Orgiophant

An orgiophant is, according to the OED, an overseer of orgies. I'm not sure whether this is a useful word for you, dear reader, but I thought I'd tell you in case the word ever popped up in the jobs section of the classified ads.

I imagine that your main duties would be getting the orgial started, as an orgial is a song sung at orgies. That and looking after the clothes.

Anyway, it's etymologically appropriate as orgy is probably related to the Greek ergon meaning to work. If this is so, then orgy would be connected to ergonomics (the study of people at work), and I suppose that would be another concern of the orgiophant.

The Inky Fool knew this would be a tricky one.

Dark Cully

A dark cully is defined in Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue thuslyly:

DARK CULLY. A married man who keeps a mistress, whom he visits only at night, for fear of discovery.

I rather like the idea of this worried husband running around in the dark, bumping into things and fearing for his wife. It also reminds me of the fantastic passage in the biblical Book of Proverbs, even though here it is the other way around:

For at the window of my house I looked through my casement, And beheld among the simple ones, I discerned among the youths, a young man void of understanding,Passing through the street near her corner; and he went the way to her house, In the twilight, in the evening, in the black and dark night: And, behold, there met him a woman with the attire of an harlot, and subtil of heart. (She is loud and stubborn; her feet abide not in her house: Now is she without, now in the streets, and lieth in wait at every corner.) So she caught him, and kissed him, and with an impudent face said unto him, I have peace offerings with me; this day have I payed my vows. Therefore came I forth to meet thee, diligently to seek thy face, and I have found thee. I have decked my bed with coverings of tapestry, with carved works, with fine linen of Egypt. I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon. Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning: let us solace ourselves with loves. For the goodman is not at home, he is gone a long journey: He hath taken a bag of money with him, and will come home at the day appointed. With her much fair speech she caused him to yield, with the flattering of her lips she forced him. He goeth after her straightway, as an ox goeth to the slaughter, or as a fool to the correction of the stocks.


Whatever happened to girls like that?

The Inky Fool catches forty winks.

Doggess

This is from Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1811):

BITCH. A she dog, or doggess; the most offensive appellation that can be given to an English woman, even more provoking than that of whore, as may be gathered from the regular Billingsgate or St Giles' answer, 'I may be a whore, but can't be a bitch.'

And what I love most about all that is the word doggess.

Licking Lechers

It is, perhaps, appropriate that the English word lecher comes from the French for licker, although it may rather cramp the thoroughgoing lecher's style.

The French for lick is still lecher, which is why the French for window shopping is faire du lèche-vitrine, which literally means to go window licking.  Meanwhile over in English slang a window-licker is a rude way to refer to somebody who isn't right in the head.

It's also always amused me when talking to academics that, unless you have Olivier-like diction, lecher and lecture sound identical.

Utter Filth and Obscenity which Should be Burned

Read no further. The following post will be utterly obscene. Filth. Beginning to end lewdness and blueness. If you desperately need a respectable logophilic fix, click on the clever widget on the right and you can read all sorts of lovely etymologies in my brand new shiny book, The Etymologicon.

It's got the thirty pages of wonderful etymologies and, so far as I recall there's nothing obscene there at all. As The Observer correctly observed last Sunday, it's "The stocking filler of the season... How else to describe a book that explains the connection between Dom Pérignon and Mein Kampf." Only those who are beyond redemption should continue with this post.

Got that?

Fine, if you're a foul enough gutter-dweller, you may click on the jump break.

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.

Bints

There's a rather ungentlemanly term for a woman in Britain: bint. It doesn't mean anything in particular, it's just a synonym for woman that conveys, in the most vulgar way, that you don't like her. I had always assumed that it was thieve's cant or that the word had just appeared magically in some pub and then spread like around the country. But then I happened to be reading an article on the formation of Arabic surnames (as you do), and saw the magical words:

bint = daughter

So, I hurled myself at the OED and found that bint does indeed come from the Arabic. The phrase was popularised by servicemen returning from duty in Egypt during the Second World War, the bints of Egypt being (presumably) particularly beautiful. Indeed, in my Dictionary of Services Slang bint is still defined as girlfriend, and as a synonym for lush.

The Inky Fool out on the pull

Jestress

I've never liked the word comedienne. I don't know exactly why, but it bugs me. There's something about the faux Frenchiness of it. It might be condescendingly sexist, or it might be tediously feminist, and either way it rankles. So I was immensely pleased when I happened across the word jestress, which is simply the female form of jester.

By a pleasant etymological path, a jester was originally somebody who told gestes which were medieval romances. And gestes comes from the Latin gesta which meant deeds (e.g. the Gesta Francorum was The Deeds of the Franks). Gesta comes from the verb gerere which meant carry. And that's why when you carry a child you gestate.

But jesters can't gestate, only jestresses can do that.

Replaced

Poop-Noddy

A poop-noddy is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as:

Sexual intercourse (rare)

I don't know about you, dear reader, but I'm planning never to have sex again, it's pure poop-noddies from here on in. However, the origin of the word is rather curious. The OED refers you to noddypoop and noddypoop is simply a synonym for noddypoll.

Now a noddy is a fool and a poll is a head. That's why you have poll tax (a tax per head) poleaxe (an axe used for chopping heads) and tadpole (toad-head). So what has any of this got to do with sex?

Well, there's a sort of clue in Shakespeare's Pericles. There's a scene where two people who run a brothel are discussing how drab and diseased their prostitutes are:

Pandar: Thou sayest true; they're too unwholesome, o' conscience. The poor Transylvanian is dead, that lay with the little baggage.


BOULT: Ay, she quickly pooped him; she made him roast-meat for worms. But I'll go search the market.

You've definitely got a sexual context here, but poop seems to mean gave him syphilis, rather than sex. So I'm going to take a guess that poop-noddy isn't sex exactly, that it is, in fact, the act of cuckolding somebody. So if you have sex with somebody's wife you are pooping her noddy of a husband.

I could be wrong though. It could be to do with poop decks, which are owned by bad DJs.

Supply your own caption.

P.S. Why do elephants have big ears?
Because Noddy won't pay the ransom.

Rhinos, Viagra, Sanskrit Tigers and an Obscene Poem

Rhinos was the Greek word for nose. That's why a nose-job is rhinoplasty and a creature with a horn, or ceros, on its nose is a rhinoceros. Rhinoceroses (the Greek plural would, apparently, be rhinocerotes) have had a bad time, largely because of impotent chaps in China. Powdered rhino horn was believed to be an aphrodisiac and so black rhinos in particular were hunted to near extinction.

As an interesting scientific aside, I met a chap who runs a reserve for black rhinos in Africa somewhere. He had gone round the reserve sedating rhinos, drilling a hole in their horns and implanting a microchip so he could track them if they were poached. The result of this was that he ended up with a fair amount of pulverised rhino horn. He powdered it, drank it all and waited.

There was no effect.

Anyway, this chap was of the opinion that what had really saved the rhino from poached extinction was not the nature reserves or the microchips, but Viagra. Nobody needs or wants rhino horn any more, because they've got a drug that actually works.

Nobody is quite sure where the name Viagra comes from, but it seems an awfully odd coincidence that vyagra is the Sanskrit word for tiger. This would mean, if true, that the tiger saved the rhinoceros.

However, even if Viagra has saved the rhino, it has destroyed something far more beautiful. Nobody is going to write poems like this anonymous gem from the late seventeenth century. However, as it's just a little bawdy, I'll put it after a jump break. Click Read More if you're filth.

The Position of the Missionary



I was reading an anthropological work of 1929 called The Sexual Life of Savages,when I came across this passage:

When we go on a love making expedition we light our fire; we take our lime gourd (and chew betel-nut) we take our tobacco (and smoke it). Food we do not take, we would be ashamed to do so.We walk, we arrive at a large tree, we sit down, we search each other's heads and consume the lice, we tell the woman that we want to copulate. After it is over we return to the village.

Other than the betel-nut, that is my method precisely.

You may wonder, dear savage reader, why I was reading this and the answer is that I promised you a post on the missionary position and it is from Malinowski's Sexual Life of Savages that the term ultimately derives. However, the term appears to be a Big Mistake and a calumny on poor missionaries. Here are the two relevant passages:

Above all, the natives despise the European position and consider it unpractical and improper. The natives, of course, know it because white men frequently cohabit with native women, some even being married to them. But as they say: "The man overlies heavily the woman; he presses her heavily downwards, she cannot respond (ibilampu)."

Well, each to his own, I suppose. But you may well notice that there is no mention of missionaries in this passage. Nor do they pop up anywhere nearby. I checked. The missionary fashion doesn't appear until a hundred and something pages later and it's not a sexual position. Here's the full passage:

Even courting is conducted most decorously. Scenes of frequent occurrence in an public park in Europe, after dark or even before, would never be seen in a Trobriand village. Holding hands, leaning against each other, embracing. . . are not permitted to lovers in public. I observed once or twice that Yobukwa'u and his betrothed used to lie together on a mat in broad daylight decorously leaning against each other and holding hands, in a manner which we would find perfectly natural in a pair of lovers soon to be married. But when I mentioned this in discussing the whole subject with some natives, I was told at once that it was a new fashion and not correct according to old custom. Tokolibeba, once a famous Don Juan, now a peppery old conservative and stickler for proprieties, insisted that this was misinari si bubnela, "missionary fashion", one of those novel immoralities introduced by Christianity. He spoke with as much feeling and righteous indignation as the late Rev. C.M. Hyde of Honolulu might have against heathen pruriency.

So, you have the awkward European coital posture, and the scandalous European habit of hand-holding. They're described separately and are utterly distinct. Who could possibly confuse the two?

Alfred Kinsey, that's who. In a book of 1948 he refers to The Sexual Life of Savages thusly:

Malinowski. . . notes that caricatures of the English-American position are performed around the communal campfires, to the great amusement of the natives who refer to the position as the ‘missionary position’.

No. Malinowski does not. Not in the slightest. The missionary fashion he describes is holding hands. The sexual position he describes is the European position.

By such mistakes is language formed; and those poor missionaries can only weep at the injustice of it all.

The Inky Fool's sermon went down rather well.

P.S. This post was meant to come out on Friday, but a combination of technical problems and personal faineancy have delayed it until now.

National Gaiety

Thou seyst also, that if we make us gay...
That it is peril of oure chastitee

Said Chaucer six hundred and something years ago.

Aunt: Why are you wearing these clothes?
David: Because I just went gay, all of a sudden.

Thus the film Bringing Up Baby in 1938.

And then, quite suddenly, the word gay leapt out of the closet singing a showtune. This shift is usually dated to the beginning of the 1940s. But gay left its brothers behind. This from yesterday's Evening Standard describing some forthcoming nuptials:

...the gaiety and chutzpah will tend to be on the Middleton side.

Will it? My word! Who would have thought that our future queen was that way inclined? And the England manager too? Impossible! Not according to Sky Sports:

All hail Mr Capello then for a week in which he's been upsetting all and sundry with the gay abandon we've secretly grown to admire

Well, I'd say I'll be blowed but you might misunderstand my relationship with both Mr Capello and the Middletons. Blowed, not blown. What's peculiar here is that while the adjective gay shifted suddenly and irrevocably in meaning, the noun gaiety stayed exactly where it was, unaffected by the explosion. Nobody talks about Elton John's gaiety, and if they did we would assume that the chap was happy. Gay abandon can survive in football, of all sweaty and uncouth places, without anybody batting an eyelid. But gay? Gay is gay and bound to stay that way.

Strange how two forms of one word can split like that, but I suppose it all adds to the homosexuality of nations.

Angry gaiety

Bonny and Buxom

One final post on weddings. In Medieval wedding services the wife would promise the following:

I take thee, John, to be my wedded husband, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer and poorer, in sickness and health, to be bonny and buxom, in bed and at board, till death do us part, and thereto I plight thee my troth.

Now, this seems to our modern eyes to be a strange sort of promise. How could a wife guarantee that she would be buxom? Were thin women unable to marry in church? However, the word buxom has changed in meaning over the years. The first citation of buxom in the OED comes from the twelfth century and is defined as: Obedient; pliant; compliant, tractable. The sense then changed to happy, then to healthy, and thence to plump.

Meanwhile bonny comes from the French bon and the Latin bonus, both of which mean good. So a bonny and buxom wife was a good and obedient one, which is why it was eventually replaced by loving, honouring and obeying. There's even a sixteenth century reference to being "bonnaire and buxome to the Pope".

Anyway, this form of the service is still occasionally used. There's a story about it here.

Glory-Hole

I was relieved to read the Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable definition of Glory-Hole


A small room, cupboard or the like, where all sorts of odds and ends and junk are dumped.

The OED says that a glory hole can also be a sailor's cabin, or a glass-blower's kiln. I really wouldn't check the Urban Dictionary' s definition unless you have a mind inured to all depravity.

This shows approximately the same lewd development as peep show and felch.

Trix

Trix is a funny little suffix that only gets used occasionally. It means female, which is why a female aviator was an aviatrix, and why a female dominator is a dominatrix. I've heard the term editrix occasionally, but my favourite trix is a female hairdresser, who can be called a tonstrix.

Trix is also the reason that meretricious is such a confusing word, and so often misused. Meretricious sounds as though it should mean good and worthy, but in fact it means gaudy and flashy.

The reason for this oddness is that the Latin word mereo meant I deserve or I earn, and that's where we get merit from. However, a lady who earned was therefore called a meretrix, and, ancient Rome being what it was, there weren't that many ways that a lady could make a living besides prostitution, and that's what meretrix came to mean.

And from meretrix we got meretricious, which means tarted up.

Incidentally, what do you call a woman who can balance a pint of ale on her nose?

Beatrix.

Thomas Jefferson's Mysterious Shag

Here is a mystery that I can't solve, and it's driving me mad.

Shag is an English verb for the world's most popular pastime.

That it is English and not American was a central joke of Austin Powers, and a central flaw in the British marketing of the 1989 American romantic comedy Shag.

So I was astonished to read the first citation in the OED. It's not English, but American. We've lost! Not just any old American, either: the first recorded shag is by Thomas Jefferson.

He had shagged his mother and begotten himself on her body.

That, I think you'll agree, is a pretty weird sentence. But the OED, of course, don't give context. They just have the line and the name of the book. So I ran down to the British Library to get hold of a copy and see what Jefferson was talking about.

I don't know whether it's that Thomas Jefferson isn't important enough, but the British Library have never bothered to buy a copy. It's recent too. Though Jefferson wrote it in 1770, it wasn't published until Princeton University press put it out in 1997.

But it's not there, dammit. It's not on Google Books either. So I'm left with this one enigmatic sentence:

He had shagged his mother and begotten himself on her body.

What the hell does it mean? I've been thinking long and hard about this. Who shagged his mother? It's not Oedipus because he didn't beget himself. I looked up Sin and Death in Paradise Lost, but they don't fit.

Then I came up with an odd idea. Maybe he's talking about Jesus. If you consider Jesus and God the Father to be one, then Jefferson's Shag might make sense. It's more than a trifle blasphemous, but I can't see what else he could have been writing about.

Does anybody have a better suggestion?

Does anybody have access to the original book? Any Princetonians? Anybody with another copyright library round the corner?

If you do then it's:

Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson's Memorandum Books volume II (ed. James Bear and Lucia Stanton)
1997
Princeton University Press
ISBN 0-691-04719-7


And it's the entry for Dec. 27 1770 on page 200.

And it's urgent.


The Inky Fool wonders if he can get his money back.

UPDATE

Thanks to Mark (see comments) I now have a photo of the page in question. The context is that it's all brief notes of court cases in which Jefferson was acting:

Now, I'd like to say that that cleared it up, but really it's caskets within caskets. I still can't work out what the phrase means. It's hard enough to see who's suing who for what and why. The open vestry is mysterious. I assume the pl. is the plaintiff, but I can't be sure.

Ah well.

Thank you to everyone for suggestions.

Quicunque Vult and Athanasian Wenches

Some bits of slang are astonishing in their intricacy. For example, an Athanasian wench was an early nineteenth century term for a strumpet or messalinist. Why? Well there was a fourth century chap called Athanasius who was terribly holy and became a saint. He also wrote a creed called the Athanasian Creed. This creed opens:

Quicunque vult salvus esse, ante omnia opus est, ut teneat catholicam fidem...

Which translates roughly as:

Whoever wants to be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholic Faith.

The creed is often known by its first two words: Quicunque vult, Whoever wants to.

And thus from the Athanasian Creed to an Athanasian wench or whoever-wants-to girl. The phrase was mentioned in Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue back in 1811 where such a creature is gently described as:

A forward girl, ready to oblige every man that shall ask her.


It seems to me to be a term ripe for resurrection, as it manages to obscure its rather unkind meaning in a distant ecclesiastical reference. Why use a nasty term, when you can just say that a girl is Athanasian?

Try not to think about the cannon

Paraphilia

I've just discovered the word paraphilia, and I can't think how it has passed me by for so long. It's a lovely catch-all term for any sort of perversion or peccadillo. But there's something so soft and scientific about paraphilia that you would never guess its meaning, and that could be useful.

'Care for some paraphilia?'
'What?'
'Nothing.'

If anything, you might guess that paraphilia was related to paraphernalia; and it often is.

Wikipedia has a helpful and frightening list of paraphilias here. I have a much more beautiful list of paraphilias here.

The Inky Fool was still searching for his scuba diving gear

Miserable Biscuit-Whores

Once upon a time there was a Hebrew word migdal meaning tower. On the shores of Galilee was a fishing village with a tower.  This village was called Magdala Nunayya, which is usually translated as Magdala of the Fishes, but could equally be rendered The Fishy Tower.

From there, probably, came a lady called Mary from Magdalen. Mary was possessed by seven demons, until a chap called Jesus drove them all out and got crucified. Mary from Magdalen was present at the crucifixion and, by all accounts, was rather upset by it.

In pictures of the crucifixion she is shown crying, weeping, lamenting and ululating. So much did she weep, and so often was she painted, that her name, without the G, became a byword for misery. And that is way sad people are maudlin to this day.

The disappearing (and reappearing) G is also the reason that the Magdalen[e] Colleges Oxonian and Cantabrigian are both pronounced maudlin. And the people there are miserable.

It's also the reason that girls named after Saint Mary Fishy-Tower are called Madeleine. One such girl was Madeleine Paulmier, who was a French pastry chef* and invented a kind of biscuit called a madeleine. Marcel Proust ate a madeleine and it reminded him of lost time and he went to live with a swan.

Finally, Mary Fishtower's reputation took an nasty knock in 591, from which it has never recovered. Pope Gregory the Great gave a sermon in which he seems to have confused and compounded several different biblical ladies. He identified Mary Fishtower with the woman taken in adultery and therefore reckoned that she was a repentant prostitute. The confusion stuck and that is why Mary Magdalene is usually portrayed as voluptuous, if lachrymose, blonde. It is also the reason that Magdalenism means prostitution.

All of which means that one could theoretically have a maudlin and magdalenic Madeline eating a madeleine.

A typical day at Magdalene College

*This is disputed, and the OED doubts her existence.

The Language of Love

A young lady of my acquaintance asked a young chap, 'Are we seeing each other?' He frowned, glanced at a mirror and observed that his eyesight was fine. Was hers?

The terror of, and yearning for, labels have skewed the lover's lexicon. Euphemism and exaggeration have stolen from it all semblance of logic. All the following sentences are comprehensible, if utterly illogical:

We've been going out for so long that we always stay in.


My lover isn't in love with me. It's purely sexual.


My mistress does as she's told.


We've been on a few dates, but we're not dating.


I don't get on with my sixty-four-year-old girlfriend.


I'm not getting any sleep since we started sleeping together.

And thus do meanings split and fracture. The phrase divorces the verb. The verb cheats on the noun.

The Inky Fool playing it cool