Ear: Valentine

Musings from The Daily Morning Astorian, Feb. 14, 1888:

• This is St. Valentine’s Day. Sometime this used to be a nice, sentimental, romantic sort of a day, when young people sent tender effusions to each other, and conveyed by post intimation of the love that filled their hearts.

Now-a-days, it is a day when cowards send anonymous insults, and curs used the post office to annoy respectable women with indecent doggerel. Malice loves a shining mark, and many a pure-minded girl has had her soul sullied by forced contact with the mire in perverted observance of St. Valentine’s Day.

Note: The recipients of mean-spirited “vinegar valentines,” according to the Smithsonian National Postal Museum weren’t just women. No one was safe. For example, to discourage a suitor: “I’m not attracted by your glitter / For well I know how very bitter / My life would be, if I should take / You for my spouse, a rattlesnake. / Oh no, I’d not accept the ring / Or evermore ‘twould prove a sting.”

Anecdotally, Atlas Obscura notes that in 1905, 25,000 vinegar valentines were held at a Chicago post office after being deemed “unfit to send.”