Fwd: "Tom Private"?

[Joel S. Berson]

What do the distinguished members (no pun intended) think about the
following?  What does "Tom Private" mean in the poem?  Does "private"
in _Hamlet_ mean (in addition to the bawdy allusion)
"soldier"?  Would one place "private" (noun alone) as meaning
"soldier" before the 1756 Washington quotation?  (Does "Tom Private"
from 1746 qualify as an antedating?)

Joel

Someone asked:
>>I'm trying to gloss something in a 1746 poem: a brief reference to a
>>"Tom Private".  I am assuming that the "Tom" is a generic "everyman"
>>name (e.g. Tom, Dick and Harry, or Peeping Tom).  I was also assuming
>>that "Private" here marked him as a low-ranked soldier.
>>
>>But I see that in the OED the earliest usage of "private" for soldier
>>is from a George Washington letter in 1756.  Now I don't think that
>>Washington was coining a new usage, so the soldier meaning might have
>>been in play earlier than this.
>>
>>My question is, do we think that the 1746 poet intended "soldier" as
>>the meaning, or something more like "private citizen" (a usage that
>>dates back much earlier)?
>>
>>For what it's worth, the full line reads:
>>"Tom Private moves demurely starch / Bluff as a Croat on his march."
>>[Tom Private is dancing in this scene.]
>>
>>I know that "Croat on his march" is obviously a reference to soldiers,
>>so I'm feeling inclined to go with that usage for "private", but I
>>just wanted to see if anyone here had actually come across that usage
>>in the 1740s or earlier.

One reply was:
>I don't know of an instance of the noun before 1746, but the OED
>shows a much older history for "private soldier," so even the
>slightest military context would seem to define Tom as a private in
>the military sense.

Another reply was:
>The OED's earliest citation of "private soldier" dates from
>1566.  But the word private alone as a noun meaning "private
>soldier" is in use well before the 18th century.  Consider
>Shakespeare's bawdy joke in Hamlet:
>
>Hamlet:  Then you live about her [Fortune's] waist, or in the middle
>of her favors?
>
>Guildenstern:  Faith, her privates we.   [II.ii.236-7]

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