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Kickin’ Rhymes in the Eighteenth Century
November/December 2004
by Jennifer L. Holley
What might you expect upon entering an eighteenth-century drawing room? There’d be coffee, there’d be tea, and there just might be rap.
Or at least rap’s “distant cousin,” says James Caudle, associate editor of the Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell. Caudle is an expert on a rhyming game called “crambo,” scandalous and highly popular in its day, in which players showed off their wit and disregard for decorum by trading rude rhymes. One of crambo’s more famous devotés, Robert Burns, wrote: “Amaist as soon as I could spell, / I to the crambo-jingle fell.”
Caudle became interested in crambo after reading about it in Boswell’s early letters and journals. He started researching the game in order to annotate the papers accurately, and suddenly found himself in an almost uninhabited scholarly terrain. Crambo is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary and the Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature, but Caudle believes it has not received much modern critical attention.
But then, the game has never been taken too seriously. Its name “comes from a phrase of Juvenal: crambe repetita, or re-stewed cabbage,” Caudle says. The players started with a rhyme and then “re-stewed” it. Someone offered the first rhyme—often, it would be sung to the tune of a popular ballad or folk song—and the subsequent lines or couplets had to rhyme with it. The game collapsed when a player was unable to come up with a new rhyming word. Names often served as a starting point. “Dignitaries would be taken down a peg to keep company laughing,” says Caudle.
One crambo poem from Boswell is rhymed around “the Laird of Craigubble”—a name ridiculing a fellow crambo player. One of the stanzas goes: “To render you bright with choice liquor at night / Take Punch made of rum that is double / And I give you this charge be your Bowl full & large / To content the good Laird of Craigubble.” Each stanza in the poem rhymes abcb, and every stanza ends with “the Laird of Craigubble.”
This kind of crambo provided genteel amusement at parties, where players could show off their accomplishment and quick thinking. Those desiring more raucous entertainment—university students or people in the street—were also fans. In either case, the wit tended to be bawdy and biting. Boswell enjoyed mocking in verse the man who married his former mistress. “Crambo never aspired to be the best form of poetry,” Caudle says.
Age Matters
by Marc Wortman
There was a time when Peter Jokl '64, '68MD, could run fast. Exceptionally fast. Jokl ran a leg on a mile relay team that set a Yale record, and he typically finished the 440-yard dash in a then very respectable time of 49 seconds.
“If I could run twice that time now I’d be happy,” says the professor of orthopedics. But he has some consolation. In August’s British Journal of Sports Medicine, Jokl reports that as a group, the swiftest men and women over the age of 50 at the New York City Marathon have been improving at a much faster rate than their younger counterparts.
Jokl and medical school colleagues Paul Sethi and Andrew Cooper looked at the running time, age, and gender of all runners in every NYC Marathon from 1983 through 1999—some 415,000 marathoners who made it to the finish line. They also examined the times of the top 50 male and female finishers by age category. The top 50 finishers aged 20 to 30 did not significantly improve their times. But the top 50 finishers over 50, particularly the women, have sped up dramatically over the years. Jokl credits the improvement to an increasingly active older population—again, especially women—and a changing attitude toward aging.
“We’re not going to have an 80-year-old win the marathon,” he says, “but we need to be aware that aging is not necessarily associated with disability. Many older adults have the potential to be really good runners.” Jokl himself recently started his own comeback, in the division for athletes over 60.
Playing with a Full Deck
by Bruce Fellman
In 1998, half of the post-65-year-olds in a national survey had engaged in some form of legalized gambling, from church bingo and state lotteries to slot machines and high-stakes poker. Experts believe the number has only gone up since then.
All that gambling must be detrimental, right? “Well, yes and no,” says associate psychiatry professor Rani Desai. On the one hand, she says, “pathological gambling is bad for you and is strongly associated with high rates of job loss, bankruptcy, incarceration, divorce, and mental and physical health problems.” But Desai is the lead author of a new study that points in another direction: “As a group, seniors who gamble are healthier than those who don’t.”
The study, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in September, compared older adults who gambled recreationally with their non-gambling peers and with younger gamblers. The younger gamblers reported high rates of substance abuse, depression, and other problems; the older gamblers reported low rates. The older gamblers also reported better general health than their non-gambling peers.
Gambling is social, and social activities are generally believed to promote healthy aging. But Desai can’t recommend taking up bingo. “We’re not saying that gambling makes you healthier,” she says. “In fact, we’ve also found evidence that older folks are more vulnerable than their younger peers to developing gambling problems.”
Family Values
by Bruce Fellman
If all of us alive today were to trace our lineage backwards, we'd eventually find a common ancestor. According to statistics professor Joseph Chang, that person was surprisingly recent: he or she may have lived in the neighborhood of 1000 BCE. “Our work suggests that we’re all hundredth cousins or so,” says Chang.
In the September 30 issue of Nature, Chang, Steve Olson '78, and MIT’s Douglas L. T. Rhode report on a computer model they developed to simulate the growth of the human population from 20,000 BCE to the present. Other scientists have shown that we descended from an “Eve” who lived between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, but Chang found the Eve date (and an Adam corollary) an unconvincing measure of how related we are. “These hypotheses trace our ancestry through either the female or male line alone,” he says. “But we all have two parents.”
Their model takes both parents into account, as well as migration, population growth, and reproductive patterns. It suggests that if any modern human were transported back about 5,000 years, almost everyone he or she met would be a forebear. “No matter what languages we speak or the colour of our skin,” the authors wrote, “we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who laboured to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu.”
Journalists and Bias
by Elizabeth Svoboda '03
Are the media biased? In a study in the August issue of the journal Psychological Science, two Yale researchers present evidence that supports Rush Limbaugh’s suspicions. But the bias is present on both ends of the political spectrum.
Psychology professor Marianne LaFrance and PhD student Victoria Brescoll scanned a sample of the country’s 50 largest-circulation newspapers for articles on a hot-button issue: scientific findings of differences between men and women. Then they analyzed whether or not reporters attributed the differences to unchangeable biological factors like genetics or to changeable factors like social learning. They found that newspapers rated politically conservative, based on their editorial stance, were much more likely to report a biological basis for gender difference than politically liberal papers.
“Science reporting is supposed to be very objective, but we found the reporters put their own slant on things,” LaFrance says. “There’s no deliberate falsification, but the same set of data can be variously interpreted depending on who’s doing the interpretation.”
The next step was to find out whether readers were influenced by the bias in the reporting. The psychologists wrote a series of fictional science articles reporting that one gender or another was better at identifying plants. Some of the articles attributed the difference to biology, others to social and cultural factors. Study subjects who had read one of the articles were asked about their beliefs. The psychologists found that those who read the social explanation were more likely to endorse the idea that people can change; those who read the biological explanation were more likely to say that people cannot change. “People don’t believe they are so easily swayed by what the paper says,” says LaFrance. “But this work shows that they are.”
LaFrance and Brescoll plan to continue their investigation of how the media portray gender differences. Next up: sitcoms and advertising.  |
