I've been studying early modern English history, mid-seventeenth century specifically, but also a century or so to either side for context. The further into the details I get, the more I see how little humans have changed in the past four hundred years. Especially as regards bad behavior.
Today's new obsolete word: jetting.
Jetting is when bored teenagers roam around at night in groups engaging in vandalism and generalized mayhem. It was a problem in fifteenth century Cambridge. Consider: minimally supervised teenage males crammed into rental housing. Studying Latin. This was before serious math was developed. Maybe if they'd had to learn Fourier transforms and semiconductor physics they'd have been too tired to run around town at night, attacking townspeople and students from other colleges. This was enough of a problem that in 1469, "the university authorities enacted a statute forbidding masters and scholars to carry, in the open, bows and arrows, or crossbows and bolts," although they could get licenses to carry such weaponry for peaceable purposes.
My university experiences seem so tame.
And this begs the question as to what constitutes peaceable use of a crossbow.
188 words | June 14, 2005 09:30 PM | Real true storyI don't know which is worse: fourier transformations or Aquinas in the original Latin.... One of my course readers a few years back had an exchange of letters between a student and his father: the student was asking for more money (because he was unfashionable, if memory serves), and the father was telling the student that he'd better shape up because the teachers were telling him about his son's slacking and bad company.... Everything changes except man, someone once said.
Posted by: Jonathan Dresner at June 15, 2005 07:02 PMthey should start a jetting club...
Posted by: fin at June 17, 2005 10:28 AMThese folys as it were rorynge swyne With theyr gettynge and talys of vycyousnes Trouble all suche seruyce, that is sayd.
—Shyp of Folys, Barclay, 1509
May we not well remember…their man-like apparel, …their jetting, their strutting, their leg-making?
—Tyrants & Protectors, J. P., 1654
(I love the OED. And I'm really wondering about that "man-like apparel" business.)