Annotations and comments

Terry Foreman has posted 16,447 annotations/comments since 28 June 2005.

Comments

First Reading

About Wednesday 7 October 1663

TerryF  •  Link

"COLT'S-FOOT, the popular name of a small herb, Tussilago Farfara, a member of the natural order Compositae, which is common in Britain in damp, heavy soils. It has a stout branching underground stem, which sends up in March and April scapes about 6 in. high, each bearing a head of bright yellow flowers, the male in the centre surrounded by a much larger number of female. The flowers are succeeded by the fruits, which bear a soft snow-white woolly pappus. The leaves, which appear later, are broadly cordate with an angular or lobed outline, and are covered on the under-face with a dense white felt. The botanical name, Tussilago, recalls its use as a medicine for cough (tussis). The leaves are smoked in cases of asthma."
http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/C…'s-foot

About Wednesday 7 October 1663

TerryF  •  Link

L&M continue after the "small and great farts;"

"and so to bed and lay in good ease all night, and pissed pretty well in the morning, but no more wind came as it used to to plentifully, after it once begun, nor any inclination to stool."

About Wednesday 7 October 1663

TerryF  •  Link

The Diarist/narrator in Mark Twain's *1601*

The Diarist in *1601* (pub. anonymously in 1880) is modeled on Samuel Pepys, whose Diary "Mark Twain" read. The version of the Diary that Samuel Clemens read was likely the spanking "new transcription of Pepys’ shorthand" by "the Rev. Mynors Bright, a senior Fellow of Magdalene college, Cambridge...published in six volumes between 1875 and 1879. Around four-fifths of the text were included along with Braybrooke’s introductory biography of Pepys from 1828, his same footnotes and the same selection of letters" as previous editions.) http://www.pepysdiary.com/about/t…
So, although he did not have the benefit of a text sprinkled with the common word for afflatus, there IS much talk of "breaking wind," and if anyone could read between the lines, HE could!

About Wednesday 7 October 1663

TerryF  •  Link

"And whether the coach did me good or no I know not, but having a good fire in my chamber, I begun to break six or seven small and great farts;" - so transcribe L&M, who also say there is more to come..

The Wheatley ellipsis recalls literary antecedents and parallels

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat…

·In Dante's *Divine Comedy*, the last line of Inferno Chapter XXI reads: ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta ("and he made a trumpet of his ass"), in the last example the use of this natural body function underlined a demoniac condition.

·In Chaucer's "Miller's Tale" (one of the *Canterbury Tales*), the character Nicholas hangs his buttocks out of a window and farts in the face of his rival Absolom. Absolom then sears Nicholas's bum with a red-hot poker ("Nicholas quickly raised the window and thrust his ass far out...At this Nicholas let fly a fart with a noise as great as a clap of thunder, so that Absolom was almost overcome by the force of it. But he was ready with his hot iron and smote Nicholas in the middle of his ass."). (Lines 690–707)

·In the translated version of Penguin's *1001 Arabian Nights Tales*, a story entitled "The Historic Fart" tells of a man that flees his country from the sheer embarrassment of farting at his wedding.

·Friedrich Dedekind's 16th century work, *Grobianus et Grobiana*, appeared in England in 1605 as *The Schoole of Slovenrie: Or, Cato turnd wrong side outward*, published by one "R.F.". The "Schoole" taught its students that holding back the desire to urinate, fart, and vomit was bad for one's health; thus, one has to indulge freely in all three activities.

· François Rabelais' tales of Gargantua and Pantagruel are laden with acts of flatulence. In Chapter XXVII of the second book, the giant, Pantagruel, releases a fart that "made the earth shake for twenty-nine miles around, and the foul air he blew out created more than fifty-three thousand tiny men, dwarves and creatures of weird shapes, and then he emitted a fat wet fart that turned into just as many tiny stooping women."[17]

· Montaigne, in his essay "Of the Force of Imagination", includes a discussion of flatulence. Of "the vessels that serve to discharge the belly", he writes "I myself knew one so rude and ungoverned, as for forty years together made his master vent with one continued and unintermitted outbursting, and 'tis like will do so till he die of it"[18].

· In Mark Twain's *1601*, properly named *[ Date: 1601.] Conversation, as it was the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors*, a cupbearer at Court who's a Diarist reports:

In ye heat of ye talk it befel yt one did breake wind, yielding an exceding mightie and distresfull stink, whereat all did laugh full sore.

The Queen inquires as to the source, and receives various replies. Lady Alice says

"Good your grace, an' I had room for such a thundergust within mine ancient bowels, 'tis not in reason I coulde discharge ye same and live to thank God for yt He did choose handmaid so humble whereby to shew his power. Nay, 'tis not I yt have broughte forth this rich o'ermastering fog, this fragrant gloom, so pray you seeke ye further."[19].

About Tuesday 6 October 1663

TerryF  •  Link

Washday blues per Ruben

http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1…
Jenny Doughty provides links and narrative, followed by Mary, Bruc and Nix, who provides a link and recommends Vol I of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson which language hat seconds.

The volume is *The Path to Power (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 1)*
http://www.amazon.com/Path-Power-…

Ruben, your annote is welcome as are you! I thought you might also be punning on the "blueing" of white laundry to make it whiter - a practice that, transmogrified, continues to be used in the US, so that many elderly women are "Blue-haired Ladies." http://www.treeble.demon.co.uk/fi…

About Monday 5 October 1663

TerryF  •  Link

"Up with pain...."

Now begins "My great fitt of the Collique" a notation later inserted in the margin of yesterday's Diary entry, as Mary noted. http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1…

(Rex, congratulations on being the first today!! Actually, we in the US have the advantage, since each day's entry's supposed to be posted at the end of Pepys's evening, at 11 PM GMT = 7 PM ET in the US; but this one was several hours late, as Phil has had a week more busy than usual.)

About Sunday 4 October 1663

TerryF  •  Link

What good are leads, if the seams aren't caulked adequately if at all.

One would think that the Navy Board would have at their beck and call skilled workment from the yards who would know how to seal housing as they would a ship. Some redecoration! More concern about wainscoating than about coating the outer surfaces of the house.

About Sunday 4 October 1663

TerryF  •  Link

29th September - "Then in the evening, towards night, it fell to thunder, lighten, and rain so violently that my house was all afloat, and I in all the rain up to the gutters [I assume at the roofline], and there dabbled in the rain and wet half an hour, enough to have killed a man." http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1…

Todd, I bet on a leaky roof and channels in the walls that likely flood all floors, the basement and the house of office.

About Saturday 3 October 1663

TerryF  •  Link

"We then to set up our bell with a smith very well"

Methinks this "smith" the Pepys's used to hang their bell is not a workman, but is a tool or a hanger?

OED anyone?

About Terrella

TerryF  •  Link

Terrella in the Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terr…

William Gilbert’s ‘Terrella’
http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/TERREL…

William Gilbert (or Gilberd, as he wrote it…)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will…

William Gilbert aka William of Colchester "set out to debunk magical notions of magnetism, yet in building an intellectual bridge between natural philosophy and emerging sciences, he did not completely abandon reference to the occult. For example, he believed that an invisible ‘orb of virtue’ [force] surrounds a magnet and extends in all directions around it. Other magnets and pieces of iron react to this orb of virtue and move or rotate in response. Magnets within the orb are attracted whereas those outside are unaffected. The source of the orb remained a mystery. Although his language was that of the natural philosophy of the time, some of his ideas were ahead of his time. His orbs of virtue were a fledgling notion of the idea of fields that would revolutionize physics more than two centuries later."
http://chem.ch.huji.ac.il/~eugeni…

About Friday 2 October 1663

TerryF  •  Link

The Terrella now has a Wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terr…

William Gilbert's 'Terrella'
http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/TERREL…

William Gilbert (or Gilberd, as he wrote it...)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will…

William Gilbert aka William of Colchester "set out to debunk magical notions of magnetism, yet in building an intellectual bridge between natural philosophy and emerging sciences, he did not completely abandon reference to the occult. For example, he believed that an invisible 'orb of virtue' [force] surrounds a magnet and extends in all directions around it. Other magnets and pieces of iron react to this orb of virtue and move or rotate in response. Magnets within the orb are attracted whereas those outside are unaffected. The source of the orb remained a mystery. Although his language was that of the natural philosophy of the time, some of his ideas were ahead of his time. His orbs of virtue were a fledgling notion of the idea of fields that would revolutionize physics more than two centuries later."
http://chem.ch.huji.ac.il/~eugeni…

About Friday 2 October 1663

TerryF  •  Link

We've seen the terella before

Wednesday 23 January 1660/61
"With [Greatorex] to Gresham Colledge (where I never was before), and saw the manner of the house, and found great company of persons of honour there"

http://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1…
vincent from:[jan 1661 J Evelyn ]23. To Lond, at our Society, where was divers Exp: on the Terrella sent us by his Majestie
Ruben pointed to The Terrella http://www-spof.gsfc.nasa.gov/Edu…
and wrote "if you read http://physicsweb.org/article/wor… ["William Gilbert: forgotten genius" (forgotten? Hardly! -TF)] then you understand that it is possible that the embryonic Royal Society was discussing the last edition of Gilbert’s book, 5 years before or received from the King whatever remained from the ;hardware' of Gilbert’s experiment decades before."