Y.
YAGER FIGHTS. At Bowdoin College, “Yager Fights,” says a correspondent, “are the annual conflicts which occur between the townsmen and the students. The Yagers (from the German Jager, a hunter, a chaser) were accustomed, when the lumbermen came down the river in the spring, to assemble in force, march up to the College yard with fife and drum, get famously drubbed, and retreat in confusion to their dens. The custom has become extinct within the past four years, in consequence of the non-appearance of the Yagers.”
YALENSIAN. A student at or a member of Yale College.
In making this selection, we have been governed partly by poetic merit, but more by the associations connected with various pieces inserted, in the minds of the present generation of Yalensians. —Preface to Songs of Yale, 1853.
The Yalensian is off for Commencement.—Yale Lit. Mag., Vol. XIX. p. 355.
YANKEE. According to the account of this word as given by Dr. William Gordon, it appears to have been in use among the students of Harvard College at a very early period. A citation from his work will show this fact in its proper light.
“You may wish to know the origin of the term Yankee. Take the best account of it which your friend can procure. It was a cant, favorite word with Farmer Jonathan Hastings, of Cambridge, about 1713. Two aged ministers, who were at the College in that town, have told me, they remembered it to have been then in use among the students, but had no recollection of it before that period. The inventor used it to express excellency. A Yankee good horse, or Yankee cider, and the like, were an excellent good horse and excellent cider. The students used to hire horses of him; their intercourse with him, and his use of the term upon all occasions, led them to adopt it, and they gave him the name of Yankee Jon. He was a worthy, honest man, but no conjurer. This could not escape the notice of the collegiates. Yankee probably became a by-word among them to express a weak, simple, awkward person; was carried from the College with them when they left it, and was in that way circulated and established through the country, (as was the case in respect to Hobson’s choice, by the students at Cambridge, in Old England,) till, from its currency in New England, it was at length taken up and unjustly applied to the New-Englanders in common, as a term of reproach.”—American War, Ed. 1789, Vol. I. pp. 324, 325. Thomas’s Spy, April, 1789, No. 834.
In the Massachusetts Magazine, Vol. VII., p. 301, the editor, the Rev. Thaddeus Mason Harris, D.D., of Dorchester, referring to a letter written by the Rev. John Seccombe, and dated “Cambridge, Sept. 27, 1728,” observes: “It is a most humorous narrative of the fate of a goose roasted at ‘Yankee Hastings’s,’ and it concludes with a poem on the occasion, in the mock-heroic.” The fact of the name is further substantiated in the following remarks by the Rev. John Langdon Sibley, of Harvard College: “Jonathan Hastings, Steward of the College from 1750 to 1779,… was a son of Jonathan Hastings, a tanner, who was called ‘Yankee Hastings,’ and lived on the spot at the northwest corner of Holmes Place in Old Cambridge, where, not many years since, a house was built by the late William Pomeroy.”—Father Abbey’s Will, Cambridge, Mass., 1854, pp. 7, 8.
YEAR. At the English universities, the undergraduate course is three years and a third. Students of the first year are called Freshmen, and the other classes at Cambridge are, in popular phrase, designated successively Second-year Men, Third-year Men, and Men who are just going out. The word year is often used in the sense of class.
The lecturer stands, and the lectured sit, even when construing, as the Freshmen are sometimes asked to do; the other Years are only called on to listen.—Bristed’s Five Years in an Eng. Univ., Ed. 2d, p. 18.
Of the “year” that entered with me at Trinity, three men died before the time of graduating.—Ibid., p. 330.
YEOMAN-BEDELL. At the University of Cambridge, Eng., the yeoman-bedell in processions precedes the esquire-bedells, carrying an ebony mace, tipped with silver.—Cam. Guide.
At the University of Oxford, the yeoman-bedels bear the silver staves in procession. The vice-chancellor never walks out without being preceded by a yeoman-bedel with his insignium of office.—Guide to Oxford.
See BEADLE.
YOUNG BURSCH. In the German universities, a name given to a student during his third term, or semester.
The fox year is then over, and they wash the eyes of the new-baked Young Bursche, since during the fox-year he was held to be blind, the fox not being endued with reason.—Howitt’s Student Life of Germany, Am. ed., p. 124.