The Horologicon E-Book

Mark Forsyth

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 318

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER THE ETYMOLOGICON. 'Reading The Horologicon in one sitting is very tempting' Roland White, Sunday Times. Mark Forsyth presents a delightfully eccentric day in the life of unusual, beautiful and forgotten English words. From uhtceare in the hours before dawn through to dream drumbles at bedtime, The Horologicon gives you the extraordinary lost words you never knew you needed. Wake up feeling rough? Then you're philogrobolized. Pretending to work? That's fudgelling (which may lead to rizzling if you feel sleepy after lunch). A Radio 4 Book of the Week, The Horologicon is an eye-opening, page-turning celebration of the English language at its most endearingly arcane.

Leseprobe

This electronic edition published in the UK in 2012 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.net

ISBN: 978-184831-430-6 (ePub format)

ISBN: 978-184831-484-9 (Adobe ebook format)

Text copyright © 2012 Mark Forsyth

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in Minion by Marie Doherty

Contents

Title page

Copyright information

About the author

Acknowledgements

The Inky Fool blog

Epigraph

Dedication

Preambulation

Chapter 1

6 a.m. – Dawn

Alarm clocks – trying to get back to sleep – feigning illness

Chapter 2

7 a.m. – Waking and Washing

Slippers – looking in the mirror – self-loathing – lavatory – shower – hair – shaving – brushing your teeth

Chapter 3

8 a.m. – Dressing and Breakfast

Clothes – make-up – breakfast – preparing to depart

Chapter 4

9 a.m. – Commute

Weather – transport – car – bus – train – arriving late

Chapter 5

10 a.m. – The Morning Meeting

Staying awake – listening – arguing – yes, no, who cares? – mugwumps – keeping quiet

Chapter 6

11 a.m. – Taking a Break

Coffee – gossip – incredulity – cigarette

Chapter 7

Noon – Looking as Though You’re Working

Effortlessness – sales and marketing – emails – approaching bankruptcy – asking for a raise

Chapter 8

1 p.m. – Lunch

Where to eat – who pays – The Free Lunch – eating – eating turtles – indigestion

Chapter 9

2 p.m. – Returning to Work

Nap – phoning family members

Chapter 10

3 p.m. – Trying to Make Others Work

Finding them – shouting at them

Chapter 11

4 p.m. – Tea

Chapter 12

5 p.m. – Actually Doing Some Work

Panicking – deadlines – giving up – stealing from your employer – leaving

Chapter 13

6 p.m. – After Work

Strolling around – arranging your evening

Chapter 14

7 p.m. – Shopping

Disorientation – ecstasy in the supermarket

Chapter 15

8 p.m. – Supper

Dietary requirements – seating arrangements – making conversation – avoiding conversation – hogging the wine – finishing supper – avoiding the bill

Chapter 16

9 p.m. – Drinking

Persuading others to – choosing a bar – opening the door – approaching the bar – ordering – drinking – the results of drinking – empties – forms of drunkenness

Chapter 17

10 p.m. – Wooing

On the prowl – observing your target – the chat-up – dancing – kissing – making rash proposals of marriage – fanfreluching – rejection

Chapter 18

11 p.m. – Stumbling Home

Setting off – getting lost – falling over – attempts to sleep outdoors

Chapter 19

Midnight – Nostos

Making too much noise upon returning – attempting to work – undressing – arguing with spouse – falling asleep

Epilogue

Appendix

Paralipomenon – The Drinker’s Dictionary

Dictionaries and Idioticons

Index

The Etymologicon

The Etymologicon Audiobook

About the author

Mark Forsyth is a writer, journalist, proof-reader, ghostwriter and pedant. He was given a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary as a christening present and has never looked back. In 2009 he started the Inky Fool blog, in order to share his heaps of useless information with a verbose world. He is also the author of the Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller The Etymologicon, published in 2011 by Icon Books.

The author would like to thank Jane Seeber and Andrea Coleman for their judicious advice, sensible suggestions and peculiar patience.

This book is the papery child of the Inky Fool blog, which was started in 2009. Though almost all the material is new, some of it has been adapted from its computerised parent. The blog is available at http://blog.inkyfool.com/ which is a part of the grander whole www.inkyfool.com.

Therefore doth Job open his mouth in vain; he multiplieth words without knowledge.

Job 35, verse 16

For my parents

Preambulation

Tennyson once wrote that:

Words, like Nature, half reveal

And half conceal the soul within.

This book is firmly devoted to words of the latter half. It is for the words too beautiful to live long, too amusing to be taken seriously, too precise to become common, too vulgar to survive in polite society, or too poetic to thrive in this age of prose. They are a beautiful troupe hidden away in dusty dictionaries like A glossary of words used in the wapentakes of Manley and Corringham, Lincolnshire or the Descriptive Dictionary and Atlas of Sexology (a book that does actually contain maps). Of course, many of them are in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), but not on the fashionable pages. They are the lost words, the great secrets of old civilisations that can still be useful to us today.

There are two reasons that these words are scattered and lost like atmic fragments. First, as already observed, they tend to hide in rather strange places. But even if you settle down and read both volumes of the Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English cover to cover (as I, for some reason, have) you will come across the problem of arrangement, which is obstinately alphabetical.

The problem with the alphabet is that it bears no relation to anything at all, and when words are arranged alphabetically they are uselessly separated. In the OED, for example, aardvarks are 19 volumes away from the zoo, yachts are 18 volumes from the beach, and wine is 17 volumes from the nearest corkscrew. One cannot simply say to oneself, ‘I wonder whether there’s a word for that’ and turn to the dictionary. One chap did recently read the whole OED, but it took him a year, and if you tried that every time you were searching for the perfect word, you might return to find that the conversation had moved on.

The world is, I am told, speeding up. Everybody dashes around at a frightening pace, teleconferencing and speed-dating. They bounce around between meetings and brunches like so many coked-up pin-balls, and reading whole dictionaries is, for busy people like you, simply not feasible. Time is money, money is time, and these days nobody seems to have much of either.

Thus, as an honourable piece of public service, and as my own effort to revive the world’s flagging economy through increased lexical efficiency, I have put together a Book of Hours, or Horologicon. In medieval times there were books of hours all over the place. They were filled with prayers so that, at any time of day, the pious priest could whip out his horologicon, flip to the appropriate page and offer up an orison to St Pantouffle, or whoever happened to be holy at the time. Similarly, my hope with this book is that it will be used as a work of speedy reference. ‘What’s the word?’ you will think to yourself. Then you will check your watch, pull this book from its holster, turn to the appropriate page and find ante-jentacular, gongoozler, bingo-mort, or whatever it might be. This is a book of the words appropriate to each hour of the day. Importantly, as I have noted, it is a reference work. You should on no account attempt to read it cover to cover. If you do, Hell itself will hold no horrors for you, and neither the author nor his parent company will accept liability for any suicides, gun rampages or crazed nudity that may result.

Of course, there is a slight problem with attempting to create an efficient reference work of this kind, namely that I have to know what you are doing at every moment of the day. This isn’t quite as hard as it sounds. I’ve consulted all of my friends and both of them have told me much the same story: they get up, they wash, they have breakfast and head off to work in an office. Neither of them is quite clear what they do there, but they insist that it’s important and involves meetings and phone calls, work-shy subordinates and unruly bosses. Then they pop to the shops, eat supper and, as often as not, head out for a drink. It is on this basis that I have made a game attempt at guessing your hypothetical life.

Some things I have, quite deliberately, ignored. For example, there are no children because they are much too unpredictable. I have included a chapter on courtship for reasons explained at the time. I haven’t quite been able to decide whether you are married – sometimes you are and sometimes you aren’t – although I am sure that you must possess a firmer opinion. Throughout, I have taken the liberty of imagining you as being half as lazy, dishonest and gluttonous as I am. You have to write about what you know. If you are a piece of virtue into whose wipe-clean mind sin and negligence have never entered, I apologise. This is not the book for you and I hope you have kept the receipt. And of course the nature of your job is a bit of a mystery and a sticking point.

Though most of this is being written in the British Library, as that is where the dictionaries are, the British Library is in fact very like an office, except that nobody is allowed to talk. It has all the usual usualnesses – i.e. the lady on my left has spent the last hour on Facebook, occasionally chortling quietly – and it has all the usual eccentricities – i.e. the chap on my right has all sorts of behemothic tomes on the theories of post-Marxist historiography out on his desk, but is in fact reading Sharpe’s Revenge under the table, and thinks nobody has noticed.

I mean, I assume you work in an office, but I suppose I may be wrong. Though I have drawn on all the knowledge I could, I can never be quite sure that I’ve got you down to a T. You might not work in an office at all. You might be a surgeon, or a pilot, or a cattle rustler, or an assassin, taking a little break between hits to find out the lost gems and hapax legomena of the English language before heading out for a hard day’s garrotting.

You could do anything, anything at all. Your life might be a constant welter of obscenity and strangeness. For all I know, you could spend all day inserting live eels into a horse’s bottom. If you do, I must apologise for the arrangement of this book, and the only consolation I can offer is that there is a single eighteenth-century English word for shoving live eels up a horse’s arse. Here is the definition given in Captain Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue:

FEAGUE. To feague a horse; to put ginger up a horse’s fundament, and formerly, as it is said, a live eel, to make him lively and carry his tail well; it is said, a forfeit is incurred by any horse-dealer’s servant, who shall show a horse without first feaguing him. Feague is used, figuratively, for encouraging or spiriting one up.

There are three instructive points to be taken from that definition. First, you should never trust an eighteenth-century horse dealer. Especially if you’re a horse. Or an eel.

Second, the English language is ready for anything. If you were to surprise a Frenchman in the act of putting a conger up a mare’s bottom he would probably have to splutter his way through several sentences of circumlocutory verbocination. However, ask an English-speaker why they are sodomising a horse with a creature from the deep and they can simply raise a casual eyebrow and ask: ‘Can’t you see I’m feaguing?’

The ability to explain why you’re putting an eel up a horse with such holophrastic precision is the birthright of every English-speaking man and woman, and we must reclaim it.

Thirdly, and finally, you will notice that that definition is not from the Oxford English Dictionary. Though the OED is the greatest and heaviest reference work yet devised by man, it does not necessarily touch the sides of the English language. In the case of feaguing, the OED does actually quote Grose, but rather coyly mentions only the stuff about ginger. Other words have been grabbed from rural dialects and criminals’ dens. Any dictionary that I could find, I have used; from Cab Calloway’s Hepsters Dictionary: Language of Jive (1944) all the way back to the rainswept miseries of Old English. I shall probably slap together a list of all the works used and stick it at the back, just in case anybody reads that far.

If I have found a word in a dictionary, any dictionary, then it has merited inclusion. Wise and learned professors have asked what makes a word truly a word. I neither know nor care. Such questions I leave to my betters. I must be content to tootle my lexicographic kazoo and dance my antic hay near, but not in, the sacred grove of Academe.

Chapter 1

6 a.m. – Dawn

Alarm clocks – trying to get back to sleep – feigning illness

There is a single Old English word meaning ‘lying awake before dawn and worrying’. Uhtceare is not a well-known word even by Old English standards, which were pretty damn low. In fact, there is only one recorded instance of it actually being used. But uhtceare is there in the dictionaries nonetheless, still awake and waiting for dawn.

Uht (pronounced oot) is the restless hour before the dawn, when Aurora herself is loitering somewhere below the eastern horizon, rosying up her fingers and getting ready for the day. But for now, it is dark. And in the antelucan hush you should be happily slumbering and dreaming of pretty things.

If you are not, if you are lying there with your eyes wide open glaring at the ceiling, you are probably suffering from a severe case of uhtceare.

There’s an old saying that the darkest hour comes just before the dawn. However, that’s utter tosh. If you get out of bed and peek through the window, you will see a pale glow in the east. But don’t, whatever you do, actually get out of bed. It’s probably chilly and you’ll never get your posture in bed (technically called your decubitus) quite right again. You’ll just have to lie there and try not think about how horrid it all is.

Ceare (pronounced key-are-a) was the Old English word for care and sorrow, emotions that have an annoying habit of striking during the uht. For some reason these early hours are the time when you remember all your sins and unpaid bills and, perhaps, the indelicate thing you did last night, and as each of these creeps into your mind your uhtceare grows more and more severe.

For an affliction so common, uhtceare is a very rare word. It is recorded only once in a poem called The Wife’s Lament, which, surprisingly, isn’t about how awful and messy her husband is, but about how he has been exiled to a far country and left her here with her uhtceare and her vicious in-laws. Old English poetry is almost universally miserable, and Old English poets should really have bucked up a bit, but they did give us uhtceare and for that we should be grateful.

The Old English used to cure their uhtceare by going to listen to the monks singing their uht song. But the monks are long since gone and you have nothing to distract you except for the possible chirruping of an insomniac songbird or the gentle sound of the dustman.

One qualification remains, though, before you self-diagnose with uhtceare. Are you sure you’re awake?

Many is the time that I have lain awake before dawn thinking that I would be able to get back to sleep if only this giant squirrel would stop chasing me round the dentist’s surgery. These strange half-dreamful, half-conscious delusions and illusions have a technical name – they are hypnopompic. Hypno from the Greek for sleep and pompic from the word for sending.

Nor should you be too keenly oneirocritical. Oneirocritical means ‘of or pertaining to the interpretation of dreams’. If your dream has a meaning it is probably obscene, and best forgotten, something that will happen in a couple of minutes anyway.

So best to suffer your uhtceare in silence and wait for the day-raw, which is the first streak of red in the dawn sky. Aside from being terribly pretty and a warning to shepherds, the day-raw will also decide whether today is a high or low dawn. Low dawn is when the sun appears straight over the horizon, high dawn is when it is, at first, obscured by clouds and then pops out suddenly in its glorious nuclear-fusive majesty farther up in the sky.

Whatever happens, this is the dayening, the greking. An eighteenth-century highwayman would have called it the lightmans, for some reason, and would probably have decided that this was the time to go home to bed, making way for the eighteenth-century farmers who would have called it, rather charmingly, the day-peep. Exhausted chorus girls in 1940s New York would have called it early bright. But for you it is simply the end of your usual uhtceare and the cue, one suspects, for your expergefactor.

Alarm clocks

An expergefactor is anything that wakes you up. This may simply be your alarm clock, in which case it is time to hit the snooze button. But it may be a dustman or a milkman or a delivery van, in which case it is time to lean out of your window and shriek: ‘Damn you all, you expergefactors!’ This ought to keep them quiet until one of them has at least found a good dictionary.

You may, though, not have opted for the alarm clock. Many people, for reasons that baffle, make the radio their expergefactor of choice. If this is the case, you will be horribly awoken by news of far-off massacres, earthquakes, plagues, elections etc., or by voices of anxious politicians explaining exactly why they were utterly blameless and how the money or mistress was simply resting in their account or bed.

The technical term for a dishonest politician is a snollygoster. Well, all right, it may not be the technical term, but it is the best one. The OED defines snollygoster as ‘A shrewd, unprincipled person, esp. a politician’, although an American journalist of the 1890s defined it more precisely (if less clearly) as:

… a fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform or principles, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnacy.

Unfortunately, the American journalist didn’t stop to explain what talknophical or assumnacy meant. I can’t see why snollygoster has fallen out of use, unless perhaps politicians have all become honest, in which case the rest of us owe them an apology.

If you feel that snollygoster is too ridiculous a way to refer to a dishonest man who holds public office, you may always refer to that voice on the radio by the name throttlebottom.

Either way, you shouldn’t use the radio news as a means to wake you up, as it is liable to irritate or depress or both. Also it may distract you from the correct method of expergefaction: an aubade.

Turn off the radio.

Turn off the alarm clock.

Listen carefully.

Do you hear an aubade?

An aubade is a song sung at dawn by your lover beneath your bedroom window. Providing that your lover can carry a tune, a good aubade is enough to put you in a merry mood until at least breakfast. However, if you cannot, at present, hear an aubade there are only two sad possibilities: I am sorry to have to break this to you so early in the day, but either your lover is a lazy, lolly­gagging shirker of his/her duties; or you have no lover at all.

In the olden days they had a much better system of waking people up. There was a chap called a knocker-up who would wander around the village tapping on people’s bedroom windows with a special stick. This was actually considered a proper job and was probably a lot safer than its alternative: the weaver’s larum.

A weaver’s larum was an odd device that worked like this. Take a reasonably heavy object like a stone or a small child and tie two pieces of string to it. Both these pieces of string should then be fed through a single hook. One of them should be attached to the wall, so that the string is taut and the stone/baby dangles. The second piece of string, which is loose, should be tied to your finger.

Got that? Heavy object attached by a taut string to 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. The stone/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 an octave 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 having a 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 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.

The Scots 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 the levee 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 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’s it. 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.

And any 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 during the night with no better motive than to tangle up your hair. The sad result, which you will see reflected, is elf-locks.

Then there are the wrinkles and, in extreme cases, wrines (these are the big ones); the crows’ feet, the frumples, the frounces, the lurking lirks and a million other synonyms for the lines on your face, which are, after all, merely signs of how thoughtful and wise you are.

There’s also the culf, which is the name for the bed fluff that has lodged in your navel. There are the red ferret-eyes through which you’re looking. There’s the ozostomia and bromodrosis, which is what a doctor would call your stinking breath and sweat, because doctors have a lovely habit of insulting you in Greek, which softens the blow. Almost anything sounds softer in a classical language. For example, if a fellow were to suggest that you stank of horse piss, you would probably take offence, but if he merely said that you were jumentous, you might imagine that the chap was telling you that you were jubilant and momentous, or something along those lines. You might even thank him.

All in all, though, you are idiorepulsive (you disgust even yourself) and something really ought be done about it soon. However, I fear that things must get worse before they can get better.

On particularly bad mornings, this may be the time to attempt a through cough. These aren’t easy. I have tried it myself and consistently failed. If you can cough and fart at precisely the same instant then you have achieved what was known – two hundred years ago – as a through cough, and can therefore continue the rest of the day with a feeling of secret satisfaction.

Anyway, a through cough is only the preface to the lowest part of the day – that part when you are no better than a beast and no worse than a monarch: the lavatory.

Part II: The Spice Islands

In the Book of Samuel, as the whole history and future of salvation is being worked out between Saul and David, everything comes to rest upon Saul’s popping to the lavatory. Not, of course, that they had proper lavatories in those days. Salvation was not that far advanced. But as Saul with his army hunted for David beside the Dead Sea, he found that his dinner was, like his kingship of Israel, a fleeting thing that he would be forced to relinquish.

Then Saul took three thousand chosen men out of all Israel, and went to seek David and his men upon the rocks of the wild goat. And he came to the sheepcotes by the way, where was a cave; and Saul went in to cover his feet: and David and his men remained in the sides of the cave. And the men of David said unto him, Behold the day of which the LORD said unto thee, Behold I will deliver thine enemy into thine hand, that thou mayest do to him as it shall seem good unto thee. Then David arose, and cut off the skirt of Saul’s robe privily.

What concerns us here is not the question of who was truly the Lord’s anointed, nor the symbolism of the king’s cloak, nor even the necessity of checking your lavatory carefully for rival claimants to the throne; but the delightful phrase to cover his feet, which is a literal rendering of the ancient Hebrew meaning to do the necessities of nature.

If the Bible teaches us one thing, it’s that you should never be so vulgar as to call a spade a spade or a lavatory a lavatory. Even if you choose not to cover your feet (which should already have pantofles on them), you can disguise your baseness with all sorts of lovely phrases. The Victorians would visit Mrs Jones, or my aunt, or the coffee shop, although that last phrase may be too suggestive for those of a liquid disposition. Others have been more exotic. In the thirteenth century they would visit a chamber foreign, or in the eighteenth century you could take a voyage to the Spice Islands, these being the most exotic place imaginable, and particularly appropriate for the morning after a curry.

However, these references to exoticism may be inappropriate to something that is often so troubling in foreign lands. The great actor David Garrick took a trip to Europe in 1764 and wrote to his brother saying:

… I never, since I left England, till now, have regal’d Myself with a good house of Office, or as he calls it, a Conveniency