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

must be that workers have lost their cunning. So here are some instructions for a beginner.
    Wait until your boss has answered the phone and then start to
whindle
. Whindling is defined in a dictionary of 1699 as ‘feigned groaning’. It’s vital to whindle for a while before giving your name in a weak voice. Explain that you are a
sickrel
and that work is beyond you. If asked for details, say that you’re
floccilating
(feverishly plucking at the bedclothes) and
jactating
(tossing around feverishly).
    If your boss insists that you name your actual condition, don’t call it dysania. Go instead for a severe case of
hum
durgeon
. Unless your boss is fluent in eighteenth-century slang he’ll never suspect that:
    HUM DURGEON . An imaginary illness. He has got the hum durgeon, the thickest part of his thigh is nearest his arse; i.e. nothing ails him except low spirits.
    Unfortunately, you cannot use hum durgeon every day. Your employer will suspect. You can probably get away with it at most twice a week, and the second time you should probably just shriek ‘My thighs! My thighs!’ down the telephone until they hang up.
    No. You have been lying here too long and too languorously. Seven o’clock is upon us. Throw off the duvet! Toss away the sheet! And crawl out of bed.

Chapter 2
7 a.m. – Waking and Washing
Slippers – looking in the mirror – self-loathing – lavatory – shower – hair – shaving – brushing your teeth

Exodus
    That’sit. You’re out of bed. Like Adam and Eve expelled from Eden.
    First, grope for your slippers, or to give them their much merrier name:
pantofles
. Pantofles are named after Saint Pantouffle who is as obscure as he is fictional. He (or she, or it) appears to have been invented in France in the fifteenth century. Nobody knows why the French would have invented a saint, or indeed why slippers should be named after him, but they were and that’s that. Robert Burton’s great medical work
The Anatomy of Melancholy
describes how Venus, the goddess of love, was so enraged with her blind son Cupid making people fall in love willy-nilly that:
    … she threatened to break his bow and arrows, to clip his wings, and whipped him besides on the bare buttocks with her pantophle.
    Andany slipper that can double up as a weapon with which to spank godlings has to be a good idea.
    Once your toes are snugly pantofled, you can stagger off to the bathroom, pausing only to look at the little depression that you have left in your bed, the dip where you have been lying all night. This is known as a
staddle
.
The bathroom
Part I: The looking glass and what you saw there
    There are a lot of synonyms for mirror – everything from
tooting-glass
(Elizabethan) to
rum-peeper
(eighteenth-century highwayman), but the best is probably the
considering glass
. That is, after all, what you do with the thing. But first, before you even peek in the considering glass, take a
gowpen
of water – i.e. a double handful – and throw it over your face. After all, nobody but an angel is beautiful before eight o’clock.
    The word
pimginnit
may be necessary here. It’s a seventeenth-century term meaning ‘a large, red, angry pimple’. This is a particularly fine definition as it implies that pimples have emotions, and that some of them are furious. Pimginnits are much more wrathful than, for example,
grog-blossoms
, which are those spots that pop up the morning after one has indulged in too much grog, or rum. Grog-blossoms are more sullen than angry, like a resentful letter mailed overnight from your liver.
    But enough of your
furuncles
. Let us just say that you are
erumpent
, which is a jolly-sounding way of saying spotty (nicer than
papuliferous
and infinitely more pleasant than
petechial
, a word that Dr Johnson defined as ‘pestilentially spotted’).There are too many other sorrows for us to get hung up on spots.
    First, there are the
elf-locks
. It is, or was, a well known fact that elves sneak into your bedroom