Mark Forysth's Gemel Edition

The Etymologicon and The Horologicon ebook bundle

Mark Forsyth

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2012
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• eBook ISBN:
  9781848315907
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Etymologicon springs from Mark Forsyth's Inky Fool blog about the strange connections between words. The Horologicon – which means 'a book of things appropriate to each hour' - follows a day in the life of unusual, beautiful and forgotten English words.

Contents

About the author

Acknowledgements

The Inky Fool blog

Epigraph

Dedication

Preambulation

Chapter 1

6 a.m. – Dawn

Alarm clocks – trying to get back to sleep – feigning illness

Chapter 2

7 a.m. – Waking and Washing

Slippers – looking in the mirror – self-loathing – lavatory – shower – hair – shaving – brushing your teeth

Chapter 3

8 a.m. – Dressing and Breakfast

Clothes – make-up – breakfast – preparing to depart

Chapter 4

9 a.m. – Commute

Weather – transport – car – bus – train – arriving late

Chapter 5

10 a.m. – The Morning Meeting

Staying awake – listening – arguing – yes, no, who cares? – mugwumps – keeping quiet

Chapter 6

11 a.m. – Taking a Break

Coffee – gossip – incredulity – cigarette

Chapter 7

Noon – Looking as Though You’re Working

Effortlessness – sales and marketing – emails – approaching bankruptcy – asking for a raise

Chapter 8

1 p.m. – Lunch

Where to eat – who pays – The Free Lunch – eating – eating turtles – indigestion

Chapter 9

2 p.m. – Returning to Work

Nap – phoning family members

Chapter 10

3 p.m. – Trying to Make Others Work

Finding them – shouting at them

Chapter 11

4 p.m. – Tea

Chapter 12

5 p.m. – Actually Doing Some Work

Panicking – deadlines – giving up – stealing from your employer – leaving

Chapter 13

6 p.m. – After Work

Strolling around – arranging your evening

Chapter 14

7 p.m. – Shopping

Disorientation – ecstasy in the supermarket

Chapter 15

8 p.m. – Supper

Dietary requirements – seating arrangements – making conversation – avoiding conversation – hogging the wine – finishing supper – avoiding the bill

Chapter 16

9 p.m. – Drinking

Persuading others to – choosing a bar – opening the door – approaching the bar – ordering – drinking – the results of drinking – empties – forms of drunkenness

Chapter 17

10 p.m. – Wooing

On the prowl – observing your target – the chat-up – dancing – kissing – making rash proposals of marriage – fanfreluching – rejection

Chapter 18

11 p.m. – Stumbling Home

Setting off – getting lost – falling over – attempts to sleep outdoors

Chapter 19

Midnight – Nostos

Making too much noise upon returning – attempting to work – undressing – arguing with spouse – falling asleep

Epilogue

Appendix

Paralipomenon – The Drinker’s Dictionary

Dictionaries and Idioticons

Index

The Etymologicon Audiobook

About the author

Mark Forsyth is a writer, journalist, proof-reader, ghostwriter and pedant. He was given a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary as a christening present and has never looked back. In 2009 he started the Inky Fool blog, in order to share his heaps of useless information with a verbose world. He is also the author of the Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller The Etymologicon, published in 2011 by Icon Books.

The author would like to thank Jane Seeber and Andrea Coleman for their judicious advice, sensible suggestions and peculiar patience.

This book is the papery child of the Inky Fool blog, which was started in 2009. Though almost all the material is new, some of it has been adapted from its computerised parent. The blog is available at http://blog.inkyfool.com/ which is a part of the grander whole www.inkyfool.com.

Therefore doth Job open his mouth in vain; he multiplieth words without knowledge.

Job 35, verse 16

For my parents

Preambulation

Tennyson once wrote that:

Words, like Nature, half reveal

And half conceal the soul within.

This book is firmly devoted to words of the latter half. It is for the words too beautiful to live long, too amusing to be taken seriously, too precise to become common, too vulgar to survive in polite society, or too poetic to thrive in this age of prose. They are a beautiful troupe hidden away in dusty dictionaries like A glossary of words used in the wapentakes of Manley and Corringham, Lincolnshire or the Descriptive Dictionary and Atlas of Sexology (a book that does actually contain maps). Of course, many of them are in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), but not on the fashionable pages. They are the lost words, the great secrets of old civilisations that can still be useful to us today.

There are two reasons that these words are scattered and lost like atmic fragments. First, as already observed, they tend to hide in rather strange places. But even if you settle down and read both volumes of the Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English cover to cover (as I, for some reason, have) you will come across the problem of arrangement, which is obstinately alphabetical.

The problem with the alphabet is that it bears no relation to anything at all, and when words are arranged alphabetically they are uselessly separated. In the OED, for example, aardvarks are 19 volumes away from the zoo, yachts are 18 volumes from the beach, and wine is 17 volumes from the nearest corkscrew. One cannot simply say to oneself, ‘I wonder whether there’s a word for that’ and turn to the dictionary. One chap did recently read the whole OED, but it took him a year, and if you tried that every time you were searching for the perfect word, you might return to find that the conversation had moved on.

The world is, I am told, speeding up. Everybody dashes around at a frightening pace, teleconferencing and speed-dating. They bounce around between meetings and brunches like so many coked-up pin-balls, and reading whole dictionaries is, for busy people like you, simply not feasible. Time is money, money is time, and these days nobody seems to have much of either.

Thus, as an honourable piece of public service, and as my own effort to revive the world’s flagging economy through increased lexical efficiency, I have put together a Book of Hours, or Horologicon. In medieval times there were books of hours all over the place. They were filled with prayers so that, at any time of day, the pious priest could whip out his horologicon, flip to the appropriate page and offer up an orison to St Pantouffle, or whoever happened to be holy at the time. Similarly, my hope with this book is that it will be used as a work of speedy reference. ‘What’s the word?’ you will think to yourself. Then you will check your watch, pull this...

Table of contents

• Half-title page
• Copyright information
• Full-title page
• Contents
• The Etymologicon
• The Horologicon
• The Etymologicon Audiobook