The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt through the Lost Words of the English Language (18 page)

Or one could go down the simpler route of throwing out a compliment or two. If you do so, you must try to be a little more gentlemanly than Dr Johnson was in his dictionary. In a rare moment of misogyny he wrote:

Bellibone
n. A woman excelling in both beauty and goodness. A word now out of use.

According to the OED the word was last used in 1586, which makes one wonder what occurred in 1587 that made ladies one or the other and rendered
bellibone
redundant.

Alternatively, you could call a lady a
wonder wench
(an old Yorkshire term for a sweetheart) or, if you’re feeling ready to defend yourself,
cowfyne
, which even in a dictionary of Scottish terms is defined as ‘a ludicrous term of endearment’. In fact, the only proper riposte that a lady can give to being called cowfyne is to reply that the chap is
snoutfair
, which means handsome, although the OED notes that it is usually used ‘with some disparaging suggestion’.

What, though, if your initial blandishments and entreaties are met not with a flirtatious exchange of archaic endearments, but with indifference, incredulity, contemptuous laughter or sudden flight? Fear not. This may merely be a case of
accismus
.

Accismus is a rhetorical term meaning pretended lack of interest in that which you keenly desire.

Foolish
Accismus hath a qualitie

To deny offer’d things in modestie:

Accismus was once considered the most necessary virtue of the female. For example, there’s a rather peculiar polemic against girls’ schools from the Victorian period that asserts:

A woman requires no figure of eloquence – herself excepted – so often as that of
accismus
… On this account, mothers, fathers, men, and even youths, are their best companions; on the contrary, girls connected with other girls of a similar age, as in schools, provoke one another to an exchange of foibles, rather than of excellences, to a love of dress, admiration, and gossip, even to the forgetting of
accismus
.

But of course all of this raises the question of when accismus (male or female) is really accismus, and when (dare I broach the possibility?) it is true uninterest. This is a question that has puzzled young lovers through the ages, but which was long ago solved by the Church of England through the system of Nolo Episcopari.

Appointing a bishop is a tricky business. To be a bishop you have to possess the Christian virtue of humility; however, if you actually are humble you’ll probably think that you’re not worthy of being a bishop and turn the job down. Even if you secretly think that you’d make a splendid bishop and would look marvellous in a mitre, you can’t just come out and say it. It would look bad. So you had to practise a little bit of accismus by announcing in front of the assembled company of churchmen that
you’d really rather not become a bishop, or, in Latin, ‘Nolo episcopari’.

When you had solemnly announced this, rather than saying ‘Oh well, that’s that, I suppose’, the church council would ask you a second time, and for a second time you would humbly reply ‘Nolo episcopari’. On the third go, you would say, ‘Oh all right then, go on’ or ‘Volo episcopari’ or somesuch line of assent. You would thus have displayed your humility and got the job.

However, it is dreadfully important to keep count, as if you said ‘Nolo episcopari’ a third time it would be assumed that you really meant it and your chances of promotion would be for ever scuppered. It’s rather like the Rule of the Bellman described by Lewis Carroll in
The Hunting of the Snark
: ‘What I tell you three times is true.’

Hope as you might, three cases of accismus are definitive and after that you deserve a slap.

This is often the stage of courtship where a woman wishes she were equipped with a
parabore
, or defence against bores. It is uncertain what a parabore would look like, although in the first (and only) usage recorded in the OED it is described as:

… a Bore-net, a para-bore, to protect me, like our musquito-curtains

So a parabore could perhaps be attached to a wide-brimmed hat. You could have some sort of rip-cord device, which when pulled would drop a thick veil around the whole head in the manner of a beekeeper. Thus, with a flick of the wrist, the beleaguered belle could make herself vanish from view and give a stern and certain message to her suitor. If parabores could be manufactured
for a reasonable cost I imagine that they would become quite popular, though dispiriting to the poor chap who sees a whole group of girls reach for their rip-cords at his timorous approach.

If this unhappy fate does befall you, you can keep some semblance of honour by turning again to the dictionary of Hepster slang and crying, ‘You’re a V-8, baby, a V-8’, where a
V-8
is, for some reason, ‘A chick that spurns company’. However, it may be best not to get into an exchange of insults, as (from behind her thick veil) she could throw some hurtful barbs of her own. A few suggestions might be:

Twiddle-Poop
An effeminate looking man

Smell-smock
A licentious man

Or, most terrible of all, this from Dr Johnson’s dictionary:

Amatorcultist
. n.s. [amatorculus, Lat.] A little, insignificant lover; a pretender to affection.

There is no coming back from being called an amatorcultist; all you can do is dwindle away and disappear in a shower of tears.

But let us assume some little success at this early amatory stage. Where now? It’s a fifty-fifty chance that your main aim is to be
thelyphthoric
, a word that comes from the Greek
thely
meaning ‘woman’ and
phthoric
meaning ‘corrupting’, thus the OED’s simple definition: ‘that corrupts or ruins women’.

Thelyphthoric began its life in English as the title of a smashing 1780 treatise:

THELYPHTHORA;
OR, A TREATISE ON FEMALE RUIN, IN ITS CAUSES, EFFECTS, CONSEQUENCES, PREVENTION, AND REMEDY; CONSIDERED ON THE BASIS OF THE DIVINE LAW: Under the following HEADS, viz. MARRIAGE, WHOREDOM, FORNICATION, ADULTERY, POLYGAMY, and DIVORCE; With many other Incidental Matters.

It’s a promising title, and it gets better with the first sentence: ‘The Author doth not scruple to call this TREATISE, one of the most important and interesting Publications, that have appeared since the Days of the
Protestant Reformation
.’

But as you read further (and who wouldn’t?) it turns out that far from being a useful instruction manual, the author is dead against female ruin and all the accompanying pleasantness for both parties. In fact, he has a high moral purpose of preventing female ruin through the outlawing of divorce and the reintroduction of polygamy.

Thelyphthoric didn’t keep its high moral tone for long and instead toboganned off into the linguistic lowlands. Frankly, a word like that is never going to remain in the purest of hands, especially as most of the world’s population either want to be thelyphthoric or be introduced to somebody who is.

The most common way of attempting thelyphthora is to dance, jig,
shake a hough
, or
tripudiate
. The thelyphthoric qualities of such rhythmic movements are amply recorded in the dictionaries. For example, from the eighteenth century:

Balum-Rancum
A hop or dance, where the women are all prostitutes. N.B. The company dance in their birthday suits.

Or from the other perspective:

Gymnopaedic
Ancient Greek Hist
. The distinctive epithet of the dances or other exercises performed by naked boys at public festivals.

Or for both sexes:

Among the tramping fraternity a
buff-ball
is a dancing party, characterised by the indecency of those who attend it, the
costume de rigueur
being that of our first parents.

The most favourite entertainment at this place is known as ‘
buff-ball
,’ in which both sexes – innocent of clothing – madly join, stimulated with raw whisky and the music of a fiddle and a tin-whistle.

But how to suggest such a thing in a manner both alluring and learned? In the 1960 film
Beat Girl
, Oliver Reed approaches a stylish young she-cat sitting in a bar and says: ‘Say, baby, you feel terpsichorical? Let’s go downstairs and fly.’ Terpsichore is one of the nine ancient muses, and specifically the muse who inspires dancing. So Mr Reed’s enquiry, in the context of the film, means: ‘Do you feel inspired by the muse of dance? Let us go to the basement and do just that.’ And, in the context of the film, it works. How or why Terpsichore got so famous in the mid-twentieth century is a bit of a mystery, but the OED even records the shortened verb
to terp
.

But
what if you are not inspired by the moving muse? If you have not paid her sufficient sacrifices she may curse you with a flip of her immortal foot and leave you
baltering
upon the dance-floor.
Balter
is an old verb meaning to dance clumsily, although one dictionary defines it strictly as ‘to tread in a clownish manner, as an ox does the grass’.

The Yaghan people of Tierra Del Fuego at the southernest tip of South America were one of the few tribes ever discovered who didn’t wear clothes. This is not because Tierra Del Fuego is a warm and balmy place. It is not. Even in summer the temperature rarely rises above nine degrees centigrade. Yet naked they were, even when Charles Darwin visited them on the
Beagle
and, rather impolitely, called them ‘miserable, degraded savages’. It would appear that the Yaghans simply hadn’t invented clothing, but they did have an ingenious method for keeping warm, which was to smear themselves head to toe in grease and cuddle each other. This ingenious and energy-efficient practice must be kept in mind when considering their insanely useful word
mamihlapinatapai
.

Mamihlapinatapai is usually defined as ‘Two people looking at each other each hoping the other will do what both desire but neither is willing to do’. Mamihlapinatapai is therefore generally reckoned to be one of the most useful words on earth. As two people stand at a doorway each gesturing ‘After you’, that is mamihlapinatapai. As two people sitting in a dull waiting room both hope that the other will start a conversation, that
is mamihlapinatapai. And when two people look into each other’s eyes, with that sudden realisation that lips can be used for something other than talking, but both too afraid to draw the other to them, that is Mamihlapinatapai Rex.

However, mamihlapinatapai is a rather controversial word. Experts on the Yaghan language (a group of which I cannot claim membership), while conceding that the word is theoretically possible, tend to pooh-pooh the idea that it ever actually existed. It could exist, just as in English the word
antifondlingness
could exist, but that doesn’t mean it does. Mamihlapinatapai is, according to them, a whimsical invention of some unknown linguist.

This case looks, at first blush, rather convincing. How could a tribe that hadn’t even invented clothes come up with a word so complex? However, I would contend that the two points are in fact connected, because if you spend half your time naked, cuddling and covered in grease, mamihlapinatapai is going to be a pretty common feeling. In fact it would probably be the dominant emotion of your nude, greasy existence.

So let us assume that the dancing is over, that your eyes have met, and that mamihlapinatapai has come upon you. What to do about it?

The simplest answer I can offer is to ask, ‘Care for a biscot?’, because
biscot
means ‘to caress amorously’ but the other person may not know that, and everybody likes a biscuit.

Less deceptive would be to ask the other party whether they are
osculable
. Osculable means ‘kissable’ but is a much more beautiful word. According to the OED, poor osculable has been used only once, in 1893, to describe the Pope. So the word is nearly virginal and should be taken out and shown to the world.

The
Latin for to kiss was
osculare
, and the obscure English words thence derived are wonderful. There’s an
osculatrix
(a lady who kisses), an
oscularity
(a kiss), and an
osculary
(anything that can and should be kissed, although this was usually a religious relic).

So, an alternative line could be: ‘You are an osculary, and this is my religious duty’, or somesuch.

And now it is time for the moment not of truth, but of kissing (the two are entirely separate notions). The eyes close. The lips of the lovers meet.
Cataglottism
is usually attempted by one or both parties, for the definition of which we should turn to Blount’s
Glossographia
of 1656:

Cataglottism
, a kissing with the tongue.

This word, though rare, has survived for centuries. As the great biologist Henry Havelock Ellis
1
observed in 1905:

The tonic effect of cutaneous excitation throws light on the psychology of the caress … The kiss is not only an expression of feeling; it is a means of provoking it. Cataglottism is by no means confined to pigeons.

And a good thing too. But one thing leads to another and the tongue is often merely the thin end of the wedge. The moral dangers of kissing were perhaps most eloquently described by Sir Thomas Urquhart in his
Jewel
of 1652.

Thus
for a while their eloquence was mute, and all they spoke was but with the eye and hand, yet so persuasively, by vertue of the intermutual unlimitedness of their visotactil sensation, that each part and portion of the persons of either was obvious to the sight and touch of the persons of both; the visuriency of either, by ushering the tacturiency of both, made the attrectation of both consequent to the inspection of either.

Where
visuriency
means ‘the desire to see’ and
tacturiency
means ‘the desire to fondle’. It is unfair, though, to judge somebody too harshly on their desire to fondle. The OED records a word at once splendid and tragic: