Word: antimacassar
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While Mr. James P. Wenner [TIME, July 14 Letters Column] is quibbling over quiddities, let him watch his own vocabulary. "Toothpicks (for Martinis)" indeed! Have we not already enough articles in current use bearing ancient names that have no reference to their modern functions, e.g., "antimacassar," "penknife" and "Democrat" (capital...
When the servant had brought in the lamp and drawn the thick curtains against the night, there was nothing that so pleased the Victorian as to lay back his head on the antimacassar and curdle his comfortable blood with fiction about fiends in human form. So Victorian Novelist Wilkie Collins, who dispensed such fiction, was not displeased, one moonlit night in the 1850s, when a beautiful lady, robed all in white, ran up to him on a lonely road, screaming for succor. She had escaped, explained the white lady, from a fiend who had held her in durance with...
...leaned back in his rocker, his bald head resting against the white embroidered antimacassar. His shirt was open at the neck, his belt loosened, his black shoes unlaced. His grey eyes peered through the windows of his comfortable house to the shade trees on Washington's drowsy Hobart Street. Now, he thought, there would be time to dabble in the tiny home laboratory, to spade and weed the small backyard garden...
...when the doses of rhubarb were periodic and gigantic, when pet dogs threw themselves out of upper storey windows, when cooks reeled drunk in areas, when one sat for hours with one's feet in dirty straw dragged along the streets by horses, when an antimacassar was on every chair, and the baths were minute tin circles, and the beds were full of bugs and disasters...
...ways. "The Harkness Boot" printed an article entitled "The Elks in Our Midst" beneath the title of which there is surely no need to go. Tap Day is one with Freshman fraternities and fence rushes. According to a letter in the "Daily News" it is "obsolete as the antimacassar, the wall motto and the works of Sarah Orne Jewett." In a word, "Tap Day" and the ritual of secrecy appears in the light of the new maturity childish, sophomoric; and ridiculous...