Who was that masked man?

We call it an anachronism when someone fakes a picture of Abe Lincoln driving a Trans-Am. Everyone knows he was a Fords man to the end.

No kidding, it's important not to mix up time references. The Founding Fathers did not write the Constitution on an iPad, and World War I happened before World War II. They numbered them to make it easier to remember.

Lately, as we all strain to hear each other speak with masks over our snouts,  I have heard people say, Those bird beak masks that doctors used to wear were used in the days of the Black Death.

The Black Death killed 25–200 million people in Eurasia and North Africa, and hit its peak from 1347 to 1351 in Europe.  But the beak mask was not invented until a French doctor named Charles de Lorme came up with it in 1619.  The bird beak mask was paired, as they say in the fashion industry, with a wax-coated coat to give medical providers protection all over.

Another word you rarely hear is "miasma." That's an unpleasant and/or unhealthy odor that wafts off something, like those musky colognes from the 70s, or a bag of grass clippings that has sat in the August sun for a week, waiting for the recycling guys, or Satan on a throne of rotting onions.

Back in the day, we thought that plagues were airborne, carried around by miasmas. Dr deLorme's mask and coat were worn by plague doctors during the Plague of 1656. That one was much less awful than the Black Death, but it did account for the deaths of 145,000 people in Rome and 300,000 in Naples.

That beak was packed with dried flowers - often lavender - or other herbs and spices. There was a common belief that the grotesque mask was worn to scare the disease away.

No, it didn't, any more than COVID-19 was frightened off by repeated viewings of "The Joker," but it can't hurt.