Cure for Bad Language

[Wilson Gray]

OT comment. Apparently, not with enough horror, since scourging was
used in state prisons as far into the North as Maryland as late as the
'Fifties, against black prisoners, at least. (It's amazing what can be
learned by merely browsing the stack [sic] of a library like Harvard's
Widener.) The photo showed a black prisoner stripped to the waist with
his hands tied above his head to the arms of a Y-shaped whipping post.
I didn't read the book, so I have no idea what constituted an offense
punishable by scourging or whether white prisoners were also subjected
to this in-the '50's?-in-the-US?-surely-you-jest! form of punishment.

-Wilson

On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 10:25 AM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Cure for Bad Language
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>
>  According to _The Whig Almanac_(N.Y.: Greeley & McElrath, 1850), p. 37,
> a U.S. Navy sailor could be punished with twelve strokes of the
> cat-o'-nine-tails for "improper language." This offense appears to have
> been distinct from "insolence," "mutinous language," "contempt," etc. How
> often this punishment was meted out is not indicated, but the threat must
> have been real enough.
>
> According to the editor, "There is no uniform scale of punishment, and the
> descriptions of the offenses are not seldom indefinite; but no one can read
> the volume [sc., the report of the Secretary of the Navy] without a feeling
> of horror, and a deep sense of the imperfection of the whole scourging
> system."
>
> See:
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=0lowAAAAIAAJ&pg=PT518&dq=%22whig+almanac%22+1848&lr=#v=snippet&q=punishments&f=false
>
> (N.b., "language," not "grammar.")
>
> JL
> --
> "There You Go Again...Using Reason on the Planet of the Duck-Billed
> Platypus"
>
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--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

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