Those terrible mountebanks.

I questioned whether I'd ever seen the word "mountebank" in the newspaper, so I searched the NYT archive � all the way back to 1852 � and got 782 hits, beginning with "Really, this Louis NAPOLEON is a very provoking fellow" ("the appearance of the mountebank in the character of a king").

Quite a few of the hits were repetitions of H.L. Mencken's 1926 description of William Jennings Bryan: "a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity . . . deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, . . . all beauty, all fine and noble things. . . . Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not."

One often encounters "mountebank" in a string of contradictions about a person, for example, Theodore Roosevelt: "He transformed the 20th century; no, he overextended the 19th. He was a progressive trust buster; no, an imperialist demagogue. He was a defender of liberty; no, a power-hungry mountebank � a pioneer environmentalist, a bloodthirsty hunter; a farseeing visionary, an energetic clerk."

I see that future President Woodrow Wilson � upon hearing of the death of President McKinley in 1901 � said: "What will happen to the country with that mountebank as President?"
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"Think of it this way: if none of us wore any clothes, then it would be the male genitalia sticking out visibly..."

"... while women�s would remain largely hidden. Maybe the entire point of formal attire to invert this possibility, to say, 'Yes, in nature, it is women who have mysterious hidden powers of creation, but once we get all dressed and civilized, it�s precisely the other way around.'"

The last paragraph of "Dickheads/The paradox of the necktie resolved," a Baffler article by David Graeber (with an excellent illustration).

Via Metafilter, where there are many comments, including:

Couldn�t we say that a tie is really a symbolic displacementof the penis, only an intellectualized penis, dangling not from one�s crotch but from one�s head?

Is this a comp lit undergrad class in 1986?

I see I have a neckties tag. I'll have to publish this post so I can click on it to see what the hell I've said about neckties over the past decade. Beyond this past decade, for the past half century, the most common insight into the necktie has been that it's a phallic symbol. But what I liked about Graeber's take was the seen-and-unseen angle � and seen and unseen is one of my all-time favorite tags.

ADDED: From the necktie-tagged archive. This is from a 2004 post about shopping for a suit at Brooks Brothers:
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