

Before the Garden Gnome, the Ornamental Hermit - pepys
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-history-of-hermits-in-gardens

======
pavlov
What a terrible job to have: seven years of living in a shack, not talking to
anyone, not allowed to wash yourself or cut your fingernails.

Fortunately it appears not all hermit employers were so draconian. This sounds
like an interesting form of entertainment:

 _" You pull a bell, and gain admittance. The hermit is generally in a sitting
posture, with a table before him, on which is a skull, the emblem of
mortality, an hour-glass, a book and a pair of spectacles. The venerable bare-
footed Father, whose name is Francis (if awake) always rises up at the
approach of strangers. He seems about 90 years of age, yet has all his sense
to admiration. He is tolerably conversant, and far from being unpolite."_

I'm now hoping for a smartphone app called _Hermit_ , which does exactly what
is described above. The "tolerably conversant" 90-year-old sounds like a fun
kind of AI to write. Compared to the stuff I do on a phone in idle moments,
chatting with a simulated hermit while contemplating a _memento mori_ desktop
seems positively useful.

~~~
colanderman
Indeed, that paragraph seems to describe every caretaker of every minor out-
of-the-way historical landmark ever.

------
jclem
With mentioning Tom Stoppard's play "Arcadia" here:
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia_(play)](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia_\(play\))

Lots of hermit and general landscape architecture intrigue, and a character
based on young Ada Lovelace.

~~~
gumby
...and a (deliberate) mistranslation of "et in Arcadia ego". I saw it when it
opened in '93 and it made a big impression on me. Stoppard is the Stephenson
of the stage.

~~~
stonogo
I can't tell if this is meant to praise or insult Tom Stoppard.

~~~
gumby
Wow, no, it was meant as praise! He's sly, clever, witty... just what I like.

If you have seen the play, you'll see what I meant about the deliberate misuse
of the phrase. Most people without a classical education misunderstand and
misuse the phrase (and have for centuries) which Stopard slyly twisted for
comic effect. (OK, it's snobbish, but really, any domain-intensive joke is
snobbish to people who aren't fluent in the domain. You can make such a joke
without mocking the people who don't get it.)

The point is to highlight in an amusing way the way memes mutate.

For example the book "The Ugly American" made a really important point about
foreign aid, anticommunism etc...but people read the title and used the phrase
completely backwards. OK, the new meaning also makes sense but completely
misses the important point made by the book.

Or people who use the phrase "the third world" and don't realize it's a French
Revolution reference. Which causes them to make useful retroformations like
"the second world" which sound ontologically bizarre but actually perfectly
sensible if you can forget where the term came from.

And speaking of "et in Arcadia ego"...well let's say that only the
misunderstood interpretation adds an undercurrent of humor to HN story from
yesterday ([http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-
arcadia-i...](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-arcadia-
immigration-architecture-20140511-story.html) /
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8707913](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8707913)
).

Speaking of snobbishness and reverse snobbishness: liking puns about group
theory, lambda calculus, or loop optimization doesn't preclude liking puns in
dead languages about ancient philosophers. Or vice versa. The Two Cultures are
alive and well but it doesn't mean anyone is compelled to live that way.

~~~
dragonwriter
The "Third World" is a Cold War, not French Revolution reference. There may
have been a use of the term in the context of the French Revolution, but the
use that has evolved into a reference to less-developed countries mutated from
a term for nonaligned countries in the Cold War which was detached from any
similar term that may have been used in the context of the French Revolution.

~~~
gumby
Sorry dragonwriter, you make my point.

The term "Tiers Monde" was coined in an essay by Sauvy specifically making the
analogy to the Tiers Etat (third estate) of pre-revolutionary France. The
point being that the dispossessed majority rose up and overthrew their
seemingly entrenched overlords, and that by analogy the disenfranchised poor
of the world would rise up and overthrow the then global powers (USA & USSR)
of the cold war.

Now academic revolutionary theory had already moved on by the time he wrote
that (revolutions like the French or American are clearly the revolutions of
the upper middle classes, and even the major communist revolutions of Russia
and China were instigated and lead by upper middle class bourgeois who used
the poor to help achieve their own ends). But the simplistic marxist view of
class struggle was still popular in the press and much of the populace (and
was still considered legit in academic settings too until the 90s).

Now as a kid/teenager during the cold war I spend part of my life in India
(famously non-aligned; Nehru even foolishly turned down a seat at the security
council to make this point) and France and the origins and implications of the
term were important parts of how geopolitics was viewed. However in the
States, all the context is stripped out rendering the analogy simplistic at
best and ultimately not really formative (we already know that there are poor
countries -- simply using a new name adds no value). In fact even today I look
at my kid's high school american history textbook (stops and rummages in kid's
backpack to confirm) and even in _American_ history it seems most of the
context has been stripped out. I guess it's too contentious, or perhaps
controversial.

