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

by Forsyth, Mark

  Shopping malls rarely have any windows on the outside. There is a good reason for this: if you could see the world beyond the window you would be able to orientate yourself and might not get lost. Shopping malls have maps that are unreadable even to the most skilled cartographer. There is a good reason for this: if you could read the map you would be able to find your way to the shop you meant to go to without getting lost. Shopping malls look rather the same whichever way you turn. There is a reason for this too: shopping malls are built to disorientate you, to spin you around, to free you from the original petty purpose for which you came and make you wander like Cain past rows and rows of shops thinking to yourself, ‘Ooh! I should actually go in there and get something. Might as well, seeing as I’m here.’ And this strange mental process, this freeing of the mind from all sense of purpose or reason, is known to retail analysts as the Gruen transfer.

  The term Gruen transfer does not seem to have appeared until a decade after Victor Gruen’s death in 1980, but it is now an essential part of planning a shop. It is the combination of sensory overload and spatial amazement that means you buy many more things than you meant to and thus keep the whole place profitable. It is what turns you from traffic – the people passing a shop – to footfall – the people entering the shop. And, oh, what linguistic beauties are within!

  The ecstasy of the supermarket

  To the uninitiated, supermarkets can seem rather boring places; places, indeed, that you just go to buy things in. But to the initiated they are palaces of poetry.

  For starters, do you see those lines of free-standing, two-sided shelves that divide the aisles? They are not called free-standing, two-sided shelves, because that would be much too dull for the race of poets that manage supermarkets. They are called gondolas, because to the romantic mind of the retail manager they resemble nothing so much as a Venetian punt.

  This marine motif is taken up with the standalone displays, the little tubs of crisps or tights or whatever is on offer, which are called islands, lapped by waves of customers like a consumer ocean. And look up! Those strings and bars suspended from the ceiling are the aisle-leapers, strange sure-footed godlings who jump above us, laughing at the mortals below. And their role in the great mythology is to support the danglers – the pennants that advertise Twenty, Thirty and Forty Percent Off Selected Products! If the danglers are made of such a material that they may sway in the soft zephyrs of the air-conditioning they are wobblers, which are thus the supermercantile equivalent of cherubim.

  Nothing is too fantastical for the inherently magical mind of the retail manager. The Light Thief, a creature never imagined by the Brothers Grimm, is their name for a display that has no illumination of its own but, painted in merry fluorescent colours and bejewelled with reflective surfaces, steals the light of others and shines itself. In traditional supermarket folklore the Light Thief is the eternal enemy of the Shelf Miser, that little tray affixed to the side of the gondola that sticks out a bit into the aisle and thus contains more goods than tradition or equality would allow.

  The Shelf Miser beetles o’er the price channel, the thin strip where the costs of items and their Every Day Low Price are shown, and casts his niggardly shadow upon the kick band, that little strip a few inches high at the base of the gondola that is darkly coloured so as not to show the marks of scuffing shoes or the drips from an unruly mop.

  There is high and low. Those cardboard thingies around the top of a bottle? They’re bottle glorifiers. Those hard plastic packs that contain the product in a little bubble and are absolutely impossible to open? They’re blister packs.

  Nothing in the supermarket is what it seems to the dreary crowds who know not its glories. They pass by discounts that are for a limited period only, without realising that they are standing next to an exploding offer. Where two products compete for shelf-space, or facing as it is anthropomorphically called, they fight to the death. And if those two products are manufactured by the same parent company, this fight is known to bloodthirsty retail outlets as cannibalism. So when Coca-Cola competes with Sprite, Magnum with Cornetto, or Tampax with Always Ultra, the retail manager sees brother eating the body of brother. No mere Venetian gondola, idle up its sleepy canal, ever held such scenes of anthropophagy, where sibling devours the flesh of sibling while the offers detonate below.

  And at the checkout you suddenly find love. For when you are given a store-card or collect points towards a future purchase this is known as romancing the customer. Of course, the romance is really just someone making calculations and offering you what they can afford to give in exchange for your favours, but all romance is like that really, and it’s best to go along with it.

  With fluttering heart, it’s little wonder the impulse buys you whimsically commit to at the point of sale! For humankind cannot bear very much supermarket. It is too grand and too terrible, too tempting and too fantastical. When you are on the street again and looking around at this blank world, you will know that it can never match the dreams and nightmares that lie beyond the Gruen transfer. When Faustus asks Mephistopheles how he has escaped from Hell, the fallen angel replies:

  Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it.

  Think’st thou that I, who saw the face of God

  And tasted the eternal joys of Heaven,

  Am not tormented with ten thousand hells

  In being deprived of everlasting bliss?

  And so it is with supermarkets. Be not afraid. You will return, if only for the romance. But for now, it is time for supper.

  Chapter 15

  8 p.m. – Supper

  Dietary requirements – seating arrangements – making conversation – avoiding conversation – hogging the wine – finishing supper – avoiding the bill

  It is time to sidle supperward (a pleasant little word that gets its own entry in the dictionary), although before we do, we ought to sort out the difference between supper and dinner. Supper is, according to the OED, the last meal of the day. (It goes on to contradict itself by mentioning a rere supper, which is a second supper consumed after the main supper; but we’ll let that pass.) Dinner is the main meal of the day. Supper can therefore sometimes be dinner, and dinner can sometimes be supper. It all depends on the size of your lunch, or indeed breakfast. It’s such a thorny question that the OED makes a rare venture into sociology for dinner’s definition:

  The chief meal of the day, eaten originally, and still by the majority of people, about the middle of the day (cf. German Mittagessen), but now, by the professional and fashionable classes, usually in the evening.

  So assuming that you are professional or fashionable, and perhaps both at once, we shall hereinafter refer to this meal as supper, except when we don’t.

  Another useful word here is tocsin, meaning a bell rung as an alarm, but only because you need it to understand Lord Byron’s supperish lines:

  That all-softening, overpowering knell,

  The tocsin of the soul, the dinner bell.

  This is an example of coenaculous, or supper-loving, poetry. Coenaculous (deriving from the Latin cenaculum (meaning dining room) but somehow obtaining an unnecessary O) is a curiously obscure word, when you consider that man is a uniformly coenaculous creature. Indeed, the rest of the day can often seem like a long preprandial tease. As Sir Francis Bacon said: ‘Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper.’

  Once the dinner bell has sounded and the guests are gathered, whether at a restaurant or at home, the first thing to do is to try to work out whether this is a Dutch feast, ‘where the entertainer gets drunk before his guest’. Having established that your host is, indeed, bumpsy, you can get on with the usual chit-chat and introducing yourself to people who remember you.

  At this point, there’s usually a panic as it turns out that one person is a vegetarian, another kosher, another is halal and a fourth wants to check that the ingredients were all
humanely and sustainably sourced. At this point you can apologetically admit to being a halalcor. You can even try making a big fuss about it, provided, that is, that nobody looks in the OED and discovers:

  Halalcor One of the lowest and most despised class in India, Iran, etc., (lit.) to whom everything is lawful food.

  If caught out like this, you should simply change tack and insist that you only eat food that is inhumanely and unsustainably sourced, as it tastes better. Anything for a little trouble.

  Once everybody’s dietary foibles have been established, along with the host’s drunkenness, everybody can sit down and prepare to eat.

  Marshalling

  People are marshalled to their places at the supper table. This meaning of the verb predates the ‘marshalling-your-troops’ sense by seventy years. Mind you, before that it meant to look after horses, which shows how much respect people had for their dinner guests in the fifteenth century.

  The place that you shall be marshalled to is the cenacle, the proper word for the chamber in which supper is to be taken (from the same Latin root as coenaculous above). Indeed, the word cenacle originally referred only to the mysterious room in which the Last Supper was taken by Jesus and co-dinnerists. Once in the cenacle, Jesus encountered the same problem that faces any supperist, namely where to sit everybody. He had had this problem before; in Matthew Chapter 20:

  Then came to him the mother of Zebedee’s children with her sons, worshipping him, and desiring a certain thing of him. And he said unto her, What wilt thou? She saith unto him, Grant that these my two sons may sit, the one on thy right hand, and the other on the left, in thy kingdom. But Jesus answered and said, Ye know not what ye ask.

  This sort of thing can indeed be tiresome and it’s probably why he ended up at the Last Supper with one chap’s head on his lap and another annoyingly trying to dip bread at exactly the same time. Nor are those of us with lesser parentage exempted from these tribulations. Who shall sit where? Who, as they would say in medieval times, should begin the board and take precedence at table?

  Technically, the host of the meal should hold the dais, but as we’ve established that they’re drunk, it’s time to sit at one’s reward, or in a much better place at table than you deserve.

  It would have been much easier in Roman times when everybody discumbed, which is to say that they ate lying down on a triclinum that ran around three sides of the table. That meant that if two people particularly wanted the same place they could just lie on top of each other. However, discumbency may cause indigestion. So it is best to merely grab your seat and lollop or ‘lean with one’s elbows on the table’.

  Making conversation

  Seventeen centuries ago, a chap called Athenaeus of Naucratis wrote a book about the perfect conversation over supper. The ideal subjects for conversation were, according to Athenaeus, absolutely bloody everything, with a particular focus on homosexuality and lexicography.

  Neither of these subjects need detain us (except perhaps to note that the ‘Celts, although they have very beautiful women, prefer boys’), for what concerns us here is not the content of the book, but the title. Athenaeus called his book the Deipnosophistae, which means, literally, the ‘kitchen-wisemen’ but is more usually translated as those who talk wisely over supper. From this we get the English word deipnosophist, first recorded in 1581, which means ‘a chap who talks wisely at supper’ or alternatively ‘a master of the art of dining’.

  The Greek word deipnon has given English a couple of other interesting little words: deipno-diplomatic, which means ‘of or pertaining to dining and diplomacy’, and deipnophobia, which is a ‘dread of dinner parties’, an emotion more often felt than named. But both those words have been used only once, whereas deipnosophism has survived and endured as a recondite yet necessary art. Only a true master of deipnosophism can tell the difference between a colloquist, one who takes part in a conversation, and a colloquialist, one who excels in conversation.

  For my own part, knowing that I lack the qualifications to speak wisely, I have instead learned to excel at the art of rhubarbing, which is the last refuge of the failed deipnosophist. To rhubarb is to say the word ‘rhubarb’ over and over again in a low, indistinct voice. The reason that this strange verb has made the dictionary is that rhubarb is the standard word that actors use in a crowd scene when they wish to mimic the sound of general conversation. So when Mark Antony comes out on stage all the actors are rhubarbing, and when he shouts ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears’, they cease to rhubarb.

  Nobody knows why rhubarb was picked for this purpose, or exactly when, but it’s etymologically perfect. ‘Rhubarb’ comes from the ancient Greek Rha Barbaron, which literally means ‘foreign rhubarb’, because rhubarb was a strange oriental delicacy imported to the classical world via Russia from Tibet. ‘Barbaron’ was Greek for foreigner because foreigners were all barbarians. But the important thing was that the barbarians were called barbarians because they spoke a foreign and unintelligible language, which sounded to the Greeks as though they were just saying ‘bar-bar-bar-bar’ all the time (roughly in the way that we say ‘blah-blah-blah’ or ‘yadda-yadda-yadda’). Therefore, the ancient word for unintelligible mumbling has, after a journey of several thousand years, come straight back to its original purpose.

  Rhubarbing is particularly useful if you want to disguise the fact that nobody wants to talk to you, although you must remember not to use it when the waiter comes to take your order.

  Avoiding conversation

  Society is now one polished horde

  Formed of two mighty tribes, the bores and bored.

  Lord Byron

  Better to be a rhubarber than a bromide. Bromide used to be used as a sedative and was therefore taken up as a nineteenth-century American term for a fellow who can put you to sleep, with the efficiency of good Valium, merely by talking. A dedicated bromide moves through his subject with the same tortoise-speed as a drill boring its way through granite, hence the more usual term: a bore.1

  However, in this I feel (as an inveterate and ambitious bore myself) that bromide is not quite the right word. Boredom is not merely the lack of stimulation, it is an active property. Sit somebody in an empty room or in front of the proverbial drying paint and they will be quite content for a while, musing on something or another, and, provided that they are over the age of ten, restlessness may not set in for quite a while. But a Class-A bore can have you frantic within seconds. I personally have merely to say the words, ‘Ah, I’m glad you asked me that …’ to observe a terrified, hunted light come into my interlocutor’s/victim’s eyes. The only way to stop me is immediate kittle pitchering, which is amply described in a late eighteenth-century dictionary.

  KITTLE PITCHERING. A jocular method of hobbling or bothering a troublesome teller of long stories: this is done by contradicting some very immaterial circumstance at the beginning of the narration, the objections to which being settled, others are immediately started to some new particular of like consequence; thus impeding, or rather not suffering him to enter into, the main story. Kittle pitchering is often practiced in confederacy, one relieving the other, by which the design is rendered less obvious.

  Why is it called kittle pitchering? Ah, I’m glad you asked me that. Well, kittle is an old word for tickling, and a pitcher is somebody who loads hay onto a cart, and hay, being dry, is proverbially boring (Thomas Gray once commented that trying to read Aristotle was like eating dried hay).

  And what do you call the rhetorical act of asking a question and then answering it yourself? Ah, I’m glad you asked me that. It is called anthypophora, and was a practice much beloved of the ancient Greeks. And what do you call it when you keep doing this again and again and again? That’s dianoea. And why do I keep using these tiresome techniques? Quite simply because it disguises the fact that nobody is interested and that nobody can get a word in edgewise anyhow.<
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  In fact, once I’ve got a good rhythm going with my dianoea, the only thing to do is to attack directly by interrupting. However, it is of no use simply asking, ‘May I interrupt?’, as such polite proposals are rarely accepted. The best thing to do in this situation is to use a particularly obscure and puerile synonym of the word ‘interrupt’. So lean forward, look the speaker in the eyes, and say in a deep and loud voice: ‘I would like to interjaculate.’

  A long silence may be left after the use of this phrase before asking somebody to pass the salt. The Latin jaculari only means ‘throw’, so interjaculate means ‘throw in between’. Put an E on the front and you have throw out. There’s even a related word interjaculatory, which is defined as ‘expressed in parenthetical ejaculations’. For example, a writer in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1827 mentions how the arrival of the host’s child ‘smites a large dinner-party mute, or into interjaculatory admiration of its hereditary beauties’.

  Thus can the monologue be turned to a duologue, and thence to a tetralogue (there is, for some reason, no English word for a conversation between three people), and hence into a free-for-all collocation.

  Who skinks?

  With the conversation resting in an uneasy truce, it is possible to get down to matters truly cenatory (or ‘related to supper’) such as eating and drinking. The first thing to ask is ‘Who skinks?’, which is an old-fashioned way of asking who the hell is meant to be pouring out the drinks.