Assassinated! Abe and Fido
QUESTION How did Fido become a generic dog’s name?
IN Latin, Fido means ‘I trust’ or ‘I am faithful’. The enduring popularity of this name as a representative of all dogs stems from a pet belonging to Abraham Lincoln.
The politician was a huge animal lover who kept cats, dogs and rabbits. Psychologists have suggested these pets were a form of therapy because he was prone to dark bouts of depression.
Lincoln adopted a floppy-eared mongrel that he named Fido. The dog lived up to his name: he would trail around after Lincoln, carrying a parcel by the string tied around it, and wait outside the barbershop while his master had a trim.
After Lincoln became president, he was concerned that the long trip to Washington DC from the family home in Springfield, Illinois, would terrify Fido.
So the dog was given into the care of neighbours. The Lincolns even gave them their sofa so Fido would feel at home.
Two of Lincoln’s sons, Tad and Willie, were upset about leaving Fido behind, so Lincoln took them to FW Ingmire’s Photographic Studio, where a number of pictures of the dog were taken.
These were widely reproduced and led to Fido becoming a popular dog’s name.
Following Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, hundreds of heartbroken mourners gathered around the family house. The faithful pet was brought back to his original home to meet the grieving public.
Tragically, Fido was killed the following year. The genial dog had approached a sleeping tramp who lashed out in a panic, stabbing poor Fido to death.
Emma Freeman, Stafford.
QUESTION I’ve heard that the term ‘boycott’ originated here in Ireland. Is this true?
THE word ‘boycott’ did indeed originate in Ireland, in Co. Mayo, in the late 19th century, and has since passed into worldwide use.
Boycott was the surname of a land agent who became notorious after he was ostracised by the local community, enraged by the way in which he was evicting tenants on the estate he managed.
Charles Cunningham Boycott (1832-1897) was English, a native of Norfolk, and a former officer in the British army. He had served in the 39th regiment, which brought him to Ireland for the first time. After he retired from military service, Boycott decided to stay in Ireland and in 1854 he settled on Achill Island to farm.
He rented 810 hectares of land from the Protestant Mission on Achill and did well enough to build the substantial Corrymore House for himself and his family; it’s still there today, near Keem Bay and the village of Dooagh.
Then he decided to move to mainland Mayo, and in 1872 became a land agent for Lord Erne, who owned vast tracts of land in the Ballinrobe area of the county. The rents charged to tenants were exorbitant and evictions, organised by Boycott, were frequent and often bloody affairs.
By 1880 the Land League’s campaign for fair rent, fixity of tenure and free sale was well under way and opposition to numerous evictions was gathering pace.
When Boycott set about evicting 11 tenants, local people had had enough and retaliated. The Mayo branch of the Land League urged Boycott’s employees to withdraw their labour and a campaign began to ignore him locally.
All local services to him were withdrawn. Boycott became a marked man, afraid not of being shot but of being ostracised by the community.
Everywhere he went, he faced scorn, silence, disdain and derision from local people. Incensed by what was happening, he made the fatal mistake of going public on the issue. He wrote a letter to The Times in London, in October 1880, outlining all the indignities he was suffering.
His blacksmith was threatened with murder if he did any more work for him and his laundress was ordered to stop doing his washing. Shopkeepers had stopped sending him supplies, the crops on his own farm were being trampled underfoot and the cattle driven out onto the road. Boycott said in his letter: ‘My ruin is openly avowed as the object of the Land League unless I throw up everything and leave the country.’
Within a month of that letter being published, 400 British soldiers were sent to Ballinrobe to try and restore order. By this stage, the story had gone worldwide and was being widely reported in English language newspapers across the globe.
Less than two months after that original letter had been published, Boycott conceded defeat, abandoning his home at Lough Mask House, which is still there today.
He left Ireland on December 1, 1880. He became a land agent in Suffolk and died there in 1897, by which time his name had become a byword for defeating tyranny by peaceful means.
By the end of 1880, the nonviolent boycott tactic had spread to many other parts of Ireland and it became one of the most successful campaigns ever used against the British in Ireland.
The word ‘boycott’, derived from his surname, has, in the years since, become synonymous with peaceful opposition to oppression around the world.
Gary O’Toole, by email.
QUESTION A single word or even letter can change a legal contract. What are the most devastating examples?
IN 1872, a rogue comma in the US Tariff Act cost taxpayers nearly $2 million (worth a cool $40 million today, or about €34million).
The original 1870 Act allowed ‘fruit-plants, tropical and semitropical for the purpose of propagation or cultivation’ to be exempt from import tariffs. When revised two years later, the hyphen between ‘fruit’ and ‘plants’ was accidentally replaced with a comma. Suddenly fruit could be imported without charge.
In 2015, Companies House records in Britain were amended to show that the engineering firm Taylor & Sons had been wound up in 2009. They meant to list a Taylor & Son. As a result, a 124-yearold company went bankrupt after suppliers cancelled contracts and creditors withdrew investment.
Taylor & Sons Ltd sued Companies House for £8.8 million and reached a settlement in 2017.
In 2003, the Japanese investment bankers Mizuho Securities attempted to sell a single share for 610,000 yen (€3,550). However, a clerical error reversed the numbers and made 610,000 shares available for a single yen.
Despite that number of shares being substantially greater than Mizuho’s holdings, the exchange went ahead, resulting in a loss of 40.7billion yen (€239million).
Mizuho brought a lawsuit against the Tokyo Stock Exchange and in 2009 was awarded 10.7billion yen (€61million) in damages, so still lost €178million.
Will Smart, Eckington, Derbyshire.