach, but magazines (and newspapers) in the eighteenth century were admitted to the mails only at the discretion of local postmasters. In fact, many of America’s early magazine publishers were postmasters, who readily franked their own products and banned those of competitors. This gave postmasters immense power over the press, and it led to corruption in political campaigns, forcing politicians to pay regional postmasters in order to appear in print. Even the honorable Benjamin Franklin, appointed postmaster of Philadelphia in 1737, discriminated in what publications his post riders could carry.

Furthermore, the cost of a magazine was compounded by a commonplace postal practice: For more than fifty years, many American periodicals arrived by mail only if a subscriber paid a fee to both the local post rider and the regional postmaster. This practice was actually legalized in the Postal Ordinance Act of 1782. Publishers advertised that subscribers would receive issues “by the first opportunity,” meaning whenever and however a magazine could be delivered.

One further problem bedeviled early American magazine publishers, one that has since been palliated but not solved: the delinquent customer. Today it is common practice to pay in advance or in installments, or to charge a
magazine subscription. But in the eighteenth century, a subscriber paid weeks or months after receiving issues—which, given the vagaries of the mail, never arrived, or arrived late or damaged. Poor incentives for paying debts. And there were no such intimidations as a collection agency or a credit rating.

The dilemma led publishers to strange practices. Desperate for payment, they often stated in their magazines that in lieu of cash they would accept wood, cheese, pork, corn, and other products. Isaiah Thomas, editor of the 1780s
Worcester Magazine
, wrote in an issue that his family was short on butter and suggested how delinquent subscribers could quickly clear their arrears: “The editor requests all those who are indebted to him for Newspapers and Magazines, to make payment—butter will be recieved in small sums, if brought within a few days.”

In the face of so many fatal odds, why did American publishers continue to issue new magazines? Because they looked toward Europe and were reminded of the lucrative and prestigious possibilities of periodicals—if only the problems of readership, authorship, and the mails could be solved.

Ladies’ Home Journal
: 1883, Pennsylvania

In the year of America’s centennial, a twenty-six-year-old Philadelphia newspaperman, Cyrus Curtis, conceived a family-oriented horticulture magazine,
Tribune and Farmer
, to sell for fifty cents for a year’s subscription. Mrs. Curtis persuaded her husband to allot her space for a short regular column, which she proposed to title “Woman and the Home.” He reluctantly consented. Mr. Curtis’s magazine folded; his wife’s contribution split off to become the
Ladies’ Home Journal
, still in strong circulation today.

Issues in the early 1880s contained comparatively few pages—of recipes, household hints, needlepoint patterns, gardening advice, poems, and occasionally a short story. Unpretentious, inexpensively printed, the thin magazine offered great variety, and Mrs. Curtis, editing under her maiden name, Louise Knapp, clearly recognized her audience as America’s middle-class homemakers. At the conclusion of its first year, the
Journal
had a circulation of 2,500, an impressive number for that day.

Cyrus Curtis, having abandoned his own publishing venture, concentrated on increasing the circulation of his wife’s magazine. The older problems of limited readership and unreliable mail distribution no longer plagued publishers, but snagging the best writers of the day was a continuing challenge. Especially for a magazine whose hallmark was household hints. Curtis soon discovered that many established authors—Louisa May Alcott, for one—reserved their work for prestigious journals, even if the pay was slightly less.