The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt through the Lost Words of the English Language (16 page)

If you spend a whole day standing still and staring southward you will see the sun rise upon your left and then trot across the sky in front of you
before setting to the right. If you stand facing northward all day you will see the shadow of your head doing the same thing on the other side, making you the living
gnomon
of a sundial.

You will only face south, though, if you’re in the northern hemisphere, where the sun spends most of its time more or less slightly south of you. Botswanans, New Zealanders and other occupants of the southern hemisphere will look north for the sun. (I must refer Equitorialists to previous comments about the average.) Clocks were built to imitate sundials in the northern hemisphere, and that is why clockwise is sunwise. If clocks had been invented in Australia, they would go the other way.

Once
upon a time it was considered right and proper to do everything in the direction of the sun, i.e. clockwise. If you were, for example, to walk around a church, you would do so sunwise. If a group of peasants were passing around their lunchtime loaf of bread, they would do so sunwise, since to pass the other way would be terribly bad luck – this is called doing something
withershins
. In fact, a standard way for a witch to curse you was to walk nine times about your house withershins; and when witches danced in a circle, they did (and do) so withershins. Everything good had to be done clockwise.

This sensible precaution against the Arch-Fiend did have some drawbacks. You could find yourself in a seventeenth-century tavern gazing longingly at a bottle but unable to reach for it. So all sorts of phrases were invented to hint to whoever had the bottle that they should get a bloody move on. ‘Remember Parson Malham’, ‘Who is Peter Lug?’, ‘Who has any lands in Appleby?’ were all cries that would come from the droughty end of the table. All of these phrases are, so far as anyone can tell, completely meaningless.
2

Today, the belief that doing anything withershins is bad luck is confined to the high table of Oxbridge colleges, where they know that it’s all true. And the current standard phrase to get the bottle moving is: ‘Do you know the Bishop of Norwich?’

However, it is vital to remember that, technically, the port should always be passed to the right if you are in the southern hemisphere.

A
fine strategic brain is required when passing the wine around, as you must try to predict who will be left with the
swank
, a dialect word recorded in an early eighteenth-century dictionary:

Swank [at Bocking in Essex] that remainder of liquor at the bottom of a tankard, pot or cup, which is just sufficient for one draught; which is not accounted good manners to divide with the left hand man, and according to the quantity is called either a large or little swank.
3

If you have managed to obtain the swank, guzzle it down as fast as you can and explain about Essex later. If somebody else has it, then you may suggest that you do the decent Victorian thing and
buz
, which is:

To share equally the last of a bottle of wine, when there is not enough for a full glass for each of the party.

But what of the food? As the dinner draws to a close it is vital, in the interests of good manners, that you remember to leave a
tailor’s mense
. In the days when a tailor came to fit you in your own home, it was customary to provide him with a light meal. This he would eat lightly. If he finished it all off, you would be left with the awkward feeling that perhaps you hadn’t provided enough
food for the poor tradesman. To pre-empt such worries the tailor would always nearly finish his meal but leave a little bit on the side of the plate to show that he was stuffed and couldn’t possibly eat another bite if his life depended upon it. As we’ve seen, mense was another word for tact or politeness, so this tactful gobbet of food was called a tailor’s mense. Thus:

Tailor’s mense
, the morsel of meat which a country tailor leaves at dinner, when working out, that he may not be charged with indecently eating all up.

In the late nineteenth century, people got very precise as to exactly how much you should leave as a tailor’s mense. One book of 1872 specifies that:

A ‘tailor’s mense,’ ration, or allowance, is, according to an old saying, a small portion of a meal left for good manners, only one-ninth part of the quantity required for a man.

The recommended daily food intake for a man is usually 2,500 calories, and so dividing that up into three equal meals a day, we can conclude that a tailor’s mense is 93.6 calories, which is about the same as one large fried egg.

Even with a fried egg gleaming on the side of your plate, though, you may for reasons purely of comfort adjust your belt to the most expansive setting. This is called the
yule hole
, and is meant to be used only after Christmas dinner. However, in
A Complete Collection of Scottish Proverbs Explained and Made Intelligible to the English Reader
(1818) the author notes that telling your host that you have ‘Set the bag to the old stent [stretch], and
the belt to the yule hole’ is terribly polite as it implies that ‘we eat as heartily as we did at Christmas’.

If, though, you are only using the yule hole out of politeness, it’s a good thing to remember this before standing up.

Now all that remains (aside from the tailor’s mense) is the duty of thanking whoever has
bedinnered
you, bedinnering being providing with dinner. Obviously, this should only be done if you actually thought that the supper was up to snuff. If it wasn’t, you could say ‘Thank you for that collation’, and it would only be much later, when your host was flicking through Dr Johnson’s dictionary, that they would find that you meant it was ‘a treat less than a feast’.

My own standard phrase here is to say that I have been
golopshusly
(or deliciously) bedinnered, before calmly handing over the bill. This has the desired effect on all but the most impudent, in which case you must simply agree to having a
blind man’s dinner
, which is one where you run away without paying. If your supper has been taken in a private dwelling then the same thing applies to the washing up. Simply explain that you are awfully sorry but you cannot stay a moment longer as you see by your watch that it is
quafftide
.

You
are fed, but you are not yet sufficiently watered, and man cannot live on supper alone. Indeed, the main purpose of supper is to make sure that you are not subjecting your body to the indignity of
dry-drinking
, which is to say, in a seventeenth-century way, boozing on an empty stomach.

However, there are various tasks that must be performed before you can declare with confidence that it is
quafftide
, which is a lovely old term meaning the time of drinking (rather like eventide or morningtide, but a lot more damaging to the liver). First, you will have to explain to your co-supperists that they want a drink too. A lot of people are strangely ignorant of the fact that they are yearning to stay up all night deliberately impairing their mental faculties. However, you must get them along,
as if you drink alone it is much harder to avoid buying your round.

A few people will concede immediately that they are up for a
small go
. The definition of this phrase (in a dictionary of Second World War services slang) is not very promising:

A Small go.
A reasonable night out with everybody happy and nobody drunk.

But a small go is easily enlarged, and can be considered the Trojan Horse of an evening’s entertainment. A little
compotation
(drinking together) can open the gates for a
perpotation
(‘the act of drinking largely’ according to Dr Johnson). So to those who insist on a small go, you can insist that that was what you had in mind yourself, and you were only planning to have one little tipple. Such little lies, or
taradiddles
as they used to be called, are merely truths that aren’t yet true.

However, there may be others who insist that they don’t want a drink at all. With these people there is no gentle cajoling to be done; all you can do is hurl insults at them. ‘You
drink-water
!’ you can shout. ‘
Nephalist
!
Hydropot
!
Wowser
!’ All that these words really mean is teetotaller, but hydropot, even though it’s only Latin for ‘water drinker’, has a lovely ring to it; and only the Australians could have come up with wowser, which the OED defines as ‘a fanatical or determined opponent of intoxicating drink’.

It is the old war between the
antithalians
and the
apolaustics
, and everybody has to pick which side they’re on right now. Thalia is the Muse of Comedy, the Grace of Plenty and the ancient deity of good fun. If you are against her, you are antithalian, a word
that, admittedly, has only one documented use in 1818. On the other side are the apolaustics, from the Greek
apolaustikos
meaning enjoyment. The war between these two armies is the eternal conflict of humanity. The antithalians are better organised, but the apolaustics have all the camp followers.

At this point the obstinately funless will probably just scamper home. Good riddance. All that are left are
owlers
.

Owler
One who goes abroad at night, like an owl.

Anyone who thinks a bar is a bar is a bar has not read enough dictionaries. There are myriad distinctive subtleties to be observed. For example, Dr Johnson, who occasionally interrupted his lexicography with night-long boozing-bouts, insisted:

Alehouse
. n.s. [Sax. ealhus.] A house where ale is publickly sold; a tipling house. It is distinguished from a tavern where they sell wine.

Each drink has its proper purveyor. There are whisky-houses, rum-holes, gin-joints or occasionally -palaces, wine-lodges, punch-houses, and beer-halls, -gardens, -cellars, -parlours and, inevitably, -bellies.

You must choose your
potation-shop
wisely, for not all
sluiceries
are equal. For example, you might be tempted to visit a
speakeasy blind tiger
(if you were in nineteenth-century USA). A newspaper of 1857 records:

I
sees a kinder pigeon-hole cut in the side of a house, and over the hole, in big writin’, ‘Blind Tiger, ten cents a sight.’ … That ‘blind tiger’ was an arrangement to evade the law, which won’t let ’em sell licker there, except by the gallon.

And as a gallon is really pushing it for what was meant to be a small do, a blind tiger (or
blind pig
, as they were also called) would be a bit much. Inexperienced drinkers should instead attend a
fuddling-school
, where the fine arts and crafts of fuddling may be explained to them by a competent teacher.

Fuddling
is a recondite verb that lies behind the common adjective
befuddled
, which technically means drunk. Fuddling is drinking. Nobody knows quite where the word comes from. It is not, alas, a frequentative, as
sparkle
is of
spark
or
gobble
is of
gob
. There is a word
fud
, but it’s a noun and means either buttocks or a woman’s pubic hair. No, fuddle is an orphan of mysterious ancestry, but it does produce the lovely word
fuddler
.

The
Gentleman’s Magazine
of 1756 condemned people who ‘fuddle away the day with riot and prophaneness’, which is doubtless the result of the fact that fuddling-schools have been undocumented since 1680.

You could be dull and go for some all-purpose
bibbery
(drinking establishment), or you could be ambitious and choose a
drunkery
(a place where people get drunk). But it is vital that you start the evening with precision, even though you will in the end arrive at that dread place written of in the
Western Canadian dictionary and phrase-book: things a newcomer wants to know
(1912):

Snake-room
,
a side room of a basement where saloon-keepers accommodate doped or drunken people until they recover their senses, presumably a place where they ‘see snakes’.

In fact, it may be worthwhile to enquire about the facilities in the snake-room before you even go through the door with your
snecklifter
.

A
lanspresado
is (according to a 1736 dictionary of thieves’ slang):

He that comes into Company with but Two-pence in his Pocket.

You either know a lanspresado, or you are one. I have taken the latter course.

Lanspresados are everywhere. They have usually forgotten their wallets or can’t find a cashpoint (did you know that in Wisconsin cashpoints are called
time machines
?) or some intensely complicated thing has happened with their rent, which means that they’re skint till Thursday.

A lanspresado was originally a
lancepesato
or broken lance, who did the work of a corporal without getting a corporal’s pay. However, if you want a more English-sounding term you may turn to the snecklifter.

You see, a lanspresado has to prowl around. He goes to the pub, but of course he can’t approach the bar unless he sees a friend already there. So he lifts the latch of the pub door, pokes his
head in, sees if there’s someone who’ll buy him a drink, and if there isn’t he walks calmly away.

An old word for a latch is a
sneck
, and so a snecklifter is a person who pokes his head into the pub to see if there’s anyone who might stand him a little drink.

Once in the door, sprint straight for the bar, if necessary employing your whiffler (see Chapter 4). Having clubbed your way through the throng, gesticulate wildly and shriek for service. The best way of getting noticed by the bar staff is to call them by unusual names. A man might positively resent being called ‘barkeep’ but hurry to serve somebody who addressed him as
Squire of the Gimlet
(1679) or
Knight of the Spigot
(1821). Similarly, a lady of the bar may be called (and apparently was called in the eighteenth century) a
pandoratrix
, on the basis that she, like the Pandora of mythology, has all the world’s delights and diseases for sale. However, a more poetic name for a barmaiden is
Hebe
, which the OED neatly defines as:

1. The goddess of youth and spring, represented as having been originally the cup-bearer of Olympus; hence applied
fig
. to:

a. A waitress, a barmaid.

The male equivalent of a Hebe (pronounced
HE-be
) would be a
Ganymede
, which has a similar sort of definition:

1. A cup-bearer, a youth who serves out liquor; humorously, a pot-boy.

But
they might balk at:

2. A catamite.

So it’s best to leave mythology out of it and stick to something matey like
birler
or
bombard man
. Only if they fail to serve you within thirty seconds should you start hurling abuse at them. If it comes to that,
under-skinker
is a good Shakespearean word, but is unequal to the cruel contempt contained in the term
lickspiggot
.

Once you have the
tapster
’s attention it is time to actually order your drinks. First, check to see whether there’s a female present who wants brandy. If there is, you can say that she’s a
bingo-mort
, and provided that the barman is fluent in the thieves’ dialect of the eighteenth century, where
bingo
was brandy and a
mort
was a woman, then you’ll be served straight away. Such fluency will also allow you to insist on a
soldier’s bottle
(a large one) rather than a
bawdy house bottle
(a very small one), because even three hundred years ago they were trying to rip people off in such bars.

Gin may be referred to as
strip me naked
, but this should be done with caution as the tapster may take you at your word, so you might be better off asking for a glass of
royal poverty
. The same caution should be applied when referring to whisky as
spunkie
, or to strong beer as
nappy ale
(on the basis that it makes you want to take a nap).

It
may be simplest to ask for
stagger-juice
all round and see what happens. After all, all that is really required is a memory-dulling
nepenthe
, a drink to make you forget. Or you may simply quote the Bible to the barman, the 31st chapter of the Book of Proverbs to be precise:

Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.

Ah, the sweet
guggle
of drink poured forth! The OED insists that drink guggles from a bottle, but it’s a matter of onomatopoeic choice really. And ah, the happiness of the corner of the bar (or
snuggery
) to which you retire with your hard-won potations. Snuggery – despite its obvious rhymes of
thuggery
,
skulduggery
and
humbuggery
– is one of the pleasantest words in the English language.

Every pub used to have a snuggery of some sort or another, and they had supernatural qualities. A nineteenth-century Scottish writer observed that:

The Snuggery, sir, has a power o’ contraction an’ expansion, that never belonged afore to any room in this sublunary world. Let the pairty be three or thretty, it accommodates its dimensions to the gatherin’.

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.

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: