That's "Today's featured picture" at Wikipedia, from the article on Eugen Sandow.
I love the poster, and I love the idea of a literal human dumbell.
Is "dumbell" the correct spelling? The OED has "dumb-bell." The double "B" is important to understanding the meaning. From the unlinkable OED:
1. (a) Formerly, An apparatus, like that for swinging a church-bell, but without the bell itself, and thus making no noise, in the ‘ringing’ of which bodily exercise was taken. (b) Also, applied to a similar apparatus, used in learning bell-ringing.You need "dumb" (for silence) and "bell" (for the familiar object, a bell).
The slang term, meaning a stupid person, goes back to the 1920s:
1920 Collier's 3 July 8/1 The gent..stands alone as the Crown Prince of dumb-bells.
1922 S. Lewis Babbitt xviii. 227 The poor old dumb-bells that you can't get to dance.
a1930 D. H. Lawrence Etruscan Places (1932) i. 21 They gave the usual dumb-bell answer.
1936 Punch 15 Apr. 430/3 Next came one of those series of Dumb-bell Letters which seem to be very popular, a dumb-bell being the kind of person who writes to the manufacturer asking him to replace a gadget that has been lost, and then adds a postscript telling him not to bother as the missing gadget has just been found.
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12 comments:
The guys in the baskets are the earliest depiction of deplorables.
Before people knew the difference between dumb-bells and basket cases.
Picking up baskets of deplorables is an "old-fashioned notion of masculinity rooted in insecurity and smallness".
I spell the weight lifting apparatus 'dumbbell'.
I accidentally hit myself in the head yesterday with a 27.5 lb dumbbell.
My friend Amber called me a dumbbell for it.
Some people see a template for political Photoshops.
Wonder if this guy was any inspiration for the character of Damien Sandow.
This is an interesting blog about old school weight lifters and training. Some of these guys are pretty impressive yet don't look like the ripped specimens of today.
https://www.oldtimestrongman.com/blog/
Wonder if this guy was any inspiration for the character of Damien Sandow.
Yes. He's considered the father of modern body building. Evidently the Mr. Olympia trophy is a sculpter of him and is called a "Sandow".
This is patently unfair!
Your portrait should be up there.
You have been carrying a dumbbell ever since you married him.
Various weights have bell at the end of the word, not sure where bell comes from. Dumb-bell, I don't know where they got dumb either. Kettle-bell, it looks like a kettle. Bar-bell, it is a big long bar and is incidentally, the only piece of weight lifting bell-type I use.
There is a book on Sandow available on Amazon that I thought was a good read. Of interest is his obsession with marketing his image which one does not really think of happening in the Victorian period besides someone like P.T. Barnum.
Looks like someplace Stefon from SNL would send the tourists.
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