“Antimacassar” is such a lovely Victorianism. We still have antimacassars — they’re those pieces of protective fabric you see at the top of your train or plane seat — but do you know why antimacassars are so called? Because in the nineteenth century Rowland’s Macassar Oil became such a popular unguent for gentlemen’s coiffures that the land was full of oily-haired chaps who, upon entering your drawing room, would settle back in your favorite chair — and uh-oh, there goes the fabric. Hence, the vital deployment of the antimacassar. Rowland’s Macassar Oil was one of the first products to be marketed nationally (and, indeed, internationally), and so universally known that Lewis Carroll put it in Alice Through the Looking-Glass:
His accents mild took up the tale:
He said ‘I go my ways,
And when I find a mountain-rill,
I set it in a blaze;
And thence they make a stuff they call
Rowlands’ Macassar-Oil –
Yet twopence-halfpenny is all
They give me for my toil.’Better yet, in Don Juan Lord Byron managed to rhyme it:
In virtue, nothing earthly could surpass her
Save thine ‘incomparable oil’, Macassar!Mark Steyn, “Self-Knitting Antimacassars”, Steyn Online, 2019-08-02.
September 23, 2023
QotD: In which we discover why they’re called antimacassars
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