The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt through the Lost Words of the English Language (4 page)

Everywhere else is optional. After all, if you spend too long in there you’ll end up with the skin on the ends of your fingers
quobbled
.

The Scots used to have a terrible reputation for lice. Whether this was justified, I don’t know. I deal in dictionaries, not Scotsmen. However,
the Scots Greys are in full march
once meant that lice were crawling all over your head. And a dictionary of 1811 defines
clan
thus:

A family’s tribe or brotherhood; a word much used in Scotland. The head of the clan; the chief: an allusion to a story of a Scotchman, who, when a very large louse crept down his arm, put him back again, saying he was the head of the clan, and that, if injured, all the rest would resent it.

All of which should explain why a comb used to be called a
Scotch louse trap
. So reviving this term will enrich the language and enrage the Scots, which is a double benefit.

In fact, one can continue to enrage the Celtic fringes of the hair by dispensing with your comb and instead using your fingers
to get your hair into some semblance of order. The Welsh had no reputation for lice, but they did once have a reputation for using cheap substitutes. So a
Welsh diamond
is a crystal, a
Welsh carpet
is a pattern painted on the floor, and a
Welsh comb
is your five fingers.

The things people do to their hair are so weird and varied that the English language is brimming with useful words on the subject, most of which contain the element
trich
-, which was the ancient Greek word for the stuff. For example, smooth-haired people are
lissotrichous
and wavy-haired people are
cymotrichous
, and
trichotillomania
is a manic desire to pull out all your hair.

If dictionaries are to be believed then the best possible thing you can do is cultivate dangling curls. Even Dr Johnson’s dictionary called a woman’s curls
heart-breakers
, and the Victorians called them
bow-catchers
, on the basis that they would catch handsome young men, or
beaus
. And Victorian women, in a rare fit of equality, would run after men who sported
bell-ropes
, which brought
belles
to ruin with their curly charms.

Let us now turn our attention to the chins of men and unfortunate ladies. Let us turn to
shavery
, which the OED solemnly defines as ‘subjection to the necessity of being shaved’, although the poet Robert Southey used it better when he observed in 1838:

Oh pitiable condition of human kind! One colour is born to slavery abroad, and one sex to shavery at home! – A woman to secure her comfort and well-being in this country stands in need of one thing only, which is a good husband; but a man
has to provide himself with two things, a good wife, and a good razor, and it is more difficult to find the latter than the former.

Slavery has been abolished but shavery survives. This latter is rather a shame, as it lessens the need for all of the technical beard words, of which there are many. They all involve the Greek root
pogo
, which is pronounced in exactly the same way as the stick (although the two are etymologically unrelated). So there’s
pogonology
(the study of beards),
pogonate
(having a beard),
pogoniasis
(a beard on a lady), and
pogonotomy
(shaving). As we live in an essentially misopogonistic society of beard-haters, most men must start the day by taking a razor from the
pogonion
or tip of the chin up to the
philtrum
, which is the name for the little groove between your nose and your upper lip. Then you have to work carefully to avoid a neckbeard, which the Victorians called a
Newgate fringe
. Newgate was the name of a London prison where people were hanged. So a Newgate fringe was meant to resemble the rope that was slipped around the felon’s neck before he took the plunge into eternity.

In the first century BC, the Roman poet Catullus wrote these lines about a man called Aemilius:

Non (ita me di ament) quicquam referre putaui,

utrumne os an culum olfacerem Aemilio.

Nilo mundius hoc, niloque immundius illud,

uerum etiam culus mundior et melior:

nam sine dentibus hic.

It
is impossible to capture the solemn beauty of the original in English, but a loose translation might go:

I really cannot tell between

His mouth above and arse beneath;

They are identically unclean,

The only difference: one has teeth.

Nothing else is known about filthy-breathed Aemilius beyond Catullus’s poem. For two thousand years that has been his sole posterity. From this we may learn two lessons: don’t get on the wrong side of poets, and keep your teeth clean.
1

So open your mouth wide and say
oze
. It’s a lovely, long, wide-throated word and means ‘a stench in the mouth’. The good thing about oze is that merely by saying it, you distribute it.

When toothpaste manufacturers talk about the small amount of toothpaste that fits on the end of your toothbrush, they call it a
nurdle
. Why they should do so is lost in the oze of time, but it’s been the word since at least 1968, and a recent court case between two of the largest manufacturers was centred entirely around who was allowed to depict which nurdle on their packaging. Not only was the nurdle said to chase away oze, it could also whiten your teeth (or, to be more technical about it, stop your being
xanthodontic
).

However, the greatest advance since the days of Catullus is the introduction of mouthwash, which was, unfortunately, introduced
after the words
squiggle
and
gleek
had died out. Squiggle was an old Norfolk dialect word meaning ‘to shake and wash a fluid about in the mouth, with the lips closed’. Squiggling is a lovely word because it sounds exactly like what it is, as does gleek. To gleek is to squirt liquid from your mouth. This should be done from as far from the basin as possible, just for the challenge.

That’s it. You’re done. There may be other things you should take care of, but I’m much too shy to enquire. Instead, I shall ask what God asked your forebears in the garden of Eden: Who told you you were naked?

Naturism
is all very well, but it gets chilly after a while. So it is time to become what nudists refer to as a
textile
, i.e. one of those poor fools who wears clothes. You’re ready to get togged up, to become the
concinnate
(finely dressed) and consummate gentleman; or if you are of the womanly persuasion, to become a
dandizette
, the nineteenth-century term for a female dandy. Certainly you cannot remain starkers or, as a witch would put it,
sky-clad
.

In the second century AD a group of Christian fanatics called Adamites practised Adamism, or holy nudity, but only in church, and even there they had to have central heating. St Epiphanius described Adamism thus:

Their churches are stoves, made warm for the reception of company by a fire underneath. When they come to the door they pull off their clothes, both men and women, and enter naked in to the place of meeting. Their presidents and teachers do the same, and they sit together promiscuously. And so they perform their readings and other parts of worship naked.

The
theory of Adamism, if you can believe it, was that by exposing themselves to such temptation they actually strengthened their wills and conquered lust. But though God may have approved of the Adamites (He has remained silent on the subject), the police and most employers take a dim view. So let us dress.

We begin with what the Victorians coyly referred to as one’s
abbreviations
, which in these coarse times is simply called underwear. In Herefordshire, capacious and roomy knickers used to be known as
apple-catchers
on the basis that they were large enough to serve a useful purpose in a late-summer orchard.

Moving to other unmentionables, the English language is weirdly wanting in slang terms for the brassiere. The only fun to be had is with padded bras, which were known in the 1940s as
gay deceivers
. As you can imagine, this was before the word gay had become widely used as slang for homosexual, and when a gay old man could still be lusting after members of the opposite sex. Such gays could be deceived by the use of rubber falsities, which, because pure rubber is a trifle smelly, would be flavoured with chocolate. It might be worthwhile to bring back the gay old terminology, but not the technology.

There’s a curious little entry in
A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew
(1699):

Sir Posthumus Hobby
, one who Draws on his Breeches with a Shoeing-horn, also a Fellow that is Nice and Whimsical in the set of his Cloaths.

It’s curious for two reasons. First, it doesn’t mention whether the shoeing-horn is necessary because the fellow is fat, or because
he wears terribly tight trousers to show off his lovely legs. Secondly, there really was a chap called Sir Posthumus Hoby who had lived a hundred years before that dictionary was written. He was a famous Puritan and may well have been the model for the stern and strict Malvolio in Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night
. But that Sir Posthumus (so named because he was born after his father’s death) was neither particularly fat nor particularly dandyish. Indeed, the only really notable things about him were his humourlessness and the fact that he matriculated at Oxford at the age of eight. Nonetheless, it seems unfair to deny him immortality at that awkward moment when you try to slip into the clothes of last year’s slimness.

It is at this point that you’re bound to notice a
grinnow
. A grinnow is a stain that has not come out in the wash and that you probably haven’t seen until this vital moment. For a word that useful, it’s astonishing that grinnow is only recorded as an obscure Shropshire dialect word in a dictionary of 1879, where they provide the helpful sample sentence: ‘I canna get the grinnows out if I rub the piece out, they’n bin biled in so many times.’

One must be wary of grinnows; too many grinnows and you end up looking like a
tatterdemalion
. A tatterdemalion is a chap (or chappess) whose clothes are tattered and torn. It is the same as a
tatter-wallop
, a
ragabash
, or a
flabergudgion
; and, given the threadbare state of modern fashion, it is an eminently useful word.

Tatterdemalion has the lovely suggestion of dandelions towards the end (although pronounced with all the stress on the
may
of malion) and should be immediately comprehensible even to the uninitiated, because everybody knows what
tatter
means,
and the
demalion
bit was never anything more than a linguistic fascinator. More wonderfully still, there are spin-off words:
tatterdemalionism
and
tatterdemalionry
, the latter meaning tatterdemalions considered as a group.

Once you are
snogly geared
(as they said in the eighteenth century),
dressed to death
(nineteenth century) or simply
togged to the bricks
(twentieth-century Harlem), it is time, if you are a lady, to apply some auxiliary beauty.

Everybody remembers the line ‘Alas, poor Yorick’, but fewer recall the final lines of Hamlet’s skull speech. ‘Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that.’ Which shows that Hamlet was not the sort of person to help you choose a lipstick.

It is tempting to bring back all the winsome words that Shakespeare would have known for make-up. In his time there would have been no brutal application of foundation, as ladies would
surfle
instead. They would then apply
ceruse
as a blusher, the eyes would have been touched with
collyrium
and the eyelids with
calliblephary
. But as the whole process back then was called
fucation
, it’s probably best not to get carried away with Elizabethan vocabulary. It could become awkward if your husband called, ‘What’s taking so long?’ and you accidentally replied: ‘I just need to fucate, darling. Won’t be a minute.’ To which your significant other might reasonably reply: ‘Eight?’

So
we must content ourselves with a few 1940s terms for auxiliary beauty such as
pucker paint
for lipstick. The 1940s also provide the splendid phrase
preparing bait
, which takes in the whole process of lustrification. It imagines the prinked paintress and perfumeress as a fisherlady, her lips as the hooks, and men as mere fish.

The
ante-jentacular
part of the day is almost over. Ante-jentacular is simply an immensely clever-sounding adjective meaning ‘before breakfast’. It is best applied to strenuous exercise or Bloody Marys.

The Greek for breakfast was
ariston
, so the study of breakfast is
aristology
, and those who devote their lives to the pursuit of the perfect morning meal are
aristologists
. The subject had a brief vogue in the mid-nineteenth century and there was even a book published called
Cookery for the Many
, by
an Australian Aristologist
; but it is now a forgotten art. This is a shame, as breakfast presents a wide buffet to the enquiring mind. Who but an aristologist would be able to tell you that a
ben joltram
was ‘brown bread soaked in skimmed milk; the usual breakfast of ploughboys’, that a
butter shag
was ‘a slice of bread and butter’, or that
opsony
was strictly defined in the OED as ‘any food eaten with bread’ (plural:
opsonia
).

The disciplined student of aristology must begin their studies nearly three millennia ago with Homer, as there is a whole book of the
Iliad
– the nineteenth – devoted to the subject of whether or not to eat breakfast.

Essentially,
Agamemnon gives a long speech commanding the Greeks to
jenticulate
(which is the posh way of saying eat your breakfast). Achilles, though, is having none of it and gives an even longer speech pointing out that they are late for work (i.e. killing Trojans) and really ought to get on with it. Odysseus then weighs in with an even longer speech that essentially says, ‘It’s the most important meal of the day. You may not feel like it now, but when you’re bathing in the blood of your enemies you’ll regret it.’ Achilles says that really, he’d rather not, especially as his breakfast always used to be made by his best friend Patroclus, whose mangled body now lies in his tent with its feet towards the door. He then turns to the corpse and gives a rather lovely little speech that goes:

‘Thou,’ said he, ‘when this speed was pursued

Against the Trojans, evermore apposedst in my tent

A pleasing breakfast; being so free, and sweetly diligent,

Thou madest all meat sweet.’

And that would have been that, except that the gods themselves are very keen that Achilles should have a hearty breakfast, so, at Zeus’s direct order, Athena descends from heaven and magically instils ‘heaven’s most-to-be-desired feast’ directly into his body, thus allowing him to set off to work. Then there’s a brief incident with a talking horse and the book ends.

Had Achilles been a more reasonable man he might have settled for a quick
chota hazri
, which is a brief breakfast that is just enough to keep you going till elevenses. The term comes from the British empire in India and is simply Hindi for ‘little breakfast’, but it has much more history and glamour to it than that.
It’s the sort of snack that you eat after spending the night up a tree with a tiger. So, when a chap in 1886 did just that, he returned at dawn and:

… he was hailed by his friends amid a perfect shower of ejaculations; all the answer they got was a wail of hunger and a cry for ‘chota hazri,’ after which Brown promised to relate his adventures faithfully and truly.

It reminds one of the sort of world where a gobbled energy bar or brief banana was not an indignity, it was simply something that you wolfed down because you were in a hurry to conquer the earth.

If you have time on your hands and a hole in your stomach you can cook yourself a proper breakfast, not quite as proper as ‘heaven’s most-to-be-desired feast’, but a damned good second place. Achilles, for example, would never have seen a chicken or a hen’s egg, as they weren’t imported to Europe until the fifth century BC. So familiar are eggs to us, however, that in the eighteenth century they were referred to as
cackling farts
, on the basis that chickens cackled all the time and eggs came out of the back of them. Unlike Achilles, we can have them fried, boiled, scrambled, coddled, poached, devilled, Benedict or Florentine.

A much grander eggy word is
vitelline
, which means ‘of or pertaining to egg yolk’. The seventeenth-century poet Robert Herrick once wrote:

Fain would I kiss my Julia’s dainty leg,

Which is as white and hairless as an egg.

Which
shows an unsettling erotic fascination with breakfast, and also misses the point that though egg whites sustain you, it is the vitelline parts that yield the true glory. It is the vitelline yumminess into which you can dip what Mr Herrick’s contemporaries would have called
ruff peck
, which to us is merely a rasher of bacon.

The earliest explanation for why it’s called a rasher comes from John Minsheu’s
Ductor in Linguas
of 1612 where he explains that it gets ‘rashly or hastily roasted’. Modern etymologists are much less fun and think rasher relates vaguely to razor. Nonetheless, a rashly roasted rasher can easily end up
brizzled
, or ‘scorched near to burning’. Brizzled is a lovely word, onomatopoeic of the sound that pigmeat will make as it burns and sizzles its way to deliciousness.

All of this can be washed down with a glass of
yarrum
(thieves’ slang for milk), or, if you are feeling rakish, a
whet
, an early-morning glass of white wine, popular in the eighteenth century but terribly hard to find in these drier and duller days. In fact, in the Age of Enlightenment they would often breakfast on a thing called
conny wabble
, which was ‘eggs and brandy beat up together’, although sadly no more precise recipe than that survives.

In fact, there are an almost infinite number of possible breakfasts and this brief book cannot contain them all. One would need a seasoned aristologist to look into all the nooks and crannies. For example, there was once such a thing as a
Spitalfields breakfast
that crops up in a dictionary of Victorian slang:

Spitalfields breakfast
, at the East end of London this is understood as consisting of a tight necktie and a short pipe.

Which
I assume means dressing hurriedly and valuing tobacco over food. If you go further back through the slang dictionaries things get more gruesome. Back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the death penalty was punishment for almost anything (this is before the invention of Australia and deportation), there were a million and one artful phrases and euphemisms for being hanged. You could
dance upon nothing with a hempen cravat
or
caper in the wind
or, if the hanging were at dawn you could: