The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt through the Lost Words of the English Language (5 page)

Have a hearty choke and caper sauce for breakfast – To be hanged

There was even a euphemism for this euphemism, mentioned in an article of 1841 called
Flowers of Hemp; or the Newgate Garland
. The author is searching for a particular criminal and is told by an informant that:

‘He died last Wednesday morning of a vegetable breakfast, that did not altogether agree with his digestive system.’

‘A vegetable breakfast! What do you mean?’

‘Mean! well now, the like of that! And so you do not perceive, that this is what Dr Lardner calls a delicate form of expression for “a hearty choke with caper sauce.”’

‘As we live and learn, sir; I am much beholden to you for the information,’ I replied, hardly able to repress my disgust at the brutal jocularity of the wretch.

So it’s worthwhile remembering as you sweep the crumbs from the table that it could all be a lot worse.

Once
upon a time, back in ancient Greece, they had a special slave called an
analecta
whose job was to gather up the breadcrumbs after a meal.
Ana
meant ‘up’ and
lectos
meant ‘gathered’. That’s why the gathered up sayings of Confucius are called
The Analects
, and that’s also why Henry Cockerham’s
English Dictionarie
of 1623 has the entry:

Analects, crums which fall from the table.

A
conge
(pronounced
kon-jee
) is a formal preparation to depart. It’s the sort of thing medieval kings did before processing around their kingdom or that beautiful princesses performed before being shipped off to marry a distant emperor. However, conges today tend to be much more disorganised affairs as you realise that you’re running late, haven’t got your phone, haven’t charged your phone, can’t find your car keys and have forgotten to put on your trousers. You are much more likely to end up running around in circles (or
circumgyrating
as Dr Johnson would have put it). The conge of today consists of grabbing everything that you possibly can into an
oxter lift
, an old Scots term for as much as you can carry between your arm and your side.

Now charge for the door, and with a quick cry of ‘Abyssinia’ (which was the hepcat way of saying ‘I’ll be seein’ ya’), you are off to work.

When
a death sentence is commuted to life imprisonment, it’s a good thing. However, commuting is uniformly awful. The connection between them, since you ask, is that both involve a
com-mutual
exchange. The noose is exchanged for the cell, small debts can be commuted for one large debt, and in nineteenth-century America individual purchases of railway tickets could be exchanged for one
commutation ticket
at a slightly reduced rate, that was valid for a year.

However, you are still at your front door. It is said that every journey begins with a single step, but in my experience, every journey begins with a single step followed by a disorderly retreat once I realise that I’m sporting the wrong clothes for the weather or have forgotten my wallet or hipflask or crossbow. So let us begin with a
celivagous
(or ‘heavenward-wandering’) glance.

The worst form of weather is a
pogonip
, which is a word we stole from the Shoshone Indians (along with the rest of their possessions) to describe a fog so cold that it freezes into ice crystals in mid-air. Actual pogonips are quite rare, as air needs to get
down to about –40°C before the water in it crystallises, but reality should never get in the way of talking about the weather. Real pogonips tend to be very localised affairs, occurring in deep Alaskan valleys and the like, so you can always claim that there was a sudden pogonip on your street, and nobody will be any the wiser.

Non-Alaskan commuters are much more likely to find the weather
swale
. Swale is recorded in the indispensable
A Collection of English Words, not generally used
(1674), where it is defined as:

Swale
: windy, cold, bleak.

It barely needs to be mentioned that swale is a north-country word, but nor do you even really need the definition. Swale is already a windy, cold, bleak word. It sways between
wail
and
windswept
, and is irresistibly suggestive of rain, misery and Yorkshire.

And more miserable even than the skies of northern England are the skies of Scotland, where they actually have the word
thwankin
, which is dismally defined in a dour dictionary of Scots as:

Thwankin
: used of clouds, mingling in thick and gloomy succession.

If it is swale and the clouds are thwankin, you should probably turn back and grab your umbrella. But no! Etymologically speaking, an umbrella is something that shades you. The Latin for shade is
umbra
, and
ella
is just a diminutive. So
umbrella
is ‘a
little shade’ – the same as a
parasol
or ‘defence against the sun’ – and as the clouds are already thwankin and swale you’ll need a
bumbershoot
.

A bumbershoot is exactly the same as an umbrella, but it’s a much better word. The
bumber
bit is a variant of brolly, and the
shoot
is there because it looks a little bit like a parachute. Bumbershoot is first recorded in America in the 1890s and, for some reason, never made it across the Atlantic, which is a crying shame as it’s a beautiful word to say aloud.

If you have no bumbershoot, you will have to make do with a
Golgotha
, which was the Victorian slang term for a hat, on the basis that, as it says in Mark’s Gospel:

And they bring him unto the place Golgotha, which is, being interpreted, The place of a skull.

So with a Golgotha on your head, and bumbershoot in hand, you may now
hurple
onwards, hurple being a verb defined in an 1862 glossary of Leeds dialect as:

To shrug up the neck and creep along the streets with a shivering sensation of cold, as an ill-clad person may do on a winter’s morning. ‘Goas hurpling abart fit to give a body t’dithers to luke at him!’

However, there remains the possibility that you open the door to discover that the skies are blue, the sun has got his Golgotha on, and it’s a lovely day. This is unlikely, especially in Leeds, but possible. If it is a hot day, then the English language allows you to use almost any word beginning with the letters SW.
Sweltering
,
swoly
,
swolten
,
swole-hot
,
swullocking
,
swallocky
will all do; however, it should be noted that swallocky means that a thunderstorm is on the way, so you should still have your bumbershoot to hand.

The very best sort of morning, though, is the
cobweb morning
. This is an old Norfolk term for the kind of morning when all the cobwebs are spangled with dew and gleaming in the misty hedgerows. On such mornings, when the world is
dewbediamonded
, you can almost forgive your expergefactor for waking you and your work for compelling you out from your house. Dew is a beautiful thing, often said to be the tears of Aurora, goddess of the dawn, although what she’s crying about is never specified. If you are of a scientific bent, you can measure dew using a
drosometer
. If you are of a poetic bent, you can contemplate what Browning called the ‘sweet dew silence’. If you are of a practical bent, you can worry about getting your feet wet, for morning moisture can have calamitous consequences, such as
beau traps
.

Have you ever trodden upon an innocent-looking paving stone, only to find that there is a hidden hole full of water beneath it? The stone tilts down under your weight and the disgusting dirty rainwater (once known as
dog’s soup
) spurts up all over your ankles and into your shoes. There is a name for this. It is called a beau trap, on the basis that it destroys the leggings of the finely dressed beau about town. Grose’s
Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
from 1811 demonstrates that some annoyances are eternal:

Beau Trap
A loose stone in a pavement, under which water lodges, and on being trod upon, squirts it up, to the great damage
of white stockings; also a sharper neatly dressed, lying in wait for raw country squires, or ignorant fops.

And the worst possible consequence of a beau trap is to have your shoes filled with water so that you can actually hear it sloshing and squeezing between your toes. There is a word for making this noise:
chorking
, as in this Scots poem of 1721:

Aft have I wid thro’ glens with chorking feet,

When neither plaid nor kelt cou’d fend the weet.
1

In fact, it may be best to set off to work on
scatches
, which are defined in a dictionary of 1721 as stilts to put the feet in to walk in dirty places, and it would certainly show a sense of balance and altitude that would make you the envy of your neighbours. Also, scatches would allow ladies to be sure that their skirts were never
daggled
, which is to say muddied at the hemline. However, walking on scatches would, I imagine, require an awful lot of practice and they would be hard to stow away at work, so you could instead go for
backsters
, which are the planks of wood laid out over soft mud used by people who want to wander around on the seashore without getting their boots or their clothes dirty.

That’s it. The door has closed behind you. So it’s time to check whether you’ve got your keys and your phone and your purse or wallet. This is done by
grubbling
in your pockets. Grubbling is like groping, except less organised. It is a verb that usually refers to pockets, but can also be used for feeling around in desk drawers that are filled with nicknacks and whatnot. It can even have a non-pocket-related
sexual sense, although this is rare and seems only ever to have been used by the poet Dryden, as in his translation of Ovid’s
Ars Amatoria
where he rather wistfully arranges to meet his lover thus:

There I will be, and there we cannot miss,

Perhaps to Grubble, or at least to Kiss.

Having established beyond doubt that you’ve forgotten your keys, that your wallet/purse is empty and that your phone is not charged, you can now decide that it’s too late to do anything about it and instead
incede
(advance majestically) to work. Or, if inceding is beyond you, you may
trampoose
to your chosen mode of transport.

There are so many methods of getting to and from your place of labour that the lexicographically-minded may simply drown in words. Pliny the Elder records that in the days of Augustus Caesar a boy managed to train a dolphin to carry him to school every morning, a story that resulted in the English word
delphinestrian
. However, in default of a dolphin you may make do with a
cacolet
, which is a comfortable basket affixed to a mule for the benefit of Pyrenean travellers. You could even
brachiate
to work, brachiate being the technical term for the way that Tarzan swings through the jungle. This gives a fantastic workout to the upper body, but requires that you have a continuous line of trees between your house and your office. If you have enough horses
and too little sleep, you could opt for a
besage
, which is a bed carried on the backs of four horses. I would say that a besage was the finest form of transport that I’ve ever heard of, except that I can’t see how the horses would know which way to go if their passenger were snoozing. And it’s a cruel thing to put somebody in a bed and not allow them to sleep. If there was a solution to this problem of the besage, it is not, alas, recorded in the
Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English
.

But to return to the more prosaic methods of transport, let us begin with the motorcar. In the Second Book of Kings, God decides that he doesn’t like Ahab one little bit. In fact, he wants to ‘cut off from Ahab him that pisseth against the wall’. This is actually a relatively common ancient Hebrew phrase meaning ‘every man jack of them’. Anyway, the chosen instrument of God’s off-cutting will be a chap called Jehu (pronounced
gee who
). So Jehu jumps into a chariot and heads off to kill the king. The king’s watchman sees the approaching chariot and dashes down to tell the monarch that ‘the driving is like the driving of Jehu son of Nimshi; for he driveth furiously.’ This one clause in the Bible was all that the English language needed to import his name and immortalise Jehu as a noun for a furious driver.

A
jehu
is a particularly bad (or good) thing if you are driving down
jumblegut lane
, which was an eighteenth-century term for a bumpy road too obvious in its origin to require any explanation at all. However, jehus and jumbleguts aside, you are much more likely to get caught in a
thrombosis
of traffic, wherein the veiny and arterial roads of the metropolis are blocked by the embolism of roadworks and by clots that have broken down. Thus
Jehu sits immobile in his chariot and gazes enviously at the bus lane.

The plural of bus is, of course,
buses
. But it’s a curious little point of history that, etymologically, the plural of bus would be
bus
. The
voiture omnibus
, or ‘carriage for everybody’ was introduced in Paris in 1820, and the plural would be
voitures omnibus
, which wouldn’t affect the shortening at all. (The same, incidentally, would apply to the
taximeter cabriolet
.)

The central problem with buses is that you wait for ages and then none come along. This waiting (or
prestolating
) is a miserable affair as it’s usually raining, and you huddle up in the bus shelter, which starts to feel rather like a
xenodochium
or hostel for pilgrims, inhabited by people who peer optimistically down the road for the approaching Godot.

When your bus does arrive, it is all too likely to be
chiliander
, or containing a thousand men, at which point you have to barrel onto the monkey board like a spermatozoa trying to get into the egg. Once within, you have no choice but to
scrouge
, which is helpfully defined in the OED thus:

To incommode by pressing against (a person); to encroach on (a person’s) space in sitting or standing; to crowd. Also, to push or squeeze (a thing).

But scrouge you must, and furiously, while at the same time looking out for
chariot buzzers
. Chariot buzzers are pickpockets who work on buses, but as the term is Victorian, you ought to be able to recognise them by their antiquated attire.

Margaret
Thatcher never said ‘Anybody seen in a bus over the age of thirty has been a failure in life.’ However, the poet Brian Howard (1905–58) did. It’s a rather snobby-sounding comment, but given that Brian Howard published only one serious book of poems, and given that the one biography of him is titled
Portrait of a Failure
, one must assume that he spent a lot of time on buses himself.

Nonetheless, the over-thirty-year-old who wishes to be thought a success, but has no access to an automobile or jetpack, should probably opt for a sub- or superterranean train.