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

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

Book: The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt through the Lost Words of the English Language Read Free
Author: Mark Forsyth
Tags: Humour, Etymology, words, English Language
Ads: Link
duvet because they cannot endure the gaze of heaven.
    The final suffering of dawn is
pissuprest
. A horse-keeper’s manual from 1610 says: ‘Pissuprest in a horse, is when a horse would faine stale, but cannot.’
    And that’s you, comfortable in your covers, with this
micturition
, this intense desire to urinate, that can only be relieved if you actually get out of bed and stumble to the lavatory. But not yet, not yet. All my possessions (as Queen Elizabeth almost said) for one more moment in bed. Perhaps if you lie here the micturition will magically vanish.
    It is time for procrastination and
cunctation
and generally putting off the inevitable. There’s nothing wrong with that. This is, after all, life in miniature. We know that death and going to the lavatory are inevitable, but that doesn’t mean we have to do it cheerfully or leap enthusiastically into the grave. Hold out! Enjoy the brief moment that you have. Treasure and savour your
grufeling
, which is defined in
Jamieson’s Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language
(1825) thus:
    To be grufeling : To lie close wrapped up, and in a comfortable-looking manner; used in ridicule.
    TheScots are clearly a nation devoid of pity, or indeed of medical knowledge. Don’t they realise that you may be suffering from undiagnosed
dysania
? Dysania is extreme difficulty in waking up and getting out of bed, and there may be a secret epidemic of it.
    Slightly better known is
clinomania
, which is an obsessive desire to lie down. But that doesn’t quite answer, does it? Perhaps you’d be better off with Dr Johnson’s word
oscitancy
, which he defined as ‘Yawning or unusual sleepiness’. The first recorded usage of the word back in 1610 mentions ‘such oscitancie and gaping drowsiness’ in describing the effects of a dull sermon in church. You can accompany your oscitation with
pandiculation
, which is the stretching of the arms and body characteristic of this mournful yawnful time.
    If you were king in the dawns of old, this would be the moment to hold your
levee
. A levee was a funny sort of formal occasion when you would lie in bed while all your social inferiors came to congratulate you on your superiority. Unfortunately the system of levees got out of hand in the eighteenth century. There were so many of them, and so many degrees of society, that those at the top were forced to remain in bed until early afternoon. The novelist Henry Fielding described it thus in 1742:
    … early in the morning arises the postillion, or some other boy, which no great families, no more than great ships, are without, and falls to brushing the clothes and cleaning the shoes of John the footman; who, being drest himself, applies his hands to the same labours for Mr Second-hand, the squire’s gentleman; the gentleman in the like manner, a little later in the day, attends the squire; the squire is no sooner equipped than he attends thelevee of my lord; which is no sooner over than my lord himself is seen at the levee of the favourite, who, after the hour of homage is at an end, appears himself to pay homage to the levee of his sovereign. Nor is there, perhaps, in this whole ladder of dependance, any one step at a greater distance from the other than the first from the second; so that to a philosopher the question might only seem, whether you would chuse to be a great man at six in the morning, or at two in the afternoon.
    During a levee you should know that your favourite courtiers are allowed to stand in the
ruelle
, which is the space between the bed and the wall where your shoes and socks are probably lying. Everybody else must make do with milling around at the foot of the bed or even by the door.
    If you are conducting a levee, I wish you well. But these days the closest thing to a levee is the early-morning phone call to your boss to
egrote
.
    Egrote
is a fantastically useful word meaning ‘to feign sickness in order to avoid work’. If it has fallen out of use, the cause

Similar Books

The Makeover

Karen Buscemi

Tangled Webs

Lee Bross

Warm Hearts

Barbara Delinsky

The Spanish Hawk (1969)

James Pattinson

Sodom and Detroit

Ann Mayburn

Power on Her Own

Judith Cutler

Hidden Power

Tracy Lane