The Lexicographer's Rules

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.”

Paypal is consistently the worst user experience I have had since I first used the Internet in 1992.

Today the problem is that I’m trying to change the home address on my account. On Friday I bought a $29 iBook keyboard on eBay and the seller seems reluctant to send it to my office. (Packages seem never to arrive at my home: rants about UPS are for another day, but let’s just say lazy sacks of shit for now.) I’ve given the seller all my contact information—which with my name is plastered from one end of the Internet to the other so it’s not likely I’d get away with scamming someone for a $29 keyboard. But I figured I would just change my Paypal information to reassure him.

Anyway, I go to my profile in Paypal. I successfully add my new home address. I try to delete the old one because it is from two apartments ago. Paypal tells me in very annoying red letters “This address cannot be removed because it is associated with a credit card in your account. To remove this address, first remove the credit card associated with this address, or update the billing address for the card.”

No links in the error message directly to the page where I can do this. Fine. I go back to the profile page and click on “Credit Cards.” I select the credit card that is attached to the old home address and click “Remove.” Another error message: “You may not remove your back-up funding source while an instant transfer is still pending.” Never mind that there’s both a second credit card and a checking account attached to my Paypal account.

Fine. I click on the old address and click “Edit,” thinking I’ll change the billing address in Paypal for the credit card in question. The card is still valid. The bills are paid up. I just verified this in my card’s online account center. That card is good. I could buy a house with it right now.

Yet when I enter the three-digit verification code and change the billing address for that card, I get another annoying red stupid error message from Paypal, “This credit card has been denied by the bank that issued your credit card. For details on why your card was denied, please contact your credit card issuer’s customer service department. Or, you may want to try adding a different credit card.”

Online banking is easier than this, all my online account management for my credit cards is easier than this. Nearly every online shopping experience I have is easier than this. What the hell is wrong with the people at Paypal?

I managed to avoid Paypal for years because of these sorts of issues, but there are some people (masochists?) who refuse to take anything else.

What happens when a bureaucracy decides that moving a 12,000-bottle, 30-year-old wine collection from one restaurant to another is illegal? "She kept referring to it as ‘liquor,’” says Mr. Geisweiller, with a distaste that can only be successfully communicated with a French accent. (Source Link)

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.

“But Mark was 37 when he got married. Does that sound too young to you? I don’t think age was the issue. The main thing was that Mark was just a degenerate. He liked very young girls—school girls. Ideally somewhere between the ‘age of consent and the onset of reason.’” (Source Link)