The Lexicographer's Rules

I’m not claiming prophet status or anything (I think the rule for that is life plus 70 years. Or is it ten years dead? I dunno.), but it’s so nice to see someone else independently arrive at an idea and make it real. The Battery Maritime Building is one-of-a-kind. It’s old New York. When you walk through lower Manhattan, judging the buildings with a critical eye—sierras and forests composed of nothing but glass, granite, and concrete—and then see the Battery Maritime Building, you get a little charge in your spine. Or at least I do. It looks even better contrast with the barf-inducing Staten Island Ferry terminal (officially the “Whitehall Ferry Terminal,” I believe) nearby, at least before the terminal’s renovation. So I’ve always thought that the Battery Maritime Building needed to be renovated, turned into a gallery of non-chain food joints, art shops, coffee lounges, and the like. And, voilà, my wish is granted.

I swear, if I had had a billion dollars in 1993-94, the housing boom and the renovation of New York City would have happened 10 years earlier.

This New York Times lede is the best I’ve seen on a story in a long while: A shirtless man was found dead in the basement of the Indonesian Consulate in Manhattan today, a butcher knife protruding from his chest, the police said.

Compare this to Newsday’s blah lede: An Indonesian man was found dead with a knife in his chest on Sunday in the basement of his country’s consulate on the Upper East Side, police said.

Tomorrow the tabloids will be all over this story like a bloodstain.

Both ledes might merely be different wire story drafts and not written by the newspapers at all; the Newsday URL is marked “AP New York.”

In researching peter player ‘a robber who uses administers knockout drops to victims’ for the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, I came across an article that says the term peter player was named after a Peter Sawyer known for using knockout drops on victims.

If that’s true, then peter player may have been the original form, and its synonym peterman, as well as peter ‘a sedative; knockout drops,’ may be derived from it.

From the Sandusky (Ohio) Register, May 18, 1894, p.7, reprinting an article from the New York Sun:

It would be hard to find a lower class of criminals in this city than the cowardly frequenters of the Bowery, who nightly secure victims through the medium of what is known in police parlance as “knocker out."…They are known to the police as “Peter players,” because the pioneer of the business in this country was old Peter Sawyer, as desperate a crook as ever got in the hands of the police in this city. […]

A form of administering “knocker out” which came in after Peter Sawyer’s snuff game went out was by a ring with an adjustable stone. The stone was worn inside the hand, the plain band of the ring belting the outside of the finger. A spring would move the stone to one side. Under the stone the crooks would conceal a morphine or opium pill, which they would drop into a glass of beer or whiskey.

Knocker-out is now a disused term, but at the time it meant someone or something which literally (such as a boxer, a peter player, or sedatives) or figuratively (such as a beautiful woman or someone very competent at a task) knocks someone out.

This claim that Peter Sawyer is the source of the term is also repeated in Asbury’s Gangs of New York, first published in 1927 (and very little like the movie supposedly based on it, by the way), as well as in Luc Santés Low Life (1991), but Santé probably got it from Asbury, who probably got his information, in turn, from the New York Sun or other newspapers. Asbury wrote (p. 181):

The late [eighteen-]sixties also saw the beginning of a reprehensible practice of using knock-out drops to deaden the senses of a victim while the thieves picked his pockets or appropriated his jewelry. Laudunum had occasionally been employed by the crimps of the old Fourth Ward water front to drug a sailor so he could be shanghaied without too much protest, but no effective use of drugs for the sole purpose of robbery was made in New York until a California crook, Peter Sawyer, appeared in 1866, and aroused such a furore in police and criminal circles that the former honored him by calling the practitioners of his art peter players. At first Sawyer used nothing more deleterious than snuff, which he dropped into his victim’s beer or whiskey, but later he and other peter players came to depend principally on hydrate of chloral. Occasionally they used morphine.

A crimp, according to Asbury, was someone who “operated boarding houses where sailors were robbed and murdered and from which they were shanghaied” (p. 48).

In his book, Sante adds the detail Sawyer came to New York City in the 1850s (p. 108).

I’ve found no other trace of Peter Sawyer, but I admit I haven’t looked very thoroughly. It’s one of those tasks I could spend weeks on for no result.  I’m satisfied, for the moment, by the minor delight of antedating OED’s entry for peter by four years.

“It’s comedy, in Mandarin. As you can see, it’s a man dressed in a bikini outfit so you know it has to be a comedy.” (Source Link)

Here’s the most bland, over-generalized, completely useless summary of New York City I’ve ever seen. According to this rubbish, the Upper West Side is east of Central Park and the Upper East Side is west of it.

Check out this particular bit of brilliance, apparently written by a sixth-grader in Sowbelly, Arkansas, in exchange for a couple of quarters: “Who can find the best diamond buy? That is the question for those in search of anything of glittering glitz in the Diamond District, located on 47th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. A great deal is not hard to find! In fact, store owners are often seen roaming up and down the street, ensuring that their prices are not being beat.”

(Source Link)