Ah Big Yaws?

Having been in South Africa for all of a few hours, I have, of course, bought myself a dictionary. I can't help it and I admit that I have a problem. In this case I have bought a copy of Ah Big Yaws? A Guard to Sow Theffricun Innglissh by Rawbone Malong, which helpfully renders English phrases into South African pronunciation. For example, the title means "I beg yours", as in pardon.

The idea is that if a Woozer says "Big poured in?", you should and could reply "Ah big yaws."

As the book itself explains "Wyall, uttsa saw-toffa-kine-doffa guard to yow peeble spick."

Just say it aloud and it'll all make sense. In a few months, I'll be fluent.

Waftage

 

 I'm flying to South Africa tomorrow to take part in the Open Book Festival. This involved numerous bits of paperwork and e-tickets and the like, none of which, to my vast misery, contained the word waftage.

Waftage was originally transportation by boat, specifically of course by a sailboat which is wafted by the wind across the alliterative water. But it also therefore means anything that can travel through the air and was being applied to witches and their broomsticks from the mid seventeenth century. A journalist of 1834 describing insects wrote:

Forest flies, ephemerals all like ourselves—but happier far in their airy waftage or watery voyaging, than the vain race of man!

And that's roughly the style in which all airlines' websites should be written.

Anyway, if any readers are in Cape Town for the next few days, here's a link to the events I'll be doing.

17 Words for Nooky

Somebody else has been reading Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, and has made a list of seventeen words for what I like to call carnal confederacy. The link is here.

A tip of the hat to the Antipodean.

Qualms

Somebody mentioned having "no qualms" about something on Saturday night, and it made me wonder what a qualm actually was. A quick check in the dictionary told me that a qualm could be the cry of a raven. But the qualm of conscience turned out to be one of those weakening words, like naughty.

Back in Old English qualm meant violent death, pestilence and plague. In fact, a qualm was anything that was monstrously and bloodily horrific. A qualm-house was a torture chamber, a qualm-stow was a place of execution.

Then, in the sixteenth century, it started to mean a period of suffering, like a bout of fever. Then it began to mean a brief illness, and then a faint feeling of discomfort. And it's from that last meaning that we get the modern ever-so-delicate qualm of conscience.

This means, that you can have no qualms about committing qualms.

Now, I'm off to a qualm-house to feel qualmish.

Many qualms and none.

This is another repost, until I'm digitally remastered.

Sulking in the Boudoir

A repost, as I still can't type.

A lady's boudoir is where she sulks.

Once upon a time there was a French word bouder meaning to sulk or pout and boudoir is simply the sulk-room, like a panic-room but much moodier.

Bouder is probably imitative of puffing your cheeks out, because melancholy is so often accompanied by windy suspirations of forced breath. In exasperation you puff out your cheeks, then you blow the air outwards, perhaps biting your lower lip and making an ffff sound. The whole sound could be transcribed as huff, hence being in a huff.

The first ever person to be tetchy was Juliet (as in Romeo). Her wet nurse decided to wean Juliet by putting wormwood oil on her breast. Wormwood is one of the bitterest tastes in the world and the poor baby did not like it:

For I had then laid wormwood to my dug,
Sitting in the sun under the dove-house wall;
My lord and you were then at Mantua:--
Nay, I do bear a brain:--but, as I said,
When it did taste the wormwood on the nipple
Of my dug and felt it bitter, pretty fool,
To see it tetchy and fall out with the dug!

Incidentally, wormwood has nothing to do with either worms or wood. If you put wormwood into alcohol a chemical called thujone is released which is a rather effective painkiller. The old Germans referred to it as man-courage or wer-mut. Wer was man - as in werewolf or man-wolf - and mut was courage as in modern English mood.

The Inky Fool throws a party

Ham & High Literary Festival

I'll be doing a little thingy at the Ham & High Literary Festival in North London this Sunday at four o'clock. More details and tickets available at this website. Basically, I'll be talking about blogs and books and the long dusty road between them, along with Jen Campbell of Weird Things Customers Say In Bookshops fame.

A Picture Paints A Word

The best possible thing you can do today is to follow this link to a series of obscure and archaic words with pretty pictures illustrating them.