Hatter (pronounced hat-er)
(1) A maker or seller of hats.
(2) In Australian slang (1) a person who has become
eccentric from living alone in a remote area or (2) a person who lives alone in
the bush, as a herder or prospector (now archaic and dating from the 1850s, a synecdoche
of “mad as a hatter”).
(3) A student or member of the athletic program at
Stetson University in Florida.
(4) In dialectical South Scots, to bother; to get someone
worked up (and thus related to the modern “to hassle”).
1350–1400: From the Middle English hatter, the construct
being hat + -er. Hat was from the Middle
English hat (head covering), from the
Old English hæt (head-covering, hat),
from the Proto-Germanic hattuz (hat),
from the primitive Indo-European kadh
(to guard, cover, care for, protect). It was cognate with the North Frisian hat (hat), the Danish hat (hat), the Swedish hatt (hat), the Icelandic hattur
(hat), the Latin cassis (helmet), the
Lithuanian kudas (bird's crest or
tuft), the Avestan xaoda (hat), the Persian خود (xud) (helmet)
and the Welsh cadw (to provide for,
ensure). The –er suffix was from the Middle English –er & -ere, from the Old English
-ere, from the Proto-Germanic -ārijaz, thought usually to have been borrowed
from Latin –ārius and reinforced by the synonymous but unrelated Old French –or
& -eor (the Anglo-Norman variant was -our),
from the Latin -(ā)tor, from the primitive Indo-European -tōr.
The –er suffix was added to verbs to create a person or thing that
does an action indicated by the root verb; used to form an agent noun. If added to a noun it usually denoted an
occupation. Hatter is a noun and the rare hattering & hattered
are verbs; the noun plural is hatters.
Lindsay Lohan wearing hats.
The synonyms are hatmaker (or hat-maker) & milliner. As makers of hats, the difference between a
hatter and a milliner is that a milliner is a hat-maker specializing (historically
bespoke headpieces) in women's headwear (and works at a millinery shop), while
a hatter makes hats for men (and works at a hattery). In the business of selling hats the
distinction blurred, especially in the case of operations which dealt with hats
for both men and women. As a retailer, a
hatter could deal either exclusively in hats for men for those for both sexes
whereas what was sold by a millinery was (at least intended) only for women. Milliner was from the Middle English Milener (native of Milan), the construct
an irregular form of Milan + -er, the link explained by the northern Italian
city being the source of many of the fine garments for women imported into
England in the late Medieval age.
Depiction of the mad hatter’s tea party. Created by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898), The Hatter appears in both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) and though nowhere in the text does the author make reference to a "mad hatter", that is the popular form and not an unreasonable one, given the madness of both The Hatter and the March Hare is confirmed by the Cheshire Cat. Lewis Carroll was said to be familiar with the traits of madness and the condition suffered by hatters was well known but some literary historians have speculated The Hatter may have been based on an eccentric shop-keeper. There’s no documentary evidence to support the claim.
Role model JR Ewing (Larry Hagman, 1931–2012) in Stetson hat.
The use of Hatter (usually in the collective Hatters) to describe students
or members of the athletic program at Florida’s Stetson University comes from John
B Stetson (1830-1906), otherwise famous as the hatter known for his eponymous hats.
The school was in 1883 founded as the DeLand
Academy but was in 1889 renamed Stetson after the Mr Hatter joined the Board of
Trustees, the change acknowledging his financial largess. Thus were born the Hatters and the name
(informally) extends to the school’s mascot (who is correctly named John B)
which wears a Stetson hat, green bandana, and alligator skin boots. The mascot is considered equal in status to
all other members of the school family.
Lindsay Lohan wearing more hats.
The phrase “mad as
a hatter” was first recorded in 1829 and is usually attributed to the
correlation noted between those engaged in the profession of hat-making and instances
of Korsakoff's syndrome induced by the frequency of them handling
mercury-contaminated felt. The nineteenth
century speculation of a link with the Old English ātor (poison) or its descendant the Middle English atter (poison, venom,) lacks evidence has
long been discredited. Korsakoff's
syndrome was named after the Russian neuropsychiatrist Sergei Sergeievich
Korsakoff (1854-1900 (his work on alcoholic psychosis still influential)) who
identified the syndrome which is induced by both exposure to mercury and
chronic alcohol use. A neurological
disorder of the central nervous system caused by a deficiency of thiamine, the
symptoms include amnesia, deficits in explicit memory, tremors and general
confabulation. The fourteenth century
variant “mad as a March hare” alludes
to the crazy behavior of hares during rutting season, mistakenly thought to be
only in March.
In 1888, a hydrochloride-based process which obviated the need to use mercury when processing felt was patented and in France and the UK, just before the turn of the century, laws were passed banning the use of substance in the making of hats but, as an illustration of the way things have changed, in the US, the risk was ignored by hatters and their employers alike, even trade unions making no attempt to end its use. Only with the onset of World War II when all available mercury was needed for military production did US hat makers voluntarily agree to adopt the long available alternative process which used hydrogen peroxide.
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