Leper Juice

Nobody knows where the dan in dandruff comes from, but the second syllable probably derives from the Old English hreofla meaning leper. Perhaps there was a particular flaky chap called Dan.

I hate to tell you this, but there is a thing called leper juice. It's the stuff in the lesions. The things you find in the OED. I'm off to start a soft drinks company.

Incidentally, the World Health Organisation think leprosy's got a bad reputation and prefer to call it Hansen's Disease. This must be a great comfort to those dying of leprosy, but not to people called Hansen.

Not a speck in sight.

Lurgy, Lurgi or Lurden

Apologies for lack of posts. I have been struck down with a loathsome and lingering lurgy. Lurgy is a purely British term for an unspecified but horrid disease that is doing the rounds, and it was invented by comedians. The first recorded case of lurgy appeared in a 1959 episode of The Goon Show Lurgi Strikes Britain*. That episode was written by Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes, so I blame them for my current condition.

However, the OED, in an uncharacteristic fit of theorising, suggests that those writers may just possibly have got it from fever-lurdan, or the disease of laziness. Fever-lurdan was a facetious term not recorded after 1806, but its last recorded spelling was fever-largie, so maybe there's something in the connection. I'm either too lazy or too ill to research further.

By the way, as a fun bit of trivia, Jimi Hendrix first started taking acid because it made listening to the Goons much funnier.

Merry Christmas one and all.





*The Goons spelled it Lurgi, the OED has it as Lurgy, presumably to differentiate it from lurgi the chemical process of gasification (which is horribly relevant to me).

Sacralgia and Kippers

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh has this to say about kippers:

Adam ate some breakfast. No kipper, he reflected, is ever as good as it smells; how this too earthly contact with flesh and bone spoiled the first happy exhilaration; if only one could live, as Jehovah was said to have done, on the savour of burnt offerings.

Now, if you want to make a great smell for your deity what you need is burnt bone, and apparently (I've never sacrificed anyone myself) the best bone to do this with is the os sacrum, the sacred bone. It's at the bottom of your spine and the Romans believed that it was the part that the gods really liked. That's why it's called the sacrum to this very day.

If you have a pain in your sacrum, it's called sacralgia. What I like about this is that, etymologically, sacralgia means sacred pain, but really it means a right pain in the arse. But if you told somebody that they were being a sacralgia, they would never realise.

This makes sacralgia a very useful word.

The Inky Fool regrets his choice of restaurant.

Homeopathy

As I passed a shop selling homeopathic remedies the other day, it occurred to me that I didn't really know what homeopathy meant. I mean, I have a vague notion that it probably involves shoving some St John's wort in your ears to balance your negative energies, but I wasn't really sure. But I did know that homeo means the same (as in homosexual) and that pathy means suffering, as in pathetic.

And, bingo, I was spot on. Homeopathy proper is the idea that like cures like. So a disease may be cured if you give somebody a medicine that would usually cause the same (homeo) symptoms. It was thought up by a chap called Samuel Hahnemannn (1755-1843) who noticed that a kind of Peruvian tree bark that appeared to cure malaria, when given to a healthy fellow, produced the symptoms of malaria.

For myself, I'm perfectly convinced by this theory and intend from now on to cure drunkenness by drinking, and undertake to remedy anybody's nosebleed by punching them in the face.

I have also discovered that for years I have been using allopathic doctors, that's what homeopathic chaps call the rest of the medical profession. Allopathy is other suffering and it's the same allo that you get in allegory or other-speaking.

The Inky Fool now offers medical insurance

Heal the Scars

A headline from the Evening Standard:

Quite right. It won't heal the scars. That's because scars don't heal. Wounds heal, and, once they've healed, they leave a scar. Everybody knows this except subeditors.

A more accurate song about scars.

Osteosarchaematosplanchnochondroneuromuelous

The following is from an early nineteenth century comic novel called Headlong Hall by Thomas Love Peacock. The context is that a phrenologist called Dr Cranium is going to give an after-dinner lecture. I trust, dear reader, that you will notice the long words.

"I invite you, when you have sufficiently restored, replenished, refreshed, and exhilarated that osteosarchaematosplanchnochondroneuromuelous, or, to employ a more intelligible term, osseocarnisanguineoviscericartilaginonervomedullary, compages, or shell, the body, which at once envelopes and develops that mysterious and inestimable kernel, the desiderative, determinative, ratiocinative, imaginative, inquisitive, appetitive, comparative, reminiscent, congeries of ideas and notions, simple and compound, comprised in the comprehensive denomination of mind, to take a peep, with me, into the mechanical arcana of the anatomico-metaphysical universe. Being not in the least dubitative of your spontaneous compliance, I proceed," added he, suddenly changing his tone, " to get every thing ready in the library."

Both those long words mean roughly made of bone, flesh, blood, organs and marrow.  So both simply mean bodily. Therefore, if you're feeling a little bit under the weather you have an osseocarnisanguineoviscericartilaginonervomedullary problem.

Headlong Hall (from which that extract was extracted) is the companion piece to another novella called Nightmare Abbey. It therefore gives me an excuse to quote the greatest description of posture ever committed to paper. I read the following passage when I was an impressionable young man, and have sat thus ever since.

[He] threw himself into his arm-chair, crossed his left foot over his right knee, placed the hollow of his left hand on the interior ankle of his left leg, rested his right elbow on the elbow of the chair, placed the ball of his right thumb against his right temple, curved the forefinger along the upper part of his forehead, rested the point of the middle finger on the bridge of his nose, and the points of the two others on the lower part of the palm, fixed his eyes intently on the veins in the back of his left hand...

Try it, dear reader, you'll look wonderful.

A rough sketch of the Inky Fool

Jane Austen and Broken-Hearted Octopuses

In Martin Amis' novel Other People there's a girl whose only knowledge of life comes from reading the novels of Jane Austen.

She read The Jane Austen Gift-Pack. The six stories it contained spoke more directly to her than anything else had done. The same thing happened in every book: the girl liked a bad man who seemed good, then liked a good man who had seemed bad, whom she duly married. What was wrong with the bad men who seemed good? They were unmanly, and lacked candour, and, in at least two clear instances, fucked other people.

This limited experience of life is a problem when she has to lie to the police:

'How old are you . . . Mary Lamb? Do your parents know what you get up to?'
'I'm in my twenty-fifth year,' said Mary carefully. 'My parents died.'
'Of what?'
Mary hesitated. 'One of consumption,' she said, 'the other of a broken heart.'
'People don't die of those things any more. Well they do, but we call it something else these days.'

Actually, we don't. A cardiologist friend of mine told me that, just as it is possible to tug on somebody's heart-strings, so it is medically possible to be broken hearted. It is actually called broken-heart syndrome and involves the sudden weakening of one of the muscles of the heart. It is sometimes brought on by emotional strain, such as the death of your beloved, and is usually fatal. This means that it is quite possible to die of a broken heart.

However, doctors don't usually call it broken-heart syndrome. They call it takotsubo, which is Japanese for octopus trap. That may sound a trifle odd, but when you're broken hearted your left ventricle swells up until it's just the same shape as a traditional Japanese octopus trap. Like this:

The poor (but delicious) octopuses find the pot and think it would make a nice home, so they crawl inside and, once snug, the wily fisherman pulls it up to the surface, cooks his tenant and leaves the other octopuses broken-hearted.

They usually die.

Solar Perplexus

I just came across this line from P.G. Wodehouse:

'What's the matter, Jerry? You seem perturbed. You have the aspect of one whom Fate has smitten in the spiritual solar plexus, or of one who has been searching for the leak in Life's gaspipe with a lighted candle. What's wrong?'

And it made me wonder why the solar plexus is solar, and indeed what a plexus is, and furthemoreover why I don't hear the term any more.

The answer to the first two of these questions is that the solar plexus is a complex of nerves that sits in the middle of the body just as Sol sits in the middle of the solar system. The plex of plexus is the same plex that you find in complex or indeed perplex and comes straight from the Latin for braid: plectere.

This also means that if you encircle something with braids you complicate it.

The reason that you don't hear it much any more is that it is now called the coeliac (bowel) plexus, which is much less fun. Although I suppose that the bowels do lead down to Life's more literal gaspipe.

Yulia Tymoshenko is a complicated lady.

Toady

A toady, or yes-man, does not get his name because he crawls around like a toad, or because he is despicable like a toad. Toady is short for toad-eater, and it was a job.

Once upon the seventeenth century the world was filled with mountebanks and quacks who would tour around trying to sell their snake-oil cure-alls. To sell, they needed to prove their potion's efficacy, and for that they needed a toad-eater.

Toads, as everybody knew, were poisonous. So the toad-eater's job was to eat one and collapse into a shivering, floccillating heap. The doctor would then give the toad-eater a dose of his patent medicine and, before the eyes of the crowd, the toad-eater would regain his health.

Obviously being a toad-eater was not a great job. Whether or not you actually ate your toad or only pretended to, it was a pretty humiliating way of making a living.

A toad-eater called William Utting is recorded in 1629, and the word was shortened to toady in 1828, by Disraeli.

P.S. I know this all sounds unlikely, but the OED says it's true.

The Handkerchief's Cargo

I have been suffering from a horrid cold for the last week. Every couple of minutes I put a vast, sail-like handkerchief to my face and imitate the mating cry of the victorious walrus. Here are some useful words for those similarly bemucused.

Snite was an Old English word that meant to blow your nose. It is now out of use, though its meaning is still obvious because its wordchild, snot, survives.

Emunction is a very posh form of nose-blowing indeed. I picked up the word from Beckett's Trilogy which has:

...certain habits such as the finger in the nose, the scratching of the balls, digital emunction and the peripatetic piss...

According to the OED, emunction is both obscure and obsolete; but it's awfully good for rhymes.You need to be careful, though, as it can technically mean the emptying of any bodily passage.

Gleimous means full of phlegm (but not, necessarily phlegmatic).

Finally, handkerchief is an oxymoron. Hand means hand (isn't etymology complicated?). Kerchief comes from Old French couvre-chief, which meant head-covering. So a handkerchief is a head-scarf for your hand (and nose).

Othello says of his handkerchief:

'Tis true: there's magic in the web of it:
A sibyl, that had number'd in the world
The sun to course two hundred compasses,
In her prophetic fury sew'd the work;
The worms were hallow'd that did breed the silk;
And it was dyed in mummy* which the skilful
Conserved of maidens' hearts.

What a terrible thing it would have been if Desdemona had had a cold like mine.

*A medicinal liquid extracted from mummies. I may need some.

Infant Tongues

Here's the opening line of Great Expectations:

My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip.

The odd thing is that infant means unable to speak. In means not, and fans was the present participle of the Latin fari, which meant speak. So infans was not speaking.

Incidentally, being tongue-tied is a proper medical condition. It's a congenital disorder whereby the tongue is fastened to the bottom of mouth. If you go to a mirror and make a horrid face you'll see an anchoring bit of flesh at the back middle of your tongue's underside. With those who are tongue tied that bit of skin comes out all the way.

Medical types call it ankyloglossia, because medical types are all frustrated scholars of Greek.

I know a chap who was born tongue-tied, but the doctors snipped his licker free and he has been making up for it ever since.

In the North of England they used to call tongues lollies, which may be the source of lollipop.

Tongue-tied no more

Mulligrubs

Those readers who are less festive than restive, and who feel that Christmas is the season to be anything other than merry, may resort to having the mulligrubs. It's such a charming way of saying that you're in a bad mood that your malevolence will be instantly forgotten.

The word pops up in The Harangues or Speeches of Quack Doctors of 1719:

See, Sirs, see here!
A Doctor rare,
who travels much at home!
Here, take my bills,
I cure all ills,
Past, present, and to come
The cramp, the stitch
The squirt, the itch,
The gout, the stone, the pox
The mulligrubs
The bonny scrubs,
And all Pandora's box.
Thousands I’ve Dissected,
Thousands new erected,
And such Cures effected,
As none e’er can tell.

The bonny scrubs is an itch, although why that should be bonny I really don't know.

P.S. Mulligrubs also seems to have been the name of a very strange Australian children's programme.

Phlebotomist

Are there many more beautiful words in the English language than phlebotomist? I mean, there are a couple, but words like wamblecropt don't wander around hospitals. There are people who, when asked what they do for a pittance, actually get to say: 'I'm a phlebotomist.'

Say it aloud.

Go on.

A phlebotomist, in case you were wondering, is the chap who does blood tests. Or more particularly the chap who takes the blood out of your arm and sends it off to be inspected by vampiric doctors. The word is just Greek for blood-taker. A less kindly world would have called them bloodsuckers or leeches or mosquitoes. It's not as though we enjoy their pins and needles. But the beauty of phlebotomy could not be held down.

What bloodshed, however dire, would not be pardoned if it were only called phlebotomy? Would Dracula have been a villain? Would fleas be scorned? I could continue in this vein (as the garrulous corpuscle once remarked), but I shall not. All wordplay is in vein beside phlebotomy. The word is just bloody beautiful.

Incidentally, a phlebotomist should never be confused with a phlebotomus which is a kind of very hairy sandfly.

The Inky Fool got carried away

Digital Information and Flipping the Finger

The fingers are the digits and are therefore used for counting. Thus did digits become numbers and when information is stored in numbers it becomes digital.

The Old English names for the fingers are much more fun than those which have been more recently fangled.

The index finger was once the towcher, or toucher, because it was used for touching things. We non-tactile moderns no longer use this finger for touching things and instead only point at, or indicate them. Hence index finger.

Though you may, dear reader, run your inky index finger down the index of a book, that's not where the name comes from. Like a co-owned onion, they merely share a root.

The index of a book indicates where a passage may be found (and the index expurgatorius indicates where the good, dirty stuff is). From this idea of indicating come all the other dull and dreary stock market and scientific indices.

The dully-named middle finger was, to our forbears the fool's finger, but not, alas, because it was covered in ink. Instead we got the name from the Romans who called it the digitus infamis (infamous), obscenus (obscene), and impudicus (rude). Nobody is sure why the Romans bore such a grudge against the middle finger, but it seems that it was they who invented the habit of sticking it up at those they did not like.

As Martial so delicately put it:

Rideto multum qui te, Sextille, cinaedum
dixerit et digitum porrigito medium

Which translates extraordinarily loosely as:

If you are called a poof don't pause or linger
But laugh and show the chap your middle finger.

What do leeches have to do with love? A leech is an old metonym for a doctor, and doctors are interested in the heart. Because it was believed that there was a nerve that ran from the fourth finger to the heart, doctors thought that they could influence the one through the other. Lovers believe that by putting a ring around the fourth finger they had, so to speak, lassoed the loved one's heart. And that's how the leech finger became the ring finger.

And the little finger? It was called the ear-finger. Why? Because it's just the right size for digging wax from your shell-like.

The Inky Fool consults the future

Myoclonic Jerk

Do you ever, dear reader, just as you're falling asleep, suddenly twitch and wake up? For no reason? I do. It's a terribly common phenomenon; and there is, dear reader, a name for it. It is a myoclonic jerk.

The reason I like myoclonic jerk is not simply that it gives a name to the nameless, but that it sounds like a term of abuse. 'That guy', I can rant, 'is a myoclonic jerk.'

It wouldn't matter that the sentence would be meaningless, because it would sound right.

Incidentally, if you ever experience a myoclonic jerk while you're not falling asleep, you are, in the words of doctor friend of mine, "absolutely fucked".

Formication and Fornication

Formication should never be confused with fornication. One is the delusional belief that you have insects crawling all over (and under) your skin: the other is a Sin.

If the two sensations are combined you should consult either a doctor, a priest, or a lepidopterist.

BARNADINE: Thou hast committed...

BARABAS: Fornication? But that was in another country: and besides, the wench is dead.

   - Marlowe The Jew Of Malta

Fornication and formication

Pasteur Pedicular

A rubbish joke:

A woman tells her doting husband that she wishes to bathe in milk. 'Whatever you ask, darling,' says her husband. 'Would you like it pasteurised?'.

'No. Just up to my chin.'

Which does nothing but illustrate how little shifts of pronunciation can cloud things. Pasteurised is, of course, named after Louis Pasteur. Yet we pronounce his name pa-stir. With his milky method we have longened the A and added in a Y to make it past-yer. Perhaps, perhaps our pronunciation has been skewed by a dream of cows in pasture. I couldn't say for sure.

The curious thing is that because of that slight shift you can use the word pasteurised without ever noticing that it must be named after the famous chemist. You see it the second you consider the word, but how often do any of us consider anything? I feel certain I don't. I am a man of wild and imponderable action. Thoughts are for losers.

Put the stress back on the middle syllable of excellent, and you can see how it relates to excel and repel and repellent. Not that that should come as a cataclysmic surprise, merely that the connection was loitering in a dusky corner. By Shakespeare's time excellent had already become a cretic. But it still meant exceeding, rather than praiseworthy as we can tell from Queen Margaret's ever-so-slightly-catty remark to Elizabeth of York:

From forth the kennel of thy womb hath crept

A hell-hound that doth hunt us all to death:

That dog, that had his teeth before his eyes,

To worry lambs and lap their gentle blood,

That foul defacer of God's handiwork,

That excellent grand tyrant of the earth,

That reigns in galled eyes of weeping souls,

Thy womb let loose, to chase us to our graves.

Women, eh? (I have an idea for a line of greetings-cards, as a competitor to Clinton's. On the outside of a card I'd have CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR BABY!!!!! !!! and on the inside I would reprint that passage. Any takers?)

As with pasteurised and excellent, lousy is obviously to do with lice, but how often do you think of that when using the word? The slight shift from the unvoiced S to the Z of lau-zee means that we never think of our diminutive neighbours. Louse-ridden has retained a pure and powerful punch. Lousy has lost meaning and must be replaced. Luckily such a word exists: pedicular. Pedicular (which was suggested to me by an erudite reader) means 'of, pertaining to, or caused by lice'. Pedicular is the thinking man's lousy.

A lousy picture, or a pedicular one

Idiopathic

Idiopathic is an immensely useful word meaning that you've got no idea what the hell is happening. It's a medical term and is there to allow bewildered doctors to conceal their bewilderment. Technically it means of an unknown or obscure cause. So when you turn up at the clinic and explain to the doctor that your pulse is down your glands are up and your right foot's fallen off, rather than saying 'Blimey, I'm flummoxed' the doctor can smile wisely and say 'Hmm, how idiopathic.'

So never again, dear reader! Never again need you admit that you don't understand something. Idiopathy can maintain you in intellectual comfort forever. Failed guesses, bankruptcies, freak election results and unsuccessful seductions can all be dismissed as idiopathic.

You might even add in the word exucontian, meaning out of nothing. It's a theological word, but along with idiopathic is useful for explaining car crashes to the police.

I only know of idiopathic because a doctor friend of mine once told me that I had a strange dark patch on my eyeball. He examined my other eye and found it there too. We worried and fretted about it for a few minutes before he calmly concluded that I had idiopathic eyes and left it at that. I started to feel Miltonic and Homeric and considered morosely that my light was spent. Later I remembered that I wear contact lenses.

Idiopathic

Sausage Poison In Your Face

Botuliform, dear reader, means sausage-shaped, and if you can't drop it into conversation in the next twenty-four hours then you're not having the right kind of conversations.

Botuliform comes from botulus in Latin meaning sausage. Sausages are stuffed with pork and peril. Too often the sausage is the last refuge of rotten meat. This culinary truth was not lost upon the Swabian poet Justinus Kerner. When not writing Swabian poetry (and everyone needs the occasional break) Justinus Kerner was a doctor. He once wrote of his twin vocations that: 

Flüchtig leb' ich durchs Gedicht,
Durch des Arztes Kunst nur flüchtig;
Nur wenn man von Geistern spricht,
Denkt man mein noch und schimpft tüchtig.

Which the Inky Fool's indentured linguist Everet Lapel translates thus:

I live briefly through the poem,
Only briefly through the doctor’s arts:
Only when one speaks of ghosts
Does one yet think of me and curse me.

However, this is no longer true. Only when one speaks of sausage-poison does one ever consider Justinus Kerner. This is because in 1817 he identified a rather horrible disease you got from rotten meat and decided to call it sausage-disease, or botulism. He named the guilty chemical sausage-poison or botulinum toxin.

In 1895 there was a funeral in Belgium where ham was served and three people dropped dead, which must have delighted the undertakers. The homicidal ham was rushed to Emile Pierre van Ermengem who was Professor of Bacteria at Ghent University and he identified clostridium botulinum, which are the bacteria that make botulinum toxin. This was useful as you could now produce botulinum toxin and take as much of it as you wanted.

Botulinum toxin is, generally speaking, a bad thing. It slowly paralyses you until you die. If you drink just one microgram then you're going to join the majority. But if you take an awful lot less than that you only get a tinsy winsy bit paralysed. So if you're having muscle spasms a doctor can temporarily cure you by injecting botulinum toxin. Also, if you're old and ugly you can inject sausage-poison straight into your old ugly face, paralyse your muscles and temporarily look a bit younger and very, very odd.

Of course you don't call it sausage-poison. You'd hardly be able to market that. You wouldn't be able to invite people to sausage-poison parties. You don't even call it botulinum toxin. You call it botox.

Now go forth and use the word botuliform.

Every time I try to self-administer botox the same thing happens

Inappropriate Places To Kill People

Much Ado About Nothing toddles along in a jolly Shakesperean-comedy sort of way. It's all terribly gentle and fluffy. Then there's a misunderstanding at a wedding which leads Benedick to ask Beatrice whether she's fallen out with Claudio. To which she replies

 I would eat his heart in the marketplace.

And bang! You have one of the foulest images in all of Shakespeare. More efficient than anything in Titus Andronicus, more horrid than anything in Lear. One sentence: I would eat his hearth in the marketplace.

Eating somebody's heart is a pretty nasty idea. For a lady like Beatrice who has so far been pretty ladylike, it's astonishing. You picture her, blood dribbling down her chin as she munches aorta over the opened corpse of Claudio. I can't think of a single line anywhere else in English literature that changes the tone so quickly*. It's like the zero-zero ejector seat, which a pilot can use even when the plane is stationary on the ground. He can sit in the cockpit drowsily humming a tune to himself and watching the flowers grow, then touch a button and a bomb explodes beneath his seat and he is sent hurtling into the sky.

Eating somebody's heart is pretty hideous, but the line wouldn't have the same effect, we would not picture it so clearly, were it not in the marketplace. Because it's in the marketplace, we see the cannibalism. Because it's in the marketplace, we realise that this is not a figure of speech but a plan, a plan with a location.

Shakespeare was all technique. Every good idea he had he used again. After Hamlet has killed Polonius, Claudius says to Laertes (Polonius' son):

Hamlet comes back: what would you undertake,
To show yourself your father's son in deed
More than in words?

And Laertes replies

To cut his throat i' the church.

I hear that line and think to myself: "Done that one before, Will. Slightly better the first time, but good effort, Will, good effort." It works: violence is twice as vivid with a location attached.

Slitting people's throats is a commonplace threat. I have heard respectable and peaceable matrons complain of some minor annoyance and add "Oh I could slit his throat." They don't mean it and I don't picture it. It is a figure of speech, no more to be taken literally than the strange evolution implicit in "Son of a bitch", or the eternal agony and torture wished for in "Damn him."

But add a location, preferably an inappropriate one like a church or a marketplace, and the image revives, the threat is precise, we see the knife cutting the skin, or the teeth breaking the ventricles.

And all by simply appending to the threat a single, simple clause.

"I'll kill you." - Not that frightening.

"I'll kill you on Tuesday." - Ooh.

A technique, dear reader: a technique to be learned and used.

While we are on the subject of hearts, heart strings (which are so often tugged) are real. Medical fellows call them chordae tendineae, because medical fellows will do anything to avoid speaking English. If anyone ever did tug on your heart strings, you would die. They might also get stuck between Beatrice's teeth.

Label on the upper right

*Although you are welcome to nominate a rival in the comments.

P.S. I got glared at furiously by a passing lady on Saturday just because I happened to observe to a friend that the best way to a girl's heart was keyhole surgery.