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[Lombro2]

Your “bumbling” is confirmed. I’d think twice about arguing with The Teacher and the Madman.

[caz]

Might be an idea to head over to jtrforums, where Gary Barnett has been posting examples of 'bumbling' being used in the 1880s, by people who evidently didn't care whether it was 'obsolete' or not.

One example was a 'bumbling' purveyor... in Paradise Street, Liverpool, in November 1888.

It's a pointless discussion, however, when we don't know what the diary author understood 'bumbling' to mean when they attached it to 'buffoon' just for jolly, because they could.

No rule that said they had to wait until these two words were used together to form a popular catchphrase. If that chap had needed to wait for 'bumbling purveyor' to become a catchphrase, he'd still be waiting.

Love,

Caz
X

[Herlock Sholmes]

Might be an idea to head over to jtrforums, where Gary Barnett has been posting examples of 'bumbling' being used in the 1880s, by people who evidently didn't care whether it was 'obsolete' or not.

One example was a 'bumbling' purveyor... in Paradise Street, Liverpool, in November 1888.

It's a pointless discussion, however, when we don't know what the diary author understood 'bumbling' to mean when they attached it to 'buffoon' just for jolly, because they could.

No rule that said they had to wait until these two words were used together to form a popular catchphrase. If that chap had needed to wait for 'bumbling purveyor' to become a catchphrase, he'd still be waiting.

Love,

Caz
X

Hi Caz,

It's interesting that you haven't quoted the 1888 example accurately. It's "Bumbling" Purveyor with a capital "B". Why was a capital letter used? What does it actually mean? Nothing posted on JTR Forums that I've seen is a clear 19th century example of "bumbling" in the modern sense of the word as it is found in the expression "bumbling buffoon". On the contrary, one of the examples given is "bumbling puppy". It was authored by none other than Eliza Lynn Linton who wrote the 1886 example that is already well known. Unless Linton was slagging off a puppy (described as "amiable") for being incompetent it seems that there might have been another, less derogatory meaning to the word as it was used in the 19th century.

But, like I said to you seven days ago in this thread and now underline, it doesn’t matter. Even taken on its own, it means that the diary author, if writing in 1888, was the very first known person in the history of the world to use the expression “bumbling buffoon” and that expression wasn’t then used again for about fifty years when it started to become very popular after the word "bumbling" was popularised by Time magazine. Such a thing is beyond belief. Then we have almost identical scenarios for “top myself” and “spreads mayhem”. For the diary author to have been the first person known to have written those three expressions which are not known to have been written down by anyone else before 1888 and for about forty or fifty years afterwards in each case stretches credulity way beyond the acceptable limit. Add to this the factual mistakes: the diarist mistaking Florence’s godmother for her aunt, thinking the killer had fled with the key and the wrong placement of Kelly’s breasts. In a document with handwriting not matching James Maybrick, all this alone would tell us for sure that the diary is a fake. But it’s not all we have by any means. Thankfully we have 100% certainty that the diary is a modern fake, written after 1945, during which period expressions such as “one off instance” entered the English language but not before. Obsessing over the other language issues as to whether Maybrick could theoretically, if unbelievably, used them, is pointless and academic. I'm amazed that anyone keeps doing it. But, as the diary includes "one off instance", we don’t need to bother ourselves with the other language problems or with the factual mistakes or any of the other signs that the diary is a fake. It is all a waste of time even to think about them, let alone write posts.

The attempts on JTR Forums to find rare and ambiguous examples of the use of “bumbling”, while ignoring what Orsam already posted in his article on the subject almost five years ago in September 2020 (which I was able to find on the Wayback archive), only puts into sharp relief that people are totally lost when it comes to “one off” and can’t find anything on this whatsoever. As I said a few weeks ago when I started discussing the matter with Ike, it’s “one off instance” which proves the diary to be a modern fake, not the other anachronistic expressions in the diary which only support the conclusion.

All that we should be discussing now is who faked the diary, why it couldn’t be the Barretts and, if not the Barretts, how did it end up in their hands in April 1992? That’s all there is left to talk about.

Strangely, though, I can’t find anyone who wants to discuss this with me.

[caz]

Yes, just to be clear Caz, "bumbling" wasn't a word in Dickens' day. That's the whole point.

You may have missed the sarcasm there, Herlock.

I didn't know you were that old, but if it really wasn't a word in Dickens's day, it most certainly was in Maybrick's.

Although you say you have "no problem" with the diary not being Victorian, which we know it isn't, you nevertheless re-introduced into this thread the subject of "bumbling buffoon", which no-one had even mentioned this year. and asked why nobody "in Maybrick's day" could have thought to take the name of Mr Bumble and turn it into "bumbling"? What was the purpose of doing so other than to try and push the diary back to the Victorian era? Is that when you would prefer the diary to have been written? But it's pointless because "one off instance" proves that it's a twentieth century creation. So isn't discussion of other expressions in the diary (for which there are no known 19th century examples in any case) just a waste of all our time?

You waste your time in your own way, and I'll waste my time in mine. I didn't force you to keep responding, did I?

My point, as usual, has been to examine the arguments for the diary author - whoever they were and whenever they were composing the text - writing something that would have been 'impossible' for anyone in 1888 to have done.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Caz, this post is another example of what I was talking about. It's like you are trying very hard for some reason to push the diary back to 1888. But "one off instance" already disproves that possibility.

Au contraire, Blackadder.

I don't need to do anything, but amuse myself to see how hard others are trying to push the diary forward to early April 1992.

Now the etymology of "bumbling" has already been discussed elsewhere. In the 19th century, "bumbling" was essentially an obsolete old English word. It isn't found in the 1844 New English Dictionary, or other nineteenth century dictionaries, other than to describe the sound of a bee, or other than as an obsolete or dialectical word because "bummel" or "bumble" is known to have been a word used in the Scottish and North Country dialects to mean a blunderer or bungler. It's not quite true to say that "The word "bumbling" came to mean "confused, blundering, awkward" in 1886." It was used by one North Country writer, Eliza Lynn Linton, in a book published that year entitled Paston Carew which referred to a character as "a big bumbling young fellow". To say that "bumbling" came to mean "confused, blundering, awkward" in 1886 as a result of that single ambiguous reference in an obscure book by a North Country writer is pushing it way too far.

I'm happy for that quote [I didn't make it up] to be struck from the record as inadmissible, M'Lud. It matters not in the great scheme of things.

"Topping myself" appeared in print back in the 1870s, so it couldn't have become an anachronism by 1888. Or was it illegal for individuals to repeat any such two-word phrase until it came back by popular demand as a catchphrase?

To repeat the point, though, there is no point in discussing these anachronistic expressions when we know for sure that "one off instance" is a modern phrase. We are better trying to work out who authored the diary in the post Second World period rather than attempting tortuous arguments to try and show that modern expressions could theoretically have been used in the nineteenth century even when there is no evidence of such usage. As to that Caz, do you have any possible candidates to propose from after 1945 who might have done it? And I must ask again, why could the Barretts not have done it, please?

If you see no point in discussing such matters, then don't.

I see no point in going over all the reasons that have been posted a million times before for not believing the Barretts wrote the diary, so I won't.

If you don't want to spend your time trawling through old posts to find them, that's entirely up to you.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Hi Caz,

It's interesting that you haven't quoted the 1888 example accurately. It's "Bumbling" Purveyor with a capital "B". Why was a capital letter used? What does it actually mean? Nothing posted on JTR Forums that I've seen is a clear 19th century example of "bumbling" in the modern sense of the word as it is found in the expression "bumbling buffoon". On the contrary, one of the examples given is "bumbling puppy". It was authored by none other than Eliza Lynn Linton who wrote the 1886 example that is already well known. Unless Linton was slagging off a puppy (described as "amiable") for being incompetent it seems that there might have been another, less derogatory meaning to the word as it was used in the 19th century.

How have you worked out that the diary author chose to attribute to a Victorian cotton merchant the 'modern' sense of the word 'bumbling'? How many times must it be pointed out that the adjective as used in the diary is ambiguous?

Obsessing over the other language issues as to whether Maybrick could theoretically, if unbelievably, used them, is pointless and academic. I'm amazed that anyone keeps doing it.

Are you applying this equally to the obsessives who have spent years working on every one of these language issues, in their efforts to prove that at least one of them was totally out of bounds to anyone writing in 1888? Not easy to prove a negative, as I hope you would agree, and in many cases it will prove to be impossible and, like a blunt pencil, pointless.

All that we should be discussing now is who faked the diary, why it couldn’t be the Barretts and, if not the Barretts, how did it end up in their hands in April 1992? That’s all there is left to talk about.

How very dare you attempt to dictate to me what 'we' should now be reduced to discussing??

How many times do you expect me to revisit all the evidence available on the message boards for how the diary ended up in Mike's hands already written, only for you to keep whining that it hasn't been discussed with you personally?

https://www.jtrforums.com/forum/persons-of-interest-or-actual-suspects/james-maybrick/3065-let-s-discuss-the-watch

https://www.jtrforums.com/forum/persons-of-interest-or-actual-suspects/james-maybrick/the-maybrick-diary-forum/621837-the-bumbling-impressario

Pay particular attention to #3 on the bumbling impressario thread, because you appear to have blinked and totally missed the 1885 letter to the editor of the Birkenhead News, demanding to know who among the railway staff was responsible for the 'bumbling' [little b].

However did the editor or the readers know what the author of the letter was banging on about?

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

How powerful must King Diary be, to make his sworn enemies bumble, fumble and grumble about forever, looking for ever more deadly weapons, instead of catching the nearest way?

Instead of simply wearing the 'wrong handwriting' trousers, over Dr B's 'freely soluble' underpants, which they all got in their Christmas stockings over 30 years ago, they've fannied around ever since in 'one off' trousers held up with 'bumbling buffoon' belt and braces, scotching the snake, not killing it.

Baxendale's original weapon of choice was the erroneous date of 1946, based on when he thought nigrosine first became common in writing inks. He was wrong - it was in general use in writing inks by the 1870s. But it was too late to cover his embarrassment with the freely soluble underpants he'd put in the drawer for later.

Love,

Caz
X

[Herlock Sholmes]

You may have missed the sarcasm there, Herlock.

I didn't know you were that old, but if it really wasn't a word in Dickens's day, it most certainly was in Maybrick's.



You waste your time in your own way, and I'll waste my time in mine. I didn't force you to keep responding, did I?

My point, as usual, has been to examine the arguments for the diary author - whoever they were and whenever they were composing the text - writing something that would have been 'impossible' for anyone in 1888 to have done.

Love,

Caz
X

But Caz it would have been impossible in 1888 for someone to have written about a "one-off instance", so any discussion about the other expressions is wholly academic. I already said in my #387 that "bumbling buffoon" wasn't literally impossible for someone to have written in 1888, albeit not any way realistic that they would have done it, so how does it get us anywhere forward to discuss this theoretical possibility? The "one off instance" mistake by the diary author proves the diary to be a modern fake. It's incontrovertible!

[Herlock Sholmes]

Au contraire, Blackadder.

I don't need to do anything, but amuse myself to see how hard others are trying to push the diary forward to early April 1992.



I'm happy for that quote [I didn't make it up] to be struck from the record as inadmissible, M'Lud. It matters not in the great scheme of things.

"Topping myself" appeared in print back in the 1870s, so it couldn't have become an anachronism by 1888. Or was it illegal for individuals to repeat any such two-word phrase until it came back by popular demand as a catchphrase?



If you see no point in discussing such matters, then don't.

I see no point in going over all the reasons that have been posted a million times before for not believing the Barretts wrote the diary, so I won't.

If you don't want to spend your time trawling through old posts to find them, that's entirely up to you.

Love,

Caz
X

Just to be clear, Caz, I'm not asking you for reasons why you don't believe the Barretts wrote the diary. I'm aware a lot of server space has been taken up about that. I'm asking you to tell me why they were not capable of doing it, which is a very different question.

Or perhaps you do believe they were capable? But, if not, I'd be grateful if you could explain to me why not.

[Herlock Sholmes]

How have you worked out that the diary author chose to attribute to a Victorian cotton merchant the 'modern' sense of the word 'bumbling'? How many times must it be pointed out that the adjective as used in the diary is ambiguous?



Are you applying this equally to the obsessives who have spent years working on every one of these language issues, in their efforts to prove that at least one of them was totally out of bounds to anyone writing in 1888? Not easy to prove a negative, as I hope you would agree, and in many cases it will prove to be impossible and, like a blunt pencil, pointless.



How very dare you attempt to dictate to me what 'we' should now be reduced to discussing??

How many times do you expect me to revisit all the evidence available on the message boards for how the diary ended up in Mike's hands already written, only for you to keep whining that it hasn't been discussed with you personally?

https://www.jtrforums.com/forum/persons-of-interest-or-actual-suspects/james-maybrick/3065-let-s-discuss-the-watch

https://www.jtrforums.com/forum/persons-of-interest-or-actual-suspects/james-maybrick/the-maybrick-diary-forum/621837-the-bumbling-impressario

Pay particular attention to #3 on the bumbling impressario thread, because you appear to have blinked and totally missed the 1885 letter to the editor of the Birkenhead News, demanding to know who among the railway staff was responsible for the 'bumbling' [little b].

However did the editor or the readers know what the author of the letter was banging on about?

Love,

Caz
X

I didn't ignore the 1885 example at all, Caz. In fact, it's pertinent to my observation about capitalization. You will note that the headline of the letter is "RAILWAY BUMBLE" not "RAILWAY BUMBLING". Why is that? The letter writer speaks of "bumbling" not "bumble". Except that a poem is included in the letter which says, "And placid sits old Bumble/While all the people grumble". Old Bumble appears to have been a well known caricature based on the Mr Bumble character of Dickens to represent the type of fussy official pomposity that has always been the definition of Bumbledom. So my reading of the letter is that the writer is complaining about the railway officials who didn't get people home on the train and the newspaper understood this. I'm suggesting, therefore, that the "bumbling" of the letter writer carried a different meaning to the way we would understand it today. I'm also suggesting that Maybrick wouldn't have thought to use it about Dr Hopper because he wasn't an official in any sense of the word.

I also think you're looking at this the wrong way round. The fact is that we don't have examples of "bumbling buffoon" before the 1940s, so the question is: why not? The very likely explanation is that "bumbling" didn't carry the same connotations before it was adopted by Time magazine in the 1920s and then came to be used more widely thereafter. You can, of course, continue with your belief that Maybrick or someone else in the 1880s could have associated "bumbling" with a buffoon in the way that no one else appears to have done before him, and didn't do again for fifty years but, as I keep saying, it simply doesn't matter because there is no way round the "one off" problem.

As to that, I think you misunderstand my question about how the diary got into Barrett's hands. That question is premised on the fact that the diary was written after 1945. See my question to you in #161 of the "Hoax" thread on 29th January to which I've yet to receive a response. (It said: But the evidence is overwhelming that the diary is a late twentieth century forgery so how for the live of all that is pure and holy did such an item get into Mike Barrett's grubby hands?)The explanation I've seen is that it was taken from Battlecrease by Eddie Lyons on March 9th, 1992, which is usually on the basis that Maybrick or someone else in the late 1880s put it under the floorboards. What I want to know is how did it get there at some point after 1945? I'm aware of what you said to Mike JG in #174 of the Hoax thread but it's not clear what time period you were referring to. So I would welcome an answer from you to my question.

[Lombro2]

Since the information about the tin match box being empty was published in 1987, 1945 is irrelevant. Unless someone wants to believe in Bruce Robinson's theory that Dr Gordon Brown put it in his notes and showed them or blabbed them to his fellow Freemasons like the Maybrick brothers.

So who would put a forgery in the floorboards after 87 and expect it to be found in a few years? You think a householder would notice the floorboard being taken up and put back down again. Then of course an electrician shows up and lifts them in that exact spot less than five years later, and finds a journal and a watch that never saw the light of day for 100 years but were kept hidden away somewhere else, all these decades, completely blank and scratchless for this particular time and purpose post-1987.

[caz]

But Caz it would have been impossible in 1888 for someone to have written about a "one-off instance", so any discussion about the other expressions is wholly academic. I already said in my #387 that "bumbling buffoon" wasn't literally impossible for someone to have written in 1888, albeit not any way realistic that they would have done it, so how does it get us anywhere forward to discuss this theoretical possibility? The "one off instance" mistake by the diary author proves the diary to be a modern fake. It's incontrovertible!

It's funny, Herlock, because I could have sworn the argument before you arrived, and right up until this week, was very much that the phrase 'bumbling buffoon' literally could not have been used in 1888, because the word 'bumbling' was obsolete by then - except apparently if you lived in Yorkshire [but definitely not in Lancashire, that wouldn't have been cricket ]. Presumably a Yorkshireman could have known all about 'bumbling' from his great-grandparents and still used it while walking his whippets on Ilkley Moor bar t'at, but that's as far as it went, explaining why no living soul could have seen, heard or put both b words together in a sentence - before it was suddenly all over the shop like a rash, as a freshly coined and packaged modern 'catchphrase'.

So what will you select as your new knockout blow and belt-and-braces, from all your other options, if Gary finds a relevant 'one off' [no hyphen] reference among all the old material just now emerging online? Best be prepared just in case. You never really know what you don't know until it jumps out and bites you, and then you know.

Love,

Caz
X

[caz]

Just to be clear, Caz, I'm not asking you for reasons why you don't believe the Barretts wrote the diary. I'm aware a lot of server space has been taken up about that. I'm asking you to tell me why they were not capable of doing it, which is a very different question.

Or perhaps you do believe they were capable? But, if not, I'd be grateful if you could explain to me why not.

All I can say to you is that I absolutely know what I would or would not be capable of. I understand my own limitations and I think that helps with understanding the limitations of certain other individuals, including both Barretts. Whenever I hear the same old nonsense about teenagers writing the Maybrick diary over a wet weekend, I see someone who has very little understanding of their own limitations, or is just trying to show how clever they are because they would have done a much better and more sophisticated job of it.

But nobody ever actually practises what they preach. The only one that springs to mind is Mike Barrett, bless him, who did at least have a bash at it, but his limitations were only too obvious to me and screamed out from every syllable, just like anything else he ever tried to write or type unaided. Anyone who saw those pages and thought otherwise should really start to consider whether they have limitations of their own.

Love,

Caz
X

[Herlock Sholmes]

It's funny, Herlock, because I could have sworn the argument before you arrived, and right up until this week, was very much that the phrase 'bumbling buffoon' literally could not have been used in 1888, because the word 'bumbling' was obsolete by then - except apparently if you lived in Yorkshire [but definitely not in Lancashire, that wouldn't have been cricket ]. Presumably a Yorkshireman could have known all about 'bumbling' from his great-grandparents and still used it while walking his whippets on Ilkley Moor bar t'at, but that's as far as it went, explaining why no living soul could have seen, heard or put both b words together in a sentence - before it was suddenly all over the shop like a rash, as a freshly coined and packaged modern 'catchphrase'.

So what will you select as your new knockout blow and belt-and-braces, from all your other options, if Gary finds a relevant 'one off' [no hyphen] reference among all the old material just now emerging online? Best be prepared just in case. You never really know what you don't know until it jumps out and bites you, and then you know.

Love,

Caz
X

The very opposite of what you are saying is true, Caz. I only started discussing "bumbling buffoon" with you in this thread on 19th February on which date (#369) I told you that the etymology of "bumbling buffoon" as an expression "doesn't matter because "one off instance" has conclusively demonstrated the diary to be a modern forgery" and, the very next day (in my #387), I distinguished "bumbling buffoon" from "one off instance" in that, I said, the former was not literally impossible in 1888 whereas the latter was (i.e. "So it's not quite the same as "one off instance" in that it was literally impossible for someone to have used that expression in 1888 but the reality is that "bumbling" was not a common English word in 1888 and anyone wanting to punctuate a description of someone as an incompetent person in that year would have called them either a "bungling buffoon" or "blustering buffoon"). For the weeks prior to 19th February in the other threads during my discussion with Ike, I was very clear that it's "one off instance" that proves the diary to be a fake not the other three anachronistic expressions. Nothing, incidentally, that's been posted elsewhere in the intervening period changes my mind about the fact that "bumbling buffoon" could not have been used by the diary author in 1888, and I think that the modern meaning of the word is being wrongly imposed on the 19th century examples which have been provided, but there's really no point in discussing that further because. as I've said to you on multiple occasions now, it doesn't matter. It's "one off instance" which proves the diary to be a fake. There's just no getting round it. And there won't be any "one off instance" type examples found at any time in the future - just as there haven't been over the past 33 years - because we know that "one off" didn't take on the meaning of uniqueness until long after 1888 and it took many more years for it to be used figuratively or metaphorically. Hells bells, I even posted an example for Ike of a journalist in the 1980s expressly saying that "one off" was a contemporary expression. The evidence is overwhelming and conclusive.