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

by Forsyth, Mark

  Mamihlapinatapai is usually defined as ‘Two people looking at each other each hoping the other will do what both desire but neither is willing to do’. Mamihlapinatapai is therefore generally reckoned to be one of the most useful words on earth. As two people stand at a doorway each gesturing ‘After you’, that is mamihlapinatapai. As two people sitting in a dull waiting room both hope that the other will start a conversation, that is mamihlapinatapai. And when two people look into each other’s eyes, with that sudden realisation that lips can be used for something other than talking, but both too afraid to draw the other to them, that is Mamihlapinatapai Rex.

  However, mamihlapinatapai is a rather controversial word. Experts on the Yaghan language (a group of which I cannot claim membership), while conceding that the word is theoretically possible, tend to pooh-pooh the idea that it ever actually existed. It could exist, just as in English the word antifondlingness could exist, but that doesn’t mean it does. Mamihlapinatapai is, according to them, a whimsical invention of some unknown linguist.

  This case looks, at first blush, rather convincing. How could a tribe that hadn’t even invented clothes come up with a word so complex? However, I would contend that the two points are in fact connected, because if you spend half your time naked, cuddling and covered in grease, mamihlapinatapai is going to be a pretty common feeling. In fact it would probably be the dominant emotion of your nude, greasy existence.

  So let us assume that the dancing is over, that your eyes have met, and that mamihlapinatapai has come upon you. What to do about it?

  The simplest answer I can offer is to ask, ‘Care for a biscot?’, because biscot means ‘to caress amorously’ but the other person may not know that, and everybody likes a biscuit.

  Less deceptive would be to ask the other party whether they are osculable. Osculable means ‘kissable’ but is a much more beautiful word. According to the OED, poor osculable has been used only once, in 1893, to describe the Pope. So the word is nearly virginal and should be taken out and shown to the world.

  The Latin for to kiss was osculare, and the obscure English words thence derived are wonderful. There’s an osculatrix (a lady who kisses), an oscularity (a kiss), and an osculary (anything that can and should be kissed, although this was usually a religious relic).

  So, an alternative line could be: ‘You are an osculary, and this is my religious duty’, or somesuch.

  And now it is time for the moment not of truth, but of kissing (the two are entirely separate notions). The eyes close. The lips of the lovers meet. Cataglottism is usually attempted by one or both parties, for the definition of which we should turn to Blount’s Glossographia of 1656:

  Cataglottism, a kissing with the tongue.

  This word, though rare, has survived for centuries. As the great biologist Henry Havelock Ellis1 observed in 1905:

  The tonic effect of cutaneous excitation throws light on the psychology of the caress … The kiss is not only an expression of feeling; it is a means of provoking it. Cataglottism is by no means confined to pigeons.

  And a good thing too. But one thing leads to another and the tongue is often merely the thin end of the wedge. The moral dangers of kissing were perhaps most eloquently described by Sir Thomas Urquhart in his Jewel of 1652.

  Thus for a while their eloquence was mute, and all they spoke was but with the eye and hand, yet so persuasively, by vertue of the intermutual unlimitedness of their visotactil sensation, that each part and portion of the persons of either was obvious to the sight and touch of the persons of both; the visuriency of either, by ushering the tacturiency of both, made the attrectation of both consequent to the inspection of either.

  Where visuriency means ‘the desire to see’ and tacturiency means ‘the desire to fondle’. It is unfair, though, to judge somebody too harshly on their desire to fondle. The OED records a word at once splendid and tragic:

  Fondlesome adj. Addicted to fondling.

  It beats heroin. But it should be remembered that recidivist fondlers often need treatment much more than they need punishment. If you object, you should never have given them a fleshment in the first place.

  Once upon a time you trained animals for the hunt by fleshing them. If they did what they were supposed to do, you gave them a little morsel of meat to encourage them; if they did not do what they were meant to do, they were denied their fleshment. Exactly the same principle and the same word may be applied to the actions now under consideration. After all, the OED merely defines fleshment as ‘the excitement resulting from a first success’. A fleshment may therefore have the unfortunate result of making people go too far too fast. In the current circumstances this could mean one of two things.

  Proposing marriage

  Mariturient means ‘eager to marry’ and is derived from the same sort of desiderative verb that gave us visuriency and tacturiency in the previous section. Maturiency is a relatively common and benign condition that leads to the most blessed state of matrimony and mutual comfort. But in extreme cases it can manifest itself as gamomania (‘a form of insanity characterised by strange and extravagant proposals for marriage’) and it is with the gamomaniacs that we are now concerned.

  Every man is occasionally and honourably seized with the desire to make a woman what was called in the seventeenth century his comfortable importance, in the eighteenth century his lawful blanket and in these fallen and unimaginative days his wife. But gamomania goes beyond this.

  The first signs may be detectable if he starts mumbling something about your being fangast. Fangast is an obsolete Norfolk dialect term meaning ‘fit to marry’ whose origins are chronically befogged. Few people know the word any more, and for that reason it could be terribly useful. Suppose that your insignificant other were to discover that you had drawn up a table of all your female acquaintances and next to each name had written ‘marriage material’ or ‘not marriage material’. She’d flip her proverbial lid. But ‘fangast’ and ‘not fangast’ – unless she’s a time-traveller from ancient Norfolk you’re in the clear.

  If just one other friend knows the word then the two of you can discuss whether somebody is fangast in front of their face with no danger of discovery: ‘Have you met my new girlfriend? She’s so pretty, and not at all fangast.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing, darling, nothing.’

  But that’s not how the gamomaniac thinks. To him (or her) all are fangast. To all will he bring his subarrhations (or gifts for a prospective wife). But you have to remember that though gamo, he’s still a maniac and must be refused, however osculable. But of course he isn’t necessarily a gamomaniac; he may have a title even less honourable, helpfully defined by Dr Johnson:

  Fribbler One who professes rapture for a woman, but fears her consent.

  Fanfreluching

  The other possible result of fondlesome cataglottism is fanfreluching, which is another way of saying swiving, meddling, melling, mollocking, wapping, flesh-company, quaffing, carnal confederacy, jelly-roll, jazz, jig-a-jig, jockumcloying, hot cockles, subagitation, interunion, the Venus exercise, the last favour, old hat, pom-pom, poop-noddy, Moll Peatley, Sir Berkeley, or in a word: sex.

  But here we reach something of a crux. First, this is a serious reference work and I am loath to add anything that may subject it to suggestions of levity. Second, there are as many carnal words as there are carnal actions, and one could get horribly bogged down in explaining exactly what is meant by changing at Baker Street – added to which my publishers have insisted that they will not stretch to illustrations. But thirdly and most importantly, this is a reference work that must maintain its relevance and usefulness. So the question that must be asked is whether you, dear reader, are going to pull tonight. And as you, dear reader, are the sort of person who reads books on obscure words, I fear that the answer is No.

  It could be worse – you could be the sort o
f person who writes books on obscure words.

  So let us sadly and sorrowfully assume that your supersaliency is met with an imparlibidinous response (that is, your attempting to initiate coitus by leaping upon the beloved is rebuffed by somebody who finds you less desirable than you find them). The course of true love never did leap smooth. There is a reason that you have never heard the word equinecessary, and that is that we so rarely are.

  Silence and tears

  It is important at this point to scrabble for whatever motes of dignity the situation affords. You could pretend, as you ruefully put your socks back on, that it was a mere passiuncle or insignificant passion. It may not be true, but none of the best things are. And as your beloved hurries off to obtain a restraining order, you can console yourself that you did at least have a Pisgah sight.

  When Moses had led the Children of Israel through the wilderness he asked God to allow him to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land. But God would not let him set foot there, only have a glimpse.

  And Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that is over against Jericho. And the LORD shewed him all the land of Gilead, unto Dan, And all Naphtali, and the land of Ephraim, and Manasseh, and all the land of Judah, unto the utmost sea, And the south, and the plain of the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, unto Zoar. And the LORD said unto him, This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac, and unto Jacob, saying, I will give it unto thy seed: I have caused thee to see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not go over thither.

  So Moses the servant of the LORD died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the LORD. And he buried him in a valley in the land of Moab, over against Bethpeor: but no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.

  And from that sad passage English gained the term ‘a Pisgah sight’, for something glimpsed but never obtained and never obtainable. By a rather extraordinary feat of self-reference, the OED’s entry for Pisgah sight mentions its own first editor, Sir James Murray, who ‘led to within a Pisgah sight of completion a larger and more scientifically organized work of linguistic reference than Dr Johnson could have produced’, but died before he could see his life’s labours in print.

  All you are left with is a case of nympholepsy, which is a longing for the unobtainable that afflicts any shepherd who happens to come across a wood nymph in the course of his work. Such shepherds are never happy again. They pine away. They neglect their sheep and search the woods for the nymph whom they will never find.

  So turn for home. It’s late anyway, and you have to get up tomorrow I suppose. We generally do. Button yourself up, pretend it never happened and set off, still perhaps humming to yourself that miserable song in which all human sadness is contained:

  I’m looking for the Ogo-Pogo

  The funny little Ogo-Pogo

  His mother was an earwig, his father was a whale

  I’m going to put a little bit of salt on his tail,

  I want to find the Ogo-Pogo.

  1 Translating Charles Féré.

  Chapter 18

  11 p.m. – Stumbling Home

  Setting off – getting lost – falling over – attempts to sleep outdoors

  The nymphs are departed, last orders have been called, and it is time to go home. Even Cab Calloway, a committed seeker of nocturnal amusements, went home in the end. His Hepsters Dictionary has a couple of helpful entries for things to say at late bright or the end of the evening:

  Final (v.): to leave, to go home. Ex., ‘I finaled to my pad’ (went to bed); ‘We copped a final’ (went home).

  And:

  Trilly (v.): to leave, to depart. Ex., ‘Well, I guess I’ll trilly.’

  But how will you get home? You could share a taxi. The OED insists that a shared taxi is called a dolmus, from the Turkish for ‘filled’. But where are your ale-knights of the Round Table now, your boon companions in the night’s struggle? Gone and bloody departed, that’s where. Camelot is derelict, and you’ll probably have to go home on foot.

  If you are extremely lucky, a white sergeant may appear:

  A man fetched from the tavern or ale-house by his wife, is said to be arrested by the white sergeant.

  But given your behaviour in the last chapter, I think that’s unlikely.

  Heading home

  In the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer explains the whole human condition and search for happiness in terms of a drunk person trying to walk home. The general theme of his musing is that though we all seek after happiness, we don’t always know where it is, and end up wandering hither and thither pursuing the things we thought we wanted.

  We faren [fare] as he that drunk is as a mouse.

  A drunk man woot [knows] well he hath an house,

  But he noot [doesn’t know] which the right way is thither

  And to a drunk man the way is slidder [slippery].

  And certes in this world so faren we;

  We seeken fast after felicity

  But we goon wrong full often, trewely.

  If the way is particularly slidder, perhaps you can persuade somebody to go agatewards with you. This charming old piece of politeness is now confined to dictionaries of obsolete English:

  Agate-Wards, adv. To go agatewards with any one, to accompany him part of his way home, which was formerly the last office of hospitality towards a guest, frequently necessary even now for guidance and protection in some parts of the country. In Lincolnshire it is pronounced agatehouse, and in the North generally agaterds.

  Gate here is an old term for the public highway. So if you walked somebody agatewards you would accompany them along the dark, narrow, unfrequented lanes where robbers lurked, and then part with them at the wide open highway, where highwaymen lurked. Highwaymen were an altogether better class of thief. There were even

  ROYAL SCAMPS. Highwaymen who never rob any but rich persons, and that without ill treating them.

  There was also a royal footpad, who was just like a royal scamp except that he didn’t have a horse. It is unfortunate that modern muggers seem to be universally republican.

  Once you could hire a moon-curser, a boy who would walk beside you carrying a torch and lighting your way. Obviously, they were in permanent economic competition with moonlight, hence the name. They were not as honourable as royal scamps:

  MOONCURSER. A link-boy: link-boys are said to curse the moon, because it renders their assistance unnecessary; these gentry frequently, under colour of lighting passengers over kennels, or through dark passages, assist in robbing them.

  So perhaps it is best to be solivagant, to wander alone towards your far-off felicity. Vagari was Latin for ‘wander’, and solivagant is only one of the wonderful vagant words in the English language. If you wander outside – or extra – the bounds of your budget you are being extravagant. Indeed, originally extravagant had no financial connotations at all and simply meant ‘wandering around too much’. So when Othello was described as ‘an extravagant and wheeling stranger/Of here and everywhere’, it just meant that he hadn’t settled down. You can also be mundivagant (wandering the world), multivagant (wandering hither and thither), montivagant (wandering the mountains), nemorivagant (‘wandering in the woods and groves’), nubivagant (wandering the clouds), and omnivagant (wandering absolutely everywhere).

  These words are much more useful than they might appear. Aircraft are all nubivagant, gorillas are all nemorivagant, and a holiday in Snowdonia could be described as a montivagant weekend. In fact, one could be simultaneously montivagant, nubivagant, nemorivagant and extravagant simply by taking an expensive holiday in the Lake District.

  The word that we need now, however, is noctivagant: wandering around at night. You must stumble like a gyrovague (or wandering monk), up blind alleys, twitchels, and diverticulums. You may well find yourself in
a trance, but only because a trance is an old Scots term for a passage between two buildings. You will wander, vagulate and wharve; and it’s as likely as not that you will end up a night-foundered vicambulist, or ‘street-walker who has got lost in the darkness’.

  At this point, you may wish to ponder the high-flown concept of nullibiety, or state of being nowhere. It’s usually used in theology, but can happily be transferred to trying to find your way home after a couple of drinks too many. It’s also got a useful sister-word, nullibiquitous, which is the exact opposite of ubiquitous and means ‘existing nowhere’. Thus you can search your house for your nullibiquitous car keys or whatnot.

  Alternatively, you could look around you at the dark and unfamiliar streets and conclude that you had been pixilated, a splendid word and the cause of an awful lot of amusing typos in newspapers, if only you can spot them. Pixilated is completely different to pixelated. The latter, with an E, is something that happens to people’s faces when they appear on television. But pixilated, with an I, means ‘led astray by pixies’. It’s astonishing, if you read the newspapers carefully, how many criminals have had their faces led astray by the Little Folk.

  Pixies are a pest, and the cause of much wild wandering, or skimbleskamble oberration as Dr Johnson would have put it, leaving you dog-weary and upon the wheady mile.

  The wheady mile is a very useful concept, defined in Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological Dictionary of 1721 as ‘A Mile beyond Expectation, a tedious one. Shropshire’. It’s that last bit of a journey that goes on much longer than you had planned. Another dictionary calls it ‘A mile of an extraordinary length’. This doesn’t make much sense if you take it literally, as miles are, ordinarily, a mile long. But in your current state – drunk, weary and heartbroken – it is an utterly comprehensible idea and I wouldn’t blame you if you sank to your knees in night-foundered despair.