Come on Res Hist! Wake up time. Dig up the dirt on the charmers in history who fooled some of the people for some of the time - or got actually away with it.

Welcome back Priscilla.

What is "cads, bounders and huzzies"? Dear, I as a Continental from the European peninsula and a Dutch speaking world citizen...is that an expression?

Did a quick search on Google "cads and bounders" Our Monopoly game from overhere?
"huzzies" plurial of "huzzie" or also "hussy": a woman adulterer or a lewd woman. In my Collins paperback English dictionary: "lewd": intended to excite crude sexual desire...

Priscilla, Priscilla, what are you up to my dear girl?

This morning I was still thinking about Temperance's thread and my explanations about the brain and the mind...also on Historum a thread about language" What is the "Thiois" language? And thinking about how language emerged? I had a thread on the former BBC board, with lol beeble, if I recall it well, with references to Noach Chomski and all. And the need of a voice to communicate and the evolution of the troath to allow a voice and be able to speak...I thought if one let communicate robots with a program to exchange comments on certain items, will these robots by trial and error not develop an evolution of the standard English...and occasionally this afternoon in the local paper I read the equivalent of this article in the tabloid of The Sun:
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/4141624/facebook-robots-speak-in-their-own-language/
They were more informative in my local paper than in The Sun. With both sides of the doom scenario: the pro-scientists and the contra-scientists
Am I a "prophète" (a predictor, a prophet) ? . Will start a thread about it on Historum, perhaps with a discussion overhere too.


Kind regards from your old friend (both literal and figurative) (once I received a letter from you about your books)

Cads and Bounders are old-fashioned terms for masculine bad behavers, mainly used for upper-class people.  The sort of men who love them and leave them. Or leave bad debts everywhere. Hussies are loose women, also an old-fashioned term, though not as much so as cads and bounders.  They are the sort of language used in PG Wodehouse books.  And the Georgette Heyers that I am so fond of.

I suppose the most famous example of a hussy is Moll Flanders.  Cads abound - Lord Byron is an example in popular legend.  Flashman in the books by George McDonald Fraser.

Paul, Caro has already explained the meanings of the words in question succinctly and well - but for interest I am pasting a link to an explanation of the etymology of 'hussy' http://blog.angelatung.com/2012/07/05/the-origin-of-hussy/ which seemingly originally was a shortening of housewife.

Would Beau Brummell have been considered a cad? He did pay most of his gambling debts but absconded to France to avoid one debt and everything seems to have been downhill from there on. His death seems rather sad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beau_Brummell

Addendum to previous post - I originally read this as "Cats, Bounders and Huzzies". Well, I am due an eye test. Not as bad (and I'm sure I've mentioned this before) as when I read the title of a craft class as "Love Making using the traditional pillow method" rather than "Lace making using the traditional pillow making".

LadyinRetirement wrote:

Addendum to previous post - I originally read this as "Cats, Bounders and Huzzies".  Well, I am due an eye test.  Not as bad (and I'm sure I've mentioned this before) as when I read the title of a craft  class as "Love Making using the traditional pillow method" rather than "Lace making using the traditional pillow making".

Lady in retirement,

yes "huzzies" it was, and Priscilla is right as it is alos a form for "hussies". See my message from yesterday.

Kind regards, Paul.

Caro wrote:

Cads and Bounders are old-fashioned terms for masculine bad behavers, mainly used for upper-class people.  The sort of men who love them and leave them. Or leave bad debts everywhere. Hussies are loose women, also an old-fashioned term, though not as much so as cads and bounders.  They are the sort of language used in PG Wodehouse books.  And the Georgette Heyers that I am so fond of.

I suppose the most famous example of a hussy is Moll Flanders.  Cads abound - Lord Byron is an example in popular legend.  Flashman in the books by George McDonald Fraser.

 
Thank you for the explanation, Caro.

Lost my reply now for the second time in a few minutes, as Temperance yesterday.
I have still all the details, will see if I can send it this evening:

about the Dutch translation of "cad" and "bounder"
about Moll Flanders from Daniel Defoe
about P.G. Woodehouse that I read at 15 in Dutch translation, while I didn't know yet enough English

Kind regards, Paul.

LadyinRetirement wrote:

Paul, Caro has already explained the meanings of the words in question succinctly and well - but for interest I am pasting a link to an explanation of the etymology of 'hussy'  http://blog.angelatung.com/2012/07/05/the-origin-of-hussy/  which seemingly originally was a shortening of housewife.

Would Beau Brummell have been considered a cad?  He did pay most of his gambling debts but absconded to France to avoid one debt and everything seems to have been downhill from there on.  His death seems rather sad.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beau_Brummell

Lady in retirement,

that's an interesting link for me, as it has a lot to do with Dutch dialects too...

http://blog.angelatung.com/2012/07/05/the-origin-of-hussy/

"housewife" in Dutch is "huisvrouw" huis/house, wife/vrouw. But here "vrouw" is "woman", thus "housewoman".
To make it more difficult, in the dialect of West-Flanders it is "huswuf" (with "u" as in the French "rubrique". I think these "u" don't exist in English). It is used rather in the pejorative way as a wife, who sticks to the house and is not a lady from the world. Although that same "wuf", which is now a very pejorative word in Dutch, still was fifty yes ago a honest word: I heard for instance from workers at the conveyor: "the wuf said that..., the wuf has gone to...". In the meantime under influence of the Dutch, the word became also pejorative even in West-Flemish....
And yes the term "huisvrouw" has the same meanings as in English.
And "slut" in Dutch is "slet"
And "tit", the Dutch made "tiet" of it. We in our dialect have "tet", "tette" not from "tit" but from the French "tête" (head) (but it is also pejorative )

For me it is a lesson that pejorative or in fact any meaning of a word has a perception by the listener, first as an individual with his own associations or second with the the associations of the group where he is embedded in. And as such: not the explicit value of a word is important, but how it is perceived, how it is experienced by the reader, the listener.
And in that the Hattie Jacques of Temperance's thread: "Plato, Augustine and..." is right I think.

Kind regards from Paul.

My own understanding of these types is that 'Cads' betrayed women, 'Bounders' were tricksters and huzzies (or hussies) were  predatory women........of the sort that Caro mentioned in fiction - Moll Flanders.  But that is only my feeling for the words. I heard all three used by the ancients in my family - and worse  words, of course - and were used of people known to them, who were ever charming but without priciples.

A "Bounder"



and a Hustler;

Mmmm -  and aeronautical huzzies?

Priscilla wrote:

Mmmm -  and aeronautical huzzies?

They are the worst sort.

Aeronautical huzzies? Well yes I was once married to a trolley-dolly. But I blame the Swiss. They were, after all, the first to introduce air-hostesses on their regular flights:

Here's Nelly Diener .... Swissair's, and Europe's, first aeronautical hussie, in 1934:

Harold Macmillan, when once asked to explain the difference between a cad and a bounder, said, "In war a bounder is a chap who goes to the Front, wins the VC, then seduces his colonel's wife. But a cad seduces his colonel's wife and never goes near the Front".

Macmillan certainly knew what he was talking about. His close friend and political ally, the MP Bob Boothby, had for several years, starting about 1930, been having an affair with Macmillan's wife, Dorothy. However while Harold Macmillan seems to have known all about their shenanigans, he didn't know what to do, and so, unable to honourably resolve the issue, he just stiffened his lip and turned a blind eye. Though no-one, especially the press, ever spoke about it publicly, I gather the situation was widely known. Queen Elizabeth (wife of George VI) described Boothby charitably as "Such a jolly man ... a cad but not a bounder."


Robert 'Bob' Boothby MP, in 1945.

Robert John Graham Boothby, Baron Boothby, KBE was certainly a flambouyant, colourful public figure. He was married twice, and fathered at least three children by the wives of two other men. He also had numerous homosexual relationships. While at Magdalen College, Boothby was nicknamed "the Palladium" (after the London theatre), because "he performed twice nightly". In 1963 he began an illicit affair with East End cat burglar Leslie Holt, a younger man he met at a gambling club. Holt introduced him to the gangster Ronald Kray (one of the infamous Kray twins), who supplied Boothby with young men and arranged orgies, receiving personal favours from Boothby in return. When Boothby's underworld associations came to the attention of the Sunday Express, the Conservative-supporting paper sat on the story. The matter was later reported in some detail – but without naming names – in 1964 in the Labour-supporting Sunday Mirror tabloid, and the parties were named a few days later by the German magazine Stern (which wasn't afraid of the UK's easily-abused libel laws). Boothby denied the story and threatened to sue the Mirror, and because his close homosexual friend Tom Driberg, a senior Labour MP, was also involved, both major parties pressured the papers to sweep the affair under the rug. The press and police backed off, delaying investigations into the Krays' criminal activities.


Never published at the time this photo is of Boothby, the gangster Ronnie Cray and the rent boy/petty criminal, Leslie Holt ... at "a private party", circa 1963.

Boothby was certainly more a bounder than a cad ... and he would probably have identified himself as such.

deleted - posted twice

I read all the Shirley Flight Air Hostess books when I was a teenager and for a while I really wanted to become a trolley dolly. It was considered a very desirable job for girls back then - rather posh as you had to be able to speak French and all! I'm trying to remember Shirley's boyfriend's name (he was a pilot, of course) - I know it was suitably aeronautical and utterly ridiculous.

Here is Shirl about to do a Gertrude Bell.



EDIT: Crossed posts - I'm being silly - sorry, Priscilla. Will try to come up with a serious cad and/or bounder tomorrow.

I was confused. Shirley's boyfriend was indeed a pilot, but only a First Officer and not a Captain. These small details do matter. He had not been suitably aeronautically baptised (unlike Ms. Flight). The man in love with Shirley was in fact First Officer Tony Luckworth - a decent bloke who, of course, was neither cad nor bounder - and SF was certainly no flying hussy. Just wanted to put the record straight.

Sir Oswald Mosley, however - politics aside - was a real cad. They don't come much caddier than this fellow. Utter b*stard is probably a fairer description of the man. He treated his first wife, Lady Cynthia Curzon ("poor Cimmie"), abominably. This is only from Wiki, but is, I believe, historically accurate:


During this marriage he began an extended affair with his wife's younger sister Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, and with their stepmother, Grace Curzon, Marchioness Curzon of Kedleston, the American-born second wife and widow of Lord Curzon of Kedleston...

... Lady Cynthia died of peritonitis in 1933, after which Mosley married his mistress Diana Guinness, née Mitford (1910–2003).

The very beautiful and utterly ruthless Mitford girl is reputed to have told Mosley that she didn't mind sharing him with his wife, but that she would be "terribly upset" if she had to share him with anyone else.

I do not know if the second Lady Mosley ranks as a bona fide hussy or not, but, despite her title, she was no lady - just a pretty nasty piece of work. She and Mosley were well suited.


You wouldn't want to tell this man that you had burnt his supper.

AH! Thanks for that, Temps. I had wondered why Lord Curzone's second wife was buried in a plain grave - close by favoured dogs,as I recall whist the first wife lies in over-the-top splendor beside her lordship in the purpose built side chapel of Keddlestone Hall. Both US wives had furnished Curzon with vast fortunes to build  and then finish the palatial heap - and for a  grand title, of course. Himself, I thought a bit of a bounder. He made the most of being Viceroy with splendid Durbahs, and similar grand affairs with him as the raised star act for bowing to -and he did not want to give it up when the time came. He refused a handover ceremony and made life difficult for his successor. Behaving much like a dictator within the Raj he worked very hard so it is said -  but mainly because he wanted to handle everything personally. His portrait in the Hall makes him to be a pompous arrogant  brute and little wonder that his lovely, gentle little first wife died young.

I know you are not too keen on links, Priscilla, but this is a good article from the Spectator archives:


A Cad By Any Other Name


I like the Spectator suggestion that we should also consider the subtle differences between the scoundrel, the rotter and the blighter. Absolute rotter, of course, is an even more damning epithet - a useful term indeed.

I was going to suggest - as the article does - Edward VIII as a bounder (he had a thing about other men's wives); rather think he was a cad too - letting down the Empire and all that. But we are heading into murky royal waters: the article shockingly names HRH Prince Philip as a bounder, and I suppose his son really has to count as one, too. But then the former husband of HRH the Duchess of Cornwall was a bounder too, so perhaps HRH the Prince of Wales and Brigadier Parker Bowles sort of cancel one another out. Gosh, Parker Bowles looks an absolute bounder in this portrait by Lucian Freud - not a scoundrel, but definitely a bit of a rotter, maybe even a cad. He's got lots of medals, but did he ever do any real fighting?






Darius Guppy is also mentioned in the article.  A friend of Earl Spencer and of Boris Johnson, Guppy was educated at Eton College, Magdalen College, Oxford and HM Prison Ford. Not sure if he was/is a cad or a bounder, but I would judge him certainly to be a dirty scoundrel and an absolute rotter. He is also devastatingly good-looking.

Guppy with Earl Spencer.

The message beneath sadly needs you to drag the curser over the text in order to make it readable.

Nielsen,

Interpol seems to be annoyed with the political plays from Erdogan and seems not willing to proceed.
BTW; What is more disturbing that 70 % of the Belgian Turks were pro the new constitution in Turkey. That promises for the further relationship in Belgium...

Also in the Belgian news some very young children, dhijadists in a school in Ronse. Indoctrinated by the parents? from the internet? It is already on national level discussed...

It will take a whole time to turn the tide...both by the Immans from their side and from the lay Belgian government on the other side...

Kind regards, Paul.