And Rick Griffen?
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Frank Morgan is known for five roles in “The Wizard of Oz” (1939), but he also had one more role that gets overlooked. He also played the disembodied head of the projected Wizard. According to one of the books on the movie’s production, the head was some kind of mask, but with Morgan’s mouth showing. It’s always been pretty obvious that he was doing the voice, but it was also the bottom part of his face.
*Professor Marvel, Coachman, Gatekeeper, Guard, The Fake Wiz
I might have found the source for Lovecraft’s use of the term. I suspect that we owe to him the coining of “Albemarle wig”, since it doesn’t show up anywhere before his “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” that I know of. I suspect that Francis van Wyck Mason was a Lovecraft reader who used the term in his Cutlass Empire because he thought it was a common term, and that Bullock and Tonkin tried to explain what an “Albemarle wig” might be because they were besieged by Lovecraft fans (and maybe even Mason fans) who wanted to know what the hell it was.
Looking through Google Books, and filtering out entries after 1930 (Lovecraft wrote the story in 1927, but it wasn’t published until well after 1930) I found that a book entitled England in the Days of Old, written by William Andrews was reviewed in another publication, which lists the Contents and Illustrations. Evidently there was a long section on wigs, which show up in both the contents and the illustrations. In the middle of a lot of illustrations of different types of wigs (“Egyptian wig”, “campaign wig”, “periwig with tail”, “Rammillie wig”, “Pg-tail Wig”, etc. ) is the simple entry “The Earl of Albemarle”, presumably with an engraving based on the painting I show earlier, or one like it. It was evidently used to illustrate the style of wig he wore, and, coming as it did in a line of pictures labeled “wig”, it wouldn’t be surprising if Lovecraft misremembered it as “Albemarle wig”, or else simply called it that because it had no other title.
The book reviewing it was Bygone Devondshire (evidently part of a Bygone ______ series) by Rev. Hilderic Friend, published by William Andrews and Co., London 1898, and the review appears here:
Not surprising that William Andrews would be plugging a book he wrote in another he published. It’s also the kind of book that would have appealed to the antiquarian Lovecraft.
On the way to looking this up, I stumbled across something else that almost made me do a spit-take. In a book entitled Costume in England by F. W. Fairholt (Chapman and Hall, London, 1846) on page 579 we find this priceless quote:
Holme, in his Academy of Armory (1684) has engraved [a peruke] “having the side or bottom locks turned up into bobs or knots turned up with ribands [ribbons].” He also calls it a "campaign wig ", and says “it hath knots or bobs, a dildo on each side, with a curled forehead.”
This is the first time I’ve encountered dildo (my highlighting) used in this sense. In fact, looking up the etymology of the term on various websites I find no notice that the term was ever used for a feature of wigs at all. All the sites claim that the word derived from nonsense syllables, and achieved its present erotic definition by 1593. Clearly wigmakers were naming features of wigs after marital aids.
This info needs forwarding to every site with an interest in the subject. Bravo!
Shakespeare used it as a double entendre in A Winter’s Tale.
SERVANT: He hath songs for man or woman, of all sizes; no milliner can so fit his customers with gloves. He has the prettiest love songs for maids, so without bawdry, which is strange with such delicate burdens of dildos and fadings, ‘Jump her and thump her’; and where some stretch-mouthed rascal would, as it were, mean mischief and break a foul gap into the matter, he makes the maid to answer, ‘Whoop, do me no harm, good man’; puts him off, slights him, with ‘Whoop, do me no harm, good man!’ (4.4.190-98)
The songs are without bawdry, or filthy imagery. Which he proves by their “delicate burdens of dildos and fadings” both of which have innocent meanings - dildos being the fa-la-la nonsense syllables and fadings being refrains (with a secondary meaning of a lively dance). But by then dildo had taken on a sexual connotation and fadings would be understood as dying, just as an orgasm was a petit mort or little death. You had to be there, I guess.
The rest is still understandable to modern folk once the tone of the speech is parsed. ‘Jump her and thump her’ indeed.
I get sidetracked and forget what I originally wanted to post. You can see from the original that William Andrews made a slight goof. He calls the illustration George, Earl of Albemarle. But the illustration is clearly of Arnold, the 1st Earl. George, the 3rd Earl, doesn’t have on a wig in his many portraits. Another George was the 6th Earl but too late to be a candidate.
As a general rule, if you’re ever not sure if Shakespeare was talking dirty, he was.
The same goes for Blues lyrics.
In Scrabble it doesn’t matter if it is a word or not in various dictionaries, it only matters if it’s legal to play (i.e. if it’s included in the Scrabble dictionary). Scrabble doesn’t really have much to do with vocabulary, it’s more of a math game. There are champion English-language Scrabble players who can’t even speak English or tell you what (m)any of the words mean.
They needn’t make sense, they merely must be legal to play. That’s two very different things.
And yes, I am more familiar with competitive Scrabble. “Living room” Scrabble doesn’t make much sense to me. Mostly because people change the rules.
[Too late for edit]
“AQUA” placed vertically directly next to “TIME” (A next to T, Q next to I, etc.) actually does work and is a legal play. AT, QI, UM, and AE are all legally playable words.
That play would probably get you a good number of points.
In international English Scrabble UM or MU and AE or EA are all legal and playable. All of those words except EA are legal and playable by the North American English rules.
And even closer to Dutch than it is to High German, I believe.
That’s true. My grandmother who spoke Sauerländer Platt used to tell a story: she was taking a walk in a park in Bonn with a friend where she met some Dutch people. They first tried to communicate in Dutch and High German, but she soon switched to Plattdeutsch and told us that they could talk quite easy that way.
And FWIW, an ancestor of Queen Camilla
On my first school exchange trip to Hamburg, my host family turned on a TV play in Plattdeutsch, and I found I could follow it by imagining they were people from North-East England trying to speak German, so close are the speech intonation and rhythm.
Just been watching some top-level Scrabble on YouTube (from Thailand - of all places). Memorize all the 2-letter words, such as “OO” and “ST”, play words not very family-friendly (C*NT), and play oddball ones like “BRRR”. I don’t know what restrictions there are on profanities (although I saw the F-word set up on someone’s rack, but he played something else). The Thais seem to be excellent players.
In the Bronze Age and probably earlier, people in eastern Europe and the Black Sea region used sheep fleeces to gather stream-borne gold dust and small nuggets, which would get caught in the wool. From there to the legendary Golden Fleece of Jason and and the Argonauts wasn’t much of a stretch.
It’s interesting to realize that even today there is the knightly Order Of The Golden Fleece, whose conceptual antecedent goes back thousands of years.
Do you have a source for that? I always find there are far too many people who think humans have no imaginations, and that everything weird in mythology somehow comes from real-world examples (e.g. the Cyclops from elephant skulls).
I have been sporadically reading that story about the Golden Fleece for decades now. I always stored it in the “urban myth” (or perhaps rather rural prehistorical myth) category. There would have to be enormous amounts of gold in the river sands to shine even a little bit. I don’t buy it.
As for the Golden Fleece Order, there is also a street in Brussels called Toison d’Or (which means exactly that: Golden Fleece), and there is a condecoration in Spain that is also called that. Powerful people have used imaginery to cement their power for ages.
AFAIK, the first story to feature a female inventor of robots was “Air Lines” by David. H. Keller M.D. in the January 1930 Amazing Stories, post-Gernsback. The wife is a professional inventor of air craft, and she finds she is constantly interrupted by the needs of her new baby. So she whips up a squad of household robots to free her time so that she can make her masterpiece, a robot plane with a robot pilot - not an automatic plane, a robot that sat in the pilot’s seat and hand-worked the controls.
Female robots were rare in those days; only a few appeared in fiction for housework or as sex objects. But female robot inventors were far more rare. I’ve searched and can’t find a second appearing in the next four decades. By then robot stories were totally passe and seldom published and I gave up looking.
SF could be incredibly sexist in those days, but you are ignoring the elephant in the room: Susan Calvin.