The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt through the Lost Words of the English Language (3 page)

Slightly better known is
clinomania
, which is an obsessive desire to lie down. But that doesn’t quite answer, does it? Perhaps you’d be better off with Dr Johnson’s word
oscitancy
, which he defined as ‘Yawning or unusual sleepiness’. The first recorded usage of the word back in 1610 mentions ‘such oscitancie and gaping drowsiness’ in describing the effects of a dull sermon in church. You can accompany your oscitation with
pandiculation
, which is the stretching of the arms and body characteristic of this mournful yawnful time.

If you were king in the dawns of old, this would be the moment to hold your
levee
. A levee was a funny sort of formal occasion when you would lie in bed while all your social inferiors came to congratulate you on your superiority. Unfortunately the system of levees got out of hand in the eighteenth century. There were so many of them, and so many degrees of society, that those at the top were forced to remain in bed until early afternoon. The novelist Henry Fielding described it thus in 1742:

… early in the morning arises the postillion, or some other boy, which no great families, no more than great ships, are without, and falls to brushing the clothes and cleaning the shoes of John the footman; who, being drest himself, applies his hands to the same labours for Mr Second-hand, the squire’s gentleman; the gentleman in the like manner, a little later in the day, attends the squire; the squire is no sooner equipped than he attends the
levee of my lord; which is no sooner over than my lord himself is seen at the levee of the favourite, who, after the hour of homage is at an end, appears himself to pay homage to the levee of his sovereign. Nor is there, perhaps, in this whole ladder of dependance, any one step at a greater distance from the other than the first from the second; so that to a philosopher the question might only seem, whether you would chuse to be a great man at six in the morning, or at two in the afternoon.

During a levee you should know that your favourite courtiers are allowed to stand in the
ruelle
, which is the space between the bed and the wall where your shoes and socks are probably lying. Everybody else must make do with milling around at the foot of the bed or even by the door.

If you are conducting a levee, I wish you well. But these days the closest thing to a levee is the early-morning phone call to your boss to
egrote
.

Egrote
is a fantastically useful word meaning ‘to feign sickness in order to avoid work’. If it has fallen out of use, the cause must be that workers have lost their cunning. So here are some instructions for a beginner.

Wait until your boss has answered the phone and then start to
whindle
. Whindling is defined in a dictionary of 1699 as ‘feigned groaning’. It’s vital to whindle for a while before giving your name in a weak voice. Explain that you are a
sickrel
and that work is beyond you. If asked for details, say that you’re
floccilating
(feverishly plucking at the bedclothes) and
jactating
(tossing around feverishly).

If your boss insists that you name your actual condition, don’t call it dysania. Go instead for a severe case of
hum
durgeon
. Unless your boss is fluent in eighteenth-century slang he’ll never suspect that:

HUM DURGEON
. An imaginary illness. He has got the hum durgeon, the thickest part of his thigh is nearest his arse; i.e. nothing ails him except low spirits.

Unfortunately, you cannot use hum durgeon every day. Your employer will suspect. You can probably get away with it at most twice a week, and the second time you should probably just shriek ‘My thighs! My thighs!’ down the telephone until they hang up.

No. You have been lying here too long and too languorously. Seven o’clock is upon us. Throw off the duvet! Toss away the sheet! And crawl out of bed.

That’s
it. You’re out of bed. Like Adam and Eve expelled from Eden.

First, grope for your slippers, or to give them their much merrier name:
pantofles
. Pantofles are named after Saint Pantouffle who is as obscure as he is fictional. He (or she, or it) appears to have been invented in France in the fifteenth century. Nobody knows why the French would have invented a saint, or indeed why slippers should be named after him, but they were and that’s that. Robert Burton’s great medical work
The Anatomy of Melancholy
describes how Venus, the goddess of love, was so enraged with her blind son Cupid making people fall in love willy-nilly that:

… she threatened to break his bow and arrows, to clip his wings, and whipped him besides on the bare buttocks with her pantophle.

And
any slipper that can double up as a weapon with which to spank godlings has to be a good idea.

Once your toes are snugly pantofled, you can stagger off to the bathroom, pausing only to look at the little depression that you have left in your bed, the dip where you have been lying all night. This is known as a
staddle
.

There are a lot of synonyms for mirror – everything from
tooting-glass
(Elizabethan) to
rum-peeper
(eighteenth-century highwayman), but the best is probably the
considering glass
. That is, after all, what you do with the thing. But first, before you even peek in the considering glass, take a
gowpen
of water – i.e. a double handful – and throw it over your face. After all, nobody but an angel is beautiful before eight o’clock.

The word
pimginnit
may be necessary here. It’s a seventeenth-century term meaning ‘a large, red, angry pimple’. This is a particularly fine definition as it implies that pimples have emotions, and that some of them are furious. Pimginnits are much more wrathful than, for example,
grog-blossoms
, which are those spots that pop up the morning after one has indulged in too much grog, or rum. Grog-blossoms are more sullen than angry, like a resentful letter mailed overnight from your liver.

But enough of your
furuncles
. Let us just say that you are
erumpent
, which is a jolly-sounding way of saying spotty (nicer than
papuliferous
and infinitely more pleasant than
petechial
, a word that Dr Johnson defined as ‘pestilentially spotted’).
There are too many other sorrows for us to get hung up on spots.

First, there are the
elf-locks
. It is, or was, a well known fact that elves sneak into your bedroom during the night with no better motive than to tangle up your hair. The sad result, which you will see reflected, is elf-locks.

Then there are the wrinkles and, in extreme cases,
wrines
(these are the big ones); the crows’ feet, the
frumples
, the
frounces
, the lurking
lirks
and a million other synonyms for the lines on your face, which are, after all, merely signs of how thoughtful and wise you are.

There’s also the
culf
, which is the name for the bed fluff that has lodged in your navel. There are the red
ferret-eyes
through which you’re looking. There’s the
ozostomia
and
bromodrosis
, which is what a doctor would call your stinking breath and sweat, because doctors have a lovely habit of insulting you in Greek, which softens the blow. Almost anything sounds softer in a classical language. For example, if a fellow were to suggest that you stank of horse piss, you would probably take offence, but if he merely said that you were
jumentous
, you might imagine that the chap was telling you that you were
jubilant
and
momentous
, or something along those lines. You might even thank him.

All in all, though, you are
idiorepulsive
(you disgust even yourself) and something really ought be done about it soon. However, I fear that things must get worse before they can get better.

On particularly bad mornings, this may be the time to attempt a
through cough
. These aren’t easy. I have tried it myself and consistently failed. If you can cough and fart at precisely the same instant then you have achieved what was known – two hundred
years ago – as a through cough, and can therefore continue the rest of the day with a feeling of secret satisfaction.

Anyway, a through cough is only the preface to the lowest part of the day – that part when you are no better than a beast and no worse than a monarch: the lavatory.

In the Book of Samuel, as the whole history and future of salvation is being worked out between Saul and David, everything comes to rest upon Saul’s popping to the lavatory. Not, of course, that they had proper lavatories in those days. Salvation was not that far advanced. But as Saul with his army hunted for David beside the Dead Sea, he found that his dinner was, like his kingship of Israel, a fleeting thing that he would be forced to relinquish.

Then Saul took three thousand chosen men out of all Israel, and went to seek David and his men upon the rocks of the wild goat. And he came to the sheepcotes by the way, where was a cave; and Saul went in to cover his feet: and David and his men remained in the sides of the cave. And the men of David said unto him, Behold the day of which the L
ORD
said unto thee, Behold I will deliver thine enemy into thine hand, that thou mayest do to him as it shall seem good unto thee. Then David arose, and cut off the skirt of Saul’s robe privily.

What concerns us here is not the question of who was truly the Lord’s anointed, nor the symbolism of the king’s cloak, nor even the necessity of checking your lavatory carefully for rival claimants to the throne; but the delightful phrase
to cover his feet
, which
is a literal rendering of the ancient Hebrew meaning to do the necessities of nature.

If the Bible teaches us one thing, it’s that you should never be so vulgar as to call a spade a spade or a lavatory a lavatory. Even if you choose not to cover your feet (which should already have pantofles on them), you can disguise your baseness with all sorts of lovely phrases. The Victorians would visit
Mrs Jones
, or
my aunt
, or
the coffee shop
, although that last phrase may be too suggestive for those of a liquid disposition. Others have been more exotic. In the thirteenth century they would visit
a chamber foreign
, or in the eighteenth century you could take
a voyage to the Spice Islands
, these being the most exotic place imaginable, and particularly appropriate for the morning after a curry.

However, these references to exoticism may be inappropriate to something that is often so troubling in foreign lands. The great actor David Garrick took a trip to Europe in 1764 and wrote to his brother saying:

… I never, since I left England, till now, have regal’d Myself with a good house of Office, or as he calls it, a
Conveniency
– the holes in Germany are generally too large, & too round, chiefly owing I believe to the broader bottoms of the Germans […] We have a little English Gentleman with us who Slipt up to the Middle of one of the holes & we were some Minutes before we could disengage him. – in short you may assure Townley, (Who loves to hear of the state of these Matters) that in Italy the People
do their Needs
, in Germany they
disEmbogue
, but in England (& in England only) they
Ease
themselves.

House of office
has a pleasing grandeur to it, although some of
Garrick’s contemporaries would have called it a
House of Commons
, which is good for the politically-minded. Medieval fellows would
go to siege
, which has a fine martial ring and is particularly appropriate for the constipated. And militarism was still present in the Victorian
scraping castle
. In fact, there are a million and one variants and euphemisms, all of which mean that since the thirteenth century nobody has had to be so vulgar as to
do their filth-hood
.

While actually on the
gong-hole
one should take care about one’s precise actions. For example, in a house with thin walls it is a little rude to
squitter
or ‘void the excrement with a noise’. Your
purgation
,
exoneration
,
dejection
or whatever you choose to call it should be performed pianissimo and the
tantadlin tart
baked in silence.

When it is all over you may turn your attention to the necessary paperwork, and if you think that the English language may fail you here, then you haven’t read Sir Thomas Urquhart’s 1653 translation of Rabelais, which has this tantalising little tip:

I say and maintain, that of all torcheculs, arsewisps, bumfodders, tail-napkins, bunghole cleansers, and wipe-breeches, there is none in the world comparable to the neck of a goose, that is well downed, if you hold her head betwixt your legs. And believe me therein upon mine honour, for you will thereby feel in your nockhole a most wonderful pleasure, both in regard of the softness of the said down and of the temperate heat of the goose …

Bumfodder
has had a rather curious history in the English language, for though it is now a very obscure word for loo roll, it still
survives in a shortened form.
Bumf
is, to this day, a rather derogatory term for large, but necessary, amounts of paperwork. And necessary it certainly is, if you want to avoid what were once called
fartleberries
.

However, in the dire circumstance that you have neither paper nor a back-up goose, you can always resort to a corner of your cloak, provided David hasn’t crept up on you and cut it off, privily.

Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning conductor, bifocal glasses, the chair-desk and the
cold air bath
. This last innovation he described in a letter of 1768. The crux of it was that he didn’t like water:

The shock of the cold water has always appeared to me, generally speaking, as too violent, and I have found it much more agreeable to my constitution to bathe in another element, I mean cold air. With this view I rise almost every morning, and sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever, half an hour or an hour, according to the season, either reading or writing.

In the interests of water conservation, Franklin’s invention could be usefully revived, although it is hard to see what effect it would have on dirt and smell. So we of the twenty-first century are probably stuck with water; and, such is the pressure of time, we are probably going to use a shower. The best thing about taking
a bath is that you get to use the 1950s American slang term
make like a fish
.

However, before launching rashly into the waters, you should prepare. Sod’s Law states that you’ll be halfway through showering before you realise that there’s almost no shampoo left in the bottle; so you should
duffifie
it now. Duffifie is an old Aberdeenshire verb meaning ‘to lay a bottle on its side for some time … that it may be completely drained of the few drops remaining’. It’s therefore much more compact than the English equivalent of
making the bottle confess.
Either way, a bit of duffifying will save you much annoyance later on.

As you set the waters running you might wish to notice the
shower curtain effect
, which would doubtless have interested Benjamin Franklin. When the shower starts, the curtain will be sucked in towards you, and though several theories have been proposed, modern science is still uncertain as to why this happens.

Even as the curtains are being pulled in around you, you will probably experience the
curglaff
, which is another old Scots term, this time for the feeling you get when you’re hit with cold water. Your heart gallops, your blood rushes, and, if you’re Benjamin Franklin, you don’t like it one little bit.

Anyway, there’s nothing to be done about that. It is time to
buddle
(scrub in water) all that is not
illutible
(unwashawayable). Baudelaire said that humans were deluded if they thought they could wash away all their spots with vile tears, but Baudelaire was French and therefore knew nothing about hygiene or shower gel.

There are funny words for almost all the parts of the body, but the important ones in the shower are these:

Oxter
– armpit

Popliteal
– behind the knees

Dew-beaters
/
beetle-crushers
– feet (depending on your usual use for them)

Inguinal
– relating to the groin