"Public Universal Friend"

I mostly think about the smells folks had to endure before indoor plumbing, but I also wonder how those men and women traversed the cobblestone streets in their heeled shoes when I look like a wombat in flip-flips doing it in sneakers. In celebration of Pride Month, the Museum of the American Revolution is debuting a new walking tour focused on one such individual, a nonbinary religious leader who called themself the Public Universal Friend and preached in Philadelphia during the 1780s. This seems to be the same sense of public as in the idiom "public enemy", which the OED glosses as "An enemy common to a number of nations, a general enemy; a person considered as a threat to the community", and traces back to the 16th century.

Author: Mark Liberman

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