The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt through the Lost Words of the English Language (12 page)

A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson, glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest the least syllable of thy addition.

Shakespeare
saw that simply piling up personal abuse is much more effective than trying to be clever. And, in case you were wondering:

Finical = excessively fastidious

Super-serviceable = Officious

Action-taking = litigious

Incidentally, the OED lists this as the very first citation for ‘son of a bitch’, demonstrating what a debt we owe to the Bard.

Your employee is probably now weeping and quivering and appealing for mercy. Show none. If they plead and beg, just say in a deep and dismal voice ‘Gabos’, and shake your head.

Gabos
(or G.A.B.O.S.) is an acronym for Game Ain’t Based On Sympathy. The game in question is the frolicsome world of gangland Miami, where the enthusiastic and endearingly territorial
narcotraficantes
refer to their lives, their code of conduct, their retail activities and occasional tiffs as The Game. Unlike cricket, this game has no central authority, book of laws, professional umpires, or even an equivalent of
Wisden
. In fact, nobody is quite sure what The Game is based on at all, yet all agree that the Game Ain’t Based On Sympathy, and that kicking a gangster when they’re down, or indeed popping a cap into their ass while so prostrated, is thoroughly licit. It would appear that the term is merely the beginning of a long process of elimination that will eventually lead to the discovery of firm foundations for The Game and thus clear up all the confusion.

This lack of sympathy with the plucky underdog was shortened into an acronym some time in the early years of this century and then made popular by rappers and documentaries. Thus
it is no longer the preserve of Miamians, and is now, I am told, part of the common parlance of the British House of Commons. The use of the word gabos in the office will give you a rakish, gangstery air that is bound to increase the productivity of your terrified subordinates or ‘soldiers’ as you may now call them.

You may finish off your carpeting by threatening to
rightsize
them. Rightsizing is the euphemistic way of saying
downsizing
which is the euphemistic way of saying
streamlining
which is the euphemistic way of saying that you’ll sack the whole sorry lot of them any day now. This saves on confusion because the verb ‘to sack’ has several different meanings listed in the dictionary, including

Sack
: To put (a person) in a sack to be drowned.

1425
Rolls of Parl.
IV. 298/2 Ye said Erle lete sakke hym forthwith, and drounyd him in Thamyse.

Oh for the heady days of real line management. Once you have herded everybody to their desks, shouted at a few people, and put the fear of God and unemployment into every purple dromedary, there is nothing much more for a good manager to do beyond playing golf and drawing a salary. And, besides, it’s time for tea.

There’s
an odd thing that though an English lord might have a cup of
tea
, the working classes are as likely to have a cup of
cha
. In this they are correct. ‘Cha’ is the original aristocratic Mandarin name for the infusion of
Camellia sinensis
, ‘tea’ is merely the term used in Fuchau, the coastal province from which the stuff was shipped to Europe. So it should be cha if you’re feeling posh, and tea only if you’re feeling particularly raffish and filled with
nostalgie de la boue
.
1

The first great treatise on tea, by the eighth-century writer Lu Yu, was called the
Ch’a Ching
or Classic of Cha. The name
cha
, along with the plant, was imported into Japan, where the true lover of a good cuppa is not merely a tea enthusiast, but a follower of
Chado
: the Way of Tea (
do
, pronounced
doh
, is the word for ‘way’).

Chado is the mystic and magical practice of drinking tea in order to achieve spiritual enlightenment, and is a lot more fun than fasting or self-flagellation. Any particular instance of Chado is called
chanoyu
, which translated literally means ‘tea’s hot water’. However, it is difficult for our debased Western minds,
filled with the cheap spiritual gratification of the teabag and electric kettle, to appreciate the obscure Oriental mystery of tea.

It is a common piece of wisdom in the lands of the rising sun that ‘Zen and tea are one and the same’. This may lead you to believe that you can practise zen merely by sipping at a cup of Rosie Lea, but this is not so. The great tea-master Shuko taught that you could not drink tea unless your mind was completely pure, a proposition I have disproved by experiment.

The greatest master of Chado was Rikyu, in the sixteenth century, whose skill with a teapot was so great that his overlord became jealous and ordered him to commit
seppuku
, or ritual suicide. Rikyu made what is meant to have been the finest damn cup of tea in history, after which he broke the teacup and obediently fell upon his sword.

In English we do have some equivalents to the idea of Chado. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from Oxford for writing a tract called
The Necessity of Atheism
, signed ‘Thro’ deficiency of proof, AN ATHEIST’. But in private he freely admitted that he was a
theist
, by which he meant nothing in the way of religion, only that he was addicted to tea (French
thé
). Theism became as popular a religion as England has ever known. In 1886 an article appeared in
The Lancet
saying:

America and England are the two countries afflicted most with the maladies arising from the excessive consumption of tea. Individuals may suffer in a variety of ways. It is customary to speak of acute, sub acute, and chronic ‘theism’ – a form that has no connection with theological matters. It is possible to be a ‘theic’ by profession, or a ‘theic’ by passion […] There is
hardly a morbid symptom which may not be traceable to tea as its cause.

Given that the love of tea is both a religious rite and a narcotic need, it is unsurprising that all sorts of terrible names have been invented for badly made tea. For example, tea that is too weak may be cursed with the name of
cat-lap
,
husband’s tea
,
maiden’s pee
, and
blash
. Indeed, one who has made the tea too weak may be said to have
drowned the miller
for reasons that nobody is quite sure of.

The opposite of such watery nonsense is strong tea, tea that blows your mind and wakes you up. Thus British servicemen of the Second World War would refer to good strong tea as
gunfire
, on the basis that it had the same enlivening effect upon the senses as coming under attack from the enemy.

Nor is this caffeinism a recent development. According to an utterly reliable Japanese legend, there was a monk named Bodhidharma who had sworn to spend nine years staring at a blank bit of wall. Why he would want to do this is not recorded, but it was considered terribly holy and nobody seems to have mentioned to him that it might be a waste of time. The story goes that after a mere five years he got tired and dozed off. When he woke up the wall was still very much there but, nonetheless, Bodhidharma felt awfully ashamed and, to make sure that it never happened again and he wouldn’t miss a moment of the fun, he cut off his own eyelids and chucked them on the ground. The eyelids germinated and sprouted and from them grew the very first tea plant. Bodhidharma decided to make an infusion from the leaves (presumably without taking his eyes off the wall – I’ve never been able to get this point
clear) and thus was made the first cup of tea. The caffeine contained in it was enough to keep him alert for the next four years.

So let us get to the making. While the kettle is thrumbling away you must first choose your brew. Here is a quick reference guide to the various etymologies of tea.

Charles Grey, 2nd
Earl Grey
, was a great man. He became an MP at the age of 22, seduced the Duchess of Devonshire, was Prime Minister of Britain from 1830 to 1844, and passed the Great Reform Act and the abolition of slavery. But he is chiefly remembered for being fond of tea flavoured with bergamot oil, a fondness that was leapt upon by tea merchants eager to associate their wares with such a chap. Lady Grey is a figment of a tea merchant’s caffeinated imagination. There was, of course, a real Lady Grey, but she was too busy having sixteen children to bother about bergamots.

Lapsang Souchong
(or
lāpǔshān xiǎozhǒng
) means ‘small plant from Lapu Mountain’. A rather unreliable story says that an army arrived and wanted their tea, but as the crop was still damp it was dried quickly over fires built from pine trees, hence the smoky flavour.

Ceylon
was the old name for the island of Sri Lanka. It comes from the Sanskrit
Sinhala
, which means ‘blood of a lion’, which is odd as there are no lions in Sri Lanka.

Assam
means either ‘unequal’ or ‘unequalled’. If the former, then it’s probably due to the mountainous terrain of this far north-eastern state of India; if the latter, then it’s due to the ancient rulers of the area who thought themselves peerless.

Darjeeling
comes from the Tibetan
dojeling
, which means ‘diamond island’. This is down to the practice there of Vajrayana Buddhism.
Vajra
can mean diamond and so
Vajrayana
is often translated as ‘diamond vehicle’. However, there is another story that Darjeeling is named after a particular stone that people used to meet at to gossip, called the
Taji-lung
in the native language. This latter etymology is rather appropriate as tea has always been intimately connected with gossip, even in English. Some used to call it
chatter broth
, others
scandal broth
, as in this lament of a pious farmer in 1801:

… we never have any tea but on Sundays, for it will not do for a hardworking family, and many of our neighbours call it
Scandal broth
.

The Victorians, in a rare fit of simplicity, just had:

BITCH, tea; ‘a bitch party,’ tea drinking.

Anyway, the kettle should have boiled now and the tea should be drawing. It must not do so for too long or it will be
overdrawn
and
potty
– which is to say, tasting of the teapot. So grasp the handle of the teapot (technically called the
boul
, which is also the name for the little finger holes in scissors) and pour the bitch into a teacup.

The handle of the common or garden teacup is a classic example of a
skeuomorph
. In the nineteenth century, when photography was
still in nappies, exposure times were so long that people who were walking would be blurred. They would have ghosts flowing out behind them. It was this that introduced the idea in paintings and drawings that movement could be indicated by lines flying out behind a moving object. Photography changed our visual ideas and that changed representations in other mediums. The viewer looks at a blurred drawing and thinks: ‘Ah, the chap’s running. I know that because of the technological failings of photography.’ Think about it: have you ever actually seen a runner with lines coming out of their back?

There’s a technical term for this: it’s
skeuomorphic
. A skeuomorph is a technological limitation that is deliberately imitated even when it’s no longer necessary. My digital camera has a little loudspeaker that emits a clicking noise when I take a photograph, just like an old mechanical camera.

Once upon a time there were teacups whose handles you might reasonably fit your fingers through. They were handles that you could, well, handle. But now they remain purely as skeuomorphic decoration, a mere memory of usefulness.

Now that the tea is ready and piping hot, it’s time to summon your fellow
thermopotes
(or drinkers of hot drinks). You could do this with the rather dull shout of ‘Tea’s up’, but for a bit of tropical allure there’s nothing like this entry in an eighteenth-century dictionary:

CONGO. Will you lap your congo with me? Will you drink tea with me?

You may add some
moo juice
, but as Fielding said: ‘Love and scandal are the best sweeteners of tea.’

And
once the day’s gossip is done, and the cha is all gone, it remains only to check the tea leaves to see what the future holds. Tea-leaf reading is called
tasseography
and there is, so far as I can tell, only one major work on the subject:
Tea-Cup Reading and Fortune-Telling by Tea Leaves
by ‘A Highland Seer’ (1920). It contains a dictionary, or at least a table of ‘Symbols and significations’, which is practically the same thing. The idea is to look at the tea leaves left in the cup and see if you can discern any familiar shapes. Here is a brief selection of the ones I consider most urgent:

AIRCRAFT, unsuccessful projects.

BADGER, long life and prosperity as a bachelor.

CANNON, good fortune.

CAR (MOTOR), and CARRIAGE, approaching wealth, visits from friends.

DONKEY, a legacy long awaited.

GRASSHOPPER, a great friend will become a soldier.

KANGAROO, a rival in business or love.

KETTLE, death.

PARROT, a sign of emigration for a lengthy period.

UMBRELLA, annoyance and trouble.

YEW-TREE indicates the death of an aged person who will leave his possessions to the consultant.

ZEBRA, travel and adventure in foreign lands.