As always, I particularly enjoy the missed connections.
I think this one's my favorite:
THE LADY WHO CALLED UPON ME AT MY OFFICE on a Friday afternoon some four or five weeks ago, and left a note signed "You know who," will please make herself known, as she is not recognized. (Oct. 21, 1865)
"Responsible parties only; therefore, triflers, take heed!"
A GENTLEMAN, YOUNG, WITH A FAIR portion of cash and very "large expectations," IYKWIMAITYD, ....
And similar after "Her happiness will be his own, and the sincere object of marital relations".
Fantastic. Thanks for posting, nosflow.
3: That one caught my eye as well. The thought of the slowly diminishing hope of an unprompted reveal in the intervening weeks is quite poignant.
3 is indeed fascinating. Either this is the Brush-Off Direct, or she got the wrong office. (Or he doesn't know which of his ladies it was...)
This one is good too:
IF THE LADY WHO, FROM AN OMNIBUS, SMILED on a gentleman with a bunch of bananas in his hand, as he crossed Wall Street, corner of Broadway, will address X., box 6,735 Post Office, she will confer a favor. (March 21, 1866)
Personal ads, then as now, a rich source of low-hanging fruit.
Most of them read -- the rich period diction and obsession with matrimony aside -- a lot like personals from anywhere would today. Heck, even like a three-lines-free in any college paper today. So I'm not sure I understand the business about personals' "special role" in NYC.
But I did quite like:
"AN ANCIENT MAIDEN, AGED SEVENTEEN . . . wishes to communicate with someone who knows how to mind everybody's business but his own, with the hope that the congeniality of our dispositions, united, may be instrumental in making the world in general at peace with one another."
Wow. Let's get together and create world peace, baby! You won't find personals with sentiments flying that close to the sun just anywhere at just any time.
And the winner for unkindest cut of all:
"ROSE - IT IS USELESS - YOU ARE TOO LOVELY TO be trifled with. I am married."
Benedict. Dude. Really?
He hopes that any lady who is afflicted with any hereditary disease will not answer this communication.
Ouch.
Obligatory reference: authentic Victorian science hero Charles Wheatstone, (unfairly presented as the Evil Henchman of completely imaginary Victorian science villain The Organist http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/series/organist/)
The Times used to publish encrypted personal messages; Wheatstone and Playfair (of the cipher) broke them for fun, and, when Wheatstone came across one proposing an elopement, he inserted a message in the next edition in the same cipher reading YOUNG WOMAN, I BELIEVE THAT SUCH AN ACTION WOULD BE RASH AND ILL JUDGED IN THE EXTREME or words to that effect. Next day, another one: "Dear Charlie, write no more, our cipher is discovered!" And that was the end of that conversation.
Most of them read -- the rich period diction and obsession with matrimony aside -- a lot like personals from anywhere would today
Are personals directed to specific parties still common?
150 year olds really shouldn't be dating anybody under 50. That's a good rule.
I think he means directed at individuals known by name to the writer.
Are personals directed to specific parties still common?
About ten years ago I was in Prague at the height of the Mysterious Tramway Epistolary Romance. Apparently an unnamed Czech had had some kind of serious argument with his unnamed girlfriend and they had broken up. As she refused to answer his phone calls, he decided to get in touch with her via the unusual method of writing (apparently very moving) letters and sticking them to the walls of the Dejvicka trams, which he knew she took to work every morning.
By the time I heard about this he had been doing it for two months, and basically a quarter of the city's entire population had heard about it and was following the situation update by update. Eventually, I think, they got back together.
Usage question:
I usually find 'as" used in place of "since" or "because" as in ajay's sentence "as she refused to answer" somewhat jarring. Not so much with ajay's sentence. It's usually written by someone who style bothers me for other reasons--often it's kind of flowery. Is there some sort of style-guide entry explaining them.
||
Relatedly, I just had someone who reviewed my cover letter tell me to take "home in on" out, because --even though I'm right--an HR person might disqualify me for having included something with a typo.
|>
25: There was a similar relationship played out in personal ads on the back page of the Village Voice in the eighties, but that one was too silly to be real -- it must have been fiction.
I'm not sure I understand the business about personals' "special role" in NYC.
Cities, anonymity, fluidity of social roles, newly independent women (saving the city!), no official promenade. More plausible as it was evidently happening in London too.
17: Oh, 2D Goggles, joy. Loosely because of that, I skimmed The Intemperate Engineer, a collection of IKB's letters and drawings stuck together with just enough context. I should attempt the higher procrastination and interleave them with the Hyperloop kerfuffle. (IKB was, of course, brilliant. He also overestimated his brilliance and bankrupted a number of concerns by wildly, wildly overengineering them. There were ALL CAPS and underscores and vituperation.)
23, 24: Not all "missed connections" are written about/to strangers, although that is the most common case.
Also, the bananas one is pretty much a classic "missed connections" posting that could have been written more or less word for word today.
Also, the bananas one is pretty much a classic "missed connections" posting that could have been written more or less word for word today.
Yeah, but I was talking about the ones addressed to Andrew and May Minnie and X.Z. and J.A.R. and whatnot, which aren't missed connections at all.
I was picturing a story where John No. 1 had met Minnie May while a-walking in the park, and they had agreed to meet her at the selfsame park bench Tuesday next, and had thus managed to go on several dates without his ever learning her address or meeting any of her acquaintance. One day she didn't show up, and the White Pages had not (I presume) been invented yet.
Rose, I think, has been liasing with Benedict without the knowledge of her family. He can't send a letter to her house because her doting mother would intercept it.
Generra enjoys making a fuss. What sort of initials are X.Z. anyway? Pioneering early Persian-American Xerxes Zoroaster? Continental Hibernophile Xavier Zimmerman?
Confidential: Return home. All is forgiven!
15: lord castock: I think that, in cutting off the end of her note, you underestimate her chances at bringing about, at least, nation-wide peace--"n.b. first cousin to jeff davis." dec. 28, 1862.
OMG you guys after we dumped them so hard last time the TV company came back to us with a new, richer australian producer?!! we burned those poor suckers for like $100,000; I honestly felt so bad. I can't believe they are even willing to speak to us. the new producer came and saw the "sizzle reel" and asked where the show was and they had to say, ah, about that, those two fucking bitches flaked on us entrepreneurs had to bow out due to health concerns and worries about the actual business side of the business. I'm still not 100% I'll be able to manage it without an unscrupulous doctor willing to prescribe me endless dexamphetamine, but we'll cross that river of little yellow parallelograms when we come to it. both my partner and I are ready to sell the business, and it'll be worth more money with a giant ad for it made of other people's money.
Rose, I think, has been liasing with Benedict without the knowledge of her family. He can't send a letter to her house because her doting mother would intercept it.
I suspect that's the real reason why named personals aren't as common: it's a security measure. (Maybe this was why the Victorians went in for such bizarre names; unique identifiers. Scene at the breakfast table: "Daughter, you have been corresponding with a man behind our backs!" "How can you say such a thing, father?" "My source is the New York Times! Look, a love-note addressed to you by name in this morning's personals column!" "But that could be any one of a hundred Diglossolalias in Brooklyn alone!")
"As": some notes on usage (for BG at 26).
Fowler ("Modern English Usage", c.1926) has a total bigot's shit-fit: "To causal or explanatory as-clauses, if they are placed before the main sentence... there is no objection [= yay ajay]. The reverse order... is, except when the fact adduced is one necessarily known to the hearer and present to his mind (I need not translate, as you know German), unpleasant to anyone with a literary mind. All good writers instinctively avoid it; but, being common in talk, it is much used in print by those who have not yet learnt that composition is an art and that sentences require arrangement."
Partridge ("Usage and Abusage", c.1947) is somewhat less prescriptive, and attempts reasons: "As for because is heavily taxed -- grossly overworked -- by many writers, who are apparently enamoured of its brevity; often as is ambiguous (He could not work as he was ill in bed)*. It is difficult to lay down rules for the use and discrimination of as, because, for, since, their correct employment being a matter of idiom. As is colloquial both for the objective, logical because and the subjective** for, either of which is to be preferred to as in good writing and dignified speech."
Fowler is never not a crank, but he had a superb ear for subtleties, and mostly favoured rhythm and the potential for nice distinction of meaning over pointless rules (especially the many silly backformed rules of the 19th century, intended to wrangle polyform irregular boondocks English into the grammatical logics and simplicity demanded of an imperial language in its pomp, viz classical Latin). Partridge -- who was Australian -- was a little more alert to regional and class variation, esp.as it was emerging so militant in the postwar (and post-colonial?) world. But even when he's more sensible, he's often not quite so precise. (I inherited three different editions of Sir Ernest Gower's Plain Words from my tartar of a granda, but I have never quite dared crack the discoloured spines of them.)
Both seem to take the opposite line from Bostoniangirl: as as an error of taste introduced from talk into writing. But of course Fowler disliked "literariness", which he thought was generally vulgar and error-ridden, so there may not be such a distance as seem. Personally -- as a sub editor with command over my domain, a terror to all I proof -- I would tend automatically to reshuffle a sentence to put the at-clause first, or else switch in a because. There is to my ear a faint bumpiness, as BG says: and I work in the kinds of arts magazines where bumpiness that isn't deliberate polemical confrontation is deprecated.
*The ambiguity is not well exemplified here, in my opinion. I think he's getting at the correlation-causation confusion you might find in I then put my gun away as the police turned up: as could mean "because" or just "at the exact same as".
**subjective vs objective cf We shall do battle here, for we are free men: and Partridge is right I think that if you switch in because there, it would be more a statement of fact than a statement of passion and politics.
seem s/b seems
at-clause s/b as-clause
Rule 1: never be yr own sub
37: Good luck. Or break a leg. Whichever fits here.
Fowler ("Modern English Usage", c.1926) has a total bigot's shit-fit
That describes most of Fowler, doesn't it? He's not as bad as Strunk & White, but still.
The passage I copied out struck me as amusingly untypical (which is why I copied it out): he can be very scornful of the half-assed attempts of others to formulate a rule, but I don't really associate him with "This is something that a real writer would just KNOW", which is actually the move he's pulling here. As I say, never not a crank, but he had a superb ear, and he's really good explaining subtleties of distinction, even when you don't accept his ruling. The King's English was published more than a century ago now, so plenty of the battles have simply moved on -- but on the whole his line was "The establishment is fucked up and stupid, and here's why", and not (as here) "We of good taste know better than this."
I've never used Strunk and White -- there used to be a pocket copy in the office, but it's vanished. I like Andy White's (much much shorter) list of New Yorker style rules, as set out in Thurber's The Years with Ross.
36: That Jeff Davis? I preferred to think not, as this would in all probability demote it to the status of a "joke personal." But your interpretation is probably right. How dreary.
I like Fowler. a lot. Even if he is a snob of sorts, or perhaps because he is. His entry on the split infinitive is absolutely brilliant.
Strunk and White are boring but were probably useful as a bootcamp for Freshman in Composition class.