Books like The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language

Fertilising One’s SpeechIf French is the language of diplomacy because of its precision, English must be the language of the farmyard because of its fecundity. English takes it where it can get it and isn’t afraid to call a spade a ‘feague’ stick (for inserting eels into a horse’s bottom) or a simultaneous fart and cough a ‘through cough’. This also has the effect of increasing the efficiency of communication by reducing the number of words necessary to describe many otherwise arcane phenomena.English is as deep as the topsoil of Iowa and as equally fertile. It seems to never lose what has been deposited in its vicinity, which slowly composts. So ‘pogoniasis’, the beard on a lady; and aristology, the study of breakfast, are a residue of Greek and lie in wait to be re-discovered. And a ‘chota hazri’, a little breakfast or elevenses, is a graft from Hindi to the Raj and hence to the Home Counties. But in East London one might refer instead to a ‘Spitalfields breakfast’ which consists rather of a tight necktie and a stout pipe. Even the Shoshone Indians of North America gave left their mark with the somewhat Greek-sounding but false friend‘pogonip’, a fog so cold that ice crystals form in the air.Consequently, English proliferates, evolves, and takes over new ground, returning to the homeland with renewed vigour. A ‘bumbershoot’ is an American replacement for an umbrella; as is ‘scream sheet’ for newspaper. Both much more descriptive than the originals. To dig transforms itself from a term of manual labour to one of aesthetic appreciation, and ultimately to the highest praise “That’s shovel city, man!” Thus simultaneously erasing gender differences long before LGBT was normalised.Forsyth has a genius for making archaic and strange vocabulary not just enjoyable but even fashionable. He writes with wit and humour. But he also accomplishes something important, the generation of respect for language as a living thing. No part of it ever completely dies. Even if words go out of use, they lie there dormant in not quite forgotten dictionaries waiting for someone like Forsyth to trip over them and repot them in the Great Global Garden of English. The book also will defeat any spellchecker better than a novel by John Banville.