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

by Forsyth, Mark

  At this late hour you are probably seized with eleutheromania, or ‘a crazed desire for freedom’. Thomas Carlyle mentioned it in his History of the French Revolution but it hasn’t been found much since. This is a crying shame, as it can be used in all sorts of situations. You can get out of any dull social event by explaining ruefully to your host that you’d love to stay but just happen to be suffering from a touch of eleutheromania and must be excused. And eleutheromania bites hardest when the working day is nearly done.

  So if everything is neatly perendinated, give up and go. But before you leave the office, it may be wise to claim any estovers that you may need. Estovers are those parts of your lord’s estate to which you, as a faithful serf, are entitled. You may take wood from your lord’s forest to repair your cottage, or water from your lord’s well, or milk from your lord’s fridge, or biros from your lord’s stationery cupboard, or loo rolls from your lord’s lavatory. Nobody will object, especially if nobody notices. And who would notice a mere niffle? A niffle is a Yorkshire term for a trifle or thing of little value. As a verb, niffling is the practice of ‘not doing very much’ or ‘stealing a little at a time’. A niffle here and a niffle there and you end up with an awful lot of biros.

  This is all nearly legal and utterly natural. Biologists even have a word for it: lestobiosis, which comes from the Greek lestos meaning ‘robber’, and biosis meaning ‘way of life’. It’s defined in the OED as:

  A form of symbiosis found among certain social insects in which a small species inhabits the nest of a larger one and feeds on the food stored there, or on the brood of the larger species.

  And it would seem remarkably unfair to deny office workers a privilege that is accorded to the humble ant. So grab a good handful of biros and maybe a couple of chairs and head for the vomitoria.

  A vomitorium is not a room in which ancient Romans would throw up halfway through a banquet in order to make room for the next course. That’s a myth. A vomitorium is simply a passage by which you can exit a building, usually a theatre. But the word can happily be applied to any building, and it is rather poetic and lovely to imagine all these personified office blocks puking their merry workers out into the evening air.

  Chapter 13

  6 p.m. – After Work

  Strolling around – arranging your evening

  It is the violet hour, the crepuscular, twilit hour when (on average) the sun drops into the western bay and night comes. If you are reading this in midsummer in the Arctic Circle, my apologies – I can deal only in averages.

  It is, as I was saying, cockshut, the ‘close of evening at which poultry go to roost’. The sky obnubilates (or darkens) and all sorts of words beginning with vesper- come out to play in the twilight.

  When the planet Venus shines at dusk, it becomes Hesperus, the evening star. And if you pronounce the H as a V you get the evening service of the church: vespers. From that you get vespertine (belonging to the evening), advesperate (‘to wax night’), vesperal (a song to be sung in the evening), and vespertilionize (to convert into a bat). I’m not sure if that last word is truly useful for those who aren’t of the vampiric persuasion; but, for those that are, it is invaluable.

  The best vesper word, though, is vespery. Vesperies were the exercises and disputations practised in the evening by scholars at the Sorbonne University in Paris. The word made it into a couple of English dictionaries back in the seventeenth century but has since pretty much vanished. This is a shame, as it’s a splendid catch-all term for whatever it is that you do after work. Your vesperies might consist of a visit to a gym (if you are exergastic or ‘tending to work out’), a supply run into a supermarket, or a stroll or a sprint to the nearest bar. All are vesperies, and each person chooses their own.

  If you do go to the gym, you are liable to be tread-wheeled, which is, according to the OED, a transitive verb meaning ‘to inflict the discipline of the treadmill upon’. This refers, of course, to the use of treadmills as a punishment in Victorian prisons. This was viewed, even at the time, as a barbaric practice1 and was abolished in 1898. It was then slyly reintroduced in the twentieth century for those who wanted to experience the misery of a nineteenth-century prison without the necessity of committing any crime.

  Over in nineteenth-century France, they had a much better idea for how to pass this twilit hour: flânerie.

  Flânerie

  Flânerie is often cited as one of those French words for which there can never be a true English translation. People harp on about how neither strolling nor loitering nor lingering nor promenading can ever express what flânerie really is. Such people cannot have checked the OED, as they would have noticed that we don’t need to translate the word: we have simply nicked it, along with the related verb flâner and the noun flâneur, one who indulges in flânerie.

  Even though the word has been kidnapped by English, it is still very hard to define exactly what it is. The OED does a reasonable job with ‘A lounger or saunterer, an idle “man about town”’. But this doesn’t get to the true essence of the business, for which we will have to turn, reluctantly, to the French.

  Put simply, the flâneur is the average French citizen raised to the level of a spiritual ideal. They wander about talking to nobody and doing very little. You can see what the OED is getting at, but it’s so much more than that. The concept was promulgated best by Charles Baudelaire:

  The crowd is his domain, as air is that of a bird, or water that of a fish. His passion and his profession, it’s to become one with the crowd. For the perfect flâneur, for the ideal idler, for the impassioned observer, it is a vast joy to be at home among the passers-by, in the swirl of people, in the movement, in the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from his home, but to be at home everywhere; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, but to be concealed from the world; such are the smaller pleasures of these independent, impassioned and impartial souls, which language can only clumsily define.

  Flânerie is an idea that was expanded and refined through the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It is the practice of sitting alone in a café observing the world hurrying past and trying to read a life in each face. It is the practice of wandering through narrow streets and seeing people on their balconies or children hurrying home from school. It is the practice of smoking endless moody cigarettes as you scamander through the city.

  Scamander, by the way, is the sister verb of meander. The river Maeander winds, by a preposterously curly-whirly route, through Izmir in Turkey. The ancient Greeks were very taken with the twistings of the Maeander, and their chief geographer, a fellow called Strabo, declared that ‘its course is so exceedingly winding that anything winding is called a meander’. Of course he declared that in Greek, but the term was nonetheless carried over into English, so that we moderns may meander around as much as we like. If you feel that the Maeander isn’t the river for you, you may pick the Scamander, another Turkish watercourse now known as the Karamenderes. The Scamander wound mazily across the windy plain before the walls of Troy, and is where Achilles did some of his best killing.2 The Scamander made a brief go of ousting its fellow river, and a dictionary of the street slang of Victorian London defines scamander as:

  To wander about without a settled purpose.

  There is, though, no need for the terms to fight. They rhyme so well that one can happily meander and scamander in the same sentence. By a process of alliteration we may add in here the scoperloit, an old north-country word for ‘the time of idleness’ when weary labourers would lounge around beneath a vespertine tree, which they would have called the mogshade. They might even, in their rustic way, have indulged in a spot of sauntry, which is the act of sauntering, and perhaps the closest native equivalent to flânerie.

  Evening arrangements

  As the dimpsy murkens and the sky obnubilates into night’s blackness it is time to sort out exactly what you are going to do
with yourself this evening. You may, of course, settle down to watch the gogglebox for the rest of the night. I can’t stop you, but if you do, I fear that there are few arcane medieval words to help you in your glaze-eyed channel hopping. So instead, I shall blithely assume that you will spend the evening out on the town with your friends. Should you stay in, this reference work will cease to function.

  However, trying to arrange a good evening’s compotation and commensation is always a tricky task. All societies are commensal, to some extent or another, which is the anthropologist’s term for the rules of who you can and cannot sit down to dinner with. In the ancient Near East commensality was considered immensely important, to the extent that if you sat down to have a nice supper with a sinner, that made you a sinner too. It is this strict principle of commensality (from com meaning ‘with’ and mensa meaning ‘table’) that makes Jesus’s sitting down with the wine-bibbers and tax collectors such a prickly point in the gospels. A man could be judged by the company he kept at table.

  Even the Messiah, trying to arrange a nice jolly before he got riveted to a plank, had to go through all sorts of weird shenanigans just to get a table:

  And he sent Peter and John, saying, Go and prepare us the passover, that we may eat. And they said unto him, Where wilt thou that we prepare? And he said unto them, Behold, when ye are entered into the city, there shall a man meet you, bearing a pitcher of water; follow him into the house where he entereth in. And ye shall say unto the goodman of the house, The Master saith unto thee, Where is the guestchamber, where I shall eat the passover with my disciples? And he shall shew you a large upper room furnished: there make ready.

  Jesus also had the tricky task of picking the guests for his farewell bash, and he seems to have managed eleven chums and one stinker. There always seems to be what a British soldier of the Second World War out on leave would call a constable:

  The Constable. Unwanted person who attaches himself to another; a hanger-on who refuses to take the hint.

  American servicemen had their own equivalent rank to constable, described in the same dictionary of Second World War slang:

  Heel. This is an Americanism for a hanger-on, and in the service it means a fellow who seeks your company for the sake of a free drink. Thus HEELING, paying a heel for something.

  Constable seems to me a much more useful word, as it can be used without the person in question having any idea of what you mean. ‘Hello, Constable’, you can say with an amicable smile, and they may even assume that the word is a mark of respect. You can go further and explain to the others that so-and-so is the Constable for the evening. Thus everybody can be set to leap out of the window and hare off down the street the moment their back is turned. Judas Iscariot, however, was definitely a heel.

  The question of how to avoid unwanted friends is one that has been bothering English-speakers for centuries. At Cambridge University in the late eighteenth century they had four distinct ways of not bumping into an old chum on the street:

  TO CUT: (Cambridge.) To renounce acquaintance with any one is to cut him. There are several species of the cut. Such as the cut direct, the cut indirect, the cut sublime, the cut infernal, &c.

  The CUT DIRECT, is to start across the street, at the approach of the obnoxious person in order to avoid him.

  The CUT INDIRECT, is to look another way, and pass without appearing to observe him.

  The CUT SUBLIME, is to admire the top of King’s College Chapel, or the beauty of the passing clouds, till he is out of sight.

  The CUT INFERNAL, is to analyze the arrangement of your shoe-strings, for the same purpose.

  The cut infernal is the most effective, and, while you’re down there, do you see the little plastic bits on the ends of your shoelaces? They’re called aglets. Jesus, I suppose, would have had to practise the cut sublime. How different theological history would have been if, in the Garden of Gethsemane, when Judas came to judasly (yes, that’s a real word) kiss Him, Jesus had simply pretended not to notice and just stared up at the Temple Mount.

  He could also have been helped by two little-known negatives. To recognise a chap is to know (cognise) him again (re). However, if you cease to recognise a fellow you decognise him. This is, to be fair, a rare word, and so far as I can tell it has only ever been used in a parliamentary debate about the position of Charles II,3 but it is still useful in phrases such as: ‘I’m so sorry, old chap, I must have decognised you.’ You can even formalise things by sending somebody you really don’t like a devitation, an obsolete and rare word that is the exact opposite of an invitation. So maybe a nice formal thing written on card with your name in curly letters at the top requesting the pleasure of _________’s absence.

  Some people just keep popping up and clapping you on the shoulder when your shoulder least needs to be clapped (incidentally, a shoulderclapper is a term for somebody who is unnecessarily friendly). Old acquaintances you thought consigned to the dustbin of your address book sometimes appear with an almost rasputinish obstinacy. Such people are known as didappers. A didapper was, originally, a name for the Little Grebe or Podiceps minor, a kind of water bird that dives for its food and, just when you think that it must have been eaten by a pike, pops up again on the other side of the pond looking sleek and well fed. The English libertine Charles Colton, in the same book in which he coined the phrase ‘Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’, wrote of John Wilkes that:

  There are some men who are fortune’s favourites, and who, like cats, light for ever up their legs; Wilkes was one of those didappers, whom, if you had stripped naked, and thrown over Westminster bridge, you might have met on the very next day, with a bag-wig on his head, a sword by his side, a laced coat upon his back, and money in his pocket.

  But even as you try to dodge heels and constables and are busy hurling shoulderclapping didappers naked from Westminster Bridge, other people are attempting to do the same to you.

  What about your friends, your makes, marrows, sociuses, sociates, compadres, consociators, belamies (from the French bel ami, beautiful friend), friars, familiars, inwards and tillicums? You may send out your invitations by text and telephone, but they may remain mere pollicitations – an offer made but not yet accepted – while your so-called friends wait around for a slightly better prospect. Damn those tillicums (tillicum or tilikum is, by the way, the Chinook word for people, which then came to mean a member of the same tribe, and then got taken up by English-speakers to mean chum).

  Rather than being picky about it, it may be time to run back after all those didappers and constables and hoist the gin pennant. The gin pennant is a real flag used by the British Navy to invite people round for a drink. It is first recorded (or at least remembered) in the 1940s as a small green triangular pennant with a white wine glass in the middle. If it is hoisted then the officers of any accompanying ships are invited on board for drinks. However, it is very, very small.

  You see, the officers of the Royal Navy were attempting, as the old phrase goes, to have their mense and their meat. ‘Mense’ means politeness and ‘meat’ meant food, so trying to have your mense and your meat was trying to earn a reputation for hospitality without actually giving any food away. So this tiny gin pennant is hoisted very quietly at sunset in the hope that nobody will notice. But it must be hoisted occasionally, just so you can say that you did, and didn’t you see it? What a shame! We were so hoping to give you our whole allowance of rum.

  In fact, several traditions have arisen concerning the gin pennant, which these days is green at each end with a white centre and green glass upon it. You can, for example, when aboard somebody else’s ship, attempt to hoist their gin pennant and thus force them to give you free booze. However, if you are caught doing this then you have to invite them back to your ship for the same. Gin pennants can even be flown privately above the bar, just to show those already present that the drinks are on you for the evening.
It therefore seems to me that the Royal Navy has a splendid piece of English ready to be taken up by us landlubbers, as in: ‘I had nothing whatever to do, so I just hoisted the gin pennant, phoned everyone, and had a splendid evening.’

  But before hoisting your gin pennant, you should make sure that you actually have some gin worth flagging up. You’ll probably need tonic and lemons and perhaps even some food as well. And for all those you will need not just a market, but a supermarket.

  1 I refer any defenders of gym-culture to a plea for prison reform written in 1824: ‘The labour of the tread-mill is irksome, dull, monotonous, and disgusting to the last degree. A man does not see his work, does not know what he is doing, what progress he is making; there is no room for art, contrivance, ingenuity and superior skill – all which are the cheering circumstances of human labour.’

  2 Just after his paranormal breakfast described in Chapter 3.

  3 Not in a Nell Gwynn way.

  Chapter 14

  7 p.m. – Shopping

  Disorientation – ecstasy in the supermarket

  Gruen transfer

  It is about time that you popped to the shops. Man cannot live on bread alone, but it’s a good start. Sadly, these days, none but the most fastidious potter from little shop to little shop buying their beef at a butcher, their bread at a baker and their costards (large apples) from a costermonger. No. Our markets must be super or even hyper: cloud-capped palaces of commerce. Places that quite deliberately blow your mind even as you walk in the door in a process called the Gruen transfer.

  Victor Gruen was born Victor Greenbaum in Austria in 1903. In 1938 he fled the Nazis and arrived in America with ‘an architect’s degree, eight dollars and no English’. It was with the first of those that he created something wonderful: the modern shopping mall. Gruen is the acknowledged originator and master of the mall, as he designed over fifty of them in the USA and accidentally gave his name to the strange mental effect they have on you.