If you want to know what was truly important to any particular generation, you could probably do a lot worse than browse the patent applications of the time.

I was therefore pleasantly surprised whilst trawling through the patents of the late 19th and early 20th Century to find a glut of animal baths. At first I found them funny, but eventually found myself enamoured with the beautiful (OK, so sometimes funny too) line drawings. Those shown above are:

• Portable Animal Bath
• Portable Bath For Animals
• Horse Vapor Bath

What’s the best old patent you can find in the database? Can you top the wonderfully simple sex aid (sorry, “Appliance For Assisting Anatomical Organs“) from 1897?

The English language is changing rapidly. During the last 15 years our focus has shifted from ‘traditional’ channels of communication (newspapers, books, television, radio) and we’ve found ourselves saturated by a whole array of new media (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, online magazines, podcasts).  This shift has been something of a democratisation process.  It’s no longer necessary to have a publishing contract or the ‘right connections’ for your words to become available to the world (or at least the world wide web).

As residents of capitalist societies, we are consumers being marketed to.  Advertisers know that information has to be more concise, more eye catching and more appealing than their last efforts.  There is always competition for our attention.

Added to this is the growing number of people speaking English as a second language.  Linguist David Crystal estimates that non-native English speakers outnumber native speakers 3 to 1.  They not only learn the language, but shape it, dictating norms for how sentences should be structured that we once viewed as mistakes.  Of course, language is organic, it’s alive.  Academic text books and dictionaries do not dictate how English is used, but evolve and are shaped in an attempt to chart current usage (at time of publication).

However, these changes come at a price.  When the channels of communication are no longer dominated by artists and their skillful mastery of well crafted verse, but ordinary people and their un-edited, generic pronouns (“great”), we lose sight of the potential for language as art-form.  When communication becomes more about efficiency than beauty, we find ourselves losing the playfulness and creativity of our words.  Suppose we meet a person at a party with a finely honed tongue, we are dismissive, viewing them as “poncey” or a relic from a long forgotten world.

My own journey places me on some hazy borderland.  As a first language English speaker, raised on the delights of English Literature, I Iearned to marvel at the well chosen word and the careful shading of a finely tuned metaphor.  I get annoyed when reading Shakespeare parodies on Twitter. While watching the movie Shadowlands (the life story of writer C.S. Lewis) recently, I found myself nostalgic for a time I barely knew, a time when language was charming and elegant, when people made speeches, not sound-bites.  On the other hand, as a world citizen (and resident of Sweden) I benefit daily from being able to speak English wherever I go and have learned the value of communication.  I’m also aware of the enormous privilege of having a global pedestal from which to broadcast my ideas at a whim.

Is it possible for artful language to survive in a fast paced world of brevity?

Moleskine image by Amir K.

In the Spring of 2007 a urologist named N.J. John K. Lattimer died in California. According to the New York Times, what made this man’s death interesting were the strange collectibles he left behind, including Napoleon’s penis, “Lincoln’s blood-stained collar and Hermann Göring’s cyanide ampoule.” Yes, that’s right. Napoleon’s penis.

Napoleon Bonaparte died in exile on the southern Atlantic island of Saint Helena on May 5, 1821. The following day an autopsy was conducted by the emperor’s doctor … [who] removed Napoleon’s heart (the deceased had requested that it be given to his estranged wife, the empress Marie-Louise, though it was never delivered) …

In 1916 … [the] collection of Napoleonic artifacts [was sold] to a British rare book firm, which in 1924 sold the lot for about $2,000 to a Philadelphia bibliophile, A.S.W. Rosenbach. Among the relics was “the mummified tendon taken from Napoleon’s body during the post-mortem.” A few years later Rosenbach displayed the putative penis, tastefully couched in blue morocco and velvet, at the Museum of French Art in New York. According to a contemporary news report, “In a glass case [spectators] saw something looking like a maltreated strip of buckskin shoelace or shriveled eel.” The organ has also been described as a shriveled sea horse, a small shriveled finger, and “one inch long and resembling a grape.” (source)

Ouch!

Napoleon Bonapart image by Dunechaser.

Fear is a powerful psychological concept that politicians, activists and the media have used to their advantage since time immemorial. Although we might like to blame the modern media on a worsening condition of fearful press, it may not be wholly accurate.

The graph above, from the Google News Archive, shows the volume of New York Times articles mentioning ‘fear’ since 1900. Perhaps we have become so oversaturated with fear that it is no-longer newsworthy.

Matching articles from each decade were passed into Wordle to extract the most fearful topics of each decade. A war-torn century was briefly broken by fears of politicians during the 20’s prohibition, communism and civil rights in the 60s, and AIDS in the 80s.