The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt through the Lost Words of the English Language (17 page)

Addicted to drinking wine, tending to drunkenness.

It’s a word that the Wife of Bath used in her grand and gaudy prologue:

For all so siker [surely] as cold engendereth hail,

A lickerous mouth must han [have] a lickerous tail.

In women vinolent is no defence –

This knowen lechers by experience.

Which may be rewritten for these more modern, more enlightened, post-feminist times as:

From lecherous women there is no defence

Especially when you’re feeling vinolent.

But to return to the subject: vinomadefied is just a finer, more Latinate way of saying
beer-sodden
or
ale-washed
.

Once the vino has begun to madefy you, you may find that your hand becomes rather
wankle
, or unsteady. In fact, it may not even be your hand that’s unsteady, just everything around it;
after all, Thomas of Erceldonne noticed right back in the fifteenth century that ‘Þe worlde is wondur wankill’.

The result of wankle hands is that whatever you’re fuddling tends to divide itself neatly between your mouth, where it should be, and your nice clean top, where it shouldn’t. The resulting spots were called
the tears of the tankard
by eighteenth-century drinkers, and in the messier officer’s messes of the Second World War they were called
canteen medals
, on the basis that they tend to end up just where the silverware would on parade day.

There are, though, worse stains than the tankard’s tears that can befall a fuddler through no fault of their own. Sailors used to refer to the

ADMIRAL OF THE NARROW SEAS. One who, from drunkenness, vomits into the lap of the person sitting opposite him.

This is pretty bad, and can ruin the whole atmosphere of the snuggery. However, it gets worse. Or at least it does if you take your shoes off while you’re drinking. I assume that sailors used to drink barefoot – if not I can find no reasonable explanation for the following definition, which seems downright ungentlemanly:

VICE ADMIRAL OF THE NARROW SEAS. A drunken man that pisses under the table into his companions’ shoes.

I mean, damn it all. That’s hardly what you want to greet a probing toe at the end of the evening. Also, I don’t quite see how one could manage to be a Vice Admiral of the Narrow Seas unless one had first picked up the shoe, or had quite fantastic aim beneath
the table. There is no equivalent phrase for ladies, nor is there likely to be (even though there is, in the OED, an
admiraless
, meaning either a female admiral or the wife of a male one).

ISLAND. He drank out of the bottle till he saw the island; the island is the rising bottom of a wine bottle, which appears like an island in the centre, before the bottle is quite empty.

Napoleon was not more sorry to spy St Helena, or Dreyfuss to sight Devil’s Island, than the keen drinker is to see that dreaded lump appear out of the wine-dark sea. At this point it must be decided by those around the table whether this is an ordinary drink or one to be consumed
supernaculum
.
Super
is Latin for on, and
nagel
is German for fingernail, and like this odd combination, drinking supernaculum is a rather odd custom described in 1592 thus:

Drinking super nagulum, a device of drinking new come out of France: which is, after a man hath turned up the bottom of his cup, to drop it on his nail and make a pearl with that is left which, if it slide & he cannot make stand on, by reason there’s too much, he must drink again for his penance.

Supernaculum can either be an adverb, as above, or a noun to describe a drink so fine that not a drop is to be wasted. So a couple of hundred years later a dictionary simply defines it as:

Supernaculum,
good liquor, of which there is not even a drop left sufficient to wet one’s nail.

And a hundred years later it had become a toast or drinking cry. The novelist/Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli has a description of a drinking contest in his first novel
Vivian Grey
(1827):

The cup was now handed across the table to the Baron Asmanshausen. His Lordship performed his task with ease; but as he withdrew the horn from his mouth, all present, except Vivian, gave a loud cry of ‘Supernaculum!’ The Baron smiled with great contempt, as he tossed, with a careless hand, the great horn upside downwards, and was unable to shed upon his nail even the one excusable pearl.

The Baron was drinking a bottle of the finest Johannisberger, which is definitely a supernaculum drink. If you have been sipping at something less, then you should perhaps not get it down to the last drop. Instead, leave it to be mixed up in a bucket to be consumed by the poor of the parish. These mixed up
heel-taps
are known as
alms drinks
and go to people living in alms houses, although they’re mentioned in Shakespeare as a quickfire way of getting somebody horribly, horribly plastered. Either way, whether you have pursued the Baron’s path or the Christian one, you should now see a
marine officer
standing on the table.

MARINE OFFICER. An empty bottle: marine officers being held useless by the seamen.

Well,
that was the reasoning given in a dictionary of 1811. But come 1860 another slang dictionary has a different explanation.

MARINE, or MARINE RECRUIT, an empty bottle. This expression having once been used in the presence of an officer of marines, he was at first inclined to take it as an insult, until some one adroitly appeased his wrath by remarking that no offence could be meant, as all that it could possibly imply was, ‘one who had done his duty, and was ready to do it again.’

Ready to do it again? Splendid. But first, how drunk are you?

The standard modern measurement of inebriation is the
Ose
system. This has been considerably developed over the years, but the common medical consensus currently has
jocose
,
verbose
,
morose
,
bellicose
,
lachrymose
,
comatose
,
adios
.

This is a workable but incomplete system, as it fails to take in
otiose
(meaning impractical) which comes just after jocose. Nor does it have
grandiose
preceding bellicose. And how they managed to miss out
globose
(amorphous or formless) before comatose is beyond me.

Back in the sixteenth century, medicine was a much less developed science. Still, in 1592 a chap called Thomas Nashe produced a good diagnostic system of the eight stages of drunkenness.

Nor have we one or two kinds of drunkards only, but eight kinds.

The
first is ape drunke; and he leapes, and singes, and hollowes, and danceth for the heavens;

The second is lion drunke; and he flings the pots about the house, calls his hostesse whore, breakes the glasse windowes with his dagger, and is apt to quarrell with anie man that speaks to him;

The third is swine drunke; heavie, lumpish, and sleepie, and cries for a little more drinke, and a fewe more cloathes;

The fourth is sheepe drunk; wise in his conceipt, when he cannot bring foorth a right word;

The fifth is mawdlen drunke; when a fellowe will weepe for kindnes in the midst of ale, and kisse you, saying, ‘By God, captaine, I love thee. Goe thy wayes; thou dost not thinke so often of me as I doo thee; I would (if it pleased God) I could not love thee as well as I doo;’ and then he puts his finger in his eye, and cryes;

The sixt is Martin
1
drunke; when a man is drunke, and drinkes himselfe sober ere he stirre;

The seventh is goate drunke; when, in his drunkennes, he hath no minde but on lecherie;

The eighth is fox drunke – when he is craftie drunke, as manie of the Dutchmen bee, that will never bargaine but when they are drunke.

All
these species, and more, I have seen practised in one company at one sitting; when I have been permitted to remain sober amongst them, only to note their several humours.

Animals have a strange knack of wandering into descriptions of drunkenness, which is odd when you think about it, as they rarely get served in pubs. And owls: the
Chambers Slang Dictionary
has a whole entry on the different sorts of owl that you can be as drunk as, without ever explaining how a ‘fresh-boiled owl’ could be drunk at all, or why anybody would have boiled it.

The Aztecs (when not sacrificing humans) had an even more wonderfully whimsical system of animal-based drunkenness. They used rabbits. Four hundred rabbits – the
Centzon Totochtin
.

When the Aztecs fermented the sap of the maguey plant (or
Agave americana
) they got a milky-looking drink called
pulque
, which got them nice and tiddly. Therefore, in Aztec mythology, when Mayahuel, the goddess of the maguey plant, married Patecatl, the god of fermentation, she gave birth to four hundred divine rabbits, which she fed from her four hundred divine breasts.

These four hundred heavenly rabbits would meet for regular pulque-swilling parties, and were pretty much permanently pissed. A couple of their names are recorded – Ometochtli (or ‘Rabbit No. 2’) and Macuiltochtli (or ‘Rabbit No. 5’) – and, frankly, the rest can be guessed.

The point of all this is that the Aztecs measured drunkenness in rabbits. Fifteen rabbits was, apparently, ideal. But if you were four hundred rabbits then you were completely gone. A lovely little coda to this story is that though the conquistadors stamped
out the native religion, they never managed to quite stamp on the boozy bunnies. That’s why there is, to this day, a Mexican phrase: ‘As drunk as four hundred rabbits.’

There are uncountable terms for being drunk. Benjamin Franklin (when not taking the air baths described in
Chapter 2
or writing interesting essays like
Fart Proudly
) observed that most vices have pleasant names. So misers can claim that they are being thrifty, spendthrifts that they are generous, lechers that they are passionate. But ‘Drunkenness is a very unfortunate vice; in this respect it bears no kind of similitude to any sort of virtue, from which it might possibly borrow a name; and is therefore reduced to the wretched necessity of being expressed by round about phrases […] Though every one may possibly recollect a dozen at least of these expressions, used on such occasions, yet I think no one who has not much frequented taverns could imagine the number of them to be so great as it really is.’ So for the sake of the drunkards of posterity he made a list of over two hundred synonyms for sozzled.
2
It contains some beer-sodden gems. Back then a drinker could be
jambled
,
nimtopsical
,
super nonsensical
,
wise or otherwise
or
as drunk as a wheelbarrow
. He could delicately be said to have
smelt an onion
, or he could move up the social scale and have
made too free with Sir John Strawberry
and announce that
Sir Richard has taken off his considering cap
. Unfortunately there are no explanations included in Franklin’s dictionary and we’ll never know who Sir Richard might originally have been. However, for one of his phrases –
as drunk as David’s sow
– there is a complete explication in Captain Grose’s
Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
:

As
drunk as David’s sow; a common saying, which took its rise from the following circumstance: One David Lloyd, a Welchman, who kept an alehouse at Hereford, had a living sow with six legs, which was greatly resorted to by the curious; he had also a wife much addicted to drunkenness, for which he used sometimes to give her due correction. One day David’s wife having taken a cup too much, and being fearful of the consequences, turned out the sow, and lay down to sleep herself sober in the stye. A company coming in to see the sow, David ushered them into the stye, exclaiming, there is a sow for you! did any of you ever see such another? all the while supposing the sow had really been there; to which some of the company, seeing the state the woman was in, replied, it was the drunkenest sow they had ever beheld; whence the woman was ever after called David’s sow.

But though David’s wife may have appeared bedraggled to the company, I’m sure the company looked lovely to her, as she would have been wearing
beer-goggles
. Sober people always appear much prettier to drunkards than drunkards appear to the sober – and this is one of the chief advantages of inebriation: the elimination of ugliness. The psychological term for this is
kalopsia
: a wonderful form of madness whereby everything becomes beautiful.

It is enough to fill your head with
lovethoughts
, for as Shakespeare rightly observed, alcohol ‘provokes the desire’. So perhaps now is the time to do something about it.

Now
that you are thoroughly tanked up, it’s probably time to attempt to mate, as it’s well known that true love is merely a peculiarly painful sort of drunkenness. And anyway, it’s
dragging time
, helpfully defined in the
Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English
as ‘The evening of a fair day when the lads pull the wenches about’.

The dictionaries, though, are usually unkind to lovers. They tend to have all sorts of rude words like
lecher
or
slattern
that seem designed to make somebody ashamed of their natural obscene urges.

A much more pleasant term is
fleshling
, which the OED defines, rather coyly, as ‘a fleshly minded person’. Fleshling sounds a little like
duckling
and a little like
gosling
and altogether makes you seem as innocent as a newborn baby. It’s certainly a lot nicer than this definition in a late seventeenth-century dictionary of slang:

Mutton-Monger
, a Lover of Women; also a Sheep-stealer.

However,
if you flick a few pages back through that same dictionary you’ll find a much more civilised term:

Give Nature a Fillip
, to Debauch a little now and then with Women, or Wine.

A
fillip
, incidentally, is the little movement you get if you brace the tip of a finger against your thumb and then release it. As that’s a good way of tossing a coin to somebody, fillip came to refer to any little gift or treat.

A few pages onwards you find the true rustic joy of:

Green-Gown
, a throwing of young Lasses on the Grass, and Kissing them.

Ah, the beauties of a good dictionary! But before such herbaceous hedonism you will first have to find yourself a lass or lad, not to mention a comfortable lawn.

So you must set out into the great fleshy unknown to find yourself somebody to call your own, or at least to call when you’re lonely. You must wander about on the pull. There are all sorts of delightful terms for this. In the seventeenth century you would have been:

Proling
, Hunting or Searching about in quest of a Wench, or any Game.

In
the eighteenth century:

Caterwauling
Going out in the night in search of intrigues, like a cat in the gutters.

And in the nineteenth:

OUT ON THE PICKAROON. Picarone is
Spanish
for a thief, but this phrase does not necessarily mean anything dishonest but ready for anything in the way of excitement to turn up; also to be in search of anything profitable.

And in Scotland you would have
sprunted
, or you would if you could find a convenient haystack:

To SPRUNT, v, n, To run among the stacks after the girls at night

However, I contend that the best possible term for pootling around on the lookout for a lover is
Ogo-Pogoing
. This will require some explanation.

If you ask the average person what an Ogo-Pogo is, they will tell you to get stuffed. If, however, you ask somebody from British Columbia, they will tell you that the Ogo-Pogo is a sort of monster that lives in the Okanagan Lake and occasionally poses for extremely grainy photographs. It is, in short, the Canadian answer to the Loch Ness Monster. However, even they are unlikely to know that the real name of this unreal beast was Naitaka, and that Ogo-Pogo is a nickname taken from a British music-hall song that was a big hit in the 1920s.

It’s
a catchy tune, and it seems that people still remembered it in 1939, when pilots in the Royal Air Force would be sent out to fly around Britain on the off-chance that they would spot an enemy aircraft. The RAF pilots called this Ogo-Pogoing, presumably because while winging around scanning the skies they would sing to themselves the refrain from the song: ‘I’m looking for the Ogo-Pogo/The funny little Ogo-Pogo.’

So Ogo-Pogo started out as a nonsense song, became the name of a mythical Canadian beast, and was taken up by the RAF meaning to fly around on the off-chance of meeting somebody. It would be a catastrophe if a word with such a rich history were to decline into disuse. And how better to describe the hopeless search for that mythical beast called Love? You even have, thanks to the RAF, the possibilities of sudden destruction or timeless glory built in. As tempting as the idea of proling, caterwauling, pickarooning or even sprunting may be, Ogo-Pogoing is without a doubt the finest word for wandering around with vague hopes of love.

It is never easy to find a suitable target while Ogo-Pogoing. Many a female who sees the
Oxford English Dictionary
’s definition of
spanandry
– ‘Lack or extreme scarcity of males in a population’ – is liable to let out an all too familiar sigh. When you want a man, every party and every nightclub is dispiritingly spanandrous. In fact, one’s
dioestrus
(a short period of sexual inactivity for females) can suddenly seem to stretch out into eternity.

But
then it begins, very quietly, with a little
propassion
. A propassion is the first stirring of a proper passion, or indeed merely the feeling that there’s a passion somewhere on its way, and that suffering is not far off. Our word passion, meaning love, as we saw in Chapter 1, derives from the Latin for suffering, on the simple basis that the two are one and the same; so the Passion of the Christ (his suffering upon the cross) is the same as our petty romantic passions, etymologically speaking.

For the moment you may merely
smicker
; it’s a good way to start. To smicker is ‘to look amorously or wantonly at or after a person’, usually after, of course, although a glossary of medieval Scottish poetry (there are such things) says that to
smikker
is to ‘smile in a seducing manner’. Either way, if you smicker enough you may well develop an acute
smickering
, or amorous inclination, towards someone. Smickering was a favourite word of John Dryden, who came up with the lovely line:

Must you be smickering after wenches while I am in calamity?

You can even smicker in very precise ways. For example, you may be particularly drawn to a pair of dark eyes, or a shapely nose, or an intriguing ankle. Those who study sexual attraction for a living (legally) call this
agastopia
, an immensely useful word that is defined in the
Descriptive Dictionary and Atlas of Sexology
thus:

Agastopia. A rarely used term for admiration of any particular part of the body.

Why
it should be rarely used is a mystery, as agastopia was known even to the sexologists and sculptors of the ancient world. It is from the bottom-fond Greeks that we get the modern English term
callipygian
, meaning beautiful-buttocked.

There was a whole cult in ancient Syracuse devoted to Aphrodite Kallipygos, or Venus of the Beautiful Bottom, or at least there may have been. The only description we have of it comes from an ancient Greek chap called Alciphron who spent his time composing imaginary letters.

It is certain that the Greeks would commission all sorts of sculptures of callipygian Venus in which the main purpose was to make her as lovely-bottomed as possible. Lucian of Samosata records seeing one such statue carved by the greatest sculptor of antiquity: Praxiteles. This statue, apparently, was rather too good. So sexy was Aphrodite’s posterior that a young man was discovered in the temple committing enthusiastic blasphemy with the marble goddess. He was rather embarrassed by this, as I suppose you would be, and cast himself into the sea. But though he died, the term callipygian lived on, and it can of course be applied to both sexes, mortal and immortal, marble and flesh.

But to move on from such
natiform
(or buttock-shaped) delights, one’s agastopia might instead be directed at the
bathycolpian
. Bathycolpian means ‘deep-bosomed’ and is an absurdly oblique and beautiful way of saying that a lady has voluptuous and luxuriant breasts. The advantages of describing a lady in such an incomprehensible manner will be evident to anyone who has ever been slapped or released on strict parole.

With all these different body parts to glance at, it is no wonder that you move your eyes from side to side using the
amatorial
muscles. One eighteenth-century dictionary is quite unnecessarily precise about it:

AMATORII
Musculi
[among Anatomists] Muscles of the Eyes, which give them a Cast sideways, and assist that particular look called Ogling.

And there we have the problem. You are fast becoming an
ogler
, a
snilcher
, a
haker
. And if you thought hake was only a kind of fish:

HAKE: To hanker after, to gape after, to sneak or loiter.

You must up your game if you do not wish to be thought merely a
gazehound
and amorous gongoozler. If you have decided upon your intended, it is high time that you did something about it. If you are a lady, you may give a coy
arrision
(which is the act of smiling at somebody) or practise your
minauderie
(coquettish manner). If you are a man, and you have picked out your
rum-strum
(a highwayman’s term for a handsome wench) it may be time to
pavonize
, or act like a peacock showing off your magnificent tail in order to cow all the potential peahens with your magnificent masculinity.

But there’s no use in just pavonizing; one is in danger of being a mere
dangler
(‘To dangle – To follow a woman around without asking the question’). You must decide if this is a grand passion or a mere
velleity
, which the OED sternly defines as ‘The fact or quality of merely willing, wishing, or desiring, without any effort or advance towards action or realization’.

Of
course there may be reasons for your inaction. Perhaps the object of your affections is a
figurant
. This is, I confess, a technical balletic term for somebody who dances only in a group and never by themselves, but its usefulness in the discotheque should be self-evident. It is extraordinarily hard to sidle up to a figurant who has enclosed themselves within a protective fortification of bouncing shoulders and turned backs, but it must be attempted. Faint heart never won fair rum-strum.

You may even be covered in what the Old English liked to call
need-sweat
, which is the perspiration caused by acute anxiety. But what is such sweat compared with
anuptaphobia
, the morbid terror of remaining single? Though anuptaphobia is only a psychological term, she really should be a goddess, a cruel and terrible deity who directs all of humanity’s most embarrassing actions. For who can disobey when Anuptaphobia commands? It is time to approach the object of your mute affections. And if Anuptaphobia tells you to
flichter
to him or her, then you must flichter.

And in case you were wondering:

FLICHTER v. To run with outspread arms, like a tame goose half-flying; applied to children, when running to those to whom they are much attached. [Dumfries dialect] Hence:

FLICHTER-FAIN adj. So fond of an object as to run to it in the manner above described.

The simplest methods are often the most effective.

Each
species has its own particular mating call. A badger, for example,
shrikes
to his would-be beloved. A fox
clickets
. A goat
rattles
. A deer
croons
. A sow
breems
for her pig. A cow
eassins
for her bull. And an otter
whineth
. You should do none of these and if you hear a shrike, make your excuses and leave, as you are dealing with a badger in disguise.

Luckily for all of us, the correct way to initiate conversation has already been discovered and set down in writing by Christopher Marlowe:

Come live with me and be my love

And we will all those pleasures prove

That hills and valleys, dale and field,

And all the craggy mountains yield.

If that doesn’t work, or if your intended expresses a distaste for craggy mountains, you could go for the 1950s standard: ‘Suppose we get together and split a herring.’ Unfortunately, everybody in the 1950s was too hep to record why it was a herring that needed splitting. A more explicable term was recorded by Cab Calloway: ‘Wouldst like to con a glimmer with me this early black?’, which he helpfully explains as ‘the proper way to ask a young lady to go to the movies’. It should be noted here, that if the object of your affections replies ‘Kill me’, they are not requesting to be euthanatised and you should not actually murder them.
Kill me
is merely the Cab Calloway way of saying ‘Show me a good time’ and is the best response you could have hoped for. Jive was rather confusing in this way.
Murder
is
defined in the
Hepsters Dictionary
as ‘Something excellent or terrific’, which is all very well provided that both parties are familiar with the idiolect, but it might lead to confusion and a rather feeble-sounding excuse in court.