July 1, 1921 Field & Stream. A missed magazine cover and what it tells us about language and cluture.
This was one of the numerous saved threads I hadn't gotten back to, and then July 1 came and went, and I forgot about it. Instead, as that day deal with the Chinese Communist Party, there was a big old hammer and sickle that appeared as the art for that day.
Wish I'd remembered this one.
This does bring up a bit of an interesting topic, or at least two such topics, one linguistic and the other cheesecake oriented.
Depictions of women fishing, and let us be more precise and say depictions of pretty young women fishing, are at least as old as print magazines in popular culture. They're considerably more common than depictions of women hunting, even though fishing is simply fish hunting. We sometimes forget that English has various words for various types of hunting, as fishing is the only one we commonly use to separate it out from hunting in general. But there are others.
Fowling, for example, refers to hunting birds and was once a fairly common term. Offhand, I can't think of another sort of hunting other than fishing which is named for the prey, but there are some types that are named for the method. For example, falconry, that type of hunting done with falcons, is named for the method. Trapping, which is a controversial type of hunting that has been controversial my entire life, also is.
Of interest in this general topic, hunting of various types was so important in the Medieval era, when people started to first acquire family names, that various things associated with it or the practice itself gave us a series of last names that are still with us. This shows the degree to which it was significant, and even elemental. Just as we have the last name "Farmer", for example, we have the last name "Hunter". Noting that English is a Germanic language, and that this evolution occurred at the same time all over Northern Europe, and Europe in general, the same occupations are reflected in the common German last names of Bauer and Jaeger or Jäger. It ought to be noted here that the last name Hunger more accurately reflects its Medieval origins, however, than "Farmer", as farmer actually meant "renter" at the time, reflecting that farmers tended to be tenants, if not actually serfs.
Jäger, interestingly, shows up as an English last name as well, in the form of Yaeger occasionally. A name that sounds related, Jagger, isn't. That name is a Yorkshire name meaning a horse packer.
Fisher, of course, also shows up as a last name, as does the German equivalent Fischer.
Falconer also shows up as a last name, that being for a person who kept and hunted with falcons. Falconry was expensive back in the day and its pretty likely that anyone who was a falconer was in the permanent employment of a noble, so it's different from simply being a hunter or fisher. The same occupation gave us the name Hawker as well.
Another name last name that may have a hunting origin is Bowman. We tend to think of bows as military weapons, in a Medieval context, but in reality they were by far the most common hunting weapon at the time and, moreover, keeping standing armies was extremely rare. While armies did employ bowmen in times of war, those guys were in other occupations the rest of the time, and they were likely using their bows for hunting.
Indeed, the significance of that may be demonstrated the only other weapon of the period which I can think of which reflects itself in a last name is Pike. It would seem obvious that the name must derive from the weapon of that name, but it apparently isn't clear that this is the case. It might be a corruption of "peak" or it might actually refer to the fish. On that, Trout occurs as a last name, and it apparently stems from fishing for trout. I.e., a person named Trout, back in the Middle Ages, was a trout fisherman, showing the importance of the species. On the other hand, maybe Pike refers to the weapon, including its importance in Medieval warfare. No other weapons directly resulted in last names, however, if that's the case, although the knife did give us the German last name of Messer.
Well so much for names. Let's talk about clothing, or the depiction of it.
As noted above, depicting female fishermen was pretty common in the early 20th Century. The depiction above is a little unusual in that the subject is deep sea fishing, but then deep sea fishing depictions in general were a little unusual. Usually fishing subjects were fishing streams, or maybe rivers.
Depictions of women fishing early in the 20th Century weren't very different from those depicting men. If you go all the way about to around 1900, they are different as women didn't usually wear trousers and therefore they're sometimes depicted wearing the bulky clothing of the day, fishing, which would have been extremely difficult, in actual practice. By World War One, however, they were usually depicted just like men, with both tending to have the outdoor clothing, rather than the work clothing, of the day. No doubt there were men, and women, who went out to the streams fully equipped with the period outdoor clothing, which tended to feature breeches and very high boots, but my guess is that most fishermen simply went out with the sort of clothing that they wore when mowing the lawn or working in the shop.
I note this as in the world of Reddit, Twitter, and Istagram, if you have any interest in fishing, you're going to be assaulted at some point with a photograph of a woman fishing wearing a bikini.
I don't know if any women really fish wearing bikini's. They don't fish wearing bikini's in the L.L. Bean or Orvis catalogs, that's for sure, and I've never seen a female bikini clad angler myself. Of course, I don't have a boat, and maybe they're all on boats, rather than on your typical Wyoming stream or river where you'd be eaten alive by insects if you tried that.
Which brings me to this, wearing hardly anything outdoors is stupid in general, very stupid when you are more or less on the water where there's no shade, and who wants to smell all over like a fish?
All of which leads me to believe that such photos are in a certain category of adolescent male driving soft pornography, much like the weird Japanese cartoon depictions of World War Two ships as young women. Maybe some young women on boats wear bikinis, but I bet they do it only once.
I was fishing the other day in a deep Wyoming canyon, the last fishing trip I'll make of the season, probably, as hunting season is now on, and even though I'm license impaired as I didn't draw anything, I'll be doing that on general tags. On my way out, I encountered a young woman hiking in.
You could see she was a serious fisherman. She was carrying her pole in its tube and had on a large brimmed fishing cap of the type that's somewhat unique to fishermen, and wearing dark sunglasses. Even from across the stream, and down in the canyon from where I was, you could also tell that she had on one of those bug and sun resistant pull on shirts that some fishermen now wear.
She looked like a real fisherman of her vintage. I.e, one of the young fishermen in their 20s.
She was looking for a way down the canyon. I pointed to a place up stream. She nodded her head in affirmation.
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