![]() ![]() Their last-minute flurry to meet deadlines at the end of term became known as working ‘en charette’ – ‘in the cart’. Coined at the Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Paris where, in the mid-19th Century, architecture students transported their projects (sculptures and scale models) in a small wheeled cart, or ‘charette’. Other niche units of measurement include the ‘smoot’, named after chairman of the American National Standards Institute, Oliver Smoot, following his 1958 attempt to gauge the length of the Harvard Bridge using his body as the measuring tape.Ī period of intense work or creative activity undertaken to meet a deadline. It seems to fill a niche.”īBC Culture has picked out 26 of the most delightful terms from The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities: our alphabet of obscure words is below.Īll definitions below taken from The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities, published by Elliott & ThompsonĪgerasia (pronounced ‘adge-uh-ray-zee-ah’)Ī more youthful appearance than one’s true age (derived from a Greek word for ‘eternal youth’).īased on the same template as ‘light-year’, one ‘beard-second’ is the approximate length a man’s beard hair grows in one second: five nanometres. “On the one hand, I’m pulling these words out of obscurity and rescuing them from the murkier corners of the dictionary – then through Twitter, which is one of the most modern things going, at the opposite end of the dictionary from the 19th-Century scholars, people are using them. His word posts offer a kind of antidote to social media. And he includes imagined science, with a word introduced in 1890 to foretell a futuristic world where messages could be sent by radio – an ‘aerogram’. Jones also collects made-up terms, such as ‘beaglepuss’ – the name for those novelty glasses with a fake nose, eyebrows and moustache attached (a nonsense word invented by the company selling them). ‘Mamamouchi’ is a delight to say out loud, and has an equally delectable meaning: ‘someone who believes themselves more important than they really are’. “I love finding words that are just beautiful as well as strange,” says Jones. ![]() There are words that have an onomatopoeic appeal, like ‘jingle-boy’- ‘a rich man’, or someone who has enough coins in their pocket to jingle as they walk. It’s that idea of something being itchy.” “A lot of them are dialect – I found one, ‘shivviness’, in an English dialect dictionary it means ‘the uncomfortable feeling of wearing new underwear’ and comes from ‘shiv’, which is an old Yorkshire dialect word for a splinter or a loose thread. The fact that anyone thought to come up with that word is great – it’s something that everybody needs,” says Jones. “I like finding words that fill in a gap – there’s one called ‘frowst’ – it’s an old 19th-Century schoolboy slang word for ‘extra time spent in bed on a Sunday’. “I’m taking words from obscure English dictionaries, but also slang dictionaries and dialect dictionaries – there are all these goldmines of language that never really get tapped into, so anything that puts that out to a wider audience has got to be good.” “I spend my days piling through books like The Language of American Popular Entertainment and pulling out words I find interesting,” he says. Since then, Jones has made it his mission to rescue unused expressions from extinction. “I got a big illustrated kids’ dictionary when I was eight or nine – I got it for Christmas off my grandparents – I just sat and read it cover to cover, like you would a normal book. “I’ve been obsessed with language ever since I was a kid,” he tells BBC Culture. For Jones, who blogs and tweets under the name Haggard Hawks, it has been a lifetime of word geekery. In September, academics in Britain uncovered 30 words ‘lost’ from the English language: researchers spent three months looking through old dictionaries to find them, in the hope they could bring the words back into modern conversations. While it offers titillation for the curious mind, it also serves a more noble purpose – retrieving words from languishing unread and unspoken. It has a different phrase for every day of the year (including 29 February) – with entries ranging from ‘ambilaevous’, or ‘equally clumsy in both hands’, to ‘stirrup-cup’, ‘one last drink before a departure’. Now, Paul Anthony Jones has compiled 366 ‘forgotten words’ in his new book The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |