The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt through the Lost Words of the English Language (7 page)

Downright disagreement can be properly imparted with the simple words, ‘I don’t go for that magoo’, and that should put an end to the subject.

So that’s ‘Yes’, ‘No’ and ‘Who cares?’, which is all you really need in life, and usually more than you need in the office where two of those will do. You can, if you like, take this principle further. Why stop at 1930s New York when you can go back to Victorian
London and act like a sweet-faced orphan or undernourished Dickensian crossing sweeper? Of course, the costume is more demanding, but if your meeting room does have a chimney then you can burst out of it at the vital moment and register agreement by shouting ‘That’s screamin’, mister!’ And ‘I’m breathin’ natural gas’ has its equivalent in the words ‘I’ve seen the elephant, chum’, a reference to the fact that the travelling circuses of Victorian England had made elephants commonplace to all but the most bumpkinish of rustics. ‘No’ can be rendered by the enigmatic expression ‘Saw your timber’.

Whatever age or idiom you elect to use, the truth remains that if an argument breaks out everybody will start piling in. It’s what schoolboys at Winchester College would have called a
Mons
(whereby everybody jumps on top of one boy for reasons that remain suspicious). You are no longer a
conventicle
of thoughtful professionals, you are
Dover Court
: all speakers and no listeners.
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And it is time for a
mugwump
to step in.

A mugwump is a derogatory word for somebody in charge who affects to be above petty squabbles and factions. So when your boss tries to make peace at the meeting table like an impartial angel, he is being a mugwump.

Mugwump
is therefore an eminently useful word. It has a preposterous sound: the
ug
and the
ump
get across the idea of plodding stupidity, and context can give it meaning.

The origin of the word is rather extraordinary and involves the first American Bible.

There was a seventeenth-century chap called John Eliot who was a Protestant, a Puritan and a colonist in America. He wanted to convert the local natives – the Wampanoag – to Christianity and to do so he needed a Bible in their language. He learnt Massachusett, the language of the Wampanoags, and then had to invent a writing system to get it down on paper. The result was Eliot’s Massachusett Bible of 1663: the first Bible ever printed in America.

Eliot had the perennial translator’s problem of finding words for concepts that don’t exist in a language. The Wampanoags had no centurions, no captains, no generals, and so what was he to do when such fellows cropped up in the Bible? He decided to translate all of them using the Wampanoag word for war leader:
mugquomp
.

Mugwump then disappeared for 150 years. There is neither citation nor quotation until the early nineteenth century when it reappears as a comical and derisive term for a boss.
4

Mugwumpery
can be dealt with in two ways. You can return to hepcat jive-talking and shout ‘Get off the fence, Hortense!’ This is an example of the mid-century American craze for throwing in a rhyming word at the end of a sentence, e.g. ‘See you later, alligator’, or ‘What’s on the agenda, Brenda?’ or ‘The figures from the third quarter are disappointing but we’re confident that we have the sales team in place to make progress in this exciting sector, Hector’.

The other way to deal with mugwumpery is to accept it and switch to
log-rolling
, which is an American term derived from the phrase ‘You roll my log, and I’ll roll yours’. Log-rolling can therefore refer to the mutual and excruciatingly boring exchange of praise and plaudits, as everybody agrees that everybody else is just super. There’s even a specialist term,
literary log-rolling
, that refers to authors writing complimentary reviews of each other’s dreary tomes. There should be an example on the back.

And now, once the
contekors
have stopped quarrelling, the dust has settled and everybody has resolved on a course of
aboulia
(indecisiveness) and
periergy
(needless caution), the morning meeting can finally be wrapped up. Anything further would be
supervacaneous
. Most importantly, we should leave now before anybody mentions the
tacenda
. Tacenda are those things that must never be mentioned, like the fact that the company is effectively bankrupt or overstaffed or in breach of child labour laws,
or all three. In fact, the tacenda is the absolute opposite of the agenda: those
nefandous
words that the tongue of man should never utter in front of his colleagues, but must instead be dedicated in reverent hush to Harpocrates, the ancient and terrible god of silence.

So take your harpocratic oath, gather up your things and dash out of the meeting room. You may even have time for a quick
earnder
, which is an old Yorkshire term for a morning drinking session.

Since
mankind first mastered the concept of the time, eleven o’clock has been the sacred hour of the mid-morning break. It is the holy hour of tea or coffee, and possibly a biscuit. At the eleventh chime of the clock, spring into inaction.

Even bears hold this
undecimarian
hour to be a time of eating and idleness, as is witnessed in the first book of
Winnie the Pooh
, Chapter 2:

Pooh always liked a little something at eleven o’clock in the morning, and he was very glad to see Rabbit getting out the plates and mugs; and when Rabbit said, ‘Honey or condensed milk with your bread?’ he was so excited that he said, ‘Both,’ and then, so as not to seem greedy, he added, ‘But don’t bother about the bread, please.’

There are all sorts of words for this snack:
elevenses
(Kentish dialect),
dornton
(northern),
eleven hours
(Scottish),
eleven o’clock
(American) and
elevener
(Suffolk). An elevener is best, as it includes the possibility of a drink or tipple, whereas all the rest are teetotalitarian.

Of
course, you mustn’t be lazy. It is important to work energetically at your coffee- or tea-making.
1
You may bustle around with the mugs and spoons while the kettle
thrumbles
(makes that rumbling noise just before it boils). And that thrumbling will act as a summons to all the office gossips.

The word for a person who always wants to know the latest gossip and scandal is a
quidnunc
, which is Latin for ‘what now?’ The practice of being a quidnunc is called either
quidnuncism
or, slightly more delightfully,
quidnuncery
. There’s even an alternative term,
numquid
, which means exactly the same thing: ‘now what’ instead of ‘what now’. So as the tea brews, the water cools or the coffee percolates, it is time to drop your voices and
quother
, or speak in low tones of firings, hirings, of bonks and rumours of bonks.

Even if you don’t want to know ‘what now’, you will probably be told anyway. The following is from a dictionary of late eighteenth-century slang, but it rings terribly true today:

FIRING A GUN, Introducing a story by head and shoulders. A man wanting to tell a particular story, said to the company, Hark! did you not hear a gun? – but now we are talking of a gun, I will tell you the story of one.

Now they all come out: the rumours,
furphies
and strange tidings – the pure joy of being a
rawgabbit
and a
spermologer
. A rawgabbit, just in case you were wondering, is somebody who speaks in strictest confidence about a subject of which they know
nothing. A rawgabbit is the person who pulls you aside and reveals in a careful whisper that the head of Compliance is having an affair with the new recruit in IT, which you know to be utterly untrue because the head of Compliance is having an affair with you, and the new recruit in IT hasn’t started yet. Nonetheless, as a careful spermologer you mustn’t reveal that you know too much. Being a spermologer isn’t nearly as mucky as it sounds. Though it does come from the Greek for seed-gathering, spermologer’s use in English is a metaphorical one for a gatherer of gossip and a seeker after scurrilous rumours.

You may begin to feel that you are in what Second World War soldiers called a
bind
.

Bind
. This must be the most used of all Air Force slang expressions. It may describe a person who bores with out-of-date news or who is always in the know.

Hence:

Binding rigid.
The act of continually retailing stale information.

Actually, though we are beside the kettle, most of the best rumours are started in the lavatory. The technical term for a story started in the lavatories is
latrinogram
, from
gram
being writing in Greek and
latrine
being, well, a latrine. Latrinogram is first recorded in 1944 as a British military term and was probably where guesses as to the date of D-Day were exchanged. So
popular were wartime lavatories as a source of gossip that there’s a similar and slightly earlier version of latrinogram:
Elsan gen
, which is defined in a 1943 dictionary of services slang thus:

Elsan gen
: News which cannot be relied upon. [Literally, ‘news invented in the gentlemen’s toilet’, Elsan being the trade name of the excellent chemical lavatories with which bombers are equipped.]

I’m not sure exactly how you would fit two people into the lavatories of an RAF bomber, or why indeed you would wish to do so. The rumble and thrumble of the engines might also make it hard to exchange the juiciest furphies in an appropriate quother. It therefore looks to me as though
Elsan gen
was a circumlocutory manner of saying that the information (or gen) was equivalent in quality to the stuff physically produced in such a cubby hole, and therefore fit only to be flushed out over Axis territory.

Soldiers of the Second World War seem to have spent as much time gossiping as fighting, if their slang is anything to go by. Aside from Elsan gen, they had
duff gen
(bad),
pukka gen
(good) and the
gen king
(the chap who knew all of the gossip before it had even happened).

All of the best rumours are false. The more that you yearn to believe a good yarn, the more likely it is that that yarn is mere
flim-flam
,
flumadiddle
,
fribble-frabble
,
effutiation
,
flitter-tripe
,
rhubarb
,
spinach
,
toffee
,
waffle
,
balductum
and
bollocks
.

This leaves the question of how you should respond to the Elsan gen. The politest method would be to tell your interlocutor that they are a
controver
, an obsolete word for an ‘inventor of false gossip’. Though it’s recorded in a dictionary of 1721 the
word, for some reason, never caught on or even made it into any subsequent dictionaries. This strange vanishing means that you can call somebody a controver to your heart’s content and they’ll never know what you mean. Thus the cogs of office society can remain oily.

Alternatively, you can exclaim, as the Victorians would have done, that a story is ‘all my eye and Betty Martin’. The origins of this phrase are rather peculiar. The story goes that a British sailor happened to wander into a church in some foreign and Roman Catholic country. There he heard a prayer which of course sounded like nonsense to him because it was in Latin. So far as the sailor could tell, they were saying something along the lines of ‘All my eye and Betty Martin’. The original prayer was probably
Ora pro mihi, beate Martine
or ‘Pray for me, blessed Martin’, Saint Martin of Tours being the patron saint of innkeepers and reformed drunkards. Alternatively, it could have been
Mihi beata mater
or ‘For me blessed Mother’, making Betty Martin the Virgin Mary. So if you want to be sure not to blaspheme, you could just call your story-teller a
blatherskite
or
clanjanderer
. Or you could take a lesson from this singular dictionary entry:

DICK That happened in the reign of queen Dick, i.e. never: said of any absurd old story. I am as queer as Dick’s hatband; that is, out of spirits, or don’t know what ails me.
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This is my personal favourite, as it usually takes the other party a couple of seconds to figure it out.

Honesty
is as under-represented in the dictionary as in life. It makes occasional appearances, such as:

BUFFING IT HOME
is swearing point-blank to anything, about the same as bluffing it, making a bold stand on no backing.

But that’s taken from an 1881 dictionary of New York criminal slang, so it doesn’t fill you with confidence. The best you can do is a
corsned
, which was a part of ancient English law:

Corsned
, Ordeal bread, a Piece of Bread consecrated by the Priest for that Use, eaten by the Saxons when they would clear themselves of a Crime they were charged with, wishing it might be their Poison, or last Morsel, if they were guilty.

As we are having elevenses, you may simply reach for the nearest chocolate biscuit.

Finally, there is the gossip that has neither the virtue of truth nor the fun of falsehood, and is merely old. A standard riposte to hearing old news is to say ‘Queen Anne is dead’. The phrase is first recorded in 1798 (Queen Anne having died in 1714), but it’s still used in British journalistic circles. It’s a slightly out of date expression for being out of date, but it does have the virtue of finality. And having informed your colleagues of the monarch’s demise, you may sneak off for a cigarette.

James VI
of Scotland and I of England was a
misocapnist
, i.e. he didn’t like smokers or smoking one little bit. In 1604 he wrote a pamphlet about how much he didn’t like smokers called
A Counter-Blaste to Tobacco.
A few years later the Bishop of Winchester translated
Counter-Blaste
into Latin. Why anybody would have bothered translating an anti-smoking tract into Latin is beyond me, but that didn’t stop the Bishop of Winchester. He called the translation the
Misocapnus
, which is Latin for ‘against smoke’, and the word blew gently into the English language as
misocapnist
(the noun) and
misocapnic
(the adjective).

The primary reason that James I didn’t like tobacco was that it was a habit newly imported from the American Indians, whom he thought simply horrible. He asks his subjects:

… shall we, I say, without blushing, abase our selves so farre, as to imitate these beastly Indians, slaves to the Spaniards, refuse to the world, and as yet aliens from the holy Covenant of God? Why doe we not as well imitate them in walking naked as they doe? in preferring glasses, feathers, and such toyes, to golde and precious stones, as they do? yea why do we not denie God and adore the Devill, as they doe?

Does that put you off your ciggy? No? Then off we go to our fag break (or
smoko
as the Australians call it). But first, it would be only polite for you to ask some of your co-workers if they wish to come along for a puff. The best way to word such an invitation
can be found in a dictionary of highwayman’s slang from 1699:

Will ye raise a Cloud
, shall we Smoke a Pipe?

It’s best to ask this in a raspy, piratish voice and, if possible, to carry a blunderbuss. But you can’t smoke here. The misocapnic ghost of James I still haunts us all with smokeless restrictions and rules, and so you will probably not be able to raise a cloud at your own desk and must instead retreat to a designated smoking area, an indignity that was never suffered by highwaymen.

‘Designated smoking area’ is an unnecessarily wordy and official name for a
fumatorium
or even better, a
coughery
, which is a place where people go to cough. Sir Thomas Urquhart wrote that before a service, priests:

… dunged in the dungeries, pissed in the pisseries, spit in the spiteries, coughed in the cougheries and doted in the doteries, that to the Divine Service they might not bring any Thing that was unclean or foul.

Even though Urquhart wasn’t being thoroughly serious about that, coughery is still as good a name as any for the little yard by the office’s back door where a forlorn but persistent
tabagie
still holds out like the last remnants of a dying Amazonian tribe. A tabagie, by the way, is the technical term for a group of smokers, although the collective noun (as in a
pride of lions
or a
murder of crows
) is a
parliament of smokers
. Both words emerged in the nineteenth century, the high-point of fumious vocabulary. For the Victorian, a smoker was not merely a smoker, he was a
tobacconalian
or a
nicotinian
.
So if you don’t feel like using ‘coughery’ and ‘raising a cloud’ you could always escape from the misocapnists by taking ‘a voyage to the Land of the Nicotinians’.

The Land of the Nicotinians would be a fabulous place: shrouded in impenetrable clouds and dotted with naturally occurring humidors. There the obedient Nicotinians would do homage before their goddess Nicotia, and no, I didn’t just make her up. Nicotia too is an invention of Victorian poetry. The American poet James Russell Lowell even wrote in the 1860s about her divine lineage. She was, according to him, the daughter of Bacchus, god of revelry, and her mother was the daughter of Morpheus, god of dreams.

Now the kind nymph to Bacchus born

By Morpheus’ daughter, she that seems

Gifted upon her natal morn

By him with fire, by her with dreams,

Nicotia, dearer to the Muse

Than all the grape’s bewildering juice,

We worship, unforbid of thee …

But the goddess can’t even protect her poor worshippers who, persecuted by the malevolent misocapnists, are forced to raise their clouds in distant pavement cougheries in the wind and the rain.