Books offered by JF Ptak Science Books LLC

The Specialized Vocabulary of Road Warriors: Tramps, Hoboes and Vagabonds

ITEM 1:  Hobo Exposed or How to be a Hobo. [Anonymous.]  1947.  11x8 inches.  12pp.  Rare.  $100 (See below.)

Elsewhere on this blog I've written a little about dictionaries and words--Sam Johnson, Ambrose Bierce, specialized dictionaries, canting dictionaries, dictionaries of vulgar and coarse language, dictionaries of first uses, dictionaries in distinct fields.

Hobo dictionaries, guides to hobo slang, are different from those of robbers and thieves and rogues.   They may borrow from one another, but the hobo language seems a little more dignified, and not as directed towards crime as that of, well, the criminals.  An even greater distinction is the hobo alphabet, a Morse Code if you will, a hieroglyphics, for hobos-to-hobos, written in chalk without the benefit of electricity. (I've written about that phenomenon here, though I'll at least reproduce an extraordinary map of a "begging district" found as the frontispiece to the lusciously-titled The Slang Dictionary; or, the Vulgar Words, Street Phrases and Fast Expression of High and Low Society… printed in London by John  Camden Hotten, in 1870.)

Back to words.

Part I:  Hobo Slang Collected by a Common and Perhaps Make-Believe Hobo

Hobo Exposed, or How to be a Hobo, at pamphlet  with no claim for a writer but copyrighted by "Kelly's Specialities" in 1946,  is dedicated to Sun Down Slim, Boston Blackie, Sticks Red and Commissary Blackie.  It gets right to the point of my interest, the Hobo Slanguage.  The collection here is not quite as road-elegant as the collection of the Hobo King, below--not that it is less "regal", just more common and less imaginative. 

For example, "Wingey" is the name for a hobo without an arm; "Sticks" is a tramp who sues a crutch; "Legs", well, you know.

There are many others:

[This section continued below.]

Part II: Hobo Slang Collected by the King of Hobos

There have been many Kings of the Hoboes, and Emperor of the Hobos, in the history of American Hobodom.  The most widely recognized of all this royalty is, probably, Mr. Jeff Davis, who was elected King of Hobos each year from 1908 to 1935, until in 1935 at the Pittsburgh meeting of the annual "Hobos of America" his minions gave up elected him King for Life. Of hobos, that is, the Knights of the Road; he was also a real hobo, unlike the pretenders, who in general were not. (Nels Anderson in his Men On The Move, written just as the Depression was broken, (1940) observed: "Whatever else may be said of King Jeff, his romanticizing the hobo is not without a basis in reality, and his poetic interest in the species arose from experience. But King Jeff has placed on a pedestal a man who belongs to the past. The hobo belongs with the pre-Hollywood cowboy and the lumberjacks of the Paul Bunyan legends.”)

Mr. Davis was certainly very effective in getting the message out—on freedom and responsibility to irresponsibility—and was a great organizer and popularizer. He helped to establish hobo meetings, newspapers and literature (a sample of which is at left). He also had a few movie appearances: in The Arkansas Traveler, 1938 and The Bridge of Sighs, 1915, he ably played the role of a hobo.

And what about the missing counterpart of Jeff Davis--Queen of the Hobos? There were certainly allot of women hoboes during the Depression; Harry Hopkins estimated that there were something like 13,000 “sisters of the road” who were out and about in the 1930’s. I guess the most famous of them though was one who did not exist; and what parts of her that were real were mostly those of one man: Ben Reitman. Sister of the Road (1940) was supposed to be an autobiography of legendary Boxcar Bertha, but it was really an assimilation of Reitman’s own experiences sprinkled about those of women from his life. Reitman, who was described (by himself) as a “hobo, whorehouse physician, musician and tour manager/lover of Emma Goldman” (??) was probably not without enough experiences to float another character or two, had his story of Bertha wind up in the hands of exploitation movie maker Roger Corman. The good news about that though was that Corman gave the project to the very young Martin Scorcese who produced an odd and not bad film on no budget, and Boxcar got to live again.

But what brought me here to begin with was Davis’ breakdown of some very colorful hobo slang, all of which was found int eh little yellow pamphlet (pictured above), and published as a "reference manual" in 1947.  And so:

Gay Cat.  Someone who “beats it from town”, settles down with a job and puts together some money so that he can get on the road again.

Gandy Dancer. “Is a hobo shovel stiff, a muck-stick artist”, a common laborer

Pearl Diver. A hobo dishwasher and who works for his meal.

Mush fakir. A hobo umbrella mender with a patch kit and a second-hand umbrella strapped to his back. (Evidently these guys were put out of business when larger stores began offering umbrella repair on their own.)

Bindle stiff. A hobo who carries his stuff in a sack on a stick, including toothbrush, “but he does NOT carry blankets”.

Kywah. An honest hobo pitchman peddling soap, perfume, jewelry, novelties, pens, knives and potatoes peelers.

Kewah. :Makes and sells articles such as willow stands…”

Scenery Bum. “A young tramp who bums it around the country, just for the fun of it.”

Ring-tail. “An ignorant, harmless tramp."

Fuzzy tail. “A smart aleck tramp, jack of all trades, a fourflusher, big bluff, false alarm, and piker of the worst sort, who most always carries a “punk kid” or “road kid” (a runaway boy).”

Dingbat. “An old tramp professional beggar who dings the main stem (begs on the main street).”

Stew bum. “An elderly tramp who wastes his time continually drinking rot booze.”

Jungle Buzzard. “A tramp who loves to eat but is too lazy to get the ingredients for a mulligan stew. He eats what is left when the gang leaves the jungle fire.” Yum.

Road Yegg. “A vicious tramp of the petty larceny type, a cheap crook.”

Brevity and Complexity--Radio Programming, 1940

ITEM:  National Broadcasting Company flyer, single sheet, 13x7 inches, radio listener survey, ca. 1938-1940.  Fine condition.  $45

Ref: JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1320

   I think that if a grown-up kid in 1940 was offered the chance to have a working-man’s Super Power,to be suddenly endowed with a non-heroic Super Something, a popular choice could have been to possess  radio repair vision (RRV).  Or that’s what it seems like.  The popularity of radio was so fantastic that ownership of radio sets doubled in the United States from 1931 to 1938, when houses with radios rose from 40% to 80%. Radio was everything.  There were many contributory factors to this phenomenal increase in popularity, not the least of which was the Great Depression–once you got your radio the listening was basically free except for the power that it cost to run the radio.  Recorded disks on the other hand suffered tremendously, with sales falling from $75 million in 1929 to 23 million in 1938 (with a low point of $5 million in 1933), and that would be due to the Depression and the the popularity of free stuff on the wireless, as well as other things.

People maintained their radios, kept them in good order, tinkered with them, cleaned the tubes, replaced the tubes, kept things going.  Those early units were pretty hearty, overall, but there was a certain percentage of folks who couldn’t do the basics for themselves, and so would bring in their radio repair man.  He was an important fixture in a community–not quite like the milk man or the ice man, who would be seen everywhere every day, but popular enough.  TO be able to fix radios with supervision and kept millions of people connected would’ve been a big deal, especially if you thought about it with the mind of a ten year old.

I’m just trying to establish the popularity of radio with this aside to get at the main point of this post–how radio executives at NBC tried to access the common knowledge base of what people wanted to hear on the radio, and when.  And one aspect of that was seen on this single piece of paper:

The National Broadcasting Company sent out self-adhesive mailers to people to probe their listening needs.  This would seem prehistoric by today’s standards of estimating what television/video watching people were like and what they would want to see, and perhaps to pay for.  But in 1940*–or perhaps a little earlier–this was one method of making this determination, with a gentle survey about what the listener wanted to hear, and when.   And they were expected to pay for the privilege, as well, as these self-,mailers weren’t pre-stamped. 

On the questionnaire of listed types of programs we find 26 examples, including six for “talk radio”, sixteen for music (eight for  instrumental and seven for vocal!), and then only five for the dramatic stuff (comedy shows, drama, variety shows, and even one for children. (An historian of radio programming would probably know instantly the age of this flyer given the number of slots slated for the drama shows, I’m sure.) The division  of the music is also interesting, particularly for me since "string ensemble"  is one of the 26 overall programming selections, though I doubt that they were talking about the late quartets of Beethoven--I think they might have been referring to sweeping, thousand-string "beautiful" music.  Also the division of "opera" and "operetta" is unusual.

 

Notes

There’s no direct mention of FM radio, which came into some restricted use by 1938-1940 and which is not mentioned explicitly here.  Perhaps this means that this was issued before FM–or perhaps it is later, as I said, and simply just not mentioned.

What Free Things Cost--The Washington Times and the Eugenics Society

ITEM:  (Ephemera) 1934 circular from the Eugenics Society to library "subscribers".  See below.  One page, 8x6 inches.  $25

Years ago when I lived in DC a new, upstart newspaper, The Washington Times (a conservative, Sun Yung Moon Unification Church organization-owned entity that is painful to italicize) spent years trying to establish a toehold in the area readership.  For years they spent a dollar per daily reader trying to get their message out--the cult leader himself, Rev. Moon, has stated that the paper has cost over a billion dollars to keep "competitive". Since its founding in 1982 the paper has always lost money but has kept its focus on target--recently though there have been breaks in its rigid far-right exterior, changing some of its rhetoric to be more accommodating, like for example in 2009 deciding to use the word "gay" rather than "homosexual".  The paper was owned by New World Communications--a branch of the Unification Church--from 1982 to 2010, when the paper was sold directly back to Moon for $1.  The paper is still in publication a,most 30 years later.  And even though the Unification Church says that the paper is independent from editorial control, former editors of the thing have said otherwise.  [New World Communications owns UPI by the way. Happy Happy World World]

For several years running as a matter of fact the Washington Times threw their newspaper onto my lawn, a freebie, news gratis--they just kept coming, day after day, even after I called them requesting that they stop the free delivery.  They didn't.  I simply didn't want to be included as a statistic as a "reader", because grass-reading was evidently a statistic they could deal with. Had I been a lawyer I think I would've sued them for littering, as that was about the extent of the value of their newspaper, to me.  I guess if you give something away long enough, people get used to it, and then, after many years, they are guilt ridden to buy, or--like a phantom song from the radio that you've heard so many times that you know it by heart even though you don't like it--it becomes part of your routine.

That's what I thought of when I saw this circular slide out of one of the volumes in the warehouse of the Journal of the Eugenics Society.  It warned librarians that the free ride their library had been given by the society was about to end--maybe--and that if the institution wanted to receive any further issues, they would need to buy them.

Unlike  the Washington Times--still in business today--the Eugenics society didn't make it.  It died decades ago. Died a death long overdue, died in its seventh decade.  Pieces of it lived from ancient times, famously with Plato, developing in more modern times into a societal, philosophical, scrapingly biological branch of pseudoscience, aimed generally at improving the human population through a more-or-less longitudinally dreamed belief system.  It was squared away and rounded up with social stats of Karl Pearson and number crunching of Francis Galton (who misunderstood the writing of his cousin, the beautiful Charles Darwin). And in spite of coming into a sort of Renaissance in the early twentieth century, it was mostly put away by Nazi monsters, who broke whatever basis in reality that eugenics had, almost entirely dealing the belief system a mortal blow.  Some people still felt comfortable with it enough to use it to continue a practice of population control by sterilizing anti0social elements--including prostitutes and drug addicts, and people of low IQ, but mostly, almost entirely, poor people--up until the 1970's. 

It looks like a desperate thing to me, this flyer (available from our blog bookstore, here).  It may well have been real, it may have been the case that it wasn't this piece of propaganda that I see  it as to help sell a fatal science...but I don't think so.  It looks pathetic, paper collar and starched shirt and doctorates and cufflinks and privileges notwithstanding.  And it reminds me of the desperate attempts of propaganda machines like The Washington Times to get its message across--even when it is very clear that there are not nearly enough people to fund it, a message machine in desperate search of an audience.

 

 

Brevity and Complexity--ALGOL, 1960

ITEM:  Naur, Peter (Editor)  "Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 60".  Offprint:  Communications of the ACM,  May, 1960, vol 3, #5. Pp 299-314.  Rare.  $850.00

Ref:  JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1311    

I think that I'd like to start a new category of observation for this blog--complicated work explained with celebrated brevity and clarity.  Earlier today I wrote a post on a 24-page effort by the great polymath and mathematical titan, Henri Poincare, describing his Newtonian-clad version of relativity, and it certainly classifies as a superior effort in a short, clarifying description of a wide and complex topic.  Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is another--it is considerably longer though incredibly short for the work that it undertakes, ending with a sentence that has become an independently-standing aphorism, "Whereof one cannot speak, one must pass over in silence".

But for right now, I'd like to look at a splendidly short work.

  Much is owed to people like Peter Naur, a Dane who made an enormous contribution in the development of computer languages by being the lead developer in the creation of ALGOL.  As a matter of fact Naur (b. 1928) received the computing world’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize (“highest distinction in Computer science")–the Turing Award–for this work, receiving the high honor in 2005. The official short description–again in the manner of the Nobel Committee– was “(f)or fundamental contributions to programming language design and the definition of ALGOL 60, to compiler design, and to the art and practice of computer programming”.         

This all came to mind while looking through Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 60 (published in the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery, May 1960) which was edited by Naur.  ALGOL was the creation of 40+ minds, twelve of whom were listed contributing to this paper-–it is a great testament to Naur to control all of that input, producing a superb fifteen page report of great brevity, beautiful logic and utter accessibility.  Perhaps If the team was given a lot more time Naur could’ve made his work even more succinct, but I really doubt it.  It is written in a language that is somewhat foreign to me, but I can certainly appreciate the way the work is structured its precise manner of presentation.  It seems to me a hallmark of communicating complicated ideas in a small space. [The original offprint of this report is available for purchase from our blog bookstore, here.]