Aftermath

Everybody knows the word mow. It's the thing that you can't be bothered to do to grass. If we weren't such inconstant gardeners we might even know the word math, which is defined in the OED thuslywise:

A mowing; the action or work of mowing; that which may be or has been mowed; the portion of a crop that has been mowed

It makes me tired just reading the definition. There are even compounds formed of math. There is a day math, which is the amount of land you can mow in a day. There is an undermath, which is an undergrowth of grass. There is even a latter-math which is the later mowing, it's the grass that has grown after the first math.

There is even a synonym for latter-math: aftermath.

The aftermath of an earthquake, a revolution or a bottle of gin is merely a metaphor derived from mowing. This pleases me.

The first metaphorical use of aftermath seems to have been in a rather extraordinary 1656 poem called To my honoured friend Mr T.C. that asked me how I liked his Mistress being an old Widdow.

The simple answer is that he didn't, and wrote the most extraordinarily ungentlemanly poem containing couplets like:

If thou wilt needs to sea, O must it be
In an old galliasse of sixty three?

He's immensely troubled by the widow's lack of virginity and says:

Rash lover, speak what pleasure hath
Thy spring in such an aftermath?

Those of you who have read The Etymologicon will know that the Rolling Stones are named after an implement for keeping your lawn nice and flat. So, the fact that they did an album called Aftermath is doubly appropriate. In fact, I'm developing a theory that the entire works of Jagger and Richards are coded references to gardening.

P.S. I am scribbling a new book and doing so so furiously that I fear I shall have to bring the blog down to three posts a week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, which is still a lot if you think about it. Having said that, there will be a post tomorrow, for my laziness is matched only by my inconsistency.

Hotbed

While listening to the radio yesterday, it occurred to me that I had no idea what a hotbed was. I've heard the phrase a thousand times (usually in relation to sin), and it turns out that I've seen them too. I simply didn't know what they were.

A hotbed is a flowerbed enclosed in a glass case. This bed is heated, usually by the fermentation of manure, to make a flowerbed that is hot and therefore good for growing things in (but not, unfortunately for sinning in).

Here is a diagram:

As you can see, there is little room for those who like their sins spacious. There is, though, another sort of hotbed. Apparently in the cheapest of cheap American lodging houses one can, or could, be given a bed that was used by different people in rotation. The hotness here is the same hotness that warms a hot-desk, and is ideal for sinners.

Neither hotbeds nor hot-desks, though, have much to do with a hotseat, which was, originally, the electric chair.

Godwottery

There was a truly terribly Victorian poet called T.E. Brown. His verse is filled with the three Victorian vices: unnecessary piety, unnecessary children, and unnecessary medievalisms. His most famous work is probably the following:

A GARDEN is a lovesome thing, God wot!
Rose plot,
Fringed pool,
Ferned grot—
The veriest school
Of peace; and yet the fool
Contends that God is not—
Not God ! in gardens ! when the eve is cool?
Nay, but I have a sign;
‘Tis very sure God walks in mine.

Reading that first line is like fighting George Foreman. There's the little jab of lovesome and just as you're disorientated, wondering why it wasn't lovely or pleasant - BAM! - you're hit full in the face by God wot!

God wot meant God knows and was used for emphasis in the seventeenth century, but what's it doing here? It reads like the stained glass in a Victorian porch and then you realise it's only there to rhyme with the affected grot, and then with the clumsy construction God is not. Dear me, and pass the laudanum.

But this terrible poem became terribly popular. It was anthologised in such works as Ye gardeyne boke: a collection of quotations instructive and sentimental, gathered and arranged and Scouting for Girls: The Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts. It's the sort of thing Mr Pooter probably wrote above his garden door.

So famous did the line become that, in the 1930s, it gave a new and wonderful word to the English language: godwottery.

Godwottery can mean two things. First, it can mean the use of affected archaisms, and verily, the poet that useth godwottery is a tosser, iwis.

Godwottery can also mean tacky gardening. The collective noun for a horde of gnomes and charming water-features is godwottery. Here, for example, is Anthony Burgess writing in 1960:

...little girls in pinafores of an earlier age shnockled over stained half-eaten apples; all the boys seemed to have cleft palates. Still, it seemed to me far healthier than the surrounding suburb. Who shall describe their glory, those semi-detacheds with the pebble-dash all over the blind-end walls, the tiny gates which you could step over, the god-wottery in the toy gardens?

And, before you ask: No. I have no idea what shnockled means. Any guesses?

The Inky Fool's garden needed a little work