LAM-01

The Origins of the Howler

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Sandy Hobbs and David Cornwell | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 1, 1995

In April, 1887, Mark Twain published in Century Magazine an article entitled “English As She Is Taught”. Caroline LeRow, a Brooklyn teacher, had sent him a manuscript, asking for his views on whether it was suitable for publication. Twain was enthusiastically in favour and his article “English As She Is Taught” was in effect a publicity blurb for LeRow’s forthcoming book of the same name (LeRow, 1887). Twain gave the following explanation of the origins of LeRow’s book:

From time to time, during several years, whenever a pupil has delivered himself of anything peculiarly quaint or toothsome in the course of his recitations; this teacher and her associates have privately set that thing down in a memorandum-book; strictly following the original, as to grammar, construction, spelling, and all; and the result is this literary curiosity. (Twain, 188 7:932)

Of course, although Twain did not stress it, almost all of what Ms LeRow and her colleagues found “quaint or toothsome” could also be termed “errors”.

Some time after the article appeared, Twain received a letter from an English schoolmaster, J.F. Cornish, which drew attention to an article entitled “Boys’ Blunders” which he himself had contributed to the Cornhill Magazine in June of the previous year (Cornish, 1886). Cornish remarked on the “similarity, amounting in one or two cases to identity, between some of the answers quoted” and some given in his own earlier paper, also supposedly based on the collection made by himself and schoolmaster colleagues. Cornish wondered if Ms LeRow might have “jotted down a few specimens and forgot their source”. In other words, he was politely raising the question of unintentional plagiarism. Twain forwarded Cornish’s letter to LeRow, but we do not know what reply, if any, was sent (Twain, 1979).

Could Cornish’s suspicions have been correct? There are similarities between the two collections. We may start with a short simple example. Cornish (l886:622) mentions a boy who defined “Republican” as “sinner”. LeRow (188 7:7) gives the definition:

Republican – a sinner mentioned in the Bible.

The wording is not identical, but the central error is the same, a confusion of “republican” and “publican”. If we think the error is a likely one for a child to make, then it is not difficult to imagine an American child and a British one each making the same mistake independently.

Other similarities are not quite so easy to explain a ccoincidence. For example, Cornish (1886:623) quotes the following iitem:

Socrates was no use at fighting; he was very ugly; he had a flat nose, his eyes stuck out; he destroyed some statues, and had to drink the shamrock.

LeRow (1887:65) has:

Socrates was no use at fighting. He destroyed some statues' and had to drink shamrock.

Here then we have three features in common.

A third case is even more telling. First, from Cornish (1886:623), this passage:

Luther introduced Christianity a thousand years ago; his birthday was in November 1883. He was once a Pope; he lived at the time of the Rebellion of Worms.

Now LeRow (1887:61):

Luther introduced Christianity into England a good many thousand years ago. His birthday was November 1883. He was once a Pope. He lived at the time of the Rebellion of Worms.

It is surely difficult to imagine two children independently producing such similar nonsense. So what is the most likely relationship between the Cornish and the LeRow texts? The presence in the latter of the extra phrase “into England” and the idea of “many thousands of years” suggests that she did not merely copy Cornish’s text but elaborated it. More likely is the supposition that neither published text was a truly original and authentic error collected by the authors. Cornish and LeRow both acknowledge that they received texts from colleagues. Both may therefore have accepted as genuine items of dubious provenance.

It is not of particular concern to us whether Cornish in England and the Mark Twain/Caroline LeRow partnership in the United States were the first to go into print with howlers. Their special significance lies in the fact that they clearly indicate the existence at that time of the practice of collecting and passing on amusing errors made in school. Earlier collections of printed howlers might still emerge, possibly from some more obscure periodical. What is clear, however, is that soon after the publications by Cornish and LeRow, printed examples became common. We have found them, for example, in Boy's Own Paper, Girl’s Own Paper and the Journal of Education (Anonymous, 1889, 1896, 1898).

Neither Cornish nor LeRow used the term “howler”. The word emerged about that time, however, and indeed the earliest appearance in print of the word (carrying this particular meaning) seems to have been 1890. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) cites from the Athenaeum for that year. A later OED citation, dating from 1894, significantly refers to “the specimen of schoolboy blunders which, under the head of “howlers”, are so popular in our journals”. It has been argued that this meaning of “howler” derives from the phrase “howling blunder” which OED cites as occurring in 1884. It is possible that the emergence on a substantial scale of this practice of collecting and passing on “blunders” gave rise to a need for a distinctive term for them, which “howlers”, for a time at least, served. In the course of our investigations into the history of the howler, we have come across a number of terms which are used in roughly the same way. The Table below summarises some of the key points about these words as they are treated in OED. These terms are not necessarily identical in meaning, and some may be more likely to be used in one type of situation rather than another. They all have in common the fact that they allude to errors. However, in no case is “error” or “mistake” regarded as a sufficient definition. One way of distinguishing these words is that they refer to the size of the error, as indicated by “gross", “bad” and “very great”. However, we doubt if we will gain much by stressing size in itself, since there are so many different ways in which one might judge such a characteristic. For example, one might consider the causes of the error, the effects of the error, the reaction of other people, and so on. We suspect that it is in the reaction of other people that we are most likely to find the distinguishing features of “howlers”. What is not clear from OED definitions, but emerges from the observation of actual usage, is that these terms are used when the errors are treated as amusing. This comes through in definitions offered elsewhere. For example, The Comic Encyclopaedia (Esar, 1978) refers to “howler” as the British term for “an amusing classroom mistake”, and cites “boner” as the equivalent American term.

However, we wish to suggest that the fact that an error evokes amusement is not in itself sufficient to identify the distinctive characteristics of “howler” and similar terms. Our proposal is that howlers are best considered reported errors which evoke amusement; this “secondhand” nature of the howler is recognized, then it helps us better to interpret the great body of examples which are to be found in the various howler collections.

Words Indicating Emphatic Mistakes

recorded* word meaning** notes on derivation***
1706 blunder gross mistake/error due to stupidity or carelessness (confusion, disturbance)
1846 bull bad blunder (self contradictory proposition)
1889 bloomer very great mistake < blooming error
1890 howler glaring blunder/esp. in examination < howling error (1884)
1912 boner mistake/blunder < bone-head (1908)
1923 brick “drop a brick” = “make a bloomer”  
1934 boob foolish mistake or blunder < booby
1947 blooper blunder/ howler esp. public or politically embarrassing < bloop = howling noise
1948 clanger mistake that attracts attention < clang
1954 boo-boo boob < boob

* earliest quotation cited in OED with this meaning.
** key words from definition in OED.
*** ( ) signifies an earlier meaning of the word;
< signifies earlier word or phrase from which it is derived.

References

Anonymous. (1889). “Cross questions and crooked answers", Boy's Own Paper, 1 1, 699-700.

Anonymous (1896). “Not a natural death", Girl’s Own Paper, 11 July, 653.

Anonymous. (1898). “Fresh howlers”, Journal of Education, February, 102.

Cornish, J.F. “Boys’ blunders”, Cornhill Magazine, 6, 619-628.

Esar, E. (1978). The Comic Encyclopaedia. New York: Doubleday.

LeRow, C. (1887). English As She Is Taught. New York: Cassell.

Twain, M. (1887). “English as she is taught", Century Magazine, 11, 932-936. . .

Twain, M. (1979). Mark Twain’s Notebooks And Journals, Vol. 3. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.

Sex stories told in pubs

/ kevinhobbs

Brian McConnell | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 1, 1995

Sex stories told by men in public houses are often suspect. Even when there is some public published record of an extrordinary sexual occurrence, there is a suspicion of embroidery by the story-teller.

My elders always assured me that during the 1920s and 1930s the following two stories were witnessed in courts.

An Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was charged with an act of indecency in Hyde Park. The magistrate found him guilty and had an undoubted duty to inquire into any previous criminality by the prisoner before passing sentence. Even so, the police must have been surprised to hear the beak ask, “Anything previously known about the prisoner?”

Another magistrate died while having sexual intercourse with a prostitute. At a subsequent inquest, the coroner asked the doxy, “When did you first think that there was anything wrong with the deceased?” Through her tears, the lady replied, “Just as I thought he was coming, he was…”, sob, sob, “going”.

Stories about people dying during the sexual act, usually couple with a pay-off line, “What a way to go!” are seldom believed. Nor are stories about couples being inescapably joined in the sexual act and taken together on one stretcher by the ambulance men to the hospital to be separated. Perhaps someone should compile a list of such stories and legends in the hope the veracity can be checked.

Before we dismiss all stories of sexual oddities as fiction, however, I offer the attached story from my journalistic alma mater with the old-fashioned mandatory quotation from a named authority to substantiate the account.

South London Press, 18 February 1994.
FREE WILLY! PERVERT PADLOCKS PRIVATES
EXCLUSIVE by RICHARD ALLEN

A red-faced patient found himself in a bit of a tight spot when he limped into hospital – with a padlock stuck on his private parts. Staff at St Thomas’ Hospital, Waterloo, called in firefighters on Tuesday morning after they failed to find a delicate way of freeing the elderly man’s manhood.

But after a bit of trial and error the Lambeth fire crew found the right key in their spare set.
A fire brigade spokesman said, “He was obviously some kind of masochist who put this thing on and then found he didn’t have the key. “He was lucky it was a standard lock, otherwise we would have had to use the cutting equipment.”

Dr Caroline Bradbeer, of St Thomas’ genito-urinary medicine department, said the case was not unusual. She said, “Sometimes people do it because they are trying to improve their erection – but then they find it wont go down again.” “Bathing it in ice cubes can work, if it hasn’t gone to far.”

Three years ago, Lewisham firefighters were called to Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup, to free a 55-year-old man who had a steel ring stuck in a similar way.

In a 90-minute operation a medical team managed to cut him free using an air-driven surgical saw while firefighters held the ring with a mole grip and doused the metal with water to keep it cool.

Folklore in the Third Reich

/ kevinhobbs

Bill Nicolaisen | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 1, 1995

The Nazification of an Academic Discipline: Folklore in the Third Reich. Edited and translated by James R. Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994. xx + 354, bibliography, name index. Obtainable from Open University Press, Celtic Court, 22-26 Ballmoor, Buckingham, MK18 1XW. £32.50. ISBN 0-253-31821-1.

In the late ’forties and early ’fifties, the study of folklore at German academic institutions was in crisis. Hardly any courses were on offer because many of the professors and lecturers who should have been teaching them had, if they had survived the war, not yet been cleared by the “denazification” panels. The crisis did, however, have deeper roots than a temporary lack of qualified instructors; it was a crisis of the very discipline itself which, during the years 1933-1945, and to a certain extent perhaps even earlier, had been hijacked by political ideologists who has successfully seized the element Volk- in Volkskunde to identify it with their notion of their term, as in the slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer” which was used to hammer home their aspirations for one people in one nation under one leader, with all the consequences of territorial acquisition, ethnic cleansing, and the derogatory stigmatisation of “others” which this implied. Immediately after the war, there had even been calls for the removal of the discipline from the academic curriculum.

In English, the word “folk” has never had the connotation of nationality (natio) and chauinistic worldview although when Thoms first coined the term “folklore” in 1846, the concept was not completely free from anti-classical bias and purifying prejudice. Any political baggage which it may have been given to carry since then has been derived generally more from class-conscious and anti-elitist thinking than from narrow-minded, simplistic nationalism. If one wants to understand both the power and the vulnerability of the German Volk therefore, English folk is not a good starting point because it is likely to puzzle and confuse rather than clarify. In this respect, it is also significant that several of the Departments or Institutes of Volkskunde in German universities have in the post-war years changed their names.

The enforced appropriation of both Volk and (to such an extent that an ordinary citizen of the Third Reich was addressed as Volksgenosse or VG, roughly “folk-comrade”) and Volkskunde for arrogant, xenophobic, political purposes in national-socialist Germany left the discipline so tainted that it took many years to imbue it with unchallengeable qualities of academic respectability again, often not surprisingly in a kind of ideological rebound via leftist and Marxist leanings, and it was not until 1986 that the German Folklore Society chose “Volkskunde und Nationalsozialismus” as the central topic of one of its biennial congresses. The German originals of the papers included in the anthology under review were also, with two exceptions, not published until the late ‘eighties or early ‘nineties, with several of them deriving from the congress just mentioned. It takes a considerable amount of temporal distance to create an atmosphere conducive to a constructive intellectual confrontation of such a phenomenon as the coercive, starry-eyed but morally brutalising take-over and conversion of a whole discipline and the materials it studies for the purposes of political advancement and cultural subversion. Evem when much water has flowed under the bridge, objectivity has become a slippery commodity and the emotional response to appalling horror and academic debasement, intermingled with the seduction of good minds and of personal tragedy (the folksong scholar Kurt Huber was shot in 1943) keeps simmering under the surface.

The authors whose articles are included in this volume know this, and it is to be regarded as an act of courage on their part rather than of defensiveness that they have been prepared to tackle problems caused by an as yet mostly unaddressed past. Most of them belong to that articulate group of eminent German and Austrian folklorists who have given the discipline of Folklore a fresh start in great adversity and a new standing in German universities; it is probably also worth mentioning that their presentations and arguments were, in the first place, intended for a German or Austrian audience, and that by having made these papers available in English, Dow and Lixfeld have allowed outside spectators to observe these sensitive and sometimes painful intra-German processes. “It couldn’t happen here” would, however, be a short-sighted and completely inappropriate response. The urge to please one’s political masters, especially if they also hold the purse-strings to finance research and the key to professional appointment and promotion, is not confined to Hitler’s Germany, quite apart from the sad fact that some of the practitioners of Volkskunde in the Third Reich Reich may have shared their masters’ ideologies (“ideological drummers”, as Bausinger calls them).

It is gratifying to see that what we have in the volume under review is not a series of general accusations and denunciations from the safety of time-encrusted positions, of their misguided, perhaps even infamous predecessors by the generation who followed them and had to pull the disciplinary cart out of the mire in which it had been left for them irresponsibly, but a set of genuine, cogently argued expositions by their successors, not so much to come to terms with a disturbing past as to begin to understand it. The authors, many of them now in their fifities and sixties, although some of them are younger, do not, it seems, interpret their task as the apportionment of blame or the condemnation of those most guilty in the intellectual rape of a discipline but as a quest to uncover the fundamental causes in what went wrong, and to elucidate the personal and institutional involvement in this development of tendentious distortion.

The tone for such an outlook was set by Hermann Bausinger, himself only in his teens at the end of the war, as early as 1965 in his article “Nazi Folk Ideology and Folk Research” (pp. 11-33) which to this day has remained the most telling contribution to the subject. The basis of Bausinger’s careful analysis and thoughtful argumentation is the realisation that, in contrast to other disciplines, in Volkskunde the National Socialist phenomenon was not an assault from outside, and introduction of foreign elements or a strengthening of the fringe but a perverting emphasis of the primary ideas within the discipline itself. He also points out that the stress on the national and racial aspects of folk-cultural research and the glorification of peasants and their culture did not begin just in 1933 although the National Socialist Volkskunde did not only continue what the leading representatives of the discipline had developed in the previous decades, either. What was important to the practitioners of National Socialism was, according Bausinger, “the absolute priority of political-ideological practice over any attempt at theoretical, neutral, or objective understanding” (p. 28).

That the seduction of folklore studies and of folklorists did not begin in 1933 is the main point of Hermann Strobach’s paper the title of which asks provocatively: “… but when does prewar begin?” (pp. 55-68). For readers familiar with some of the names and figures involved in Volkskunde in Germany in the late ‘twenties and early ‘thirties this is a fascinating account of personal interactions, maintained or shifting positions, and institutional actions and reactions. For the outsider, judging the scene from a more impersonal and external perspective, the almost unstoppable inevitability of the developments and of the events to come is frightening when viewed with hindsight. — The status of one particular collection, the “Weigel Symbol Archive” of over 50,000 photos and index cards, which was made over to the Folklore Department in the University of Gottingen after World War II, is examined by Rolf Wilhelm Brednich (pp. 97-111). Symbols played an important part in the Third Reich, and Brednich’s article highlights the nature, accretion, and ultimate institutionalisation of symbol research in that period. — The late Peter Assion (pp. 112-134) investigates the role of one of the most notorious Nazi scholar-ideologists, Eugen Fehrle, who was appointed Professor of Folklore at the University of Heidelberg in the mid-thirties, openly promoted the nationalistic policies and racial concepts of the Third Reich, and was intered in a camp for political prisoners from 1946 to 1948 – a biography that was unfortunately not exceptional.

For lack of space, it must suffice to list the authors and titles of the remaining papers: the latter are usually self-explanatory: Helge Gerndt, “Folklore and National Socialism” (pp. 1-10); Wolfgang Emmerich, “The Mythos of Germanic Continuity” (pp. 34-54); Christoph Daxelmuller, “Nazi Conceptions of Culture and the Erasure of Jewish Folklore” (pp. 69-86); Hermann Bausinger, “Folk-National Work during the Third Reich” (pp. 87-96); Olof Bockhorn, “The Battle for the ‘Ostmark'” (pp. 135-155); Helmut Eberhart, “Folklore at the Universities of Graz and Salzburg at the time of the Nazi Takeover” (pp. 156-188); Anke Oesterle, “The Office of Ancestral Inheritance and Folklore Scholarship” (pp. 189-246); Wolfgang Jacobeit, “Confronting National Socialism in the Folklore of the German Democratic Republic” (pp. 247-263); and James R. Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld “Epilogue: Overcoming the Past of National Socialist Folklore” (pp. 264-296). The last of these, written especially for this volume ties many strands together and offers pragmatic and theoretical outlooks for the future. It also makes it clear that German post-war folklorists have not been united in their stance and that a few attempts not so much at “white-washing”, but at deflecting, or softening the criticism of, the past have occurred, although these can be described as minority positions. (This reviewer was present on one of these occasions.)

For anybody interested in the fate of German Volkskunde as an academic subject in the Nazi-period the extensive “Bibliography” included in the volume under review (pp. 308-345) is particularly useful; as is to be expected, most of the items it lists are in German. Dow and Lixfeld have done non-German speaking folklorists a great service by making so many of these seminal papers on the subject available in translation. For anybody familiar with the German originals reading them in English is a somewhat schizophrenic experience and, without wishing to detract from the very real merit of this volume and the hard work the translators have put into it, one cannot help suspecting that, in places, knowledge of the original German is beneficial in sensing some of the fine nuances and delicate verbal variations involved in the treatment of such a sensitive and volatile topic. This is particularly true of the translations of some of the official names of National Socialist institutions and titles. What does anybody, for example, make of “Cultivating Bureau for South German Folk Goods” (Pflegant fur suddeutsches Volksgut) or of “Reich Farmer Bank” (Reichsnahrstand) when the German titles are practically untranslatable, as are concepts like Volklstum, Volkhaftigkeit, or Volksmensch, and the like, which are so central to those aspects of National Socialist ideology which affected German folklore scholaship between 1933 and 1945 most; in their period- and ideology-specificity they are also part of a language which, instead of reflecting reality, became a substitute for it. These almost unavoidable minor flaws apart, Dow and Lixfeld have, through the publication of this anthology, issued an invitation to those who were not there at the time or are not directly affected by the consequences of what happened, to take a closer look themselves and to abstain from simplistic, uninformed, generalised judgements.