The play Abraham Lincoln was watching when he was shot was Our American Cousin. Its English author, Tom Taylor (1817–80), reached the height of his great popularity with The Ticket-of-Leave Man, staged two years earlier, in 1863. I noticed a belittling reference to it in Stevenson the other day, so I decided to read it. He’s right, it isn’t very good, though if you like ‘relevance’, it does deal with a criminal on probation. Taylor sprinkles his dialogue with slang. A neddy is a life-preserver or cudgel, and flimp is, in his usage, to steal. The Oxford English Dictionary quotes sources suggesting that flimping is robbery with violence, either with one man pushing the victim in the back while his accomplice steals his watch, or simply by garrotting. The play mentions garrotting once, for it had been all the rage in 1862 and was in everyone’s mind.
A couple of terms in the play have adjusted their meanings. A villain speaks of the ‘cutest detective in the force’, meaning ‘sharpest’; and the danger is remarked of falling into ‘gay company’, meaning ‘fast’, and certainly connoting loose-living.
In 1856 John Leech (1817–64) had published in Punch a cartoon showing two prostitutes standing in the street, bedraggled in the rain. The buildings behind are broken down. To ensure the reader gets the point, a fly-poster on the wall reads, ‘Great success: La Traviata’. One woman says to the other, ‘How long have you been gay?’
Leech and Taylor worked on Punch from its early years. Leech had actually invented the word cartoon in its humorous sense when in 1843 he began a series of full-page drawings provoked by the designs (cartoons) for murals at the Palace of Westminster.
But the word in the play that really stumped me was no slang term; it was opodeldoc. If I were better read in 19th-century novels, I should have known it, for it refers to a common kind of plaster or liniment. The British Pharmacopoeia specified 3oz soap dissolved in a pint of alcohol, and 1oz camphor, with a drachm each of oil of origanum and of rosemary. The Merchant Shipping Act of 1867 mentions a liniment of the name composed of equal parts of the prescription just given and of opium.
Although opodeldoc was thoroughly popularised, it originated, in the form oppodeltoch, in the works of Paracelsus (1493–1541), who is believed to have invented the word. After a life of 400 years, it is unknown now, except no doubt to a few learned readers of The Spectator.
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