Sammy Peeps! The most endearing quality of everyone’s favorite Restoration-era diarist, I think, is his charmingly innocent belief that he was a master of linguistic misdirection.
“Pepys’ diary was written in shorthand so could not easily be read by a casual browser. There are, however, some passages of a secretive nature where, for reasons of concealment or because his passion deserves a special language, he resorts to a private code involving words based on Spanish, French and Italian.”
Here is Sammy’s nearly-uncrackable code:
“[Elizabeth] did find me imbracing the girl con my hand sub su coats; and endeed I was with my main in her cunny. I was at a wonderful loss upon it.”
It’s so precious! I can see him now, quill perched between his teeth: “Mustn’t make it obvious what I’m writing about, in case this diary falls into the wrong hands…I blanked my hand blank her clothes and placed it blank her vagina. There. Nigh-incomprehensible to the untrained eye. No one will ever know, except for my wife, who saw us.”
I have never loved Sammil Pipsy more than I do now, when he resembles nothing so much as Joey from Friends trying to describe The Shining without spoiling it for Rachel: “All blank and no blank makes blank a blank blank. Oh no, no, no! The end, when Jack almost kills them all with that blank, but then at the last second they get away?”
Sammington! Your secret is safe with us.
PEPYS’ GUIDE TO SUPER SECRET SEX WRITING:
– definitely obfuscate all your prepositions, prepositions are killer
– don’t openly name any part of the body unless it’s an orifice, then it’s ok
Wow. I used to be embarrassed by the needlessly complicated code I wrote my journal in at the age of thirteen, but now I’m almost proud.
Soooo.., in order to write a Victorian pastiche I read the infamous sex dairy “My Secret Life” and while someone writing with detached analyitcal Victorianess about giving his first blowjob as instructed by his mistress (who was basically a dom? She got paid.) is highly amusing , the really disturbing thing was how every woman he met whom he wasn’t related to was considered sexually available. Literally any random woman in the street could be approached and threatened, and cause he was Well off he could offer like, a months wages for a grimy little alleyway handjob and it was all so gross and exploitative and even more gross cause you’re thinking “well at least he’s not beating them physically?”
Ugh men.
Boswell’s diary is much the same. A little more subdued than that, but not much.
Well, that is basically an improvement on the Victorian porn book me and my friend read in sixth-form (last 2 years of a school) where his mother, his sisters and then later on daughters were totally available for the sexing.
(It was written as cheerfully mutual when it was his sisters and his mother, which was readable, but I stopped reading with the daughters because that was just too 🙁 even in fiction.)
Victorians, or at least Victorian porn=apparently *all about the incest*. Like, to the point where The Pearl has a story about a guy banging all his cousins (and like two unrelated women) and it’s kind of a refreshing change: they’re *almost* not blood relations! My guess is that, in a society where you’re not supposed to be alone with members of the opposite sex who aren’t related, Attitudes Develop.
(Also “frequent incest” is a weird Venn diagram point of intersection between post-Tolkien epic fantasy and Victorian porn. In 1887, Everyone’s A Lannister?)
Let’s not forget poor Turin and Nienor, not all incest was post-Tolkien.
Cousins did not even count! They married all the time.
But oh my God, you guys, I’ve been reading Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks, which is fabulous if you’re that kind of nerd, and I’ve learned terrible things about the guy who created the Perpetua font. D: He lived in the early 19th century and did not believe in taboos or a kind of deviancy he didn’t want to try, including incest and bestiality. (The book didn’t tell all the details, but it wasn’t hard to find online.)
I was wondering just how many incestuous abuser typographers there could BE, until I realized you meant 20th century.
I double-checked, and he was born in the 19th century! But you’re right, he made it in the 20th.
Walter, you were terrible. The story that keeps hanging around my mind is the fourteen year old whose mother had just died whose father was basically trying to sell her.
Oh, G-d, everything is and always has been terrible.
“He resorts to a private code involving words based on Spanish, French and Italian.”
So he’s writing in Esperanto?
omg SAMMY PEPPERS INVENTED ESPERANTO
More like Sexperanto.
Why can I not give this more than one thumbs up?
FOR. REAL.
goodness gracious, if that’s not the most stimulating set of GIFs I’m going to see today
This changes everything. Except not really because Esperanto.
Sounds like me writing titles of videos in Youtube so the copyright bots won’t get them. I put up a review of The Lion in Winter and it got taken down, so I rejigged it and then titled it “Pantherea Leo en Hiver”. Well, it worked, the copyright bots didn’t get it!
If only this story were about my secret sex code, but instead it’s about preventing my video review of a three hour shouting match between Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn from being blocked worldwide. Much less cool.
Has anyone read William Thomas Prestwood’s diaries? He actually used a cipher so it was a little more difficult to crack his secret sex code, but they’re pretty great.
January 5, 1811: Went to J. Gandy’s. Byner and Sex.
January 19, 1811: Borrowed two books. Went to our hill. Fucking Mrs. Powell. Forged a letter for HM.
January 20, 1811: Court’d M. Windon. Come home. Asked Betsy Gandy for a fuck.
My favorite, which I’ve loved so long and so well I don’t even know if it’s an exact quote anymore: “I did what I would con ella.”
What more can any of us ask of this life?
I have some of my great-grandfather’s diaries from the end of the 19th C, and he slipped into shorthand if he wasn’t talking about the weather or the tennis game he enjoyed that day. I asked my mother, who was traditionally trained as a secretary to decipher, and it was just giddines about how lovely his intented (who did indeed become my great-grandmother) was, and how blessed he felt. Sweet, but a bit of a letdown
Oh my gosh, thank you for writing this. I was losing my faith in [male] humanity.
SEX PUZZLES!!!
In a myth and folklore class in college, we used a Victorian translation of the Kojiki, which had all the naughty bits in Latin (so your wife or your servants wouldn’t be able to figure out what was going on)… Man, the kids who had classical educations suddenly became very popular!
Same goes for dictionaries. Of course only because Latin’s so much more precise, nudge nudge…
Aha, so that’s why Victorian translators did that! Nicholson translated the bits of Rumi’s Mathnawi that he considered questionable (sometimes it was homosexuality or adultery, sometimes just a fart iirc) into Latin and I had no idea why. Only people with classical educations were considered responsible enough to know that gay people and genitals exist, or sthg? That makes a lot more sense now. Iqbal spent a whole chapter of his 1956 work on Rumi tearing up one side of Nicholson and down the other for the silly things he censored, it was p great.
Way back when I was a Classics undergraduate, we were set ‘The Golden Ass’ by Apuleis for a class. I got an old second copy for cheap unlike my classmates who got the most recent edition. Confusion ensued while reading my translation, as parts of it were still in the Latin. Textual comparisons quickly explained why.
Sadly, it’s still the most discreet and gentlemanly sentence ever written that contains the word “cunny.”
I’M LOOKING AT YOU GEORGE R. R. MARTIN.
Peeps! You have no idea how long I went through my youth pronouncing it as Peppy-s…
Also, I clicked the Samuel Pepys tag, and did not find a “dirtbag” post. Get right on that please;)
In the meantime:
http://scaryduck.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/samuel-pe…
“And then I did a verb to her noun, quite adverbly. She was quite an adjective tart.”
So what I’ve gathered from the comments is that the only reason men used to write diaries is so when they died, people would know about all the sexing they did. Yet Casanova gets all the dang credit.
Still can’t even THINK about Pepys without Anne Bancroft in my head. “What kind of Pepys diary is THIS?!”
I love you, Samuel PeePee, you fifteenth-century rapist, you. *cheek pinch*
Ahem. Seventeenth. (I AM DOOMED TO CORRECT PEOPLE’S CENTURIES TODAY.)
put that hand away, samuel
i know where it’s been
Radio 4 often airs episodes of a dramatisaion of Samuel Pepys’ diary, and I was very taken aback one evening when they left in the word “cunny”. Radio 4, it’s 7.45 in the evening! I am pretty sure you wouldn’t be allowed to use the Modern English version of that word!