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

by Forsyth, Mark

  However, these references to exoticism may be inappropriate to something that is often so troubling in foreign lands. The great actor David Garrick took a trip to Europe in 1764 and wrote to his brother saying:

  … I never, since I left England, till now, have regal’d Myself with a good house of Office, or as he calls it, a Conveniency – the holes in Germany are generally too large, & too round, chiefly owing I believe to the broader bottoms of the Germans […] We have a little English Gentleman with us who Slipt up to the Middle of one of the holes & we were some Minutes before we could disengage him. – in short you may assure Townley, (Who loves to hear of the state of these Matters) that in Italy the People do their Needs, in Germany they disEmbogue, but in England (& in England only) they Ease themselves.

  House of office has a pleasing grandeur to it, although some of Garrick’s contemporaries would have called it a House of Commons, which is good for the politically-minded. Medieval fellows would go to siege, which has a fine martial ring and is particularly appropriate for the constipated. And militarism was still present in the Victorian scraping castle. In fact, there are a million and one variants and euphemisms, all of which mean that since the thirteenth century nobody has had to be so vulgar as to do their filth-hood.

  While actually on the gong-hole one should take care about one’s precise actions. For example, in a house with thin walls it is a little rude to squitter or ‘void the excrement with a noise’. Your purgation, exoneration, dejection or whatever you choose to call it should be performed pianissimo and the tantadlin tart baked in silence.

  When it is all over you may turn your attention to the necessary paperwork, and if you think that the English language may fail you here, then you haven’t read Sir Thomas Urquhart’s 1653 translation of Rabelais, which has this tantalising little tip:

  I say and maintain, that of all torcheculs, arsewisps, bumfodders, tail-napkins, bunghole cleansers, and wipe-breeches, there is none in the world comparable to the neck of a goose, that is well downed, if you hold her head betwixt your legs. And believe me therein upon mine honour, for you will thereby feel in your nockhole a most wonderful pleasure, both in regard of the softness of the said down and of the temperate heat of the goose …

  Bumfodder has had a rather curious history in the English language, for though it is now a very obscure word for loo roll, it still survives in a shortened form. Bumf is, to this day, a rather derogatory term for large, but necessary, amounts of paperwork. And necessary it certainly is, if you want to avoid what were once called fartleberries.

  However, in the dire circumstance that you have neither paper nor a back-up goose, you can always resort to a corner of your cloak, provided David hasn’t crept up on you and cut it off, privily.

  Part III: For all the water in the ocean/Can never turn the swan’s black legs to white,/Although she lave them hourly in the flood

  Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning conductor, bifocal glasses, the chair-desk and the cold air bath. This last innovation he described in a letter of 1768. The crux of it was that he didn’t like water:

  The shock of the cold water has always appeared to me, generally speaking, as too violent, and I have found it much more agreeable to my constitution to bathe in another element, I mean cold air. With this view I rise almost every morning, and sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever, half an hour or an hour, according to the season, either reading or writing.

  In the interests of water conservation, Franklin’s invention could be usefully revived, although it is hard to see what effect it would have on dirt and smell. So we of the twenty-first century are probably stuck with water; and, such is the pressure of time, we are probably going to use a shower. The best thing about taking a bath is that you get to use the 1950s American slang term make like a fish.

  However, before launching rashly into the waters, you should prepare. Sod’s Law states that you’ll be halfway through showering before you realise that there’s almost no shampoo left in the bottle; so you should duffifie it now. Duffifie is an old Aberdeenshire verb meaning ‘to lay a bottle on its side for some time … that it may be completely drained of the few drops remaining’. It’s therefore much more compact than the English equivalent of making the bottle confess. Either way, a bit of duffifying will save you much annoyance later on.

  As you set the waters running you might wish to notice the shower curtain effect, which would doubtless have interested Benjamin Franklin. When the shower starts, the curtain will be sucked in towards you, and though several theories have been proposed, modern science is still uncertain as to why this happens.

  Even as the curtains are being pulled in around you, you will probably experience the curglaff, which is another old Scots term, this time for the feeling you get when you’re hit with cold water. Your heart gallops, your blood rushes, and, if you’re Benjamin Franklin, you don’t like it one little bit.

  Anyway, there’s nothing to be done about that. It is time to buddle (scrub in water) all that is not illutible (unwashawayable). Baudelaire said that humans were deluded if they thought they could wash away all their spots with vile tears, but Baudelaire was French and therefore knew nothing about hygiene or shower gel.

  There are funny words for almost all the parts of the body, but the important ones in the shower are these:

  Oxter – armpit

  Popliteal – behind the knees

  Dew-beaters/beetle-crushers – feet (depending on your usual use for them)

  Inguinal – relating to the groin

  Everywhere else is optional. After all, if you spend too long in there you’ll end up with the skin on the ends of your fingers quobbled.

  Part IV: Stare, stare in the basin/And wonder what you’ve missed

  Hair

  The Scots used to have a terrible reputation for lice. Whether this was justified, I don’t know. I deal in dictionaries, not Scotsmen. However, the Scots Greys are in full march once meant that lice were crawling all over your head. And a dictionary of 1811 defines clan thus:

  A family’s tribe or brotherhood; a word much used in Scotland. The head of the clan; the chief: an allusion to a story of a Scotchman, who, when a very large louse crept down his arm, put him back again, saying he was the head of the clan, and that, if injured, all the rest would resent it.

  All of which should explain why a comb used to be called a Scotch louse trap. So reviving this term will enrich the language and enrage the Scots, which is a double benefit.

  In fact, one can continue to enrage the Celtic fringes of the hair by dispensing with your comb and instead using your fingers to get your hair into some semblance of order. The Welsh had no reputation for lice, but they did once have a reputation for using cheap substitutes. So a Welsh diamond is a crystal, a Welsh carpet is a pattern painted on the floor, and a Welsh comb is your five fingers.

  The things people do to their hair are so weird and varied that the English language is brimming with useful words on the subject, most of which contain the element trich-, which was the ancient Greek word for the stuff. For example, smooth-haired people are lissotrichous and wavy-haired people are cymotrichous, and trichotillomania is a manic desire to pull out all your hair.

  If dictionaries are to be believed then the best possible thing you can do is cultivate dangling curls. Even Dr Johnson’s dictionary called a woman’s curls heart-breakers, and the Victorians called them bow-catchers, on the basis that they would catch handsome young men, or beaus. And Victorian women, in a rare fit of equality, would run after men who sported bell-ropes, which brought belles to ruin with their curly charms.

  Shaving

  Let us now turn our attention to the chins of men and unfortunate ladies. Let us turn to shavery, which the OED solemnly defines as ‘subjection to the necessity of being shaved’, although the poet Robert Southey used it better when he observed in 1838:


  Oh pitiable condition of human kind! One colour is born to slavery abroad, and one sex to shavery at home! – A woman to secure her comfort and well-being in this country stands in need of one thing only, which is a good husband; but a man has to provide himself with two things, a good wife, and a good razor, and it is more difficult to find the latter than the former.

  Slavery has been abolished but shavery survives. This latter is rather a shame, as it lessens the need for all of the technical beard words, of which there are many. They all involve the Greek root pogo, which is pronounced in exactly the same way as the stick (although the two are etymologically unrelated). So there’s pogonology (the study of beards), pogonate (having a beard), pogoniasis (a beard on a lady), and pogonotomy (shaving). As we live in an essentially misopogonistic society of beard-haters, most men must start the day by taking a razor from the pogonion or tip of the chin up to the philtrum, which is the name for the little groove between your nose and your upper lip. Then you have to work carefully to avoid a neckbeard, which the Victorians called a Newgate fringe. Newgate was the name of a London prison where people were hanged. So a Newgate fringe was meant to resemble the rope that was slipped around the felon’s neck before he took the plunge into eternity.

  Teeth

  In the first century BC, the Roman poet Catullus wrote these lines about a man called Aemilius:

  Non (ita me di ament) quicquam referre putaui,

  utrumne os an culum olfacerem Aemilio.

  Nilo mundius hoc, niloque immundius illud,

  uerum etiam culus mundior et melior:

  nam sine dentibus hic.

  It is impossible to capture the solemn beauty of the original in English, but a loose translation might go:

  I really cannot tell between

  His mouth above and arse beneath;

  They are identically unclean,

  The only difference: one has teeth.

  Nothing else is known about filthy-breathed Aemilius beyond Catullus’s poem. For two thousand years that has been his sole posterity. From this we may learn two lessons: don’t get on the wrong side of poets, and keep your teeth clean.1

  So open your mouth wide and say oze. It’s a lovely, long, wide-throated word and means ‘a stench in the mouth’. The good thing about oze is that merely by saying it, you distribute it.

  When toothpaste manufacturers talk about the small amount of toothpaste that fits on the end of your toothbrush, they call it a nurdle. Why they should do so is lost in the oze of time, but it’s been the word since at least 1968, and a recent court case between two of the largest manufacturers was centred entirely around who was allowed to depict which nurdle on their packaging. Not only was the nurdle said to chase away oze, it could also whiten your teeth (or, to be more technical about it, stop your being xanthodontic).

  However, the greatest advance since the days of Catullus is the introduction of mouthwash, which was, unfortunately, introduced after the words squiggle and gleek had died out. Squiggle was an old Norfolk dialect word meaning ‘to shake and wash a fluid about in the mouth, with the lips closed’. Squiggling is a lovely word because it sounds exactly like what it is, as does gleek. To gleek is to squirt liquid from your mouth. This should be done from as far from the basin as possible, just for the challenge.

  Done

  That’s it. You’re done. There may be other things you should take care of, but I’m much too shy to enquire. Instead, I shall ask what God asked your forebears in the garden of Eden: Who told you you were naked?

  1 In fact, Catullus wrote another poem about a chap with shiny white teeth, claiming that they only got that way because he drank piss. There’s no pleasing some poets.

  Chapter 3

  8 a.m. – Dressing and Breakfast

  Clothes – make-up – breakfast – preparing to depart

  Naturism is all very well, but it gets chilly after a while. So it is time to become what nudists refer to as a textile, i.e. one of those poor fools who wears clothes. You’re ready to get togged up, to become the concinnate (finely dressed) and consummate gentleman; or if you are of the womanly persuasion, to become a dandizette, the nineteenth-century term for a female dandy. Certainly you cannot remain starkers or, as a witch would put it, sky-clad.

  In the second century AD a group of Christian fanatics called Adamites practised Adamism, or holy nudity, but only in church, and even there they had to have central heating. St Epiphanius described Adamism thus:

  Their churches are stoves, made warm for the reception of company by a fire underneath. When they come to the door they pull off their clothes, both men and women, and enter naked in to the place of meeting. Their presidents and teachers do the same, and they sit together promiscuously. And so they perform their readings and other parts of worship naked.

  The theory of Adamism, if you can believe it, was that by exposing themselves to such temptation they actually strengthened their wills and conquered lust. But though God may have approved of the Adamites (He has remained silent on the subject), the police and most employers take a dim view. So let us dress.

  We begin with what the Victorians coyly referred to as one’s abbreviations, which in these coarse times is simply called underwear. In Herefordshire, capacious and roomy knickers used to be known as apple-catchers on the basis that they were large enough to serve a useful purpose in a late-summer orchard.

  Moving to other unmentionables, the English language is weirdly wanting in slang terms for the brassiere. The only fun to be had is with padded bras, which were known in the 1940s as gay deceivers. As you can imagine, this was before the word gay had become widely used as slang for homosexual, and when a gay old man could still be lusting after members of the opposite sex. Such gays could be deceived by the use of rubber falsities, which, because pure rubber is a trifle smelly, would be flavoured with chocolate. It might be worthwhile to bring back the gay old terminology, but not the technology.

  There’s a curious little entry in A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew (1699):

  Sir Posthumus Hobby, one who Draws on his Breeches with a Shoeing-horn, also a Fellow that is Nice and Whimsical in the set of his Cloaths.

  It’s curious for two reasons. First, it doesn’t mention whether the shoeing-horn is necessary because the fellow is fat, or because he wears terribly tight trousers to show off his lovely legs. Secondly, there really was a chap called Sir Posthumus Hoby who had lived a hundred years before that dictionary was written. He was a famous Puritan and may well have been the model for the stern and strict Malvolio in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. But that Sir Posthumus (so named because he was born after his father’s death) was neither particularly fat nor particularly dandyish. Indeed, the only really notable things about him were his humourlessness and the fact that he matriculated at Oxford at the age of eight. Nonetheless, it seems unfair to deny him immortality at that awkward moment when you try to slip into the clothes of last year’s slimness.

  It is at this point that you’re bound to notice a grinnow. A grinnow is a stain that has not come out in the wash and that you probably haven’t seen until this vital moment. For a word that useful, it’s astonishing that grinnow is only recorded as an obscure Shropshire dialect word in a dictionary of 1879, where they provide the helpful sample sentence: ‘I canna get the grinnows out if I rub the piece out, they’n bin biled in so many times.’

  One must be wary of grinnows; too many grinnows and you end up looking like a tatterdemalion. A tatterdemalion is a chap (or chappess) whose clothes are tattered and torn. It is the same as a tatter-wallop, a ragabash, or a flabergudgion; and, given the threadbare state of modern fashion, it is an eminently useful word.

  Tatterdemalion has the lovely suggestion of dandelions towards the end (although pronounced with all the stress on the may of malion) and should be immediately
comprehensible even to the uninitiated, because everybody knows what tatter means, and the demalion bit was never anything more than a linguistic fascinator. More wonderfully still, there are spin-off words: tatterdemalionism and tatterdemalionry, the latter meaning tatterdemalions considered as a group.

  Once you are snogly geared (as they said in the eighteenth century), dressed to death (nineteenth century) or simply togged to the bricks (twentieth-century Harlem), it is time, if you are a lady, to apply some auxiliary beauty.

  Make-up

  Everybody remembers the line ‘Alas, poor Yorick’, but fewer recall the final lines of Hamlet’s skull speech. ‘Now get you to my lady’s chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that.’ Which shows that Hamlet was not the sort of person to help you choose a lipstick.

  It is tempting to bring back all the winsome words that Shakespeare would have known for make-up. In his time there would have been no brutal application of foundation, as ladies would surfle instead. They would then apply ceruse as a blusher, the eyes would have been touched with collyrium and the eyelids with calliblephary. But as the whole process back then was called fucation, it’s probably best not to get carried away with Elizabethan vocabulary. It could become awkward if your husband called, ‘What’s taking so long?’ and you accidentally replied: ‘I just need to fucate, darling. Won’t be a minute.’ To which your significant other might reasonably reply: ‘Eight?’