The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt through the Lost Words of the English Language

by Forsyth, Mark

  You may, though, not have opted for the alarm clock. Many people, for reasons that baffle, make the radio their expergefactor of choice. If this is the case, you will be horribly awoken by news of far-off massacres, earthquakes, plagues, elections etc., or by voices of anxious politicians explaining exactly why they were utterly blameless and how the money or mistress was simply resting in their account or bed.

  The technical term for a dishonest politician is a snollygoster. Well, all right, it may not be the technical term, but it is the best one. The OED defines snollygoster as ‘A shrewd, unprincipled person, esp. a politician’, although an American journalist of the 1890s defined it more precisely (if less clearly) as:

  … a fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform or principles, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnacy.

  Unfortunately, the American journalist didn’t stop to explain what talknophical or assumnacy meant. I can’t see why snollygoster has fallen out of use, unless perhaps politicians have all become honest, in which case the rest of us owe them an apology.

  If you feel that snollygoster is too ridiculous a way to refer to a dishonest man who holds public office, you may always refer to that voice on the radio by the name throttlebottom.

  Either way, you shouldn’t use the radio news as a means to wake you up, as it is liable to irritate or depress or both. Also it may distract you from the correct method of expergefaction: an aubade.

  Turn off the radio.

  Turn off the alarm clock.

  Listen carefully.

  Do you hear an aubade?

  An aubade is a song sung at dawn by your lover beneath your bedroom window. Providing that your lover can carry a tune, a good aubade is enough to put you in a merry mood until at least breakfast. However, if you cannot, at present, hear an aubade there are only two sad possibilities: I am sorry to have to break this to you so early in the day, but either your lover is a lazy, lollygagging shirker of his/her duties; or you have no lover at all.

  In the olden days they had a much better system of waking people up. There was a chap called a knocker-up who would wander around the village tapping on people’s bedroom windows with a special stick. This was actually considered a proper job and was probably a lot safer than its alternative: the weaver’s larum.

  A weaver’s larum was an odd device that worked like this. Take a reasonably heavy object like a stone or a small child and tie two pieces of string to it. Both these pieces of string should then be fed through a single hook. One of them should be attached to the wall, so that the string is taut and the stone/baby dangles. The second piece of string, which is loose, should be tied to your finger.

  Got that? Heavy object attached by a taut string to the wall and by a loose string to your finger.

  Right, now get a tall, thin candle and put its base right next to the taut bit of string. Now light the candle and drift off to sleep. During the night the candle will slowly burn down and down until the flame gets to the piece of string, which is incinerated. The stone/baby falls to the floor and your finger gets a vigorous yank to pull you rudely from your slumbers.

  The final possibility is a reveille. This is the drum roll or bugle-blast that’s meant to waken a whole barracks full of soldiers. It’s thus a term that can usefully be applied to the noise of dustmen, children or any of the other inconveniences and natural expergefactors of modern life.

  Zwodder

  Uhtceare is now officially over; however, that does not mean that you feel great. There is a word for people who are breezy and bright in the morning: matutinal. In fact, there are a bunch of words, but most of them are rude. As Oscar Wilde observed, only dull people are brilliant at breakfast. And, anyway, breakfast is still a long way off.

  For the moment, you can lie there in a zwodder cursing the arrival of a new day. The rather racy lexicographical classic Observations on some of the Dialects in the West of England, particularly Somersetshire (1825) defines a zwodder as: ‘A drowsy and stupid state of body or mind.’

  This would, in and of itself, make zwodder a useful word. But the really important thing is how it sounds. Say it. Zwodder. It’s the sort of word that can and should be mumbled from the refuge of your bedclothes. Zwodder. It’s the drowsiest word in the English language, but there’s also something warm and comfortable about it.

  Alternatively, you could be addled, stupefied and generally speaking philogrobolized, a word that should be said at about an octave beneath your normal speaking voice and reserved for the morning after the carnage before. As responses to ‘How are you this morning?’ go, ‘Philogrobolized’ is almost unbeatable. Nobody will ever have to ask you what you mean as it’s all somehow contained in the syllable grob, which is where the stress should always be laid. It conveys a hangover, without ever having to admit that you’ve been drinking.

  Another rather more religious way of doing this is to speak enigmatically of your ale-passion. Passion here is being used in its old sense of suffering, as in the Passion of Christ. (That a word for suffering became a synonym for romantic love tells you all you need to know about romance.) Ale-passion is mentioned in the 1593 book Bacchus Bountie in the following context:

  Fourthly, came wallowing in a German, borne in Mentz, his name was Gotfrey Grouthead; with him he brought a wallet full of woodcocks heads; the braines thereof, tempered with other sauce, is a passing preseruatiue against the ale-passion, or paine in the pate.

  In fact, you should probably keep a small aviary of woodcocks next to your bed, just in case. If not, you will lie there feeling awful. You will suffer from xerostomia, the proper medical term for dryness of the mouth through lack of saliva. But there will be nothing you can do about it unless you actually get out of bed. You’re also liable to have slumbered in the wrong decubitus and found that your arm has fallen asleep, a condition that the medical world refers to as obdormition. The only way to cure this is to wave the said limb about frantically, like a string-puppet having a fit, until the prinkling starts and your blood slowly, reluctantly resumes its patrol.

  Alas that such sufferings should invade your bleary-eyed lippitude. Now is the zwoddery time when you wish that you’d invested in thicker curtains, for the sun is insistent, and you are one of those lucifugous creatures that avoids sunlight like a vampire, or a badger. Lucifugous (or light-fleeing) is a word that is usually applied to sins and demons, but it can just as well refer to somebody making a tactical retreat beneath the duvet because they cannot endure the gaze of heaven.

  The final suffering of dawn is pissuprest. A horse-keeper’s manual from 1610 says: ‘Pissuprest in a horse, is when a horse would faine stale, but cannot.’

  And that’s you, comfortable in your covers, with this micturition, this intense desire to urinate, that can only be relieved if you actually get out of bed and stumble to the lavatory. But not yet, not yet. All my possessions (as Queen Elizabeth almost said) for one more moment in bed. Perhaps if you lie here the micturition will magically vanish.

  It is time for procrastination and cunctation and generally putting off the inevitable. There’s nothing wrong with that. This is, after all, life in miniature. We know that death and going to the lavatory are inevitable, but that doesn’t mean we have to do it cheerfully or leap enthusiastically into the grave. Hold out! Enjoy the brief moment that you have. Treasure and savour your grufeling, which is defined in Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (1825) thus:

  To be grufeling: To lie close wrapped up, and in a comfortable-looking manner; used in ridicule.

  The Scots are clearly a nation devoid of pity, or indeed of medical knowledge. Don’t they realise that you may be suffering from undiagnosed dysania? Dysania is extreme difficulty in waking up and getting out of bed, and there may be a secret epidemic of it.

  Slightly better known is clinomani
a, which is an obsessive desire to lie down. But that doesn’t quite answer, does it? Perhaps you’d be better off with Dr Johnson’s word oscitancy, which he defined as ‘Yawning or unusual sleepiness’. The first recorded usage of the word back in 1610 mentions ‘such oscitancie and gaping drowsiness’ in describing the effects of a dull sermon in church. You can accompany your oscitation with pandiculation, which is the stretching of the arms and body characteristic of this mournful yawnful time.

  If you were king in the dawns of old, this would be the moment to hold your levee. A levee was a funny sort of formal occasion when you would lie in bed while all your social inferiors came to congratulate you on your superiority. Unfortunately the system of levees got out of hand in the eighteenth century. There were so many of them, and so many degrees of society, that those at the top were forced to remain in bed until early afternoon. The novelist Henry Fielding described it thus in 1742:

  … early in the morning arises the postillion, or some other boy, which no great families, no more than great ships, are without, and falls to brushing the clothes and cleaning the shoes of John the footman; who, being drest himself, applies his hands to the same labours for Mr Second-hand, the squire’s gentleman; the gentleman in the like manner, a little later in the day, attends the squire; the squire is no sooner equipped than he attends the levee of my lord; which is no sooner over than my lord himself is seen at the levee of the favourite, who, after the hour of homage is at an end, appears himself to pay homage to the levee of his sovereign. Nor is there, perhaps, in this whole ladder of dependance, any one step at a greater distance from the other than the first from the second; so that to a philosopher the question might only seem, whether you would chuse to be a great man at six in the morning, or at two in the afternoon.

  During a levee you should know that your favourite courtiers are allowed to stand in the ruelle, which is the space between the bed and the wall where your shoes and socks are probably lying. Everybody else must make do with milling around at the foot of the bed or even by the door.

  If you are conducting a levee, I wish you well. But these days the closest thing to a levee is the early-morning phone call to your boss to egrote.

  Egrote is a fantastically useful word meaning ‘to feign sickness in order to avoid work’. If it has fallen out of use, the cause must be that workers have lost their cunning. So here are some instructions for a beginner.

  Wait until your boss has answered the phone and then start to whindle. Whindling is defined in a dictionary of 1699 as ‘feigned groaning’. It’s vital to whindle for a while before giving your name in a weak voice. Explain that you are a sickrel and that work is beyond you. If asked for details, say that you’re floccilating (feverishly plucking at the bedclothes) and jactating (tossing around feverishly).

  If your boss insists that you name your actual condition, don’t call it dysania. Go instead for a severe case of hum durgeon. Unless your boss is fluent in eighteenth-century slang he’ll never suspect that:

  HUM DURGEON. An imaginary illness. He has got the hum durgeon, the thickest part of his thigh is nearest his arse; i.e. nothing ails him except low spirits.

  Unfortunately, you cannot use hum durgeon every day. Your employer will suspect. You can probably get away with it at most twice a week, and the second time you should probably just shriek ‘My thighs! My thighs!’ down the telephone until they hang up.

  No. You have been lying here too long and too languorously. Seven o’clock is upon us. Throw off the duvet! Toss away the sheet! And crawl out of bed.

  Chapter 2

  7 a.m. – Waking and Washing

  Slippers – looking in the mirror – self-loathing – lavatory – shower – hair – shaving – brushing your teeth

  Exodus

  That’s it. You’re out of bed. Like Adam and Eve expelled from Eden.

  First, grope for your slippers, or to give them their much merrier name: pantofles. Pantofles are named after Saint Pantouffle who is as obscure as he is fictional. He (or she, or it) appears to have been invented in France in the fifteenth century. Nobody knows why the French would have invented a saint, or indeed why slippers should be named after him, but they were and that’s that. Robert Burton’s great medical work The Anatomy of Melancholy describes how Venus, the goddess of love, was so enraged with her blind son Cupid making people fall in love willy-nilly that:

  … she threatened to break his bow and arrows, to clip his wings, and whipped him besides on the bare buttocks with her pantophle.

  And any slipper that can double up as a weapon with which to spank godlings has to be a good idea.

  Once your toes are snugly pantofled, you can stagger off to the bathroom, pausing only to look at the little depression that you have left in your bed, the dip where you have been lying all night. This is known as a staddle.

  The bathroom

  Part I: The looking glass and what you saw there

  There are a lot of synonyms for mirror – everything from tooting-glass (Elizabethan) to rum-peeper (eighteenth-century highwayman), but the best is probably the considering glass. That is, after all, what you do with the thing. But first, before you even peek in the considering glass, take a gowpen of water – i.e. a double handful – and throw it over your face. After all, nobody but an angel is beautiful before eight o’clock.

  The word pimginnit may be necessary here. It’s a seventeenth-century term meaning ‘a large, red, angry pimple’. This is a particularly fine definition as it implies that pimples have emotions, and that some of them are furious. Pimginnits are much more wrathful than, for example, grog-blossoms, which are those spots that pop up the morning after one has indulged in too much grog, or rum. Grog-blossoms are more sullen than angry, like a resentful letter mailed overnight from your liver.

  But enough of your furuncles. Let us just say that you are erumpent, which is a jolly-sounding way of saying spotty (nicer than papuliferous and infinitely more pleasant than petechial, a word that Dr Johnson defined as ‘pestilentially spotted’). There are too many other sorrows for us to get hung up on spots.

  First, there are the elf-locks. It is, or was, a well known fact that elves sneak into your bedroom during the night with no better motive than to tangle up your hair. The sad result, which you will see reflected, is elf-locks.

  Then there are the wrinkles and, in extreme cases, wrines (these are the big ones); the crows’ feet, the frumples, the frounces, the lurking lirks and a million other synonyms for the lines on your face, which are, after all, merely signs of how thoughtful and wise you are.

  There’s also the culf, which is the name for the bed fluff that has lodged in your navel. There are the red ferret-eyes through which you’re looking. There’s the ozostomia and bromodrosis, which is what a doctor would call your stinking breath and sweat, because doctors have a lovely habit of insulting you in Greek, which softens the blow. Almost anything sounds softer in a classical language. For example, if a fellow were to suggest that you stank of horse piss, you would probably take offence, but if he merely said that you were jumentous, you might imagine that the chap was telling you that you were jubilant and momentous, or something along those lines. You might even thank him.

  All in all, though, you are idiorepulsive (you disgust even yourself) and something really ought be done about it soon. However, I fear that things must get worse before they can get better.

  On particularly bad mornings, this may be the time to attempt a through cough. These aren’t easy. I have tried it myself and consistently failed. If you can cough and fart at precisely the same instant then you have achieved what was known – two hundred years ago – as a through cough, and can therefore continue the rest of the day with a feeling of secret satisfaction.

  Anyway, a through cough is only the preface to the lowest part of the day – that part when you are no better than a beast and no worse than a monarch:
the lavatory.

  Part II: The Spice Islands

  In the Book of Samuel, as the whole history and future of salvation is being worked out between Saul and David, everything comes to rest upon Saul’s popping to the lavatory. Not, of course, that they had proper lavatories in those days. Salvation was not that far advanced. But as Saul with his army hunted for David beside the Dead Sea, he found that his dinner was, like his kingship of Israel, a fleeting thing that he would be forced to relinquish.

  Then Saul took three thousand chosen men out of all Israel, and went to seek David and his men upon the rocks of the wild goat. And he came to the sheepcotes by the way, where was a cave; and Saul went in to cover his feet: and David and his men remained in the sides of the cave. And the men of David said unto him, Behold the day of which the LORD said unto thee, Behold I will deliver thine enemy into thine hand, that thou mayest do to him as it shall seem good unto thee. Then David arose, and cut off the skirt of Saul’s robe privily.

  What concerns us here is not the question of who was truly the Lord’s anointed, nor the symbolism of the king’s cloak, nor even the necessity of checking your lavatory carefully for rival claimants to the throne; but the delightful phrase to cover his feet, which is a literal rendering of the ancient Hebrew meaning to do the necessities of nature.

  If the Bible teaches us one thing, it’s that you should never be so vulgar as to call a spade a spade or a lavatory a lavatory. Even if you choose not to cover your feet (which should already have pantofles on them), you can disguise your baseness with all sorts of lovely phrases. The Victorians would visit Mrs Jones, or my aunt, or the coffee shop, although that last phrase may be too suggestive for those of a liquid disposition. Others have been more exotic. In the thirteenth century they would visit a chamber foreign, or in the eighteenth century you could take a voyage to the Spice Islands, these being the most exotic place imaginable, and particularly appropriate for the morning after a curry.