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.

(part 1) (part 2)

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: Fewer Stones

Being a native of the Internet, common interests have inspired me to meet a number of people from around the country that I first knew online. It turned out that I didn’t fit their preconceived notions about residents of northern New England: I’ve never seen a live chicken up close, I don't have lift tickets hanging from my jacket’s zipper, and I'm not particularly emotional about maple syrup.

But even I can’t completely avoid a relationship with the land and its history, if only because it’s everywhere I look—often in the form of long-abandoned stone walls.

From beside the highway to the middle of the woods, they’re leftovers of New England’s agricultural past. Once upon a time, some farmer cleared those rocks from his pasture and used them to build a wall nearby. According to Robert Thorson, founder of the StoneWall Initiative, it was estimated in 1939 that there were more than 250,000 miles of stone walls in the northeast.

Based on the following entry in the Dictionary of Every-day Wants, some of those stones may have been moved with the help of clever Dr. Youman.

This technique dates all the way back to Hannibal’s trip to Rome—he had to get those pesky elephants over the Alps somehow—and it turns out that it’s use in even today. (Don’t try this at home, kids! Stones sometimes explode when exposed to temperature extremes.)

By the time the Dictionary of Every-day Wants was written, New Englanders had already been moving West for at least fifty years. The stone walls I see practically every day are ghosts they left behind, abandoned homes and farms reclaimed by Mother Nature. Thanks to that eager beaver, the landscape around here is pretty different: In 1850, 30 percent of Vermont was covered by forest. Today that number is closer 80 percent.

Want: A Taste for Farm Life

James Johnston, a British agriculturist, wrote in his 1851 Notes on North America:

As yet in New England and New York [there is] scarcely any such thing as local attachment — the love of a place, because it is a man’s own, because he has hewed it out of the wilderness, and made it what it is; or because his father did so, and he and his family have been born and brought up, and spent their happy youthful days upon it. Speaking generally, every farm from Eastport in Maine, to Buffalo on Lake Erie, is for sale.

Apparently Mr. Johnston wasn’t kidding. By the 1872(ish) publication of the Dictionary of Every-day Wants, Victorian-era brain drain must have been a serious concern indeed: The book’s farming chapter includes more than just the practical advice you’d expect for things like getting rid of ants and cultivating barley. It also provides this best-practices entry for inspiring a boy to love his family’s farm.

(click to enlarge)

As for the farmer’s daughter? I guess Youman expected her to know her place—this entry is indexed as “boys, to attach to farm life.” There is no index entry for “girls.”