The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities

A Yearbook of Forgotten Words

The University of Chicago Press

January 1

quaaltagh (n.) the first person you meet on New Year's Day

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Proving there really is a word for everything, your quaaltagh is the first person you meet on New Year's Day morning.

If you think that word doesn't look even remotely English, you're right: quaaltagh (pronounced 'quoll-tukh', with a rasping 'gh' like the sound in loch) was borrowed into English from Manx, the Celtic language of the Isle of Man, in the early nineteenth century. Its roots lie in a Manx verb, quaail, meaning 'to meet' or 'to assemble', as it originally referred to a group of festive entertainers who would come together to gambol from door to door at Christmas or New Year singing songs and reciting poems. For all their efforts, these quaaltagh entertainers would be invited inside for food and drink before moving on to the next house on their route.

If, as was often enough the case, all of that happened early on the morning of 1 January, then there was a good chance that the leader of the quaaltagh would be the first-footer of each household. As a result, a tradition soon emerged that the identity of the quaaltagh could have a bearing on the events of the year to come: dark-haired men were said to bring good luck, while fair-haired or fair-complexioned men (or, worst of all, fair-haired women) were said to bring bad luck – a curious superstition said to have its origins in the damage once wreaked by fair-haired Viking invaders.

Eventually, the tradition of door-to-door New Year's Day gambolling disappeared (presumably because everyone is feeling far too delicate the morning after the night before), but the tradition of the quaaltagh being your luck-bringing first encounter on the morning of New Year's Day, either inside or outside your house, has remained in place in the dictionary.

fedifragous(adj.) promise-breaking, oath-violating

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If you made a New Year's resolution only to ditch the gym for a box of chocolates or an afternoon in the pub on 2 January, then the word you might be looking for is fedifragous – a seventeenth-century adjective describing anything or anyone that breaks an oath or a promise, or reneges on an earlier agreement.

Fedifragous combines two Latin roots: foedus, meaning 'treaty' or 'contract', and frangere, meaning 'to break'. Foedus is a common ancestor of a clutch of more familiar words like confederate, federal and federation, while it is from frangere that the likes of fragment, fragile and fraction are all descended – as well as an entire vocabulary's worth of more obscure and equally broken words:

• confraction (n.) a smashing or crushing, a breaking up into small pieces

• effraction (n.) a burglary, a house-breaking

• effractive (adj.) describing anything broken off something larger

• irrefrangible (adj.) incapable of being broken

• ossifragous (adj.) powerful enough to break bone

Along similar lines, ossifrage – literally 'bone-breaker' – is an old name for the lammergeyer, an enormous mountain-dwelling eagle known for its habit of smashing bones by dropping them from a great height and then devouring the shards. And even the humble saxifrage plant can take its place on this list: its name derives from the Latin saxum, meaning 'rock' or 'stone', and literally means 'stone-breaker'. The Roman scholar Pliny the Elder would have you believe that this refers to the plant's supposed effectiveness in treating kidney stones but, alas, it's more likely to be a reference to the plant's habit of growing in cracks and fissures in rocks.

eucatastrophe(n.) a sudden and unexpected fortuitous event

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If a catastrophe is an unexpected disaster, then a eucatastrophe is its opposite: using the same positive-forming prefix found in words like euphoria and euphonious, J. R. R. Tolkien coined the word eucatastrophe in 1944, defining it as 'the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears'.

As well as being the author of The Hobbit (1937) and the Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954–55), Tolkien – born on 3 January 1892 – was a professor of English at Oxford University and an expert philologist and etymologist. Alongside his fiction, he compiled a dictionary of Middle English, completed his own translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf and, following active service in the First World War, worked for a time on the very first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

As an expert in Germanic languages, Tolkien was tasked with researching a clutch of Germanic-origin words falling alphabetically between waggle and warlock at the OED – waistcoat, wake, walnut, wampum and wan among them. The verb want ended up being the longest entry he assembled (Tolkien eventually identified more than two dozen different definitions and sub-definitions of it) but oddly it was the walrus that proved the toughest etymological challenge. He discovered that the walrus's original and long-forgotten English name, morse, is entirely unrelated to the word we use today, while the name walrus itself represents a metathesised (i.e. reordered) form of an Old Norse word, hrosshvalr, literally meaning 'horse-whale'. Why replace one word for the other? And why rearrange the Norse word we ended up using? No one is entirely sure, and in fact the word posed such a problem that Tolkien continued to study and lecture on its origins long after he left the OED in 1920.

spike-bozzle(v.) to sabotage; to ruin or render ineffective

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The longest workers' strike in history ended on 4 January 1961, when a band of disgruntled barbers' assistants in Copenhagen, Denmark, finally returned to work after thirty-three years. By 5 January, presumably, every man in Copenhagen was imberbic (that is, beardless).

The act of downing tools has been known as striking since the mid 1700s, when supposedly dissatisfied sailors would show their refusal to go out to sea by lowering or 'striking' their sails. Strikes have also been known as steeks, stickouts, turn-outs and rag-outs down the centuries, while those who cross the picket lines have been known by an array of depreciative nicknames including dungs, scabs, ratters, snobs, knobs and knobsticks.

Disgruntled workers have been sabotaging their equipment in protest since the early 1800s: the word comes from sabot, a type of French wooden boot, and although linguistic folklore will have you believe that the original saboteurs threw their shoes into their machinery in protest, sadly there's little evidence to back that story up. But why sabotage anything at all, of course, when you can spike-bozzle it?

A term originating during the First World War, spike-bozzling originally referred to the practice of scuppering or completely destroying enemy aircraft or equipment. In that sense, it probably derives from the practice of 'spiking' a gun – that is, driving a nail into its mechanism to render it useless – perhaps combined with bamboozle or bumbaze, an eighteenth-century Scots word meaning 'to confound' or 'to perplex'. By the mid 1900s, however, spike-bozzling was being used more broadly to refer to any attempt to ruin or render something ineffective, or else to upset another's work or plans.

pontitecture(n.) the building of bridges

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If etymological legend is to be believed, both pontiff and pontifex – titles held by and used of the Pope – derive from the Latin word for 'bridge', pons. If that's the case, then the pontiff is literally a 'bridge-builder' or 'bridge-maker', perhaps a figurative reference to his task of building spiritual bridges between heaven and earth, or else perhaps a literal reference to the papal blessings supposedly once bestowed on newly constructed bridges.

That Latin root, pons, crops up elsewhere in the dictionary in a handful of obscure words like pontage (a toll paid for the use or upkeep of a bridge), ponticello (the bridge of a stringed instrument), pont-levis (a drawbridge, or a term for a horse unseating its rider) and both transpontine and cispontine (adjectives describing things located on opposite sides of a bridge – flick ahead to 30 June for more on that).

Pons is also at the root of pontitecture, a term for the construction of bridges coined by a nineteenth-century Scottish scholar and businessman named Andrew Ure in 1853. 'There is perhaps no other form of pontitecture', Ure wrote in his Dictionary of Arts, Manufactures & Mines, 'which can compete with the wrought-iron girder when the clear space exceeds 70 feet.' Quite.

Ure's term pontitecture – which he based straightforwardly enough on the same template as architecture – is also a fitting word for today: it was on 5 January 1933 that work began on the construction of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge.

recumbentibus(n.) a powerful or knockout blow

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The word recumbent, meaning 'lying down', derives from a Latin verb, recumbere, meaning 'to recline' or 'to rest'. The less familiar verb recumb – 'to rest', 'to rely upon' – derives from the same root, as does the superb word recumbentibus, which was adopted directly into English from Latin in the early 1400s.

In its native Latin recumbentibus was used merely of the act of lounging or reclining, but when the word was adopted into English it was given a twist: English writers, no doubt familiar with the word from its appearance in several early Latin translations of the Bible, began to use it to refer to forceful, knockout or knockdown blows, strong enough to knock someone off their feet.

Had you some husband, and snapped at him thus, I wise he would give you a recumbentibus. John Heywood, A Dialogue of Proverbs in the English Tongue (1546)

The word remained in use in that sense through to the late seventeenth century, before largely falling out of use. Nowadays, we tend only to refer to knockout blows as precisely that, but a strike strong enough to knock someone off their feet can also be called a purler (literally a 'hurling' or an 'overturning'), a stramazoun (derived from an Italian word for a downward strike of a sword), and a sockdolager (flick ahead to 8 April for more on that).

With knockout blows in mind, the first documented boxing match in English history took place on 6 January 1681. According to a report in the London Protestant, Christopher Monck, 2nd Duke of Albemarle, arranged the fight between his butler and his butcher. The butcher, reportedly, was victorious.

translunary(adj.) located beyond the moon

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A lunatic was originally – and quite literally – someone whose bizarre behaviour was believed to be influenced by the moon: the word derives from the Latin word for 'moon', luna, which also crops up in lunacy, the deranged behaviour of a lunatic. Similarly, lunambulism is a nineteenth-century word for sleepwalking that supposedly is worsened by a full moon. A lunarnaut is an astronaut who has travelled to the moon, while an inhabitant of the moon, were one to exist, would be a lunarian. One lunation is the period of time between one full moon and the next. Anything described as novilunar or plenilunar takes place during a new or full moon, respectively. And while something that is circumlunar orbits or revolves around the moon, anything that is translunary is positioned beyond or on the other side of the moon.

Speaking of which, on 7 January 1610 the legendary astronomer Galileo Galilei wrote for the first time of a group of three 'fixed stars' he had observed close to Jupiter. In the weeks and months that followed, he not only discovered a fourth star to add to his list, but found that they were not 'fixed' as he had presumed, but instead appeared to be orbiting Jupiter. What he had observed were not stars, he finally determined, but the first natural satellites in astronomical history found to orbit a planet other than the earth.

sheep's-eye(v.) to look amorously at someone

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On 8 January 1902, it was reported that a bill had been tabled in the New York State Assembly that sought to punish 'any person who is intoxicated in a public place, or who shall by any offensive or disorderly act or language annoy or interfere with any person or persons'. Although the bill's impenetrable legalese kept its rulings fairly vague, its architect, State Assemblyman Francis G. Landon, was less ambiguous when it came to explaining who he intended it to target. As he explained to the New York Morning Telegraph, 'My bill is aimed at the flirters, gigglers, mashers, and makers of goo-goo eyes in public. We have all been disgusted with them ... so they must be brought to their senses.' Anyone caught in violation of Landon's bill faced a $500 fine, or even up to a year in prison.

Remarkably, Landon's bill was passed the following day. Even more remarkably, it has never been repealed - meaning flirting has officially been illegal in New York ever since.

Long before Landon's goo-goo eyes, the flirters and romantics of sixteenth-century Europe had sheep's-eyes. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to cast or throw a sheep's-eye has been used to mean 'to look lovingly, amorously, or longingly at someone' since the early 1500s; almost three centuries later, in 1801, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined the verb sheep's-eye, meaning to do precisely that. Sheep's eyes aren't especially romantic of course (although there's no accounting for taste) but the expression apparently alludes to the sheep's dopey, wide-eyed appearance – the same appearance that is at the root of the expression to look sheepish.

Looking sheepish in New York, incidentally, is entirely legal.

manatine(adj.) resembling a manatee

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On 9 January 1493, shortly before embarking on the return journey from the Americas to Europe, Christopher Columbus wrote in his journals that 'the admiral went to the Rio del Oro', on modern-day Haiti, where 'he saw three mermaids, which rose well out of the sea'.

'They are not so beautiful as they are painted,' Columbus continued, 'though to some extent they have the form of a human face.' As exciting a discovery as this would have been, unsurprisingly neither Columbus nor his admiral actually saw a mermaid that day. Instead, they saw a trio of manatees, the large plant-eating aquatic mammals that inhabit the warm seas and brackish rivers of the Caribbean and the Amazon.

In fact, the word manatee would not appear in English until almost fifty years after Columbus's death, when an account of 'those huge monsters of the sea' known to the inhabitants of Central America as the 'manati' was published in 1555. Folk etymology would have you believe that the name derives from the Latin word for 'hand', manus – a reference to the manatee's surprisingly hand-like flippers, which contain five bony 'fingers' and end in a set of short semi-circular fingernails used to grip the seabed as it feeds. But the truth is that manatee is actually derived from a local Carib word, manáti, meaning 'breast' or 'udder', as female manatees feed their young with a rich milk produced from teats below each of their flippers. Their surprisingly human-like habit of appearing to 'cradle' their offspring in their 'arms' as they feed could only have helped fuel the myth that they were mermaids, but despite all their human-like characteristics – and despite Columbus's manatine description – the manatee's closest living relative is actually the elephant.

love-libel(n.) a love letter, a love note

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Libel is the crime of publishing a written statement that damages another person's reputation. A love-libel is a love letter or love note, the contents of which are hardly likely to be disparaging of the person on the receiving end. In both cases, libel is derived from libellus, a Latin word that literally means 'little book'. That meaning was essentially still intact when the word first appeared in English in the thirteenth century as another word for a handwritten statement or document, and from there it came to mean a leaflet or a widely distributed pamphlet, before the Elizabethan playwright Thomas Dekker coined the word love-libel – literally, 'a handwritten admission of someone's love' – in 1602.

The crime of libel took a different route. In the medieval legal system, a libel was a formal document outlining the allegations raised against a plaintiff, but by the seventeenth century things had changed: thanks to the use of libel to refer to a publicly distributed document or pamphlet, in legal contexts libel had come to refer to the crime of publishing or circulating a defamatory statement. As that meaning began to take hold, all other meanings of the word quickly drifted into obscurity – including Dekker's love-libel.

On the topic of which, on 10 January 1845 a brief letter was sent from Telegraph Cottage in Hatcham, Surrey, to 50 Wimpole Street in Marylebone, London. 'I love your verses with all my heart,' the letter began, 'and this is no off-hand complimentary letter that I shall write.' The note was the very first love letter sent by Robert Browning to his eventual wife Elizabeth Barrett, whose lengthy courtship via a total of 573 items of correspondence is one of English literature's most enduringly romantic tales.