Forgotten English: April 9th - April 14th
Monday's forgotten word:
Clanjamphry (noun) - (1) A company of people, especially a disorderly or vulgar crowd; a mob, rabble; "Such a clanjamphry of thievin' drunken miscreants," from Jane Barlow's Lisconnel (1895). Rubbish; trumpery; odds and ends. Nonsensical talk. Scotland, Ireland, Northumberland.
--Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary, 1898-1905
(2) The "whole clanjamphrey," the mob; the rabble. Scotland.
--Albert Hyamson's Dictionary of English Phrases, 1922
Riding the Lord
Annually on the day after Easter in Neston, Cheshire, a curious custom known as Riding the Lord was honored, perhaps for many centuries. Christina Hole's Traditions and Customs of Cheshire (1937) preserved the memory of this properly discarded medieval-sounding ritual: "A man was mounted on a donkey, and rode from the top of High Street to Chester Lane. The assembled people amused themselves by jeering at him and pelting him with rotten eggs and mud all along the route. He was given a sum of money for this unpleasant performance, and we can only hope that the pay was sufficient to make it worthwhile. No explanation seems to have been forthcoming for the singular rite, except the time-honoured one that it had always been done."
Tuesday's:
Cruckle (verb) - To sink down. "He cruckled to the floor."
--Ammon Wrigley's Lancashire Words and Sayings, 1940
RMS Titanic Casts Off
On this date in 1912, Titanic left her berth in Southampton, England, for New York on her maiden voyage. Her wake caused the liner City of New York, docked nearby, to slip her moorings and come within a few feet of Titanic before a tugboat intervened. A few days later "unsinkable" Titanic went to the bottom in the early hours of April 15, after famously sideswiping an iceberg with her starboard side, taking 1,517 people to their deaths.
Of the 2,223 passengers, only 706 escaped with their lives. More than 60% of the first-class passengers were saved, including "the Unsinkable" Molly Brown, compared with less than 42% of those in second class, a mere 25% in steerage, and only 24% of crewmembers - all of whom returned to sea duty - along with two dogs. The Hampshire Chronicle noted that almost 1,000 Southampton families were affected by this tragedy. Nearly every street in the town's Chapel district lost more than one resident, and over 500 households mourned a loved one. One survivor - stewardess Violet Jessop, who had been aboard RMS Olympic when it collided with HMS Hawke in 1911 - later survived the sinking of HMS Britannic in 1916.
Wednesday's:
Medicinal days (pl. noun) - (1) The sixth, eighth, tenth, twelfth, sixteenth, eighteenth, etc. days of a disease, so called because, according to Hippocrates, no crisis occurs on these days, and medicine may be safely administered.
--Ebenezer Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1898
(2) Medicinal hour, medicinal month, times when the administration of medicine was deemed proper.
--Sir James Murray's New English Dictionary, 1908
Feast Day of St. Gemma,
a 19th-century Italian patroness of apothecaries.
Vance Randolph's Ozark Superstitions (1947) mentioned a medicine dispensed by a "very competent MD" named Wade: "'Take a dose of that stuff every day . . . and keep it up till snakes crawl.' Wade prescribed this medicine in late February, and no snake was seen thereabouts that year until March 24. Instead of saying so many days or weeks, this physician used a real backwoods expression, which pleased the patient much more than an arbitrary date. He felt that his recovery was somehow tied up with the orderly processes of Nature rather than governed by some manmade rule in a medical book. When a neighbor boy came running in on March 24, shouting that some woodcutters had found a snake, my friend put away the medicine. He was a well man."
Thursday's:
Crotch-trolling (noun) - (1) A method of . . . angling for pike, used in the broads and rivers in Norfolk. The fisherman has no rod, but has the usual reel and, by the help of a crotch-stick, throws his bait a considerable distance from him into the water, and then draws it gently towards him. It is much practised by poachers, as there is no rod or pole to betray their intention.
--Rev. Robert Forby's Vocabulary of East Anglia, 1830
(2) Piscarie . . . signifieth in our common lawe a libertie of fishing in another man's waters.
--John Cowell's Interpreter of Signification of Words, 1607
Feast Day of St. Zeno,
a fourth-century patron of anglers.
John Worlidge's Systema Agriculturæ: The Mystery of Husbandry Discovered (1681) offered these reasons for fishing's enduring popularity: "There is not any exercise more pleasing nor agreeable to a truly sober and ingenious man than this of angling. It wearieth not a man over-much, it injureth no man . . . neither doth it in any wise debauch him that useth it. The delight of it also rouses up the ingenious early in the spring-mornings [so] they have the benefit of the sweet and pleasant morning air which many, through sluggish[ness], enjoy not."
Friday's:
Pantofles (pl. noun) - Slippers; to be upon one's pantofles, to stand upon one's dignity.
--A.V. Judges' Elizabethan Underworld, 1930
Standing Up for Handel's Messiah
On this date in 1742, George Frideric Handel debuted his hastily composed oratorio, now a Christmastime favorite, called simply Messiah. This gala event was so well attended that women were asked not to wear bulky hoop skirts and men were forbidden to carry swords. Working feverishly, the German-born composer had finished the score in only 24 days, later summing up his intense experience with a paraphrase from St. Paul: "Whether I was in my body or out of my body when I wrote it, I know not."
At the London premiere the following year, inept King George II, who spoke very little English, heard that stirring passage of the "Hallelujah Chorus" that includes the words "And he shall reign forever and ever." He rose to his feet, thinking that the words referred to him. Those around him could not, of course, remain seated with the monarch standing. So the audience dutifully stood up, and this odd custom has continued ever since - even abroad. When Franz Josef Haydn heard the "Hallelujah Chorus" he wept openly, and commented, "He is the master of us all" - referring to Handel, not the king.
Saturday's:
Welsh ambassador (noun) - (1) The cuckoo. [John] Logan [1748-1788], in his poem To the Cuckoo, calls it the "messenger of spring" . . . Welsh ambassador means that the bird announces the migration of Welsh labourers into England for summer employment.
--Ebenezer Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 1898
(2) If, when you hear the cuckoo for the first time, you are standing on grass or any green leaves, you will certainly live to hear the bird next season. But if you are standing on a roadway or the earth, or even upon stone, you will not live to hear the cuckoo when it comes next.
--Marie Trevelyan's Folk-Lore and Folk-Stories of Wales, 1909
First Cuckoo Day
Into the 19th century, a spontaneous celebration customarily broke out among English country folk on hearing the first song of a cuckoo. This became formalized as an April 14 fair in Heathfield, East Sussex, accompanied by a specially brewed cuckoo ale. It was believed that the cuckoo sang only from this date until St. John's Day, June 24. Logan's poem concludes:
O, could I fly, I'd fly with thee!
We'd make, with joyful wing,
Our annual visit o'er the globe,
Companions of the spring.
All text © 2011 Jeffrey Kacirk