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

the wall and by a loose string to your finger.
    Right, now get a tall, thin candle and put its base right next to the taut bit of string. Now light the candle and drift off to sleep. During the night the candle will slowly burn down and down until the flame gets to the piece of string, which is incinerated. Thestone/baby falls to the floor and your finger gets a vigorous yank to pull you rudely from your slumbers.
    The final possibility is a
reveille
. This is the drum roll or bugle-blast that’s meant to waken a whole barracks full of soldiers. It’s thus a term that can usefully be applied to the noise of dustmen, children or any of the other inconveniences and natural expergefactors of modern life.
Zwodder
    Uhtceare is now officially over; however, that does not mean that you feel great. There is a word for people who are breezy and bright in the morning:
matutinal
. In fact, there are a bunch of words, but most of them are rude. As Oscar Wilde observed, only dull people are brilliant at breakfast. And, anyway, breakfast is still a long way off.
    For the moment, you can lie there in a
zwodder
cursing the arrival of a new day. The rather racy lexicographical classic
Observations on some of the Dialects in the West of England, particularly Somersetshire
(1825) defines a zwodder as: ‘A drowsy and stupid state of body or mind.’
    This would, in and of itself, make zwodder a useful word. But the really important thing is how it sounds. Say it.
Zwodder
. It’s the sort of word that can and should be mumbled from the refuge of your bedclothes.
Zwodder
. It’s the drowsiest word in the English language, but there’s also something warm and comfortable about it.
    Alternatively, you could be addled, stupefied and generally speaking
philogrobolized
, a word that should be said at about anoctave beneath your normal speaking voice and reserved for the morning after the carnage before. As responses to ‘How are you this morning?’ go, ‘Philogrobolized’ is almost unbeatable. Nobody will ever have to ask you what you mean as it’s all somehow contained in the syllable
grob
, which is where the stress should always be laid. It conveys a hangover, without ever having to admit that you’ve been drinking.
    Another rather more religious way of doing this is to speak enigmatically of your
ale-passion
. Passion here is being used in its old sense of suffering, as in the Passion of Christ. (That a word for suffering became a synonym for romantic love tells you all you need to know about romance.) Ale-passion is mentioned in the 1593 book
Bacchus Bountie
in the following context:
    Fourthly, came wallowing in a German, borne in Mentz, his name was Gotfrey Grouthead; with him he brought a wallet full of woodcocks heads; the braines thereof, tempered with other sauce, is a passing preseruatiue against the ale-passion, or paine in the pate.
    In fact, you should probably keep a small aviary of woodcocks next to your bed, just in case. If not, you will lie there feeling awful. You will suffer from
xerostomia
, the proper medical term for dryness of the mouth through lack of saliva. But there will be nothing you can do about it unless you actually get out of bed. You’re also liable to have slumbered in the wrong decubitus and found that your arm has fallen asleep, a condition that the medical world refers to as
obdormition
. The only way to cure this is to wave the said limb about frantically, like a string-puppet havinga fit, until the
prinkling
starts and your blood slowly, reluctantly resumes its patrol.
    Alas that such sufferings should invade your bleary-eyed
lippitude
. Now is the zwoddery time when you wish that you’d invested in thicker curtains, for the sun is insistent, and you are one of those
lucifugous
creatures that avoids sunlight like a vampire, or a badger. Lucifugous (or light-fleeing) is a word that is usually applied to sins and demons, but it can just as well refer to somebody making a tactical retreat beneath the