folling and cotton and bummer

I am now reading a perfectly delightful book, Mark Perry's Grant and Twain (Random House, 2004). It chronicles the intersecting lives of these two late 19th century giants, especially as it relates to Grant's writing of his memoirs in the last year of his life (1884-85). Though I have been highly critical of Perry/his editor in some essays, I am generally taken by the humane detail and vivid pictures of people created by Perry in this book. This essay will consider a few words in the book that are no longer much in use today. Words open up worlds; let's enter into both.

Folling

One of the interesting mysteries of Twain's life was why he stopped writing Huck Finn in 1876 after he had finished chapter 16, where a passing ship upsets their raft when Huck and company are near the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers near Cairo, IL. Twain set aside the work for seven years, completing it only late in 1883, when the rest of it flowed as easily as the graceful Mississippi itself. While he spent the summer of 1883 in Elmira, NY (his wife's home town--the College of Elmira has the Twain gazebo, where he did much of his summer writing, prominently displayed now on campus), he mused about his writing:

"I haven't had such booming working-days for many years. I am piling up manuscript in a really astonishing way. I believe I shall complete, in two months, a book which I have been folling over for 7 years" (p. 111).

Folling over? The word is not attested in the OED, but behind it quite obviously stands the noun "folly." We have the verb "to fool" in English, but we really don't have a verbal form of "folly" which represents the actor's own folly. That is, we "fool" someone else, but what if the folly is our own doing? Twain invented this term, which obviously didn't catch on, to describe his own folly or wastefulness. He follied over Huck Finn for seven years before he finally got down to business and wrote the rest quickly. Cute, don't you think?

Bummers

The most popular use of the term "bummer" today was only invented in the 1960s. A "bummer" of this variety is a disappointment or failure. In drug culture lingo of those days it may also refer to a "bad trip." The legendary Timothy Leary, for example, the Harvard professor who urged people to "tune in, turn on and drop out," wrote in his 1968 Politics of Ecstasy: "The Western world has been on a bad trip, a 400-year bummer." Indeed, the older I get the more I realize that what angered the "establishment" so much about Leary is not so much that he smoked marijuana or engaged in illicit drug-use (though this did anger people), but that he gave a message to the younger generation that they ought not to feed the voracious maw of American capitalism anymore through their work and lives. Certainly anyone who stands up in 2006 and says that people ought not to buy anymore will quickly be branded an enemy of the state, and all efforts will be made to silence such a person. Bad movies can be called "box-office bummers, ideas may be bummers, situations can be bummers, etc.

Perry uses the term in Grant and Twain when describing William Techumseh Sherman's description of his army that marched to the sea and devastated the South. "'I can make that march and make Georgia howl,' he crowed. His army was followed by a ragtag mob of criminals, looters and freed slaves, called 'bummers'" (p. 129). This use of "bummer" as an "idler, lounger, loafer," (OED definition 3) has its first attestation in the 1855 Oregonian, where I wrote editorials in the summer and fall of 1985. "Come, clear out, you trunken loafer! Ve don't want no bummers here!" A year after Sherman devastated Georgia, the word was also used: "If it be asked what a 'bummer' is, the reply is easy. He is a raider on his own account--a man who temporarily deserts his place in the ranks...and starts out upon an independent foraging expedition." Finally, the Atlantic Monthly, in its March 1865 edition, could say: "The brain...is a lazy bummer..that lived at the stomach's expense."

Cotton (as a Verb)

After the publication of Huck Finn in mid-February 1885, the New York Sun gave it a laudatory review. "Who on earth except Mark Twain would even cotton to a youth like Huckleberry Finn for the hero of what is neither a boy's book nor a grown-up novel?" (quoted on p. 145). Actually the verb "cotton" is very much a word of the 21st century, even if rarely used. One of the two usages of the term, according to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate dictionary, is: "to take a liking to," such as in the sentence, "he cottons to people easily." This meaning, which the OED renders, slightly more ponderously, as "to get on together or with each other; to suit each other; to work harmoniously, harmonize, agree," is only the fifth meaning listed in the OED. The earlier definitions of the verb show how the verb is linked to the substance "cotton." Its first meaning, for example, is "to form a down or nap on; to furnish with a nap."* One of the

[*It would take me too far afield at this point to explore the word "nap," both in its noun and verb form. Suffice it to say that it was the woolly or fuzzy material taken off cloth that could be put inside a pillow or on a quilt for comfort, warmth and a soft feeling when lying on it.]

definitions from the late 16th century takes us way far afield: "Cotonare, to cotton, to bumbace, to thrum, or set a nap upon." Space will not permit us to go into those terms. But the verb basically meant to "furnish or clothe with cotton."

It is not too much of a stretch to say that, figuratively speaking, "to cotton" may mean to "prosper" or "succeed" or "get on well." If you place the nap on the bed properly, you probably will sleep well. Thus, the verb, which originally suggested only the equipping of a bed or a blanket, now morphs gently into something that makes it do well or get on well. Thus, we can understand now how cotton would mean to "get on well" with another person. From 1700: "They don't cotton, they don't agree well." Or, from 1881: "All I ask is that I may be able to cotton with the man she's set her heart on.."

Conclusion

While the 19th century may seem downright primitive to us in many ways, especially as it relates to technology, it was downright perceptive and creative in its use of language. We do well to pause once in a while on its words.

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