(via therumpus)
(via therumpus)
(Source: groveatlanticinc)
Today: behave inner child and a good bottle by Saskia Keultjes
“
Another expedient [during the industrial revolution] was to pay workers at least partly in kind—and notice the very richness of the vocabulary of the sorts of things one was assumed to be allowed to appropriate from one’s workplace, particularly from the waste, excess, and side products: cabbage, chips, thrums, sweepings, buggings, gleanings, potchings, vails, poake, coltage, knockdowns, tinge.(103) “Cabbage,” for instance, was the cloth left over from tailoring, “chips” the pieces of board that dockworkers had the right to carry from their workplace (any piece of timber less than two feet long), “thrums” were taken from the warping-bars of looms, and so on.
(103) Actually the full list is: ‘cabbage, chips, waxers, sweepings, sockings, wastages, blessing, lays, dead men, onces, primage, furthing, dunnage, portage, wines, vails, tinge, buggings, colting, rumps, birrs, fents, thrums, potching, scrapings, poake, coltage, extra, tret, tare, largess, the con, nobbings, knockdown, boot, tommy, trimmings, poll, gleanings, lops, tops, bontages, keepy back, pin money.’
” — David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
It’s #fridayreads once again, and I’ve picked up David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years after abandoning it a year ago, so when I finish I will still be in the dark as to the last year and a half of debt, but whatever. A galley of Fobbit, for review probably; Chekhov’s The Duel, continuing my campaign to read the shortest books possible by the great Russian fiction writers; and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, part of my ongoing survey of Western philosophy (I’m still in the shallow waters of the Stoics).
