Word With a Past: Shoddy
In the early nineteenth century British textile manufacturers began to recycle woolen rags into a an inexpensive woolen cloth. The rags were shredded into fibers, mixed with new wood, and then spun and woven into the cloth, which was known as "shoddy"--a term that may have come from an old word meaning divide.* The process was such a success that wool rags for the textile mills were collected all over Britain. For several decades, shipments of rags even arrived from continental Europe.
Civil war soldier
By the mid-nineteenth century, shoddy was exported to North America in large quantities, where it was available in the American Civil War when the need for Army uniforms put wool cloth from the New England textile mills at a premium. Some clothiers, most notably Brooks Brothers,** used shoddy instead of wool to make uniforms and blankets for the Union Army. (I assume this was war profiteering rather than sabotage.) Some soldiers complained that the uniforms melted to rags in the rain.
As the war went on, profiteering and graft ran rampant. Contractors sold the army tins of spoiled meat, boots with soles made from glued together wood chips*** and unserviceable rifles. The material from which inferior uniforms was made became a description for every piece of second-rate, badly made material that was foisted off on the Army.**** The contractors who made a killing on supplying the war were given the derisive nickname "the shoddy aristocracy."
Shoddy. adj. Made of inferior material .Cheap, inferior, shabby, dilapidated.
*An etymology I offer with hesitation, as does the OED.
**I was shocked.
***Try marching in those.
****Probably with the connivance of a quartermaster or steward on the take. Graft happened at both ends of the supply chain.
From the Archives: Walking Hallowed Ground
When this post goes live, I'll be on my way to Gettysburg for the 2016 Sacred Trust program. Instead of trying to write a new post while my brain is full of Gettysburg, I'd like to share this post from June, 2011, on the question of battlefield visits in general and one special battlefield visit in particular.
Later, y'all.
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In response to my recent post on the American Civil War, blog reader Karen Eliot talked about her experiences visiting Gettysburg.
Her comments left me thinking about what makes battlefield visits such a powerful experience. I've certainly walked my share of Civil War battlefields: Gettysburg, Antietam, Pea Ridge, and my hometown battlefield of Wilson's Creek. (Not to mention a few Revolutionary War and War of 1812 sites. I'm an equal opportunity history nerd.) My Own True Love will tell you that I tear up at every battlefield I visit. Or at least get a lump in my throat.
But thinking it over, I'm not sure that the experience would be quite so powerful if the National Park Service weren't there to lead me by the hand. I think it takes a special person to be able to walk into an empty field and see the sweep of a past battle. I'm not that person. I need a guide, an exhibit, or at least a few historical markers. (Have I mentioned how much I love historical markers?)
Which brings me to the battlefield visit that hit me hardest: Gallipoli.
Fought at the Dardanelle Straits, where Turkey has one foot in Europe, the Gallipoli campaign of World War I was the first major amphibious operation in modern warfare. The British and French hoped to drive Turkey out of the war and gain control of the warm water ports of the Black Sea. The campaign started out as a slapdash naval expedition in which the big powers expected to blow Turkey out of the water--so to speak. It turned into the grimmest of trench warfare. Trenches were close enough together that soldiers could toss a live grenade back and forth across the lines several times before it exploded in a horrible parody of the childhood game of Hot Potato. Water was so scarce on the European side that they tanked it in from Egypt. ( That's a long water run. Look at a map.)
The campaign was a military stalemate paid for by heavy losses on both sides, but it was a formative event for three modern nations: Australia, New Zealand and Turkey. Today the Gallipoli National Historic Park is a pilgrimage site for all three countries.
My Own True Love and I traveled to Gallipoli from Istanbul in a tour bus. Many of our fellow travelers that day were New Zealanders and Australians whose father/uncle/grandfather/great-grandfather had fought at Gallipoli. (ANZAC Day is a national holiday in both Australia and New Zealand commemorating the landing of Australian and New Zealand forces.) Our tour guide was a retired Turkish naval captain for whom Gallipoli was a lifelong passion. The museum was heart-breaking. You could walk the trenches in the battlefield. The memorial honored the soldiers from both sides. The combination was magical.
But the thing I remember most clearly is the end of the day. Every tour of the Gallipoli National Historic Park ends in front of a statue of the oldest Turkish survivor of the battle and his young granddaughter, who holds a bouquet of rosemary for remembrance. He is said to have told his granddaughter that every man who died at Gallipoli is part of Turkey now and should be honored. Visitors add rosemary springs to the granddaughter's bouquet from bushes that surrounded the memorial. Because My Own True Love held the highest military rank of anyone on our bus, Captain Ali invited me to step forward to add a spring of rosemary to the bouquet on behalf of our group. Did I get all teary? You bet.
Remembrance is, ultimately, why we visit battlefields. Remembrance of those who died and those who survived, of causes lost and causes won, of the reasons we go to war, of greed, honor, bravery and shame. Remembrance of the world we have lost on the road to today.
What battlefield visits made an impact on you?
Two Poets, Eight Centuries, One Poetic Masterpiece
Edward Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is one of those books that some scholars love to be snotty about. Literary critics of a certain stamp dismiss it as bad poetry, apparently on the grounds that people love it who don't otherwise read poetry.* Persian linguists rightly point out that Fitzgerald's translation really isn't a translation so much as a re-imagining--a complaint that seems to miss the point. Me, I'm a long-term fan.
But while I've always been fascinated by the idea of the mathematician-poet,** I hadn't given two thoughts to Edward Fitzgerald until I picked up Robert D. Richardson's Nearer the Heart's Desire, a dual biography of the eleventh-century Persian polymath and the nineteen-century British literary dabbler whose lives are inextricably bound together in a single poetic work.
The book is divided into two unequal and fundamentally different sections. The first third of the book is as much a portrait of Seljuq Persia as of Khayyam himself. Richardson untangles the myths that have grown up around the historical Khayyam and places him firmly in the world of the Seljuq court, with its political struggles, religious controversies, and scientific curiosity. In the second section of the book, Richardson introduces Edward Fitzgerald, the "bohemian scholar-gypsy masquerading as a Victorian gentleman" whose loose translation of Khayyam's ruba'i*** ensured the earlier poet's fame centuries after his lifetime.
In both sections, Richardson focuses on the relationship between poet and poetry. He considers the ruba'i as a verse form and the contested authorship of Khayyam's poetry. He describes Fitzgerald's unconventional and sometimes heavy-handed editorial process of abridgement, re-arrangement, and revision. And he celebrates the successful marriage of the two in Fitzgerald's The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, "the quiet thunderbolt of a translation that is also a poetic masterpiece."
Richardson does a fine job of bringing the two poets to life for a modern audience for whom they are probably unfamiliar, but Nearer the Heart's Desire is ultimately a biography not of the poets but of their shared poetry.
Pretty dang fascinating.
*Since its original publication in 1859, Fitzgerald's version of the Rubaiyat has been translated into at least fifty-four languages and appeared in more than 1300 editions.
**Lewis Carroll, another favorite of mine, also falls into this category. Anyone else come to mind?
***It's a poetic form with rules. Like a sonnet. Or maybe a limerick.
The illustrations are by Edmund J. Sullivan, who illustrated a 1913 edition of The Rubaiyat. Since they're the illustrations in the first copy I ever owned, they're also the illustrations in my head.
Much of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers. Among other changes, I have re-inserted Oxford commas.