America’s weirdest guidebooks were funded by the government | Hacker News Reader

America’s weirdest guidebooks were funded by the government

nytimes.com

70 pointsaxiomdata31632 comments

>"impecunious"

is one of the *rarest* words I've ever seen in print, and I just want to digress to say I find this remarkable. In HN's comment history, it's only been used 13 times (i++). And half those appearances (including this comment) are meta. Four of them discussed the dictionary meaning, since pg had used it once in a 1998 essay and they too [0] thought this remarkable. Two more mocked the word's appearence in a 2016 Livejournal post about socioeconomics.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=impecunious&type=comment&dateR...

It's not obscure in every cultural sphere -- for example the NY Times has used it a fair number of times. Google's NGrams data suggest its popularity peaked in the 1880's.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=impecunious&ye...

[0] 'chops' in 2012: "In 1998, I had made an effort to do the whole "once a day, learn a random new word from the dictionary". I did that for exactly one day. The one word I learned was "impecunious." Up until now, I've never, ever, seen or heard that word used."

"So in 1998, independent, near simultaneous events (Viaweb being acquired, and me learning a single word) were set in motion that would culminate 14 years later in me reading for the first time an actual legitimate use of that word, resulting in a very self-satisfied grin. Consider my day made."

"It means "poor" btw."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3462071

And here I am in 2021 -- appending to this generational thread, linked not by [reply] buttons but esoteric search engine queries, for the next HN'er to discover in the distant future. This is HN's 14th occurrence of "impecunious". I am signing out.

I bet it has also showed up in some poor GRE test taker's reading comprehension section.

It felt a bit less obscure once I figured the relationship to "pecuniary".

Penniless!

Not having read the article, only the comment, my first thought was “unprofitable”. I’m sure context would have made it clear, but I was still kind of shocked how far off I was.

> but I was still kind of shocked how far off I was

Far off in etymology maybe but in the grand scheme of things / abstractly, not that far off. Being poor is probably the most unprofitable state you can be in today's society, being poor costs a lot more than having lots of money.

https://archive.is/xaCnm

This article seems to miss the context, unusual for the Times. The Writers' Project was part of the Works Progress Administration, a jobs program of the Great Depression. The Government put unemployed people to work. People who could do construction work built public buildings. Thousands of post offices, courthouses, and the dams of the Tennessee Valley Authority were built. Rincon Center in San Francisco is perhaps the best Bay Area example. Artists were given art jobs; sometimes large murals in government buildings. Writers got writing jobs, hence these books.

From the article:

"four years earlier the Works Progress Administration had initiated an unprecedented scheme to pay thousands of unemployed writers to document America, its people, its locales and its heritage"

A recession is a great time for vast infrastructure projects.

Thanks neonate for archive link. Here is the best quote from the article: "Collect the county’s gophers in order to ship them to Australia, where they would be inoculated with a disease fatal to rabbits but harmless to the gophers..."

The whole project reminds me of the Canadian TV commercials - funded by the government, "hinterland who's who". Growing up in Canada, watching these on TV, we never could figure out if they were serious or comedy. Example: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=upR_s5rigVQ

Those hinterland-who's were mesmerizing, there's something very trippy about them.

I think they were partly the inspiration for Boards of Canada.

Thanks for sharing, I had seen a parody of those Hinterland videos a long time ago and now I feel like I have a much more thorough appreciation (https://youtu.be/p2HipedgM3I)

These were strange, and when you look at them now, they were part of this effort in the 60's onward to create a national "Canadian" culture and identity using little factoids like those in Hinterland Who's Who as a common understanding.

The logrider's waltz is another one, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upsZZ2s3xv8, but you have to imagine what weird places the CBC and TV Ontario would have had to have been in the 50's and 60's, where it was a mix of turtlenecked beatnicks, remittence men, old family connected bureaucrats, with influential infiltrators from french separatist and foreign communist movements, Camp X instructors, and a bunch of political idealists spending relatively unlimited public money on inventing a new national identity. In hindsight, the 1970s, Polka-Dot Door was obviously an acid fueled propaganda machine, and Polkaroo, a giant dotted ambiguously gendered kangaroo friend that nobody else could see was the beginning of intersectionality. The future was imminently revolutionary and operated by a benevolent new intellectual class on systems like a new rumored Chilean technology called Cybersyn, which I am sure we sent agents to infiltrate and steal the blueprints of this amazing technology for ourselves to give us a national advantage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn), and groups of conceptual artists formed networks that connected revolutionary politics with the young people of establishment society, e.g. General Idea (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Idea)

All against a backdrop of those earth toned rainbows, the Olympics in Montreal, from a place where the future was beige, and unlimited cigarettes, courduroy, moustaches, LSD, and money for new technologies like portable recorders, theremins and synthesizers made it basically like a Trotskyist version of Mad Men meets early Star Trek.

Canada is really, really weird. That's a show I'd watch anyway.

This fantastic comment accurately captures the feel of the CBC in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, when I was a small child. We had one channel growing up in the north, logically called CBC North, and I always wondered if anyone actually picked up the phone to contact the Canadian Wildlife Service to talk about beavers.

The WPA state guidebooks are quite interesting. The one for Washington, DC, is about the size of any three state guides put together: after WW II, George Washington University brought out a drastically edited version about the size of the standard state guide. I have a copy of the original, which is interesting (among many other ways) in having a map that shows older names of streets, streets not yet built in my neighborhood, etc.

Here are Internet Archive scans of some of the books produced by the Federal Writers’ Project described in the article:

“California: A Guide to the Golden State” https://archive.org/details/californiaguidet00federich/

“Missouri: A Guide to the ‘Show Me’ State” https://archive.org/details/missouriaguide00writmiss

“New Orleans City Guide” https://archive.org/details/neworleanscitygu00federich

From page 178 of the New Orleans book:

“Parades may be viewed from the street, balconies, windows of homes and business houses, or from specially constructed tiers a story or so high. Each view has its advantage, but to mingle with the joyous crowd of the street is to feel the real spirit of the Carnival. Many await the parade on St. Charles and Canal Streets, for it is on these streets that the kings meet their queens: Momus and Comus at the Louisiana Club, 636 Gravier Street; Hermes at the City Hall, 543 St. Charles Street; Proteus at the Boston Club, 824 Canal Street. Although the varicolored lights of Canal Street give the parade a certain splendor, St. Charles Avenue is the better place to see a night parade. The avenue, with its beautiful homes and wide neutral ground, is not so highly lighted as Canal, and stars overhead wink back to the twinkling lights. Red-robed Negroes carry gasoline torches, calcium burners, and star-sparkling flares.

“Soon after noon, when there is a night parade, ‘pop’ stands, hot dog counters, peanut wagons, cotton candy sheds, and souvenir boards sprout up along the streets like mushrooms after a spring rain. Cars, whose tops will be used as reviewing stands, are parked on the side streets near St. Charles Avenue. At five o’clock spectators begin to appear, and the crowd thickens so fast that one must walk in the streets. On the night of the parade all traffic along the way is rerouted to prevent interference. Children form human chains to whip through the crowd, and there is much laughter and noise.”

https://archive.org/details/neworleanscitygu00federich/page/...

A bibliography, with links to more books in the series, is here:

http://www.digitalbookindex.com/_search/search010histus20fed...

In other words, they were funded by us taxpayers

It was from the Works Progress Administration so yeah but also practically everything else was also funded by us taxpayers back then. It was a kickstart project.

You exist because other people paid taxes.

Is this more or less accurate than the birds and the bees?

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