15 Forgotten English Words You Should Know

[AdamSmith]

One or two of these promise to be quite useful.

15 Forgotten English Words You Should Know

Please note: Some are mildly disturbing. But it’s mostly just a wonder and a joy that these words exist

By Katy Steinmetz @katysteinmetzOct. 09, 201317 Comments

Have you ever faked being sick to get the day off from work? Well, you were egroting. Have you ever laid a shampoo bottle on its side to draw the stubborn goop out of the bottom? You were duffifying. Have you ever put a live eel up a horse’s behind? Of course you have, and it so happens you were feaguing.

In his book Horologicon, published this month in the U.S., English blogger Mark Forsyth puts together a collection of words that he describes as too beautiful to live long, too amusing to be taken seriously and too precise to be common. He excavated these gems from obscure dictionaries and, thankfully, does not present them in alphabetical order. Instead, he arranges the terms by the time of day one might use them. They don’t all fit into this scheme—I mean, when it comes to feaguing, it’s five o’clock somewhere, right?!—but it’s much more practical than a big, theme-less list.

Here is a sample of the forgotten English slang, technical terms and euphemisms Forsyth found, our gift to your cocktail banter:

chork (v.): to make the noise that feet do when one’s shoes are full of water.

Example: “Caught in the rainstorm with no shelter, he was soon chorking his way toward a terrible cold.” Leave it to the Scots, in all their rainy brooding, to have a word for that sloshy squeezing between the toes.

duffifie (v.): to lay a bottle on its side for some time so that it may be completely drained of the few drops remaining.

Example: “The relationship started to fall apart when Dennis uprighted a bottle of ketchup that Sarah had been duffifying for days.” This old Scottish verb is one of those most delightful of miracles—a word for something we all do but never knew had a name.

egrote (v.): to feign sickness in order to avoid work.

Example: “Among lazy men, egroting is a pursuit of perfection.” Forsyth recommends groaning before giving one’s name in a weak voice. Alternatively, he says, an egroter can simply call their boss and yell into the phone, “My thighs! My thighs!”

feague (v.): to put a live eel up a horse’s bottom; used figuratively to describe encouraging someone or getting their spirits up.

Example: “I’ve heard Ann Romney’s secret to winning dressage is feaguing Rafalca right before the competition.” This word, used in the 1700s by what were apparently kinky horse-traders, came from a reference called Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue.

jehu (n.): a fast or furious driver.

Example: “So I’ve got an idea for a movie. We get a bunch of jehus—well, that’s about it..” A jehu is named for Jehu, a Biblical figure who “driveth furiously” as he went to murder King Ahab by the Lord’s decree.

pedeconference (n.): to hold a meeting while walking.

Example: “Roughly 40% of the West Wing is footage of people pedeconferencing.” Because nothing says power meeting like power walking while you’re having it.

scuddle (v.): to run with an affected haste.

Example: “Desperate to look important and with nothing to do, she scuddled around the office like a pinball.” Next time someone tries to look busy by dashing about and panting needlessly, call them on their blatant scuddling.

throttlebottom (n.): a dishonest man who holds public office.

Example: “’That Barack Obama is a downright throttlebottom!’ said the Tea Party supporter who feigned political opinions so he could wear colonial garb.” Other great political insults include flapdoodler, lollie boy, pollywog and quockerwodger.

uhtceare (n.): lying awake before dawn and worrying.

Example: “Knowing that some object he owned had been secretly put in the toilet bowl, Jerry lay awake, plagued by uhtceare.” Pronounced oot-key-are-a, the word breaks down into two parts: uht, a word for the restless hour before dawn and ceare, an Old English term for care and sorrow.

voyage to the Spice Islands (v.): 18^th-century slang for going to the bathroom.

Example: “After eating Thai food, he always had to take a voyage to the Spice Islands. The bathroom could be out of commission for days.” Forsyth also includes an excerpt from a 1653 translation of Rabelais in which toilet paper is called “tail-napkins.”

zarf (n.): the cup-shaped holder for a hot coffee cup that keeps you from burning your fingers.

Example: “Forgetting a zarf often leads to a dangerous game of hot potato.” In the olden days, zarfs were typically metal or ornamental. These days they’re referred to as ‘one of those little cardboard thingys.’”

This is an edition of Wednesday Words, a weekly feature on language. For the previous post, click here.

Read more: 15 Forgotten English Words You Should Know | TIME.com http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/10/09/15-forgotten-english-words-you-should-know/#ixzz2mXg4TQPx

[MsGuy]

"scuddle (v.): to run with an affected haste.

Example: “Desperate to look important and with nothing to do, she scuddled around the office like a pinball.” Next time someone tries to look busy by dashing about and panting needlessly, call them on their blatant scuddling."

With all due deference both to you and Mr. Forsyth, AdamSmith, I suspect "scuddle" is merely an alternate spelling/pronunciation of "scuttle", a perfectly good (and current, not forgotten) term. Properly used, it's even standard English, not slang. Example: "The priest scuttled into the shadows as soon as the altar boys started pointing at him."

"Feaguing" I can accept actually happened, if only because there's hardly anything we humans won't get up to given enough time and boredom, but the thought that it was common enough to require a specific word for it is just horrific beyond words.

Speaking of which, what's the word for behavior that's horrific beyond words?

[AdamSmith]

With all due deference both to you and Mr. Forsyth, AdamSmith, I suspect "scuddle" is merely an alternate spelling/pronunciation of "scuttle", a perfectly good (and current, not forgotten) term. Properly used, it's even standard English, not slang. Example: "The priest scuttled into the shadows as soon as the altar boys started pointing at him."

Good point. On looking into it, the author's rationale for including scuddle would seem to be that it takes historical precedence over scuttle but has fallen out of modern usage. Dictionary.com for instance says:

scut·tle

verb (used without object)

1. to run with quick, hasty steps; scurry.

noun

2. a quick pace.

3. a short, hurried run.

Origin:

1400–50; late Middle English scottlynge (gerund), variant of scuddle, frequentative of scud

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/scuttle?s=t

Speaking of which, what's the word for behavior that's horrific beyond words?

Several candidates that float to mind in light of recent doings might best be left there, forever swirling round on the top, never going down.

[RA1]

I MUST remember to keep and find an eel to keep for the time when and if I find an escort with a HORSE cock. Will that make him more lively or will he just moan and groan, I know not which whether in agony or ecstasy?

With the plethora of English words already extant, I always find it amazing that some think we find new ones to incorporate. I have to think we are disregarding older ones when we do.

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

Speaking of which, what's the word for behavior that's horrific beyond words?

P.S. Lovecraft essayed an answer of sorts -- or rather considered whether it could be answered -- in his story story "The Unnamable." As his work is now out of copyright, herewith:

The Unnamable

By H. P. Lovecraft

We were sitting on a dilapidated seventeenth-century tomb in the late afternoon of an autumn day at the old burying-ground in Arkham, and speculating about the unnamable. Looking toward the giant willow in the centre of the cemetery, whose trunk has nearly engulfed an ancient, illegible slab, I had made a fantastic remark about the spectral and unmentionable nourishment which the colossal roots must be sucking in from that hoary, charnel earth; when my friend chided me for such nonsense and told me that since no interments had occurred there for over a century, nothing could possibly exist to nourish the tree in other than an ordinary manner. Besides, he added, my constant talk about “unnamable” and “unmentionable” things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my lowly standing as an author. I was too fond of ending my stories with sights or sounds which paralysed my heroes’ faculties and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced. We know things, he said, only through our five senses or our religious intuitions; wherefore it is quite impossible to refer to any object or spectacle which cannot be clearly depicted by the solid definitions of fact or the correct doctrines of theology—preferably those of the Congregationalists, with whatever modifications tradition and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may supply.

With this friend, Joel Manton, I had often languidly disputed. He was principal of the East High School, born and bred in Boston and sharing New England’s self-satisfied deafness to the delicate overtones of life. It was his view that only our normal, objective experiences possess any aesthetic significance, and that it is the province of the artist not so much to rouse strong emotion by action, ecstasy, and astonishment, as to maintain a placid interest and appreciation by accurate, detailed transcripts of every-day affairs. Especially did he object to my preoccupation with the mystical and the unexplained; for although believing in the supernatural much more fully than I, he would not admit that it is sufficiently commonplace for literary treatment. That a mind can find its greatest pleasure in escapes from the daily treadmill, and in original and dramatic recombinations of images usually thrown by habit and fatigue into the hackneyed patterns of actual existence, was something virtually incredible to his clear, practical, and logical intellect. With him all things and feelings had fixed dimensions, properties, causes, and effects; and although he vaguely knew that the mind sometimes holds visions and sensations of far less geometrical, classifiable, and workable nature, he believed himself justified in drawing an arbitrary line and ruling out of court all that cannot be experienced and understood by the average citizen. Besides, he was almost sure that nothing can be really “unnamable”. It didn’t sound sensible to him.

Though I well realised the futility of imaginative and metaphysical arguments against the complacency of an orthodox sun-dweller, something in the scene of this afternoon colloquy moved me to more than usual contentiousness. The crumbling slate slabs, the patriarchal trees, and the centuried gambrel roofs of the witch-haunted old town that stretched around, all combined to rouse my spirit in defence of my work; and I was soon carrying my thrusts into the enemy’s own country. It was not, indeed, difficult to begin a counter-attack, for I knew that Joel Manton actually half clung to many old-wives’ superstitions which sophisticated people had long outgrown; beliefs in the appearance of dying persons at distant places, and in the impressions left by old faces on the windows through which they had gazed all their lives. To credit these whisperings of rural grandmothers, I now insisted, argued a faith in the existence of spectral substances on the earth apart from and subsequent to their material counterparts. It argued a capability of believing in phenomena beyond all normal notions; for if a dead man can transmit his visible or tangible image half across the world, or down the stretch of the centuries, how can it be absurd to suppose that deserted houses are full of queer sentient things, or that old graveyards teem with the terrible, unbodied intelligence of generations? And since spirit, in order to cause all the manifestations attributed to it, cannot be limited by any of the laws of matter; why is it extravagant to imagine psychically living dead things in shapes—or absences of shapes—which must for human spectators be utterly and appallingly “unnamable”? “Common sense” in reflecting on these subjects, I assured my friend with some warmth, is merely a stupid absence of imagination and mental flexibility.

Twilight had now approached, but neither of us felt any wish to cease speaking. Manton seemed unimpressed by my arguments, and eager to refute them, having that confidence in his own opinions which had doubtless caused his success as a teacher; whilst I was too sure of my ground to fear defeat. The dusk fell, and lights faintly gleamed in some of the distant windows, but we did not move. Our seat on the tomb was very comfortable, and I knew that my prosaic friend would not mind the cavernous rift in the ancient, root-disturbed brickwork close behind us, or the utter blackness of the spot brought by the intervention of a tottering, deserted seventeenth-century house between us and the nearest lighted road. There in the dark, upon that riven tomb by the deserted house, we talked on about the “unnamable”, and after my friend had finished his scoffing I told him of the awful evidence behind the story at which he had scoffed the most.

My tale had been called “The Attic Window”, and appeared in the January, 1922, issue of Whispers. In a good many places, especially the South and the Pacific coast, they took the magazines off the stands at the complaints of silly milksops; but New England didn’t get the thrill and merely shrugged its shoulders at my extravagance. The thing, it was averred, was biologically impossible to start with; merely another of those crazy country mutterings which Cotton Mather had been gullible enough to dump into his chaotic Magnalia Christi Americana, and so poorly authenticated that even he had not ventured to name the locality where the horror occurred. And as to the way I amplified the bare jotting of the old mystic—that was quite impossible, and characteristic of a flighty and notional scribbler! Mather had indeed told of the thing as being born, but nobody but a cheap sensationalist would think of having it grow up, look into people’s windows at night, and be hidden in the attic of a house, in flesh and in spirit, till someone saw it at the window centuries later and couldn’t describe what it was that turned his hair grey. All this was flagrant trashiness, and my friend Manton was not slow to insist on that fact. Then I told him what I had found in an old diary kept between 1706 and 1723, unearthed among family papers not a mile from where we were sitting; that, and the certain reality of the scars on my ancestor’s chest and back which the diary described. I told him, too, of the fears of others in that region, and how they were whispered down for generations; and how no mythical madness came to the boy who in 1793 entered an abandoned house to examine certain traces suspected to be there.

It had been an eldritch thing—no wonder sensitive students shudder at the Puritan age in Massachusetts. So little is known of what went on beneath the surface—so little, yet such a ghastly festering as it bubbles up putrescently in occasional ghoulish glimpses. The witchcraft terror is a horrible ray of light on what was stewing in men’s crushed brains, but even that is a trifle. There was no beauty; no freedom—we can see that from the architectural and household remains, and the poisonous sermons of the cramped divines. And inside that rusted iron strait-jacket lurked gibbering hideousness, perversion, and diabolism. Here, truly, was the apotheosis of the unnamable.

Cotton Mather, in that daemoniac sixth book which no one should read after dark, minced no words as he flung forth his anathema. Stern as a Jewish prophet, and laconically unamazed as none since his day could be, he told of the beast that had brought forth what was more than beast but less than man—the thing with the blemished eye—and of the screaming drunken wretch that they hanged for having such an eye. This much he baldly told, yet without a hint of what came after. Perhaps he did not know, or perhaps he knew and did not dare to tell. Others knew, but did not dare to tell—there is no public hint of why they whispered about the lock on the door to the attic stairs in the house of a childless, broken, embittered old man who had put up a blank slate slab by an avoided grave, although one may trace enough evasive legends to curdle the thinnest blood.

It is all in that ancestral diary I found; all the hushed innuendoes and furtive tales of things with a blemished eye seen at windows in the night or in deserted meadows near the woods. Something had caught my ancestor on a dark valley road, leaving him with marks of horns on his chest and of ape-like claws on his back; and when they looked for prints in the trampled dust they found the mixed marks of split hooves and vaguely anthropoid paws. Once a post-rider said he saw an old man chasing and calling to a frightful loping, nameless thing on Meadow Hill in the thinly moonlit hours before dawn, and many believed him. Certainly, there was strange talk one night in 1710 when the childless, broken old man was buried in the crypt behind his own house in sight of the blank slate slab. They never unlocked that attic door, but left the whole house as it was, dreaded and deserted. When noises came from it, they whispered and shivered; and hoped that the lock on that attic door was strong. Then they stopped hoping when the horror occurred at the parsonage, leaving not a soul alive or in one piece. With the years the legends take on a spectral character—I suppose the thing, if it was a living thing, must have died. The memory had lingered hideously—all the more hideous because it was so secret.

During this narration my friend Manton had become very silent, and I saw that my words had impressed him. He did not laugh as I paused, but asked quite seriously about the boy who went mad in 1793, and who had presumably been the hero of my fiction. I told him why the boy had gone to that shunned, deserted house, and remarked that he ought to be interested, since he believed that windows retained latent images of those who had sat at them. The boy had gone to look at the windows of that horrible attic, because of tales of things seen behind them, and had come back screaming maniacally.

Manton remained thoughtful as I said this, but gradually reverted to his analytical mood. He granted for the sake of argument that some unnatural monster had really existed, but reminded me that even the most morbid perversion of Nature need not be unnamable or scientifically indescribable. I admired his clearness and persistence, and added some further revelations I had collected among the old people. Those later spectral legends, I made plain, related to monstrous apparitions more frightful than anything organic could be; apparitions of gigantic bestial forms sometimes visible and sometimes only tangible, which floated about on moonless nights and haunted the old house, the crypt behind it, and the grave where a sapling had sprouted beside an illegible slab. Whether or not such apparitions had ever gored or smothered people to death, as told in uncorroborated traditions, they had produced a strong and consistent impression; and were yet darkly feared by very aged natives, though largely forgotten by the last two generations—perhaps dying for lack of being thought about. Moreover, so far as aesthetic theory was involved, if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulosity as the spectre of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against Nature? Moulded by the dead brain of a hybrid nightmare, would not such a vaporous terror constitute in all loathsome truth the exquisitely, the shriekingly unnamable?

The hour must now have grown very late. A singularly noiseless bat brushed by me, and I believe it touched Manton also, for although I could not see him I felt him raise his arm. Presently he spoke.

“But is that house with the attic window still standing and deserted?”

“Yes,” I answered. “I have seen it.”

“And did you find anything there—in the attic or anywhere else?”

“There were some bones up under the eaves. They may have been what that boy saw—if he was sensitive he wouldn’t have needed anything in the window-glass to unhinge him. If they all came from the same object it must have been an hysterical, delirious monstrosity. It would have been blasphemous to leave such bones in the world, so I went back with a sack and took them to the tomb behind the house. There was an opening where I could dump them in. Don’t think I was a fool—you ought to have seen that skull. It had four-inch horns, but a face and jaw something like yours and mine.”

At last I could feel a real shiver run through Manton, who had moved very near. But his curiosity was undeterred.

“And what about the window-panes?”

“They were all gone. One window had lost its entire frame, and in the other there was not a trace of glass in the little diamond apertures. They were that kind—the old lattice windows that went out of use before 1700. I don’t believe they’ve had any glass for an hundred years or more—maybe the boy broke ’em if he got that far; the legend doesn’t say.”

Manton was reflecting again.

“I’d like to see that house, Carter. Where is it? Glass or no glass, I must explore it a little. And the tomb where you put those bones, and the other grave without an inscription—the whole thing must be a bit terrible.”

“You did see it—until it got dark.”

My friend was more wrought upon than I had suspected, for at this touch of harmless theatricalism he started neurotically away from me and actually cried out with a sort of gulping gasp which released a strain of previous repression. It was an odd cry, and all the more terrible because it was answered. For as it was still echoing, I heard a creaking sound through the pitchy blackness, and knew that a lattice window was opening in that accursed old house beside us. And because all the other frames were long since fallen, I knew that it was the grisly glassless frame of that daemoniac attic window.

Then came a noxious rush of noisome, frigid air from that same dreaded direction, followed by a piercing shriek just beside me on that shocking rifted tomb of man and monster. In another instant I was knocked from my gruesome bench by the devilish threshing of some unseen entity of titanic size but undetermined nature; knocked sprawling on the root-clutched mould of that abhorrent graveyard, while from the tomb came such a stifled uproar of gasping and whirring that my fancy peopled the rayless gloom with Miltonic legions of the misshapen damned. There was a vortex of withering, ice-cold wind, and then the rattle of loose bricks and plaster; but I had mercifully fainted before I could learn what it meant.

Manton, though smaller than I, is more resilient; for we opened our eyes at almost the same instant, despite his greater injuries. Our couches were side by side, and we knew in a few seconds that we were in St. Mary’s Hospital. Attendants were grouped about in tense curiosity, eager to aid our memory by telling us how we came there, and we soon heard of the farmer who had found us at noon in a lonely field beyond Meadow Hill, a mile from the old burying-ground, on a spot where an ancient slaughterhouse is reputed to have stood. Manton had two malignant wounds in the chest, and some less severe cuts or gougings in the back. I was not so seriously hurt, but was covered with welts and contusions of the most bewildering character, including the print of a split hoof. It was plain that Manton knew more than I, but he told nothing to the puzzled and interested physicians till he had learned what our injuries were. Then he said we were the victims of a vicious bull—though the animal was a difficult thing to place and account for.

After the doctors and nurses had left, I whispered an awestruck question:

“Good God, Manton, but what was it? Those scars—was it like that?”

And I was too dazed to exult when he whispered back a thing I had half expected—

“No—it wasn’t that way at all. It was everywhere—a gelatin—a slime—yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory. There were eyes—and a blemish. It was the pit—the maelstrom—the ultimate abomination. Carter, it was the unnamable!”

http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/u.aspx

[AdamSmith]

With the plethora of English words already extant,

Such as that one! Always makes me think of either an early keyboard instrument related to a virginal, or else an obscure body part never noticed until required to be operated on.

[AdamSmith]

Just came across this Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English.

What I was trolling the Internet for was the proper Southern usage of "directly." None of the other so-called Southern sites I found got it right, but this one nails it as gramma and her kin used it. When they agreed to do something directly, the word contained enough ambiguity to sound like assent, while on almost no account ever turning out to mean right away.

directly (also dreckly, toreckly) adverb In a little while, before long, as soon as is convenient, later (often used to put off or delay a request); immediately. This term is subject to variable interpretation; see 1996 citation.
1939 Hall Coll. (Deep Creek NC) "They're not a-going [to] let [the bear] cross the Smoky," I said, "He'll turn back down directly." 1939 Hall Coll. (Smokemont NC) We was looking round and about for them, and directly we found them right in the top, laying up on a limb. 1956 Hall Coll. (Cosby TN) "If you don't speak to me," [the ghost] said, "I'll shoot you dreckly." 1965 Dict Queen's English 17 "I'll do that to-reckly." 1969 GSMNP-25:2:8 I could show you directly, but it's hard to tell you because I did have pillars laid up till I could tell you. 1976 Weals It's Owin' = soon, before long. "Directly school will be starting." 1986 Helton Around Home 377 = later. 1996 Montgomery Coll. The usual sense is "in a little while, soon," indicating a definite intention or purpose, but sometimes the term conveys "after a while" if a person wishes to procrastinate; depending on the context, it may mean "at once, immediately."

http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/engl/dictionary/dictionary.html#d

[RA1]

I have always thought it to mean "soon" but exactly nothing else. Still in wide spread use today, at least in the very large back woods in which I live.

Best regards.

RA1

[AdamSmith]

Then you are like to have spent a heap of time waiting on folk who said they would do something directly.

[RA1]

Good thing you italicized or I would have homed in on the word, "heap". There have been a lot of heaps in my lifetime from heap of trouble to heap of debts.

Best regards,

RA1