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

by Forsyth, Mark

  A jehu is a particularly bad (or good) thing if you are driving down jumblegut lane, which was an eighteenth-century term for a bumpy road too obvious in its origin to require any explanation at all. However, jehus and jumbleguts aside, you are much more likely to get caught in a thrombosis of traffic, wherein the veiny and arterial roads of the metropolis are blocked by the embolism of roadworks and by clots that have broken down. Thus Jehu sits immobile in his chariot and gazes enviously at the bus lane.

  Bus

  The plural of bus is, of course, buses. But it’s a curious little point of history that, etymologically, the plural of bus would be bus. The voiture omnibus, or ‘carriage for everybody’ was introduced in Paris in 1820, and the plural would be voitures omnibus, which wouldn’t affect the shortening at all. (The same, incidentally, would apply to the taximeter cabriolet.)

  The central problem with buses is that you wait for ages and then none come along. This waiting (or prestolating) is a miserable affair as it’s usually raining, and you huddle up in the bus shelter, which starts to feel rather like a xenodochium or hostel for pilgrims, inhabited by people who peer optimistically down the road for the approaching Godot.

  When your bus does arrive, it is all too likely to be chiliander, or containing a thousand men, at which point you have to barrel onto the monkey board like a spermatozoa trying to get into the egg. Once within, you have no choice but to scrouge, which is helpfully defined in the OED thus:

  To incommode by pressing against (a person); to encroach on (a person’s) space in sitting or standing; to crowd. Also, to push or squeeze (a thing).

  But scrouge you must, and furiously, while at the same time looking out for chariot buzzers. Chariot buzzers are pickpockets who work on buses, but as the term is Victorian, you ought to be able to recognise them by their antiquated attire.

  Margaret Thatcher never said ‘Anybody seen in a bus over the age of thirty has been a failure in life.’ However, the poet Brian Howard (1905–58) did. It’s a rather snobby-sounding comment, but given that Brian Howard published only one serious book of poems, and given that the one biography of him is titled Portrait of a Failure, one must assume that he spent a lot of time on buses himself.

  Nonetheless, the over-thirty-year-old who wishes to be thought a success, but has no access to an automobile or jetpack, should probably opt for a sub- or superterranean train.

  Train

  Trains present their own problems. For starters you need to fight your way singlehanded through a railway station just to get on one. This involves dodging a lot people with heavy, bruising suitcases who are all milling around like an illustration of Brownian motion.

  The people who design guided missiles refer to a balladromic course, which is the path that a rocket takes towards its target, ignoring everything else and moving at speeds in excess of Mach 3. This is probably the best way to approach a station concourse: know where your platform is and be ready to explode at the slightest provocation. Keep it balladromic.

  If you are of a more pacifist and peacenik disposition, you could always gaincope, which is ‘to go across a field the nearest way’, and is a word more suited to the pastures and meadows of Olde Englande. But what you really need is a whiffler.

  There are very few whifflers today, if any; and I’ve never understood this, as a whiffler for hire at a station entrance could make an awful lot of money during rush hour. A whiffler is, according to the OED:

  One of a body of attendants armed with a javelin, battle-axe, sword, or staff, and wearing a chain, employed to keep the way clear for a procession.

  Of course, a full-time whiffler (if you could afford one) would be useful at all sorts of events such as Christmas shopping or cocktail parties. But at rush hour, a whiffler is not merely useful, but necessary. Without your whiffler you may well be reduced to a state of hemothymia, which is what psychiatrists call an impulse to murder, or, more literally, bloodlust.

  If you are ever reduced to such a helpless state of violent anger that you want to set about your fellow commuters with a bow and arrow, you should be comforted that the English language already has a phrase in place for you. Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811) says:

  Have among you, you blind harpers; an expression used in throwing or shooting at random among the crowd.

  This constitutes some usefully enigmatic final words before the ticket inspector wrestles you to the ground.

  If you ever do make it to the train, then you can settle down with your coffee and newspaper and spend your journey chuckling over the obituaries. Incidentally, the thing round the coffee cup that stops you burning your fingers is a zarf, and a newspaper is much more fun when referred to as a scream sheet.

  None of this applies of course if the train is so thringed, thronged and crammed that you cannot get a seat. Whether this is better or worse than being scrouged in a bus or clotted in a traffic thrombosis is a question that I cannot answer; all I can tell you is that the standard unit of measurement for pain is a dol and is measured with a dolorimeter.

  Clocking in

  By the time you arrive anywhere near your place of work you ought to be exhausted, bruised, battered, frustrated and generally broken in to twenty-first-century life. Nothing from here on in can be as bad as the commute, so things are looking up. You may celebrate this fact with a sly dew drink, which is a beer taken before the working day begins. This will delay you still further, but as you are almost inevitably the postreme (one who is last) as it stands, and as your tardiness is hardly your fault but can be blamed on the traffic/trains/bus driver/vengeful God or whatnot, a dew drink seems to be exactly what you need and deserve.

  Once refreshed you can stride into the barracoon, or slave depot, refreshed and ready to do a passable impression of a day’s work. Of course, you don’t stride into the barracoon: the correct method for entering the workplace is to scuddle in, which Dr Johnson defined as:

  Scuddle: To run with a kind of affected haste or precipitation.

  It doesn’t matter how slowly you ambled up the front steps. Or how you paused to admire the pretty clouds in the sky: the actual entrance to the office should be done at a scuddle. The correct method is to hyperventilate a few times to make yourself out of breath. Once gasping, give both cheeks a firm pinch and then hurl yourself at the doors, slamming them loudly as you shoot through and stagger to a halt in the middle of your office. Try to speak. You can’t. You’re too out of breath, swallowing air like a man who has nearly drowned. At last, gazing around you with wild innocent eyes, and with your scuddle complete, you finally manage to ask with perfect seeming-sincerity, and as though you don’t already know the answer to the question: ‘Am I late?’

  1 Scots dialect was invented by poets who couldn’t think of a rhyme.

  Chapter 5

  10 a.m. – The Morning Meeting

  Staying awake – listening – arguing – yes, no, who cares? – mugwumps – keeping quiet

  Offices are peculiar places and nobody is ever quite sure what happens in them, least of all the people who work there. But the day tends to begin with a morning meeting, in which everybody decides what they will fail to do for the rest of the day. This is usually held around a little table, or, in a particularly modern office, standing up or even walking, a strangely nomadic habit known as pedeconferencing. Indeed, if trends continue, the offices of the future will hold their morning meetings at an all-out sprint, with the winner getting to be boss for the day.

  Medieval guilds would call this a morn-speech, the ancient Greeks a panegyris, the medieval church a synod. In Turkey a council of state was called a divan, after which the item of furniture is named – so in Milton’s Paradise Lost, when all the demons of Hell are ‘rais’d from their dark divan’, it has nothing to do with comfy seating arrangements. However, the best word for a meeting is a latrocinium.

  A
latrocinium is, technically speaking, a robber-council. So, when deciding what to thieve next, Ali Baba and his 40 thieves would have held a 41-strong latrocinium in their magical cave. It is up to the conscience of the individual office-worker to decide whether it is a latrocinium that they attend, but as the word is incomprehensible and sounds pleasantly similar to latrine, it should be used at all possible opportunities. Moreover, latrocinium has a great and significant history. The word was first applied to the Second Council of Ephesus, a grand meeting of the fifth-century church to decide upon the exact nature of Christ and who should therefore be burnt. It was so riotous, raucous and disagreeable that the Pope declared the whole thing null and void, called it a latrocinium, and then held another council at Chalcedon, which reversed all of its decisions. As most morning meetings, like most mornings, will someday be thought better of, latrocinium has resonance.

  So, everybody here? When you read the minutes of a meeting, whether it’s a board-meeting, an AGM or an orgy, you will find near the top the cumbersome phrase ‘apologies for absence’, or in some particularly verbose cases ‘apologies for non-attendance’. This can be done away with. You see, there is a single (and singularly suitable) word for that: essoinment.

  Essoinment is the act of essoining, and essoining is (OED):

  To offer an excuse for the non-appearance of (a person) in court; to excuse for absence.

  So all that the minutes of the meeting really need is ‘Essoinments’ followed by a list of names. Once the essoinments are given, the constulting (or being stupid together) can begin.

  Eutychus in the boardroom

  At any given meeting somebody is bound to go on too long, and it’s usually the first speaker. It doesn’t really matter if the speaker is St Paul himself, as is clear from the Book of Acts, Chapter 20:

  And upon the first day of the week, when the disciples came together to break bread, Paul preached unto them, ready to depart on the morrow; and continued his speech until midnight. And there were many lights in the upper chamber, where they were gathered together. And there sat in a window a certain young man named Eutychus, being fallen into a deep sleep: and as Paul was long preaching, he sunk down with sleep, and fell down from the third loft, and was taken up dead.

  This is a story to remember if anybody ever tells you about the enthusiasm and ecstasy of the early Christians. Indeed, if there were any justice in this world or the next, Eutychus would by now be the patron saint of people who doze off during sermons.

  There are all sorts of precise and technical words for exactly how somebody might bore you. For example, Henry Cockeram’s English Dictionarie of 1623 has the word obganiate, which he defines as ‘to trouble one with often repeating of one thing’, and which comes from the Latin for ‘growl’. So once the same point has been made for the umpteenth time in the umpteenth different way, you can nod and murmur ‘Obganiation’ as though it weren’t rude.

  If the obganiation comes down to the repetition of a particular word – like ‘teamwork’, ‘delivery’, or ‘chryselephantine’ – it becomes battology. Battology is named after an ancient Greek king called Battus, who founded the city of Cyrene but is remembered in the English language only for the fact that he had a stammer. A word can be battologised so often that it relinquishes all meaning or significance and becomes a pure series of sounds that flutter around the meeting table. This is called semantic satiation, or ‘lapse of meaning’.

  But it is not merely repetition that annoys: there’s some talk that is pointless in the first place. One can, for example, speculate with neither fruit nor point about how a client might react to something that will never happen, or where the company will be in twenty years’ time. Such pointless speculation is technically known as mataeology, and such speculators as mataeologians.1 And though this term of abuse is usually applied to theologians, it is as rife in the corporation as the cathedral.

  Listening

  In all this, the important thing is to look as though you’re listening. If you are actually listening, that’s even better, but let us start with simple goals. Evelyn Waugh, in his later years, used to have an ear trumpet. It probably wasn’t even necessary, but he would hold it conspicuously to his shell-like during conversations, and, when he was bored, would just as conspicuously put it back in his pocket, sometimes while you were in mid-sentence. This is a Bad Tactic, unless you own the company.

  Much better is the method adopted by the actor Peter Lorre when he had fled the Nazis and managed to get a meeting with Alfred Hitchcock in London. Lorre knew no English, but as Hitchcock was remarkably enamoured of the sound of his own voice this was not a problem. When Lorre had to speak, he said ‘Yes’. For the rest of the time:

  I had heard that [Hitchcock] loved to tell stories and so I watched him like a hawk and when I was of the opinion he had just told the punch line of a story I broke out in such laughter that I almost fell off my chair.

  If you take this method and replace laughing with nodding, you have achieved all you really need to do in the morning meeting: you have become nod-crafty.

  Nod-crafty is defined in the OED as ‘Given to nodding the head with an air of great wisdom’. And once you notice nod-crafties, they’re everywhere. Those who are paid to interview people on television are notoriously nod-crafty. Indeed, as many interviews are conducted with only one camera, which is pointed at the interviewee, they then have to set everything up again for a second series of shots that show nothing but the interviewer nodding. In the trade, these are called noddies. W.H. Auden pointed out in 1969 that a lot of doctors are nod-crafty, that’s despite the fact that the OED doesn’t record any uses after 1608. But the best place to observe the nod-crafty is in an art gallery. Here the nod-craftiest will approach a picture, pause, tilt up their aesthete chins for a few seconds of appreciation and then finally, with a small smile, nod. The pictures rarely nod back.

  In an office meeting, being nod-crafty can be combined with pectination. This is when the fingers are interlaced like two combs (the Latin for comb was pectin). Well-pectinated fingers and a head like a rocking horse should be enough to get you through the meeting unscathed, especially if you are also wise enough to keep your mouth shut and play at mumbudget, a lovely old phrase for keeping quiet.

  I should warn you that Sir Thomas Browne observed in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646) that:

  To set cross leg’d, or with our fingers pectinated or shut together is accounted bad, and friends will perswade us from it.

  It’s at times like this that you know who your real friends are.

  Argument

  There are times, though, when good people have to take a stand, even at the morning meeting. Sometimes you can no longer sit there in silent longanimity, but must stand up and speak out for what you believe in, such as comfier chairs and a new printer. At such times you should remember Cicero before the Senate, Socrates before the Athenians, Jesus before Pilate, and that they all ended up dead. So it’s probably better to follow the example of Lord Copper’s underling in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop:

  When Lord Copper was right he said ‘Definitely, Lord Copper’; when he was wrong, ‘Up to a point.’

  You must not simply ding people, ding being an eighteenth-century term for telling a chap what he really doesn’t want to hear. If you tell your opponent that they’re an idiot and that you’d no more take their advice on innovative teamwork than you would ask a rabbi whether to go for streaky or back, it may cause a scene. Far better to start off with the words: ‘Permit me to discept.’ And then, before anybody has a chance to grab a dictionary and discover that discepting means ‘disagreeing utterly’, you can continue with: ‘I see what you’re saying and it’s ultracrepidarian.’ Be careful here to put the stress on ultra, as words with ultra always sound cool.

  Ultracrepidarianism is ‘giving opinions on subjects that you know nothing about’, and is thus a terribly useful word. U
ltracrepidarian was introduced into English by the essayist William Hazlitt, but it goes back to a story about the great ancient Greek painter Apelles.

  The story goes that Apelles used to leave his new paintings out on public display and then hide behind a pillar to hear people’s reactions. One day he overheard a cobbler pointing out that Apelles had painted a shoe all wrong. So he took the painting away, corrected the shoe and put it out on display again the next day.

  The cobbler came back, saw that Apelles had taken his advice and was so proud and puffed up with conceit that he started talking loudly about what was wrong with the leg; at which point Apelles jumped out from his hiding place and shouted: ‘Ne sutor ultra crepidam’,2 which approximately translates as ‘the cobbler should go no further than the shoe’. Thus ultracrepidarian literally means ‘beyond-the-shoe’.

  Providing that nobody else at the table knows that little story, you can use ultracrepidarian with impish impunity.

  Though this may not provide a sockdolager, or winning point in an argument, it will nonetheless give you a certain gravitas and mystery that will unsettle any dictionaryless meeting. Nor should your attack end here; it should be pressed home with all the ferocity of a Vandal sacking Rome. In fact, this may be the moment to get all Cab Calloway on your colleagues’ sorry bottoms.