The Horologicon Quotes

“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.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language

“Offices are peculiar places and nobody is ever quite sure what happens in them, least of all the people who work there. But the day tends to begin with a morning meeting, in which everybody decides what they will fail to do for the rest of the day.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language

“Wamblecropt is the most exquisite word in the English language. Say it. Each syllable is intolerably beautiful.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language

“So familiar are eggs to us, however, that in the eighteenth century they were referred to as cackling farts, on the basis that chickens cackled all the time and eggs came out of the back of them.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language

“The standard modern measurement for inebriation is the Ose system. This has been considerably developed over the years, but the common medical consensus currently has jocose, verbose, morose, bellicose, lachrymose, comatose, adios.

This is a workable but incomplete system, as it fails to take in otiose (meaning impractical) which comes just after jocose. Nor does it have grandiose preceding bellicose. And how they managed to miss out globose (amorphous or formless) before comatose is beyond me.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language

“Shopping malls rarely have any windows on the outside. There is a good reason for this: if you could see the world beyond the window you would be able to orientate yourself and might not get lost. Shopping malls have maps that are unreadable even to the most skilled cartographer. There is a good reason for this: if you could read the map you would be able to find your way to the shop you meant to go without getting lost. Shopping malls look rather the same whichever way you turn. There is a reason for this too: shopping malls are built to disorientate you, to spin you around, to free you from the original petty purpose for which you came and make you wander like Cain past rows and rows of shops thinking to yourself, "Ooh! I should actually go in there and get something. Might as well seeing as I'm here." And this strange mental process, this freeing of the mind from all sense of purpose or reason, is known to retail analysts as the Gruen transfer.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language

“If you are to use Alexander Graham Bell’s product, which is to say the blower, you should, in all courtesy, use it as he would have wished; and Dr Bell insisted that all phone calls should begin with the words ‘Ahoy, ahoy’. Nobody knows why he insisted this – he had no connection to the navy – but insist he did and started every phone call that way. Nobody else did, and it was at the suggestion of his great rival Edison that people took to saying ‘Hello’. This seems unfair.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language

“Words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the soul within.”
― Mark Forsyth, Horologicon

“Wouldst like to con a glimmer with me this early black?’, which he [Cab Calloway] helpfully explains as ‘the proper way to ask a young lady to go to the movies’. It should be noted here, that if the object of your affections replies ‘Kill me’, they are not requesting to be euthanatised and you should not actually murder them. Kill me is merely the Cab Calloway way of saying ‘Show me a good time’ and is the best response you could have hoped for. Jive was rather confusing in this way.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language

“It's a fifty-fifty chance that your main aim is to be thelyphthoric, a word that comes from the Greek thely meaning "woman" and phthoric meaning "corrupting," thus the OED's simple definition: "that corrupts or ruins women.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language

“It is time to buddle (scrub in water) all that is not illutile (unwash-awayable). Baudelaire said that humans were deluded if they thought they could wash away all their spots with vile tears, but Baudelaire was French and therefore knew nothing about hygiene or shower gel.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language

“The worst form of weather is a pogonip, which is a word we stole from the Shoshone Indians (along with the rest of their possessions) to describe a fog so cold that it freezes into ice crystals in mid-air.”
― Mark Forsyth, Horologicon

“Thank God for modern medicine. It was not until 1905 that ergophobia (the morbid fear of returning to work) was first identified and reported in the British Medical Journal. As yet there is no known cure, but doctors have been working on it, and may get back to working on it sometime soon.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language

“Every dictionary contains a world. I open a book of thieves’ slang from Queen Anne’s reign and they have a hundred words for swords, for wenches, and for being hanged. They did no die, they danced on nothing. Then I peek into any one of my rural Victorian dictionaries, compiled by a lonely clergyman, with words for coppices, thickets, lanes, diseases of horses and innumerable terms for kinds of eel. They gave names to the things of their lives, and their lives are collected in these dictionaries – every detail and joke and belief. I have their worlds piled up on my desk.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language