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So many of the Victorian era's jobs are starkly low-value by today's standards. Even poorer parts of the world today don't have a need for knocker-uppers and can leapfrog directly from rising with the sun to an alarm clock.
What sun? This is the UK we're dealing with. These factory workers would be going to work in the dark. I imagine alarm clocks would be a luxury item back then.
Nothings changed then..
> Yet, not everyone viewed this profession as the key cog it was in industrial Britain—including celebrated social reformer Helen Dendy. Dendy referred to this class of people brought to the forefront during the Industrial Revolution as “the Residuum,” and grouped knocker-uppers with “the girl who cleans steps [and] the old woman who minds babies.” Her view of this class was entirely negative.
I paused at "old woman who minds babies". I would say that this is an important profession close to the center of national debate.
Japan population is in decline because it's hard to raise babies and work at the same time.
This is one of those quirks between national language dialects that will always amuse me. "Knock up" in British slang means "wake up another" while in American slang it means "impregnate another". https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/18568/knocked-up...
From my experience in Canada, it means impregnate another, but not in a good way. It's usually out of wedlock, unexpected, and maybe not even in a relationship. It would seem very out of place for me to hear someone say they knocked up their wife. But common to tell a young girl with a casual boyfriend not to get knocked up.
I'm American and I agree with this.
To me, a Brit, the primary meaning of 'knock up' means to make something in a hurry.
Maybe they're more similar than I thought. I guess 9 months' gestation isn't exactly "in a hurry", though.
The knock up occurs immediately prior to those 9 months, and might happen in a hurry…
I've long wondered where the American meaning comes from. In the UK, the etymology is pretty clear from the long-gone occupation described in this article: knocking on a window that is often up on the second story (or perhaps more directly, forcing someone up from their slumber through the act of knocking).
Likely "to knock" meant "to have sex with" because during the Gold Rush (mid-19th century), a brothel was called a "knocking house"
Also see: "knocking boots".
But cf. knocking shop?
This is also a joke in Futurama https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4BOZcDMw_A
The phrasal verbs are often completely idiomatic and make no sense at all.
"Do someone in"
"Come across", "come forward"
"Back down" "back up"
Yes, one of the many delightful differences! I'm being picky but "another" seems a bit redundant there, right?
For "impregnate", yes. I included it because I included it for "wake up", which is otherwise ambiguous, but I guess I didn't need to. Especially because it would make sense linguistically (from a certain angle) to say an organism which reproduces asexually "knocks itself up".
I quite enjoy old jobs or things that people (or even animals such as the spit dog) used to do, that no longer exist.
This reminds me of the set of interesting job titles (eg. the cooler-down) for British steam locomotive maintenance:
Reminded me of “putters” — a person who makes scissors by hand, short for putter togetherer:
And who rouses the rousers?
> Strangely enough Mr Crompton is himself awakened by an alarm clock. He rose at 3:45 am and charged from fourpence to sixpence a week.
I think that's not so strange. If an alarm clock is expensive and hard to come by, one person in the town has a lucrative business by owning one.
I didn't include the previous sentence, which said that alarm clocks had put the knockers out of business, save a few, like the guy the quote was about.
> And who rouses the rousers?
little known fact, but it's actually something like the crowd doing a Wave in a stadium, it travels from east to west with the sun, rousers rousing neighbors, making a gradient across each timezone.
It's rousers all the way down
Eventually you hit rabble.
The rouser rousers.
Just a friendly reminder that JSTOR is one of those "non-profits" that leech public monies through universities among others by demanding payment to access publicly funded research.
In the process JSTOR drove Aaron Swartz to suicide.
Academic publishing is rotten to the core, including the "non-profits". It is detrimental to science and human progress and leeches off countless billions of public funds to do so.
JSTOR did not press charges against Aaron Swartz. They settled out of court a year and a half before his suicide and before he was even indicted. JSTOR's subsequent involvement in the case was under subpoena.
Academic publishing is corrupt and broken, but the facts can speak for themselves without needing to be exaggerated.
I misread "before his suicide" as "after" and thought I just casually came across one of the most quietly horrifying sentences put to paper
If I make a contract that entitles me to income, and you set about trying to undermine it and my income, and I attempt to enforce the contract, and you really don't like that, I hope you don't blame me for your suicide, because it's not on me.
here come the downvotes cuz some people can't handle the truth. I'm entirely sympathetic to Aaron's mental illness because I was raised in a way that gave something similar to me too. Luckily my crash worked out better. Aaron's parents hold him up as a martyr, and I (with no direct knowledge) suspect they might have had a hand in making him behave like a martyr, because I know just what it's like.
By the way, framing this as "good vs evil" and Aaron was good, and he did a good thing, while you don't yourself engage the world the way you are encouraging him to, is the root of the actual evil. The world isn't black and white, it's many shades (and colors) and lighting yourself on fire or encouraging somebody else to is rarely the right way to address problems you see.
an eye for an eye is fair enough.
but in his case though i think most people felt justice was hugely disproportionate- and only because they wanted to make an example out of a vulnerable person, just to protect their profit.