Samuel Adams helped ferment a revolution
newyorker.com
Samuel Adams helped ferment a revolution
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Re: Samuel Adams helped ferment a revolution
#2Re: Samuel Adams helped ferment a revolution
#3No, this is not about a beer making. It is about the actual Sam Adams and the actual revolution.
Re: Samuel Adams helped ferment a revolution
#4Foment? To instigate or stir up
Re: Samuel Adams helped ferment a revolution
#5Foment? To instigate or stir up
It's a pun, Adams is noted as a brewer
ETA: "Adams has often been described as a brewer, but the extant evidence suggests that he worked as a maltster and not a brewer."
Re: Samuel Adams helped ferment a revolution
#6Foment? To instigate or stir up
It's a pun. His father's business was grain malting.
Re: Samuel Adams helped ferment a revolution
#7Foment? To instigate or stir up
My initial reaction. But then I saw it's The New Yorker. They're being clever as they are wont to be.
Re: Samuel Adams helped ferment a revolution
#8Foment? To instigate or stir up
As I learned on a different post on HN, you can use either ferment or foment in this context.
Definitions by Google.
> Ferment: 2. incite or stir up (trouble or disorder).
> Foment: 1. instigate or stir up (an undesirable or violent sentiment or course of action).
I still think ferment sounds totally wrong too.
Re: Samuel Adams helped ferment a revolution
#9Foment? To instigate or stir up
My initial reaction. But then I saw it's The New Yorker. They're being clever as they are wont to be.
I get sick of that kind of clever that consists only of playing with language. I know The New Yorker is known for this sort of thing, but I expect more of them; they are, when at their best, both clever and thoughtful. This particular piece is insufferable.
Re: Samuel Adams helped ferment a revolution
#10Disappointing historical treatment. Not a single mention of the molasses trade, i.e. brewing rum, which was the real alcohol business of the era. This involved a lot of smuggling trade with the British East Indies, and problematically for the Crown, with French sugar producers as well.
Source: Grande (2016) "Yankees in Haiti: Boston Merchant Trade in Revolutionary Saint-Domingue"
> "Future patriot leaders such as Samuel Adams, for example, joined the merchants in their protests against the Sugar Act. In a letter to a Massachusetts customs agent, Adams expressed many Bostonians’ uneasiness “at several Acts of Parliament lately made, by which their Trade is greatly obstructed.” Should these acts stay in place, Adams feared that colonial trade “must soon be ruined.” Adams linked the potential ruin of the Boston economy to Parliament’s enhanced customs procedures and the new duty on foreign molasses. He argued that the “English West India Islands do not produce sufficient for the Consumption and Trade of the Continent,” and that the “Duty of three Pence per Gallon on foreign Molasses amounts to a full prohibition, and must soon put a Stop to that Branch.” In other words, the duty on foreign molasses would force Boston merchants away from foreign colonies like Saint-Domingue and to the British West Indies; and the dearth of molasses exported by the British sugar islands would spell the end to Boston’s rum industry."
> "Adams continued by asserting that damage to the molasses trade would affect other industries as well. First and foremost would be the fishing industry. He described the molasses trade and fishing industry as “mutual Supports to each other.” Boston merchants had long been accustomed to trading fish for molasses in Saint-Domingue. If confined to the British West Indies, then the highly productive New England fisheries would suffer from low fish prices due to chronic oversupply. A failing New England fishery would mean added unemployment in an already depressed economy."
See also "Smuggler Nation" by Peter Andreas.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13689883-smuggler-nation