I had my name without the address and I recall that that was very common. I think you have it backwards. It was definitely common for women to just use an initial and last name. Either one wasn’t considered unlisted so it was free.
They charged a nominal amount for an unlisted number which I always thought was bullshit.
It’s astounding that that not too long ago you could look in a book or call 411 and get anyone’s address and phone number in the entire country. At some point they started charging you fifty cents or something if you exceeded a certain number of 411 calls per month (5?). One of my housemates was infuriating because they were too lazy to use the phone book and we were charged for dozens of 411 calls a month.
Literally stumbled into an absolutely amazing life story while doing a minor “this day in history” project for an event in a couple of weeks.
This guy (who is still alive) was a champion swimmer from Armenia back in the 70s.
And by pure happenstance, he was involved in three separate random crisis situations where he was personally responsible for saving many lives.
In 1974 he was a passenger on a bus that lost control with no driver, and he managed to get behind the wheel and prevent the bus from plunging into a gorge.
In 1976 he witnessed another bus crash into a lake. He immediately dove in and began dragging people out of the bus; in the end he got three dozen people to shore. Not all of them survived, but the ones who did owe their lives to him.
In 1985 he was on the grounds of a sports complex when a fire broke out. He joined the firefighters and helped carry people to safety.
In the second and third incidents, he himself was hospitalized for injuries suffered during his rescue efforts.
I can’t decide if he himself is a little cursed, or if the people around him are blessed. Maybe both.
Don’t know. The translator didn’t explain! One linguistic expert (don’t recall the name) speculated because the words were somewhat similar sounding, and the Greek word also referred to something used for “hygiene,” and it wouldn’t carry any connotations of “private parts” usage. But that was just one person’s opinion.
Of course! Only German is boring in this case. We say “die Dinge (or: das Kind) beim Namen nennen”, that is: to call (the) things (or: the child) by their name.
Montreal had the same thing - from the 1840s until the 1990s. All the (annual) directories are online with free access. In addition, there was a “classified” section (by type of business). It’s interesting looking at categories such as “LAUNDRIES, Chinese” year by year, and noting the hundreds of them that were around in the 1920s.
This is why Montgomery Burns uses “ahoy-hoy” as a greeting when he answers the phone. It’s one of many little touches suggesting how old-fashioned he is, and probably the most obscure one.
Similar to The Onion’s fictional editor T. Herman Zweibel, supposedly born in 1868 and having a career in journalism for over 115 years. His editorials frequently featured archaisms such as the excessive use of hyphenated-nouns.
Mark Twain makes the “Hello-Girl” and the phrase “Hello Central” one of the recurrent jokes of “A Conneticut Yankee…”. Here, for instance (Chapter XLIV: A post-script by Clarence):
Was that the child?.. Hello-Central!.. she doesn’t answer. Asleep, perhaps?
The humblest hello-girl along ten thousand miles of wire could teach gentleness, patience, modesty, manners, to the highest duchess in Arthur’s land.”
“Hello-girl?”
“Yes, but don’t you ask me to explain; it’s a new kind of a girl; they don’t have them here; one often speaks sharply to them when they are not the least in fault, and he can’t get over feeling sorry for it and ashamed of himself in thirteen hundred years, it’s such shabby mean conduct and so unprovoked; the fact is, no gentleman ever does it—though I—well, I myself, if I’ve got to confess—”
[…]
…when I used to wake in the soft summer mornings, out of sweet dreams of her, and say “Hello, Central!” just to hear her dear voice come melting back to me with a “Hello, Hank!” that was music of the spheres to my enchanted ear. She got three dollars a week, but she was worth it.
So in 1889 the phrase was common enough to make a joke of it, but fresh enough to know it was not old.
Someone wrote a book-length treatise about the history of this expression. Former U of Vermont professor Wolfgang Mieder seems to be the source of the idea that Erasmus was playing with language rather than making a translating error. I cannot directly vouch for his scholarship.