Slang-o-rama takes a break for: New Year's Bits and Pieces

 Since looking up Christmas song firsts was so fun last week, I thought I'd continue my Slang-o-rama break another week and turn my attention to New Year's trivia—musical and otherwise. So, without further ado, do you know:

1. When was the first New Year's celebrations (that we know of)?
2. What years was the NYC/Times-Square ball a "no show"?
3. What is the earliest recording of Auld Lang Syne?

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1. According to Britannica, the earliest known record of a New Year festival dates from about 2000 BCE in Mesopotamia, where in Babylonia the new year (Akitu) began with the new moon after the spring equinox (mid-March) and in Assyria with the new moon nearest the autumn equinox (mid-September).
2. Mental Floss lists 10 Facts about New Year's Eve, including the fact that the NYC ball drop was "missing in action" in 1942 and 1943. World War II was in full swing, and the army worried that the city's light displays would help German subs spot U.S. vessels in New York Harbor. So the Times Square ball drop was suspended for two years.
3. Auld Lang Syne, first put to paper by Robert Burns in 1788, was recorded by Emile Berliner in 1890 on a vulcanized rubber disc and played on a "toy" gramophone. It was recorded again in 1898 on a wax cylinder by the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition. (You can hear the very scratchy recording right here, at about 1:12 minutes.) Recording quality had vastly improved by 1910, in this rendition performed by Frank C. Stanley:

 

There are sooo many good recordings of this iconic New Year's Eve song. Do you have a favorite? Let me know in the comments! 

Personally, I feel it's either got to be sung with an authentic Scottish brogue or played on bagpipes...

Happy new year, to all!

Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Nanty narking

So how many of you will be celebrating the end of this (pretty awful) year with nanty narking?

Hmmm. I'm not seeing a lot of hands going up. Perhaps I should define my terms.

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According to Passing English of the Victorian era: a dictionary of heterodox English, slang and phrase by James Redding Ware (1909), nanty narking is a bit of slang dating from 1800 meaning "Great fun." Although the entry references Life in London: Or, The Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn, Esq., and His Elegant Friend Corinthian Tom, Accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxonian, in Their Rambles and Sprees Through the Metropolis by Pierce Egan (1821), I am unable to find nanty narking within its (digital) pages.

My hardcopy of Green's Dictionary of Slang provides the same brief definition and reference, so I'm going to just give it up at this point. My nanty narking on Dec. 31 will probably consist of watching a movie and then heading to bed early with hopes of a better tomorrow. How about you??

Back when, they were serious about their nanty narking.
(From Egan's Life in London)

Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Mafficking

How was your New Year's Eve? Did you go mafficking about when the clock struck midnight? I'll wager that many folks did (although I am long past that point and was more intent on sleeping the night through).

Now, let us dive into the mysterious word: mafficking...
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Mafficking is a most excellent bit of Victorian slang that, according to the Mental Floss blog post "56 Delightful Victorian Slang Terms You Should Be Using," means getting rowdy in the streets.

The origin of this word is fascinating as well. According to Merriam Webster:

 Maffick is an alteration of Mafeking Night, the British celebration of the lifting of the siege of a British military outpost during the South African War at the town of Mafikeng (also spelled Mafeking) on May 17, 1900. The South African War was fought between the British and the Afrikaners, who were Dutch and Huguenot settlers originally called Boers, over the right to govern frontier territories. Though the war did not end until 1902, the lifting of the siege of Mafikeng was a significant victory for the British because they held out against a larger Afrikaner force for 217 days until reinforcements could arrive. The rejoicing in British cities on news of the rescue produced maffick, a word that was popular for a while, especially in journalistic writing, but is now relatively uncommon.

I think it's a word that should be revived, don't you? 

Here's to a new year, a new decade, and a renewal of mafficking!

Here's to more mafficking in 2020!
Image by ktphotography from Pixabay

Happy New Year's Eve . . . at 10,000 feet in 1878

I'm thrashing around in my office, trying to identify and pull together all the receipts, statements, etc., that I need for tax season (yuck), and incidentally catching up (at least a little) with the piles of paper everywhere.

In the process, I found a great article in Leadville's Herald Democrat newspaper, a newspaper to which I subscribe and devour avidly (although often belatedly, as life gets in the way of newspaper reading). Anyhow, page 4 of the January 1, 2009, issue, has a reprint an article from the Jan. 1, 1891 issue that hearkens back to how New Year's Eve was celebrated in 1878, the first year of the city's existence. This is such a great article, I just have to quote bits and pieces of it, to wit:

. . . upon no common ground, at any point in the universe, was there ever gathered as here such a conglomerate mass of diversified humanity—men of education and culture, graduates of Harvard, Yale and Princeton, mingling with ignorant and uncouth bullwackers, men of wealth mixing with adventurers of every degree without a sou in their pockets . . . men of refinement jostling against cheap variety actors and scarcely less masculine variety actresses; dance hall herders and others with callings less genteel; representatives of the better element in all callings of life, hopelessly entangled with the throngs of gamblers, bunco steerers, thugs, bullies, drunkards, escaped convicts, dead-beats, and the "scum of the earth" generally. . . .

Whew!
Had enough? No? Then how about:

. . . numerous barkeepers, almost fainting from exhaustion, strove hard to satisfy the thirst of the multitude that eddied back and forth between curbstone and bar. Poor indeed and unsatisfying was the meal that could be procured on that New Year's day for a dollar, while indifferent, if not positively bad whiskey readily commanded 25 cents a swallow.

Thank you, Herald Democrat!

This newspaper, which has been going in one form or another since 1879, is a real treasure and allows me to keep up on the city's current day activities as well as pick up tidbits from the past, such as in this reprint.

I not only love the descriptions of Leadville's New Year's Eve of old, which are worth their weight in silver (? Do descriptions have mass? Oh, nevermind.), but also the cadence and exuberance of the language. There's a certain rhythm and energy that I, as a writer and reader, admire. Of course, back then, truth was a commodity with a value that rose or fell depending on its ability to entertain. Hmmm. I can think of some places where that holds true today as well!