On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down: Number 2: On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down, #2

FEBRUARY

February 1, 1884

English is a fucked-up language; it can be mastered through tough thorough thought, though. You would think if anywhere had a handle on it, it would be Oxford University. When they decided to compile a dictionary, it took twenty-three years just to complete the first section: A to Ant.

He told him that he loved only him. You can place the word only anywhere in that sentence. I learned a new word writing this piece: fascicle. A separately published installment of a book. It’s also a bundle of nerve or muscle fibers godfuckingdammit this language. Speaking of language, get a load of the initial title of the project: A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles: Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society. It eventually became The Oxford English Dictionary.

Work began in 1857. A to Ant wasn’t published until February 1, 1884. Eleven years later they finally gave it the aforementioned modern name, unofficially. Thirty-three years after that they finally finished the fucking thing. If you suck at math, it was 1928 when it was all done, seventy-one motherfucking years to complete this project. But it wasn’t just one book that you have from decades ago sitting lonely on your bookshelf because everyone uses the internet now unless you’re using the Scrabble Dictionary to challenge Bart Simpson on his use of kwyjibo. Holy shit spell check didn’t underline that. Bill Gates must be a fan of The Simpsons.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. It was ten volumes, with Volumes IX and X each split into two parts. The final fascicle was published in April of 1928, covering Wise to the end of W. Then the final volume came out covering V to the end of Z, not having been released as a fascicle. Fascicle fascicle fascicle. I won’t say now it sounds weird because it did from the first instance.

Then the supplements followed. The second edition, released in 1989, was twenty volumes. The third edition is in process because we keep adding words. A shit-ton of new words were added in 2021 alone, including anti-vaxxer and staycation. The head of Oxford University Press said it’s unlikely that the third edition will ever see print. They’re solely gonna internet that shit.

But why is it so fucking long? That’s because it’s a historical dictionary. We’re not just talking definitions, but the development of forms and meanings of words for those scholars who are interested in that shit. Despite being a big motherfucker—and yes that word is in the OED—it’s not the largest dictionary. In terms of number of pages, the Dutch dictionary is believed to be the biggest. It also wasn’t the first. There were much smaller English language dictionaries that preceded the OED. And the Italians, French, Spanish, and Chinese all had completed dictionaries before Oxford got to work on theirs.

February 2, 1959

Russians can be pretty dark. What the English-speaking world refers to as the Dyatlov Pass Incident, Russians call The Dyatlov Group demise. The demise of nine ski hikers in the Northern Ural Mountains was a fucking mystery.

I wrote was a mystery. It’s been solved. Maybe. But it sure was fucked up, leading to a ton of conspiracy hypotheses that ranged from the deaths being caused by military testing, to infrasonic wind-induced panic attacks, to a goddamn yeti or fucking aliens.

They were a group of ski hikers from the Ural Polytechnical Institute, led by Igor Dyatlov, a twenty-three-year-old engineering student. The pass was not yet named for him. It was the screwy circumstances of February 2, 1959, that a pass a mile away from said fuckery was later named in his memory.

There were ten people, eight men and two women, most of them fellow students of Dyatlov. All were experienced ski hikers with certifications and the whole bit. Their mission was to traverse almost 200 miles in difficult conditions to earn the highest of hiking certifications. They began on January 27 and one hiker, who had some health problems, turned back. Lucky guy.

Four days later they got into some weather and cut a camp into the snowy slope of Kholat Saykhl. That name means Dead Mountain, which isn’t at all ominous. When the group never showed up, a search was conducted. What investigators found was a headscratcher.

The tent, mostly buried in the snow, was cut open from the inside, with their clothes and boots and other winter survival gear still inside. There were nine sets of footprints, mostly barefoot or only wearing socks, leading away from the camp toward the woods below. It took months of snowmelt to find all the bodies, but what they revealed was strange indeed. They were barely dressed, scattered far and wide from the camp. The first five bodies found all died of hypothermia, with one only having a small skull fracture. But when they found the other four, holy shit. Some were missing their eyes, another lacked a tongue. On others, heads and chests were smashed.

The local Mansi people were interrogated; it was suggested the hikers were murdered for encroaching on their lands. This hypothesis was soon dismissed. It was labeled death by an unknown unnatural force and, being that this was the Soviet Union, hushed up. Then in 2019 the case was reopened, and the Russians said the deaths were due to an avalanche, which had been suggested back in 1959. But it didn’t add up; the conditions weren’t right and there was no evidence of an avalanche. Long story short, in 2021 researchers used computer modelling developed to create the movie Frozen to suggest that a small avalanche, basically a sixteen-foot slab of ice, landed on them due to their cutting into the slope, causing injuries not immediately fatal, creating a panicked exodus from the tent. The eyes and tongue were likely eaten by scavengers.

February 3, 1989

In June of 1981 the first official reports of a strange new disease were published. Fifteen months later they began to call that disease Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, AIDS for short. Before that it was often referred to as gay cancer, and that wasn’t the only misinformation perpetuated. But on February 3, 1989, Princess Diana hugged a boy in a pediatric AIDS unit in Harlem, helping to dismiss the belief that the disease could be spread via casual contact.

She held and touched several children on her solo visit to the United States, because she knew what she was doing. Diana was not uninformed on the subject; advocating for people with HIV/AIDS was a personal cause for the young royal. Say what you will about royalty and even Diana, this was using one’s fame for good. And it did help, because fear and misinformation were running rampant. Even after the term AIDS was coined it continued to be referred to as the gay plague, being seen as a disease that only affected gay men and IV drug users. And President Reagan (and his successor, Bush) took a let them die approach regarding the nation’s health policy.

The visit to Harlem Hospital was neither the beginning nor the end of Diana’s advocacy. Upon her death in 1997, Gavin Hart, Communications Director for the National AIDS Trust, said, Diana was the foremost ambassador for AIDS awareness on the planet and no one can fill her shoes.

While touring the Harlem Hospital Diana saw a seven-year-old boy in blue pajamas looking up at her. Are you very heavy? She asked him. Then she bent down, picked him up, and hugged him for two or three minutes, his head resting on her shoulder. He was not the only one. There were several other children in the ward Diana touched, held hands with, and hugged. It made international news, and the royal family was pissed.

Allegedly, the Queen said to Diana, Why don’t you get involved with something more pleasant?

It wasn’t the first time Diana had dared to touch an AIDS patient. Two years previous she was photographed shaking hands, and not wearing gloves, with a thirty-two-year-old man with HIV when she opened the UK’s first dedicated HIV/AIDS unit in London. Then she shook hands with eleven other patients. In 1991 Diana stated, AIDS does not make people dangerous to know, so you can shake their hands and give them a hug … you can share their homes, their workplaces, their playgrounds and toys. She continued to advocate for HIV/AIDS patients until her death, and her son Harry carries on her work. In 2016 Harry publicly got tested for HIV to help break the stigma of doing so and to show that it’s easy to do.

During Diana’s visit to Harlem Hospital the Director of Pediatrics said to the princess, AIDS is a virus infection. It is a disease. It is not a crime or a sin.

February 4, 1789

On February 4, 1789, George Washington was unanimously elected by the U.S. Electoral College as President Numero Uno. First guy to be top guy. Except no. He wasn’t actually the first. There were others before him. A whole bunch of them. Wait, what?

July 4 is celebrated as scare the shit out of your dog / terrorize veterans with PTSD / possibly lose some fingers day in America. The Declaration of Fuck You Britain happened on that day, in 1776. So, uh, who was running the show for the thirteen years between then and 1789? Some white guys were, that’s who. You might even recognize a name or two.

Yeah, it wasn’t technically President of the United States of America. Before the Declaration of Independence there were four dudes who were president of the United States in Congress Assembled. Sixteen months after the declaration the United States came up with the Articles of Confederation and it changed to president of the Congress of the Confederation and there were a bunch of those dudes too. A name you might recognize, John Hancock, served two terms, one with each title.

Unlike when Georgie took the mantle, it was more of a ceremonial position, at least at first. As the war with Britain progressed and the foundling nation began to get its constitutional shit together, the position became more prominent. In 1781 John Hanson was elected and Washington sent him a note saying, I congratulate your Excellency on your appointment to fill the most important seat in the United States. So either George was a total kiss ass or it wasn’t a nothing