Tucson Daily Citizen, June 7, 1902. The administration and faculty of The Hope Chest wish you laughter and merriment but not congestion of the brain this holiday season. Please drink and eat mince responsibly.

Chicago Tribune, May 17, 1908. First item: Such is the condescension faced by avian-Americans even unto this day: A super-sentient chicken is memorialized not for its astonishing intellectual powers but the brute physical fact that it laid two eggs a day.
Second item: grand theft mince is arguably a self-punishing crime.

Henceforth I will be diverting Chicago-related currents of my historical blogorrhea to the website of the Chicago Reader, where they will appear under the rubric Bad News From the Past. Some such content may feel  remedial to close followers of THC, but I’ll try to keep actual recycling to a minimum.

The cover story of the Chicago Reader this week is all mince and all mine. Check it out.

Harper’s Magazine, December, 1942. From an essay on the difficulty of finding good help during wartime by Dame Rebecca West (“Dinner for the Man Who Came to Dinner”). The dish in question sounds most intriguing.

New York Herald, June 1, 1891. Hoo-boy, high times at the headline composition desk.
Translation: “Yeah, we’ve jumped the shark on this ‘Jack the Whatever’ thing, but we’re under deadline here.” I’ll spare you the ensuing 500-words. Suffice to say that one Jack is a smash-and-grab artist and the other a voyeur.

Auburn Daily Bulletin, something something, 1891. Vigilante violence against dudes, fully sanctioned by the media.Why can’t everybody just abide and let abide? And why such anger against the dudes ? Are we essentially talking about queer-bashing here, in the light of the definition Meylnda earlier supplied?

To wit:

Thanks to the due diligence of Dudespaper (q.v.), I bring you glad tidings of etymological certitude:

“The key to the etymology of the long troublesome *dude* lies in the May 1883 article in *Clothier and Furnisher,* vol. 13, no. 10, pp. 27-28—already reprinted in Com, on Et., April 1997, pp. 2-3. Here is that article once again.
‘DEFINITION OF THE WORD DUDE
‘In answer to a correspondent, the editor of the New York Journal of Commerce says that it is impossible to give an “exact definition” of the word “dude” that shall express the various ideas in the minds of those who use it. It is not exactly slang, but has not rooted itself in the language[1] and has not, therefore, a precise and accepted meaning. The word pronounced in two syllables as if spelled “dood-y” has been in occasional use in some New England towns for more than a score of years.[2] It was probably born as a diminutive of dandy,[3] and applied to the feeble personators of the real fop.[4] It was employed to describe a young man who had nothing particular in him but an alimentary canal, but who was very careful of his exterior adornment, especially in the tie of his cravat, the selection of his watch chain and appendages, the curl of his hair, and the fit of his trousers; one who eschewed not only all useful occupations, but also any violent exer cise; who was too languid in his manner to speak with anything but a drawl or a lisp; who affected special refinement, but lacked the chief essentials of manliness. In the last year or two[5] the name, now generally sounded to rhyme with rude,[6] has been applied to one who, in addition to the characteristics we [p. 28] have described, makes a feeble attempt to imitate the manners of some effeminate young nobleman about whom he has read in a foreign novel, but turns out to be only an emasculated penny edition of the despicable character he is trying to copy. The name is doubtless applied in familiar speech and in the press to some who have not all the essential features we have drawn; whatever may be the variations, there is one attribute common to all — they exist without any effort to recompense the world for their living.’

Chicago Herald, June 2, 1891. The victimological gamut of “merchants, mechanics and laboring men” establishes that the perp is an equal-opportunity wisenheimer and not some filthy workshy Iowan anarchist targeting the haves and sparing the have-nots. “Mechanic” here is being used in the wider 19th-century sense of a technologically-skilled worker quelconque.

Statistically this was a very strange week here at THC. I can never anticipate which items are going to grow legs and which will not, but on December 7th traffic on this site suddenly spiked from the normal range of 1,000,000 hits per diem to 5,000,000.* To my surprise, the big rainmaker was this. Which was odd because mince, while good for generating comments from the front of the class, has never been a popular favorite. Though it’s 3D celebrity pron when compared to the poor unloved BGN, whose poison extends to the box office.

*Above numbers may differ from reality by several orders of magnitude.

The Fort Worth Register, July 24, 1897. A rare instance of journalistic skepticism vis a vis the deadly bite of the BGN.
Our correspondent is not wrong about the prevalence of these stories in the Southern. I’ve got more BGN anecdotes than I know what to do with, especially since most are exactly the same. I’ll stick to posting the outliers. The reference to “enraged [blue gum] nurses” is intriguing: I haven’t run into that trope yet. But it does establish that there were accused female BGs after all.

I have no idea where the mule enters into this.

“By his own class” I take to mean other BGNs.

So it turns out that William Faulkner works the whole blue gum angle in The Sound and the Fury, which novel I must confess I have never read. That’s just the kind of lightweight I am. I’m only as God made me.

San Francisco Bulletin, June 11, 1891. I appreciate it when some obliging newspaper editor has done all the gleaning and gathering for me. Thank you, nameless long-dead newspaperman.