(originally posted at my blog Nothing New Under The Sun)
There has been alas too much personal stress (code for my family and coworkers have driven me round the bend again) as well as the dauntingness of all the awfulness of the news, how to comment on any of it? the sorrowful are mute - but one small aspect of all the headdesking quality (or huddled-under-the-desk quality) of it all has galled my history-buff brain into banging on the desk, because words matter, ideas matter and sloppy language --> sloppy thinking --> grossly-stupid action (or inaction), and this way, way, too common bad habit is something this first-hand-sources junkie knows a little about.
I'm speaking of all the whinging Deploring of the Vitriol-Slinging in the Political Discourse in Online Communities Today, Undoubtedly Brought About By the Slacking Moral Standards Caused By The Anonymity Of The Internet - using perhaps not all those exact words in every instance, but inevitably* using the word "vitriol", along with these memes--
People, do you know what vitriol-slinging really IS? Do you know what vitriol is, either? It has NOTHING to do with harsh language, at all.
Vitriol is H2SO4 - Sulfuric Acid, in lay terms, commonly used nowadays in car batteries as well as other industrial applications for the past 200 years- and the throwing of it, historically, was often an act of political terrorism - but it could also be highly personal terrorism, as the first link below indicates; either way, it represents a formerly-all-too-common use of a common industrial substance as the implement of a hate crime.
Let's look at the very first two Google entries for "vitriol" + "thrown", shall we? (And no, I didn't know before I searched how totally apt they were going to be, but I knew I was going to quickly find examples of both personal and political vitriol-throwing, being an old if amateur history junkie; back in high school I was actually trying to write a play based on the theme of the second story - it came to naught, of course, but I did have a sort of outline, after reading too much Maupassant &c.)
VITRIOL THROWN ON HER. | Woman Accuses a Man, Who Denies the Charge, but Is Locked Up.
and
VITRIOL THROWN ON AN EDITOR | Frank B. Steele of Waterbury, Conn., Badly Injured About the Face
This is literal vitriol-throwing, from the newscasts of yore. Full text of both stories** is given below:
VITRIOL THROWN ON HER.
----
Woman Accuses a Man, Who Denies the Charge, but Is Locked Up.
Mary McCullough, a young woman, giving her occupation as seamstress and her residence as 253 East Fourteenth Street, walked into the East Twenty-second Street Station about midnight last night and informed the Sergeant that Robert De Gess, thirty-eight years old, of 145 East Fifteenth Street, had thrown vitriol on her at Irving Place and Fifteenth Street, a few moments before. The woman's arms were burned by some kind of acid, her neck had been also burned slightly by splashes of the acid, and the front of her dress was burned.
She said the man, with whom she was only slightly acquainted, had suddenly approached her, thrown the acid at her, and decamped. She did not know why he should have sought to injure her.
Detectives Kelly and Kain were told to find De Gess, and at 12:30 he was brought in from his home. He denied that he knew the woman; that he had seen her that night, and that he had thrown acid on her or any one else. He was locked up as a suspicious person. De Gess is a waiter in a hotel on Broadway.
[The New York Times, August 21, 1901]
VITRIOL THROWN ON AN EDITOR
----
Frank B. Steele of Waterbury, Conn., Badly Injured About the Face
WATERBURY, Conn, Jan 11. -As Frank B. Steele of Waterbury, editor of The Bridgeport Sunday Herald, left his office about 6 P.M., an unknown man stepped up and walked alongside. Steele noticed the man make a motion, and then felt something hot on his face. As he turned, the man threw a bottle, striking Steele in the face, cutting him slightly.
The man ran, and Steele started to pursue him, but realizing that it was vitriol, he want to an apothecary's store near by, where Drs. Axtelle and Goodenough were summoned. The vitriol covered the left side of his face and ran down the outside of the throat and breast, his clothing about the neck being badly burned. His eyes were uninjured. His assailant is as yet unknown.
[The New York Times, January 12, 1895.]
Okay. Anyone still want to describe what we go through in online flamefests and feuds as "vitriol-throwing"? Or lament the loss of a more civilized time in politics and society in this country--?
--Personally, I haven't found even the occasional ugly threat of real bodily harm by the disgruntled and trollish to equal either the experience of, nor the real anticipated possibility of, having battery acid thrown in my face. Maybe that's just because I've never had battery acid thrown in my face, but somehow I doubt it.
Someday it may come [back] to that, someday someone in this oh-so-civilized country will likely alas get battery acid thrown in their eyes, or be shot, or stabbed, for what they have written and posted online - just like in the Good Old Days of the 1890s, and earlier, to print editorialists - for threatening the Status Quo to the point that its defenders feel obliged to take up cowards' arms to terrorize the challengers into silence; that is after all the reason so many right-wing bloggers have done so, that is exactly what they were hoping someone else would go do, when Malkin and Jawa Report and other posters who I will not name due to flock did so to their critics - or simply to people who did things which threatened their worldview, even.
And someday it will happen to a blogger who is blogging against that part of the status quo that regards "seamstresses" out at midnight on city streetcorners on the edge of the theatre district as deserving whatever happens to them, by virtue of their absent virginity, and both of those threads from a hundred years ago will convergence: unchaste women and "shrill" editors being punished in one.
But, for the moment, for American bloggers, and blog commenters, it remains only hyperbole.
So don't cheapen the courage of brave writers and editors of the Fourth Estate quondam, and courageous journalists in other countries with repressive governments or lawless plutocrats today, by claiming their sufferings as our own. We're still pikers, until they actually do start arresting us en masse for sedition and smashing our presses, once again.
<hr>* Seriously, it's hard to find the technical data on oil of vitriol due to all the hyperbolic uses of it, with a casual Google: I had to cheat and dump in + 'acid' to get the chemistry pages.
** I haven't been able to find out more about either case: I don't know what side of what past political issues Mr. Steele was on, or who assaulted him and why; nor do I know what ultimately happened with the "suspicious" Mr. De Gess, if he was charged, punished (and how) or released with apology - there might be more, if one were to go to the physical archives of the Bridgeport Sunday Herald (defunct as of 1973) or even the NYT itself; but I haven't got access these days to those kinds of stacks - any number of scenarios might be constructed to explain Ms. McCullough's assault, and while only one timeline is the truth, it might not be recorded anywhere. At least - and this is interesting, although the names of all involved might reveal nuances of local ethnic politics - the police did take her world, and did respond right away, if the story is accurate.