The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt through the Lost Words of the English Language (13 page)

We
are now approaching the end of the working day, and I don’t mean to sound beastly, but it may be time to stop fudgeling and ploitering and actually do some work.

As five o’clock strikes you may well think wistfully of how you are missing out on your
cinqasept
. This French term may usefully be pondered (if only from a distance) for the light it throws on the French nation and their working practices as a whole. A cinqasept is literally a ‘five till seven’, but in French reality it means:

A visit to a mistress or a brothel, traditionally made between five and seven p.m.

It’s that word ‘traditionally’ that tells you all you need to know about Gallic morals. Oh, to be French! But it’s too late now – you have an hour left at work and, so far as I can recall, you have achieved next to nothing. You must therefore attempt to fit a whole
dieta
(or day’s work) into one measly hour of insane,
betwattled
toil. The end times are upon us.

Theologically
speaking, we are in work’s
eschaton
, which is the correct term for the rumpus that precedes the end of the world. If you’re being very strict about things an apocalypse is not the end of the world, it is merely a
vision
of the eschaton. So The Apocalypse of Saint John the Divine, commonly known as the Book of Revelation, is just that: a revelation, or apocalypse, of what will happen when God finally calls time on this sorry mess we call existence. Viewed from this rigorous linguistic perspective,
Apocalypse Now
is a much less worrying title.

So to work! Time is ticking away and if we’re going to get anything done we can’t think about cinqasepts and revelations. We must get down to a proper
fit of the clevers
, as Sir Walter Scott’s maids allegedly described a sudden burst of activity.

The Russians have a particularly wonderful word for such a work schedule: they call it
shturmovshchina
, and it is a word so useful that it might even be worthwhile remembering how to spell it. It is the practice of working frantically just before a deadline, having not done anything for the last month. The first element means ‘storm’ or ‘assault’, the second is a derogatory suffix.

Shturmovshchina originated in the Soviet Union. Factories would be given targets and quotas and other such rot by the state, but they often weren’t given any raw materials. So they would sit around with their feet up and their tools down waiting until the necessaries arrived, and it was only when the deadline was knocking at the door and the gulag beckoned that they would panic, grab whatever was to hand, and do a really shoddy, half-arsed heap of work, or
shturmovshchina
. It’s an excellent and easily usable word that should be included in the Special Skills section of any good CV.

Hermann
Inclusus, or Hermann the Recluse, could be said to have engaged in a Satanic shturmovshchina. Hermann lived in the thirteenth century in Podlazice in the middle of Bohemia (which is now the Czech Republic, approximately). But Hermann was not like other monks praying and fasting and living a life of virtuous virginity. Hermann could never quite get the hang of virtue. Hermann the Recluse was an Evil Monk.

Nobody knows how evil Hermann was or in what particular specialities of evil he excelled, but it was quite enough to attract the notice of the other monks in the monastery, who decided that he was quite beyond any normal redemption or punishment and decided to
immure
him, which is to say that they put him in a room and then built a wall where the door had once been. This done they settled down, like good Christians, to let him starve to death.

Of course, Hermann Inclusus didn’t want to die; he had all sorts of extra evil things he wanted to do and felt that he was being cut off in the prime of his sin. So he did a deal that involved writing a book to expiate his sins, although nobody seems to be very clear on how the deal was done or with whom.

This notion of writing as repentance was considered less odd at the time than it now appears. Atonement before the Lord is not included in modern publishing contracts, not even the very generous ones, but in the Middle Ages it was considered a practically automatic part of the system of royalties. For example, Oderic Vitalis (1075–1142), in his
Historia Ecclesiastica
, recounts a story about a monk who was surprisingly sinful, but also a very devoted scribe. When he died they counted up all the words that he had ever written and found that
they outnumbered all the sins that he had ever committed, by a total of one. He therefore went to heaven.

So, Hermann the Recluse struck a deal whereby he could expiate his guilt by writing the biggest book in the whole wide world in a single night. He set to work, but like many writers who signed their contract thinking that it would be easy, he discovered the deadline charging towards him like a herd of elephants. He then struck a second deal, this one with the Devil (I told you that Hermann the Recluse was an evil monk). The Devil agreed to help him write the book, but only in exchange for Hermann’s soul. Deal done, the book was produced in a single night, after which Hermann tried to strike a third deal giving him forgiveness and salvation, this time with the Virgin Mary, who, I suppose, happened to be around. However, just before he could sign on the dotted line, he died and went to Hell.

There are historians and cynics who question the absolute accuracy and veracity of the stories above, but no writer who has ever worked to a deadline would doubt a word of it.

Anyway, the book that was produced survives to this day. It’s called the Codex Gigas and is kept in the National Library of Sweden. It’s just under a metre tall, half a metre wide, and twenty centimetres thick. It weighs slightly more than I do, and its parchment reputedly contains the skins of 160 donkeys. All this shows what can be achieved if you leave everything until the last possible minute and then work like stink.

Shturmovshchina has, for some unjust reason, never made it into an English dictionary, though we do have the equivalent term of a
charette
. Charettes began in Paris in the nineteenth century among students of architecture. Unlike most of the other university disciplines, architects were often made to build little
models of the buildings they were designing, using very large pieces of paper. This was a difficult and time-consuming activity, and it also meant that the work was so cumbersome and bulky that it was very hard to hand in.

Consequently, on the day that the work was to be handed in, Parisian architecture students would be forced to hire a cart to transport all their designs and models across Paris to be given to their examiners. Architecture students were not actually so different to their peers in other disciplines, in that they tended to leave their work till the last possible minute. The difference with them was that the last possible minute was spent in a cart, and once a year the would-be Haussmanns could all be seen parading through Paris in their carts still adding little details to their designs and fixing inelegant parts of their models. These were said to be working ‘in the cart’ or, in French,
en charette
. Somehow the term charette ended up on the other side of the Atlantic with a sense given by the OED of:

A period of intense (group) work, typically undertaken in order to meet a deadline.

It is somehow comforting to know that whether immured in Bohemia, Soviet Russia, Belle Époque Paris or modern America, everybody procrastinates until the deadline is almost upon them. Even in the Second World War in Britain, with Nazi invasion looming and freedom and civilisation at stake, soldiers would still work in what was known as a
panic party
in an attempt to remedy a week of rest with an hour of intense labour.

Though a panic party was usually a soldiers’ shturmovshchina, another military definition is recorded in the
Sydney Sun
(1942):

A
route march is an organised shemozzle, while any rush move is a panic party.

And, just in case you were wondering, this is from
Soldier and Sailor Words
(1925):

Shemozzle
, to, to make off: to get out of the way – e.g., ‘We saw the M.P.’s (Military Police) coming, so we shemozzled.’

Between your shturmovshchina, charette and panic party, you should now be as busy as a one-legged tap dancer. You will be
very throng
, as they said in rural eighteenth-century England. Indeed, you may lose all respectability and self-control and begin to
fisk
, which once meant ‘to run about hastily and heedlessly’. Fisking is best done with a sheaf of papers in each hand and a mobile telephone jammed between your head and shoulder. This is also the best time of day to have a heart attack, should you be so inclined. And even if you aren’t, you can liven up the office by pretending. It would be rather apt, as there’s a lovely little definition in Grose’s
Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
:

GRAVE DIGGER: Like a grave digger; up to the a-se in business, and don’t know which way to turn.

You may even lose all sense of perspective and forgo your
seven beller
, which is a naval term for a cup of tea taken exactly half an hour before the end of a shift. This is on the basis that a watch in the Royal Navy used to last for four hours, with a bell tolling every thirty minutes. So eight bells signified completion and seven bells meant near-completion and a cup of tea.

This
is also, incidentally, the reason that you can still
beat seven bells
out of somebody in a fistfight. If you were to beat eight bells out of a fellow sailor it would mean that they were dead, that their watch on this watery earth was finally over. But seven bells means Not Quite Dead, or a nice cup of tea, depending on your propensity to violence.

But there is no nice cup of seven bells for he who is
festinating
(that is hurrying) to get everything done before the clock strikes six. In fact, you may be forced to do whatever it is you’re doing
frobly
, which is to say indifferently well. If a job is worth doing it is, after all, worth doing badly. There is a splendid journalistic term for this: the
quality of doneness
. This term originated in an editorial meeting of the American magazine
The Weekly Standard
in 2005. The staff were debating whether to use an article that wasn’t quite up to snuff or scratch. Everybody felt that it could have been written rather better until the executive editor pointed out its one vital advantage. It might not have the highest quality of writing, but it did have the most important quality of any article:
the quality of doneness
.

If something has the quality of doneness you can forgive its having been done half-arsed or
crawly-mawly
or
frobly-mobly
. It is
upwound
,
perimplenished
,
perfurnished
,
expleted
and ended.

And if it isn’t, it can always be put off till tomorrow, which is the precise and technical meaning of the word
pro
- (for)
crastinate
(tomorrow). Indeed, why put off till tomorrow what you can put off till the day after tomorrow? The technical term for this is to
perendinate
a task – a rare word for a common action.

At this late hour you are probably seized with
eleutheromania
, or ‘a crazed desire for freedom’. Thomas Carlyle mentioned it in his
History of the French Revolution
but it hasn’t been
found much since. This is a crying shame, as it can be used in all sorts of situations. You can get out of any dull social event by explaining ruefully to your host that you’d love to stay but just happen to be suffering from a touch of eleutheromania and must be excused. And eleutheromania bites hardest when the working day is nearly done.

So if everything is neatly perendinated, give up and go. But before you leave the office, it may be wise to claim any
estovers
that you may need. Estovers are those parts of your lord’s estate to which you, as a faithful serf, are entitled. You may take wood from your lord’s forest to repair your cottage, or water from your lord’s well, or milk from your lord’s fridge, or biros from your lord’s stationery cupboard, or loo rolls from your lord’s lavatory. Nobody will object, especially if nobody notices. And who would notice a mere
niffle
? A niffle is a Yorkshire term for a trifle or thing of little value. As a verb,
niffling
is the practice of ‘not doing very much’ or ‘stealing a little at a time’. A niffle here and a niffle there and you end up with an awful lot of biros.

This is all nearly legal and utterly natural. Biologists even have a word for it:
lestobiosis
, which comes from the Greek
lestos
meaning ‘robber’, and
biosis
meaning ‘way of life’. It’s defined in the OED as:

A form of symbiosis found among certain social insects in which a small species inhabits the nest of a larger one and feeds on the food stored there, or on the brood of the larger species.