The Wonder of Whiffling Read online

  THE WONDER OF WHIFFLING

  And other extraordinary words in the English language

  ADAM JACOT DE BOINOD

  Illustrations by Sandra Howgate

  PARTICULAR BOOKS

  PARTICULAR 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

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  First published 2009

  1

  Text © Adam Jacot de Boinod, 2009

  Illustrations © Sandra Howgate

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-195927-6

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Acknowledgements

  CLATTERFARTS AND JAISIES Getting acquainted

  STICKYBEAK Character

  GOING POSTAL Emotions

  TWIDDLE-DIDDLES Body language

  PRICK-ME-DAINTY Clothes

  GOING WEST Illness, death and spiritual matters

  SLAPSAUCE Food

  CRAMBAZZLED Drink

  FOOTER-FOOTER Taking off

  MUTTONERS AND GOLDEN FERRETS Sport

  RUBBY-DUBBY Country pursuits

  MADHOUSE Indoor games and hobbies

  MUSH FAKERS AND APPLESQUIRES The world of work

  BULK AND FILE Crime and punishment

  BUNTING TIME Matters of love

  WITTOLS AND BEER BABIES Marriage and family life

  OYSTER PARTS Culture

  DIMBOX AND QUOCKERWODGER Military and political concerns

  SCURRYFUNGE Domestic life

  AW WHOOP Animals

  SWALLOCKY Rural life and weather

  FEELIMAGEERIES Paraphernalia

  FOREWORD

  While I was working on my last 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 all kinds of collections covering dialect, jargon, slang and subsidiary areas, such as Jamaican or Newfoundland English.

  My passion for the arcane was renewed as I confronted the remarkable wealth of 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 contemporary life and the jargon that has grown up around such diverse activities as darts, birding and working in an office. When I was 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 always have. 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, a person who will not stop talking, not to mention a shot-clog, a drinking companion only tolerated because he pays for the drinks? And if one day we feel mumpish, sullenly angry, shouldn’t we seek the company of a grinagog, 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 is crambazzled (Yorkshire), prematurely aged through drink and a dissolute life?

  Like English itself, my research hasn’t stopped at the shores of the Channel. Our language is arguably the most widespread of all, and second only to Mandarin in terms of usage. Varieties of our basic tongue thrive all over the globe and certain locales have come up with charming and serviceable words that could usefully be imported back. 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.

  The language of specialist activities, from sport to card games, could have filled another volume. I’ve contented myself instead with a pick of my favourites, from fliffis, the gymnast’s term for a twisting double somersault to squopped, the term for a free tiddlywink that lands on another wink. The stage has a splendid private jargon, from pong, to speak in blank verse after forgetting one’s lines, to gravy, easy laughs from a friendly audience. Perhaps only the criminal fraternity has more, with everything from the vamper, a thief who deliberately starts fights between others in order to rob people in the confusion, to the pappy, the elderly man with baggy clothes and saggy pockets who is a pickpocket’s ideal victim.

  Returning to the mainstream it’s been interesting to note those words coined by major literary figures such as kankedort (Chaucer), an awkward situation; fleshment (Shakespeare), excitement from a first success; ferrule (Dickens), the metal tip on an umbrella; oubliette (Scott), a dungeon whose only entrance is in the ceiling and mud-honey (Tennyson) the dirty pleasures of men about town.

  Along the way I’ve discovered some intriguing people: from the parnel, a priest’s mistress, through the applesquire, the male servant of a prostitute, to the screever, a writer of begging letters. If the first two of these are now largely historical, the third certainly isn’t, nor is the slapsauce, the person who enjoys eating fine food or the chafferer, the
salesman who enjoys talking while making a sale.

  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 trifling or pettifogging, 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 seventeenth century a whiffler was a smoker of tobacco; in the underworld slang of Victorian times, 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.

  So let’s raise a brendice, a cup in which a person’s health is drunk, to this extraordinary language of ours, crammed full of words most ostrobogulous (bizarre and interesting), the study of which could keep us occupied from beetle-belch to cockshut. As a self-confessed bowerbird (one who collects an astonishing array of sometimes useless objects), I’ve had great fun putting together this collection. I sincerely hope that you enjoy reading it, and that it saves you both from mulligrubs, depression of spirits and, of course, onomatomania, vexation in having difficulty finding the right word.

  Adam Jacot de Boinod

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In compiling this book I’ve been keen to distinguish formalized English from the informal and have pinpointed from where a word originates and when it came into the English language (with dates in brackets to mark its first printed reference in English, and with the letter b. stating that the word came into our language before a specific time). Source languages are also included here when a word has been loaned. An English county indicates dialect, which may well have spread into other areas. As before, I’ve done my level best to check the accuracy of all the words included, but for any comments or even favourite examples of words of your own please contact me direct at the book’s website, www.thewonderofwhiffling.com. (There were some helpful responses to my previous books, for which I remain very grateful.)

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am deeply grateful to the following people for their advice and help: Giles Andreae, Kate Lawson and Sarah McDougall. In particular I must thank my illustrator Sandra Howgate, my agent, Peter Straus, my excellent editorial team at Penguin – my editor Georgina Laycock and Ruth Stimson and Helen Conford, and once again my collaborator Mark McCrum for his invaluable work on the text.

  CLATTERFARTS AND JAISIES

  Getting acquainted

  Great talkers should be crop’d,

  for they have no need of ears

  (Franklin: Poor Richard’s Almanack 1738)

  Once upon a time, your first contact with someone was likely to be face to face. These days you’re as likely to get together via the computer:

  floodgaters people who send you email inquiries and, after receiving any kind of response, begin swamping you with multiple messages of little or no interest

  digerati those who have, or claim to have, expertise in computers or the Internet

  disemvowel to remove the vowels from a word in an email, text message, etc, to abbreviate it

  bitslag all the useless rubble one must plough through on the Net to get to the rich information ore

  ham legitimate email messages (as opposed to spam)

  DOG AND BONE

  Possibly the most used English word of greeting – hello – only came into common usage with the arrival of the telephone. Its inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, felt that the usual Victorian greeting of ‘How do you do?’ was too long and old-fashioned for his new device. He suggested the sailor’s cry ahoy! as the best way to answer his machine and operators at the first exchange did just that. But ahoy! didn’t prove popular because it felt too abrupt. Compromise was soon reached with hello!, a word that came straight from the hunting-field. But could Bell ever have foreseen some of the ways in which his device would come to be used?

  Hollywood no (US slang 1992) a lack of response (to a proposal, phone call, message etc.)

  scotchie (South African slang) a ‘missed call’ which communicates some pre-arranged message or requires the receiver to call back at their expense, thereby saving the first caller the cost of the call

  fox hole (UK slang 2007) the area beneath one’s desk (in these days of open-plan offices) where telephone calls can take place peacefully

  SNAIL MAIL

  Of course, the old-fashioned letter still has its uses, as these Service slang words indicate: the key one being, in these days of retentive hard drives, that once you’ve destroyed your message, it leaves no trace:

  yam yum a love letter

  giz to read a pal’s letter to his girlfriend; to offer advice

  gander a look through the mail, a glance over another’s shoulder at a letter or paper

  flimsies the rice paper on which important messages are written and which can be eaten without discomfort in case of capture

  VISITING HOURS

  Or you can do that wonderfully traditional thing and pay a call in person:

  pasteboard (1864) to leave one’s visiting card at someone’s residence

  cohonestation (17C) honouring with one’s company

  gin pennant (Royal Navy slang) a green and white triangular pennant flown to indicate an invitation on board for drinks

  GR8

  The arrival of mobile phones on the scene led immediately to some interesting usages. In the first wave of texting came shortened versions of much-used phrases:

  F2T

  free to talk

  AFAIK

  as far as I know

  T+

  think positive

  BCNU

  be seeing you

  HAND

  have a nice day

  KIT

  keep in touch

  CUL8R

  see you later

  ZZZ

  tired, bored

  When people switched to predictive text, they discovered the phenomenon of the phone’s software coming up with the wrong word; most famously book for cool (so teenagers started describing their hipper friends as ‘book’). Other textonyms include:

  lips for kiss

  shag for rich

  carnage for barmaid

  poisoned for Smirnoff

  A LITTLE SOMETHING

  A gift, however small, will always go down well:

  toecover (1948) an inexpensive and useless present

  xenium (Latin 1706) a gift given to a guest

  exennium (Old English law) a gift given at New Year

  groundbait (Royal Navy slang) a box of chocolates or something similar given to a lady friend in pursuit of a greater prize

  DIGNITY AND PRIDE

  In the US, the knuckles touched together are called, variously, closed-fist high fives, knuckle buckles or fist jabs. Done horizontally, the gesture is called a pound; vertically it’s the dap (which some say is an acronym of ‘dignity and pride’). Other greetings, of course, involve words, but hopefully not misunderstandings:

  dymsassenach (Cheshire) a mangled Welsh phrase meaning ‘I don’t understand English’

  shaggledick (Australian slang) an affectionate greeting for someone who is familiar but whose name doesn’t come to mind

  take me with you (Tudor–Stuart) let me understand you clearly

  thuten (Middle English 1100–1500) to say ‘thou’ to a person, to become a close friend

  All RIGHT, MATE?

  You never get a second chance to make a first impression, so be aware of how you’re coming across:

  corduroy voice (US 1950s) a voice that continually fluctuates between high and low (from the up-and-down ridges in corduroy)

  yomp (Cheshire) to shout with the mouth wide open

  snoach (1387) to speak through the nose

  psellism (1799) an indistinct pronunciation, such as produced by a
lisp or by stammering

  RABBIT, RABBIT

  Though there are always those who just can’t help themselves:

  macrology (1586) much talk with little to say

  clatterfart (1552) a babbler, chatterer

  chelp (Northern and Midlands 19C) to chatter or speak out of turn

  blatteroon (1645) a person who will not stop talking

  clitherer (Galway) a woman with too much to say

  air one’s vocabulary (c.1820) to talk for the sake of talking

  SMOOTH CUSTOMER

  Chit-chat apart, good manners always go down well (however bogus they may be):

  garbist (1640) one who is adept at engaging in polite behaviour

  jaisy (Midlands) a polite, effeminate man

  sahlifahly (Nottinghamshire) to make flattering speeches

  court holy water (1519) to say fair words without sincere intention; to flatter

  deipnosophist (1656) a skilful dinner conversationalist

  PETER PIPER: TONGUE TWISTERS

  There are tongue twisters in every language. These phrases are designed to be difficult to say and to get harder and harder as you say them faster. They’re not just for fun. Therapists and elocution teachers use them to tame speech impediments and iron out strong accents.

  Repeat after me (being particularly careful with the last one)…

  Sister Sue sells sea shells. She sells sea shells on shore. The shells she sells. Are sea shells she sees. Sure she sees shells she sells

  You’ve known me to light a night light on a light night like tonight. There’s no need to light a night light on a light night like tonight, for a night light’s a slight light on tonight’s light night