The best response to discovering you’ve awakened on October 28 is to shout “Yahoo!” Since you just woke up, of course, you might first need to clear your throat by going “houyhnhnm” a couple of times. When you settle down with some coffee and check the morning business news, take note of that startup company lagado.io, which has announced a new product that will extract solar energy from cucumbers. Anyone with solar panels will be able to use cucumbers on cloudy days (or at night) if their batteries get low. It seems, though, that Annmarie Balnibarbi, the spokesperson, won’t admit to a specific shipping date.
As a result of the lagado announcement, Tesla stock dipped overnight before trading opened, largely due to newfound doubts about the need for their brobdignagian gigafactories for batteries. Now everybody seems to be wondering if the solution to energy problems could be something as lilliputian as a cucumber. With your head spinning at the odd events of the day, you’re probably glad to reach page six and discover that October 28 was the date in 1726 that “Gulliver’s Travels” was published.
Jonathan Swift wrote “Gulliver’s Travels” as a political satire — his target was the Whig party. The Whigs opposed the Tories, with the Whigs being the liberals of the day and the Tories being the conservatives. Both parties existed in England for over 150 years, though, and exactly what “conservative” and “liberal” meant shifted several times during their existence. In fact, in 1912 what was left of the two old parties (neither still formally existed by then) merged to form the modern Conservative Party. But if you could translate the positions of the Conservative Party into the world of the early 1700s, they’d be much more like the “liberal” Whigs than the “conservative” Tories. The labels are a little bit silly, really.
“Gulliver’s Travels” is partly about that silliness. Most of the fantastic lands Gulliver visits feature aspects of the real world taken to absurd extremes. The tiny Lilliputians are obsessed with tiny issues like which end of an egg to crack open. Swift’s point was that the politicians bickering over trivial matters (or almost any political bickering) were like the Lilliputians; small, inconsequential people.
In 1726, though, you could get in serious trouble if your satire was obvious enough that people in charge thought they recognized themselves or their friends. So Swift took some steps to protect himself. The manuscript was delivered to the publisher in secret, and the publisher divided it into five different parts and send them to five different printers (this wasn’t that unusual; it also protected against someone stealing the book and reprinting it). And before he even delivered the manuscript, Swift had someone copy it over so it wasn’t in his handwriting. The 1726 version of the Whigs apparently had some forensic skills.
They would have needed more than forensic skills to discover all the clues in Swift’s book, though. One section dealt with a conflict between the flying island of Laputa and a rebellious surface city, Lindalino. Notice that in “Lindalino”, the syllable “lin” appears twice. It’s a “double lin” — which sounds a lot like the real city of Dublin. The episode is a satire about a real event in Dublin, when a patent was granted to a private business to mint coins to be used there. The dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin thought the coins were of poor quality and were introduced only to highlight Ireland’s dependence on England. The dean wrote a series of pamphlets about the issue. They’re still well known as “Drapier’s Letters,” and they worked; the coins were withdrawn. The dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, by the way, was Jonathan Swift himself. “Drapier” was an alias to protect his identity.
After Gulliver, Swift kept on with his satirical writing with “A Modest Proposal” — although the complete title, in true 1700s style (and capitalization), is “A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick.” The proposal, as you probably remember, is that the children of poor people would be most beneficial to the public if the rich folks simply ate them.
Swift borrowed from earlier literature for some of his work. In Gulliver, there’s a scientific project underway in one of the lands to identify political conspiracies by examining sewage. This comes from “Pilgrim’s Progress,” a 1678 book by John Bunyan. It’s a religious allegory, and one of the characters is “the man with the muck-rake”, who ignores salvation in order to keep doing his job raking filth. That’s also the source of the term “muckraking”, which was coined around the 1890s to refer to journalists investigating government or corporate misbehavior. Theodore Roosevelt, whose government engaged in a fair bit of misbehavior itself, popularized the term in a 1906 speech, saying “the men with the muck rakes are often indispensable to the wellbeing of society, but only if they know when to stop raking the muck.”
Speaking of terms, Swift himself coined “yahoo.” Jerry Yang and David Filo, the founders of Yahoo!, still say that they chose the name because in Louisiana where Filo grew up, it meant people who were “rude, unsophisticated, and uncouth.” Which is exactly what Swift used it for too. The idea that “Yahoo!” is an acronym (for Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle) is just a myth. It’s really a “backronym,” where you try to create an acronym matching a word you already have. It’s the sort of thing they would have tried in Balnibarbi.
