Within the snuggery not only are the rules of sublunar space relaxed, but all human endeavours, all that mankind has ever fought, strived and died for is suddenly achieved without the slightest effort. Elsewhere on this petty orb, people are fighting and demonstrating and revolting and campaigning to achieve an equality that is somehow assumed in the snuggery over a few pints. Lord and commoner, billionaire and beggar, senior vice president in charge of sales and junior intern in charge of tea; all sit in parity around the beer mats. Cares, sorrows and injustices are abandoned somewhere near the till and all are equally jolly (except the nicotinians who have to go outside these days).
Of course, the table will probably require pooning. It usually does. To poon is:
To prop up the piece of furniture with a wedge (a poon) under the leg (from 1856). Originally, to poon seems to have meant to be unsteady, and you propped up the leg that pooned.
That definition is taken from a dictionary of school slang peculiar to the Collegium Sancta Maria Wincorum or, in the common tongue, St Mary’s College of Winchester. It seems astonishing that an action so bloody universal should have a name only in one boarding school in the nether regions of Hampshire, but that’s how language works. Your dinner table probably needed to be pooned as well, but it was less necessary when the glasses were less full. Not that they will be full for long.
The results of fuddling
Once you are properly vinomadefied all sorts of intriguing things start to happen. Vinomadefied, by the way, does not mean ‘made mad by wine’, but merely dampened by it. It’s the sister word of madefied meaning moistened, and on the other side of the family is a relative of vinolent, which has nothing to do with violence and merely means:
Addicted to drinking wine, tending to drunkenness.
It’s a word that the Wife of Bath used in her grand and gaudy prologue:
For all so siker [surely] as cold engendereth hail,
A lickerous mouth must han [have] a lickerous tail.
In women vinolent is no defence –
This knowen lechers by experience.
Which may be rewritten for these more modern, more enlightened, post-feminist times as:
From lecherous women there is no defence
Especially when you’re feeling vinolent.
But to return to the subject: vinomadefied is just a finer, more Latinate way of saying beer-sodden or ale-washed.
Once the vino has begun to madefy you, you may find that your hand becomes rather wankle, or unsteady. In fact, it may not even be your hand that’s unsteady, just everything around it; after all, Thomas of Erceldonne noticed right back in the fifteenth century that ‘Þe worlde is wondur wankill’.
The result of wankle hands is that whatever you’re fuddling tends to divide itself neatly between your mouth, where it should be, and your nice clean top, where it shouldn’t. The resulting spots were called the tears of the tankard by eighteenth-century drinkers, and in the messier officer’s messes of the Second World War they were called canteen medals, on the basis that they tend to end up just where the silverware would on parade day.
There are, though, worse stains than the tankard’s tears that can befall a fuddler through no fault of their own. Sailors used to refer to the
ADMIRAL OF THE NARROW SEAS. One who, from drunkenness, vomits into the lap of the person sitting opposite him.
This is pretty bad, and can ruin the whole atmosphere of the snuggery. However, it gets worse. Or at least it does if you take your shoes off while you’re drinking. I assume that sailors used to drink barefoot – if not I can find no reasonable explanation for the following definition, which seems downright ungentlemanly:
VICE ADMIRAL OF THE NARROW SEAS. A drunken man that pisses under the table into his companions’ shoes.
I mean, damn it all. That’s hardly what you want to greet a probing toe at the end of the evening. Also, I don’t quite see how one could manage to be a Vice Admiral of the Narrow Seas unless one had first picked up the shoe, or had quite fantastic aim beneath the table. There is no equivalent phrase for ladies, nor is there likely to be (even though there is, in the OED, an admiraless, meaning either a female admiral or the wife of a male one).
Arriving at the island
ISLAND. He drank out of the bottle till he saw the island; the island is the rising bottom of a wine bottle, which appears like an island in the centre, before the bottle is quite empty.
Napoleon was not more sorry to spy St Helena, or Dreyfuss to sight Devil’s Island, than the keen drinker is to see that dreaded lump appear out of the wine-dark sea. At this point it must be decided by those around the table whether this is an ordinary drink or one to be consumed supernaculum. Super is Latin for on, and nagel is German for fingernail, and like this odd combination, drinking supernaculum is a rather odd custom described in 1592 thus:
Drinking super nagulum, a device of drinking new come out of France: which is, after a man hath turned up the bottom of his cup, to drop it on his nail and make a pearl with that is left which, if it slide & he cannot make stand on, by reason there’s too much, he must drink again for his penance.
Supernaculum can either be an adverb, as above, or a noun to describe a drink so fine that not a drop is to be wasted. So a couple of hundred years later a dictionary simply defines it as:
Supernaculum, good liquor, of which there is not even a drop left sufficient to wet one’s nail.
And a hundred years later it had become a toast or drinking cry. The novelist/Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli has a description of a drinking contest in his first novel Vivian Grey (1827):
The cup was now handed across the table to the Baron Asmanshausen. His Lordship performed his task with ease; but as he withdrew the horn from his mouth, all present, except Vivian, gave a loud cry of ‘Supernaculum!’ The Baron smiled with great contempt, as he tossed, with a careless hand, the great horn upside downwards, and was unable to shed upon his nail even the one excusable pearl.
The Baron was drinking a bottle of the finest Johannisberger, which is definitely a supernaculum drink. If you have been sipping at something less, then you should perhaps not get it down to the last drop. Instead, leave it to be mixed up in a bucket to be consumed by the poor of the parish. These mixed up heel-taps are known as alms drinks and go to people living in alms houses, although they’re mentioned in Shakespeare as a quickfire way of getting somebody horribly, horribly plastered. Either way, whether you have pursued the Baron’s path or the Christian one, you should now see a marine officer standing on the table.
MARINE OFFICER. An empty bottle: marine officers being held useless by the seamen.
Well, that was the reasoning given in a dictionary of 1811. But come 1860 another slang dictionary has a different explanation.
MARINE, or MARINE RECRUIT, an empty bottle. This expression having once been used in the presence of an officer of marines, he was at first inclined to take it as an insult, until some one adroitly appeased his wrath by remarking that no offence could be meant, as all that it could possibly imply was, ‘one who had done his duty, and was ready to do it again.’
Ready to do it again? Splendid. But first, how drunk are you?
The stately progress of the drinker
The standard modern measurement of inebriation is the Ose system. This has been considerably developed over the years, but the common medical consensus currently has jocose, verbose, morose, bellicose, lachrymose, comatose, adios.
This is a workable but incomplete system, as it fails to take in otiose (meaning impractical) which comes just after jocose. Nor does it have grandiose preceding bellicose. And how they managed to miss out globose (amorphous or formless) before comatose is beyond me.
Back in the sixteenth century, medicine was a much less developed science. Still, in 1592 a chap called Thomas Nashe produced a good diagnostic syste
m of the eight stages of drunkenness.
Nor have we one or two kinds of drunkards only, but eight kinds.
The first is ape drunke; and he leapes, and singes, and hollowes, and danceth for the heavens;
The second is lion drunke; and he flings the pots about the house, calls his hostesse whore, breakes the glasse windowes with his dagger, and is apt to quarrell with anie man that speaks to him;
The third is swine drunke; heavie, lumpish, and sleepie, and cries for a little more drinke, and a fewe more cloathes;
The fourth is sheepe drunk; wise in his conceipt, when he cannot bring foorth a right word;
The fifth is mawdlen drunke; when a fellowe will weepe for kindnes in the midst of ale, and kisse you, saying, ‘By God, captaine, I love thee. Goe thy wayes; thou dost not thinke so often of me as I doo thee; I would (if it pleased God) I could not love thee as well as I doo;’ and then he puts his finger in his eye, and cryes;
The sixt is Martin1 drunke; when a man is drunke, and drinkes himselfe sober ere he stirre;
The seventh is goate drunke; when, in his drunkennes, he hath no minde but on lecherie;
The eighth is fox drunke – when he is craftie drunke, as manie of the Dutchmen bee, that will never bargaine but when they are drunke.
All these species, and more, I have seen practised in one company at one sitting; when I have been permitted to remain sober amongst them, only to note their several humours.
Animals have a strange knack of wandering into descriptions of drunkenness, which is odd when you think about it, as they rarely get served in pubs. And owls: the Chambers Slang Dictionary has a whole entry on the different sorts of owl that you can be as drunk as, without ever explaining how a ‘fresh-boiled owl’ could be drunk at all, or why anybody would have boiled it.
The Aztecs (when not sacrificing humans) had an even more wonderfully whimsical system of animal-based drunkenness. They used rabbits. Four hundred rabbits – the Centzon Totochtin.
When the Aztecs fermented the sap of the maguey plant (or Agave americana) they got a milky-looking drink called pulque, which got them nice and tiddly. Therefore, in Aztec mythology, when Mayahuel, the goddess of the maguey plant, married Patecatl, the god of fermentation, she gave birth to four hundred divine rabbits, which she fed from her four hundred divine breasts.
These four hundred heavenly rabbits would meet for regular pulque-swilling parties, and were pretty much permanently pissed. A couple of their names are recorded – Ometochtli (or ‘Rabbit No. 2’) and Macuiltochtli (or ‘Rabbit No. 5’) – and, frankly, the rest can be guessed.
The point of all this is that the Aztecs measured drunkenness in rabbits. Fifteen rabbits was, apparently, ideal. But if you were four hundred rabbits then you were completely gone. A lovely little coda to this story is that though the conquistadors stamped out the native religion, they never managed to quite stamp on the boozy bunnies. That’s why there is, to this day, a Mexican phrase: ‘As drunk as four hundred rabbits.’
There are uncountable terms for being drunk. Benjamin Franklin (when not taking the air baths described in Chapter 2 or writing interesting essays like Fart Proudly) observed that most vices have pleasant names. So misers can claim that they are being thrifty, spendthrifts that they are generous, lechers that they are passionate. But ‘Drunkenness is a very unfortunate vice; in this respect it bears no kind of similitude to any sort of virtue, from which it might possibly borrow a name; and is therefore reduced to the wretched necessity of being expressed by round about phrases […] Though every one may possibly recollect a dozen at least of these expressions, used on such occasions, yet I think no one who has not much frequented taverns could imagine the number of them to be so great as it really is.’ So for the sake of the drunkards of posterity he made a list of over two hundred synonyms for sozzled.2 It contains some beer-sodden gems. Back then a drinker could be jambled, nimtopsical, super nonsensical, wise or otherwise or as drunk as a wheelbarrow. He could delicately be said to have smelt an onion, or he could move up the social scale and have made too free with Sir John Strawberry and announce that Sir Richard has taken off his considering cap. Unfortunately there are no explanations included in Franklin’s dictionary and we’ll never know who Sir Richard might originally have been. However, for one of his phrases – as drunk as David’s sow – there is a complete explication in Captain Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:
As drunk as David’s sow; a common saying, which took its rise from the following circumstance: One David Lloyd, a Welchman, who kept an alehouse at Hereford, had a living sow with six legs, which was greatly resorted to by the curious; he had also a wife much addicted to drunkenness, for which he used sometimes to give her due correction. One day David’s wife having taken a cup too much, and being fearful of the consequences, turned out the sow, and lay down to sleep herself sober in the stye. A company coming in to see the sow, David ushered them into the stye, exclaiming, there is a sow for you! did any of you ever see such another? all the while supposing the sow had really been there; to which some of the company, seeing the state the woman was in, replied, it was the drunkenest sow they had ever beheld; whence the woman was ever after called David’s sow.
But though David’s wife may have appeared bedraggled to the company, I’m sure the company looked lovely to her, as she would have been wearing beer-goggles. Sober people always appear much prettier to drunkards than drunkards appear to the sober – and this is one of the chief advantages of inebriation: the elimination of ugliness. The psychological term for this is kalopsia: a wonderful form of madness whereby everything becomes beautiful.
It is enough to fill your head with lovethoughts, for as Shakespeare rightly observed, alcohol ‘provokes the desire’. So perhaps now is the time to do something about it.
1 The Martin here may be a Pine Marten, or it may be an unidentified kind of monkey, or it may be an obscure reference to the Martin Marprelate controversy in which Nashe was involved and which is much too complicated to explain here.
2 The list in its entirety may be found in an Appendix at the back of the book.
Chapter 17
10 p.m. – Wooing
On the prowl – observing your target – the chat-up – dancing – kissing – making rash proposals of marriage – fanfreluching – rejection
Now that you are thoroughly tanked up, it’s probably time to attempt to mate, as it’s well known that true love is merely a peculiarly painful sort of drunkenness. And anyway, it’s dragging time, helpfully defined in the Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English as ‘The evening of a fair day when the lads pull the wenches about’.
The dictionaries, though, are usually unkind to lovers. They tend to have all sorts of rude words like lecher or slattern that seem designed to make somebody ashamed of their natural obscene urges.
A much more pleasant term is fleshling, which the OED defines, rather coyly, as ‘a fleshly minded person’. Fleshling sounds a little like duckling and a little like gosling and altogether makes you seem as innocent as a newborn baby. It’s certainly a lot nicer than this definition in a late seventeenth-century dictionary of slang:
Mutton-Monger, a Lover of Women; also a Sheep-stealer.
However, if you flick a few pages back through that same dictionary you’ll find a much more civilised term:
Give Nature a Fillip, to Debauch a little now and then with Women, or Wine.
A fillip, incidentally, is the little movement you get if you brace the tip of a finger against your thumb and then release it. As that’s a good way of tossing a coin to somebody, fillip came to refer to any little gift or treat.
A few pages onwards you find the true rustic joy of:
Green-Gown, a throwing of young Lasses on the Grass, and Kissing them.
Ah, the beauties of a good dictionary! But before such herbaceous he
donism you will first have to find yourself a lass or lad, not to mention a comfortable lawn.
On the prowl
So you must set out into the great fleshy unknown to find yourself somebody to call your own, or at least to call when you’re lonely. You must wander about on the pull. There are all sorts of delightful terms for this. In the seventeenth century you would have been:
Proling, Hunting or Searching about in quest of a Wench, or any Game.
In the eighteenth century:
Caterwauling Going out in the night in search of intrigues, like a cat in the gutters.
And in the nineteenth:
OUT ON THE PICKAROON. Picarone is Spanish for a thief, but this phrase does not necessarily mean anything dishonest but ready for anything in the way of excitement to turn up; also to be in search of anything profitable.
And in Scotland you would have sprunted, or you would if you could find a convenient haystack:
To SPRUNT, v, n, To run among the stacks after the girls at night
However, I contend that the best possible term for pootling around on the lookout for a lover is Ogo-Pogoing. This will require some explanation.
If you ask the average person what an Ogo-Pogo is, they will tell you to get stuffed. If, however, you ask somebody from British Columbia, they will tell you that the Ogo-Pogo is a sort of monster that lives in the Okanagan Lake and occasionally poses for extremely grainy photographs. It is, in short, the Canadian answer to the Loch Ness Monster. However, even they are unlikely to know that the real name of this unreal beast was Naitaka, and that Ogo-Pogo is a nickname taken from a British music-hall song that was a big hit in the 1920s.
It’s a catchy tune, and it seems that people still remembered it in 1939, when pilots in the Royal Air Force would be sent out to fly around Britain on the off-chance that they would spot an enemy aircraft. The RAF pilots called this Ogo-Pogoing, presumably because while winging around scanning the skies they would sing to themselves the refrain from the song: ‘I’m looking for the Ogo-Pogo/The funny little Ogo-Pogo.’
The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt through the Lost Words of the English Language Page 15
