Oubliette

An oubliette is a secret dungeon with only an opening in the ceiling.  It was for the prisoners that the state wanted to put away permanently where they could be “forgotten.”  That is were the name comes from; oubliette is French for “forgotten place.”

One of my favorite Flickr photographers remembered this word to me with her photo that could be found here.  Thank you Sarah Schloo for the reference.

Her photograph, made from a photo from Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary (not an oubliette), made me think of the word as a figurative expression.  In all of us, there is a forgotten place.  It is where we  put away the thinks we have done that cannot be reconciled, the people we have hurt and the mistakes we have made.  It is the Struwwelpeter, who lies under the floorboards.  There is, it seems, an oubliette to the soul.

Pessary

When I come across words that I do not know, I flip out my trusty iPhone, navigate to the list that I have, and type it in.  I don’t know a lot of words, so I am stressed by the back-up.  Unless a word is interesting enough to jump to the front of my list, it lingers for several weeks.  For example, I am only now getting to my Philadelphia trip.

What this means, is that the word pessary has been sitting quietly on my list for some time.  Now that I’ve gotten to it, I’m thinking, “My God, I can’t do an entry about this.”  A pessary is any one of a variety of objects that placed inside of the vagina or rectum, sometimes to cure an infection, sometimes as a contraceptive, sometimes as a way of keeping everything in place.  One use of the word is synonymous with suppository.

What may this have to do with Philadelphia? you may be thinking.  More likely, you’re thinking: Please, please, don’t tell us!  Don’t worry; it’s not that bad.  While there, I visited the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, otherwise known as the Mutter Museum, more informally called the museum of scientific oddities.  In the days before the internet and television, the Mutter Museum served an important purpose.  It became a place where physicians could go to learn about rare medical diseases and complications that they might possibly run across during their ministrations.  Nowadays, it has become a stopping point for ghouls like myself who want to see Yang and Ang’s liver, Grover Cleavland’s jaw, and the largest colon in the United States.

The Mutter museum also holds of collection of over 250 pessaries.  These were the kind that were inserted into a women vagina after particularly hard labor so as to keep the uterus from, well, falling out (at least falling out of place).  A prolapsed womb, it was called.  Some of them were  stunningly decorated glass orbs, but that just seems like a bad idea to me.  More information can be found on this tongue-in-cheek blog about Gimcrack hospital.  The URL says it all.

Recision

Recision is the act of rescinding and is specifically used to refer to the policy of health insurance companies revoking health care from clients once they become diagnosed as ill. Last weekend’s This American Life had a segment on this very issue.  Last month, a House sub-committee interrogated representatives from three major insurance companies to investigate their policies of actively searching for excuses to deny health coverage for the sickest of patients.  For example, allegedly insurance applications contained difficult to understand language on purpose with the hope that a patient might make a mistake on them.  If said patient then becomes very ill, the company has the grounds to deny coverage (even though they accepted payments all along from this patient).  In the culmination of this hearing, all three companies were asked to commit to not rescind any policy unless there was “intentional fraudulent behavior” on the part of the client.  All three companies refused on the grounds that state laws did not force them to do so.  There it is, EMAIL YOUR  REPRESENTATIVES.

I recently spoke to Jess Roney, a history professor at Ohio University, about her research on Colonial American voluntary organizations in Philadelphia.  These included some of the earliest insurance companies in the country, including the fire insurance company popularized by Benjamin Franklin.  “They were more like mutual-aid societies,” she said.  That’s exactly the concept that has been lost: a group of people concerned about a the possibility of a catastrophe (in this case, fire), pool their money together so as to aid any one of them on whom that catastrophe falls.  It had the added benefit, Jess told me, of creating a mutual responsibility.  If you saw a house on fire that was protected under your insurance, you would rush to the aid of putting it out because you knew that it was in your economic interest to reduce the damage.  To be sure, some houses, particularly wooden  ones, were denied coverage — this was not a charity.  The reason was, however, that coverage was denied because it was an undue burden on the other members.  Under this system, recision would have been a bad policy because your vote to deny a fellow contributor today could easily be turned on you tomorrow.

Modern insurance companies have lost that sense of being a mutual-aid society, and recision is only one example of that.  The problem is that the company itself, formerly just a money-management tool, has now become an interest in itself.  What used to be an agreement between a group of contributors is now a corporate entity that is built, not upon redistributing wealth to those in need, but upon making a profit.  The day that insurance companies became profit-seeking organizations was the day recision became an effective policy.  It is also the day that an insurance company ceased to be a mutual-aid society.

Inurb

n. An older, close-in suburb

Walking home in the rain in Riverdale, I was already in a bad mood.  The scenery made it worse.  Having spent last weekend in Philadelphia, I missed the excitement and activity of large city streets.  Ever since I lived in Williamsburg, Virginia, however, I have missed the charm and peacefulness of small towns.  The streets I walked now had neither excitement nor charm.  It lacked the sublimity of a city skyline, or the beauty of from lawns and porches.

What do you call these inner city sections?  Neither city nor suburb, they have no other name to me, as a New Yorker, other than the boroughs.  The exist where ever cities do, however.  Usually, the started as separate cities and where absorbed into the growing metropolis.  As a result, they have lost the independent feel of a separate town (e.g. city buses still cruise by blowing smog), but they do not have the vitality of downtown.

I went to my latin – urb means city and sub means at the foot of.  Exurb is another interesting phrase for a particular type of suburb, the commuting town.  The answer seemed obvious.  I did a search of “inurb.”  It does not show in any dictionary, but I did find a reference in the Double-Tongued Dictionary.

Double-Tongued Dictionary “records undocumented or under-documented words from the fringes of English, with a focus on slang, jargon, and new words. This site strives to record terms and expressions that are absent from, or are poorly covered in, mainstream dictionaries.”  Looks pretty good, but you can imagine that many of the words recorded are rather offensive.

Back to the point: inurb was used in the Weekly Standard in 2006 by Fred Barnes.  He wrote “Older, close—in, inner suburbs-or “inurbs,” as Kirk calls them-began to vote Democratic in the 1990s, and the trend has continued into the new century.”  I’m not sure if that is exactly what I want, but it will do.  Start using it

Philadelphia Lawyer

n. A lawyer with an excellent ability to exploit legal technicalities

I chose this post as homage to my weekend vacation in the City of Brotherly Love, and also to a nickname that my parents used for me when I was  young.  It seems to be a phrase that has fallen out of use; at least I have never heard anyone in my generation use the term.  While in Philly this weekend, I found myself wondering about its origins, and they were relatively easy enough to find.

First, the term dates back to the Early Republic period and was used as a complement.  To call someone a Philadelphia Lawyer meant that he had an outstanding grasp of the law.  The prototype for the term dates back even earlier to an Andrew Hamilton.  Hamilton, a lawyer from Philadelpha, earned his spot in history for defending John Peter Zenger in the famous free press trial of 1735.  Zenger, the owner of the New York Weekly Journal had been arrested for printing a document critical of the colonial govornor William Cosby.  The brilliance of Hamilton’s defence, my wife will tell you, was not that we pleaded his clients innocence, but that he attacked the law.  Zenger couldn’t have committed seditious libel, Zenger argued, because basically everything in the article was true.  The twelve man jury, handpicked by the governor, found Zenger not guilty, and Hamilton’s fame was secured.

Somewhere along the line, the term picked up negative connotations (although none of the major dictionaries carry them).  To call someone a Philadelphia lawyer now seems to imply that a person will use the technicalities of the law to violate the spirit, an intelligent but slippery fellow.  Merriam-Webster suggests that this turn came hand-in-hand with the public’s general distrust of lawyers, but distrusting lawyers seems to be as old as the profession itself.