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

are all milling around like an illustration of Brownian motion.
    The people who design guided missiles refer to a
balladromic course
, which is the path that a rocket takes towards its target, ignoring everything else and moving at speeds in excess of Mach 3. This is probably the best way to approach a station concourse: know where your platform is and be ready to explode at the slightest provocation. Keep it balladromic.
    If you are of a more pacifist and peacenik disposition, you could always
gaincope
, which is ‘to go across a field the nearest way’, and is a word more suited to the pastures and meadows of Olde Englande. But what you really need is a
whiffler
.
    There are very few whifflers today, if any; and I’ve never understood this, as a whiffler for hire at a station entrance could makean awful lot of money during rush hour. A whiffler is, according to the OED:
    One of a body of attendants armed with a javelin, battle-axe, sword, or staff, and wearing a chain, employed to keep the way clear for a procession.
    Of course, a full-time whiffler (if you could afford one) would be useful at all sorts of events such as Christmas shopping or cocktail parties. But at rush hour, a whiffler is not merely useful, but necessary. Without your whiffler you may well be reduced to a state of
hemothymia
, which is what psychiatrists call an impulse to murder, or, more literally, bloodlust.
    If you are ever reduced to such a helpless state of violent anger that you want to set about your fellow commuters with a bow and arrow, you should be comforted that the English language already has a phrase in place for you. Grose’s
Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
(1811) says:
    Have among you, you blind harpers ; an expression used in throwing or shooting at random among the crowd.
    This constitutes some usefully enigmatic final words before the ticket inspector wrestles you to the ground.
    If you ever do make it to the train, then you can settle down with your coffee and newspaper and spend your journey chuckling over the obituaries. Incidentally, the thing round the coffee cup that stops you burning your fingers is a
zarf
, and a newspaper is much more fun when referred to as a
scream sheet
.
    Noneof this applies of course if the train is so
thringed
, thronged and crammed that you cannot get a seat. Whether this is better or worse than being scrouged in a bus or clotted in a traffic thrombosis is a question that I cannot answer; all I can tell you is that the standard unit of measurement for pain is a
dol
and is measured with a
dolorimeter
.
Clocking in
    By the time you arrive anywhere near your place of work you ought to be exhausted, bruised, battered, frustrated and generally broken in to twenty-first-century life. Nothing from here on in can be as bad as the commute, so things are looking up. You may celebrate this fact with a sly
dew drink
, which is a beer taken before the working day begins. This will delay you still further, but as you are almost inevitably the
postreme
(one who is last) as it stands, and as your tardiness is hardly your fault but can be blamed on the traffic/trains/bus driver/vengeful God or whatnot, a dew drink seems to be exactly what you need and deserve.
    Once refreshed you can stride into the
barracoon
, or slave depot, refreshed and ready to do a passable impression of a day’s work. Of course, you don’t stride into the barracoon: the correct method for entering the workplace is to
scuddle
in, which Dr Johnson defined as:
    Scuddle : To run with a kind of affected haste or precipitation.
    It doesn’t matter how slowly you ambled up the front steps. Or how you paused to admire the pretty clouds in the sky: the actualentrance to the office should be done at a scuddle. The correct method is to hyperventilate a few times to make yourself out of breath. Once gasping, give both cheeks a firm pinch and then hurl yourself at the doors, slamming them loudly as you shoot through and stagger to a halt in the