TRUMPS. To be put to one's trumps: to be in difficulties, or put to one's shifts. Something may turn up trumps; something lucky may happen. All his cards are trumps: he is extremely fortunate.
A selection from Francis Grose’s “Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue” (1785)
GUTTING A QUART POT. Taking out the lining of it: i. e. drinking it off. Gutting an oyster; eating it. Gutting a house; clearing it of its furniture. See POULTERER.
A selection from Francis Grose’s “Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue” (1785)
GRANNY. An abbreviation of grandmother; also the name of an idiot, famous for licking, her eye, who died Nov. 14, 1719. Go teach your granny to suck eggs; said to such as would instruct any one in a matter he knows better than themselves.
A selection from Francis Grose’s “Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue” (1785)
BANG UP. (WHIP.) Quite the thing, hellish fine. Well done. Compleat. Dashing. In a handsome stile. A bang up cove; a dashing fellow who spends his money freely. To bang up prime: to bring your horses up in a dashing or fine style.
A selection from Francis Grose’s “Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue” (1785)
HOSTELER, i.e. oat stealer. Hosteler was originally the name for an inn-keeper; inns being in old English styled hostels, from the French signifying the same.
A selection from Francis Grose’s “Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue” (1785)
PRICK-EARED. A prick-eared fellow; one whose ears are longer than his hair: an appellation frequently given to puritans, who considered long hair as the mark of the whore of Babylon.
A selection from Francis Grose’s “Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue” (1785)
CAT CALL. A kind of whistle, chiefly used at theatres, to interrupt the actors, and damn a new piece. It derives its name from one of its sounds, which greatly resembles the modulation of an intriguing boar cat.
A selection from Francis Grose’s “Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue” (1785)
DRAGOONING IT. A man who occupies two branches of one profession, is said to dragoon it; because, like the soldier of that denomination, he serves in a double capacity. Such is a physician who furnishes the medicines, and compounds his own prescriptions.
A selection from Francis Grose’s “Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue” (1785)
I have trouble with this because the foundations of such arguments are based on trends that presume some kind of physics, when economies are structurally, if not also actually, more like whims. A panic over something can send prices spinning in one or another direction. There is no structural requirement that yesterday relates to tomorrow.
And by these things, I include even things like Steven Pinker going on about the world getting better by studying what amount to almanacs. Truly, the betterness he describes is built on surplus, and surplus is a product of structural integrity, which is not always a visible thing. Pinker has done interesting work in other areas, but his predictions and assurances on the goodness of the world rely on really no structure at all. They have zero predictive value in my book. The moment the world has no surplus (and that is what climate change is setting us up for), all "betterness" that Pinker speaks of will evaporate like so much cotton candy.
To turn the conversation back by way of climate metaphor, it can look like the ice in, say, Antarctica has not changed as seen from a satellite, only to find that it's been melting from below due to heating oceans or some sort of volcanic effect or other effects we just haven't discovered, and things can just fall in.
The economy is the same. For a hopefully-entertaining brief parable on the matter, see my 2009 essay "Hollow Support" (http://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2009/03/hollow-support.html). In it, I offer a metaphor for thinking about the economy and its fragility, which I was pondering after what was then a recent crash.
A lot of what we are doing with the economy these days has been aptly, I think, described as a "sugar high". It locally seems good, but it's not improving structure, so doom must follow.
And so back to this actual piece: High rent is something hard to sustain in hard times, so becomes a weight that weighs one down. And while I'm a big advocate of things like community kitchens, they are rarely publicly funded, and the importance of that is critical to understand.
Public funding is eschewed by many as some kind of socialism, but another way to think of it is a public commitment to making sure a process is there no matter the economy. In tough times, donations to private matters dry up, and that cascades down to hard times for our most vulnerable. To make something like this, or social security, or medicare, be publicly funded to a proper degree is to say we have no higher priority in society than the survival of our citizens. We are either committed to them or we are not, but privatization basically says we are not, that they will somehow manage to survive tough times by means we aren't willing to think through.
So there is no real backstop there. There is just the illusion of continuity from good times. And it is terrible policy, public or private, to tell people to reason about the future based on the artifacts of the past. Those artifacts can inform intuitions, but what must really inform thought is an understanding of what is changing, including the hearts of the public.
Any suggestion I can offer is unsatisfying. Some would say this is why people should be preppers, but prepperism is really only useful for temporary problems. The climate problem is so structural that no basement full of food will get anyone through it. At best it will help people survive a brief glitch or give people a chance to endure climate pain for longer before it is too much to endure.
The solution is to care about climate, and also social justice, and make structural changes there. But there seems little public appetite for that, in part because the people likely to be most affected are mindlessly backing the people who would do the worst to them.
VINCENT'S LAW. The art of cheating at cards, composed of the following associates: bankers, those who play booty; the gripe, he that betteth; and the person cheated, who is styled the vincent; the gains acquired, termage.
A selection from Francis Grose’s “Dictionary Of The Vulgar Tongue” (1785)