Annotations and comments

Paul Chapin has posted 849 annotations/comments since 17 January 2003.

Comments

First Reading

About Saturday 16 September 1665

Paul Chapin  •  Link

A quantum more -

CGS is quite right. I didn't mean to imply that the word "quantum" itself, obviously a Latin word, was new in the C17, just its importation into English.

About Sunday 17 September 1665

Paul Chapin  •  Link

Thanks to CGS for the "vacation" entry. I speculate that in this context Sam was using the word in a sense that we would express today by "evacuation," referring to his being forced to vacate his London house because of the plague.

About Saturday 16 September 1665

Paul Chapin  •  Link

"he paid me my quantum out of it"

"Quantum" is a word I thought of more recent origin, and in scientific discourse that's true, the first attested use in OED being from 1902, by Lord Kelvin. But for Sam it was a modern word:

3. One's share or portion.
1649 Jer. Taylor Gt. Exemp. ii. xii. 94 Poverty is her portion, and her quantum is but food and raiment. 1724 Swift Drapier's Lett. Wks. 1755 V. ii. 60 He will double his present quantum by stealth as soon as he can. 1818 Bentham Ch. Eng. 421 A Parish, in which the quantum of this soul-saving Mammon rises as high as 12,000l. a year. 1897 F. T. Bullen Cruise ‘Cachalot’ 167 Having completed our quantum of wood, water, and fresh provisions.

About Wednesday 13 September 1665

Paul Chapin  •  Link

I concur with The Mollusc. Young Pen has recently returned from France, so is full of stories of what he saw there. It's fun, and a little strange, to picture him and Sam arguing vehemently about the meaning of some French words, with Elizabeth, who surely knew the right answer, standing silently by.

About Thursday 31 August 1665

Paul Chapin  •  Link

"odd 100"

A modern version would be "give or take 100."
OED (under entry for "odd"):
†4.b. and odd or odd (denoting an indefinite number) qualifying a n. of lower denomination. Obs. or arch.
a1548 Hall Chron., Hen. IV, 32b, When he had reigned .xiii. yeres, v. monthes and odde daies. 1603 Petowe Stanzas in Farr S.P. Jas. I (1848), Three thousand and od hundred clowds appere. 1634 Sir T. Herbert Trav. 43 It is in the latitude of twenty two degrees, odde minutes north. 1714 Lond. Gaz. No. 5213/4, 11 Foot odd Inches in the Hold. 1813 Sir R. Wilson Priv. Diary I. 434 Thirty-eight thousand odd hundred infantry, two thousand odd hundred cavalry.

About Saturday 26 August 1665

Paul Chapin  •  Link

"Painted ladies" is also the local term for the lovely multi-colored Victorian row houses that grace the streets of San Francisco. OED doesn't recognize this usage.

About London (ship)

Paul Chapin  •  Link

Diary annotation by Rex Gordon on Tue 26 Aug 2008 (1665):

Wreck of HMS London found in the Thames Estuary …

This isn’t related to today’s diary entry, but today’s Daily Mail has an amazing photograph of the HMS London, which blew up and sank in 1665, resting in remarkably good condition on the floor of the Thames estuary. Here’s the link:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/scienc…

Sam would have known this ship well. Its demise was certainly a major event.

About Friday 25 August 1665

Paul Chapin  •  Link

Marvelous annotations today - the wreck of HMS London discovered and pictured, and the powerful passage from "God's Terrible Voice." Many thanks to Rex and to CGS.

About Friday 11 August 1665

Paul Chapin  •  Link

Thanks to Mary. With "any" the translation becomes smoother: "A man could have done anything with her ..."

About Friday 11 August 1665

Paul Chapin  •  Link

The Duncan Grey text and translation

Thanks to Terry for providing a link to this site, which I hadn't known about. Grey's text and translation of Sam's polyglot passage in this entry raises two interesting points. Repeated here for easy reference:

‘uno ombre pouvait avoir done an cosa cum ella, but I did natha sino besar her’. [I would have been able to have done the thing with her but I did nothing except kiss her.]

Grey's use of "uno ombre" instead of Wheatley's "une contre" suggests a better translation than Grey's: "a man could have done the thing with her" etc. And "natha" in place of "nothing" looks like Sam's representation of Spanish "nada", in which the /d/ is pronounced like English voiced /th/.

Can someone with L&M tell us how they transcribe this passage?

About Monday 7 August 1665

Paul Chapin  •  Link

I continue to have a better opinion of Sam than many of my fellow annotators appear to, and today's entry shows one of the reasons why. Sam makes a clear distinction between "getting something", that is, a commission, from a deal that is good for the government and that he works to bring about, versus a bribe to do something that he either disapproves of or would do anyway in the normal course of business. In the context of his times, that seems to me perfectly honorable behavior.

About Saturday 5 August 1665

Paul Chapin  •  Link

Whipping vs. other punishments

I would venture that in the context of the times, whipping would have been considered a more lenient punishment, for men at least, than imprisonment or pressing into naval service. A whipped man could go back to work after a few days' recovery, while a prisoner or a pressman would have no way to feed his family.

About Thursday 3 August 1665

Paul Chapin  •  Link

Hackney

Once again I learn something from this blog. I had always assumed a direct linguistic relationship between the horse/carriage called "hackney" and the London borough of the same name.

Not at all. The etymology of the horse sense (no pun intended) is as Terry has shown above (actually a little more complicated, per the OED, but not in a way that matters here). The Borough of Hackney, on the other hand, describes the history of its name as follows: "The actual name 'Hackney' was first recorded in 1198 AD and is probably derived from an island or a raised place in a marsh (an 'ey') in the vicinity of the River Lea, together with the name of a Dane called Haca or Hacon, who owned it."

As Language Hat has reminded us occasionally, assumed or folk etymologies are often highly prone to error.

About Site statistics

Paul Chapin  •  Link

Wonder what the difference is between "samuel pepys" number 3, and "samuel pepys" number 17.

Also, I'll bet the people who came here looking for the meaning of "cum salis grano" were surprised.

About Monday 24 July 1665

Paul Chapin  •  Link

The pox

The bio notes on the "great person," Richard Butler, that Jeannine quoted from Grammont for us a couple of years ago, say that his wife Mary, Sam's "lady of extraordinary quality," died in 1667 at the age of eighteen. Do you suppose the poor thing died of the pox that her great husband bestowed upon her?

About Tuesday 18 July 1665

Paul Chapin  •  Link

Thanks to Terry for the interesting quotes from the article by Paul Rahe. I would suggest that in our own time, three and a half centuries later, we are witnessing a similar social transformation, with the rise of the blogosphere. Once again, as the 17th century observer noted, "the meanest sort of people are not only able to write, &c. but to argue and discourse on matters of highest concernment," an opportunity which had pretty well disappeared from newspapers by the early 20th century.