"Horribles" (and a 1792 instance)

Wed Jan 26 21:03:50 UTC 2011

Fred, was the American Speech author any more
specific about where his association with the
Ancient and Honourable Company came from?

EAN has "horribles" earliest in 1792 (perhaps a
useful interdating between 1726 and 1851):  "List
of Horribles" (article title).  Catskill [New
York] Packet; Date: 09-03-1792; Volume: I; Issue:
5; Page: [3]. Of course the Ancient and
Honourable antedates American newspapers.

GBooks gives "parade of 'Horribles'" [note the
interior quote marks] in Youth's Companion,
allegedly 1885, Vol. 58 (snippet).  That is
reasonably consistent (within one year?) with a
first publication date of 1827.  That's the
earliest I saw for this specific phrase.  "Of
horribles" by itself seems to appear in 1878 and the 1880s.

Joel

At 1/26/2011 02:58 PM, Shapiro, Fred wrote:
>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>
>Actually, JSTOR shows that John M. Maguire used
>"parade of horribles" in the Yale Law Journal in
>1939 (it is disturbing that HeinOnline didn't
>call up the 1939 usage).  More interestingly,
>there was an article in American Speech in 1940
>suggesting that the word "horribles" in "parade
>of horribles" is a corruption of the word
>"honorable" in the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Boston.
>
>Fred Shapiro
>
>
>
>________________________________________
>From: American Dialect Society
>[ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Shapiro, Fred [fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU]
>Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2011 2:54 PM
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>Subject: Re: "Horrible" as a noun?
>
>HeinOnline shows that Walton Hamilton used
>"parade of horribles" in the Yale Law Journal in 1941.
>
>Fred Shapiro
>
>
>
>________________________________________
>From: American Dialect Society
>[ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Baker, John [JMB at STRADLEY.COM]
>Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2011 9:09 PM
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>Subject: Re: "Horrible" as a noun?
>
>         "Parade of horribles," a listing of the
> negative effects to be expected from a legal or
> policy position that one opposes, is a standard
> term among lawyers.  Ben Zimmer's Language Log
> posting mentions its use in 2002, but it was
> frequently used by my law professors in the
> early 1980s, and the example below from 1982 is
> clearly the same thing.  Note that you can
> never have just one horrible of this type,
> although you can have one horrible after another.
>
>
>John Baker
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: American Dialect Society
>[mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Jocelyn Limpert
>Sent: Tuesday, January 25, 2011 7:39 PM
>To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
>Subject: "Horrible" as a noun?
>
>I've been informed that "horrible" is being used as a noun in a soon-to-be
>published book, a possible best seller.
>
>Does anyone know who coined this usage and if it is now in fairly common
>usage?  Had anyone heard it much?
>
>I found the following at diffen.com
>
>*horrible as a Noun* The use of "horrible" as a noun is fairly rare. A
>person wearing a funny or gross costume in a parade of
>horribles<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parade_of_horribles>is called
>*a horrible*.
>
>Read more: Horrible vs Horrific - Difference and Comparison |
>Diffen<http://www.diffen.com/difference/Horrible_vs_Horrific#ixzz1C65P7gQK>
>http://www.diffen.com/difference/Horrible_vs_Horrific#ixzz1C65P7gQK
>
>
>I found the following in Wikipedia:
>Noun
>
>*horrible* (*plural*
>*horribles<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/horribles#English>
>*)
>
>    1. A thing that causes horror <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/horror>; a
>    terrifying <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/terrifying> thing, particularly
>    a prospective bad consequence asserted as likely to result from an act.
>    â€ƒ[quotations â²]
>       - *1851*, Herman Melville, *Moby Dick* *Here's a carcase. I know not
>       all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it
>laughing. Such
>       a waggish leering as lurks in all your horribles!*
>       - *1982*, United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, *The
>       Genocide Convention: Hearing Before the Committee on Foreign Relations,
>       United States Senate* *A lot of the possible horribles conjured up by
>       the people objecting to this convention
> ignore the plain language of this
>       treaty.*
>       - *1991*, Alastair Scott, *Tracks Across
> Alaska: A Dog Sled Journey* *The
>       pot had previously simmered skate wings, cods' heads, whales,
>pigs' hearts
>       and a long litany of other horribles.*
>       - *2000*, John Dean, CNN
>interview<http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0001/21/ip.00.html>,
>       January 21, 2000: *I'm trying to convince him that the criminal
>       behavior that's going on at the White House has to end. And I
>give him one
>       horrible after the next. I just keep raising them. He sort of swats
>       them away.*
>       - *2001*, Neil K. Komesar, *Law's Limits: The Rule of Law and the
>       Supply and Demand of Rights* *Many scholars have demonstrated these
>       horribles and contemplated significant limitations on class actions.*
>
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