Radio Script #8
Little Talk On Common Things
January 2, 1949
A lot of people think they know the origin of “not worth a Hannah Cook”. All agree that it began as a seaman’s term, but there is much disagreement about just what the original words were. Miss Alta Smith of the Good will School, herself the co-author of a charming book of Maine pictures and Maine legends, thinks it was originally hand or cook, meaning that the skipper found something so worthless that he wouldn’t spare a hand or a cook for it. Mrs. Harold Milton of Waterville says the expression comes down from the old whaling ship days, and referred to a whale not worth going after — one for which the captain felt it was not worth risking the life of a single hand (that is, a seaman), or even a cook. The Answer Man of a competing national network calls it a corruption of hand and cook. These are all variants of the usually accepted origin, which up to this time the American Dialect Society has been loathe to accept. It doesn’t quite ring true. The readers of Jim Connolly’s famous stories of the Gloucester fishermen know that a very important person on a fishing schooner is the cook, and he must have been equally important on the old whalers. To say that the expression means not worth a hand or even a cook, is to slander the cook beyond all reason. To some of us who have made a comparative study of similar expressions, and in spite of what the books say, isn’t it more likely that the expression first meant not worth a hand to cook? Of what earthly value would the average sailor be in place of the indispensable cook?
Mrs. Milton offers what is to this observer a brand-new expression: “Up to Sim Sozens”. However, it ought to be spelled, she says it always sounded like S0ZENS with a short 0 as in of. Mrs. Mil ton says that when she was a girl and would ask where something was or where some .event happened, she would often get the answer, “Up to Sim Sozens”. As she grew older she understood that this stock expression was not always the equivalent of “I don’t know”, but that it quite as frequently meant “I don’t intend to tell you”.
This expression of Mrs. Milton’s strikes me as equally original and picturesque as one from my own boyhood. A clerk in one of the village stores had an ailing wife, one of those women who seem to enjoy poor health. When some friend would ask him, “How’s Sally this morning?”, he often replied, “Oh, she’s got another smudgeon”, meaning she’s complaining again.
Dr. Hugh Robinson, a trustee of Colby College, is a man who has heard many languages and all sorts of expressions in various parts of the world. He spent many years in China, and for more than two years he was a prisoner of the Japanese at the Santo Tomas Internment Camp in Manila. Dr. Robinson says one of the expressions he remembers best was a kind of minced oath repeatedly uttered by his college roommate, who came from Clinton, Maine. When anything went wrong the roommate would exclaim, “Dod-rabbit-it”.
Then Dr. Robinson points out most interestingly that this expression is very old English. It is found in the first great English novel, Fielding’s TOM JONES, published more than two hundred years ago.
A common but very ugly thing is rumor. Ever since the story of the Garden of Eden, when Eve was beguiled by the serpent, Dame Rumor had enjoyed a ready market for her characteristic inside information about a particular event or person. Her unverified reports are more welcome than the truth, not merely because they are startling, but even more because they are gratifying. As choice morsels on the tongue, rumors serve to bolster man’s opinions and attitudes, and to fortify his baseless confidence.
Some rumors, founded in old-time ignorance and superstition doubtless do no harm, but their very persistence shows what a gripping hold upon us a rumor can have. Like the idea that Boston is the hub of the universe, you cannot, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, pry that rumor out of the head of a Bostonian with the tire of all creation flattened out for a crow-bar.
Attendants at the Question House in the Bronx Zoo in New York say that the question most often asked is whether an ostrich hides its head in the sand when frightened. For at least 2,000 years people have been passing on that silly tale. Almost as long, naturalists and zoologists have tried to debunk the rumor. But it goes on and on. Without any basis whatever in fact, it will not die. As people believed it allover Europe in 50 B.C., so many people allover the so called enlightened United States believe it today. Patiently the zoo attendants keep explaining that the hippopotamus does not sweat blood, that swamp rabbits don’t use their ears to swim with, that elephants are not afraid of mice, that one cannot get warts from a toad, and that a porcupine does not throw its quills.
Rumors of sea-serpents and other weird monsters of the deep will probably never die. Do you remember the Loch Ness monster of Scotland in the 1930’s? The newspapers spent thousands of dollars trying to verify its existence. Yet none of the correspondents ever saw the monster, and none of the photographers ever got a picture of it. The rumor was subsiding a bit when suddenly, in January, 1934, a veterinary student insisted that early one morning, as he was riding by the lake on his motorcycle, there before him, to his amazement, was the monster on dry land. He added one element to the traditional description: the animal’s tail was rounded off at the end, which is more than can be said for the tale about these sea and lake monsters. They refuse ever to round off, or even to have an end.
Much more serious are the rumors that spread alarm or fear or hate. Those are the rumors that blast and kill. It was a muggy June Sunday in Detroit. The heat had brought a hundred thousand people out into Belle Isle Park on the Detroit River. It was 1943 and the nation was at war. The war industries had brought thousands of negroes into the Detroit area. For some time feeling had run high. On that particular Sunday an argument on the bridge between river bank and park had led to a fist fight, in which friends of both parties engaged. The incident itself was soon over. Then Dame Rumor took command. First, it was reported that a white woman had been attacked by a negro on the park bridge; then it was said she had been killed. Then the story was that she had a baby in her arms, which her assailant had tossed into the river.
With each new telling the rumor took on bigger dimensions. As it grew more and more lurid, it fanned higher and higher the flames of anger and hate. And the rumors were by no means confined to the white people. When the report reached Paradise Valley, one of the city’s most crowded negro sections, it said that a bunch of white ruffians had killed a negro woman at Belle Isle Park. Faster and faster the growing rumors circulated — from barber shops to bars, from beauty parlors to church socials, from lobbies to restaurants, from telephone to telephone. The subsided fist fight now broke out into a full-blown riot. By midnight the fighting and looting had spread to a dozen sections of the city.
By Monday morning organized bands of whites roamed the streets, burning all cars in sight that belonged to negroes. At nightfall four white boys, none over 16 years of age, shot and killed a middle-aged negro who was just standing in the doorway of his shop. When the orgy of hate was finally over, the death toll was 25 negroes and nine whites, and property damage exceeded a million dollars.
Were you one of those who believed the bumping rumor, spread so widely in 1944? It was told to you something like this, always by someone who had got it straight. A white schoolteacher in Boston.or New York .or Chicago or Cleveland — or any northern city that fitted the convenience of the story teller — this teacher asked one of her colored pupils to bring her mother to see the teacheron Thursday, to talk over the pupil’s progress in school. “MCilma can’ t come on Thursday”, said the little girl, “Thursday is her bumping day.” “What on earth is bumping day?” asked the teacher. “Why that’s the day Mama goes to the department stores and bumps white women.”
These Bump Club rumors became so serious in some cities that the FBI was finally called to investigate. Everyone knows that Mr. Hoover’s G-Men do not go through a job skimpily or half-heartedly. In this instance their investigation was typically. thorough. It failed to produce a single shred of evidence to prove the actual existence of any such club.
Most business is today conducted on a high level — most business, but not all. In the trade wars for competitive markets Dame Rumor sometimes wields a most vicious weapon. Do you recall those days back in 1934 when the whole nation was buzzing with the whisper that a leper had been found working in a certain cigarette factory? Here was a reputable manufacturer confronted by a persistent rumor designed to spread the fear that one might contract a terrible disease if he smoked this brand of cigarettes. The company offered rewards as high as $50,000 for a clue that would lead to unearthing the rumor’s origin. No clue was ever found, and eventually it died down, because the cigarette makers had to face together the angry candy makers, who saw their business hit by the folks who could be induced to reach for a smoke instead of a sweet.
The power of rumors is enhanced by the fact that people who hear them believe they come from unbiased sources. This gives opportunity for those who would harm a certain company to spread rumors about its product which it would never dare to put in print. Whispering campaigns against another concern’s products or operations, are branded as illegal and subject to prosecution by the Federal Trade Commission. The alertness of that commission keeps the practice down, but it does not stop it. A well known breakfast food was once driven off the market by an unfounded rumor that it contained morphine. Aluminum ware was rumored to produce cancer. The first mechanical refrigerators were said to be poisoning the food. A certain dental cream would cause pyorrhea.
The telephones of northern headquarters of the Ford Motor Company were kept buzzing in the spring of 1947ยท with inquiries whether it was true that a 1943 copper penny would buy its possessor a brand new Ford. Though the source of the rumor remains to this day a mystery, the headquarters manager received demands for verification and information from Ford dealers from coast to coast. Patiently but wearily he kept telling the callers, “There is no such thing as a 1943 copper penny.” The need for copper during the war was so critical that steel-zinc pennies were the only pennies coined in 1943. Furthermore the Ford Company was certainly not a party to any such hoax. It had never offered to sell ‘a car for that or any other mythical coin.
Perhaps as amusing a rumor as ever went the rounds concerns the State of Washington I s famous mountain. It had originally been named Mt. Rainier in 1792 by Captain Vancouver in honor of a famous British admiral. In 1883 a director of the Northern Pacific Railroad, who also happened to be president of the Tacoma Land Company, announced that hereafter all guide books and other publications of the railroad would use the name Mt. Tacoma. When, a few years ago, the controversy sprang up allover again, a new rumor went the rounds. Someone claimed to have unearthed what happened in Washington when a federal board gave official name to the mountain. The brewers of Rainier beer, said this rumor, had shipped a whole carload of their beverage to Washington to quench the board members I thirst. Those august men became so jolly and gay and so naturally grateful for the present, that they promptly named the mountain Rainier.
The facts spoil that luscious story. The bender never did take place, if only for the reason that Rainier beer had not come into existence until years after the federal decision had been made.
How does class warfare the curse of our economic and social life — usually begin? How do wars between nations get started? These catastrophes start because men, beguiled by their own anxieties and befogged by their own rumors, pennit the gap of misunderstanding to grow wider and wider. Both sides in a dispute thoroughly accept the lies about each other. When will the human species learn that it is rumor that enslaves; it is only truth that makes men free?
Year: 1949