Monday, August 23, 2021

'Daub the Wall of a Jakes with Him'

Some words are strictly literary, or at least confined to print. We have never heard them spoken. An example is jakes, a singular noun defined by the OED as “a privy, a latrine; a toilet.” I have no idea how I knew that, and I think it refers exclusively to an outdoor toilet, an outhouse, but I could be wrong. In his Dictionary, Dr. Johnson euphemistically defines jakes as “a house of office.” He uses the same euphemism when defining a synonym of jakes, boghouse. 

I encountered the word again in Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (1727), a collection of work by Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot and Gay, with a preface by Swift.  The authors published the book themselves as part of their ongoing war with Edmund Curll, the bookseller who had forged and pirated their work. In the preface, Swift writes:

 

“[T]hose very booksellers, who have supported themselves upon an author’s fame while he lived, have done their utmost after his death to lessen it by such practices; even a man’s last will is not secure from being exposed in print; whereby his most particular regards, and even his dying tendernesses, are laid open. It has been humorously said that some have fished the very jakes for papers left there by men of wit . . .”

  

The OED includes citations for jakes dating from the fifteenth century though the twentieth, including passages from Ulysses and a letter by Malcolm Lowry. Dr. Johnson’s are more interesting. From Act II, Scene 2 of King Lear, Kent says of Oswald:

 

“Thou whoreson zed! thou unnecessary letter! My

lord, if you will give me leave, I will tread this

unbolted villain into mortar, and daub the wall of

a jakes with him.”

 

And in his translation of the “Third Satire” of Juvenal, John Dryden writes:

 

“From thence returned, their sordid avarice rakes

In excrements again, and hires the jakes.”

 

Of related interest is jake as an adjective meaning, according to the OED, “Excellent, admirable, fine, ‘O.K.’” That’s a word I associate with hard-boiled crimes novels and movies. It shouldn’t be confused with the 1990 film The Two Jakes, the execrable sequel to Roman Polanski’s masterpiece, Chinatown (1974).

1 comment:

Barry Cusack said...

I am sure the point you make, that some words are literary and we never hear them spoken, is a good one, but not in the case of jakes. Some people have most certainly heard jakes spoken on a daily basis. At my Catholic school in the UK, jakes was the word for what most schoolboys called the bog i.e. the lavatory. When we came upon King Lear in class, we were ahead - at least on this issue! Our teacher explained that the word went from England to the continent when Catholic education of priests was outlawed in England in Tudor times. It largely fell out of use in the homeland, but remained in the argot of Catholic schools and seminaries until their return to England after the French revolution. And on that return, the word (and many others presumably) returned with them, at least in the lingo of schoolboys. I hope my teacher had it right!