In American pioneer days, when the land was cleared for farming, there were many felled trees lying around; these, being discarded material, were
lumber
— which later was put to good use.
15
American writers from time to time use the word in the English way (Poe, in his “The Rationale of Verse,” wrote that metrical quantity “is a point in whose investigation the lumber of mere learning may be dispensed with, if ever in any”); but the reverse is seldom true: Adam Smith is the only writer from Great Britain I can come up with who used our sort of lumber several times.16 In The Wealth of Nations (1776), he writes:
In a country quite covered with wood, where timber consequently is of little or no value, the expense of clearing the ground is the principal obstacle to improvement. By allowing the colonies a very extensive market for their lumber, the law endeavours to faciliate improvement by raising the price of a commodity which would otherwise be of little value, and thereby enabling them to make some profit of what would otherwise be a mere expense.
Incidentally, the Poe and the Adam Smith I found by searching the Library of the Future CD-ROM, Version 3, which gives forty-five competent lumberians (not Alexander Pope, though), from Harriet Beecher Stowe (“The garret of the house that Legree occupied, like most other garrets, was a great, desolate space, dusty, hung with cobwebs, and littered with cast-off lumber”), and Oscar Wilde (“The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life,” says Lord Illingworth, in A Woman of No Importance; “The old are in Life’s lumber-room”), to Johann Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson in translation (“The stairs served afterwards for a kind of lumber-room”).
Webster’s Second (1934), the dictionary Nabokov loved, includes the obsolete pawning sense of lumber as its first definition for the word; its one quotation comes from the prologue to The Scarlet Letter—
The heap of Customhouse
lumber. Hawthorne
— which refers to the yellowing documents and the torn piece of scarlet cloth in the second story of the Custom-House that betray Salem’s guilty secret.17Webster’s Third (1961) scraps the Hawthornian lumber and replaces it with a bit of forward-looking table-thumpery halfway between timber-cutting and encumbrance-clearing—“<get rid of the useless ~ that blocks our highways of thought — John Dewey>”—substituting
Dewey because (as Herbert Morton shows in his valuable history of Webster’s Third) its unsentimental editor, Philip Gove, wanted quotations that pulled their weight of definitional meaning, not ones which merely demonstrated that a famous name had employed the word. “The hard truth is that literary flavor in a dictionary quotation represents a luxury of a bygone age,” Gove wrote, heartbreakingly18—and it is true that Hawthorne’s Custom-House context doesn’t get you very far if you don’t already understand what he’s talking about.
Funk & Wagnalls New Standard Dictionary (1963), however, manages to quote Hawthorne19and convey meaning:
2. Discarded household goods; disused articles put aside.
Happy the man who in a rainy day can betake himself to a huge garret, stored, like that of the Manse, with lumber that each generation has left behind it from a period before the revolution.
HAWTHORNE MOSSES, The Old Manse p. 26. [H. M. & CO. 1891.]
(Notice that Funk & Wagnalls gives specific page references, like the OED. Webster’s doesn’t.) Isaac Funk and his heirs also call our attention to a couplet from Cowper’s “Table Talk” (1782) about poetry in the time of Cromwelclass="underline"
3. Hence, worthless stuff; rubbish.
Verse, in the finest mould of fancy cast,
Was
lumber
in an age so void of taste.
COWPER Table Talk 1. 627.
The rest of Cowper’s passage (one of three by him, according to the English Poetry Database, that have lumber in them) is good:
But when the second Charles assumed the sway,
And arts revived beneath a softer day,
Then like a bow long forced into a curve,
The mind released from too constrain’d a nerve,
Flew to its first position with a spring
That made the vaulted roofs of pleasure ring.
(But Cowper is not at all pleased, as he goes on to say, with the “dissolute and hateful school” of indecent poets that surrounded Charles II, by whom he means men like John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, appointed a Gentleman of the Bedchamber in 1665, and author of the most beautiful piece of lumber-poetry extant, which I plan to quote in a moment.)
The last meaning in the Funk & Wagnalls entry, flagged by a dagger to indicate that it is obsolete, is “6†. A pawnshop,” and there follows a generous quotation from Trench’s On the Study of Words about lombard-rooms. Webster’s Third, by contrast, entirely eliminates the debtor-creditor meaning, except to allude to it in a capsule etymology: “perh. alter. of 1lombard; fr. the use of pawnshops as storehouses of disused property.”
Yet Webster’s Third is much better about the modern sense of lumber-room than either Webster’s Second or Funk & Wagnalls: besides furnishing a primary meaning (“a room in which unused furniture and other discarded articles are kept: STOREROOM”), it gives a separate figurative submeaning that includes the following ungrudgingly long but apt citation: “<go through life … filling the lumber room of their minds with odds and ends of a grudge here, a jealousy there — J.L.Liebman>.”
Who was J. L. Liebman? Joshua Loth Liebman was a Boston rabbi and “one of the leading radio preachers in America,” according to the author’s note at the back of his Peace of Mind (1946)—“his sermons over NBC, ABC and CBS coast-to-coast networks have been heard by millions.” He is dead and forgotten now, as so many are. Dead, wee become the Lumber of the World, wrote the Earl of Rochester, around 1674, immortally translating a chorus from Seneca’s Trojan Women:
After Death, nothing is, and nothing Death,
The utmost Limit of a gaspe of Breath;
Let the Ambitious Zealot, lay aside
His hopes of Heav’n, (whose faith is but his Pride)
Let Slavish Soules lay by their feare;
Nor be concern’d which way, nor where,
After this Life they shall be hurl’d;