Beards: They're not for everyone. But those who get it, get it.
Herman Melville gets it!
Tolstoy, Whitman, Dostoyevsky, Hugo—none of them said anything of note before they grew their beards. Still, we all know what happens to a man’s facial hair when he’s aboard a boat for too long.
Here are 25 unique words or phrases that Melville used to describe beards in two chapters (84 and 85) of White-Jacket or The World in a Man-of-War, his 1850 novel based on experience crewing a U.S. frigate, the USS Neversink, in the South Seas for 14 months.
Melville’s Alternative Names for Beards:
1. the
crop
2. suburbs
of the chin
3. homeward-bounders
4. fly-brushes
5. long,
trailing moss hanging from the bough of some aged oak
6. love-curls
7. Winnebago
locks
8. carroty
bunches
9. rebellious
bristles
10. redundant
mops
11. yellow
bamboos
12. long
whiskers
13. thrice-noble
beards
14. plantations
of hair
15. whiskerandoes
16. nodding
harvests
17. viny locks
18. the
fleece
19. fine
tassels
20. goatees
21. imperials
22. sacred
things
23. admiral’s
pennant
24. manhood
25. muzzle-lashings
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Our Muse Herman Melville (1819-1891) The Bard of Beards |
Here is a little context for Melville's whiskery vocabulary. The Captain of the USS Neversink issued an unpopular decree. All sailors with long hair must cut it short, and all those with long whiskers must trim them down to Navy regulations. This decree was met with various levels of consternation from the crew, ranging from reluctant obedience to out and out mutiny.
In Chapter 85, The Great Massacre of the Beards, Melville recounts the story of Jack Chase as he took his turn with the barber. About to be shorn, Jack gave a soliloquy to his beard:
“My friend, I trust your scissors are consecrated. Let them not touch this beard if they have yet to be dipped in holy water; beards are sacred things barber. Have you no feeling for beards, my friend?"This beard has been caressed by the snow-white hand of the lovely Tomasita of Tombez—the Castilian belle of all lower Peru. Think of that, barber! I have worn it as an officer on the quarter-deck of a Peruvian man-of-war. I have sported it at brilliant fandangoes in Lima. I have been alow and aloft with it at sea. Yea, barber! it has streamed like an Admiral's pennant at the mast-head of this same gallant frigate, the Neversink! Oh! barber, barber! it stabs me to the heart.—Talk not of hauling down your ensigns and standards when vanquished—what is that, barber! to striking the flag that Nature herself has nailed to the mast!"
Melville, the Bard of Beards! At one point he complains that the hair and beard regulation is "directly opposed to the theocratical law laid down in the nineteenth chapter and twenty-seventh verse of Leviticus, where it is expressly ordained, "Thou shalt not mar the corners of thy beard." But legislators do not always square their statutes by those of the Bible."
As Melville aged, he cited that Bible verse to justify a rather distinctive squared-off beard style.
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“Ye shall not shave the corners of your head round, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard.” —LEVITICUS 19:27 |
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