Does that put you off your ciggy? No? Then off we go to our fag break (or smoko as the Australians call it). But first, it would be only polite for you to ask some of your co-workers if they wish to come along for a puff. The best way to word such an invitation can be found in a dictionary of highwayman’s slang from 1699:
Will ye raise a Cloud, shall we Smoke a Pipe?
It’s best to ask this in a raspy, piratish voice and, if possible, to carry a blunderbuss. But you can’t smoke here. The misocapnic ghost of James I still haunts us all with smokeless restrictions and rules, and so you will probably not be able to raise a cloud at your own desk and must instead retreat to a designated smoking area, an indignity that was never suffered by highwaymen.
‘Designated smoking area’ is an unnecessarily wordy and official name for a fumatorium or even better, a coughery, which is a place where people go to cough. Sir Thomas Urquhart wrote that before a service, priests:
… dunged in the dungeries, pissed in the pisseries, spit in the spiteries, coughed in the cougheries and doted in the doteries, that to the Divine Service they might not bring any Thing that was unclean or foul.
Even though Urquhart wasn’t being thoroughly serious about that, coughery is still as good a name as any for the little yard by the office’s back door where a forlorn but persistent tabagie still holds out like the last remnants of a dying Amazonian tribe. A tabagie, by the way, is the technical term for a group of smokers, although the collective noun (as in a pride of lions or a murder of crows) is a parliament of smokers. Both words emerged in the nineteenth century, the high-point of fumious vocabulary. For the Victorian, a smoker was not merely a smoker, he was a tobacconalian or a nicotinian. So if you don’t feel like using ‘coughery’ and ‘raising a cloud’ you could always escape from the misocapnists by taking ‘a voyage to the Land of the Nicotinians’.
The Land of the Nicotinians would be a fabulous place: shrouded in impenetrable clouds and dotted with naturally occurring humidors. There the obedient Nicotinians would do homage before their goddess Nicotia, and no, I didn’t just make her up. Nicotia too is an invention of Victorian poetry. The American poet James Russell Lowell even wrote in the 1860s about her divine lineage. She was, according to him, the daughter of Bacchus, god of revelry, and her mother was the daughter of Morpheus, god of dreams.
Now the kind nymph to Bacchus born
By Morpheus’ daughter, she that seems
Gifted upon her natal morn
By him with fire, by her with dreams,
Nicotia, dearer to the Muse
Than all the grape’s bewildering juice,
We worship, unforbid of thee …
But the goddess can’t even protect her poor worshippers who, persecuted by the malevolent misocapnists, are forced to raise their clouds in distant pavement cougheries in the wind and the rain.
And why? Because smoking is considered unhealthy (and Red Indian). But it was not always thus! Once upon a time there was no great divide between the sporty and the smoky, because smoking was a sport. There was such a thing as a smoking match. It is recorded in Joseph Strutt’s Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801) in an entry between ‘Grinning Matches’ and ‘Hot Hasty-Pudding Eaters’.
Smoking matches are usually made for tobacco-boxes, or some other trifling prizes, and may be performed two ways: the first is a trial among the candidates who shall smoke a pipe full of tobacco in the shortest time: the second is precisely the reverse; for he of them who can keep the tobacco alight within his pipe, and retain it there the longest, receives the reward.
Smoking matches were filled with twists and turns and yellow-nail-biting excitement. Consider this match report from 1723, when men were men and smoking was a competitive sport:
Oxford, a scaffold being built up for it just at Finmore’s, an alehouse. The conditions were, that anyone (man or woman) that could smoak out three ounces of tobacco first, without drinking or going off the stage, should have twelve shillings. Many tryed, and ’twas thought that a journeyman taylour, of St Peters in the East, would have been victor, he smoaking faster than, and being many pipes before, the rest; but at last he was so sick, that ’twas thought he would have dyed; and an old man, that had been a souldier, and smoaked gently, came off conquerour, smoaking the three ounces quite out, and he told one, (from whom I had it,) that, after it, he smoaked four or five pipes the same evening.
In the seventeenth century smokers were even given the ridiculously romantic title of fume gallants, conjuring an image of white knights with yellow teeth. There used to be none of this nonsense about smoking being bad for you. In fact it was once generally recognised (but since covered up by misocapnist spoilsports) that smoking cures you (a fact that has always been known to salmon). Hence a medical dictionary of 1859 contains this fascinating entry:
INSUFFLATION (in, in; sufflo, to blow). The act of blowing a gas or vapour into a cavity of the body, as when tobacco smoke is injected into the rectum, or air blown into the lungs, &c.
I don’t know how useful that word will be to you; but if the necessity ever arises, you will at least know what to call it.
Anyhow, having arrived in the tabagie, you must now obtain a cigarette (the cost these days being such that nobody at all buys their own). The correct 1950s way to ask for a smoke is ‘Butt me’, which works very well unless you’re talking to a ram. If you are among particularly generous company, somebody may even offer you a cancer stick without being asked, in which case they should, if they wish to be equally 1950s, accompany their generosity with the kind words, ‘Have a firework’.
Of course, the problem with accepting cigarettes from others is that they may smoke a different kind of coffin nail to you. For example, you may be offered a straight, or manufactured cigarette, when what you were really after was a quirly which you roll yourself. And even if you and your patron are in agreement that smoking should be an arts and crafty type of affair, their favourite tobacco may be to you little more than mundungus, which is ‘bad, or rank tobacco’, also called old rope.
Now that you have something tobaccical, look around for a salamander, or ‘red hot iron used for lighting tobacco’. If none has been provided, you may settle for an entry in Dr Johnson’s dictionary:
Sponk. A word in Edinburgh which denotes a match, or any thing dipt in sulphur that takes fire: as, any sponks will ye buy?
Once you have a sponk you may cock your organ (light your pipe) and begin to funk. Funk was the standard term for smoking from the late seventeenth century through to the early nineteenth, when it suddenly started to mean a panic attack, and then in the twentieth century it became a kind of music. Funk was also, by association, a term for tobacco smoke, which means that you are currently smelling rather funky.
Ashcan used to be a slang term for wasted time. So unfortunately you must funk as fast as you can and then remember the poor of the parish. This from a dictionary of Victorian slang:
HARD-UPS, cigar-end finders, who collect the refuse pieces of smoked cigars from the gutter, and having dried them, sell them as tobacco to the very poor.
So don’t whatever you do stamp out your stub. Remember the hard-ups, and remember those devilish Red Indians that James I hated. But why rely on his misocapnist claptrap? Instead we can use an actual account of tobacco in the New World: the very first written record of the human smoking. It’s from Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, who visited Hispaniola in 1535 and recorded how the native chieftain would smoke until he passed out and then ‘his wives, who are many, pick him up, and carry him to his hammock’.
But not for you! Back to your desk, and pretend to work.
1 In the eighteenth century they used to mix tea and coffee together and call it twist. In the interests of scholarship I tried this myself and do not recommend that anybody else does.
2 The sec
ond half of that entry is irrelevant, but much too much fun to leave out.
Chapter 7
Noon – Looking as Though You’re Working
Effortlessness – sales and marketing – emails – approaching bankruptcy – asking for a raise
Sprezzatura, or the nonchalance of the perfect office worker
It is probably time to do some work, or at least appear to. Work, like justice, must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. Appearances are everything, reality an inconvenience.
In the Renaissance, there was an exquisite idea named sprezzatura, the nonchalance of the perfect courtier. It was the newest and most fashionable thing once. You see, all through the medieval period, knights had known what they had to do: they had to be knights in armour. They had to be chivalrous to ladies of course, but they also had to be warlike and violent and bloodthirsty. When the Renaissance came along the bar was raised somewhat. Skill at arms was still valued, but suddenly a man was expected to stop being medieval and be Renaissance, which meant learning to do all sorts of things like read, write, paint, play a few instruments, speak Latin, appreciate sculpture and whatnot.
These new requirements were handily laid out in a sort of textbook by Baldassare Castiglione. Castiglione was the very model of a modern courtier and peregrinated around Italy being a friend of Raphael and the Medicis. He was an ambassador, a classicist, a soldier and a sonneteer. And he wrote a book about how you too could be like him. It was called The Book of the Courtier, was translated into every language anyone could think of, and for centuries afterwards was the European definition of the Perfect Man. However, there was one word in it that could never quite be translated properly: sprezzatura.
Sprezzatura sort of means nonchalance, but more precisely it means the appearance of nonchalance – the effort made to disguise the fact that you’re making an effort. So you should be a brilliant musician, for example, but nobody should ever see or hear you practise. Thus you take your flute or lute or whatever and disappear well out of earshot and work at your musicianship in secret. Then when somebody says, ‘Hey, Baldassare, do you play the lute at all?’, you can reply, ‘The lute? Hmm. I’ve never tried but pass it here … Oh, like this?’ – and then knock off a little virtuoso performance while looking bored. Everybody gasps in astonishment at your effortless ability, and you appear much better than you would have done had the whole court heard you plink plonk plunking for months on end.
This Great Untranslatable, graceful nonchalance hiding discreet diligence, simply had to be imported into the other European languages including English, where the OED defines it as ‘studied carelessness’.
But the Renaissance is dead and done, and with it sprezzatura has wandered nonchalantly from the language. It has been replaced, though, by that most horrible of ideas: presenteeism, the belief that you should be the first in and the last to leave and do nothing in between because it’s not work but the appearance of work that is rewarded.
But imagine, just imagine, if sprezzatura were brought back to the modern office. Gone would be those dreary press releases saying ‘Flumshoe Incorporated are really excited about this new acquisition! John Splunkington, Head of Mergers, said: “I want to thank everybody on the team who have put in the long hours over the last year to make this deal happen.”’ Instead, you would have: ‘Flumshoe Incorporated is filled with languorous indifference at this new acquisition. John Splunkington, who lolls gracefully around the mergers department, murmured: “It was nothing. A trifle really”, and continued to play his lute.’
Earning a living
But sprezzatura is gone, and it is time to actually sit down at your desk and quomodocunquize. Quomodocunquizing is ‘making money in any way that you can’, and was used in this glorious phrase by Sir Thomas Urquhart in 1652: ‘Those quomodocunquizing clusterfists and rapacious varlets.’
A clusterfist is, as you might imagine, somebody who keeps a tight grip on his cash. Quomodocunquizing can be used of governments, football clubs, famous people who advertise things, and of course yourself. For we are quomodocunquizing animals. It is the chief symptom of plutomania, which is ‘the frenzied pursuit of money’.
In case you were wondering, the planet Pluto is named after the god of the underworld. As gold and silver and diamonds are always found underground, the ancients decided that Pluto was also the god of money, hence plutomania, plutocracy (government by the rich), plutography (written descriptions of the lives of the rich) and plutolatry (worship of wealth).
The best course for the aspiring plutomaniac is to become a plutogogue, which can mean either somebody who speaks only to the rich or somebody who speaks only for them. The former is commonly known as sales, and the latter advertising, but plutogogue is a much more impressive word to put on your business card or CV.
If you would prefer, though, to have a more rough-and-ready feel to your job description in sales, you could always describe yourself as a barker, which was the Victorian term for somebody who stood outside a shop shouting its virtues into the smoggy air. Unfortunately, Victorian slang dictionaries also contain this entry:
CHUFF IT, i.e., be off, or take it away, in answer to a street seller who is importuning you to purchase.
A useful phrase for dealing with cold callers.
Email
These days, the telephone is used less and less and email more and more. It’s enough to bring back the noble business of screeving. A screever is a professional writer of begging letters. These letters would not be sent, rather they would be given to somebody else who would use them as a sort of certificate of authenticity as they told their hard luck story. Luckily for historians of strange trades, a typical Victorian screever’s price list survives:
Friendly letter 6d
Long ditto 9d
Petition 1s
Ditto with signatures 1s 6d
Ditto with forged names 2s 6d
Ditto ‘very heavy’ (dangerous) 3s
Manuscript for a broken-down author 10s
Part of a play for ditto 7s 6d
It is somehow comforting to know that there were broken-down authors even then.
There’s something rather nasty about the sound of the word screever that makes it less than wholesome. It’s a mixture of scream and grieve and would not look good on the résumé. If you want a more high-flying term for a writer of begging letters, the Victorians also called them high fliers.
Once you have screeved and flown high, the matter is up to the answer jobber, who is, as you may have guessed, a professional writer of answers. This is the way most of us spend at least the first half hour of our day at the desk, picking through the emails that have accumulated like dew in the night.
It’s a shame that there are not, as yet, any particularly beautiful names for kinds of email. In the days of pen and paper, a little letter could be called a notekin or a breviate or a letterling, but a short email is a short email and nobody seems to be doing much about it. Some of the terms for letters can be saved, though. For example, an omnibus letter – one intended for several recipients – could easily become an ‘omnibus email’ and replace the tedious ‘group email’. In fact, here is a list of the possibilities, in which I have simply replaced ‘letter’ with ‘email’ and provided the old definition.
Bread and butter email – one saying thank you.
Cheddar email – one to which several people have contributed, just as several dairies contribute to a single cheddar cheese.
Email of comfort – one that assures a creditor that a debt will be paid, without being legally binding.
Journal email – one that talks about what you’ve been up to lately.
Email of placards – one that grants permission.
Email of marque – one that allows you to behave like a pirate. These should be sent sparingly. (Letters of marque would be sent out to ships’
captains when war was declared, allowing them to plunder the merchant ships of the enemy nation.)
Laureate email – one announcing victory.
Email of Uriah – ‘A treacherous email, implying friendship, but in reality a death warrant’, thus (almost) Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. I send a lot of these. The name refers to the Second Book of Samuel: ‘And it came to pass in the morning, that David wrote a letter to Joab, and sent it by the hand of Uriah. And he wrote in the letter, saying, Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die.’
Once the emails are finished with, there are all sorts of jobs for a busy jobler to do (a jobler is somebody who does small jobs). You could rearrange the stuff on your desk, update your status on the interweb, or you could work hard as a nephelolater (one who admires passing clouds). Whatever you do, though, don’t look at the accounts unless you have audit ale.
Audit ale was a specially strong and tasty kind of ale to be drunk only on the day of an audit. You can’t buy it any more. You couldn’t even buy it back in 1823 when Byron wrote ‘The Age of Bronze’, lamenting the fallen state of modern Britain and asking:
Where is it now, the goodly audit ale,
The purse-proud tenant never known to fail?
And you can’t do an audit without an audit ale, because you should never look at your finances without a good strong drink in your hand. Bankruptcy looks so much better through the bottom of a bottle. If ale-sodden insolvency does beckon, all that you can do is grab what you can while you can. A pleasant little word for this is deaconing. A dictionary of Americanisms from 1889 has this helpful definition:
To deacon land, to filch land by gradually extending one’s fences or boundary lines into the highway or other common property.
So move that pile of papers just a little onto your podmate’s desk, and dream of slow victories and distant laureate emails.
The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt through the Lost Words of the English Language Page 7
