The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt through the Lost Words of the English Language (11 page)

Wilco
(short for
wil
l
co
mply) means ‘Absolutely, granny, I shall remember to wrap up warm’.

Copy
means ‘Yes, I heard what you just said. There’s no need to repeat it.’

Reading you five
: ‘Yes, the line is perfectly good from my end.’

Wait out
means ‘I’ve no idea, can I call you back sometime?’

And, most importantly, all chitchat about the weather or instructions on which bus to take to the pub tonight should be prefixed with
Securité!
, which means ‘I have important meteorological, navigational or safety information to pass on’.

Got
all that? Good. So a typical phone call to your dear old mother might go something like this:

‘Ahoy, ahoy! Just feeling matriotic and thought I’d give you a call.’

‘Darling! So lovely to copy that.’

‘Roger that. How are things?’

‘Securité! Securité! We’ve had such glorious weather this morning that I was out in the garden, but then Securité! Securité! it began to drizzle a bit so I came inside. Now, when are you going to come up and visit us?’

‘Wait out.’

‘It’s been five years.’

Click. Phone call finished. Family obligations and filial piety complete. As it says in the Ten Commandments: ‘Honour thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long in the land of the Lord.’ It’s the only commandment with a promise.

If
you follow learning you shall learn more each day. If you follow the Way you shall do less each day. You shall do less and less until you do nothing at all. And, if you do nothing at all, there is nothing that is left undone.

The Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu, fifth century BC

So far I have been assuming that you are a subordinate, a mere Israelite slaving and sweating for some cruel taskmaster, and have provided you with the words necessary for workshy
lollygagging
. This is, perhaps, unfair, and I may have underestimated you. You could well be a captain of industry, a tycoon, a big shot, a
buzz-wig
, a
king-fish
, a
mob-master
, a
satrapon
, a
celestial
, a
top-hatter
, a
tall boy
, or a Fat Controller. If you are any or all of these, work avoidance is exactly the other way round: you must prowl around your business empire finding people to whom to delegate your toils, and you require the words with which to do it.

You must get your lazy
lolpoops
and
loobies
– your staff who are not operating as productive units of humanity – and scream
Imshi!
at them, a Second World War expression meaning ‘Get to work!’

But first you must find them, and this is going to be a problem if your staff are
michers
, a micher being, according to Dr Johnson’s dictionary, ‘A lazy loiterer, who skulks about in corners and by-places, and keeps out of sight; a hedge creeper’. A
hedge creeper
is, of course, ‘A hedge-thief, skulker under hedges, pitiful rascal’ – according to Farmer’s
Slang and its Analogues,
anyway.

The first thing to do is check under all the hedges in the office, a brief pursuit unless you manage a hedge fund. Having dealt with the hedge creepers, you must then turn your attention to the
latibulaters
, latibulate meaning ‘hide in a corner’. In fact, you could save yourself some time by merely posting signs in every corner of the office saying NO LATIBULATION in big red letters. This may not solve the problem completely, though, as hardened latibulaters deprived of their corners may
incloacate
, or conceal themselves in a lavatory. Incloacation is not a common problem, but it was on the charge sheet of a seventeenth-century outlaw who was said to have ‘incloacated himself privily’. Incloacaters are probably the hardest michers to deal with, and the best way to flush them out is to make the lavatories as unpleasant as possible. This is easily and subtly achieved by spraying the necessary room with
mercaptans
, one or more of the several stinking compounds in the sulphydryl group, or, to put it another way, the thing that smells in shit.

Once
all your
chasmophiles
– or lovers of nooks and crannies – have been beaten back to their desks and cubbyholes, you should give them a good earful. However, your reprimands must be chosen with the care befitting the dignity of an executive like you. You may be stern or soft, so long as you are memorable enough that your rockets stick in their memory, as it were. That way you shouldn’t have to admonish anybody more than once a week or so. There was a don at Oxford University in the seventeenth century whose insults were considered so exquisite that they merit a whole paragraph in Aubrey’s very brief
Brief Life
of him. His name was Dr Ralph Kettell and his …

… fashion was to goe up and down the college, and peepe in at the key-holes to see whether the boyes did follow their bookes or no […] When he scolded at the idle young boies of his colledge, he used these names, viz.
Turds
,
Tarrarags
(these were the worst sort, rude raskells),
Rascal-Jacks, Blindcinques
,
Scobberlotchers
(these did no hurt, were sober, but went idleing about the grove with their hands in their pocketts, and telling the number of trees there, or so).

These might seem to be enough, but they clearly weren’t, as Aubrey also mentions that:

Upon Trinity Sunday he would commonly preach at the Colledge, whither a number of the scholars of other howses would come, to laugh at him.

So
you must, in your scolding, rise above even the invention of Dr Kettell. You could try resorting to John Florio’s 1598
Worlde of Wordes
and go for:

A shite-rags: an idle, lazie, loobie fellow

… but this may get you in trouble. To be honest, there are any number of words for layabouts, loafers, lingerers and
lurdans
. You might want to save time by just shouting at all of them at once, in which case you will need to know that the correct collective noun is a
lounge
of idlers. However, it might be more interesting to up the philosophical stakes by bringing in the concept of the
drogulus
.

The drogulus was invented as a purely theoretical concept by the British philosopher A.J. Ayer. Ayer is a chap who deserves everybody’s respect and time, if not for his thought, then at least for the fact that he once, at the age of 77, stopped Mike Tyson from attacking a young model called Naomi Campbell. It was at a party in New York, and when Ayer got in the way Mike Tyson asked him: ‘Do you know who the fuck I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world.’ To which Ayer replied: ‘And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.’ Meanwhile, Miss Campbell had slipped away.

But to return to the drogulus: this fascinating little speculative creature was invented in a less glamorous argument in 1949 when Ayer was debating with a priest about meaningful and meaningless statements. Ayer contended that a statement could be meaningful only if you could state what would prove that it was true or false. So ‘God exists’ would be a meaningful statement
only if you could say definitively what would make you believe or disbelieve it. Ayer invented the idea of the drogulus, which is a creature that has no discernible effect whatsoever on anything.

And you say, ‘Well how am I to tell if it’s there or not?’ And I say, ‘There’s no way of telling. Everything’s just the same if it’s there or it’s not there. But the fact is it’s there.’

Drogulus
has remained a term of speculative epistemological philosophy, but it could easily be imported into the repertoire of management-speak. For what better insult to a lazy employee than ‘You drogulus!’ It sounds a bit like
dog
and a bit like
useless
, but if your subordinate went crying to an employment tribunal, they would probably be rather impressed with your erudition and say with A.J. Ayer: ‘Everything is just the same if you’re there or you’re not there. But the fact is you’re there.’

All this, of course, assumes that there is Something To Be Done. And if there is not something to be done then it is your duty as manager to cover the fact up. This has been the central point of leadership since leadership began and there are all sorts of cunning and inventive manoeuvres. For example, on 1 April junior employees used to be sent out to buy
pigeon milk
for their masters. Every shopkeeper would direct them onwards to somewhere just round the corner and they could wander around town all day on this
sleeveless errand
.

On exactly the same basis, modern recruits to the British Army are often sent by their commanding officer to get
the keys to the indoor tank park
. Indeed, the futility of war is as nothing to the futility of basic training, where the old rule is that if it doesn’t
move you should paint it and that if it does you should salute it.

Even once you have sent your employees running around milking pigeons, you must still watch them like hawks in case they are merely
eye-servants
and
lip-labourers
.

EYESERVANT. n.s. [
eye
and
servant
.] A servant that works only while watched …

Servants, obey in all things your masters; not with
eye-service
, as men pleasers, but in singleness of heart. Cor. I ii.22

LIP-LABOUR. n.s. [
lip
and
labour
.] Action of the lips without concurrence of the mind; words without sentiments.

Christ calleth your Latyne howres idlenesse, hypocresye, moche bablynge, and
lyppe-laboure
. Bale,
Yet a Course &c
(1543)

Eye-servants are even worse than those incloacated chasmophiles mentioned earlier, because you think they’re working when in fact they are napping, phoning their friends, tweeting, texting, booking their faces, indulging their
oniomania
(or compulsion to buy stuff) on the Internet, or otherwise
ploitering
, which is to say pretending to work when they are not. Such people are leeches upon the healthy limbs of business and must be salted accordingly.

At this point, you may be called upon to summon them to
a meeting without coffee
. This is an immensely useful term
invented in the British Ministry of Defence. It combines gentleness of phrasing with a subtle and malevolent menace. On the international stage the Ministry of Defence will go and organise naval manoeuvres or missile tests right next to whatever impish country they want to intimidate. Internally, they achieve exactly the same effect by mentioning a meeting without coffee. It works like this. A senior officer’s secretary will phone up a subordinate to arrange a meeting. The subordinate will say something along the lines of, ‘Oh, that’s splendid. I’m terribly excited about our new initiatives on installing tea-makers in British Army tanks,
1
and I’d like to discuss the possibility …’ But here the secretary will cut them off with the dread words: ‘Actually, this is a meeting without coffee.’

It’s an easy and friendly thing for the secretary to say, but the subordinate knows what it means. Their opinion will not be asked. They will not be smiled at. They will not even be allowed to sit down and sip a thoughtful cup of the brown stuff. They will stand there and be shouted at until their feet are sore and their ears
tintinnabulate
. A good, proper military carpeting. And the beauty of it is that the dread felt on the part of the subordinate as they pencil the meeting meekly into their diary, as they fail to sleep the night before, as they spend all morning fretting and practising excuses – that dread is the real punishment. It is psychological trench warfare.

But should you be so cruel? Would it not be better to organise a caring and sharing office environment where everybody feels valued? No, it would not. I refer you to Machiavelli.

It
has been asked whether it is better to be loved than feared, or feared than loved. I am of the opinion that both are necessary; but as it is not an easy task to unite them, and we must determine on one or the other, I think the latter (to be feared) is the safest. Men, it must be allowed, are generally ungrateful, fickle, timid, dissembling, and self-interested; so much so, that confer on them a benefit they are entirely yours; they offer you, as I have already said, their wealth, their blood, their lives, and even their own offspring, when the occasion for any of them is distant; but should it present itself, they will revolt against you.

Any questions? Good. Now that your meeting without coffee has been arranged with the eye-serving drogulus, the next step is to work out exactly what you are going to say. It’s always good to start with something ear-catching, and, as the executive self-help books suggest, to learn from history’s greatest managers. When Ghengis Khan seized Bukhara he gathered all the city’s most prominent citizens to kneel before him and began his pep talk thus:

I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.

Change ‘punishment’ to ‘line manager’ and you have your opening. Ghengis could have saved a lot of time by using the word
theomeny
, which means wrath of God, but we will let that pass. Now that you’ve softened them up and established the tone of the meeting (and hidden any stray cafetieres) you can press home your advantage by shrieking the dread words: ‘You are a
purple dromedary
!’

Pause
for a while to let this sink in; it is a terrible thing for anyone to learn that they are a purple dromedary. The pain is particularly acute if you have not read
A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew
, where they translate:

You are a purple Dromedary – You are a Bungler or a dull Fellow

If you’re feeling particularly alliterative you can add
drumble-dore
to dromedary, for, although the former is usually applied to a clumsy insect, it can also mean a clumsy, incompetent individual.

Now that their dromedarian nature has been exposed, you can pin them down with any of the other words that English has produced for the incurable incompetent:
maflard
,
puzzle-pate
,
shaffles
,
foozler
,
juffler
,
blunkerkin
or
batie-bum
. Or if you feel that the work of selecting words is beneath the dignity of a director like you, you can just copy Shakespeare, who provided a handy cut-out-and-memorise passage in
King Lear
, where Kent calls Oswald: