NK - Fwd: Life in the 1500s - interesting (fwd)

[Jennifer Carlson]

Actually, it was amusing, the first time I read it.  I had a real good 
laugh over it, as it was obviously a bit of fun. When something is being 
obviously satirical and funny, great.  But some folks have missed the joke 
and thought "Life in the 1500s" was serious.  Satire is a subtle art that 
not everyone gets - there are still people who think Jonathan Swift, in his 
"A Modest Proposal" was serious about suggesting that people eat Irish 
babies in order to decrease the surplus population.  Now, it's possible 
that the piece in question started out as one of those compilations of 
silly statements gleaned over time from student papers, and that the 
original headers got stripped off so that the true source of it was lost, 
like the letter/song called The Message that is so popular on the radio 
right now.  I hope so.

Last week in the newspaper, on Shakespeare's birthday (or some such event), 
the children's section was devoted to Shakespeare and filled with factoids. 
 Some of those "facts" were wrong.  For instance, it said that people in 
Elizabethan times had no concept of sanitation, with a picture of a woman 
emptying a chamberpot.  True, they used chamberpots and didn't have flush 
toilets (although the Romans did), but they did have sewer systems and 
public employees who kept the streets cleaned out.  Their sanitary 
practices were not up to our standards today, but they weren't ignorant of 
the idea.

The one that had me howling was their assertion that Queen Elizabeth I had 
a gown that weighed over 200 pounds and made her so heavy that she had to 
be hauled around in a wheeled cart. Woof!  And they are feeding this 
garbage to children, who have no reason to question it, and so the myths go 
on and on...

Yes, I had a good laugh over "Life in the 1500s", but it also bugs me to 
know that there are people out there who will think it is accurate.  Don't 
feel embarrassed about enjoying it.  On another list, we had fun trying to 
count exactly how many inaccuracies there were in it and, like Dairmuit, 
find out where the various turns of phrase actually did come from.

Talana
Ask me about the "they used pepper to disguise the taste of rotten meat" 
canard sometime.  Wear asbestos earplugs.