History Today’s short features are good this month.
The London Gazette is the longest-running continuous newspaper in Britain, and possibly in the world. I think one Dutch paper might be older. The Gazette’s starting point gives us another neat 400 year resonance.
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The Restoration government needed to manage the news. In 1663 it gave the job to its censor, Roger L’Estrange. It was not a good fit. The news, he wrote, ‘makes the multitude too familiar with the actions and counsels of their superiours’. His indifference made him careless. In one issue of L’Estrange’s The Newes, His Highness the Duke of York, a Catholic, was referred to as ‘His Holiness’.
L’Estrange’s principal rival, meanwhile, Henry Muddiman, had built a lucrative subscriber list for handwritten newsletters. L’Estrange fought back: ‘I found him very short of intelligence’, he wrote to the secretary of state, Joseph Williamson, who disagreed. It helped that Muddiman had followed the court to Oxford as it fled the plague.
Muddiman’s Oxford Gazette was launched on 16 November 1665. Sold for a penny, it was an immediate success. Three presses ran simultaneously to meet demand.
= = = = = END QUOTE.
Modern L’Estranges, who call themselves “journalists”, share the same sniffy elite disdain for non-aristocrats. Modern Muddimans are succeeding through cheap newsletters, offering material that people find valuable.
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I was curious about the etymology of gazette, which rings another resonance!
= = = = = START ETYMOLOGY:
from French gazette (16c.), from Italian gazzetta, Venetian dialectal gazeta “newspaper,” also the name of a small copper coin, literally “little magpie,” from gazza; applied to the monthly newspaper (gazeta de la novità) published in Venice by the government, either from its price or its association with the bird (typical of false chatter), or both. First used in English 1665 for the paper issued at Oxford, whither the court had fled from the plague.
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And now we’re back to magpies, always associated with printing!
Thinking about Trump as Pied Piper. When the metaphor first appeared in those DNC emails I didn’t quite understand it. After learning that Trump is Roy Cohn’s protege, I understand it PRECISELY. Agents Provocateurs are Pied Pipers. Their job is to lead a specific group of people into PUBLICLY VISIBLE CRAZINESS so Deepstate can conveniently exterminate them.
In the printing context, a pied form is the desired result of all Sorosian leaders. Turn a purposeful ordered LIVE organization or person or country into a jumbled chaotic DEAD mess. So Trump is the Pied Piper or the Pie-ing Piper, depending on metaphor.
The apprenticeship of a printer’s devil inevitably includes some pi:
Pursuing the etymology leads into more self-completing circles.
Pie as food:
From Middle English pye, pie, probably from Latin pīca (“magpie, jay”) (from the idea of the many ingredients put into pies likened to the tendency of magpies to bring a variety of objects back to their nests).
Pie as chaotic letters:
Some sources think it comes from the “black-and-white appearance of type” resembling the feathers of the magpie. Wrong. Lead type is all gray.
Other sources evoke the randomly assorted magpie’s nest, which makes immediate and complete sense.
The pastry analogy is especially strong because a pied form is normally seen in a galley, which is identical to a baking pan or tray.
The Latin base for all of these is pica, which included crows and woodpeckers along with [mag]pies. The pica pole is the basic measuring tool in a printshop. And then, of course, we have the multicolored part of the trio. (Online etymologies disagree with this, but it seems to be an inevitable semantic convergence.)
= = = = = END 2019 REPRINT.
From 1660 to 1960, reporters started work as printers devils, learning to arrange pied forms into meaningful text. As they moved into the more abstract side of journalism, they learned to edit pied reality into meaningful text. Modern journalists start with abstraction and never learn how to restore order.
Polistra's Mill 