Lost Word Of The Day (36)

Serious and destructive fires seem to be becoming more frequent around the world, the result of changing climatic conditions, we are told, and, occasionally, human carelessness or stupidity. It struck me that the English language struggles to differentiate between the intensity of fires and we usually have to resort to explanatory phrases around the noun of fire to illustrate the degree of ferocity and the extent of damage it has caused.

It was not always thus. In the 17th century, when the construction and proximity of housing meant that fires were more of an everyday event, a seriously destructive fire or conflagration was known as a scathefire. Thomas Heywood, the Jacobean playwright, used it in 1611 thus; “Beneath their ruines: and these horrid sights / Lighted by scathe-fires, they that haue beheld…”

Might we need to resurrect it?