Want: A Financial Plan

I’ve long believed that you get out of things what you put into them, and Youman’s work is no exception. I bring to the Dictionary a taste for books, for the ghoulish, for real estate, and for the concerns of women. But the Dictionary’s scope is so broad that no matter who you are, no matter what you care about, you will find something in its 557 pages that seems to speak to you alone.

The terrifyingly cruddy economy of late has inspired a new interest for many people: frugality. It’s too soon to say if the Great Recession will have a lasting impact on the way we live in America, but for a while there it changed the way many people looked at the world. Instead of seeming quaint and dated, depression-era strategies for saving money were a hot topic of discussion on the Internet. We visited Wise Bread and Get Rich Slowly for tips on the best interest rates, hoped that Suze Orman would tell us we really could afford something we wanted to buy, and used online calculators to figure out just how much disposable income we actually had.

As I was getting to know Youman and his Dictionary of Every-day Wants, it seemed certain that he would have plenty to say on the topic of living less-than-large. But guess what? Based on a Google search of the Dictionary’s contents, the word frugal—a term in common use since the sixteenth century, according the OED—doesn’t appear once. Neither do thrifty, abstemious, spartan, parsimonious, stingy, or even miserly. And unlike government representatives in 2011, Youman has no use for any form of the word austere.

Maybe this is because America’s future looked pretty rosy in 1872—in the wake of the Civil War, industry was growing, transportation was becoming easier, and Horatio Alger was penning the rags-to-riches fairy tales that would color our national identity for the next hundred years.

But a bit more exploration reveals that Youman did have a lot to say about frugality, but instead of couching it in general terms and abstract discussions, he focused on its real-world application.

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Youman’s advice is clearly just as valuable today as it was in 1872, whether you’re furnishing a house, buying a car, or visiting Costco: Buy what you need, not what you want. Instead of spending your every penny, set aside money for the future. Don’t spend more than you make, and don’t try to keep up with the Joneses, because “the truly judicious and respectable” know a person is more than the value of his or her possessions. And having spent last winter without an at-home Internet connection, I can personally attest that truer words than these have never been written: “As riches increase, it is easy and pleasant to increase comforts; but it is always painful and inconvenient to decrease.”

Youman’s tone is usually dispassionate and matter-of-fact, but when his blood is up, as toward the end of the entry, he’s not above swerving into the moralistic. Of living beyond your means, he writes: “The glare there is about this false and wicked parade is deceptive; it does not, in fact, procure a man valuable friends, or extensive influence.”

The Dictionary clearly recommends living with moderation—which is a good thing. Just as people haven’t changed much since Youman’s day, our economy’s tendency toward roller-coaster-of-terror-hood is nothing new. In 1873, one year after the Dictionary’s publication, the economy swooped downward: Banks were failing. Businesses were closing. People were losing jobs, or their pay was being cut. Sounds  eerily familiar, doesn’t it?

Want: Oysters?

While Dr. Youman was certainly a smart cookie with lots of valuable things to say, the Dictionary of Every-day Wants is not without its WTF moments. Take, for example, today’s entry: “Oysters—are they healthy?”

Here’s what I know about oysters: they’re disgusting, icky splats of bottom-feeding mucus, and people tend to eat them not only raw, but alive. Youman, with his scientific bent, knows a lot more: Their juice is teeming with an assortment of microscopic animals, worms, and baby oysters—shell and all.

At first blush this seems laughably improbable, like Sarah Palin being a good president. And yet Mark Kurlansky’s 2007 The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell corroborates Youman’s seemingly fanciful tale. Oysters release eggs, Kurlansky reports, which in some species are then fertilized and grow, shell and all, inside the mother’s shell for several days before striking out on their own.

Youman is a tiny bit off the mark on one point, though; this only happens in European oysters, a fact that goes unmentioned in this book intended for an American audience. Breeds native to American waters release their eggs, which are then fertilized and grow externally. (Who knew?)

Whether oysters can actually glow in dark, I’m not so sure. This guy is, though.

This entry doesn’t really answer the question it poses: Are oysters healthy? But between the worms and the animalculae, I would say it leans toward no. And yet, what’s the very next entry?

Yum.

Want: Good Roads?

Knowing the state of LAW’s driveway this spring, it’s no wonder her travels through the Dictionary of Every-day Wants would lead her here. . .

Here in northern New England, after a long winter of heavy snowfall, we are just entering the “fifth season” of the year: Mud Season. Villages have “load limit” signs posted on side roads, and our hardworking, dedicated snow plow operators find it harder and harder to clear spring snowfall from roads misshapen by frost heaves, surface cracks, and sinkholes. Soon the road crews will shift their efforts from plowing to repairing and resurfacing, in the endless struggle to make and keep roads smooth and safe for driving and biking.

Perhaps Alexander Youman was a New England lad, given his views on “ROADS, Repairing.” “Winter makes sad havoc in the earth roads which intersect the country in all directions,” he tells us—a reminder that our network of Interstate Highways is no more than 50 years old, a child of the Cold War mentality that saw an urgent need for wide, smooth highways to facilitate troop movements in a bipolar world.

In 1872 as now, the state of local roads must have been a favorite topic for conversation, second only to the weather. Youman becomes uncustomarily eloquent on the subject: “…frosts upheave, and the springs wash out deep gulleys and ruts, and when at last the reign of frost is over, that which was straight is all crooked; level places are changed into alternate rises and depressions, stones are left on the top, and, in short, these roads become sloughs of despond in which loaded teams wallow in despair, and where wagons are left standing for weeks up to the hubs in mud, simply because it is beyond the power of horse flesh to extricate them.”

 Absent the AAA membership, Youman and his neighbors had to fend for themselves to pull those wagons out of the mud. Another entry on the same page gives a helpful hint for how to proceed—“ROPES, Rules for Computing the Strength of” (“to find what size rope you require, when roven as a tackle, to lift a given weight. Divide the weight to be raised by the number of parts at the movable block, to obtain the strain on a single part; add one third of this for the increased strain brought by friction…”).

 Once you pulled your wagon clear, you might consider how to remove all those “stones left on top” of the road surface; the very next entry, “ROCK BLASTING,” comes to your aid with a recipe for a blasting powder with more than three times the strength of gunpowder alone. All it required, in addition to the gunpowder, was “sawdust of soft wood,” which you could undoubtedly find plenty of in any carpentry shop.

 Gradually the mud would dry up, and come summer, the local “road master” would summon residents “to turn out and work on the road.” There would be plenty of work to do, but at last the road would be “put into passable condition.” There might be as much a month or two of good driving conditions, until “the fall rains…again cut [the roads] all up, and the snow following hides them from view till the ensuing spring.”

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Want: Horse Hockey

I’ve known a lot of horse people in my life, but I don’t get the animal’s appeal: they’re big, smelly, and vaguely frightening, and I’ve never gotten over feeling cheated by the fact that they don’t actually talk. (Damn you, Mr. Ed.) But for Youman and his contemporaries, horses weren’t a laughing matter: expensive to both buy and keep, they were status symbols that offered serious travel and productivity benefits. Buying or selling a horse was a transaction you didn’t want to screw up, and with the founding of Consumer Reports some 61 long years away, what was the average American to do? Read the Dictionary of Every-day Wants, clearly.

Even knowing that a horse was a major purchase in 1872, today’s entry comes as a bit of a shock. A casual scan of the Dictionary leaves you with the feeling that A. E. Youman was a decent guy. He’s generally a proponent of kindness to animals and children, doesn’t dismiss women or their work as unimportant, and is a tireless advocate for his readers. His calm, straightforward approach to life and its obstacles must have been a source of comfort for the (potentially panicked) folks consulting his book.

But when it comes to buying and selling horses, Youman’s Dudley Do-right facade begins to crack.

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To be frank, I don’t have a lot of facts to bring to the table on this entry: my knowledge of barnyard animals is largely limited to the fact that they’re often good to eat. I do, however, know the difference between right and wrong, cultural (temporal?) relativism be damned.

Having watched approximately 200 hours worth of McLeod’s Daughters, Australia’s favorite sheep opera, I can say with some confidence that “drenching” the horse as described in “To Cover Up the Heaves” means putting metal shotgun pellets into the horse’s stomach by way of a tube inserted down its throat.

And Youman saves what might be the most upsetting procedure for last—making a horse look young by “puncturing the skin over the cavity [above its eye] and filling through a tube by air from the mouth, and then closing the aperture, when the brow will become smooth—for a time.”

Advice on avoiding dirty tricks would certainly have been helpful to readers of the Dictionary. But I’m not sure that’s what this entry provides: instead, it seems packed with details for conning people out of what they rightfully deserve, and hurting animals in the process. With these techniques you could make a not-so-great horse fabulous, and a fabulous horse not-so-great—or make them look that way long enough for a sale, anyway.

Maybe it’s hypocritical for a meat eater to be repelled by treating an animal like this: just because I didn't kill the chicken I ate for dinner doesn’t mean that I’m not culpable for its death. But this is just dishonest meanness.

Treating people and horses this way doesn’t seem characteristic of kindly grandpa Youman, and I have only the tiniest sliver of hope that his intent was truly to prepare his readers, not help them behave badly. It was a rough world out there, after all. Take a look at these entries for the word “Jockey” in the 1892 Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language.

Want: Hair Removal

When some people think about history, they think about battlefields and treaties, voyages of discovery and royal dynasties. It’s true that these things are important, but they’re only part of the story—and not the interesting part, if you ask me. I think it’s the day-to-day details of real life that are most fascinating, and that’s why I find Youman’s Dictionary of Every-day Wants so cracktacular. It’s a snapshot of a moment in a time, focused in tight on just the spots I want to see. I have a pretty good idea what Ulysses S Grant was up to 1872—but what was his maid doing? His wife?

Well, today’s entry might have been taking up some of their time: DIY hair removal. Modern straight razors and rudimentary safety razors had been around for at least a hundred years at that point, and waxing techniques date back to the ancient Egyptians. But although depilatory shenanigans were nothing new, in 1872 the nearly hairless body Americans are now accustomed to wasn’t yet in vogue. Men shaved their faces or had well-kept(ish) facial hair, but women weren’t key players in hair removal until the first half of the twentieth century, when tops turned sleeveless, hems got high, and the advertising industry started telling us we needed a shave.

But maybe Mrs. Grant had an unsightly ’stache, or even an unfashionably low hairline. In which case, she may have read this:

 

  

The ingredients sound pretty terrifying, but come right down to it, is pitch so different from wax? And can you guess what the depilatories on the market today are made from? You got it: Nair’s ingredients include Calcium hydroxide, also known as slaked lime, and Sodium hydroxide, or lye. (One thing you won’t find at your local CVS, however, is the arsenic Youman thoughtfully notes can be avoided by picking depilatory recipes 3 and 4.)

This entry points out that waxing is more painful than depilatory creams, but I'm not sure it’s right. With modern techniques, at least, waxing is a quick burst of intense pain. The chemical burns that seem to inevitably accompany Nair, on the other hand, are the gift that keeps on giving—days later you can still be hurting. It’s hard to imagine getting better results from an indifferently mixed, homemade, feather-destroying substance that’s left on the skin however long it takes to dry.

The Dictionary of Every-day Wants is full of reminders of a world that was, and that this world wasn’t so different from the one we know. Just remember: Even if it never came up in high school classes, personal grooming is still part of history.

Want: Help Running Errands

Contributing blogger LAW comes through for us  once again with this gem from the recesses of the Dictionary of Every-day Wants.

My frequent shopping companion on the weekends is my dog. Accustomed to such routine excursions, she waits patiently in the car, windows rolled down slightly to give her fresh air, while I go to the supermarket, pharmacy, or hardware store. Her role is a passive one since in our society dogs are generally barred from supermarkets and all but the occasional dog-friendly emporium.

How different from Youman’s day, when marketing was done daily and on foot, and your dog could be not only your companion but an active helper and participant. Under the attention-getting heading of “DOGS, Teaching to go Errands,” Youman gives the sensible, pragmatic advice we’ve come to expect, and also reveals himself to be a kind and considerate pet owner.

“It is an excellent plan,” he begins, “to teach all dogs … to carry baskets or parcels when accompanying their masters.” The training process is “very simple, consisting of merely placing the articles in the dog’s mouth, and when he lets go of it give him a slight box on the ear and replace the article in his mouth.” A handle basket is just right, being “of such a form as to be grasped easily by him without hurting his mouth or teeth” and light enough so as to be “never more than he can easily carry.”

Clearly, this wouldn’t work for the average basset hound or dachshund—dogs that are just too low to the ground to hold a basket clear. [But think of the saddlebag space!—Ed] Even a larger dog wouldn’t be able to safely carry a week’s groceries, or even a day’s groceries for a big family. But for small-scale, daily shopping, this must have been a win-win for dog and owner alike. Youman notes that “most dogs will take a real pleasure in carrying articles in this manner.” It’s not hard, he says, to teach the dog to carry a basket of food—whether people food or dog food—without being tempted to steal. In kindly fashion, he advises that “if a dog ever deserves a reward for well doing he certainly does in this case, for it is too bad to tantalize him with the smell of some dainty and then not to let him finally have something for his good conduct.”

Eighteen seventy-two comes alive for me most vividly, though, in Youman’s final suggestion: “Suppose you wish [your dog] to go to market for you of a morning; take him with you regularly for a few mornings, letting him carry the basket. In a few days he will understand when you start where it is you propose to go, and will, perhaps, run on ahead and arrive there some minutes before you do.” In a world without cars, trucks, and traffic, it was actually safe for the dog to do so. How I’d like to walk out the door some Saturday morning, hand my dog her basket, and give her the command Youman recommends. “Tink,” I’d say, “go to market!”

Too bad Youman didn't include any helpful tips on this trick, which would definitely change my life for the better.

Want: A Rental House

I purchased my first home about two years ago, drunk on HGTV’s House Hunters and giddy with visions of the $8,000 tax credit available at the time. I have to say it’s a good thing I like the condo where I ended up, because my nerves are shot when it comes to house hunting: the only way I’m moving out is in a pine box.

It’s no wonder I feel this way. I had four different addresses in 2008, including my mother's house, where I spent a month living out of boxes and sharing a bed with a blanket-hogging basset hound. And then there was finding a place I could afford on the salary of a single, liberal-arts-degree-holding employee of a nonprofit organization, followed by the delights of convincing a banker to lend me a boatload of money to actually buy it. It’s a miracle I lived to tell the tale, quite frankly.

According to the Dictionary of Every-day Wants, housing stress is nothing new. “The choice of a house is in importance second only to the selection of a friend,” Youman wrote with his characteristic authority. And as is so often the case, much of his advice on the topic is just as practical today as was in 1872.

Pick a house in a nice neighborhood, but not one that’s trendy and expensive. Make sure everything works. Avoid lawsuit-happy slumlords. Really, what more information do we need than that?

Although the past few years may have been less fraught if we’d followed more of Youman’s advice, a few key issues have changed since his day. For example, Youman says that inclusive housing costs shouldn’t be higher than one-sixth of your total income, or about 17 percent; today’s personal-finance rule of thumb is that it’s okay to pay 30 percent of your income (or even more!) for housing.

There’s a good reason for this change in proportions: the extra money we spend on housing was already spoken for in our great-grandparents’ budgets. In the nineteenth century, it’s estimated that people spent up to 75 percent of their income just to eat. On the other hand, about 12 percent of the average American’s salary was spent on food in 1998, thanks to modern farming practices and transportation.

Having seen The Silence of the Lambs at an impressionable age, I can’t argue with Youman’s preference for living far away from a slaughterhouse or tannery. His advice wasn’t solely rooted in the ick factor, though: he clearly considered the right location a matter of good health. No matter what era you live in, there are certainly lots of reasons not to live near polluters like mills and chemical works. But Youman’s real concern is something even more fundamental.

The theory of germ-borne illness was just coming onto the world stage when the Dictionary was probably being written. Before it was universally accepted, sickness was blamed on miasma—foul smells and stagnant air, just the things you would find in mosquito-breeding mill dams and near overcrowded burial grounds, some of the very places this entry warns renters against. (For more on the changing understanding of illness, read Steven Johnson’s Ghost Map, a fascinating detective story about an 1854 cholera outbreak in London and the search for its cause.)

It turns out that the more things change, the more they really do stay the same. Fellow watchers of Selling New York, my second favorite real estate show, will realize that a close cousin of the miasma theory lives on even today in the form feng shui. On the show, a real estate agent frustrated by a property’s nasty reputation brought in a feng shui practitioner to spiff up the place before a potential showing.