Lost English

by Chris Roberts

  Charabanc

  The word dates from the early nineteenth century and derives from the French char-à-banc, meaning a carriage with benches. Originally pulled by horses, by the twentieth century charabancs resembled elongated roofless cars or light trucks with rows of forward-facing bench seats, and were often hired for countryside outings and ‘spins’ to the coast. The nearest modern equivalent is probably the stretch limo, which offers the same sort of provision for groups of people to eat, drink and be mobile, though the limos seem content to cruise aimlessly around city centres. Improved public transport, coupled with wider car ownership, took the edge off the charabanc trade in the post-war period, but the term, and indeed actual charabancs, survived beyond that. The English, being English, generally pronounced the word as ‘sharrabang’.

  Like other archaic transport terms it is sometimes used ironically, and even found its way into pop songs by, amongst others, Van Morrison. The most attractive term for what was once a bewildering array of wheeled conveyances, phaeton, was a four-wheeled carriage named after the Greek legend of Phaeton who crashed his father’s chariot (dad was Helios, the sun god) into the earth. More prosaically, hansom cabs (after their inventor, the English architect Joseph Hansom, 1803–82) were designed specifically for city use, and the term outlived the last horse-drawn taxi to work the London streets in 1946. The brougham (a light four-wheeled carriage) is never heard of today but cab (from cabriolet, a two-wheeled carriage with a hood, drawn by a single horse) and hackneys, which they replaced, are still in current use. The modern ‘hackney carriage’ looks nothing like its 1850s predecessor, but is still defined, according to the Taxi London website, as ‘a carriage exposed for hire to the public whether standing in the public street or in a private yard.’ The word ‘hackney’ means a harness horse with a high-stepping trot, and comes from Middle English, and originally from a French word, haquenée, for a docile horse or pony with an ambling gait; our use of the word may have arrived by way of the London Borough of Hackney, where horses were once pastured. Hackney coaches or cabs first appeared in London in the early 1600s, and, as vehicles plying for hire, they have been regulated by law for several centuries.

  Character

  Although personal references are still required by prospective employers or landlords, among others, they are no longer referred to as ‘characters’. This doesn’t mean that an employee’s character is not important any more – rather the reverse, in fact – but that different means are used to gauge it, and broader issues considered. The other aspect of ‘character’ that has been lost is the notion of a general, as opposed to job-specific, recommendation, whereby the character would almost double up as a letter of introduction. This places a good deal of onus on the previous employer to tell the truth, and a broader truth than just whether a person is competent at a given task. This is particularly the case with regard to staff in serving roles that might require them to live in the same house as their employer, for it would be terrible to admit a rum cove (qq.v.) under one’s roof. With this in mind the anonymous Victorian author of the Dictionary of Daily Wants (1858–9) devoted a section to characters, detailing the punishments for producing a false one.

  The penalties attaching to false characters are, that if any person falsely personate any master or mistress in order to give a servant a character; or if any master or mistress knowingly give in writing a false character of a servant, or account of his former service; or if any servant bring a false character or alter a certificate of character, the offender forfeits upon conviction £20, with 10s. costs.

  The CV (curriculum vitae, from the Latin for ‘course of life’) and standard job-application letter have replaced the character as the primary documents an employer is likely to use when assessing candidates, and on these there are usually the names of a couple of senior or otherwise responsible people cited as willing to provide references, though these are rarely taken up at an initial stage.

  Churching

  Considering that the twenty-first century seems to be proving both more religious and more superstitious than its predecessor, it is odd that this word, which in part represents a collision of both, has vanished. In Jewish belief a woman was considered unclean after childbirth until purified (see Leviticus 12:2, for instance), whereas in the (much later) Christian faith the ‘churching of women’ became more a ritual celebration and blessing after giving birth. The traditional proscribed time was forty days before a woman could re-enter the church or synagogue after bearing a child, though some areas hurried the process as the time between birth and being churched was often held to be one that made a woman susceptible to attack (and even kidnap) by fairies. More practically, welfare reformers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries referred to the concept of churching as the time a woman should be allowed to rest and recuperate after the traumas of childbirth. In the Church of England, the Book of Common Prayer still contains a section entitled ‘The Thanksgiving of Women After Child-Birth, commonly called The Churching of Women’, although the practice has largely fallen into disuse in churches in the West.

  Colour bar

  This is a system, whether official or unofficial, under which people are denied the same rights as others on the basis of their ‘race’ – or, not to mince words, on the colour of their skin. Notable colour bars occurred in the post-slavery United States until at least the 1960s, and, as a legally enforced policy of racial segregation, in apartheid-era South Africa, 1948–91 (the Afrikaans word apartheid means ‘separateness’). In the 1950s and 1960s, however, it was common to hear talk of a colour bar in Britain (although there was no such official policy); a poll in Birmingham in 1956 found that 74 per cent of respondents believed that such a thing operated in the city in employment, housing, education, and even leisure services and shops. Another poll found 98 per cent of white residents unwilling to take in coloured lodgers, often citing not their own prejudice, but that of other tenants. Similar barriers had been experienced by Irish and Jewish migrants from the nineteenth century until well into the twentieth, and these factors together led to the 1965 Race Relations Act, which outlawed any form of discrimination on grounds of race or colour. One of the many good things about the Act was that it brought about the disappearance of such overt signs of prejudice as the notices often seen in the windows of lodging houses reading ‘No Dogs, No Irish, No Coloureds’.

  Certain political parties attempted to make capital out of this (unofficial) operation of a colour bar among sections of the white population, notably the National Front in the 1970s, one of whose chief policies (similar to that of the British National Party today) was to reverse migration to Britain, and particularly African, Afro-Caribbean and Asian migration. This policy was once succinctly summed up by the letters KBW (‘Keep Britain White’), which had become popular among such groups in the 1950s. What may well be the last surviving remnant of these once widely graffitied initials made it into the twenty-first century on St Paul’s Road in Islington, North London.

  The word ‘coloured’ to denote a person ‘wholly or partly of non-white descent’ (OED) was used in Britain until the 1960s, having originally been adopted in the 1860s by freed American slaves as a mark of racial pride. It is now regarded as offensive, except in an historical context, not least because it was an official term in South Africa for people of mixed ethnic origin.

  Combination

  One primary application of this word (though almost always in the plural) is to underwear, but once it would most likely have referred to a motorcycle and sidecar, in full, a ‘motorcycle combination’. Also known as a ‘combo’ or ‘outfit’, for much of the twentieth century this was basically the poor man’s family car, for a large-capacity motorcycle combination fitted with a double-adult sidecar could carry a family of four. They are now all but extinct on British roads, having fallen victim to the wide availability of cheap, well-made and well-equipped small cars. There is a legend (almost certainly untrue) that Herbert Austin designed the famous Aus
tin Seven car because he so hated his foreman’s BSA motorcycle-and-sidecar outfit, and determined to build a car of the same dimensions and with the same sized wheels to sell at a roughly equivalent price. For many years both the AA and the RAC motoring organizations maintained patrolmen equipped with motorcycle combinations, the sidecar being a box containing tools and spare parts. Patrolmen from the AA would salute oncoming motorists displaying an AA badge, except if there was a police speed trap in the area, the lack of a salute serving as a warning to slow down.

  Confirmed bachelor

  This expression is a victim of changing circumstances, for while a bachelor is still a mature unmarried man, or at least one who lives without a wife or, nowadays, a female partner, the connotations have altered. The word may come from French bas chevalier meaning a lowly or novice knight in the service of a more senior one (‘knight bachelor’ being the lowest rank of knighthood), or even a young squire in another knight’s service until knighted himself, and with the addition of ‘confirmed’ was often used to refer to either a rampant womanizer who couldn’t or wouldn’t settle down, or to a man with no interest in female society. The first definition even gave rise to the expression ‘gay [q.v.] bachelor’, meaning an unmarried man who was out with a different female companion every night. However, the euphemistic use of ‘confirmed bachelor’ to describe a gay (in the modern sense) man in the period after the Second World War rather eclipsed other uses and has resulted in the term’s redundancy because there is no use for the euphemism any more.

  Until relatively recently, ‘confirmed bachelor’ was a staple of newspaper obituaries of men who never married, a useful phrase for suggesting that the subject was gay without actually coming out and saying so in hard print. Such a notice might end: ‘A confirmed bachelor, he retained his interest in the Scout movement into old age.’ Similar euphemisms were used by obituarists for other types, such as ‘Although there were some who questioned his business methods’ (for which read ‘He was a thumping crook’), and ‘It is true that she did not suffer fools gladly’ (‘She possessed a sudden, irrational, unpredictable and frequently violent temper’).

  Co-respondent

  In the days before ‘guilt-free divorce’, this was a legal term applied in divorce proceedings to the person with whom a spouse (the ‘respondent’) had – or had allegedly, in a contested divorce – committed adultery. There was even a kind of chap (co-respondents were almost always men) who would act as a paid co-respondent to hurry along a case when adultery would speed the matter through better than other charges. These ‘fancy dans’ (poodlefakers, q.v.) might be seen escorting the respondent in and out of a seaside hotel (Brighton seems to have been a favourite) for the benefit of a watching private investigator, who would also have been engaged to provide evidence for the court case, often taking a photograph of the adulterous couple (sometimes, if the private eye could bribe a chambermaid for a key to the couple’s room, in flagrante delicto). The sort of living enjoyed by the professional or habitual co-respondent, whose heyday seems to have run from the 1920s to the 1950s, could only be made by a disreputable and louche fellow wearing noisy clothes. There is an urban legend that ‘co-respondent shoes’ (a decadent style of two-tone brogue, either black and white or brown and white, popular in the 1920s, although the term is hardly used nowadays; they are properly called ‘spectator shoes’) acquired their name through association with the rather rum coves (qq.v.) that wore them, possibly because leaving such highly noticeable footwear outside an occupied hotel room, as if for cleaning, tacitly indicated that hanky-panky was taking place inside. In short, the paid co-respondent was just the sort of fast Terry-Thomas type who might well persuade another man’s wife to spend time with him at a discreet hotel, probably by the sea.

  Cosmopolitanism

  Since the success of the magazine Cosmopolitan (relaunched as a women’s magazine in the States in the mid-1960s; the British edition was launched in 1972) the word ‘cosmopolitan’, meaning at ease in, and knowledgeable about, many countries or cultures, has come to evoke a smart, clever, fashionable and well-travelled person, especially a female. As a philosophical and even a political concept, however, cosmopolitanism is the idea that all of humanity belongs to a single moral community running counter to ideologies based on patriotism and nationalism, and may, or may not, suggest support for a world government. As such it is one of a handful of words used dismissively by opposing extremes of the political process. ‘Rootless cosmopolitan’ was a euphemism deployed from the late 1940s by Josef Stalin to attack foreigners and ‘unpatriotic’ elements within Soviet Russian society, including Jews. This use was taken up by some groups in the West as well, particularly after the end of the Second World War when, in the light of the exposure of the horrors of the Nazi death camps, overt anti-Semitism became unfashionable. In consequence, right-wing politicians would often talk euphemistically of cosmopolitanism ‘sapping the national identity’, rather than of the supposed Jewish conspiracy that they were actually targeting.

  Counterpane

  A type of bedspread, usually a fairly substantial coverlet serving as the topmost covering for a bed. Laid over the blankets and sheets, it has largely been superseded by the modern duvet or ‘Continental quilt’. It is an alternative to the older word ‘counterpoint’ meaning stitched quilt. This might often be very ornate and pictorial, allowing the imagination to fly as it did for Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94), whose A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885) contains a poem called ‘The Land of Counterpane’. In it, he recalls lying sick in bed with all his toys close at hand, spending happy hours playing with them among the rumpled bedclothes: toy soldiers and ‘ships in fleets’, miniature trees and houses:

  I was the giant great and still

  That sits upon the pillow-hill,

  And sees before him, dale and plain,

  The pleasant land of counterpane.

  Courting

  Of all the categories of ‘lost’ words, the language of love is potentially the most fraught with difficulty because its vanished or half-forgotten words or phrases have a habit of coming back into use. ‘Courting’ is the wooing of a person to whom one is attracted, while to ‘be courting’ means that a relationship (with that person) has been entered into; the word carries the implication that marriage is intended, at least by one of the parties. The word’s origins lie in the Middle Ages and it ties in with the highly idealized concept of courtly love and the (often hopeless and generally unconsummated) wooing of fair (and usually married) ladies by gallant knights, but the twentieth-century use conveyed a blunter (and more egalitarian) meaning, equivalent to the almost equally dated ‘stepping out with’, or the American idea of ‘dating’, which might lead to couples ‘going steady’. Traditional courting contained a strong element of winning a person over, which in turn meant in some way gaining parental approval, as Michael Corleone in the film The Godfather (1972) discovers: ‘I wanna meet your daughter, with your permission and under the supervision of your family. With all – respect.’ He is somewhat hampered in this by the fact that he has to press his suit through a translator, but even within the same language the separate dialogue of desire can be very difficult. Today, some newspapers, magazines and websites rely on little else than people’s interest in who is courting whom and who is going steady, though as often as not the phrases ‘seen exiting a fashionable restaurant with . . . ’ and ‘hotel romp’ are used. ‘Hooking up’ or ‘hanging out’ can lead to ‘necking’ (spooning, q.v.), and sometimes, to use that annoying American phrase, to ‘getting to first base’, all of which may lead to someone becoming a ‘main squeeze’, ‘partner’ or (again in tabloidese) ‘live-in lover’.

  Cove

  Perhaps ironically, a cove being generally a conventional, home-loving sort of body, the word may be derived from the Romany kova, which simply means a person or thing. In a very competitive field, cove is one of the nicest words for ‘man’ in the English language. In the great selection of terms whe
re a chap is different from a fellow who is not the same as a bloke and definitely not a geezer, cove sits somewhere apart again. Often in order truly to delineate a ‘cove’ one has to employ a qualifier such as ‘rum’ (q.v.) or ‘friendly’, because coves on their own are just ordinary, unremarkable bodies (apart from ‘interestin’ coves’, of course). Perhaps because of that, the word has ceased to be used in everyday English (except occasionally humorously or ironically), despite having been employed in this sense since the sixteenth century.

  Darby and Joan

  This phrase refers to a devoted elderly married couple who contentedly live an ordinary sort of life, often in fairly reduced circumstances. It seems to have originated in a poem called ‘The Joys of Love Never Forgot’ by Henry Woodfall, published in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1735, and has been picked up and used by other poets, novelists (including Thackeray, Trollope and Henry James), and music-hall artists, among others, until well into the twentieth century. The 1909 music-hall number ‘Darby and Joan’ (sung on stage by ‘Joan’) contains the verse:

  Darby dear we are old and grey,

  Fifty years since our wedding day.