The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt through the Lost Words of the English Language by Mark Forsyth Read Free Book Online Page A

four horses. I would say that a besage was the finest form of transport that I’ve ever heard of, except that I can’t see how the horses would know which way to go if their passenger were snoozing. And it’s a cruel thing to put somebody in a bed and not allow them to sleep. If there was a solution to this problem of the besage, it is not, alas, recorded in the
Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English
.
Cars
    But to return to the more prosaic methods of transport, let us begin with the motorcar. In the Second Book of Kings, God decides that he doesn’t like Ahab one little bit. In fact, he wants to ‘cut off from Ahab him that pisseth against the wall’. This is actually a relatively common ancient Hebrew phrase meaning ‘every man jack of them’. Anyway, the chosen instrument of God’s off-cutting will be a chap called Jehu (pronounced
gee who
). So Jehu jumps into a chariot and heads off to kill the king. The king’s watchman sees the approaching chariot and dashes down to tell the monarch that ‘the driving is like the driving of Jehu son of Nimshi; for he driveth furiously.’ This one clause in the Bible was all that the English language needed to import his name and immortalise Jehu as a noun for a furious driver.
    A
jehu
is a particularly bad (or good) thing if you are driving down
jumblegut lane
, which was an eighteenth-century term for a bumpy road too obvious in its origin to require any explanation at all. However, jehus and jumbleguts aside, you are much more likely to get caught in a
thrombosis
of traffic, wherein the veiny and arterial roads of the metropolis are blocked by the embolism of roadworks and by clots that have broken down. ThusJehu sits immobile in his chariot and gazes enviously at the bus lane.
Bus
    The plural of bus is, of course,
buses
. But it’s a curious little point of history that, etymologically, the plural of bus would be
bus
. The
voiture omnibus
, or ‘carriage for everybody’ was introduced in Paris in 1820, and the plural would be
voitures omnibus
, which wouldn’t affect the shortening at all. (The same, incidentally, would apply to the
taximeter cabriolet
.)
    The central problem with buses is that you wait for ages and then none come along. This waiting (or
prestolating
) is a miserable affair as it’s usually raining, and you huddle up in the bus shelter, which starts to feel rather like a
xenodochium
or hostel for pilgrims, inhabited by people who peer optimistically down the road for the approaching Godot.
    When your bus does arrive, it is all too likely to be
chiliander
, or containing a thousand men, at which point you have to barrel onto the monkey board like a spermatozoa trying to get into the egg. Once within, you have no choice but to
scrouge
, which is helpfully defined in the OED thus:
    To incommode by pressing against (a person); to encroach on (a person’s) space in sitting or standing; to crowd. Also, to push or squeeze (a thing).
    But scrouge you must, and furiously, while at the same time looking out for
chariot buzzers
. Chariot buzzers are pickpockets who work on buses, but as the term is Victorian, you ought to be able to recognise them by their antiquated attire.
    MargaretThatcher never said ‘Anybody seen in a bus over the age of thirty has been a failure in life.’ However, the poet Brian Howard (1905–58) did. It’s a rather snobby-sounding comment, but given that Brian Howard published only one serious book of poems, and given that the one biography of him is titled
Portrait of a Failure
, one must assume that he spent a lot of time on buses himself.
    Nonetheless, the over-thirty-year-old who wishes to be thought a success, but has no access to an automobile or jetpack, should probably opt for a sub- or superterranean train.
Train
    Trains present their own problems. For starters you need to fight your way singlehanded through a railway station just to get on one. This involves dodging a lot people with heavy, bruising suitcases who