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

by Forsyth, Mark

  You must get your lazy lolpoops and loobies – your staff who are not operating as productive units of humanity – and scream Imshi! at them, a Second World War expression meaning ‘Get to work!’

  Finding them

  But first you must find them, and this is going to be a problem if your staff are michers, a micher being, according to Dr Johnson’s dictionary, ‘A lazy loiterer, who skulks about in corners and by-places, and keeps out of sight; a hedge creeper’. A hedge creeper is, of course, ‘A hedge-thief, skulker under hedges, pitiful rascal’ – according to Farmer’s Slang and its Analogues, anyway.

  The first thing to do is check under all the hedges in the office, a brief pursuit unless you manage a hedge fund. Having dealt with the hedge creepers, you must then turn your attention to the latibulaters, latibulate meaning ‘hide in a corner’. In fact, you could save yourself some time by merely posting signs in every corner of the office saying NO LATIBULATION in big red letters. This may not solve the problem completely, though, as hardened latibulaters deprived of their corners may incloacate, or conceal themselves in a lavatory. Incloacation is not a common problem, but it was on the charge sheet of a seventeenth-century outlaw who was said to have ‘incloacated himself privily’. Incloacaters are probably the hardest michers to deal with, and the best way to flush them out is to make the lavatories as unpleasant as possible. This is easily and subtly achieved by spraying the necessary room with mercaptans, one or more of the several stinking compounds in the sulphydryl group, or, to put it another way, the thing that smells in shit.

  Shouting at them

  Once all your chasmophiles – or lovers of nooks and crannies – have been beaten back to their desks and cubbyholes, you should give them a good earful. However, your reprimands must be chosen with the care befitting the dignity of an executive like you. You may be stern or soft, so long as you are memorable enough that your rockets stick in their memory, as it were. That way you shouldn’t have to admonish anybody more than once a week or so. There was a don at Oxford University in the seventeenth century whose insults were considered so exquisite that they merit a whole paragraph in Aubrey’s very brief Brief Life of him. His name was Dr Ralph Kettell and his …

  … fashion was to goe up and down the college, and peepe in at the key-holes to see whether the boyes did follow their bookes or no […] When he scolded at the idle young boies of his colledge, he used these names, viz. Turds, Tarrarags (these were the worst sort, rude raskells), Rascal-Jacks, Blindcinques, Scobberlotchers (these did no hurt, were sober, but went idleing about the grove with their hands in their pocketts, and telling the number of trees there, or so).

  These might seem to be enough, but they clearly weren’t, as Aubrey also mentions that:

  Upon Trinity Sunday he would commonly preach at the Colledge, whither a number of the scholars of other howses would come, to laugh at him.

  So you must, in your scolding, rise above even the invention of Dr Kettell. You could try resorting to John Florio’s 1598 Worlde of Wordes and go for:

  A shite-rags: an idle, lazie, loobie fellow

  … but this may get you in trouble. To be honest, there are any number of words for layabouts, loafers, lingerers and lurdans. You might want to save time by just shouting at all of them at once, in which case you will need to know that the correct collective noun is a lounge of idlers. However, it might be more interesting to up the philosophical stakes by bringing in the concept of the drogulus.

  The drogulus was invented as a purely theoretical concept by the British philosopher A.J. Ayer. Ayer is a chap who deserves everybody’s respect and time, if not for his thought, then at least for the fact that he once, at the age of 77, stopped Mike Tyson from attacking a young model called Naomi Campbell. It was at a party in New York, and when Ayer got in the way Mike Tyson asked him: ‘Do you know who the fuck I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world.’ To which Ayer replied: ‘And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.’ Meanwhile, Miss Campbell had slipped away.

  But to return to the drogulus: this fascinating little speculative creature was invented in a less glamorous argument in 1949 when Ayer was debating with a priest about meaningful and meaningless statements. Ayer contended that a statement could be meaningful only if you could state what would prove that it was true or false. So ‘God exists’ would be a meaningful statement only if you could say definitively what would make you believe or disbelieve it. Ayer invented the idea of the drogulus, which is a creature that has no discernible effect whatsoever on anything.

  And you say, ‘Well how am I to tell if it’s there or not?’ And I say, ‘There’s no way of telling. Everything’s just the same if it’s there or it’s not there. But the fact is it’s there.’

  Drogulus has remained a term of speculative epistemological philosophy, but it could easily be imported into the repertoire of management-speak. For what better insult to a lazy employee than ‘You drogulus!’ It sounds a bit like dog and a bit like useless, but if your subordinate went crying to an employment tribunal, they would probably be rather impressed with your erudition and say with A.J. Ayer: ‘Everything is just the same if you’re there or you’re not there. But the fact is you’re there.’

  All this, of course, assumes that there is Something To Be Done. And if there is not something to be done then it is your duty as manager to cover the fact up. This has been the central point of leadership since leadership began and there are all sorts of cunning and inventive manoeuvres. For example, on 1 April junior employees used to be sent out to buy pigeon milk for their masters. Every shopkeeper would direct them onwards to somewhere just round the corner and they could wander around town all day on this sleeveless errand.

  On exactly the same basis, modern recruits to the British Army are often sent by their commanding officer to get the keys to the indoor tank park. Indeed, the futility of war is as nothing to the futility of basic training, where the old rule is that if it doesn’t move you should paint it and that if it does you should salute it.

  Even once you have sent your employees running around milking pigeons, you must still watch them like hawks in case they are merely eye-servants and lip-labourers.

  EYESERVANT. n.s. [eye and servant.] A servant that works only while watched …

  Servants, obey in all things your masters; not with eye-service, as men pleasers, but in singleness of heart. Cor. I ii.22

  LIP-LABOUR. n.s. [lip and labour.] Action of the lips without concurrence of the mind; words without sentiments.

  Christ calleth your Latyne howres idlenesse, hypocresye, moche bablynge, and lyppe-laboure. Bale, Yet a Course &c (1543)

  Eye-servants are even worse than those incloacated chasmophiles mentioned earlier, because you think they’re working when in fact they are napping, phoning their friends, tweeting, texting, booking their faces, indulging their oniomania (or compulsion to buy stuff) on the Internet, or otherwise ploitering, which is to say pretending to work when they are not. Such people are leeches upon the healthy limbs of business and must be salted accordingly.

  Dressing down

  At this point, you may be called upon to summon them to a meeting without coffee. This is an immensely useful term invented in the British Ministry of Defence. It combines gentleness of phrasing with a subtle and malevolent menace. On the international stage the Ministry of Defence will go and organise naval manoeuvres or missile tests right next to whatever impish country they want to intimidate. Internally, they achieve exactly the same effect by mentioning a meeting without coffee. It works like this. A senior officer’s secretary will phone up a subordinate to arrange a meeting. The subordinate will say something along the lines of, ‘Oh, that’s splendid. I’m terribly excited about our new initiatives on installing tea-makers in British Army tanks,1 and I’d like to discuss the possibilit
y …’ But here the secretary will cut them off with the dread words: ‘Actually, this is a meeting without coffee.’

  It’s an easy and friendly thing for the secretary to say, but the subordinate knows what it means. Their opinion will not be asked. They will not be smiled at. They will not even be allowed to sit down and sip a thoughtful cup of the brown stuff. They will stand there and be shouted at until their feet are sore and their ears tintinnabulate. A good, proper military carpeting. And the beauty of it is that the dread felt on the part of the subordinate as they pencil the meeting meekly into their diary, as they fail to sleep the night before, as they spend all morning fretting and practising excuses – that dread is the real punishment. It is psychological trench warfare.

  But should you be so cruel? Would it not be better to organise a caring and sharing office environment where everybody feels valued? No, it would not. I refer you to Machiavelli.

  It has been asked whether it is better to be loved than feared, or feared than loved. I am of the opinion that both are necessary; but as it is not an easy task to unite them, and we must determine on one or the other, I think the latter (to be feared) is the safest. Men, it must be allowed, are generally ungrateful, fickle, timid, dissembling, and self-interested; so much so, that confer on them a benefit they are entirely yours; they offer you, as I have already said, their wealth, their blood, their lives, and even their own offspring, when the occasion for any of them is distant; but should it present itself, they will revolt against you.

  Any questions? Good. Now that your meeting without coffee has been arranged with the eye-serving drogulus, the next step is to work out exactly what you are going to say. It’s always good to start with something ear-catching, and, as the executive self-help books suggest, to learn from history’s greatest managers. When Ghengis Khan seized Bukhara he gathered all the city’s most prominent citizens to kneel before him and began his pep talk thus:

  I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.

  Change ‘punishment’ to ‘line manager’ and you have your opening. Ghengis could have saved a lot of time by using the word theomeny, which means wrath of God, but we will let that pass. Now that you’ve softened them up and established the tone of the meeting (and hidden any stray cafetieres) you can press home your advantage by shrieking the dread words: ‘You are a purple dromedary!’

  Pause for a while to let this sink in; it is a terrible thing for anyone to learn that they are a purple dromedary. The pain is particularly acute if you have not read A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, where they translate:

  You are a purple Dromedary – You are a Bungler or a dull Fellow

  If you’re feeling particularly alliterative you can add drumble-dore to dromedary, for, although the former is usually applied to a clumsy insect, it can also mean a clumsy, incompetent individual.

  Now that their dromedarian nature has been exposed, you can pin them down with any of the other words that English has produced for the incurable incompetent: maflard, puzzle-pate, shaffles, foozler, juffler, blunkerkin or batie-bum. Or if you feel that the work of selecting words is beneath the dignity of a director like you, you can just copy Shakespeare, who provided a handy cut-out-and-memorise passage in King Lear, where Kent calls Oswald:

  A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.

  Shakespeare saw that simply piling up personal abuse is much more effective than trying to be clever. And, in case you were wondering:

  Finical = excessively fastidious

  Super-serviceable = Officious

  Action-taking = litigious

  Incidentally, the OED lists this as the very first citation for ‘son of a bitch’, demonstrating what a debt we owe to the Bard.

  Your employee is probably now weeping and quivering and appealing for mercy. Show none. If they plead and beg, just say in a deep and dismal voice ‘Gabos’, and shake your head.

  Gabos (or G.A.B.O.S.) is an acronym for Game Ain’t Based On Sympathy. The game in question is the frolicsome world of gangland Miami, where the enthusiastic and endearingly territorial narcotraficantes refer to their lives, their code of conduct, their retail activities and occasional tiffs as The Game. Unlike cricket, this game has no central authority, book of laws, professional umpires, or even an equivalent of Wisden. In fact, nobody is quite sure what The Game is based on at all, yet all agree that the Game Ain’t Based On Sympathy, and that kicking a gangster when they’re down, or indeed popping a cap into their ass while so prostrated, is thoroughly licit. It would appear that the term is merely the beginning of a long process of elimination that will eventually lead to the discovery of firm foundations for The Game and thus clear up all the confusion.

  This lack of sympathy with the plucky underdog was shortened into an acronym some time in the early years of this century and then made popular by rappers and documentaries. Thus it is no longer the preserve of Miamians, and is now, I am told, part of the common parlance of the British House of Commons. The use of the word gabos in the office will give you a rakish, gangstery air that is bound to increase the productivity of your terrified subordinates or ‘soldiers’ as you may now call them.

  You may finish off your carpeting by threatening to rightsize them. Rightsizing is the euphemistic way of saying downsizing which is the euphemistic way of saying streamlining which is the euphemistic way of saying that you’ll sack the whole sorry lot of them any day now. This saves on confusion because the verb ‘to sack’ has several different meanings listed in the dictionary, including

  Sack: To put (a person) in a sack to be drowned.

  1425 Rolls of Parl. IV. 298/2 Ye said Erle lete sakke hym forthwith, and drounyd him in Thamyse.

  Oh for the heady days of real line management. Once you have herded everybody to their desks, shouted at a few people, and put the fear of God and unemployment into every purple dromedary, there is nothing much more for a good manager to do beyond playing golf and drawing a salary. And, besides, it’s time for tea.

  1 I am, of course, making this example up. British Army tanks all contain tea-making facilities as it stands. Really.

  Chapter 11

  4 p.m. – Tea

  There’s an odd thing that though an English lord might have a cup of tea, the working classes are as likely to have a cup of cha. In this they are correct. ‘Cha’ is the original aristocratic Mandarin name for the infusion of Camellia sinensis, ‘tea’ is merely the term used in Fuchau, the coastal province from which the stuff was shipped to Europe. So it should be cha if you’re feeling posh, and tea only if you’re feeling particularly raffish and filled with nostalgie de la boue.1

  The first great treatise on tea, by the eighth-century writer Lu Yu, was called the Ch’a Ching or Classic of Cha. The name cha, along with the plant, was imported into Japan, where the true lover of a good cuppa is not merely a tea enthusiast, but a follower of Chado: the Way of Tea (do, pronounced doh, is the word for ‘way’).

  Chado is the mystic and magical practice of drinking tea in order to achieve spiritual enlightenment, and is a lot more fun than fasting or self-flagellation. Any particular instance of Chado is called chanoyu, which translated literally means ‘tea’s hot water’. However, it is difficult for our debased Western minds, filled with the cheap spiritual gratification of the teabag and electric kettle, to appreciate the obscure Oriental mystery of tea.
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  It is a common piece of wisdom in the lands of the rising sun that ‘Zen and tea are one and the same’. This may lead you to believe that you can practise zen merely by sipping at a cup of Rosie Lea, but this is not so. The great tea-master Shuko taught that you could not drink tea unless your mind was completely pure, a proposition I have disproved by experiment.

  The greatest master of Chado was Rikyu, in the sixteenth century, whose skill with a teapot was so great that his overlord became jealous and ordered him to commit seppuku, or ritual suicide. Rikyu made what is meant to have been the finest damn cup of tea in history, after which he broke the teacup and obediently fell upon his sword.

  In English we do have some equivalents to the idea of Chado. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from Oxford for writing a tract called The Necessity of Atheism, signed ‘Thro’ deficiency of proof, AN ATHEIST’. But in private he freely admitted that he was a theist, by which he meant nothing in the way of religion, only that he was addicted to tea (French thé). Theism became as popular a religion as England has ever known. In 1886 an article appeared in The Lancet saying:

  America and England are the two countries afflicted most with the maladies arising from the excessive consumption of tea. Individuals may suffer in a variety of ways. It is customary to speak of acute, sub acute, and chronic ‘theism’ – a form that has no connection with theological matters. It is possible to be a ‘theic’ by profession, or a ‘theic’ by passion […] There is hardly a morbid symptom which may not be traceable to tea as its cause.

  Given that the love of tea is both a religious rite and a narcotic need, it is unsurprising that all sorts of terrible names have been invented for badly made tea. For example, tea that is too weak may be cursed with the name of cat-lap, husband’s tea, maiden’s pee, and blash. Indeed, one who has made the tea too weak may be said to have drowned the miller for reasons that nobody is quite sure of.