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Who and What Was a Knocker-Upper?
- mikrl 3y agoAnd who rouses the rousers?
- qup 3y ago> Strangely enough Mr Crompton is himself awakened by an alarm clock. He rose at 3:45 am and charged from fourpence to sixpence a week.
- maccard 3y agoI think that's not so strange. If an alarm clock is expensive and hard to come by, one person in the town has a lucrative business by owning one.
- qup 3y agoI didn't include the previous sentence, which said that alarm clocks had put the knockers out of business, save a few, like the guy the quote was about.
- hooverd 3y agoThe rouser rousers.
- version_five 3y agoIt's rousers all the way down
- _jal 3y agoEventually you hit rabble.
- oh_sigh 3y agohttps://mymodernmet.com/candle-clock-alarm/ https://mymodernmet.com/candle-clock-alarm/
- fsckboy 3y ago> And who rouses the rousers? little known fact, but it's actually something like the crowd doing a Wave in a stadium, it travels from east to west with the sun, rousers rousing neighbors, making a gradient across each timezone.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoThis is one of those quirks between national language dialects that will always amuse me. "Knock up" in British slang means "wake up another" while in American slang it means "impregnate another". https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/18568/knocked-up-to-mean-woken-up https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/18568/knocked-up...
- petepete 3y agoTo me, a Brit, the primary meaning of 'knock up' means to make something in a hurry.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoMaybe they're more similar than I thought. I guess 9 months' gestation isn't exactly "in a hurry", though.
- andyferris 3y agoThe knock up occurs immediately prior to those 9 months, and might happen in a hurry…
- Lammy 3y agoThis is also a joke in Futurama https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4BOZcDMw_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4BOZcDMw_A
- nmstoker 3y agoYes, one of the many delightful differences! I'm being picky but "another" seems a bit redundant there, right?
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoFor "impregnate", yes. I included it because I included it for "wake up", which is otherwise ambiguous, but I guess I didn't need to. Especially because it would make sense linguistically (from a certain angle) to say an organism which reproduces asexually "knocks itself up".
- jschveibinz 3y agoThis reminds me of the set of interesting job titles (eg. the cooler-down) for British steam locomotive maintenance: https://youtu.be/stPkjtlRj24?feature=shared https://youtu.be/stPkjtlRj24?feature=shared
- wisemang 3y agoReminded me of “putters” — a person who makes scissors by hand, short for putter togetherer: https://kottke.org/tag/Cliff%20Denton https://kottke.org/tag/Cliff%20Denton
- syntheweave 3y agoSo many of the Victorian era's jobs are starkly low-value by today's standards. Even poorer parts of the world today don't have a need for knocker-uppers and can leapfrog directly from rising with the sun to an alarm clock.
- forgotusername6 3y agoWhat sun? This is the UK we're dealing with. These factory workers would be going to work in the dark. I imagine alarm clocks would be a luxury item back then.
- chinabot 3y agoNothings changed then..
- FooBarBizBazz 3y ago> Yet, not everyone viewed this profession as the key cog it was in industrial Britain—including celebrated social reformer Helen Dendy. Dendy referred to this class of people brought to the forefront during the Industrial Revolution as “the Residuum,” and grouped knocker-uppers with “the girl who cleans steps [and] the old woman who minds babies.” Her view of this class was entirely negative. I paused at "old woman who minds babies". I would say that this is an important profession close to the center of national debate.
- ezconnect 3y agoJapan population is in decline because it's hard to raise babies and work at the same time.
- jampekka 3y agoJust a friendly reminder that JSTOR is one of those "non-profits" that leech public monies through universities among others by demanding payment to access publicly funded research. In the process JSTOR drove Aaron Swartz to suicide. Academic publishing is rotten to the core, including the "non-profits". It is detrimental to science and human progress and leeches off countless billions of public funds to do so.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fsckboy 3y agoIf I make a contract that entitles me to income, and you set about trying to undermine it and my income, and I attempt to enforce the contract, and you really don't like that, I hope you don't blame me for your suicide, because it's not on me. here come the downvotes cuz some people can't handle the truth. I'm entirely sympathetic to Aaron's mental illness because I was raised in a way that gave something similar to me too. Luckily my crash worked out better. Aaron's parents hold him up as a martyr, and I (with no direct knowledge) suspect they might have had a hand in making him behave like a martyr, because I know just what it's like. By the way, framing this as "good vs evil" and Aaron was good, and he did a good thing, while you don't yourself engage the world the way you are encouraging him to, is the root of the actual evil. The world isn't black and white, it's many shades (and colors) and lighting yourself on fire or encouraging somebody else to is rarely the right way to address problems you see.
- mathisfun123 3y ago[flagged]
- fsckboy 3y agoI'm standing up for acknowledging and treating mental illness.
- 3y ago
- animal531 3y agoI quite enjoy old jobs or things that people (or even animals such as the spit dog) used to do, that no longer exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnspit_dog