They’re Off!

Next month on May 7 the annual Kentucky Derby will be run in Louisville, Kentucky, and as part of the festivities ladies in pastel dresses and feathered hats and gentlemen in bright plaids or seersucker blazers will be sipping (or maybe gulping, depending on the circumstances) ample quanties of an iced beverage called a Mint Julep. Of course everyone knows that a “derby” is a horse race named in honor of Edward Stanley, the 12^th Earl of Derby (1752-1834), who founded the English (now Epsom) Derby.  He also got a hat named for him. But what is the origin of a “julep”?

It’s an Old French word of the 14^th century, meaning a syrupy liquid in which medicine is delivered, derived from medieval latin julapium, Arabic julab, and Persian gulab, meaning a “sweet drink.” In 1787, Americans latched on to this word to describe a concoction made with Bourbon whiskey, sugar, and fresh mint leaves.  It’s supposed to be served in a silver cup with shaved ice.

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou finds mint juleps are a tad too sweet for his taste, and he prefers them without the sugar, or the mint, or the ice, or the silver cup. 

            I’d much rather have a cold mint julep

            Than a lily or a rose or an old Dutch tulip.

Hats Off!

I read the other day that when Mark Rylance, the brilliant British actor who is currently Thomas Cromwell on the PBS series Wolf Hall, ran London’s Globe Theatre, he always wore a hat to let people know when he was functioning as artistic director and not as actor. The hat was a trilby. (I also read, to my surprise, that Rylance grew up and graduated from high school in Milwaukee—but that’s another story.)

 

A trilby is a small, narrow-brimmed hat with a short, indented crown. It is worn with the brim snapped down in front and turned up in back. In shape it is similar to the Tyrolean hat. It is so named from the character Trilby O’Ferrall, who wore such a hat in the first production of the stage version of George du Maurier’s 1894 novel Trilby. 

Similar to a trilby is a fedora, which is also named for a character in a play. The fedora has a wider brim and a taller crown. It got its name from the character of Princess Fédora, who wore such a hat when played by Sarah Bernhardt in Victorien Sardou’s 1882 play Fédora.

Other hat names have mostly non-theatrical sources. The bowler was named for London hatmakers Thomas and William Bowler, who designed it for a client in the 1820s.  When it crossed the Atlantic in the 1840s, it was called a derby because it was favored by the Earl of Derby, who regularly wore it to horse races. 

The homburg is a formal stiff hat with what is called a “gutter crown” with a single dent running down the middle and a stiff brim. It was named for the German spa Bad Homburg, where King Edward VII procured a hat of this type and then popularized it in England. 

The boater is a straw hat with a flat brim, which was fashionable at the beginning of the twentieth century at sailing events. For some reason, it was popular with FBI agents, almost as an unofficial uniform, in the 1910s and 1920s. 

The Bard of Buffalo Bayou wears a hat mostly for protection—to try to keep his head safe from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

            When Rylance is doing his work as director,

            He knows he must move in the management sector,

            And prove by whatever he puts on his head

            That he is the top guy whom all others dread.           

            A bowler or derby would just be a bummer,

            And people might think he was merely a mummer.

            A homburg is humbug and makes him look stuffy,

            He’d deplore a fedora, it’s so seedy and scruffy.

           

            The reason a boater would never apply

            Is that someone might think he was just F.B.I.

            Mr. Rylance’s headwear must be only a trilby,

            To show that he wants to be boss—and he will be.

                         

Eponymic Earls

If you happen to be playing bridge after the Kentucky Derby, while eating a sandwich, wearing your new cardigan underneath your chesterfield, and idly admiring an orrery, when you are suddenly dealt a yarborough—then you are making use of six eponyms derived from British earldoms. As if you didn’t already know, an eponym (from the Greek epi meaning “attached to” and onyma meaning “name”) is a person for whom something is named.

Six British earls gave their names to the items above.  In case you’re wondering who they are, please read on.

Edward Stanley (1752-1834), 12^th Earl of Derby, founder of the horse race known in his honor as the English (now Epsom) Derby, a name adopted by other annual horse races.  He can brag of a double-whammy in the eponym department: in 1888 he visited America wearing a rounded, rigid hat known in England as a bowler (from its manufacturer, the London hatmakers Thomas and William Bowler), and Americans named the style of hat as a tribute to the Earl.

John Montagu (1718-1792), the 4^th Earl of Sandwich, ordered his dinner meat brought to him between two slices of bread so that he could continue playing cribbage without getting the cards greasy (as he would have done by eating the meat with his fingers, as was his custom). He didn’t really invent the sandwich—people had been eating meat between pieces of bread for millennia—but his friends soon started referring to food served in that manner as a “sandwich.”

James Thomas Brudnell (1797-1868), 7^th Earl of Cardigan, was a British cavalry officer for whom a sweater that buttons in the front was named.  No one seems to know what the Earl’s connection to the sweater was, but so what, who cares?

           

An overcoat with concealed buttons and a fur collar is known as a chesterfield, named for one of the 19^th-century Earls of Chesterfield, but nobody seems to know which one or why.

Charles Boyle (1676-1731), the fourth Earl of Orrery, commissioned a model of the solar system, including the sun, the moon, the earth and all the other known planets in approximate scale to each other and mechanized to make orbital movements.  This device, often seen in science museums, is known as an orrery.

Charles Anderson Wosley (1809-1897), the 2^nd Earl of Yarborough, was a betting man, and he offered £1000 to anyone who was able to deal a bridge hand containing no card higher than a nine—provided the opponent paid the Earl  £1 each time he failed to achieve such a hand.  The Earl was on solid ground, since the odds of getting such a hand (in a fair deal, of course) are 1827 to 1. Such a hand has since been known as a yarborough, in the Earl’s honor.

Nothing has ever been named for the Bard of Buffalo Bayou, but that has not stopped him from resolutely turning out metrical slop like the following:

            There was a worried little eponym—

            Who always feared someone would step on him.

            He longed, instead, be a toponym,

            And then, he said, there’d be no stoppin’ him.