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: More Time

In the 140 years since the publication of the Dictionary of Every-day Wants, America has changed a lot. We’ve gone from steam to oil to electricity, from snail mail to e-mail to text messages. But there’s one fundamental thing that hasn’t changed, and maybe never will—the day is just too short for accomplishing everything we want to do.

Youman began his venerable book by acknowledging that fact: “every hour, every minute has its money value.” Pitched as an “aid to the progressive hurrying spirit of the age,” the Dictionary isn’t so different from the Real Simple magazine that shows up in my mailbox each month. Youman gives tips for keeping the kettle clean (insert an oyster shell before use!); Real Simple gives tips for storing grocery bags for reuse (use an old tissue box!). The family resemblance between the two isn’t so hard to spot.

I could use a bit more time in my day, too, so I’ve decided to scale back on the publication schedule of this blog. While a new topic every day was a noble goal, it’s not really sustainable: A thoughtful post can take hours to prepare, and I’m not really interested in producing any other kind.

So for now, expect two entries a week—Monday and Friday. In the meanwhile, you could always do some extracurricular reading of the Dictionary on the slightly evil (yet completely addictive) Google Books.

Keep in mind, though, the lesson I learned the hard way after devouring an entire advent calendar’s worth of chocolate one December 1st. Savoring something is best done slowly—one bite at a time.

Introducing A. E. Youman

The world is chockablock full of things I don’t know how to do. A heavily abbreviated list, ranging from the silly to the serious, includes:

• barricading my home against zombie invasion
• blowing bubbles with chewing gum
• locating north when the sun isn’t actively setting or rising
• growing anything that doesn’t have the word “chia” in its name
• knitting
• building a fire
• responding to any medical emergency of greater severity than a (mild) nosebleed

In this day and age of specialization, none of these things have presented much of a problem. With trusty Google on my side, I sometimes even feel like a superhero—there’s nothing I can’t learn to do, find someone else to do, or procrastinate my way around. But what did people do once upon a time, before eyeliner tutorials on Youtube and dentist reviews at Angie’s List? Before Walmart and CVS and Amazon.com?

Once upon this distant past, people did things for themselves: They raised the barns and birthed the babies and plucked the chickens, all with their own two hands. But they didn’t necessarily do it alone—if they were lucky, they might have had Alexander Youman on their side.

Published around 1872 and completely forgotten by nearly everyone but GoogleBooks and a handful of print-on-demand specialists, Youman’s Dictionary of Every-day Wants (Containing Twenty Thousand Receipts in Nearly Every Department of Human Effort) is a exhaustive guide to . . . well, pretty much everything. It's a fat doorstop of a book filled with cradle-to-grave wisdom ranging from popular names for children and directions for cleaning lace, to advice on selecting a cart horse and pointers for embalming at home. Arranged alphabetically and boasting one of the most deliciously thorough indexes I’ve ever seen, this book was clearly every bit as useful as the modern world’s most successful search engine.

And, according to this ad in the 1908 World Almanac and Encyclopedia, it even had healthy backlist potential 36 years after its first release.

 (Click to enlarge)

Enter this blog, 139 years and a number of technological innovations later. Every weekday, we’ll post a new entry from the Dictionary of Every-day Wants. Try them if you dare.