The opposite of such watery nonsense is strong tea, tea that blows your mind and wakes you up. Thus British servicemen of the Second World War would refer to good strong tea as gunfire, on the basis that it had the same enlivening effect upon the senses as coming under attack from the enemy.
Nor is this caffeinism a recent development. According to an utterly reliable Japanese legend, there was a monk named Bodhidharma who had sworn to spend nine years staring at a blank bit of wall. Why he would want to do this is not recorded, but it was considered terribly holy and nobody seems to have mentioned to him that it might be a waste of time. The story goes that after a mere five years he got tired and dozed off. When he woke up the wall was still very much there but, nonetheless, Bodhidharma felt awfully ashamed and, to make sure that it never happened again and he wouldn’t miss a moment of the fun, he cut off his own eyelids and chucked them on the ground. The eyelids germinated and sprouted and from them grew the very first tea plant. Bodhidharma decided to make an infusion from the leaves (presumably without taking his eyes off the wall – I’ve never been able to get this point clear) and thus was made the first cup of tea. The caffeine contained in it was enough to keep him alert for the next four years.
So let us get to the making. While the kettle is thrumbling away you must first choose your brew. Here is a quick reference guide to the various etymologies of tea.
Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey, was a great man. He became an MP at the age of 22, seduced the Duchess of Devonshire, was Prime Minister of Britain from 1830 to 1844, and passed the Great Reform Act and the abolition of slavery. But he is chiefly remembered for being fond of tea flavoured with bergamot oil, a fondness that was leapt upon by tea merchants eager to associate their wares with such a chap. Lady Grey is a figment of a tea merchant’s caffeinated imagination. There was, of course, a real Lady Grey, but she was too busy having sixteen children to bother about bergamots.
Lapsang Souchong (or lāpǔshān xiǎozhǒng) means ‘small plant from Lapu Mountain’. A rather unreliable story says that an army arrived and wanted their tea, but as the crop was still damp it was dried quickly over fires built from pine trees, hence the smoky flavour.
Ceylon was the old name for the island of Sri Lanka. It comes from the Sanskrit Sinhala, which means ‘blood of a lion’, which is odd as there are no lions in Sri Lanka.
Assam means either ‘unequal’ or ‘unequalled’. If the former, then it’s probably due to the mountainous terrain of this far north-eastern state of India; if the latter, then it’s due to the ancient rulers of the area who thought themselves peerless.
Darjeeling comes from the Tibetan dojeling, which means ‘diamond island’. This is down to the practice there of Vajrayana Buddhism. Vajra can mean diamond and so Vajrayana is often translated as ‘diamond vehicle’. However, there is another story that Darjeeling is named after a particular stone that people used to meet at to gossip, called the Taji-lung in the native language. This latter etymology is rather appropriate as tea has always been intimately connected with gossip, even in English. Some used to call it chatter broth, others scandal broth, as in this lament of a pious farmer in 1801:
… we never have any tea but on Sundays, for it will not do for a hardworking family, and many of our neighbours call it Scandal broth.
The Victorians, in a rare fit of simplicity, just had:
BITCH, tea; ‘a bitch party,’ tea drinking.
Anyway, the kettle should have boiled now and the tea should be drawing. It must not do so for too long or it will be overdrawn and potty – which is to say, tasting of the teapot. So grasp the handle of the teapot (technically called the boul, which is also the name for the little finger holes in scissors) and pour the bitch into a teacup.
Skeuomorphs
The handle of the common or garden teacup is a classic example of a skeuomorph. In the nineteenth century, when photography was still in nappies, exposure times were so long that people who were walking would be blurred. They would have ghosts flowing out behind them. It was this that introduced the idea in paintings and drawings that movement could be indicated by lines flying out behind a moving object. Photography changed our visual ideas and that changed representations in other mediums. The viewer looks at a blurred drawing and thinks: ‘Ah, the chap’s running. I know that because of the technological failings of photography.’ Think about it: have you ever actually seen a runner with lines coming out of their back?
There’s a technical term for this: it’s skeuomorphic. A skeuomorph is a technological limitation that is deliberately imitated even when it’s no longer necessary. My digital camera has a little loudspeaker that emits a clicking noise when I take a photograph, just like an old mechanical camera.
Once upon a time there were teacups whose handles you might reasonably fit your fingers through. They were handles that you could, well, handle. But now they remain purely as skeuomorphic decoration, a mere memory of usefulness.
Now that the tea is ready and piping hot, it’s time to summon your fellow thermopotes (or drinkers of hot drinks). You could do this with the rather dull shout of ‘Tea’s up’, but for a bit of tropical allure there’s nothing like this entry in an eighteenth-century dictionary:
CONGO. Will you lap your congo with me? Will you drink tea with me?
You may add some moo juice, but as Fielding said: ‘Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.’
Reading your future
And once the day’s gossip is done, and the cha is all gone, it remains only to check the tea leaves to see what the future holds. Tea-leaf reading is called tasseography and there is, so far as I can tell, only one major work on the subject: Tea-Cup Reading and Fortune-Telling by Tea Leaves by ‘A Highland Seer’ (1920). It contains a dictionary, or at least a table of ‘Symbols and significations’, which is practically the same thing. The idea is to look at the tea leaves left in the cup and see if you can discern any familiar shapes. Here is a brief selection of the ones I consider most urgent:
AIRCRAFT, unsuccessful projects.
BADGER, long life and prosperity as a bachelor.
CANNON, good fortune.
CAR (MOTOR), and CARRIAGE, approaching wealth, visits from friends.
DONKEY, a legacy long awaited.
GRASSHOPPER, a great friend will become a soldier.
KANGAROO, a rival in business or love.
KETTLE, death.
PARROT, a sign of emigration for a lengthy period.
UMBRELLA, annoyance and trouble.
YEW-TREE indicates the death of an aged person who will leave his possessions to the consultant.
ZEBRA, travel and adventure in foreign lands.
1 This is a French term meaning ‘homesickness for mud’, which refers to those of the upper classes longing for the gritty suffering of the lower.
Chapter 12
5 p.m. – Actually Doing Some Work
Panicking – deadlines – giving up – stealing from your employer – leaving
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.
The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt through the Lost Words of the English Language Page 11