The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt through the Lost Words of the English Language
Page 4
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.
Breakfast
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:
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.
Conge
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.
Chapter 4
9 a.m. – Commute
Weather – transport – car – bus – train – arriving late
The weather
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.
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.
Cars
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.