And More

By following this link.

More Horologicon

The Daily Mail being a daily thing, there's more digested Horologicon to be read today. You can find out about everything from nod-crafty to wamblecropt. Just follow this link.

The Daily Mail

When I first heard the word blackmail I was only a child. I assumed that it involved letters that arrived in black envelopes, possibly posted down the chimney. I was, as I usually am, utterly wrong. For the mail in blackmail comes from an old word for payment or rent. In fact, there used to be silver-mail (payment in silver) and burrow mail (rent for land) and all sorts of other lovely mails. But none of them have anything to do with chain mail or The Daily Mail, which has started serialising The Horologicon today.

Yes! My beautiful book! The handsome Horologicon! It's being serialised in the Daily Mail. So you can read extracts from it online right here. It's even got pretty illustrations and everything.

To remind the forgetful and edify the innocent, I've written a book called The Horologicon, which is about the strangest and most beautiful words in the English language, arranged by the hour of the day when they will be most useful to you. Today's Mail is running extracts from 6am to 10. Read it instantly.

Look! A proper illustration of something I've written.

Club and Club

It's a funny little thing that a golf club can either be a nine iron used to hit a ball, or an organisation that you join because you like playing golf. Similarly, somebody could be described as clubbable because they're the sort of social chap who's welcome in any gentleman's club or because they could easily be hit over the head with a club.

What is the connection? The medieval meaning of club was big stick used to hit things with, the sort of thing slouching cavemen are usually depicted with. However, if you don't have a club of your own, you can always make one. The simplest way to do this is mentioned in a 1625 passage about people warding off elephants:

Many times they fall upon the elephants which come to feed where they be, and so beate them with their clubbed fists, and pieces of wood, that they will runne roaring away from them.

You can make a club out of anything, even your hair. Ladies in the eighteenth century would often wear their hair in a club, which is to say that it wrapped together into what we'd call a bun on top of their heads. And metaphorically, you can wrap people together to make them one powerful object, like a club.

The sense development here is, to be honest, pretty damned obscure. Maybe the haircut was the bridge or maybe the sense of a group of soldiers formed into one blunt and brutal club. But pretty much everybody agrees that the idea of a club of people is that metaphorically they have come together like the instrument carried by a slouching caveman.

So a golf club and a golf club are, etymologically, one and the same.

Both are now weapons

Pneumatico-Logistics

A reader has asked what the relationship is between pneumatics and pneumonia, and it's more fun than I'd thought. Both of them in their common form relate to air. Pneumatics uses air to drive pistons and the like, pneumonia is a disease of the lungs and affects their ability to breathe air. So far so simple.

They both come from the Greek word pneumon, which meant either breath or spirit. For that matter spirit means either breath or spirit. It comes from the Latin spiro, or breathe, and still survives in respire and respiratory diseases, such as pneumonia.

The fun thing is that when you look up pneumatic in the OED, the first definition is this:


Belonging or relating to spirit or spiritual existence; spiritual.
Chiefly in the context of New Testament theology.

That's from 1624, and pneumatic doesn't get its engineering meaning until thirty years later. One of the citations (from 1899) has:

The Gospel of St. John—the pneumatic gospel, as it was called, or gospel of religious genius.

Pneumatic seems to have kept its spiritual meaning and, in the nineteenth century, Jeremy Bentham invented the lovely word pneumatico-hedonistics which means:

 ...the branch of study that deals with spiritual or mental pleasures (as distinguished from those of the body)

And it turns out that I am much more devoted to somatico-hedonistics: "those branches of art and science which, as above, have for their objects those modifications of pleasure, which have the body for their seat."

But the funnest pneumo-word in the OED is this:

 Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis n. (also pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis)  [compare pneumonoconiosis n.] a word invented (prob. by Everett M. Smith (born 1894), president of the National Puzzlers' League in 1935) in imitation of polysyllabic medical terms, alleged to mean ‘a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine sand and ash dust’ but occurring only as an instance of a very long word.

The Inky Fool goes for a spin

Days for the Diary

Diurnal, meaning daily, and diary, meaning a record of days, both come from the same Latin root dies. However, that is irrelevant to me at the moment. My diary has been given to me by my almighty publishers and here are all the events, talks and signings that I'm meant to be doing until Christmas with my lovely, shiny, blue-covered book, The Horologicon.

At each place, as I understand, I shall give talk and a reading lasting about forty minutes or so and then take questions and sign books, just to prove that I wrote them. If you, dear reader, would like to come along, that would be charming.

NOVEMBER
Saturday 10th, Blackwells, Park Street, BristolPlease call 0117 927 6602 for more information for ask in store.

Wednesday 14th, 7pm, Blackwells, Broad Street, Oxford – Entry £3
To purchase tickets visit the Customer Service Department, Second Floor or call 01865 333623.

Thursday 15th Heffers, Trinity Street, Cambridge – Entry £3
To purchase tickets ask a member of staff or call 01223 463 200.

Friday 16th, venue TBC, hosted by Topping Books ElyPlease call 01353 645005 or email ely@toppingbooks.co.uk for more information.

Monday 19th, 7pm, Waterstones, Albion Street, LeedsPlease call 0843 290 8443 for more information or ask in store.

Tuesday 20th, 6pm, Waterstones, Saddler Street Durham – Entry £2Tickets are available from the shop and redeemable against purchase of the book on the night. Please call 0191 383 1488 for more information or ask in store.

Wednesday 21st, Blackwells University Bookshop, Percy Street, NewcastlePlease call 191 232 6421 for more information or ask in store.

Thursday 22nd, Blackwells, South Bridge, EdinburghPlease call 0131 622 8222 for more information or ask in store. 

Wednesday 28th, Waterstones, Promenade, CheltenhamPlease call 0843 290 8227 for more information or ask in store.

Thursday 29th, 7pm, Mr B’s Emporium of Reading Delights, John Street, BathPlease call 01225 331155 or email books@mrbsemporium.com for more information or ask in store.

Friday 30th, 7pm, Wanstead Library, Spratt Hall Road, London – Entry £5Tickets are available from Newham Books or by calling 0208 708 400.

DECEMBER
Wednesday 5th December, 7:30pm, West End Lane Books, West End Lane, London – Free entryPlease reserve your seat via Twitter (@WELBooks), by calling 0207 431 3770, emailing info@welbooks.co.uk or ask in store.

Saturday 8th December, Booka Books, Church Street, OswestryPlease call 01691 662244 or email mail@bookabookshop.co.uk for more information or ask in store.

Wednesday 12th December, 7:30pm, Chepstow Books, St Mary Street, Chepstow – Entry £4Ticket price redeemable against book purchase at the event. Please call  01291 625 011 or email shop@chepstowbooks.co.uk for more information or ask in store.

Thursday 13th December, Waterstones New Street, BirminghamPlease call 0843 290 8149 for more information or ask in store.

Friday 14th December, Warwick Books, Market Place, Warwick – Entry £4Please call 01926 499939 for more information or ask in store.

A typical book signing with the Inky Fool

Mayday! M'aidez!

I was reminded last night that the distress call Mayday is merely an Englished spelling of the French m'aidez, which means Help me.

While I'm here, I should, perhaps, point out that SOS doesn't stand for anything. It's simply very easy to transmit in Morse Code. When SOS was thought up, there was an alternative suggestion that the signal should be CQD, standing for Come Quickly, Distress, but it was too hard to transmit.