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

by Forsyth, Mark

  So Ogo-Pogo started out as a nonsense song, became the name of a mythical Canadian beast, and was taken up by the RAF meaning to fly around on the off-chance of meeting somebody. It would be a catastrophe if a word with such a rich history were to decline into disuse. And how better to describe the hopeless search for that mythical beast called Love? You even have, thanks to the RAF, the possibilities of sudden destruction or timeless glory built in. As tempting as the idea of proling, caterwauling, pickarooning or even sprunting may be, Ogo-Pogoing is without a doubt the finest word for wandering around with vague hopes of love.

  Observing the prey

  It is never easy to find a suitable target while Ogo-Pogoing. Many a female who sees the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of spanandry – ‘Lack or extreme scarcity of males in a population’ – is liable to let out an all too familiar sigh. When you want a man, every party and every nightclub is dispiritingly spanandrous. In fact, one’s dioestrus (a short period of sexual inactivity for females) can suddenly seem to stretch out into eternity.

  But then it begins, very quietly, with a little propassion. A propassion is the first stirring of a proper passion, or indeed merely the feeling that there’s a passion somewhere on its way, and that suffering is not far off. Our word passion, meaning love, as we saw in Chapter 1, derives from the Latin for suffering, on the simple basis that the two are one and the same; so the Passion of the Christ (his suffering upon the cross) is the same as our petty romantic passions, etymologically speaking.

  For the moment you may merely smicker; it’s a good way to start. To smicker is ‘to look amorously or wantonly at or after a person’, usually after, of course, although a glossary of medieval Scottish poetry (there are such things) says that to smikker is to ‘smile in a seducing manner’. Either way, if you smicker enough you may well develop an acute smickering, or amorous inclination, towards someone. Smickering was a favourite word of John Dryden, who came up with the lovely line:

  Must you be smickering after wenches while I am in calamity?

  You can even smicker in very precise ways. For example, you may be particularly drawn to a pair of dark eyes, or a shapely nose, or an intriguing ankle. Those who study sexual attraction for a living (legally) call this agastopia, an immensely useful word that is defined in the Descriptive Dictionary and Atlas of Sexology thus:

  Agastopia. A rarely used term for admiration of any particular part of the body.

  Why it should be rarely used is a mystery, as agastopia was known even to the sexologists and sculptors of the ancient world. It is from the bottom-fond Greeks that we get the modern English term callipygian, meaning beautiful-buttocked.

  There was a whole cult in ancient Syracuse devoted to Aphrodite Kallipygos, or Venus of the Beautiful Bottom, or at least there may have been. The only description we have of it comes from an ancient Greek chap called Alciphron who spent his time composing imaginary letters.

  It is certain that the Greeks would commission all sorts of sculptures of callipygian Venus in which the main purpose was to make her as lovely-bottomed as possible. Lucian of Samosata records seeing one such statue carved by the greatest sculptor of antiquity: Praxiteles. This statue, apparently, was rather too good. So sexy was Aphrodite’s posterior that a young man was discovered in the temple committing enthusiastic blasphemy with the marble goddess. He was rather embarrassed by this, as I suppose you would be, and cast himself into the sea. But though he died, the term callipygian lived on, and it can of course be applied to both sexes, mortal and immortal, marble and flesh.

  But to move on from such natiform (or buttock-shaped) delights, one’s agastopia might instead be directed at the bathycolpian. Bathycolpian means ‘deep-bosomed’ and is an absurdly oblique and beautiful way of saying that a lady has voluptuous and luxuriant breasts. The advantages of describing a lady in such an incomprehensible manner will be evident to anyone who has ever been slapped or released on strict parole.

  With all these different body parts to glance at, it is no wonder that you move your eyes from side to side using the amatorial muscles. One eighteenth-century dictionary is quite unnecessarily precise about it:

  AMATORII Musculi [among Anatomists] Muscles of the Eyes, which give them a Cast sideways, and assist that particular look called Ogling.

  And there we have the problem. You are fast becoming an ogler, a snilcher, a haker. And if you thought hake was only a kind of fish:

  HAKE: To hanker after, to gape after, to sneak or loiter.

  You must up your game if you do not wish to be thought merely a gazehound and amorous gongoozler. If you have decided upon your intended, it is high time that you did something about it. If you are a lady, you may give a coy arrision (which is the act of smiling at somebody) or practise your minauderie (coquettish manner). If you are a man, and you have picked out your rum-strum (a highwayman’s term for a handsome wench) it may be time to pavonize, or act like a peacock showing off your magnificent tail in order to cow all the potential peahens with your magnificent masculinity.

  But there’s no use in just pavonizing; one is in danger of being a mere dangler (‘To dangle – To follow a woman around without asking the question’). You must decide if this is a grand passion or a mere velleity, which the OED sternly defines as ‘The fact or quality of merely willing, wishing, or desiring, without any effort or advance towards action or realization’.

  Of course there may be reasons for your inaction. Perhaps the object of your affections is a figurant. This is, I confess, a technical balletic term for somebody who dances only in a group and never by themselves, but its usefulness in the discotheque should be self-evident. It is extraordinarily hard to sidle up to a figurant who has enclosed themselves within a protective fortification of bouncing shoulders and turned backs, but it must be attempted. Faint heart never won fair rum-strum.

  You may even be covered in what the Old English liked to call need-sweat, which is the perspiration caused by acute anxiety. But what is such sweat compared with anuptaphobia, the morbid terror of remaining single? Though anuptaphobia is only a psychological term, she really should be a goddess, a cruel and terrible deity who directs all of humanity’s most embarrassing actions. For who can disobey when Anuptaphobia commands? It is time to approach the object of your mute affections. And if Anuptaphobia tells you to flichter to him or her, then you must flichter.

  And in case you were wondering:

  FLICHTER v. To run with outspread arms, like a tame goose half-flying; applied to children, when running to those to whom they are much attached. [Dumfries dialect] Hence:

  FLICHTER-FAIN adj. So fond of an object as to run to it in the manner above described.

  The simplest methods are often the most effective.

  The chat-up

  Each species has its own particular mating call. A badger, for example, shrikes to his would-be beloved. A fox clickets. A goat rattles. A deer croons. A sow breems for her pig. A cow eassins for her bull. And an otter whineth. You should do none of these and if you hear a shrike, make your excuses and leave, as you are dealing with a badger in disguise.

  Luckily for all of us, the correct way to initiate conversation has already been discovered and set down in writing by Christopher Marlowe:

  Come live with me and be my love

  And we will all those pleasures prove

  That hills and valleys, dale and field,

  And all the craggy mountains yield.

  If that doesn’t work, or if your intended expresses a distaste for craggy mountains, you could go for the 1950s standard: ‘Suppose we get together and split a herring.’ Unfortunately, everybody in the 1950s was too hep to record why it was a herring that needed splitting. A more explicable term was recorded by Cab Calloway: ‘Wouldst like to con a glimmer with me this early black?’, which he helpfully explains as ‘the proper way to ask a young lady to go to t
he movies’. It should be noted here, that if the object of your affections replies ‘Kill me’, they are not requesting to be euthanatised and you should not actually murder them. Kill me is merely the Cab Calloway way of saying ‘Show me a good time’ and is the best response you could have hoped for. Jive was rather confusing in this way. Murder is defined in the Hepsters Dictionary as ‘Something excellent or terrific’, which is all very well provided that both parties are familiar with the idiolect, but it might lead to confusion and a rather feeble-sounding excuse in court.

  Or one could go down the simpler route of throwing out a compliment or two. If you do so, you must try to be a little more gentlemanly than Dr Johnson was in his dictionary. In a rare moment of misogyny he wrote:

  Bellibone n. A woman excelling in both beauty and goodness. A word now out of use.

  According to the OED the word was last used in 1586, which makes one wonder what occurred in 1587 that made ladies one or the other and rendered bellibone redundant.

  Alternatively, you could call a lady a wonder wench (an old Yorkshire term for a sweetheart) or, if you’re feeling ready to defend yourself, cowfyne, which even in a dictionary of Scottish terms is defined as ‘a ludicrous term of endearment’. In fact, the only proper riposte that a lady can give to being called cowfyne is to reply that the chap is snoutfair, which means handsome, although the OED notes that it is usually used ‘with some disparaging suggestion’.

  What, though, if your initial blandishments and entreaties are met not with a flirtatious exchange of archaic endearments, but with indifference, incredulity, contemptuous laughter or sudden flight? Fear not. This may merely be a case of accismus.

  Accismus is a rhetorical term meaning pretended lack of interest in that which you keenly desire.

  Foolish Accismus hath a qualitie

  To deny offer’d things in modestie:

  Accismus was once considered the most necessary virtue of the female. For example, there’s a rather peculiar polemic against girls’ schools from the Victorian period that asserts:

  A woman requires no figure of eloquence – herself excepted – so often as that of accismus … On this account, mothers, fathers, men, and even youths, are their best companions; on the contrary, girls connected with other girls of a similar age, as in schools, provoke one another to an exchange of foibles, rather than of excellences, to a love of dress, admiration, and gossip, even to the forgetting of accismus.

  But of course all of this raises the question of when accismus (male or female) is really accismus, and when (dare I broach the possibility?) it is true uninterest. This is a question that has puzzled young lovers through the ages, but which was long ago solved by the Church of England through the system of Nolo Episcopari.

  Appointing a bishop is a tricky business. To be a bishop you have to possess the Christian virtue of humility; however, if you actually are humble you’ll probably think that you’re not worthy of being a bishop and turn the job down. Even if you secretly think that you’d make a splendid bishop and would look marvellous in a mitre, you can’t just come out and say it. It would look bad. So you had to practise a little bit of accismus by announcing in front of the assembled company of churchmen that you’d really rather not become a bishop, or, in Latin, ‘Nolo episcopari’.

  When you had solemnly announced this, rather than saying ‘Oh well, that’s that, I suppose’, the church council would ask you a second time, and for a second time you would humbly reply ‘Nolo episcopari’. On the third go, you would say, ‘Oh all right then, go on’ or ‘Volo episcopari’ or somesuch line of assent. You would thus have displayed your humility and got the job.

  However, it is dreadfully important to keep count, as if you said ‘Nolo episcopari’ a third time it would be assumed that you really meant it and your chances of promotion would be for ever scuppered. It’s rather like the Rule of the Bellman described by Lewis Carroll in The Hunting of the Snark: ‘What I tell you three times is true.’

  Hope as you might, three cases of accismus are definitive and after that you deserve a slap.

  This is often the stage of courtship where a woman wishes she were equipped with a parabore, or defence against bores. It is uncertain what a parabore would look like, although in the first (and only) usage recorded in the OED it is described as:

  … a Bore-net, a para-bore, to protect me, like our musquito-curtains

  So a parabore could perhaps be attached to a wide-brimmed hat. You could have some sort of rip-cord device, which when pulled would drop a thick veil around the whole head in the manner of a beekeeper. Thus, with a flick of the wrist, the beleaguered belle could make herself vanish from view and give a stern and certain message to her suitor. If parabores could be manufactured for a reasonable cost I imagine that they would become quite popular, though dispiriting to the poor chap who sees a whole group of girls reach for their rip-cords at his timorous approach.

  If this unhappy fate does befall you, you can keep some semblance of honour by turning again to the dictionary of Hepster slang and crying, ‘You’re a V-8, baby, a V-8’, where a V-8 is, for some reason, ‘A chick that spurns company’. However, it may be best not to get into an exchange of insults, as (from behind her thick veil) she could throw some hurtful barbs of her own. A few suggestions might be:

  Twiddle-Poop An effeminate looking man

  Smell-smock A licentious man

  Or, most terrible of all, this from Dr Johnson’s dictionary:

  Amatorcultist. n.s. [amatorculus, Lat.] A little, insignificant lover; a pretender to affection.

  There is no coming back from being called an amatorcultist; all you can do is dwindle away and disappear in a shower of tears.

  But let us assume some little success at this early amatory stage. Where now? It’s a fifty-fifty chance that your main aim is to be thelyphthoric, a word that comes from the Greek thely meaning ‘woman’ and phthoric meaning ‘corrupting’, thus the OED’s simple definition: ‘that corrupts or ruins women’.

  Thelyphthoric began its life in English as the title of a smashing 1780 treatise:

  THELYPHTHORA; OR, A TREATISE ON FEMALE RUIN, IN ITS CAUSES, EFFECTS, CONSEQUENCES, PREVENTION, AND REMEDY; CONSIDERED ON THE BASIS OF THE DIVINE LAW: Under the following HEADS, viz. MARRIAGE, WHOREDOM, FORNICATION, ADULTERY, POLYGAMY, and DIVORCE; With many other Incidental Matters.

  It’s a promising title, and it gets better with the first sentence: ‘The Author doth not scruple to call this TREATISE, one of the most important and interesting Publications, that have appeared since the Days of the Protestant Reformation.’

  But as you read further (and who wouldn’t?) it turns out that far from being a useful instruction manual, the author is dead against female ruin and all the accompanying pleasantness for both parties. In fact, he has a high moral purpose of preventing female ruin through the outlawing of divorce and the reintroduction of polygamy.

  Thelyphthoric didn’t keep its high moral tone for long and instead toboganned off into the linguistic lowlands. Frankly, a word like that is never going to remain in the purest of hands, especially as most of the world’s population either want to be thelyphthoric or be introduced to somebody who is.

  The dance-floor

  The most common way of attempting thelyphthora is to dance, jig, shake a hough, or tripudiate. The thelyphthoric qualities of such rhythmic movements are amply recorded in the dictionaries. For example, from the eighteenth century:

  Balum-Rancum A hop or dance, where the women are all prostitutes. N.B. The company dance in their birthday suits.

  Or from the other perspective:

  Gymnopaedic Ancient Greek Hist. The distinctive epithet of the dances or other exercises performed by naked boys at public festivals.

  Or for both sexes:

  Among the tramping fraternity a buff-ball is a dancing party, characterised b
y the indecency of those who attend it, the costume de rigueur being that of our first parents.

  The most favourite entertainment at this place is known as ‘buff-ball,’ in which both sexes – innocent of clothing – madly join, stimulated with raw whisky and the music of a fiddle and a tin-whistle.

  But how to suggest such a thing in a manner both alluring and learned? In the 1960 film Beat Girl, Oliver Reed approaches a stylish young she-cat sitting in a bar and says: ‘Say, baby, you feel terpsichorical? Let’s go downstairs and fly.’ Terpsichore is one of the nine ancient muses, and specifically the muse who inspires dancing. So Mr Reed’s enquiry, in the context of the film, means: ‘Do you feel inspired by the muse of dance? Let us go to the basement and do just that.’ And, in the context of the film, it works. How or why Terpsichore got so famous in the mid-twentieth century is a bit of a mystery, but the OED even records the shortened verb to terp.

  But what if you are not inspired by the moving muse? If you have not paid her sufficient sacrifices she may curse you with a flip of her immortal foot and leave you baltering upon the dance-floor. Balter is an old verb meaning to dance clumsily, although one dictionary defines it strictly as ‘to tread in a clownish manner, as an ox does the grass’.

  Make me immortal with a kiss

  The Yaghan people of Tierra Del Fuego at the southernest tip of South America were one of the few tribes ever discovered who didn’t wear clothes. This is not because Tierra Del Fuego is a warm and balmy place. It is not. Even in summer the temperature rarely rises above nine degrees centigrade. Yet naked they were, even when Charles Darwin visited them on the Beagle and, rather impolitely, called them ‘miserable, degraded savages’. It would appear that the Yaghans simply hadn’t invented clothing, but they did have an ingenious method for keeping warm, which was to smear themselves head to toe in grease and cuddle each other. This ingenious and energy-efficient practice must be kept in mind when considering their insanely useful word mamihlapinatapai.