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

by Forsyth, Mark

  Devotional habits

  When Diocletian entered Alexandria in 298 AD he was in a foul temper. The city had risen up in revolt against him and it had taken several months of siege before they finally gave in and opened the gates to the emperor, who was by now furious. He immediately ordered his legionaries to start killing the citizens and not to stop until his horse was up to its knees in the blood of the Alexandrians. The population of Alexandria was a little under a million at the time. The average human contains about a gallon of blood. This means that the resources available to the Roman soldiers would have been enough for – to use the standard Journalistic Unit of Measurement – an Olympic swimming pool and a half. Diocletian’s plan was therefore thoroughly practicable.

  Diocletian’s horse had other ideas, though, for just as the soldiers were sharpening their swords and getting ready for the fun, the horse went down on its knees and refused to get up. Diocletian took this as an omen from the gods and immediately called off the massacre, thus saving the town. The Alexandrians erected a statue of the horse.1

  The Victorians had a term for horses that fell to their knees all the time: they were said to have acquired devotional habits, on the basis that it looked as though they were kneeling down to pray. It’s rather pleasant to imagine that a horse can’t go twenty yards without kneeling to thank its creator. Pleasant for humans at least, not so for the horse, who is probably just old and tired and ready for the knacker’s yard. Nor will anyone blame you if you acquire devotional habits of your own on your pixilated way.

  Falling flat on your face

  To Seel a Ship is said to Seel, when she tumbles suddenly and violent, sometimes to one side, and sometimes to another, when a Wave passes from under her Sides faster than she can drive away with it.

  Universal Etymological Dictionary, 1721

  Towards midnight a person is said to seel when they tumble suddenly and violent, sometimes to one side, and sometimes to another, when the pavement passes under their feet faster than they can stumble away with it, too exhausted and too well-refreshed to continue with this wheady mile.

  Mischievous Reality notices you seeling and takes the opportunity to turn upside down and back to front. You totter, and before you have a chance even to cry out ‘I labascate!’, which means ‘I begin to fall’, you’re actually falling in a terrible Newtonian degringolade onto your face.

  Now is the time of humicubation: the act of lying on the ground, especially as a form of repentance. As a seventeenth-century bishop sternly observed:

  Fasting and Sackcloth, and Ashes, and Tears, and Humicubations, used to be companions of Repentance. Joy may be a Consequent of it, not a Part of it.

  Another useful word here may be spartle, to wave the limbs around vainly. Spartling is a common companion of evening humicubations, especially when the midnight creatures come curiously closer.

  The moon-cursers and the bug hunters gather around. You catch a glimpse of the approaching vespilone, ‘he that carries forth dead bodies in the night to be buried, as they use in time of plague and great sickness’, with his uncuses, his corpse-hooks, his eternity box and his danna-drag on which the waste of the city is carried out. The Black Ox licks your cheek. The barguest, the ghost of broken walls, is watching with Old Split-Foot. The hircocervus blows a mort. The donestres call for you! The whangdoodle wails in the Yggdrasil! The skinless écorchés cavort! And Aboaddon, the Angel of the Bottomless Pit, beats time while the four hundred drunken rabbits dance an obscene can-can around you.

  Now may be the time to indulge in a spot of xenodocheionology, which is the study of hotels and places to stay the night. There is the possibility of a sheep bed, i.e. the grass. But that won’t keep away the sooterkins (strange, dark creatures said to grow inside Dutch women). Also, there is the question of warmth. If you are lucky enough to live in California all you will need to do is cover yourself with a newspaper, or California blanket. Those in chillier climes could knock on a few doors to see if anybody is feeling xenodochial – a slightly shorter relative of xenodocheionology that means ‘given to putting strangers up for the night’.

  Somebody who goes from house to house, even at this time of night, is circumforaneous, whether they’re an encyclopedia salesman, a burglar or simply have something important to tell you about salvation.

  But what is this? Is this your mascaron? Is this your own front door?

  1 It should be noted that many spoilsport historians think this story is much too good to be true.

  Chapter 19

  Midnight – Nostos

  Making too much noise upon returning – attempting to work – undressing – arguing with spouse – falling asleep

  The Oxford English Dictionary insists that beauty-sleep is ‘the sleep secured before midnight’. So if you’re still up, it’s too late. Mind you, if you’ve gone to bed anywhere near a dairy farm, you may be sitting up in bed looking rather startled and consulting this humble, yet precise, reference work to find out what on earth that noise is. Luckily, I can refer you to The Vocabulary of East Anglia; An Attempt to Record the Vulgar Tongue of the Twin Sister Counties, Norfolk and Suffolk as It Existed In the Last Years of the Eighteenth Century, and Still Exists (1830). It’s a saucy little page-turner of a dictionary filled with fantastical diseases of the turnip and explanations of why an arseling pole and a bed faggot aren’t what you might have suspected.1 On the subject of midnight it has this entry:

  BULL’S-NOON, s. midnight. The inhabitants of dairy counties can feelingly vouch for the propriety of this term. Their repose is often broken in the dead of night by the loud bellowing of the lord of the herd, who, rising vigorous from his evening rumination, rushes forth on his adventures, as if it were broad noon-day, and blores with increased rage and disappointment when he comes to a fence which he cannot break through.

  So if you have just woken up, don’t worry. It’s merely the lord of the herd back from his evening rumination. If, on the other hand, you are the lord of the herd, much the worse for wear after your evening rumination, then you should try to make a little less noise coming home.

  The nightingale floor

  If you wish to assassinate the Lord of Nijo Castle in Kyoto – and who doesn’t occasionally have strange whims? – several difficulties will immediately present themselves to you. There are two rings of fortified wall, two rings of moats, and there hasn’t actually been a lord there since 1939. However, even once you’ve surmounted these problems, you’re going to have to deal with the nightingale floor.

  The Tokugawa Shogunate were not the sort of chaps who took chances. So even if you made it to the sleeping quarters, all the floorboards were specially designed to squeak when you walked on them, meaning that you couldn’t surprise anybody in their bed. In fact, the squeakings were specifically designed to be rather melodious and sound like nightingales. There was an intricate system of nails and brackets beneath each corridor, and even though the results were rather approximate, it was possible to imagine that there was an aviary of indignant birds beneath your feet. It’s a clever and ancient form of the burglar alarm, and though the original Japanese uguisu-bari has never made it into English, nightingale floor has an entry all to itself in the OED. The other peculiar thing is that though the Japanese make them deliberately, in the West we have been accidentally making nightingale floors for ages. Rare and extremely new is the house where the floorboards don’t sing like a violated canary, or where the door doesn’t screak on its hinges – a splendidly jarring word that sounds like a combination of scream and shriek.

  You may plan to be as surrepent (or creeping stealthily underneath) as a creep-mouse, but you will probably sound more like a randy, post-ruminatory bull. The best you can do is, once beyond the nightingales, take Dr Johnson’s advice and:

  SOSS … To fall at once into a chair.

  Lamp-life

  Before actually totter
ing bedwards, you may wish to get a few things done. After all, you may be clinophobic and have a morbid fear of going to bed. You could, as the expression has it, get next week’s drinking done early, although considering what happened a couple of chapters ago I cannot recommend this. Or you could take this opportunity to get some work done.

  Winston Churchill was the grand old master of working at odd hours of the day. His brain seemed to rise with the bull, and there are numerous stories of how he won the Second World War at times of day when most of us are tucked up and dreaming. He used to hold cabinet meetings at just around this time, which were known to the poor people who had to attend as Churchill’s midnight follies. Then he would pace around the cabinet war rooms during the small hours phoning people up and giving orders that were often complete nonsense and rightly ignored. Alan Brooke, Churchill’s Chief of Staff, later recalled that ‘Winston had ten ideas every day, only one of which was good, and he didn’t know which one it was’.2

  Those who feel philogrobolized all morning, so-so in the afternoon, and decent in the evening, but who are only truly awake after midnight are called lychnobites. Lychnobite comes from the Greek lychno-bios and means, approximately, ‘lamp-life’ (that’s the same bio that you get in biology, ‘the study of life’). The word was invented by Seneca, but found its way into the English language in the early eighteenth century.

  If you are a hard-working lychnobite, like Churchill, or if you are a lazy lychnobite who simply failed to get anything done in the day, like me, now is the time to lucubrate. Lucubrate means to work by lamp-light, and is quite the most civilised form of working there is. There is nobody around to tell you how to do things, or how fast to do things, or that you can’t do things with your feet up and a little whisky. This is especially true if you have a good strong lock on your lucubatory.

  A lucubatory is ‘a place of midnight study’, a room that you work in when all the world is sleeping around you. They are very hard to find and rarely mentioned in estate agents’ particulars. Some people like to add extensions to their houses – a games room, a gym, a private cinema – but if I ever have the money I shall add a lucubatory. I feel sure that it would increase my productivity no end, even though I would, of course, never go in there until I had heard the chimes at midnight. For the day, I would content myself with a phrontistery, which is ‘a place for thinking’. There the eager phrontist can muse and ponder, ponder and muse to their heart’s content, in a way that is utterly impossible in a utility room. Descartes, incidentally, had a phrontistery. He claimed to do all his best thinking sitting inside a stove. Not while it was lit, of course, that would be uncomfortable. But perhaps that would be the ideal lucubatory: a stove by day, and at night, when the embers have been raked out, a place of meditation and sooty solitude.

  Dr Johnson didn’t work late at night, and referred to lucubraters as candle-wasters, which is cruel. But perhaps he was right, and it is indeed time to couch a hog’s head, hit the hay, and head up the weary wooden hill to Bedfordshire.

  Disrobing

  Apodysophilia is ‘a feverish desire to undress’. It is usually a term of criminal psychology applied to people who do it in inappropriate places and get into trouble. The only appropriate places for an attack of apodysophilia are the apodyterium, or undressing room, of a Roman bathhouse, and your own bedroom.

  Here you may play the ecdysiast at will – ecdysiast being a very learned term for a strip-tease artist invented by the American satirist H.L. Mencken. He had received a letter from a lady called Georgia Southern, a distinguished stripper of the 1940s, who didn’t like being called a stripper. She observed in her letter that:

  Strip-teasing is a formal and rhythmic disrobing of the body in public. In recent years there has been a great deal of uninformed criticism levelled against my profession. Most of it is without foundation and arises because of the unfortunate word strip-teasing, which creates the wrong connotations in the mind of the public. I feel sure that if you could coin a new and more palatable word to describe this art, the objections to it would vanish and I and my colleagues would have easier going.

  H.L. Mencken, being a perfect gentleman, set himself to the task and eventually replied thus:

  I need not tell you that I sympathize with you in your affliction, and wish that I could help you. Unfortunately, no really persuasive new name suggests itself. It might be a good idea to relate strip-teasing in some way or other to the associated zoological phenomenon of molting. Thus the word moltician comes to mind, but it must be rejected because of its likeness to mortician. A resort to the scientific name for molting, which is ecdysis, produces both ecdysist and ecdysiast.

  And ecdysiast it was. The term was instantly put to use by her publicist, got itself into the OED and even gave birth to the word ecdysiasm or ‘the activity and occupation of strip teasing’.

  You are nearly ready to leap into bed. First you must take your shoes off (a detail often omitted by ecdysiasts), which is technically noted as discalcing.

  Finally, it is vital to check for snudges.

  Snudge, c. one that lurks under a bed, to watch an opportunity to Rob the House. (1699)

  So down on your knees and have a good peek. There should be nothing down there except …

  BEGGAR’S VELVET, s. the lightest particles of down shaken from a feather-bed, and left by a sluttish housemaid to collect under the bed till it covers the floor for want of due sweeping, and she gets a scolding from her dame.

  So it’s time to get into bed – and, speaking of scolding, there is a risk that that is what you are now to receive.

  Domestic dragons

  As noted in the Preambulation, I have never been quite sure in this book whether you are married or not. I observed a couple of chapters ago that I feared the worst, but just to interpose a little ease, let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise and assume that you are possessed of a top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art spouse. In which case, I don’t see why you haven’t got to bed until this extraordinary late hour. And nor does your spouse.

  The relevant word here is dragonism. Dragons, quite aside from their wings and halitosis, have the extraordinary quality of never going to sleep. Instead, they are eternally watchful, guarding their treasure and fair maidens. Thus dragonism is the practice of staying awake for ever, ready to attack. Prepare for a lecture.

  Curtain Lecture A woman who scolds her husband when in bed, is said to read him a curtain lecture.

  The idea here is that you sleep in a four-poster bed and it’s only once the curtains are drawn around you that your spouse, be they male or female, starts confessing your faults. The curtains stop the sound travelling too far, and also protect you from observation if you are gymnologising, or ‘having an argument in the nude’, as the ancient Greeks often did.

  The ancient Greeks were masters of argument and spent a lot of time classifying methods of making yourself look good and your opponent look bad. They called this rhetoric. There are precisely a million and one rhetorical forms, but two of them are surprisingly common, almost universal, in a good domestic set-to.

  Paralipsis is the practice of mentioning that you’re not mentioning something, and saying what you’re not saying. That may sound like a strange and preposterous paradox, but consider the following:

  I’m not going to bring up how you were late, late by half an hour. And I’m not going to mention how you disgraced yourself at Percy’s funeral, and I’m not even going to say a thing about your obsession with ferrets. All I’m saying is …

  Do you see how it’s done? You make a big show of saying what you’re not saying. You list all the topics that you will not bring up. Now you know what paralipsis is – I am sure that you have used it yourself and had it used on you. It is the single most common rhetorical trope deployed in family rows. Any clause that begins with the words ‘Not to mention’ is paralipsis. Needless to say, it’s a
very clever technique because it allows you to score point after point without even allowing for a reply.

  Epitrope is the granting of ironic permission, usually while listing all of the concomitant disadvantages. Consider the following:

  Go right ahead. Don’t mind me. Really, don’t. Stay out late. Ruin your liver. It doesn’t bother me that you’re heading for an early grave and I’m going to be left bankrupt and alone with seventeen children and a wooden leg. Why should that bother me? You just do what you want to do.

  Familiar? The only advantage of epitrope is that it usually means you’re somewhere near the end of the curtain lecture. If you’re not, you may become fugacious or ready to run away from home.

  If you’re lucky, your curtain lecture may be subderiserous, or gently mocking. And if you are truly blessed, you may receive levament, which Dr Johnson defined as ‘The comfort that one hath of his wife’.

  Lying down to sleep

  Night-spel, was a Prayer against the Night-mar. (1674)

  Finally, your Scotch warming pan has ceased to scold you (mind you, it might all start up again if you call them a Scotch warming pan). It is time to put out the lights and dowse the glims, as a highwayman would have said. Highwaymen could never say anything in ordinary English, and they would bid you good night by saying bene darkmans, pronounced BEN-ay, and deriving from the Latin for blessed. So if there is somebody with you, that is how to wish them good night.