Sandwich

People Who Are Things (cont.)

Somewhere in his diary, Pepys describes one of the Earls of Sandwich comparing an acquaintance who had impregnated his maid then married to her to a man who 'would shit in his hat then clap it on his head.'

This was the same earl who preferred to eat at the gambling table rather than adjourn for dinner. It was during one of these sessions that he asked his servant to bring him 'a selection of cold meats placed between two buttered slices of bread,' contributing the laborious and circumlocutory phrase to the English language for which he is remembered more than three centuries later.