Free Anonyponymous by John Bemelmans Marciano Page B

offered to resign if he was wrong. To Burnside’s surprise, Lincoln accepted his resignation and awarded the job to the most vicious of his critics, General Joseph Hooker.
    Burnside’s Civil War career was not over, however, as he played a key role in what would become known as the Battle of the Crater. In an attempt to break the stalemate at the Siege of Petersburg, Union leadership devised a Secret Plan. The first part of the operation went wondrously well—coal miners dug a shaft under Confederate lines and detonated an enormous cache of dynamite, killing scores of Johnny Reb. But as Burnside’s men were pursuing the flee-ing Southern troops, the plan went awry. A division of black troops tapped to lead the charge around the edge of the crater was pulled back, for fear of political repercussions if too many were killed (or so Grant later claimed). Unfamiliar with the plan, the replacement white soldiers decided, Wile E. Coyote–like, to take the most direct route across the battlefield: right into the crater. The Confederates reformed, circled the rim, and shot down Union troops like fish in a barrel. Burnside was finally, mercifully discharged, never to be recalled again.

    And yes, he had facial hair. In fact, his sideburns were so long that they met each other via the mustache, a nineteenth-century fashion that has yet to come back into vogue. This muttonchops-to-mustache style was called the Burnside, or burnsides; at some point the word did a flip-flop, and sideburns receded from the nose until they stayed firmly hugging the ears, where they belong.

    sil·hou·ette n. A shape distinctly outlined by background.
    While living in London, Étienne de Silhouette stumbled onto the black-magic secrets of Anglo-Saxon capitalism and fiscal responsibility. He returned to Paris spreading the dark gospel, no more popular on the Champs-Élysées in the mid-1700s than now. Silhouette, however, had the ear of the royal mistress, Madame de Pompadour, through whose devices he was elevated to be Contrôleur général des finances . To pay down the crushing debt being incurred from the ongoing Seven Years’ War, Silhouette suggested what amounted to an import of the British Window Tax, although he wanted to tax doors too, and just about everything else he could think of. Silhouette also proposed slashing the pay of bureaucrats—again, never a way into the Gallic heart—and even ordered the king to melt down the royal plate.
    The most amazing thing about Silhouette’s departure after nine months in the office was that he lasted so long. Parisian ridicule of the finance minister didn’t stop with his fall from grace, and anything made on the cheap was said to be done à la silhouette , including the then-popular method of producing a portrait without having to draw, in which the “artist” traced the subject’s shadow onto a piece of black paper, cut it out, and stuck it in a frame.

    so·lon n. A wise and august legislator; generally used mockingly.
    Unable to live with the despised legal code of Draco, Athens voted to give another legislator dictatorial powers to correct it sometime around 593 b.c. As Archon Eponymos * Solon imposed a basket of laws that would come to be regarded as the world’s first constitution and earn Solon honor as one of the Seven Sages. Solon erased capital punishment for most crimes save murder and lessened legal distinctions between rich and poor. According to Draco’s laws, a debtor who fell behind on payments became a serf or was forced into slavery, even if he was an honest farmer and Athenian citizen. Under Solon such persons were freed.
    Solon is also said to have set up state-sponsored brothels, wanting to make sex “democratically” available to all. Not for nothing was he known as the people’s champion.
    While draconian has entered the wider vocabulary, solon is mostly relegated to wonky political reporting. Maybe that’s because draconian is evocative of dragon and Dracula ; when