Let’s try again, since hamsters have eaten my earlier attempt.
Over the weekend I picked up a copy of the new Dover reprint of the original First Edition (1911) Boy Scout Manual. I’m an Eagle Scout myself, and it wasn’t long ago that I looked through my own vintage 1960s manual. i give Dover and the BSA credit for reprinting this unexpurgated and in its entirety (ads and all!), since the Disclaimer says:
I was expecting the outdated medical advice to be about things like Artificial Respiration (which had changed already since the 1950s), but I wasn’t ready for the remedy for “hiccoughs”* :
*I really dislike people who take the onomatopeia of “hiccup” and try to reform it by spelling it “hiccough”, which agrees neither with pronunciation nor etymology, and looks like an attempt to make it related to “cough”. These are the kind of people who spell “ketchup” as “catsup”.
** !!
*** !!! (italics mine). I think that, as a kid, I’d rather be hiccuping than throwing up. As an adult, too, for that matter.
The people of 1911 may have been much more blasé about vomiting than we are today, due to casual food sanitation. I imagine their attitude was akin to those of our modern cats: eat what you like, and what stays down, stays down.
The racism I’ve come across thus far is relatively mild – there’s a lot of downright worship of the American Indian, but it’s James Fenimore Cooper’s/Longfellow’s Indians. They’re woodcrafty and clever, but they talk in broken English and say “Ugh!” a lot. In talking about tracking, the manual says that the “black races of Australia” are the best trackers around, and that this ability to track effectively is inverselt related to the relative advancement of their society. So the excellent Aborigine traclers are the “most degraded” society. The manual giveth and the manual taketh away. Were I a Chippewa or a Bindibu I’d feel a little uneasy with its backhanded compliments, but it’s azt worst misguided but even-handed. I haven’t come across anything even addressing Orientals, Jews, or Africanancestored blacks.
One of the other dads in my son’s scout troop bought this last year. The advice on masturbation is, as I recall, - um - interesting :eek:, and the explanation for that advice is hilarious! Or a cringe-worthy mess of confused biology. Well, it’s both.
On preivew, I see tuckerfan has heard of this also.
Not in those terms. There is a warning about using up your vital sex fluid, but it’s vaguely enough worded that I’ll bet a lot of boys at the time didn’t really know what they were talking about. They seem to conflate and confuse testosterone with seminal fluid. I think that if I were their target audience, living in that society with much tighter control on its ta;lk about sex, I’d be extremely confused. It’s only because I know more and better that I can, like Typo Knig and his troop, see it as hilarious.
A bit late with this part of the post, aren’t you? If I’m reading the link correctly, the spelling you dislike apparently first appeared in 1626 and the one you prefer appeared in 1788.
The spelling does agree with pronunication. That’s because for that word the pronounciation of cough is cup, and has been for over two hundred years.
