Mark Forsyth - Horologicon

PRAISE FOR ETYMOLOGICON

The Facebook of books... Before you know it, youve been reading for an hour.

The Chicago Tribune

A breezy, amusing stroll through the uncommon histories of some common English words... Snack-food style blends with health-food substance for a most satisfying meal.

Kirkus Reviews

The stocking filler of the season... How else to describe a book that explains the connection between Dom Perignon and Mein Kampf.

Robert McCrum, The Observer

Crikey... this is addictive!

The Times (UK)

Mark Forsyth is clearly a man who knows his onions.

Daily Telegraph (UK)

Delightful... Witty and erudite and stuffed with the kind of arcane information that nobody strictly needs to know, but which is a pleasure to learn nonetheless.

The Independent (UK)

Witty and well researched... Who wouldnt want to read about the derivation of the word gormless? Or the relationship between the words buffalo and buff?

The Guardian (UK)

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Copyright 2012 by Mark Forsyth.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

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eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-60576-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Forsyth, Mark.

Horologicon / Mark Forsyth.Berkley trade paperback edition.

pages cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-425-26437-9 (pbk.)

1. English languageObsolete words. 2. English languageEtymology. 1. Title.

PE1075.F63 2013

420.9dc23 2013021235

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Icon Books Ltd., UK, hardcover edition / November 2012

Berkley trade paperback edition / October 2013

Cover design by Danielle Abbiate.

Book design by Tiffany Estreicher.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

For my parents.

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

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

JOB 35, VERSE 16

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.

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 atomic 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 theres 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 worlds 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. Whats 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, bingomort, 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 isnt quite as hard as it sounds. Ive 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 its 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.