[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[gthewlis at comcast.net]

A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon it adds up to real money.
Senator Everett Dirksen

An incompetent attorney can delay a trial for months or years. A competent attorney can delay one even longer.
Evelle J. Younger

Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.
Fred Hoyle

I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages.
William H. Mauldin

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
Upton Sinclair

One reason I don't drink is that I want to know when I am having a good time.
Nancy Astor

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Mrs

The r in Mrs comes from mistress, but the word mistress is a shadow of what it once was. It came into English from Old French in the fourteenth century as the female equivalent of master, a woman who has authority or who exerts control of some sort over other people. It usually referred to the female head of a household. It was common in later centuries to call a husband and wife “the master and mistress”. And mistress was also a title of respect conferred on the wives of farmers, the lower clergy, small tradesmen and the like — recall Shakespeare’s Mistress Quickly, an innkeeper in four of his plays.

In writing, mistress was conventionally shortened to forms such as Mres or Mris. The churchwarden’s accounts of St Mary at Hill in London recorded in 1485 a gift of a pyx cloth from “Mres. Sucklyng”. From the seventeenth century, the abbreviation was limited to the title mistress when it was attached to a proper name. The Mrs spelling had already begun to appear, in the later sixteenth century, initially in accounts, church records and the like. This is an early appearance in print, in an official publication of the Parliamentary cause during the English Civil War:

Another part of his Letter was to desire safe conduct from Oxford to London, for Mrs. Elizabeth Crofte with a Coach and six. - A Perfect Diurnall of Some Passages and Proceedings of Parliament and in Relation to the Armies in England and Ireland, Middlesex, 13 May 1644.

The Mrs spelling had long become standard by the time this famous novel appeared:

Upon these apprehensions, the first thing I did was to go quite out of my knowledge, and go by another name. This I did effectually, for I ... took lodgings in a very private place, dressed up in the habit of a widow, and called myself Mrs. Flanders. - Moll Flanders, by Daniel Defoe, 1722.

Nobody knows for sure how Defoe would have pronounced the Mrs. He might have given it the older full form of mistress, but he would probably have adopted an elided form, missis, which was in common use later in the century:

The same haste and necessity of dispatch, which has corrupted Master into Mister, has, when it is a title of civility only, contracted Mistress into Missis. -- Thus, Mrs. Montague, Mrs. Carter, &c. are pronounced Missis Montague, Missis Carter, &c. To pronounce the word as it is written would, in these cases, appear quaint and pedantick. - A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, and Expositor of the English Language, by John Walker, 1791.

That comment was published before the first appearance of the spelling missus in the historical record. By the 1790s, it was being used in the West Indies for the way servants addressed their mistresses. That spelling is also found in American writing of the nineteenth century. In the early 1800s it’s recorded as a dialectal form in parts of England — Edward Moor commented in Suffolk Words and Phrases in 1823 that Misses was “the usual way of addressing a woman, especially a matron.”

Charles Dickens, who had an extraordinarily keen ear for the way people spoke, often recorded the missus form for the way that tradesmen and similar men addressed women, here in the fictitious northern English industrial city of Coketown:

On his telling her where he worked, the old woman became a more singular old woman than before. ‘An’t you happy?’ she asked him. ‘Why — there’s awmost nobbody but has their troubles, missus.’ - Hard Times, by Charles Dickens, 1854.

The exact pronunciation has varied, as has the way in which those variant speech forms were transcribed.

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Ulysses S. Grant's real name is Hiram Ulysses Grant.
If you called him Ulysses S. Grant during his youth, he wouldn’t know who you were talking about. Grant was born Hiram Ulysses Grant in Point Pleasant, Ohio, on April 27, 1822, to Jesse Root Grant, a tanner, and Hannah Simpson Grant. The young Ulysses did go by his middle name as a boy (according to legend, he disliked the initials H.U.G.), but the moniker known to the history books was bestowed upon him when he was nominated to attend West Point by Ohio congressman Thomas Hamer. Hamer, an old friend of Grant’s father, did Ulysses a favor and nominated him for enrollment at the prestigious military academy in 1839, and somehow, in the process, his name was put down as “Ulysses S. Grant,” with the “S” standing for Grant’s mother’s maiden name: Simpson. The young Grant, aware of his meager social standing, accepted the clerical error, and the name stuck. His classmates even used it as a nickname, calling him “Sam.” Later, in an 1844 letter to his future wife Julia, he joked, “Find some name beginning with ‘S’ for me, You know I have an ‘S’ in my name and don’t know what it stands for.” (Grant isn’t the only president with a strange middle name, by the way. Harry S. Truman’s middle initial was also just an “S.”)

Ulysses S. Grant hated the West Point uniform.
Though Grant’s father hoped that pushing him into the prestige of West Point would open up opportunities for his son, the younger Grant pretty much hated the decorum of going to school. He was known to be generally unkempt during his time there and received demerits for his sloppy uniform habits (something he’d continue during his time as commander of the Union Army during the Civil War). In an 1839 letter, a 17-year-old Grant told his cousin, McKinstry Griffith, he “would laugh at my appearance” if he saw the cadet in his uniform: “My pants set as tight to my skin as the bark to a tree.” If he bent over, he wrote, “they are very apt to crack with a report as loud as a pistol,” and “If you were to see me at a distance, the first question you would ask would be ‘Is that a fish or an animal?’”

Ulysses S. Grant was introduced to his wife, Julia, by her brother.
Julia Boggs Dent was born January 26, 1826, in St. Louis. She was a voracious reader and skilled pianist who also had some artistic talent. Julia was introduced to her future husband by her brother, Fred, who attended West Point alongside the future general. He wrote to his sister of Grant, “I want you to know him, he is pure gold.” The matchmaker mentioned Julia to Grant as well. After graduating from West Point in 1843 as a brevet second lieutenant, Grant began to visit the Dents at their home outside St. Louis in 1844 and popped the question to Julia a few months later. They hid their engagement until 1845, when Grant asked her father for her hand, though Mr. Dent said yes, the Mexican-American War broke out, and Julia and Grant didn't marry until 1848.