The wackiest words you've never heard of
Had an abligurition recently? Want to batterfang your boss? Or maybe you're carked about your callipygian cousin. Christopher Foyle, chairman of the eponymous bookshop, has spent half a lifetime collecting obscure English words. Here's a philavery of his favourites.
Published: 20 July 2007
I first began to collect words which I considered to be of "uncommon usage" at the time of the first Gulf War, in 1991, after General Norman Schwarzkopf described information which he considered to be of little or no value as "bovine scatology". Although I was familiar with the word "bovine", I had to find the meaning of "scatology".
From then on, I started to make a note of any words I came across that I was unfamiliar with, and checked their meaning in a dictionary. This " collection" of words grew rapidly; to these previously unknown words I added new gems – pleasing, interesting and unusual words, both ancient and modern, which attracted my attention in some way and demanded to be remembered.
From archaic words like "Fastingong" and "hebberman", which are all but lost to modern ears, to dialect terms such as "beek" or "sniddle" which, if not lost already, may soon suffer the same fate, literally hundreds of words came to be recorded. I came across words both well- and little-known which, like "halcyon" and " ultracrepidarian", had fascinating and often surprising etymologies. Some uncommon words seemed to provide a more satisfying and evocative alternative to their more familiar counterparts – "amanuensis" for secretary, "murken" for darken, or "crapulent' for hungover.
Now I have collected several hundred of my favourites in a book. It is not a dictionary, just a collection. I find my words in a variety of places. I take six newspapers a day: five British broadsheets and the International Herald Tribune. Having read one of them, I skim the news pages of the others and mostly concentrate on the editorials, letters, opinion and comments sections. These, together with The Economist, The Spectator and specialist periodicals, provide a steady stream of unusual words.
I have called it a "philavery" – a term coined by my mother-in-law during a game of Scrabble. While discussing a suitable name for this collection she managed to trump any of my suggestions with this word, loosely constructed from Greek phileein ("to love") and Latin verbum ("a word"). The recommended pronunciation is " fil-a-vuh-ri", with the stress on the second syllable.
My passion for words began early. As a young child I quickly became an avid reader. This was hardly surprising as books and reading pervaded my life from birth, my entire family being steeped in the book trade. My grandfather, William Foyle, was the co-founder of Foyles bookshop in Charing Cross Road in London, and my father, Richard Foyle, and one of his sisters, my aunt Christina, followed him into the business; my mother worked for a company producing illustrated books.
In my teens I read Exploration Fawcett, based on the diaries of Colonel Percy Fawcett, an eccentric Englishman who tramped through the jungles and mountains of South America in the early 20th century. In the course of his eight expeditions, Fawcett became interested in the legends of the people he encountered; tales of lost cities and of a white race which pre-dated the first Spanish conquerors. These accounts sparked in me an interest in the anthropology, and prehistory of South and Central America, which subsequently extended to cover other regions and civilisations.
Meanwhile, in 1999, my life came full circle with my appointment as director and then chairman of the Foyles book business on the death of my aunt. It is satisfying to be following in the footsteps of earlier generations of Foyles, but it has one drawback – easy access has swelled the piles of books, and subsequent philavery-bound cuttings, around my house and office to almost unmanageable proportions.
This is an edited extract from "Foyle's Philavery: A Treasury of Unusual Words", by Christopher Foyle, published by Chambers on 27 July. To order a copy for £9.99 (plus free P&P) call Independent Books direct on 08700 798 897, or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk
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