A human being. The N.E.D. gives an instance ab. 1533; and Charles Lamb, in his ‘Last Essays of Elia’ (Ellistoniana) writes of “all the savoury esculents, which … Ocean pours forth upon poor humans from her watery bosom.”
a. 1611.
| “Mars, Mars,” said he, “thou plague of men, smear’d with the dust and blood | |
| Of humans, and their ruin’d walls.” | |
Chapman, ‘Iliad,’ v. 440. (N.E.D.) |
1830. ’Tis strange to us to see company: I expect the sun may rise and set a hundred times before I shall see another human that does not belong to the family.—Mrs. Trollope, ‘Domestic Manners of the Americans,’ i. 70. [This was near Cincinnati.] (Italics in the original.)
1833. They don’t raise such humans in the old dominion, no how.—James Hall, ‘The Harpe’s Head,’ p. 91 (Phila.).
1833. Keep that, if you please, stranger, till you meet with a homelier human than yourself, and then give it to him.—Id., p. 92.
1842. How in the deuce does Lancaster raise so many smart humans?—Phila. Spirit of the Times, Oct. 20.
1845. I can’t tell you how I felt, but it warn’t like a human, though I shivered mightily like one.—W. G. Simms, ‘The Wigwam and the Cabin,’ p. 43.
1845. What should I see but a human, half across a log, with his legs hanging in the water, and his head down.—Id., p. 48.
a. 1848. Why humans, with all their wisdom, should have bestial propensities, is all a mystery.—Dow, Jun., ‘Patent Sermons,’ i. 86.
1851. “Brutes, in a common way,” she continued aphoristically, as she pushed down the tobacco in the bowl of her pipe with her fore-finger—“is more knowiner ’an humans.”—J. J. Hooper, ‘Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs,’ &c., p. 182–3.
1851. I’ve heard of some monsus explites kicked up by the brown bars, sich as totein off a yoke o’ oxen, and eatin’ humans raw, and all that kind o’ thing.—‘Polly Peablossom’s Wedding,’ &c., p. 49.
a. 1853. Woman, primarily, was a sort of second-hand human.—Dow, Jun., ‘Patent Sermons,’ iii. 30.
a. 1853. [A wife] expects to be treated like a human, at least.—Id., iii. 123.
a. 1853. It is the concrete essence of that kind of courage which braces a he-human to “do all that may become a man”—and a few over.—Id., iv. 209.
1855. Covered with blood, weltering in his own lather, and so convulsed and grinning with irrepressible laughter as to look, for all the world, more like a galvanized dead subject than a living human.—Knick. Mag., xlv. 347 (April).
1857. I threw my huntin’ cap at him [the moose], but he pitched into it, and if he didn’t trample it into the ground, as if it was a human, you may shoot me.—S. H. Hammond, ‘Wild Northern Scenes,’ p. 322.
1867. His dogs were, he said, the best trained of any in Georgia, and would follow “nothing but humans.”—W. L. Goss, ‘The Soldier’s Story,’ p. 134 (Boston).
1878. Some mineral or salt [in the spring] which has strange effects on the male human. A few quarts of it will destroy the strongest faith in the necessity for polygamy.—J. H. Beadle, ‘Western Wilds,’ p. 373.
1905. They are unanimous in pronouncing [President Roosevelt] the ugliest human on earth.—Fayetteville (Ark.) Daily, Oct. 28.
1907. “Sleep overpowers when humans fail.”—Heading with reference to the capture of a maniac: St. Louis Republic, Oct. 28.
1911. One of the principal menaces [to health] is to be found in the cheap boarding houses where no animal, let alone a human, should be permitted to live.—Convention Journal, Diocese of Oregon, p. 91 (June).
