Humor from Pepys' Diary

[snopes]

Comment: This is a variation of an old Jewish joke about a man who comes
to America and, if he has an Anglicized name, is asked what it was before
he changed it.

The source here is hard to believe, so I'll leave it to you to figure out
if this is just an antiquarian form of the joke to get some extra yucks.

--------------------------------------------

From H.L. Mencken's The American Language on surnames, quoting from the
Diaries of Samuel Pepys (1633 1703):

I take the following from Dr. Pepys' Diary in the Journal of the American
Medical Association:

"Today in ye clinic a tale told of Dr. Levy who hath had his name changed
to Sullivan. A month after he cometh again to ye court, this time wishing
to become Kilpatrick. On request for ye reason, he telleth ye court that
ye patients continually ask of him, 'What was your name before?' If
granted ye change he shall then tell them 'Sullivan.'"

[Chance]

It seems very unlikely, since from what I've seen, Pepys didn't write in such Olde Fashionede Englishe, so the ye this and ye that and "telleth" make it suspect to begin with. Still, I checked a couple of online texts of the diary, and the only use of "levy" I found was as a word, not a name. I couldn't find any instance of the name "Sullivan".

[Richard W]

Pepys wrote his diary in a sort of shorthand, so it's possible that the spelling of "ye" vs "the" and the verb form might be a matter of transliteration rather than the way he wrote it. Although you're right, I don't think his writing is usually presented that way, and by the time it was deciphered those forms were obsolete, so somebody would have had to be making it look deliberately archaic if so.

Entries from Pepys' diary containing the word Levy

Entries from Pepys' diary containing the word Sullivan (none)

The site doesn't have the complete text, however - the person running it is publishing an entry per day, and started in 2003, so he's only got 1660 - 1664 in there at the moment. The diary runs from 1660 - 1670; the dates in the OP are the dates of Pepys' life.

[lucy]

Hi, longtime lurker, first-time poster...

What's happened here, I think, is that somehow the 'Diary of Samuel Pepys' has gotten included, misleadingly, as part of the citation from Mencken's book.

Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association in the 1920s, 1930s, and (most of the) 1940s, had a column in that journal called 'Dr Pepys' Diary'. He even took it with him to the next journals he edited when he was kicked off JAMA.

In that column, he used to describe the various encounters he had in his busy editorial life. He travelled tons, giving lots of speeches, particularly about the supposed evils of 'socialized' medicine. He would also pass along whatever jokes, etc. were current among the doctors he met. And he and his readers seemed to enjoy rendering of said events in Ye Fake Olde Ostensibly Pepys-ish Speake.

He was also buddies with Mencken, at least for a while - so the inclusion in Mencken's volume is not surprising. Mencken loved Fishbein's energetic quack-busting and, um, deliberate writing style.

Wikipedia's entry on Fishbein is minimal, but see:
http://ead.lib.uchicago.edu/view.xqy...%3AKing&page=4

[Richard W]

Ah, that makes sense - thanks! I didn't stop to wonder what "Dr Pepys' Diary" would have been doing in the Journal of the American Medicine Association in the first place...

[TheLazenby]

We know it's right, it's in black and white, and it's all written down in his diary.

Steve "Naughty Samuel Peeps" Worek