Learn English – When did ‘chirurgy’ become ‘surgery?’

Nowadays people tend to separate the formal closing (or subscription) of a letter from flow of the preceding main text of the letter. But it was not always thus. In the 18th and 19th centuries, many letter writers tried to move relatively seamlessly from their message to their farewell. Thus we have numerous examples where "yours truly" appears as part of a final sentence and might encourage readers to equate the phrase with the writer of the letter, rather than reading it as a telescoping of the phrase "I am yours truly." For example, from letter of September 17, 1768, to Mr. M————— in Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho (1782):

Mind, we ask no money—only rags—mere literal rags—patience is a ragged virtue—therefore strip the girls, dear M—————, strip them of what they can spare—a few superfluous worn-out garments—but leave them pity—benevolence—the charities—goodness of heart—love—and the blessings of yours truly with affection, or something very like it, —I. Sancho

Likewise, from letter of March 30, 1787, to Mr. John Nichols, in Bibliotheca Topographica Britannica, No. 45 (1787):

Such are the trifling memorabilia, which I have been able to add to the more important communications the publick have already been indulged with from abler hands. The probability that within a very few years the church and town will become a prey to the fury of the waves, fully justifies what is now submitted to its inspection, however insignificant, by Yours truly, John Pridden.

And from letter of February 19, 1834, in The Crisis (March 22, 1834):

That the workmen may be firm, wise, and determined ; yet moderate, just, and charitable, is the earnest wish, the ardent desire, the sincere prayer, of him, who, though not a producer, is a working distributor, and who subscribes himself as yours truly, to serve in the cause of oppressed and enslaved industry, X. W.

And from letter of ~March 4, 1835, in Substance of, and Extracts from the Evidence Taken Before the Committee Appointed to Examine and Report upon the Ipswich Election Petition (1835):

Cowell watched P———— out of Connould's house and followed him to Bacon's Bank, where Mr. Kelly was standing and where P———— joined him. I hope the evidence of the petitioners will close tomorrow, but you must not return yet nor till you hear from Yours truly, in haste, JOHN CLIPPERTON

In his comment attached to the OP's question (above), Frank provides a link to a crucial early instance where "yours truly" appears not in the final sentence of a letter but somewhat earlier in a postscript. It occurs in a letter annexed to Document No. 46, in Documents of the House of Representatives, at the First Session of the Twenty-Fifth Congress (1837):

P.S. Please not to forget to give my wife or my brother the papers I asked you for, and oblige yours truly. You shall hear from me again. Yours truly, N. STEELE.

As Frank indicates, the meaning of the first "yours truly" in this example is clearly "me," though the writer may have been strongly influenced in his word choice by the standard formalities of letter writing. The next question, then, is when did people begin using "yours truly" outside the context of a letter? According to Farmer & Henley, Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present, volume 7 (1904), such usage existed by 1866, when Wilkie Collins used it in his novel Armadale:

YOURS TRULY, phr. (common).—A jocular mode of reference to oneself : cf. NIBS and WATCH. 1866. Collins, Armadale, 11, 168. Yours truly, sir, has an eye for a fine woman and a fine horse. 1899. Kettle[actually Charles Hyne], [A Master of Fortune: Being the] Furth[er] Adv[entures of Captain Kettle], ix. You may take it as straight from yours truly that you'll go to your own funeral if trouble starts.

Here is a fuller presentation of the Armadale instance:

"Might I ask, Mr. Armadale, which way your business takes you? Toward Bayswater? Would you mind dropping me in the Park? It's a habit of mine when I'm in London to air myself among the aristocracy. Yours truly, sir, has an eye for a fine woman and a fine horse ; and when he's in Hyde Park he's quite in his native element." Thus the all-accomplished Pedgift ran on ; and by these little arts did he recommend himself to the good opinion of his client.

And here is a longer look at the Kettle instance:

"You've friends in this town," he [Kettle] said, "and I dare say you'll have a goodish bit of power in your small way. I've neither, and I don't deny that if you bring up all your local army to interfere, I may have a toughish fight of it; but whatever happens to me in the long run, you may take it as straight from yours truly that you'll go to your own funeral if trouble starts. So put that in your hookah and smoke it, tintacks, and give me the other tube."

I didn't find any instances (excluding letters) earlier than Armadale where "yours truly" clearly seems to mean "me." However, I found a number that were earlier than the Captain Kettle instance. One unusual instance from 1847 involves a character named Yours Truly. N. P. Willis, "Supper After the Opera" in Dashes at Life With a Free Pencil (1847) presents a vignette involving three speaking characters: Brigadier, Flagg, and Yours Truly. The author sets the scene thus:

Private room over the Mirror office, corner of Ann and Nasau—Supper on the round table, and brigadier mixing summat and water—Flagg, the artist, fatiguing the salad with a paper-folder—Devil in waiting—Quarter past ten, and enter "Yours Truly" from the opera.

From Old Calabar, "The Dead Heat," in Baily's Monthly Magazine (February 1870):

'The horse will leave by the late train to-night for England with a lad ; so no one will be a bit the wiser. My old stud groom will come to your diggings this evening to give you a help. So au revoir till mess time, when you will see yours truly,' and putting his horse at a five-foot wall, he sent him over, hurling the loose stones behind him in a cloud, and was quickly out of sight.

From Justin McCarthy, "Donna Quixote," serialized in Belgravia (June 1879):

There was something uncomfortable, uncanny about the woman [Paulina] which made her companionship more oppressive to Gabrielle than any mere lack of education or good manners could have done.

...

'Had I not better write a line to Mr. Fielding, and ask him to come and see you, Paulina?' Gabrielle asked. They two were alone. ' He will wish to see you, and you will like to see him.'

' Law, Gabrielle, send for him as soon as you like, if it's any ease to your mind, my dear ; if you don't feel quite sure about yours truly, Fielding will soon give you satisfaction on that point. He can't deny that I am myself, anyhow; he can't say that this girl isn't the wife of Philip Vanthorpe. But don't send for him on my account, I beg of you, nor on his, my dear. We don't particularly want to see each other, I can tell you.'

From George M. Baker, The Flowing Bowl (1885) [the second instance of "yours truly" in this excerpt seems to mean (in the old-fashioned sense, and in contrast to the first instance's meaning) "truly yours"]:

Jessie. Any friend of Mr. Jerome—

Charlie. Is yours truly. (Offers hand.) Put it there. (Jessie, shrinking, places her hand in his.) Don't be skeered, gal : I'm as gentle as a calf here, but out thar rile me, an I'm a tearer. That's me.

...

Charlie (taking position at table at corner nearest Jessie, as before). Mean business, that's me. I'm roaring Carlos of the prairie. I'm a dead shot, a boss horseman, and a sure slinger of the lasso. I've a big ranch, a big herd of cattle, and a big heart, all of which is yours truly. Now short, sweet, and to the pint : when will you marry me?

From Ernest Favenc, "The Hut-Keeper and the Cattle-Stealer," in Tales of the Austral Tropics (1893):

"I give you my word, boys, he's out at Murderer's Camp now, shaking in his shoes and praying that all hands and the cook up above will take pity on the soul of yours truly."

"How did you fix him?" said one.

"With a painted mark round my neck and my own devil's humour. It was the greatest fun out."

From Paul Ford, The Honorable Peter Stirling (1894):

"Mr. Pierce, chum," replied Watts, with a look in his eyes which Peter had learned to associate with mischief on Watts's part, "has too great an affection for yours truly to object to anything I do. Do you suppose, if I hadn't been sure of my footing at the Shrubberies, that I should have dared to ask an invitation for:—then Watts hesitated for a moment, seeing a half-surprised, half-anxious look come into Peter's face, "for myself?" he continued.

To sum up, the use of "yours truly" as a kind of jocular self-reference—and not merely as part of a formal way to close a letter—seems to have occurred in the middle of the 19th century. In most of the earliest instances where the phrase appears in print in non-epistolary contexts, authors put it in the mouths of unrefined or indeed uncouth characters, implying that the usage arose out of a misunderstanding by unschooled (or marginally schooled) individuals as to its proper meaning at the end of a letter.

As a noun meaning "native or citizen of the island of Lesbos," Lesbian has been used in English as a noun since the earliest translations of Herodotus and Thucydides. As a result, the notion of using lesbian as a noun when the later meaning of "a woman who is a homosexual" (Merriam-Webster's current definition) arose, around 1890, would not have struck many hearers as being a startling innovation. Interestingly, MW reports that both the noun lesbian and the noun sapphism (meaning "lesbianism") around 1890.

Though Sappho was well known to have been a native of Lesbos, one eighteenth-century makes no reference to her in expressing an unflattering opinion as to the licentiousness of the island's population (most particularly the men). From An Universal History, from the Earliest Account of Time to the Present, volume 3 (1738):

As to the morals of the ancient Lesbians, we cannot say any thing in their commendation ; they were given to all sorts of lewdness and debauchery, insomuch that to express the lewd and dissolute life of a debauchee, the antients used to say, that he lived like a Lesbian. [Hubert] Goltzius exhibits a medal [coin], which does no great honour to the Lesbian women.

I haven't found a picture of Goltzius's medal online; but another author observes that the medals of Lesbos were notably oriented toward sexuality. From Richard Knight, The Worship of Priapus and Its Connection with the Mystic Theology of the Ancients (1865):

It appears, too, that the act of generation was a sort of sacrament in the island of Lesbos ; for the device on its medals (which in the Greek republics had always some relation to religion) is as explicit as forms can make it.

William Guthrie, A New Geographical, Historical, and Commercial Grammar (1815) recounts Lesbos's past and continuing claims to fame:

It produces excellent oil and wine, the latter of which was anciently in high esteem, and still sells at a great price. It i famous for having been the native place of Sappho. The ancient Lesbians were accused of dissolute manners, and the modern inhabitants, it is said, too much resemble them in this respect.

And Julius Rosenbaum, The Plague of Lust: Being a History of Venereal Disease in Classical Antiquity (1901) reports that "irrumation" (oral sex performed on a man) was associated in ancient Greece with the island of Lesbos:

This the Greeks called λεσβιαζειν (to follow the Lesbian mode), because the vice was especially practiced by the Lesbian women, though in common with all others of the sort of the sort it came originally from Asia.

The connection between Sappho and the modern sense of lesbianism appears not to have been universally recognized in the nineteenth century. From Agnes Smith, Olympus and Its Inhabitants (1851):

The most celebrated victim of this extravagant superstition [that diving off a promontory on the island of Leucadia into the sea would cure one of unhappy memories of a lost love] was the fair Lesbian Sappho, whose immortal verses so well depict the passion which destroyed her. Its object, a beautiful youth of Mitylene, was a man insensible to the charms of mind or the power of genius, he despised her unsolicited love, and, unable either to conquer it or to bear its torments, she sought its remedy in the waters of Leucos.

On the other hand, William Mure, A Critical History of the Language and Literature of Antient Greece, volume 3 (1854) alludes to the sexual attraction of women to other women in connection with "the Lesbian vice":

Another delicate question involved in this inquiry, is that concerning the precise nature of the intercourse between Sappho and her female associates. It will neither be necessary nor agreeable here to dwell at any length on the chapter of Greek scandalous history with which this question connects itself, further than by remarking that the taste for impure intercourse, which forms so foul a blot on the Greek national character, was not confined to the male sex ; and that, among the females who had the chief credit of being infected with that taste, the Lesbians were so remarkable, as to have procured for it, under its several varieties, the distinctive title of the Lesbian vice. This certainly affords strong presumption that in a Lesbian female association, the main object of which was the pursuit of love and pleasure, even this eccentric variety of the passion was not likely to be excluded.

...

We may add, what is probably known to most men who have lived much in the world during the last half century, that, at different epochs of that period, the "Lesbian vice" has not only prevailed to a greater or less extent in certain European capitals, but has, in almost every such instance, numbered among its votaries females distinguished for refinement of manners and elegant accomplishments.

Mure's discussion in an appendix dedicated to a discussion of "the Lesbian vice" is especially interesting because in it he makes clear that his focus there is not on what Rosenbaum in 1901 calls "the Lesbian mode" of sexual interaction between men and women.

The earliest unmistakable instance of "a lesbian" in the modern sense of the term that a Google Books search returns is from Edgar Saltus, The Imperial Orgy: An Account of the Tsars from the First to the Last (1920):

Indulgent and cruel, prodigal and mean, a woman in whom every contradiction was resumed, Catherine was an empress who made enormous an empire already vast ; a tsarista who enumerated her victories and could not count her amours ; a conqueror who had Adonis for secretary of the treasury and Apollo for minister of war ; a cynic who slaughtered Poland and called herself a pupil of Voltaire ; a sovereign before whom the entire pageant of passion and glory unrolled ; a tyrant and a lesbian who passed through history dripping with blood and exhaling the perfume of Eros.

This is, of course, much later than the earliest citation in Merriam-Webster, and is undoubtedly a sign of the limitations of the Google Books database or search engine or both. The earliest Google Books match for lesbians is from Jacobus X, Crossways of Sex: A Study in Eroto-pathology, volume 2 (1904), which devotes a lengthy chapter to "Lesbians, Tribades, Fricarelles, and Saphists."