Word With a Past
From the Archives: Word With a Past -Vaudeville
In 1648, revolution broke out in the streets of Paris. Known at the time as the Fronde ,* it was in many ways a rehearsal for the French Revolution(s) that would follow. Barricades went up in the streets. Aristocrats were pulled out of their carriages and shot at. Militias paraded in the public squares. There…
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From the Archives – Word with a Past: Two Bits
Somehow this piece from 2013 seems appropriate post-Super Bowl. (New stories are piling up waiting to be written. Soon, I promise.) One of the favorite cheers for my junior high school’s football team went “Two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar, all for our team stand up and holler.” It made no sense to…
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From the Archives: Word with a Past – Silhouette
I’m poking around in the long eighteenth century these days and stumbling across lots of surprising tidbits. Take silhouettes. I had long known that charming likenesses cut from black cardstock became a popular and affordable alternative to oil portraits in the mid-eighteenth century. To the extent that I thought about the word at all, I…
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