A correspondent writes:
So I’m reading a short novel called The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill and came across this description of one of the characters: “…white-handed and white-shirted, and gentleman to the very purse of him…”
My first (and so far only) assumption is that since one’s stash of money was so precious, something that must be guarded at all times, analogically his “gentleman-ness” was the most sacred part of his being, his inner core, and therefore most important for him to maintain. But I may be off base here.
Ever come across this use of “purse” before? Google didn’t help me.
I had not, so I thought I’d place the question before the Varied Reader. Ideas? (I might add that The Big Bow Mystery has apparently been called “the first full-length locked room mystery”; maybe I should give it a try.)
A half-century earlier, Carlyle in The French Revolution had similarly suggested that the purse was at some folks’ inner core:
And yet, in those days, for men that have a country, what a glow of patriotism burns in many a heart; penetrating inwards to the very purse! So early as the 7th of August, a Don Patriotique, ‘Patriotic Gift of jewels to a considerable extent,’ has been solemnly made by certain Parisian women; and solemnly accepted with honourable mention. Whom forthwith all the world takes to imitating and emulating. Patriotic Gifts, always with some heroic eloquence, which the President must answer and the Assembly listen to, flow in from far and near: in such number that the honourable mention can only be performed in ‘lists published at stated epochs.’ Each gives what he can: the very cordwainers have behaved munificently; one landed proprietor gives a forest; fashionable society gives its shoe-buckles, takes cheerfully to shoeties. Unfortunate-females give what they ‘have amassed in loving.'[1] The smell of all cash, as Vespasian thought, is good.
penetrating inwards to the very purse!
Aha, I’ll bet Zangwill was deliberately alluding to Carlyle. Excellent find!
The point of view traditionally ascribed to Vespasian is not that cash smells good but that it has no odor at all, which is good enough under the circumstances. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecunia_non_olet
Vespasian, a clear-eyed* soldier, was, of course, quite right: the entire point of money is its abstraction from the frequently unedifying details of how our economic life actually operates. Money-laundering the second rinse, not the first.
* Vae, puto deus fio.
Money-laundering the second rinse, not the first.
i will be quoting you, possibly often!
Wash-wash scams.
(While searching for a suitable link, I discovered that there is a National Association of Bunco Investigators.)
I never thought of this before, but having thought of it, I now think it’s interestingly odd that “bunco” and “bunkum” appear to be etymologically unrelated despite how easy it is to imagine how the distinct senses of “false claims used for a swindle that sound plausible at first at least if you weren’t listening carefully” and “essentially meaningless claims that sound plausible at first at least if you weren’t listening carefully” could have come from the same Latinate etymon. One’s from the ablative and the other from the accusative, innit?
The word “purse” appears in the text of the novel 5 times, and I believe that this noun refers literally to a coin-purse, wallet, or a money bag.
During the inquest, “Inspector Howlett said: A purse full of gold was on the dressing-table beside a big book. Dr. Robinson, divisional surgeon, stated “I noticed a purse on the dressing-table, lying next to Madame Blavatsky’s big book on Theosophy.”
I believe that the presence of the gold has importance in the closed room mystery, but I would be delighted if Madame Blavatsky was the clue that broke the case.
On the subject of Bunco, Ray Hyman’s Guide to Cold Reading from 1955 describes practitioners of the confidence swindle.