This page lists archived tumblr posts in my puutterings project (2022, ongoing). Numbers at left are links to the archived posts. Columns are sortable.
| ↕ | ↕ | ↕ | ↕ | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1912 | Chicago (South Park Commissioners) | nevertheless | economy; efficiency |
| 2 | 1916 | Collins, A. Frederick | not a bit of it, it’s only puttering around | electricity; experiment |
| 3 | 1910 | McGlauflin, Idabelle Handicraft for Girls | there is a difference | education |
| 4 | 1914 | Farnum, Royal B. | in one minute, and vigorous execution | education |
| 5 | 1860 | Clifford, Nell | who ever heard | vanitas |
| 6 | 1860 | Puttering, Judith | Judith | obituary |
| 7 | 1917 | Anderson, Sherwood | always | The Seven Arts |
| 8 | 1927 | Hull, Helen R. | past the need; she could spend all day in the greenhouse | solitude; The Seven Arts |
| 9 | 1911 | Watts, Mary Stanbery | the meagre remains | |
| 10 | 1911 | Dustin, S. T. | ESS-TEE-DEE | dandruf; hair |
| 11 | 1917 | Wyatt, Edith | an abundant element of | Elinore Pruitt Stewart |
| 12 | 1918 | Lewis, Sinclair | curious puttering studies, crackling coals | gray centuries |
| 13 | 1922 | Chen, Da (通夫) | as a “monstrous” creature, puffing | China; flappers |
| 14 | 1922 | Lockert, Lacy (on John Galsworthy) | the man of broad, clear, imaginative vision, not | experiment; vagaries |
| 15 | 2004 | Knopp, Lisa (on Frank Zyback) | metal things at the hardware store | center-pivot irrigators; invention |
| 16 | 1827 | Hedge, Mary Ann (M. A. H.) | about a bit, especially to wait | |
| 17 | 1843 | Emerson, Ralph Waldo | to use the country phrase | nails |
| 18 | 1841 | Seneca, The New Genesee Farmer | small potatoes; long manure | long manure; root culture |
| 19 | 1855 | Stephens, Harriet Marion | or, Passion and Reality | Hagar; race |
| 20 | 1849 | Knickerbocker, The | broke in with this searching remark | coincidences |
| 21 | 1863 | Adams, Mrs. G. H. (Elba, Wis.) | nothing that he would call any thing, or you either, taken separately | how any one could get tired |
| 22 | 1903 | Wright, Joseph English Dialect Dict. | to walk slowly or feebly; to halt, hobble... | lexicon |
| 23 | 1900 | Lowe, F. T. | reserves | telegraphic code; social code |
| 24 | 1924 | Hull, Helen R. | departed with his gloves | puer aeternus |
| 25 | 1843 | Johnson, Samuel; The Knickerbocker | I do not much wish well to discoveries, for | discoveries |
| 26 | 1839 | Pierce, Daniel Thompson | Oh, nothing very special — nothing of any great consequence — — | Vermont |
| 27 | 1860 | Soule, Caroline A. | my economy quilt | clergymen’s wives; economy |
| 27a | 1860 | Soule, Caroline A. | my economy quilt | transcription, ibid. |
| 28 | 1865 | Stoddard, Elizabeth | with gum-arabic and sea-weed | |
| 29 | 1921 | Anderson, Sherwood | about with a camera, nowhere into nothing | |
| 30 | 1866 | Alger, W. R. (on Madame Swetchine) | of time, and no exhaling vapor | |
| 31 | 1855 | Fern, Fanny (Sarah Payson Willis) | it would be stepping off your pedestal, you’ve got other things to do | antimonial; husbands |
| 32 | 1855 | Fern, Fanny (Sarah Payson Willis) | and, with the timely aid of a stray sunbeam | “good-for-nothingness” |
| 33 | 1897 | Root, Frederick Stanley | power through repose | Annie Payson Call |
| 34 | 1901 | New Mexico, Governor of | a visionary scheme, it was declared | date palm; desert; present signs |
| 35 | 1911 | Cameron, Ruth (Persis Dwight Hannah) | and they’ve rusted and most ruined the skirt | class; housekeeping |
| 36 | 1902 | Sylvester, Sara | the seams, with the comforting remark | sanitarium |
| 37 | 1898 | Lloyd, Alfred Henry | what he does or makes is wholly idle, being useless to him in the next minute | action; doubt; laboratories |
| 38 | 1897 | Herrick, Robert | She wondered what he had been so anxious to burn. | papers |
| 39 | 1904 | Clarke, Lulu MacClure | The exigencies of the case demand | feminist; some peculiar reasons |
| 40 | 1908 | Domestic Engineering | regular monkey and parrot time | Master of Mechanical Details |
| 41 | 1911 | Automobile Topics | that the electric is essentially a woman’s vehicle | EV; automotive; gender |
| 42 | 1903 | Hardy, Arthur Sherburne | But the life is so narrow, their interests so small... | socio-economic class |
| 43 | 1902 | Clark, Edward B. | And the meadows are green. | the forty-thousand dollar carnation |
| 43a | 1902 | Farmers’ Review | lightly and disappeared | negro, negroes; racism; whites |
| 44 | 1900 | Crockett, Montgomery A. | of hemorrhage, and the avoidance of “puttering” during the operation | gynecology; shock; surgery |
| 45 | 1901 | Marcy, Henry O. | the chief cornerstone in the new edifice | gynecology; instrumentalism |
| 46 | 1911 | Kimball, Atkinson (pseud.) | green to see what happens | conceptualist musing; amateurism |
| 47 | 1918 | Wallace, Emma Gary | so much of it fragmentary | clergy; philosophical pharmacy |
| 48 | 1991 | Waugh, Douglas M.D. | not only unnecessary but also of little or no immediate importance | mindless activity; recuperative |
| 49 | 1918 | Norris, Charles Gilman | the clink of glasses. presently | en passant |
| 50 | 1918 | Bulletin of Photography | makeshift things, things that are | a day of doers, of men who see |
| 51 | 2021 | Fitbit | for a plurality of moments of interest | metabolic equivalent of task (MET) |
| 52 | 1922 | Sies, Alice Corbin | all bound up in the use of the hands | Spontaneous and Supervised Play |
| 53 | 1920 | Clum, Woodworth | ultimates and confiscation, pink variety | A. W. Calhoun; W. E. Zeuch |
| 54 | 1920 | Cooke, Edmund Vance | to train the ants to play and dance, to teach the toad to stutter | verse; recuperative |
| 55 | 1918 | Tuttle, W. C. | around, and writing letters | loitering; suspicion; westerns |
| 56 | 1942 | Parks, Robert O. | it was raining outside. | the arts of war; recuperative |
| 57 | 1915 | Hale, Louise Closser | some dull wooden station, muddy town | motoring; mud; recuperative |
| 58 | 1915 | Universal Drafting Machine Co. | enemy to accuracy, and produces bad habits of thought | drawing; mental hygiene |
| 59 | 1912 | Austin, Mary Hunter | fairly bristling with an objectionable maleness | anger; offensiveness; retail |
| 60 | 1864 | The Country Gentleman, N. J. C. | any single thing which can be enumerated | agriculture; Mr. Anti-putterer |
| 61 | 1878 | Bell, Mrs. Lucia Chase | here a little, and there a little of | learning; reading; recuperative |
| 62 | 1961 | Caillois, Roger | wan... detached and idle, certain | game theory; orientalizing |
| 63 | 1879 | Tourgée, Albion Winegar | legislators and theorizers have been puttering and quibbling upon the idea | racism; reconstruction |
| 64 | 1980 | Tyler, Anne | a tinkering, puttering, hardware sort | hardware; tinkering |
| 65 | 1884 | Pierce, L. B. | that all skilled work is puttering | the cheapness of land; recuperative |
| 66 | 1886 | Jennings, Thomas | with this burlesque as a consequence | residential schools; Menominee |
| 67 | 1892 | Thwaites, Reuben Gold (on Lyman Draper) | and as for generalization he abhorred it | American border history |
| 68 | 1891 | Eggleston, Edward (and A. S. Winston) | a readjustment of the relations between the moon and tides | aërial therapeutics |
| 69 | 1895 | McConnell, Alice Barber | and she began the “puttering” rambling over the foot-hills | relief; temperance |
| 70 | 1897 | Powers, S.; Clute, Oscar | with water and shade and perhaps, after light frost in November | strawberries; casava; the ministry |
| 71 | 1902 | Wilson, Harry Leon | absolute zero | on fortune, and spending it |
| 72 | 1903 | Cotton, Alfred C., M.D. | the man who intends | breastfeeding; maleness |
| 73 | 1912 | Snow, Mary S. | the less money, the more need for psychology | comparative puttering; economy |
| 74 | 1906 | Kuyper, Abraham | varnish and plaster... the well-known mirage of the desert | anti-modernism; jeremiad |
| 75 | 1913 | Flandrau, Charles Macomb | the reduction of puttering to a science | minimalist living |
| 76 | 1907 | Horn, P. W. (Houston, Texas) | and so long as a blind trail | education; habit-formation |
| 77 | 1913 | Weed, Clarence Moores | on my “abandoned farm” | herpetology |
| 78 | 1905 | Whiting, Maisie B. | that Sobriety was puttering around here | The Pink Swan Pattern |
| 79 | 1913 | Johnson, C. N. | an ingenuity not to be despised, a material of which we are never certain | decay; dental; pyorrhea alveolaris |
| 80 | 1906 | Miller, Charles C. | when in a good season there ought to be lively work | apiary; starvation |
| 81 | 1907 | Indian School Journal (Chilocco) | the most genuine surviving relic, their wares spread out about them | residential schools; wrinklings |
| 82 | 1905 | Austin, Mary Hunter | oners. Besides | — |
| 83 | 1908 | Sweet, Frank H. | big clump of tickle grass and flung | ageism; puttering as obligation |
| 83a | 1908 | Sweet, Frank H. | A New Start | transcription, ibid. |
| 84 | 1919 | Treves, André | about’; and not until long after does he awake | idleness; rehabilitation; war |
| 85 | 1921 | Perry, Ralph Barton | Domestic Superstitions | gender politics; domestic economy |
| 86 | 1921 | Collins, Harrison | black threads for lines | Japan; mistranslation |
| 87 | 1921 | — | cynic stock, petty mire | H. D.; The Bookman |
| 88 | 1922 | Black, Alexander (and Esther Brock Bird) | the peering, puttering analyses of subject, the apprehensive discrimination | What’s in a Place?; The Bookman |
| 89 | 1921 | Riess, John | as he is today; and his duty toward | engineering; labor; AFL |
| 90 | 1996 | Gornick, Vivian | in a drawerful of little cardboard boxes | gender; hardware; small anxieties |
| 91 | 1911 | Fay, Charles Norman | with details. a live issue. another plain tale. so long. | Chicago; “Is Democracy a Failure?” |
| 92 | 1916 | Stone, George E. | tamping and troweling | shade trees; unscrupulous workers |
| 93 | 1914 | Caldwell, Daniel E. | that he should do this and do that | Pacific Poultrycraft; rabbit-keeping |
| 94 | 1915 | Pattison, Harold | arch enemy to highest usefulness | clergy; ministry; distractions |
| 95 | 1920 | Corbett, Elizabeth Frances | up to a certain point; that point passed | painting; procrastination |
| 96 | 1918 | Burroughs, Edgar Rice | a hopeless endeavour | north; The Gods of Mars |
| 97 | 1918 | Adams, Edward F. (Commonwealth Club) | It does not get anywhere. | immigration; race; California |
| 98 | 1918 | Sharp, Dallas Lore | in some Minnesota pasapoplectic struggle, plover though it be | “Birds of the Salt Marsh” |
| 99 | 1922 | Boddy, Luther | the exhaust? that noise? | the Black body; racism |
| 100 | 1923 | Schwimmer, Rosika | another puttering utpouring | Cécile Tormay; Hungarian politics |
| 101 | 1959 | Van Gogh, Vincent | silly theory, in four columns | — |
| 102 | 1925 | Jones, Marc Edmund | planing away the surface | Codex Occultus; Sabian Assembly |
| 103 | 1912 | Wells, Kate Gannett | needless ironing. | domestic economy; efficiency |
| 103a | 1912 | Wells, Kate Gannett | Tangible Present, Thoughts of Strange Things, A Silent Appeal | ibid.; context |
| 104 | 1883 | Champney, Lizzie W.; The Continent | and, strange to say, he went over the mountain this evening | woman’s work; Albion W. Tourgée |
| 105 | 2010 | Schulenberg, Thomas S., et al | pee’i’i’i’i’i’i’i’i’i’i’i’i’i’i’i’i’ew. | birdsong; ornithology; Peru |
| 106 | 1875 | Pollock, Frederick | sparing of words, yet by a condensation | William Macready; putterance |
| 107 | 1782 | Baker, David Erskine | styled in the ride; page one of Levell’d. Wood | putterance; “like will to like” |
| 108 | 1915 | Silas, Uncle | puttering light in the leaves | efficiency; poetry; stenography |
| 109 | 1911 | Mulford, Clarence Edward | And there was that geologist; he must have slipped one noon | innocent or suspicious puttering |
| 110 | 1904 | Bryant, Lilian True | under the trees in the hay fields, with the same Latin grammar | education; Nathaniel T. True |
| 111 | 1881 | Dall, Caroline Wells Healey | a sort of angry impatience, a uniformity of change | proto-influencers; California |
| 112 | 1900 | Lee, Jennette (Barbour Perry) | afraid of being laughed at. It was his conscience. | gender; woman’s work |
| 113 | 2012 | Summerfield, Mark | with a map | Go; ordered map; Philip K. Dick |
| 114 | 1977 | Babitz, Eve | the world got slower | baseball; Los Angeles; motoring |
| 115 | 1994 | Eigner, Larry | sundry times, around | Larry Eigner; Baruch Spinoza; ToC |
| 116 | 1975 | Ashbery, John | a lot of here and there | dust; method |
| 117 | 1923 | Kelley, Edith Summers | of much commoner clay; a mere clod | pestilence |
| 118 | 1868 | Blood, Benjamin Paul | these simple imitations, as dissimilar as a horse and an intuition | alphabet; poetical engines |
| 119 | 1913 | Jennings, Al; Irwin, Will | Dick, engage this person in conversation while I look around. | ineptitude; lawnessness; Oklahoma |
| 120 | 1915 | Lockhart, Caroline | thick, and a safe distance from the work | mining; Wyoming |
| 121 | 1903 | Jamieson, Malcolm McGregor | ever so far removed from mere | “the most elemental, the highest art” |
| 122 | 1920 | Chatham, Dennis and Marion; A. L. M. | anything that is frankly trivial | dictionaries; woodpeckers |
| 123 | 1902 | Chicago Dry Goods Reporter | lines on a side street, circling | Ray Bradbury; Oklahoma |
| 124 | 1929 | Wolfe, Albert Benedict | both virgin wool and shoddy | Foundation pennies; insignificances |
| 125 | 1910 | Gilman, Charlotte Perkins | talking machines; alphabets of dead languages | ageism; humanness |
| 126 | 1912 | Clark, Mary Gail (Gomez) | and they turned their attention to the drama | gender-fluid; nuclear; abstraction |
| 127 | 1960 | Nash, Jay B.; Fyodor Dostoevsky | a bridge; a character of uselessness | leisure; work, purposeful |
| 128 | 1925 | Simmons, Charles Finlay | or a whe-e r r r r o o o of a more sudden low goop-goop | birdsong; ornithology; Texas |
| 129 | 1922 | Lee, Gerald Stanley | a saw and a nail, a passing word | exercise; unkrinkling; walking |
| 130 | 1875 | Hering, Constantine | Borax. Plumbum. Sepia, can scarcely. | homeopathy; materia medica |
| 131 | 2015 | Baume, Sara | Here’s my driftwood. joining the swatches. | pottering |
| 132 | 1913 | Lagerstedt, Albert | by blowing out the gas | filibustering; W. K. Rogers |
| 132a | 1913 | Lagerstedt, Albert | a cup of cream. I belong to no church | William Kissane Rogers |
| 132b | 1919 | Juda, Miss Fanny | California Filibusters | filibustering; William Walker, et al. |
| 133 | 1933 | Olson, Charles; Herman Melville | stranger lands, disturbed the dust would be | presentiments; rovings |
| 134 | 1890 | Hamsun, Knut; Lyngstad, Sverre | puslende pusler, pusle, pusled | some strips of paper |
| 135 | 1874 | Perkins, Frederic Beecher | the huge dark ungainly mass of | order; disorder, daughters |
| 136 | 1991 | Adams, Alice; Norris, Charles Gilman | but he was unaccustomed to it | gardening; orts; Berkeley |
| 137 | 1977 | Handke, Peter | then silence. in the end | — |
| 138 | 2013 | various | suttera puttera; ja, doch, schon | putterance; and followed by a pause |
| 139 | 1989 | King, Florence | sputtering, instead of | gardening; orts |
| 140 | 1909 | Tracy, Virginia | the gray stage, the gray | grays; theatre |
| 141 | 1924 | Seabury, David | gray-haired men, their contraptions and strange sentences | bench vs desk; grays; telegraphy |
| 142 | 1903 | Ford, Guy Stanton | utterances of, hopeless | Prussia |
| 143 | 1925 | Levick, M. B. | I guess that’s taking dictation | putterment |
| 143a | — | Levick, M. B. | writings, sorted | ibid.; context |
| 144 | 1878 | Woodruff, George H., et al | all conspired to divest the wilderness of its romance | puuttering; Joliet; “Fort Nonsense” |
| 145 | 1859 | Ainsworth, Robert; Anthon, Charles | a strawberry. a puuttering or sound | puuttering; to have nothing to do |
| 146 | 2011 | Sutherland, John | do not fall happily from the lips | putterage (bricolage); method |
| 147 | 1913 | Thorndike, E. L. | aimless in the sense | all; because it is what it is |
| 148 | 1957 | Du Bois, W. E. B. | What became of him? | race |
| 149 | 1952 | du Bois, William Pène | Not at all. | interior décor |
| 150 | 1950 | Du Bois, Theodora | planning this improvement and that | “Next year we’ll do so and so.” |
| 151 | 1972 | Gorky State Pedagogical Institute | graphomania; in the way, in the same way, not the most important ones | putterage; разговорной речи |
| 152 | 1922 | Forman, Henry James | Oh, there’s Boccaccio | even moves to the country |
| 153 | 1973 | Audio-Visual Education Center, UMich | a rainy Thursday; the washing machine won’t start. | boredom; bricolage; French |
| 154 | 1998 | Clover, Carol J.; Douglas, Stan | a zero point much like | gardening; mud; out of synch |
| 155 | 2008 | Storr, Robert; Taylor, Al | at this juncture | ad nauseum; exhausts its utility |
| 156 | 1927 | Noyes, Pierrepont | comparing passages, yesterday and tomorrow | — |
| 157 | 1902 | Noyes, Charles Johnson | several things, nothing much | Uncle Silas; old lame darkey |
| 158 | 1923 | Noyes, John Humphrey | little signs and omens, devil’s providences they might be called | repudiations; Oneida Community |
| 159 | 1938 | Frontier Bees and Honey | we talked about margins, the necessary rule of | Alfred Noyes; apiary; fit and fill |
| 160 | 1914 | Young, Rose Emmet | got drowned in the dishwater | apophony; lumber; middle age |
| 161 | 1889 | Mulford, Prentice | two hours a day | apophony; “Thoughts are Things” |
| 161a | — | Mulford, Prentice | writings, sorted; and about | “his was a wanderer’s life” |
| 162 | 1871 | Blackwell, Antoinette Brown | a late sense [of] sand, and barnacles still | apophony; clergy; mementos |
| 162a | 1980 | Leach, William E. | its discursiveness, its failure to define | Antoinette Brown Blackwell |
| 163 | 1886 | Farmers’ Review | on a northern or northwestern slope, this need but little further | agriculture; apophony |
putterings what
I cannot recall what caused me to malinger over the word “puttering” — was it the Sherwood Anderson appearance in The Seven Arts ? — and to engage in another of my trawlings. But this one is different.
The lexical and etymological aspects of the word, although various, are one thing; its uses and contexts another. Who uses which of its senses, to what ends. Who gets to putter. Who must not. Who is accused of puttering, and who does the accusing, or assumes entitlement to do so. Who has permission to putter, who not. Where is it the theme of reflection, and where used as shorthand, and in both wheres, for what. Where does its inclusion in alliterative chains — congeries — owe as much to sound as sense. Some extended ruminations on the word putter would redeem it; others condemn. So much policing.
Gender and class enter into this. Maybe race.
Concerns of this sort have not much occupied or driven my previous google books-search based trawlings. Here, they are at least part of the work. With only a few exceptions, usages don’t go back far, so while the findings were many, they are relatively finite. These tumblr posts (and this html archive) are primarily a way for me to keep track of what I’ve found, a kind of aide-mémoire that can prevent my getting buried under my own heap of findings. I only publish them, so to speak, as a way of pushing them away, keeping them at bay for the time being. And too, this project itself is only another temporizing instance of my puttering.
12 August 2022