10 Words For The People You Know - 500 Words Ep. 27

You might have spotted this tweet over on the HH Twitter feed the other day:

FRAME-PERSON is an old English dialect word for an overnight visitor whose stay demands a great deal of planning beforehand.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 11 July 2016

Which, as our friends at UWG English pointed out, is probably not the most appropriate word for that kind of person…:

I call this person a "NEVER-AGAIN." https://t.co/u6FsU53yFs

— UWG English (@uwgenglish) 11 July 2016

But what about all the other characters that we know and love and love to hate? What other words are hiding out in the dictionary to describe them?

Well, from unknowledgeable critics to penniless friends, this week’s HH YouTube instalment is looking at 10 words for precisely those kinds of people:

One word that didn’t make the final cut here, however, was zoilist:

A ZOILIST is an unfair or unnecessarily harsh critic, or someone who particularly enjoys finding fault in things.

— Haggard Hawks Words (@HaggardHawks) 13 May 2015

Just as (spoiler alert if you haven’t watched the video yet...) the ultracrepidarians of this world take their name from a story from Ancient Greece, the carping zoilists have their roots in a fourth-century BC Greek grammarian and literary critic named Zoilus of Amphipolis. 

Born in what is now Macedonia c.400 BC, Zoilus was one of the most scathing critics of the Greek poet Homer. Despite being the author of both the Iliad and Odyssey and one of the most well respected writers of Ancient Greece, writing two cornerstones of Western literature was not enough, it seems, to impress Zoilus. 

In a long-lost essay called Homeric Questions, Zoilus challenged Homer’s portrayal of the gods, and called out a number of plot holes and inconsistencies in his works: in the Iliad, for instance, Menelaus dies in battle only to be seemingly revived to witness the death of his son several pages later. Other writers might have fallen victim to Zoilus’ criticizing glare of the years, but it was for these criticisms of Homer’s writing that Zoilus was best known—and for which he deservedly the nickname Homeromastix, the “Scourge of Homer”, among his contemporaries. 

Zoilus’s writings have not survived, and as a result it’s unclear just how harsh his criticism really was. But the enduring popularity of Homer’s works has nevertheless led to history being somewhat less kind to his harshest critic. 

Various historical accounts record that Zoilus died having been thrown from a cliff by an angry mob, stoned to death on the island of Chios, or else tossed alive on top of a funeral pyre in Smyrna. Whether any of these gruesome demises ever truly occurred is debateable, but instead it’s likely that they are all just myths and smears rooted in little more than the unpopularity of Zoilus’s opinions—but it’s precisely those opinions that led to Zoilus the zoilist earning a permanent place in the language. 

10 Words Shakespeare Used That No One Can Work Out

In honour of the #Shakespeare400 anniversary on 23 April 2016, this week’s HaggardHawks YouTube video is looking at a part of Shakespeare’s writing that isn’t dealt with all too often.

Everybody knows Shakespeare invented a considerable number of the 31,534 words he used in his work—as many as 1 in every 20, if some statistics are to be believed—and alongside those, he transformed many pre-existing words into different parts of speech, a process known as anthimeria. So if you’ve ever grazed, squabbled with, elbowed, caked or ghosted someone, then you’ve got Shakespeare to thank for it: none of those had been used as verbs before he got hold of them...

All this linguistic playfulness, however (coupled with the obvious fact that his writing is four centuries old) can make Shakespeare’s work tough to navigate these days, and a little patience and background knowledge is often are needed to unlock some of his toughest lines. But even the best Shakespeare scholars have to admit that—well,  sometimes we just don’t know what the hell he’s talking about.

Armgaunt. Eftest. Pajock. In his buttons. The list of words and phrases that crop up in Shakespeare’s work that no one can quite decipher runs on and on. But just because we don’t know for sure what he meant doesn’t mean that we can’t have an educated guess. And it’s that that we’re looking at in this week’s video…

Smellfungus

So. The other day, we tweeted this:

A SMELLFUNGUS is a grumbling, constantly complaining person.

— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) June 24, 2015

It’s another one of those “seriously?” words:

@HaggardHawks Er, are you sure you're not making some of these up, HH?

— Edith Calman (@EdithCalman) June 24, 2015

HaggardHawks make something up? The very idea of it. Well, there was that one time, but that was entirely different. No—seriously, this is true. And not only that, but there’s a brilliant story behind it.

Smellfungus dates back to 1768. For once, we can be absolutely positive about the date of a word, because we know precisely who invented it, when, and why. So no need to play etymological Cluedo here—it was Laurence Sterne, in the Sentimental Journey, aided and abetted (albeit indirectly) by Tobias Smollett.

Smollett was born in Dunbartonshire in Scotland in 1721. A prolific and well-respected writer, perhaps best known for his comic novel The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751), Smollett’s output covered almost every literary genre and influenced many later literary giants, including Dickens, George Eliot, and William Thackeray. Even the normally unforthcoming George Orwell wrote a glowing essay calling him “Scotland’s Best Novelist”.

Wait—what?! Had Orwell not read any Sherlock Holmes?! Disgraceful. But, I digress.

In all, Smollett’s vast back catalogue includes plays, a non-fiction History of England, several volumes of poetry, half a dozen novels, and even English translations of the likes of Voltaire and Cervantes. But in 1766, he added one more genre to his literary checklist when he published his Travels Through France And Italy, an account of a two-year journey he and his wife embarked on from spring 1763 to summer 1765. Stopping off in the likes of Paris, Nice, Cannes, Pisa, Sienna and Rome, to many it would have been the trip of a lifetime—but Smollett, by and large, remained unimpressed.

Of Florence’s magnificent San Lorenzo chapel, for instance, he wrote that it “will, in my opinion, remain a monument of ill taste and extravagance”. The Pantheon left him “much disappointed”, because “after all that has been said of it, [it] looks like a huge cockpit.” He dismissed Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement, painted behind the alter in the Sistine Chapel, as “a mere mob, without subordination, keeping or repose”, and likened it to “a number of people talking all at once”. Even the Vatican itself didn’t escape unscathed:

[Its] relicks of pretended saints, ill-proportioned spires and bellfreys, and the nauseous repetition of the figure of the cross (which is in itself a very mean and disagreeable object, only fit for the prisons of condemned criminals) have contributed to introduce a vicious taste into the external architecture, as well as in the internal ornaments of our temples.

Michelangelo’s Last Judgement: Crap, apparently

Unsurprisingly, when Smollett’s Travels were published, his fairly tactless and hypercritical attitude, as well as the disdainful way in which he wrote about many of the people he encountered (“At Brignolles … I was obliged to quarrel with the landlady and threaten to leave her house before she would indulge us with any sort of flesh-meat”), outraged his contemporaries. But his apparent arrogance and peevishness also made him a prime target for satire—which brings us to Laurence Sterne.

Sterne was born in Ireland in 1713, but spent much of his childhood in England. After graduating from Cambridge, he became the Anglican priest of a small church in rural Yorkshire where he remained for more than twenty years, dabbling in freelance writing in his spare time. In 1759, he self-published his first major work—two volumes of a vast satirical novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman—and within months was one of the most famous authors in the country.

Flushed with success, Sterne quit the church and moved to London in 1760. But in the dank and dreary capital his already precarious health quickly deteriorated, so he and his wife left on a rejuvenating trip to the Mediterranean. They arrived in Montpellier in 1763—where, the following November, they were joined by Tobias Smollett.

It’s unclear exactly how much time Smollett and Sterne spent together, but a number of meetings and engagements are recorded in the letters they sent back home to England, before Smollett decided Montpellier’s cool mountain climate wasn’t for him and he continued on to Nice in early 1764. It’s also largely unclear how well the two men got along, but given what happened next, we can presume the pair hadn’t always seen eye to eye.

In 1768, in response to Smollett’s Travels, Sterne published his own Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy. Again, Sterne’s Journey was based around his own tour of the continent, but unlike Smollett his travelogue was also a part-fictionalized follow-up to his earlier novel, Tristram Shandy. 

Narrated by a genial English reverend named Mr Yorick (Sterne’s literary alter ego), the aptly-titled Sentimental Journey comprises a light-hearted series of comic episodes and romantic encounters, as Yorick travels down through France from Calais and on into Italy. Along the way, he meets a whole host of unusual and whimsical characters—including a glum, overcritical zoilist known only as “Smelfungus”:

The learned Smelfungus travelled from Boulogne to Paris, from Paris to Rome, and so on; but he set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he pass’d by was discoloured or distorted. He wrote an account of them, but ’twas nothing but the account of his miserable feelings.

Smelfungus—spelled with only one L by Sterne—is clearly a fairly unsubtle and unflattering caricature of Smollett, right down to his acerbic views on the architecture of Rome:

I met Smelfungus in the grand portico of the Pantheon—he was just coming out of it. ’Tis nothing but a huge cockpit, said he.

Unfortunately for Smollett the Sentimental Journey was an enormous success, even surpassing Tristram Shandy both critically and commercially. Nowadays it’s seen as having helped to establish travel writing as a respected literary genre in its own right—while Sterne’s acerbic lampoon of Smollett as “Smelfungus” gave the English language a whole new word for a carping, unhappy critic. 

Sadly, however, Sterne didn’t live to see any of the influence his novel would eventually have: he died just twenty days after its publication. And as for Smollett, well, his reputation as a glum, unimpressed tourist—“the most embittered and cantankerous Englishman that ever travelled abroad”, according to one account—might now be permanently installed in the language, but more recent commentators on his work have been considerably more understanding. They quite rightly point out that his Travels were written at a particularly difficult time in his life: both he and Sterne were suffering from the aftereffects of tuberculosis, and he and his wife were still reeling from the death of their only child, their 15-year-old daughter Elizabeth, the previous year.

Not only that, but modern readers who are aware of Smollett’s nit-picking are often surprised to discover how much admiration and positivity his Travels contain alongside the famously tactless criticisms. Indeed despite Smollett’s reputation, the Continent must have held some kind of attraction to him—having retired to Italy in his late 40s, he died in Livorno in 1771, and is buried in the Old English Cemetery in Tuscany.

***Competition!***

Today is April Fool’s Day, and with our new factbook Word Drops on its way in just over two weeks’ time, now seems like the perfect opportunity to offer you the chance to win yourself a copy ahead of its release on 16 April...

So alongside our usual daily dose of words and language facts, today we tweeted five tweets with the hashtag #HHAprilFools—and one of them is completely untrue. Tell us which one you think it is either by commenting on it, tweeting @HaggardHawks, or by commenting on this blogpost. If you’re right, your name will go in the hat, and if picked out you’ll win one of three signed copies of Word Drops we have to give away. 

Oh, and like all the best quiz shows we have to accept your first answer. So no hedging your bets and commenting on all five…

(1) In Old English, hiccups were ‘ælfsogoða’. It literally means “elf-chokes”. #HHAprilFools
— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) April 1, 2015

(2) A SMIDGEN is precisely 1/32nd of a teaspoon. #HHAprilFools
— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) April 1, 2015

(3) MAISTER-PIG is an old Scots word for a zit or a rogue hair. #HHAprilFools
— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) April 1, 2015

(4) In Navajo, Adolf Hitler was known as ‘Dágháilchįįh’. It literally means “he who smells his own moustache”. #HHAprilFools
— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) April 1, 2015

(5) A SEMI-HORE is a half hour. #HHAprilFools
— HaggardHawks Words (@HaggardHawks) April 1, 2015

So which one is fake? It’s up to you to decide—comment here or tweet @HaggardHawks anytime before Friday 3 April to be in with a chance of winning. Oh, we’re too good to you, we really are…

***Exciting news!***

It’s been just over a year since HaggardHawks fluttered into life on Twitter back in December 2013. Since then, we’ve appeared everywhere from The Guardian in the UK to Mental_Floss in the US and The New Daily in Australia. We’ve tweeted nearly 4,000 words and language facts, and we’ve gained more than 8,000 followers. So a quick thanks—to everyone—for your continued interest and support.

But, thought we, isn’t it a shame to leave all these facts in the electronic ether? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a shiny, papery copy of HaggardHawks’ back catalogue of linguistic trivia to add to your bookshelf?

Well, thanks to the lovely people at Elliott & Thompson, we now have just that:

Our new factbook, Word Drops, is published on 16 April 2015. In it, you’ll find 1000 of our best and strangest facts—as well as a whole host of new linguistic titbits and trivia that we’ve never tweeted before—all in one long word-association chain. 

So the fact that the word unkempt literally means “uncombed” links into the fact that barber, Barbados and rebarbative all derive from the Latin word for “beard”. And that links in nicely with the fact that in Old English, a frumberdling was a boy growing his first beard. And a beard-second is a measurement of 5 nanometres—or the distance a beard hair grows in one second. 

And a treatise written on the subject of beards is a pogonology. While the pogonion is the frontmost point of your chin. And speaking of which, the word sobriquet comes from the French for “hit under the chin”. But the toast chin-chin is a reworking of the Chinese greeting tsing-tsing. And did you know that the sentence “when you are eating grapes you don’t spit out the skin, but when you are not eating grapes you do spit out the skin” is a Chinese tongue-twister? 

We could go on, but that would be telling. (You can find out how that particular part of the chain picks up on page 140.) 

All the way through Word Drops we’ve also added hundreds of footnotes and annotations to flesh out some of the most intriguing facts, providing all the extra background that there often isn’t room for on Twitter—everything from how to play some traditional Inuit games to the origin of the Bellini cocktail, from the precise length of one jiffy to what the Romans thought hoopoes ate, and from what to expect on a night out with Dr Johnson to how Samuel Pepys cured his hangover. Want to know what the longest word made of Roman numerals is, or who The Great Masticator was? Or what Norwegian steam is, or what a jäääär is? It’s all inside. 

In the weeks leading up to the release of Word Drops—so called, we should say, because each fact “drops” into place beside the others—there are a few developments planned on @HaggardHawks, including a competition this coming April Fools Day, in which you can win yourself a signed copy before the book even hits the shops… More details of that to come later this week!

In the meantime, you can head across to Amazon now for more info. 

And thanks again for following! There would be no HaggardHawks without you.