Inquilinate

The word inquilinate is defined in the dear old OED as:


To dwell in a strange place.

I'm not sure if Clerkenwell counts. As the poet John Oldham wrote in 1680:

‘Tis a long way to where I dwell,
At farther end of Clerkenwell:
There in a garret near the sky,
Above five pairs of stairs I lie.

Which, other than the precise number of stairs, describes me perfectly.

That the OED is not able to quote a single usage of inquilinate proves that every man's home is ordinary to him.

Inquilination

Christmas in Bedlam

My life, my flat and my diary are all utter bedlam, which is rather appropriate for Christmas. You see, bedlam is simply a variant form of Bethlehem.

The Wycliffite Bible of the fourteenth century says that Jesus was born in Bedleem, but the King James Version took us back to Bethlehem because it's closer to the Hebrew. However, the two pronunciations were pretty much interchangeable until the end of the sixteenth century.

So the chaos and pandemonium of Christmas? That is down to the Hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem for the poor distracted people of London. Distracted in this context means mad, for St Mary of Bedlam was the original English madhouse. As the C17th playwright and inmate Nathaniel Lee put it

They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.

As the Bethlehem/Bedlam hospital was the most famous madhouse in Britain it easily became a byword for any disordered place filled with poor distracted people like me.

The reasons for my distraction are legion. The Etymologicon is still number one in the Amazon charts, which is playing havoc with my liver. This success is despite my writing, and purely because it has been read so well by Hugh Dennis, whose last instalment can be listened to here. And as a result of all this curiousness I've just been interviewed for this evening's Channel 4 news. Link will follow.

The Bethlem Royal Hospital still exists, is still a psychiatric hospital, and is now based in Bromley in South London.

And here is Hogarth's great painting of Bedlam Hospital:

The Inky Fool checks into his hotel

Queer Carey Street

Those of you who follow the news (and, as Evelyn Waugh said, News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.) will, likely as not, have come across the fabulous outrage occasioned by Robert Peston referring to insolvency as "Queer Street".* This has led to lots of people talking about the etymology of the phrase. So I shall throw my proverbial hat into the lexicographic ring.

Queer Street first pops up at the beginning of the nineteenth century and is defined in Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue as:

Wrong. Improper. Contrary to one's wish. It is queer street, a cant phrase, to signify that it is wrong or different to our wish.

However, by the mid-nineteenth century it had come to mean broke, insolvent, penurious and heading for bankruptcy. I would take a guess that this shift in meaning comes down to the Bankruptcy Court which was established on Carey Street in London in the early 1840s. There was certainly a phrase, listed in the OED and Brewers of "being on Carey Street" meaning that you were heading for bankruptcy. The OED doesn't record this phrase until the 1920s, but I just found this description of an artist's predicament from the 1880s:

For the moment, he keenly felt the disgusting cramped situation of Carey Street, which compelled him to peep at his objects, through the rails of his apartment : for the moment, also, he felt the immediate necessity of procuring the gold talismanic key to give him once more liberty, again to wander amidst the beauties of nature : it was then that MORLAND painted for money...

And if I can backdate the phrase forty years, somebody else ought to be able to take it further.
So I shall stick my neck out and make a claim for convergence. An existing term, Queer Street, became an alternative name for the site of the new Bankruptcy Court, Carey Street. All of which allows me to use this photograph.

It's a rich man's world, but a poor man's heaven.

*Phew, what a jormungandrian sentence.
P.S. Photographic credits to The Antipodean.

Indians Entirely Responsible for the Looting!

Well, in the strictly etymological sense that loot comes from the Hindi word lut, meaning plunder.

There has been much argument in Britain over whether the naughty fellows of last week should be called protesters, rioters or looters. I object to all three terms. Looter is callow neologism dating from only 1858. The only acceptable name is the original eighteenth century term lootie-wallah.

I demand that lootie-wallah is brought back into the language Right Now, and if my demands are not met I shall unleash an apocalypse of violence and plunder the like of which has never even been conjectured.

Personally, I'm going to wait till it kicks off in Marylebone and then loot the hell out of Daunt Books. Get me some more Tennyson.

How could they?

Merdurinous

Merdurinous means composed of dung and urine, and if you can't find a use for that word, you have too few enemies. Merdurinous is pronounced with the stress on the second syllable, which makes it a particularly satisfying word to say or shout. I've tested.

It was coined by Ben Jonson in a poem called The Famous Voyage, which I thoroughly recommend you read. It's a mock epic about two men who take a boat up the Fleet River in London. The Fleet River wasn't exactly a river, it was more of a ditch, and in effect an open sewer and the smelliest stinkiest place in Elizabethan London.

Jonson's poem is about two men who sail up it for a bet, just to see if their noses can take it. There's also an informative little digression of fast food in renaissance London, which shouldn't be read by any cat lovers:

Cats there lay divers had been flayed and roasted
And, after mouldy grown, again were toasted;
Then selling not, a dish was ta'en to mince 'em,
But still, it seemed, the rankness did convince 'em

The Fleet River has now been covered over and filled in, but the name survives. When people refer to the British press as Fleet Street, it's a metonym for the street that was once a river.

Jonson's full poem is here.

The truth about Fleet Street

Bless You, Autocorrect

The original well

Those of you who possess an iPhone will know about Autocorrect, a system that automatically replaces a strange word with a more familiar one. This plays havoc with my prose as bathycolpian is corrected to Bathe impish and malbolge comes out as Map Olga. There's a whole website called Damn You, Autocorrect that is devoted to such amusing alterations. However, it doesn't always get it wrong.

On Saturday I was in Clerkenwell, which is a bit of London mentioned by T.S. Eliot:

Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate.

And I tried to send a text message saying where I was. But Autocorrect was having none of it. Clerkenwell was, according to Autocorrect, Clerks Well. And the odd thing is that that is absolutely right.

Thomas á Beckett had a subdeacon called William Fitzstephen who wrote a brief description of the City of London in 1174 praising "the respectability of its citizens, and the propriety of their wives". He also describes how:

There are also in the northern suburbs of London springs of high quality, with water that is sweet, wholesome, clear, and "whose runnels ripple amid pebbles bright". Among which Holywell, Clerkenwell and St. Clement's Well have a particular reputation; they receive throngs of visitors and are especially frequented by students and young men of the city, who head out on summer evenings to take the country air.

The description was written in Latin, but the old English for students was clerken, from which we get the modern English clerk (and clerical). So the well where students hung around on summer evenings was the clerks' well, or Clerkenwell.

But Autocorrect knew that already.

The well, incidentally is still there, now contained within an office block called Well Court (pictured). And while we're on the subject of clerks, here's an interesting little detail about a poem by Auden.

Auden once wrote a poem called The Fall of Rome about the end of a civilisation that is, nominally, ancient Rome. However, there are all sorts of modern details (like trains and musclebound marines) that suggest he was thinking about a more modern civilisation. But which?


Auden was an Englishman who had emigrated to America so he knew that in Britain we pronounce clerk to rhyme with ark, but in America clerk rhymes with Turk. So the fifth stanza of this poem shows exactly which civilisation he's thinking about.

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.


Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.


Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.


Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.


Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.


Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.


Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

God, I love that last stanza. Incidentally, cerebrotonic means:

Designating or characteristic of a type of personality which is introverted, intellectual, and emotionally restrained, classified by Sheldon as being associated with an ectomorphic.

Clerkenwell Gaol (or maybe Jail)

Hallmarks

Here is a picture of Goldsmith's Hall in the City of London. Why is that of interest? Because once upon a time, if you had a bit of gold or silver that you wanted to sell, you had to take it to the Goldsmith's Guild where they would test its purity. They would then stamp it with the mark of the Goldsmith's Hall, which guaranteed its value to a buyer.

In the racy classic An Exact Abridgement of All the Statutes of King William and Queen Mary (1700) it says:

Any Persons, Natives or Foreigners, who by themselves or others shall bring any sort of Wrought Plate between 1 Jan 1696. and 4 November, 1697. to any of his Majesty's Mints, or to such Persons as shall be Authorized to Recieve the same, shall be then and there paid for such Plate at 5 s. 4 d. per ex. And all such Plate, having the Goldsmiths Hall Mark and Workman's Mark, shall be Received as Sterling Silver*

And that, my child, is where the word hallmark comes from. It's the mark of quality given out in Goldsmith's Hall. It's also why the building in the picture is the origin of all those greetings cards and the American TV channel.

Well, in fact, that building wasn't erected until the 1820s. In William and Mary's time it looked like the picture below.

By 1809 the word was being used figuratively to mean a characteristic stamp. So a sermon could have the hallmark of orthodoxy. Thus the cards.

*The OED doesn't have a citation for hallmark until 1721, and nothing for the figurative use until 1864. Do I get a prize?

Pantechnicon

Once upon a time, 180 years ago, a shop was built in Belgravia, on Motcomb Street. It was a shop like no other, because it was going to sell everything. It displayed goods manufactured by all conceivable kinds of craftsmen: carpenters, potters, painters, sculptors, glassblowers, silversmiths, goldsmiths, blacksmiths and (I assume) whitesmiths.

Then, as now (as ever shall be) a shop in Belgravia needed a fancy, filigreed, highfalutin name. So the Seth Smith brothers who had built it called it The Pantechnicon, which is Greek for Pertaining To All Of The Crafts, or Universally Crafty.

The shop did not do well. After a while they converted it into a storage place for people who had nowhere to put their furniture. All over Victorian London the great horse-drawn wagons would trundle, taking beds, divans, sofas and seats to and from the Pantechnicon. As with modern moving vans they had the name of the company- Pantechnicon - painted on the side.

The furniture storage business did very well until February 1874 when the Pantechnicon burnt to the ground. However, it had been around for long enough for the vast removal wagons to become universally known as pantechnicons. They were massive, twelve foot long and seven foot wide.

Nothing is left of the Pantechnicon today but the facade, and a nearby pub of the same name. But it still survives in the language as the name for a large vehicle that is just outside my window.

Not if you're American, though. I don't think Americans call them pantechnicons.

Lofts, Attics and Garrets

To move house I had to clear out the loft. A loft is, of course, aloft. It is up in the air and therefore cognate with the German Lufthansa and Luftwaffe (which just means air force).

Loft is a far older word than attic. Attics are Attic because they're Greek. In a Greek temple you have lots of big columns. Sometimes you have another smaller set of columns on top. They are characteristic of classical Athenian architecture and Athens was the capital of Attica.

The technical term for a small section at the top of a temple then became a jocular term for the small space above a house. The word was first used in this sense by Daniel Defoe in his Tour of Great Britain, in which he also described Hampstead (which I am leaving) thus:

But it must be confest, 'tis so near heaven, that I dare not say it can be a proper situation, for any but a race of mountaineers...

Attics should be used for storing mad women and cash.

Garrets (which originally meant watchtowers) should be used for storing artists.

The Inky Fool leaving Hampstead

Lionized Lions (and Lionel Singh)

According to The Independent Banksy "is so lionised by the art world establishment (and now by the movie world too) that his edge risks becoming blunted."

You might deduce from this, dear reader, that Banksy is suffering from leontiasis ossea - a grotesque medical condition where the bones of the face grow and grow and grow until you start to look like a lion - and indeed if this were the case then it would explain why Banksy never appears in public. But The Independent was, of course, referring to the Tower of London.

The lion is half of the Royal coat of arms, which is a little odd as lions are not and never have been native to these shores (although I'm reliably informed that unicorns roam wild in East Anglia). This bothered Henry I who decided to have some imported and kept at the Tower of London in the Royal Menagerie along with a few camels (history does not record how the camels felt about this).

In the eighteenth century the lions were made available to the gawping public. You had to either pay thruppence to get in or just bring along a cat or dog to feed to the hungry attractions - a policy that could be usefully adopted by London Zoo. The lions were the tourist draw in London. As with the Eiffel Tower in Paris, The Colosseum in Rome or the NEC in Birmingham, so a trip to London was incomplete without having "seen the lions" which became a phrase equivalent to "seeing the sights". Lion became a term for anything worth going to stare at. The lions were the celebrities - sought after and gawped upon - and so celebrities began (in 1715) to be called lions. Lion meant celebrity. By 1800 famous writers were being called literary lions and celebrity spotters came to be called lion-hunters*, all because of those lions in the Tower.

Being a lion, as any celebrity will tell an interviewer, is a tiresome business. Nobody likes to be gawped at. It's embarrassing. Walter Scott, a literary lion, said of the London celebrity party circuit in 1809:

If I encounter men of the world, men of business, odd or striking characters of professional excellence in any department, I am in my element, for they cannot lionize me without my returning the compliment and learning something from them.

He invented the word and the word stuck, and that's why Banksy has been lionised. It's all the fault of Henry I and Walter Scott.

It only remains for me to tell you that Lionel means little lion and that Singh means lion, so in the unlikely event of somebody being called Lionel Singh I would be ridiculously pleased. Oh, and dandelions are lions' teeth. Oh, and it's a symbol of Saint Jerome.
 

The paw little thing

P.S. There seems to be no consistency in English spelling between lionise and lionize, I have servilely followed the dictionary.

 

*Hence, since you ask, Mrs Leo Hunter in Pickwick Papers