Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

Mard-arsed monkeys

I would have all you hipster whipper-snappers know that I first added an Arctic Monkeys tune to my iTunes library last April (having been tipped off by Untouched by Work or Duty). I'm just saying, is all. I did not, however, know what a "mardy bum" was until last week.

I was under the impression it was a nonsense word, and then I ran into it in D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow. In the first chapter, when Tom Brangwen is still just a teenager, his older brother Frank, a butcher, calls him a "mardy baby." I have a moderately vintage Compact Oxford English Dictionary, where I have to look up every word twice, because the supplements are printed separately from the old first edition. In the first-edition part, I found mard listed as a variant of marred, merd, or marter. Merd derives from the French merde, and means the same thing, so the phrase "mardy bum" suddenly took on a vividly blue cast. But this turned out to be a wrong turn, fortunately. In the supplement, mardy appeared in its own right, defined as " Spoilt', sulky, whining," and exemplified by no fewer than three quotations from . . . D. H. Lawrence, who seems to have absolutely adored the word, because quotes from him also illustrate mard as a verb ("She marded 'em till they were soft") and as an adjective ("Eh, tha'rt a mard-'arsed kid"). The OED claims the word comes from "marred"---i.e., spoiled---and that the French have nothing to do with it.

UPDATE (3/25): Mitch Gould writes to suggest that perhaps mardy does come from merde after all, and that the OED editors have cleaned up the etymology, as it were. This would make the mard-from-marred derivation the opposite of a folk etymology, I suppose. (Is there a word for that?) As Mitch points out, the fact that mard appears with both bum and arse is awfully suspicious, given that there's nothing especially sulky about that part of the body. Also, if mard came from marred, it's strange that anyone would feel obliged to add a -y suffix to it in order to make it sound adjectival; marred is perfectly capable of functioning as an adjective solo.

Harper's out of control

I've just sent a letter of protest to the editors of Harper's, regarding their decision to publish Celia Farber's article "Out of Control," which encourages readers to doubt that HIV is the cause of AIDS. It's dismaying to do a Technorati search and see how many people have already swallowed Farber's disinformation wholesale. Richard Kim made an early critique of the article in his blog for The Nation, and CJR Daily jumped into the fray this morning. Gay City News interviewed Harper's editor Roger Hodge about the article here. And scientists and members of several AIDS organizations, in America and in South Africa, have collaborated to produce this 37-page correction of Farber's errors. Update: The New York Times reports on 13 March 2006 that Harper's and Hodge are standing by Farber and her article.

Madame Merle, not waving but drowning?

Here's a current-day Google hybrid map of the same area of the Brooklyn Navy Yard pictured below in an 1850 map. The big thing to notice is that in 1850 much of today's navy yard was still under water; there must have been a big landfill project sometime afterward. Corie Trancho was kind enough to send me an email of her assessment of the 1850 map:

I don't think that any of those shaded images were the Officer's Row houses. The configuration of the yard is a little strange in that map, but the houses would probably have sat somewhere to the right of the triangular area.

Kaboom

"The Terror Last Time," my article about the 1886 trial of Chicago's Haymarket anarchists, which is in part a review of James Green's new book Death in the Haymarket, is published in the 13 March 2006 New Yorker. As it happens, there are many Haymarket resources on the web, so I thought I'd link to a few of them. What follows will seem a little scattered unless you read my article first (ahem), but if you've done that, then . . .

If you want to read the witnesses' testimony yourself, the Chicago Historical Society has published the trial transcript in the Haymarket Affair Digital Collection. The collection has all sorts of neat tidbits. If you thought my description of Louis Lingg's beauty was a bit too breathless, for example, you can judge for yourself here. If you want to see exactly how nut and bolt screwed together to make a bomb, look here, for a bomb allegedly Lingg's. The historical society also collaborated with Northwestern University to create Dramas of the Haymarket, a sort of online guided tour of the archival holdings.

The 2003 re-analysis of the Haymarket bomb fragments and evidence was described in this article by Timothy Messer-Kruse, James O. Eckert Jr., Pannee Burckel, and Jeffrey Dunn in a 2005 issue of the journal Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas.

The night before Parsons, Spies, Engel, and Fischer were hanged, Parsons sang the Scotch ballad "Annie Laurie." There's no recording of Parsons himself singing it, but there's a period recording of the song by the Edison Male Quartette in the UC Santa Barbara Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project. As I mention in the article, the next morning, just a few hours before they were hanged, the men sang the "Workers' Marseillaise" together. The three German speakers may well have sung in German, and I strongly suspect that that's what's being sung in this period recording. I'm not sure, though, because my German comprehension is extremely poor; it's the right tune, certainly, and someone has catalogued it under the title Arbeiter, i.e., "workers."