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

by Forsyth, Mark

  The odd thing about the word is that after a little citation from 1616 the wamblecropt goes into hiding and doesn’t reappear until 1798 in America, where it remained. The Massachusetts Spy has the line, ‘I feel a good deal womblecropped about dropping her acquaintance’. And that is almost the end of wamblecropt. It was revived here and there but always as a joke, an example of a dialect word, a mickey-take. For example, there was a humorous Canadian writer called Thomas Chandler Haliburton who wrote a (rather good) series of sketches in the persona of Sam Slick, who says of marriage that:

  The difference atween a wife and a sweetheart is near about as great as there is between new and hard cider: a man never tires of puttin’ one to his lips, but makes plaguy wry faces at t’other. It makes me so kinder wamblecropt when I think on it, that I’m afeared to venture on matrimony at all.

  Sam Slick uses the word, but I doubt that Haliburton did. It was fast disappearing down the chute of quaint dialect and all future uses are of the ‘“By jiminee I’ll be wamblecropt”, averred the blacksmith quaintly’ variety.

  Wambling, of the uncropt kind, survived far longer on these shores. Indeed, wambling was a standard activity of British stomachs right up to the late nineteenth century. Here are my three favourite examples:

  [My soul] can digest a monster without crudity, a sin as weighty as an elephant, and never wamble for it.

  Thomas Middleton, A Game At Chess (1624) (because I like the sin as big as an elephant)

  Vast fires subterranean … work and wamble in the bowels of the earth

  John Goad, Astro-Meteorologica (1686) (because I like the idea of the earth having indigestion)

  Yes faith have I [been in love], and have felt your flames and fires, and inclinations and wamblings.

  Thomas Betterton, The Revenge (1680) (because it’s beautiful)

  Incidentally, wamble can by extension mean to roll or stumble around and can be spelled with an O, making womble.

  And nothing is so inclined to crop your wambles as the arrival of the bill. This is the dread moment when you hope that Sir Timothy Treat-All is a good residentarian. Otherwise, it may fall to you to waste yourself in abligurition. Abligurition is ‘extravagant spending on food and drink’ and is a terribly valuable word when it comes to filing expenses claims, especially as it has a rather legal ring to it. The wily business traveller could happily say that they had spent ten thousand pounds on conveyancing and abligurition without anybody in HR being any the wiser. It comes from the Latin word abligurire which meant ‘to squander on dainties’, and thus has the justification of antiquity.

  The Romans were greedy fellows, but the ancient Greeks had no word for squandering money on long and luxurious lunches. They knew what to spend their ancient cash on. Instead of abligurire, they had the word katapepaiderastekenai, which meant ‘squander your money on the love of beautiful boys’.

  Chapter 9

  2 p.m. – Returning to Work

  Nap – phoning family members

  Thank God for modern medicine. It was not until 1905 that ergophobia (the morbid fear of returning to work) was first identified and reported in the British Medical Journal. As yet there is no known cure, but doctors have been working on it, and may get back to working on it sometime soon.

  There is something about a good lunch that quite cures one of the delusion that toil is ennobling. It frees one from the temptation to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield. Instead, one sees the immediate and practical necessity for a nooningscaup, which was the rest granted to the farm labourers of Yorkshire after a particularly laborious lunch. One might have imagined that a nooningscaup would occur at noon, and though that’s correct, it should be noted that noon has moved backwards over the years. Noon was originally the ninth, or in Old English non, hour after dawn, which averages it out as three o’clock. Nobody is quite sure why noon moved backwards, but it did, leaving some odd words behind, one of which appears to be nooningscaup, which probably originally meant noon-song. Midday was therefore, of course, the sixth hour or sexta hora in Latin, from which we get siesta.

  The world being what it is, appearances must be maintained and you ought to show your face back at the office before discreetly dozing off in your cubicle. This may be difficult, especially if your lunch hour ended up being sesquihoral, or an hour and a half long.

  You could delay your return to work and just wander about. You could even go out for a doundrins or afternoon drinking session. But your absence might be noticed, and the Scots have a word for that sort of thing (or at least they did in Victorian Aberdeenshire):

  CAUSEY-WEBS A person is said to make causey-webs, who neglects his or her work, and is too much on the street.

  An efficient way to make causey-webs is to gongoozle. Gongoozling has the benefit of being a ridiculous-sounding word that manages to contain gone, goose and ooze all in one. In fact, it’s probably a portmanteau of two ancient dialect terms: gawn meaning ‘stare curiously’ and gooze meaning ‘stare aimlessly’; but its technical meaning, set for eternity in the OED, is to stare at canals. This is one of those words that must cause even the most avid dictionary reader to stop and wonder to himself: Why?

  The term gongoozler is first recorded in a glossary of canal terminology:

  Gongoozler, an idle and inquisitive person who stands staring for prolonged periods at anything out of the common. This word is believed to have its origin in the Lake District of England.

  There is still a small canal in Ulverston, but it is closed, which must render the lives of the true and native gongoozlers even less eventful than before. Nonetheless, it is as pleasant a way of spending an afternoon as any, and there are always the ducks.

  But if canals don’t interest you, the thing to do is to head back to your workplace for a nap. The best way to do this is to snudge along to your desk. Everybody snudges along now and then, even if they don’t know that they’re doing it. Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological Dictionary (1721) defines it thus:

  To SNUDGE along: to walk looking downward, and poring, as though the Head was full of Business.

  Nobody will interrupt you if you snudge, especially if you use the modern prop of the mobile phone, which can be studied with undistractable intensity. Indeed, a really good snudger could probably just snudge around the office for years without being caught and end up drawing a handsome pension, all for having learned how to furrow his brow in just the right way. However, permanently snudging along would probably work havoc with your feet and so it’s best to get back to your desk where you can have a good rizzle.

  Rizzle is a mysterious word that had a sudden vogue in late nineteenth-century America and then disappeared. It appeared in several terribly respectable medical journals and might have had the same success as ergophobia, as doctors of that lost and lovely era were clearly civilised chaps and not the stern fun-spoilers who prowl around the hospitals of today telling you not to smoke or eat turtles. Here is a description of rizzling taken from the American Medical Bulletin of 1890:

  Do you rizzle every day? Do you know how to rizzle? One of the swell doctors in town says that it is the most wonderful aid to perfect health.

  ‘I masticate my food very thoroughly at dinner,’ he says, ‘and make sure to have my family or friends entertain me with bright talk and plenty of fun. After dinner it is understood that I am going to rizzle. How do I do it? I retire to my study, and having darkened the room, I light a cigar, sit down and perform the operation.

  ‘How to describe it I don’t know, but it is a condition as nearly like sleep as sleep is like death. It consists in doing absolutely nothing.

  ‘I close my eyes and try to stop all action of the brain. I think of nothing. It only takes a little practice to be able to absolutely stifle the brain.

  ‘In that delightful condition I remain at least ten minutes, sometimes twenty. That is the co
ndition most helpful to digestion, and it is that which accounts for the habit animals have of sleeping after eating. I would rather miss a fat fee than that ten minutes’ rizzle every day.’

  People are liable to notice if you pull down all the blinds and start smoking a cigar at your desk, and if they don’t you can be sure that you are working in a very superior sort of office. However, in the late Victorian world it would have been considered, quite rightly, a medical necessity.

  Sometimes, though, rizzling is not enough. Emptiness of the mind may be fine for the enthusiast of meditation, but what of those who really need a good nap and don’t have a cigar to hand? These people may now sloom.

  Sloom is a beautiful word because you almost know what it means without needing to be told. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as a ‘gentle sleep or slumber’, inadvertently letting us know that all the best sleeping words begin with SL. This was a point not lost upon the alliterative poets of Middle English, who could write lovely lines like:

  Slipped upon a sloumbe sleep

  There was even a proper set of rules on how to have your after-dinner medieval sloom. The fourteenth century was teeming with courtesy books, which were rather like self-help manuals for nervous knights. These would tackle all of the important subjects like how to make your armour shine, how to address a dragon, and how to have a nap after lunch.

  Whole men of what age or complexion so ever they be of, should take their natural rest and sleep in the night: and to eschew meridial sleep. But and [if] need shall compel a man to sleep after his meat: let him make a pause, and than let him stand and lean and sleep against a cupboard, or else let him sit upright in a chair and sleep.

  Sleeping against a cupboard is nearly impossible, and, worse, much more likely to get you noticed. So sit in your chair and streke, which is to say stretch out all your limbs. Now, rest some worthy-looking file of papers with one end on your stomach and the other on the edge of the desk, let the tip of your chin rest upon your neck and very subtly sloom, and dream of being a knight errant.

  Intermission

  Feeling refreshed? Splendid. You may draw the curtains and extinguish your cigar, for rizzling and slooming are over and there may be nothing for it but to do some work. What are your facienda? Your list of things that you must get done? They must be tackled one faciendum at a time, of course; you wouldn’t want to strain something. But facienda there must be. Otherwise somebody will notice and you’ll be out of a job and forced to gongoozle all day, which would probably become rather dull, canal traffic being so much reduced from its day of hey.

  A quick phone call

  Perhaps you should turn to your personal facienda, especially as you’ve only just woken up, and perform your familial duties by calling a relative. Relatives like to be telephoned. Nobody knows why, but they do. Now seems as good a time as any, and you never know when people will be drawing up their wills. So, just to be helpful, here are all the words you’ll need to love your family.

  Uxorious: Excessively fond of one’s wife. It should be noted that wives rarely put any stress on the excessively part of that definition, feeling correctly that whatever fondness they get is too little. Uxorious also has the splendid little cousin word uxorilocal, which means ‘of a husband living in the vicinity of his wife’s relatives’. Whether this is a good or bad thing is disputed.

  Maritorious: Excessively fond of one’s husband. This is, for some reason, a much rarer word than uxorious. Indeed, few people have ever heard of it. This may be because its only notable appearance in English literature is in the pithy statement: ‘Dames maritorious ne’er were meritorious.’

  Philadelphian: Loving your brother. Alternatively this can mean from the city of Philadelphia, which was named after the virtue of brotherly (adelphian) love (philos). This should not be confused with philodelphian, which would mean loving dolphins.

  I have never found a word for loving your sister. This may be significant.

  Matriotic: This is a usefully abstract word for doting on your mother, although it can also simply mean nostalgic love for one’s old school or university. There are other words for loving one’s mother, but they generally have some connection to an uncouth fellow called Oedipus who was unlucky and is dead.

  Philopater: One who loves his father or his country. The true philopater can be recognised by their tendency to patrizate, or to take after or imitate one’s father (again, not like that evil Oedipus).

  Philoprogenitive: Loving one’s offspring. This was, originally, a phrenological term and referred to a philoprogenitive bump on the skull.

  Materteral: Relating to an aunt. Amazingly this word never appears in the works of P.G. Wodehouse.

  Avuncular: Relating to an uncle, more specifically a maternal uncle. There’s an even more curious and useless term: the avunculate, which means maternal uncles considered as a group.1

  It’s a little thing, but a phone call to a loved one can make all the difference. Think of how much pain could have been avoided if King Lear had only called Cordelia from the blasted heath, or if Odysseus had texted Penelope to say that he would be late, or had Romeo picked up the phone to hear the sweet sound of his wife’s voice saying, ‘Hi, I’m in the crypt’.

  If you are to use Alexander Graham Bell’s product, which is to say the blower, you should, in all courtesy, use it as he would have wished; and Dr Bell insisted that all phone calls should begin with the words ‘Ahoy, ahoy’. Nobody knows why he insisted this – he had no connection to the navy – but insist he did and started every phone call that way. Nobody else did, and it was at the suggestion of his great rival Edison that people took to saying ‘Hello’. This seems unfair.

  Telephones improved greatly over the course of the twentieth century and went, in terms of the reproduction of sound, from a distorted and distant voice to a clear and ringing intimacy. Such was the improvement that we all decided we needed a new challenge and switched to mobile telephones, which give you the splendidly retro feeling of crackly lines, broken connections and Too Few Bars.

  Soldiers and pilots have been dealing with such precarious lines for years and have developed a thing they call Voice Procedure that eliminates all sorts of annoyances. For example, if you are a coastguard radioing the captain of a sinking ship you don’t want to spend ten minutes having a conversation that goes ‘Can you hear me?’ ‘I can hear you, can you hear me?’ ‘I can’t hear what you said. Did you say you could hear me?’ Quite aside from the fact that a hundred souls might be lost beneath the angry waves, it’s just plain annoying. So, instead of saying ‘So sorry, I can’t quite make you out. Could you repeat that?’, coastguards just go: ‘Say again.’ This is a practice that could usefully be applied to modern mobile communications that are cursed with a Bad Line. Here are the important ones:

  Roger means ‘I can hear you perfectly well, granny’. This is because ‘roger’ and ‘received’ both begin with an R. Incidentally, roger can also mean ‘have sexual intercourse’, which makes the technical terms roger that and roger so far rather amusing. (Roger can also mean ‘an itinerant beggar pretending to be a poor scholar from Oxford or Cambridge’ but nobody knows why.)

  Wilco (short for will comply) means ‘Absolutely, granny, I shall remember to wrap up warm’.

  Copy means ‘Yes, I heard what you just said. There’s no need to repeat it.’

  Reading you five: ‘Yes, the line is perfectly good from my end.’

  Wait out means ‘I’ve no idea, can I call you back sometime?’

  And, most importantly, all chitchat about the weather or instructions on which bus to take to the pub tonight should be prefixed with Securité!, which means ‘I have important meteorological, navigational or safety information to pass on’.

  Got all that? Good. So a typical phone call to your dear old mother might go something like this:

  ‘Ahoy, ahoy! Just f
eeling matriotic and thought I’d give you a call.’

  ‘Darling! So lovely to copy that.’

  ‘Roger that. How are things?’

  ‘Securité! Securité! We’ve had such glorious weather this morning that I was out in the garden, but then Securité! Securité! it began to drizzle a bit so I came inside. Now, when are you going to come up and visit us?’

  ‘Wait out.’

  ‘It’s been five years.’

  Click. Phone call finished. Family obligations and filial piety complete. As it says in the Ten Commandments: ‘Honour thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long in the land of the Lord.’ It’s the only commandment with a promise.

  1 And, in case you need them, the words for murdering all these would be uxoricide, mariticide, fratricide, sororicide, matricide, parricide and filicide.

  Chapter 10

  3 p.m. – Trying to Make Others Work

  Finding them – shouting at them

  If you follow learning you shall learn more each day. If you follow the Way you shall do less each day. You shall do less and less until you do nothing at all. And, if you do nothing at all, there is nothing that is left undone.

  The Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu, fifth century BC

  So far I have been assuming that you are a subordinate, a mere Israelite slaving and sweating for some cruel taskmaster, and have provided you with the words necessary for workshy lollygagging. This is, perhaps, unfair, and I may have underestimated you. You could well be a captain of industry, a tycoon, a big shot, a buzz-wig, a king-fish, a mob-master, a satrapon, a celestial, a top-hatter, a tall boy, or a Fat Controller. If you are any or all of these, work avoidance is exactly the other way round: you must prowl around your business empire finding people to whom to delegate your toils, and you require the words with which to do it.