You mincing Frenchman, you. (A brief history of the English umbrella.)
Put Down That Umbrella!
10 responses to “Put Down That Umbrella!”
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Very entertaining, but it doesn’t instill confidence in the accuracy of the piece to have “a hansom cab driver even tried to run Hanway over with his coach” almost a century before the hansom cab was patented.
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I had no idea it was patented. I’ve always assumed it was just a sort of natural variant on the horse-and-carriage.
You caused me to notice a usage which always strikes me as odd, and slightly off: “run him over.” “Run over him” is the way I would put it. I don’t think I heard “run him over” until fairly well along in years. -
It was designed by Joseph Hansom, a Neo-Gothic architect who was responsible for a number of 19th-century Catholic churches (including what is now the Oxford Oratory).
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Had no idea, and never even wondered about the origin of the name any more than I did about, say, “buggy.” In conjectural defense of the writer of that piece, if he’s American he probably just thought “hansom cab” was a synonym for “horse-drawn carriage for hire.”
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Speaking of word origins, we went to the Memphis Cotton Museum yesterday where I learned that the cotton gin was a “gin” because it used an enGINe.
AMDG -
Interesting. They often used the word “engine” somewhat more broadly than we do now. Babbage called his early computer design the “difference engine”.
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In Dr Johnson’s definition, and engine is “Any mechanical complication, in which various movements and parts concur to one effect.”
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*an engine
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That’s really wonderful.
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Thanks, Maclin. I thought this was really funny!
Light On Dark Water 
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