I Never Knew There Was a Word For It Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  I NEVER KNEW THERE WAS A WORD FOR IT

  Adam Jacot de Boinod, hunter of perfect and obscure bon mots, is a true linguistic bowerbird (a person who collects an astonishing array of – sometimes useless – objects). He trawled the languages of the world for exotic specimens in his bestselling books The Wonder of Whiffling, The Meaning of Tingo and hit follow-up Toujours Tingo.

  In memory of my father

  I Never Knew There

  Was a Word For It

  ADAM JACOT DE BOINOD

  With illustrations by Sandra Howgate

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA), Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

  Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  The Meaning of Tingo first published in Penguin Books 2005

  Toujours Tingo first published in Penguin Books 2007

  The Wonder of Whiffling first published in Particular Books 2009

  Published under this title with a new Introduction in Penguin Books 2010

  Copyright © Adam Jacot de Boinod, 2005, 2007, 2009, 2010

  Illustrations copyright © Samantha Howland, 2005, 2007, 2009

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 978-0-14-196353-2

  Contents

  Introduction

  Acknowledgements

  The Meaning of Tingo

  Meeting and Greeting

  From Top to Toe

  Movers and Shakers

  Getting Around

  It Takes All Sorts

  Falling in Love

  The Family Circle

  Clocking On

  Time Off

  Eating and Drinking

  Below Par

  From Cradle to Grave

  Otherworldly

  All Creatures Great and Small

  Whatever the Weather

  Hearing Things

  Seeing Things

  Number Crunching

  What’s in a Name?

  Toujours Tingo

  Getting Acquainted

  The Human Condition

  Emotional Intelligence

  Social Animals

  Having an Argument

  The Rules of Attraction

  Family Ties

  Kids

  Body Beautiful

  Dressed to Kill

  Stretching Your Legs

  Upping Sticks

  Home Sweet Home

  Dinner Time

  One for the Road

  All in a Day’s Work

  Game Theory

  Animal Magic

  Climate Change

  The Root of All Evil

  The Criminal Life

  Realpolitik

  From Better to Hearse

  The Great Beyond

  The Wonder of Whiffling

  Clatterfarts and Jaisies

  Stickybeak

  Going Postal

  Twiddle-diddles

  Prick-me-dainty

  Going West

  Slapsauce

  Crambazzled

  Footer-footer

  Muttoners and Golden Ferrets

  Rubby-dubby

  Madhouse

  Mush Fakers and Applesquires

  Bulk and File

  Bunting Time

  Wittols and Beer Babies

  Oyster Parts

  Dimbox and Quockerwodger

  Scurryfunge

  Aw Whoop

  Swallocky

  Feelimageeries

  Introduction

  My name is Adam Jacot de Boinod and I’m hopelessly addicted to strange words. I’ve spent the last six years compulsively hunting down unusual vocabulary and now have written three books collecting my very best and most unusual discoveries.

  All three are included in this volume, which I’ve called I Never Knew There Was a Word For It, because I didn’t. My vocabulary is now ten times richer than it was six years ago, as I hope yours will soon be too … Let me tell you a little about each book:

  The Meaning of Tingo

  My interest in unusual words was triggered when one day, working as a researcher for the BBC programme QI, I picked up a weighty Albanian dictionary to discover that they have no less than twenty-seven words for eyebrow and the same number for different types of moustache, ranging from a mustaqe madh, or bushy, to a mustaqe posht, one which droops down at both ends.

  My curiosity rapidly became a passion. I was soon unable to go near a bookshop or library without sniffing out the often dusty shelf where the foreign language dictionaries were kept. I started to collect my favourites: nakhur, for example, a Persian word meaning ‘a camel that gives no milk until her nostrils are tickled’; Many described strange or unbelievable things. How, when and where, for example, would a man be described as a marilopotes, the Ancient Greek for ‘a gulper of coaldust’? And could the Japanese samurai really have used the verb tsuji-giri, meaning ‘to try out a new sword on a passerby’? Others expressed concepts that seemed all too familiar. We have all met a Zechpreller, ‘someone who leaves without paying the bill’; worked with a neko-neko, the Indonesian for ‘one who has a creative idea which only makes things worse’; or spent too much time with an ataoso, the Central American Spanish for ‘one who sees problems with everything’. It was fascinating to find thoughts that lie on the tip of an English tongue, crystallized into vocabulary. From the Zambian sekaseka, ‘to laugh without reason’, through the Czech nedovtipa, ‘one who finds it difficult to take a hint’, to the Japanese bakku-shan, ‘a woman who only appears pretty when seen from behind’.

  In the end my passion became an obsession. I combed over two million words in countless dictionaries. I trawled the internet, phoned embassies, and tracked down foreign language speakers who could confirm my findings. I discovered that in Afrikaans, frogs go kwaak-kwaak, in Korea owls go buung-buung, while in Denmark Rice Crispies go Knisper! Knasper! Knupser! And that in Easter Island tingo means to borrow things from a friend’s house one by one until there’s nothing left.

  Luckily for my sanity, Penguin then signed me up to write the book that was to become The Meaning of Tingo, which meant I had an editor to help me decide which of the thousands of great words should make it into the final
book but, goodness, it was hard to leave some out. The book came out in 2005 and was an instant hit. It has since been published in eleven different languages and Tingomania spread all round the globe.

  Toujours Tingo

  I was delighted when the book’s fans demanded a sequel as I felt like I was only just getting started. This time I found such delights as okuri-okami, the Japanese word for ‘a man who feigns thoughtfulness by offering to see a girl home only to molest her once he gets in the door’ (literally, ‘a see-you-home wolf’); kaelling, the Danish for ‘a woman who stands on the steps of her house yelling obscenities at her kids’; and belochnik, the Russian for ‘a thief specializing in stealing linen off clothes lines’ (an activity that was supposedly very lucrative in the early 1980s). And how could I have missed the German Kiebitz, ‘an onlooker at a card game who interferes with unwanted advice’ or the Portuguese pesamenteiro, ‘one who habitually joins groups of mourners at the home of a deceased person, ostensibly to offer condolences but in reality to partake of the refreshments which he expects will be served’?

  In this book I ventured into over two hundred new languages. The Ndebele of Southern Africa have the word dii-koyna, meaning ‘to destroy one’s own property in anger’, an impulse surely felt by most of us at some time or another, if not acted upon. From the Bakweri language of Cameroon we have wo-mba, a charming word to describe ‘the smiling in sleep by children’; and from the Buli language of Ghana the verb pelinti, ‘to move very hot food around inside one’s mouth in order to avoid too close a contact’. And doubtless there are many among us who have found ourselves disturbed by a butika roka (Gilbertese, Oceania) ‘a brother-in-law coming round too often’.

  Once again, of course, many of the more unusual words relate closely to the local specifics of their cultures. Most of us are unlikely to need the verb sendula, (from the Mambwe of Zambia) meaning ‘to find accidentally a dead animal in the forest’, which carries with it the secondary meaning ‘and be excited at the thought that a lion or leopard might still be around’. But even if we never have the call to use these expressions, it’s surely enriching to know that in Finnish, poronkusema is ‘the distance equal to how far a reindeer can travel without urinating’; while manantsona, from the Malagasy of Madagascar, is ‘to smell or sniff before entering a house, as a dog does’. We may not share the same climate, but we can all too easily imagine the use of words like hanyauku, (Rukwangali, Namibia) ‘to walk on tiptoe on warm sand’, barbarian-on (Ik, Nilo-Saharan), ‘to sit in a group of people warming up in the morning sun’, or dynke (Norwegian), ‘the act of dunking somebody’s face in snow’.

  Half as long again as The Meaning of Tingo, this second bite into the substantial cherry of world languages allowed me to venture in depth into all sorts of new areas. There are more examples of ‘false friends’, from the Czech word host, which confusingly means ‘guest’, to the Estonian sober, a perhaps unlikely word for ‘a male friend’. There are the intriguing meanings of the names of cities and countries, Palindromes and even national anthems, as well as a series of worldwide idioms, which join the words in confirming that the challenges, joys and disappointments of human existence are all too similar around the world. English’s admonitory ‘Don’t count your chickens’, for example, is echoed in most languages, becoming, in Danish: man skal ikke sælge skindet, før bjørnen er skudt ‘one should not sell the fur before the bear has been shot’; in Turkish, dereyi görmeden paçalari sivama, ‘don’t roll up your trouser-legs before you see the stream’ and in the Ndonga language of Namibia ino manga ondjupa ongombe inaayi vala, ‘don’t hang the churning calabash before the cow has calved’.

  The Wonder Of Whiffling

  While I was working on the previous two books, scouring libraries and second-hand bookshops, riffling through reference books from around the world to find words with unusual and delightful meanings, I kept coming across splendid English dictionaries too. Not just the mighty twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary, but collections covering dialect, slang and subsidiary areas, such as Jamaican or Newfoundland English. Sneaking the occasional glance away from my main task I realized there was a wealth of little-known or forgotten words in our language, from its origins in Anglo-Saxon, through Old and Middle English and Tudor–Stuart, then on to the rural dialects collected so lovingly by Victorian lexicographers, the argot of nineteenth-century criminals, slang from the two world wars, right up to our contemporary world and the jargon that has grown up around such activities as darts, birding and working in an office. Offered the chance, it seemed only right to gather the best examples together and complete my trilogy: bringing, as it were, the original idea home.

  Some of our English words mean much the same as they’ve always meant. Others have changed beyond recognition, such as racket, which originally meant the palm of the hand; grape, a hook for gathering fruit; or muddle, to wallow in mud. Then there are those words that have fallen out of use, but would undoubtedly make handy additions to any vocabulary today. Don’t most of us know a blatteroon (1645), a person who will not stop talking, not to mention a shot-clog (1599), a drinking companion only tolerated because he pays for the drinks. And if one day we feel mumpish (1721), sullenly angry, shouldn’t we seek the company of a grinagog (1565), one who is always grinning?

  The dialects of Britain provide a wealth of coinages. In the Midlands, for example, we find a jaisy, a polite and effeminate man, and in Yorkshire a stridewallops, a tall and awkward woman. If you tuck too much into the clotted cream in Cornwall you might end up ploffy, plump; in Shropshire, hold back on the beer or you might develop joblocks, fleshy, hanging cheeks; and down in Wiltshire hands that have been left too long in the washtub are quobbled. The Geordies have the evocative word dottle for the tobacco left in the pipe after smoking, and in Lincolnshire charmings are paper and rag chewed into small pieces by mice. In Suffolk to nuddle is to walk alone with the head held low; and in Hampshire to vuddle is to spoil a child by injudicious petting. And don’t we all know someone who’s crambazzled (Yorkshire), prematurely aged through drink and a dissolute life?

  Like English itself, my research hasn’t stopped at the shores of the Channel. How about a call-dog (Jamaican English), a fish too small for human consumption or a twack (Newfoundland English) a shopper who looks at goods, inquires about prices but buys nothing. Slang from elsewhere offers us everything from a waterboy (US police), a boxer who can be bribed or coerced into losing, to a shubie (Australian), someone who buys surfing gear and clothing but doesn’t actually surf. In Canada, a cougar describes an older woman on the prowl for a younger man, while in the US a quirkyalone is someone who doesn’t fall in love easily, but waits for the right person to come along.

  Returning to the mainstream, it’s good to know that there are such sound English words as rumblegumption, meaning common sense, or ugsomeness, loathing. Snirtle is to laugh in a quiet, suppressed or restrained manner, while to snoach is to speak through the nose. If you are clipsome, you are eminently embraceable; when clumpst, your hands are stiff with cold. To boondoggle is to carry out valueless work in order to convey the impression that one is busy, while to limbeck is to rack the brain in an effort to have a new idea.

  As for whiffling, well, that turned out to be a word with a host of meanings. In eighteenth-century Oxford and Cambridge, a whiffler was one who examined candidates for degrees, while elsewhere a whiffler was an officer who cleared the way for a procession, as well as being the name for the man with the whip in Morris dancing. The word also means to blow or scatter with gusts of air, to move or think erratically, as well as applying to geese descending rapidly from a height once the decision to land has been made. In the underworld slang of Victorian times, a whiffler was one who cried out in pain, while in the cosier world of P.G. Wodehouse, whiffled was what you were when you’d had one too many of Jeeves’s special cocktails.

  As a self-confessed bowerbird (one who collects an astonishing array of sometimes useless objects), I’ve greatly
enjoyed putting together all three collections. I sincerely hope that you enjoy reading them, and that they save you both from mulligrubs, depression of spirits, and onomatomania, vexation in having difficulty finding the right word.

  In compiling all three books I’ve done my level best to check the accuracy of all the words included, but any comments or even favourite examples of words of your own are welcomed at the book’s two websites: for foreign languages www.themeaningoftingo.com – and for English www.thewonderofwhiffling.com (There were some very helpful responses to my previous books, for which I remain grateful.)

  Adam Jacot de Boinod

  Acknowledgements

  I am deeply grateful to the following people for their advice and help on all three books: Giles Andreae, Martin Bowden, Joss Buckley, Candida Clark, Anna Coverdale, Nick Emley, Natasha Fairweather, William Hartston, Beatrix Jacot de Boinod, Nigel Kempner, Nick and Galia Kullmann, Kate Lawson, Alf Lawrie, John Lloyd, Sarah McDougall, Yaron Meshoulam, Tony Morris, David Prest and David Shariatmadari.

  In particular I must thank my agent, Peter Straus, my illustrator Sandra Howgate, my editor at Penguin, Georgina Laycock; and Mark McCrum for his invaluable work on the text.

  The Meaning of Tingo

  Meeting and Greeting

  ai jiao de maque bu zhang rou (Chinese)

  sparrows that love to chirp won’t put on weight

  ¡Hola!

  The first and most essential word in all languages is surely ‘hello’, the word that enables one human being to converse with another:

  aa (Diola, Senegal)

  beeta (Soninke, Mali, Senegal and Ivory Coast)

  bok (Croatian)

  boozhoo (Ojibwe, USA and Canada)

  daw-daw (Jutlandish, Denmark)

  ella (Awabakal, Australia)

  i ay (Huaorani, Ecuador)

  khaumykhyghyz (Bashkir, Russia)