One of the oldest extant terrestrial globes, dating from around 1510, the Lenox, is the only map known to use the phrase “here be dragons,” designating an area in Southeast Asia near to the island of Komodo, known for its large lizards.
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Into the early modern period, the word bug referred to a phantom in the dark; a 1535 translation of the Bible made for Henry VIII came to be known as the Bug Bible for its rendering of Psalm 91:5 as “Thou shalt not nede to be afrayed of eny bugges by night.” The word was changed to terrors in later editions, but the original sense still colors the common bedtime warning against letting bedbugs bite.
“I have been bullyragged all day by the builder, by his foreman, by the architect, by the tapestry devil who is to upholster the furniture, by the idiot who is putting down the carpets, by the scoundrel who is setting up the billiard table (and has left the balls in New York),” Mark Twain wrote to his mother-in-law in 1874 about work on his Hartford home. “And I a man who loathes details with all his heart!”
While at war to end Sparta’s regional supremacy, Theban general Epaminondas persuaded his soldiers to fight an extra four months, in violation of law; for this he was condemned to death on returning home victorious. He made no defense but proposed an inscription be made clarifying that “Epaminondas was punished by the Thebans with death” because “he not only saved Thebes from destruction but also secured freedom for all Greece.” The jury broke into laughter and refused to carry out the sentence.
Vladimir Nabokov referred to Thomas Mann once as a “quack” and to Ezra Pound as “that total fake.”
About the presidential election of 1928, between anti-Prohibitionist Al Smith and Prohibitionist Herbert Hoover, H.L. Mencken wrote, “If Al wins tomorrow, it will be because the American people have decided at last to vote as they drink.” Hoover won, earning 444 of the 531 electoral-college votes.
In 1864, responding to his friend Victor Hugo’s invitation to visit Guernsey, where the writer was living in exile, the French painter Gustave Courbet wrote, “In your sympathetic retreat I will contemplate the spectacle of your sea. The viewpoints of our mountains also offer us the limitless spectacle of immensity. The unfillable void has a calming effect. I confess, poet, I love terra firma and the orchestration of the countless herds that inhabit our mountains. The sea! The sea with its charms saddens me. In its joyful moods, it makes me think of a laughing tiger; in its sad moods, it recalls the crocodile’s tears and, in its roaring fury, the caged monster that cannot swallow me up.”
“In 1931, when Brave New World was being written, I was convinced that there was still plenty of time,” wrote Aldous Huxley in 1958. He’d thought “the completely organized society, the scientific caste system, the abolition of free will by methodical conditioning, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of chemically induced happiness” were all far off, but now he had come to feel “a good deal less optimistic.” It seemed his prophecies were “coming true much sooner than I thought they would.”
Having gained fame in England as a mind reader, Maud Lancaster came to New York City to perform in 1893. Nellie Bly, investigating for the New York World, quickly discovered that Lancaster’s telepathy act involved a confederate giving secret signals. Bly donned a blindfold, performed the signature trick herself, and published a front-page exposé about the events under a headline reading “Miss Lancaster, Who Astonished All London, Finds the World ’s Young Woman Too Much for Her.”
In 1967 Bobby and Ethel Kennedy participated in the tenth annual Hudson River Whitewater Derby. Bobby’s kayak capsized in the freezing water; he was hurtled down the rapids. The next day Ethel attempted the course, accompanied by a ski expert and a mountain guide; the trio’s canoe tipped over three times. “A rescue party’s been sent up the river to get Mrs. Kennedy, who is on a rock,” an announcer told those waiting at the finish. “She’s having a bad day.”
At the 1883 trial of Alferd Packer, who ate five members of his prospecting party in Colorado after the group got lost during a winter trek, the judge was said to have told the convicted, “There was seven Democrats in Hinsdale County, and you’ve ate five of them, God damn you. I sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you is dead, dead, dead, as a warning against reducing the Democrat population of the state.”
In Serbian oral tradition, fate often appears written on foreheads. A typical story tells of a man on the run from a plague personified as a woman. “It is not fated that I should kill you,” she says on catching him and seeing his forehead’s inscription. “You’ll be killed by a turtle.” Later, the man mows a field. His scythe hits a turtle, ricochets off its shell, and slices his leg. He dies soon after from blood poisoning.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, once said of Lord Byron, “I was fourteen when I heard of his death. It seemed an awful calamity; I remember I rushed out of doors, sat down by myself, shouted aloud, and wrote on the sandstone: BYRON IS DEAD!”
In 1961 Mary Ingraham Bunting established the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, a research center for women with PhDs or “the equivalent” in creative achievement who had been forced to leave academia and the workforce. A 1960 brochure advertising the program warns that “this sense of stagnation can become a malignant factor even in the best of marriages,” but that women no longer need be “crusaders and reformers” because “the bitter battles for women’s rights are history.”
Nineteenth-century British penologist Matthew Davenport Hill, who believed justice to be debased by fees extracted throughout the legal process, often cited mock examination questions given by Cambridge professor Richard Porson. “What happens if you win your cause?” asks the first, to which the answer is “You are nearly ruined.” The second: “What happens if you lose your cause?” Answer: “You are quite ruined.”