Bryson's Dictionary For Writers And Editors (v5.0)
Page 39
There was, however, one consequence in all this. The advent of comfort in the home, in particular the widespread use of soft furnishings, made furniture much more vulnerable to stains, burns, and other careless abuses. In an effort to save the most valuable furniture from the worst of the risks, a new type of room was created, and it is there, conveniently, that we go next.
*A furlong in horse racing is 220 yards, or one-eighth of a mile, but farming furlongs originally were of no particular length. The word means simply “long furrow.”
*Ayrshires were the creation of Bruce Campbell, inventive second cousin of James Boswell, who was put in charge of the family estate in Scotland only after Boswell himself declined the responsibility, preferring a life of conversation and refined debauchery in London to dairy farming in lowland Scotland. Had Boswell been more dutiful, we would have lost not only his great Life of Johnson but also one of the world’s best breeds of dairy cattle.
*Though the name is now pronounced “Van-bruh” or “Van-burra” (like the terminal diphthong of “Edinburgh” or “Barbara”), it appears to have been pronounced “Van-brook” in his own lifetime. It was frequently so spelled.
*Whig is a shortening of Whiggamore, the name for a group of seventeenth-century Scottish insurgents. Where Whiggamore itself came from is uncertain, as is the question of how it then suggested itself as a suitable name for a group of powerful English aristocrats. It was first applied derisively by the Tories, but embraced with pride by the target group. Exactly the same thing happened with the term Tory.
*In a large house, room numbers are generally notional. It depends on the extent to which you count storerooms, closets, and the like as separate rooms (and also no doubt how carefully one counts). The published numbers for the total rooms at Blenheim range from 187 to 320—quite a disparity.
*It was also, come to that, the age of the celebrity craftsman. One such was the great carver Grinling Gibbons, who lived from 1648 to 1721. His interesting Christian name was his mother’s maiden name. He grew up in Holland, of English parents, and came to England in about 1667, after the restoration of Charles II as king. He settled in Deptford, in southeast London, where he made a very basic living carving figureheads for ships. One day in 1671, John Evelyn, the diarist, chanced to pass his workshop and was immediately taken with Gibbons’s skill, personable manner, and possibly good looks. (Gibbons was by all accounts stunningly good-looking.) He encouraged the young man to take on more challenging commissions and introduced him to people of influence, such as Christopher Wren.
Thanks to Evelyn’s support, Gibbons became very successful, but most of his wealth actually came from running a workshop that produced statuary and other stonework. It was Gibbons, it appears, who came up with the idea of depicting British heroes as Roman statesmen, in togas and sandals, and this made his work in stone extremely fashionable. Though he is now widely thought of as the greatest woodcarver in modern times, he was not especially famous for it in his own lifetime. For Blenheim Palace, Gibbons produced £4,000 worth of decorative stonework but only £36 worth of wood carving. Part of the reason his wood carvings are so valued today is that there aren’t very many of them.
*Although he is little read now, Walpole was immensely popular in his day for his histories and romances. He was a particularly adept coiner of words. The Oxford English Dictionary credits him with no fewer than 233 coinages. Many, like gloomth, greenth, fluctuable, and betweenity, didn’t take, but a great many others did. Among the terms he invented or otherwise brought into English are airsickness, anteroom, bask, beefy, boulevard, café, cause célèbre, caricature, fairy tale, falsetto, frisson, impresario, malaria, mudbath, nuance, serendipity, somber, souvenir, and, as mentioned a few pages back, comfortable in its modern sense.
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PUBLISHED BY BROADWAY BOOKS
Copyright © 1991, 1994, 2008 by Bill Bryson
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Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of The Doubleday Broadway Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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Earlier editions of this work were published as The Penguin Dictionary for Writers and Editors in Great Britain in hardcover by Viking, London, in 1991 and in paperback by Penguin Books, London, in 1994.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Bryson, Bill.
Bryson’s dictionary for writers and editors / Bill Bryson.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. English language—Usage—Dictionaries. I. Title. II. Title: Dictionary for writers and editors.
PE1628.B79 2008
423'.1—dc22
2007034363
eISBN: 978-0-7679-2911-0
v3.0_r1
FOOTNOTES
*1Figures are rounded off to the nearest whole number.
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*2 Figures are rounded off to the nearest whole number.
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