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The Imperiia Project: a spatial history of the Russian Empire

Sligo

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A century after O'Conor, a giant of Irish literature would spend his early years in Sligo: William Butler Yeats. Yeats was no writer of putrid lines. Do you need evidence? Here is an excerpt from one of his most well-known poems, "The Tower":

I pace upon the battlements and stare
On the foundations of a house, or where
Tree, like a sooty finger, starts from the earth;
And send imagination forth
Under the day's declining beam, and call
Images and memories
From ruin or from ancient trees,
For I would ask a question of them all.

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Putrid Words really can be fun. If you haven't dug into the history of the word "putrid," you are in for a treat. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (because why would you look for absurdly entertaining word histories anywhere else?), the first written occurrence of the word dates to 1425 (CE). In that year, a French surgeon named Guy de Chauliac wrote the following:
I say þe signez ar greuousnes & heuynez of þe sidez biside þe false costez & putride.
If that strikes you as a bit impenetrable, here are a few other early uses of the word.

First, from John Marston's Scourge of Villanie, 1598:
Quake guzzell dogs, that liue on putred slime, Skud from the lashes of my yerking rime.
(You have to admit, the rhyme really works.)

And finally, our particular favorite, from Charles O'Conor's Dissertation on the History of Scotland, published in 1766:
Quoting and ridiculing also, Some putrid Lines which he ascribes to Irish Bards.
That one makes us laugh, since we all know that Irish bards never pen putrid lines. Irish bards only ever write witty, lovely lines. O'Conor knew this. Born in 1710 in Sligo, Ireland as Cathal Ó Conchubhair Donn, O'Conor was the most eloquent and effective advocate of Irish Gaelic culture in the 18th century.