2006
One of the gifts I received from my wife last Christmas was the 16th edition of “Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader,” a riveting compendium of trivia and minutiae. One page was devoted to archaic, unusuable English words. Naturally, being a writer, I felt challenged to put the unusable to some use. And here, using several of those unusable words, is the tale I wove:
One day, long ago when I was a hobberdehoy, I had occasion to travel to Portsmouth. A forest of masts, reaching heavenward from the decks of the ships docked in the harbor and visible from the highway leading into the city, aroused both my curiosity and sense of adventure and lured me toward the brackish water and into a seedier part of the town where a young well-dressed gentleman such as I had no business visiting. I had not ventured far before I was accosted by a pitiful man clad in rags who begged for alms. I attempted to ignore him by quickening my step, but even though he was much smaller than I, valgus, and in a deplorable physical state, he encountered no difficulty in matching my pace, all the while apprising me in a most vulgar American accent of the tragic events that had reduced him to these squalid circumstances. He had lost all his worldly possessions in a shipwreck, he said, and after being rescued by a passing vessel bound for Portsmouth, upon berthing had been heartlessly cast by its crew into this cursed city, marooned here now, far from his beloved homeland and without a farthing.
Realizing I could not outdistance him, especially while attempting to dodge other people wending their ways in the narrow, crowded thoroughfare, I abruptly halted and confronted him. He was appallingly disgusting. His dirty, leptorrhinian face was wemmed, and his anisognathous smile was forced. The atmosphere about him was noxious. Living on an estate in the country, I was accustomed to the odor of bodewash and encountering jumentous people who engaged in husbandry. But this saprostomous urban castaway stank of mundungus. I was young but not naïve, and it only took me a moment to size him up as a whipjack, and I called him on his ruse. His stubbled jaw went slack. But he was not so easily persuaded to surrender the attention he had labored so diligently to acquire. “You have seriously misjudged me, kind sir,” he faffled. “But I am in desperate straits, and if you spare me a moment of your valuable time — and a few shillings — I shall make it very, very much worth your while. I can show you where there is a pirate’s treasure buried on the island from which I was rescued.”
I confess he had piqued my curiosity and summoned the greed inherent in all of us. I nodded. Encouraged, he smiled broadly, dipped into one of the pockets of his tattered galligaskin and produced a nub of chalk. Then this befouled calcographer reached down, retrieved a loose cobblestone, and began to etch a crude map on the driest side. It was at that propitious moment that a constable appeared out of the milling crowd. Recognizing my wretched benefactor, the constable raised his baton and shouted: “Hey, you spodogenous knave!” The terrified beggar dropped the chalk and stone and, with amazing alacrity, vanished into the throng. “And you, sir,” the constable lectured the chastened young gentleman standing in front of him, “are a liripoop for listening to that treasure twaddle.” Grateful that my purse had not been lightened, I sheepishly retreated to a more civilized quadrant of the city.
I’m certain that you found much of that tale indecipherable. But the point I’m trying to make here is that English seems to get a raw deal when compared with other languages from around the globe. Sure, there are some languages that sound more pleasing to the ear than English, and the spelling is certainly impractical. But we have so many wonderful, colorful words in our language, and it’s a shame that we use so few of them. I think I read once that there are about 250,000 words in the English language – a number I’m sure has grown since then – yet most of us only know about 10,000 of them and can function well on a day-to-day basis using only a fraction of those. Think about that for a moment: A person can know only about four percent of the words in English and still be considered fluent in that language!
Granted, as you have just heard, many English words are archaic and have little or no value in modern society. One only needs to read or listen to Shakespeare – or Dickens, for that matter – to realize how difficult it would be to understand and follow a conversation using their vernacular. The phrasing, of course, has a lot do with that. Anyone who watches the HBO series “Deadwood” with its perversely profane Elizabethan phrasing of comparatively modern English knows what I mean.
But there are still thousands of words that are so descriptive and so perfect that we neglect to use. One day, some years ago, one of my best friends referred to his sister-in-law as a “slattern,” and I doubled over in laughter. When he asked me what was so funny, I told him I had never, ever, heard that word used in a conversation. But the thing was, I couldn’t have thought of a more perfect word to describe his sister-in-law. Another time, one of my editors questioned my use of the word “niggardly” in a story. He thought it was racist, and I had to explain to him exactly what it meant.
I frequently find myself stumbling over words in conversations because I’m trying to think of one that better conveys what I’m trying to say. Meanwhile, I shake my head over the lazy language I read and hear. And nothing has been lost more these days than the colorful art of swearing. Almost everybody overuses what I call the generic verb/adjective/adverb to the extent it has lost its impact, and even that’s a shame. No word – any word – should be robbed of its character.
It only takes a little imagination to brighten up a conversation.