Bradley Wiggins: tin tacks, syntax and Chinese sensibility

Few people read dictionaries cover to cover, and you get rather odd looks if you do. Lately, in the course of researching a new book on the lost words of the English language, I?ve been devouring them, and it?s astonishing how much they can teach you about the lives of others.

For example, histories of the Second World War will tell you all about a soldier?s experience of D-Day, but you must remember the old adage that war is 1 per cent terror and 99 per cent boredom. If you want to know what a soldier?s life was really like in the Forties, pick up a dictionary of Services slang. Most of the words have nothing to do with fighting: they?re to do with gossiping, making tea, and waiting around. There were furphies (gossip started in the lavatories), and elsan gen (gossip so obviously false it was fit only to be flushed down an Elsan lavatory). There was duff gen, pukka gen, and the gen king (who knew all the gossip). Only very occasionally do you get even the faintest hint of death and glory.

Still, if it is death you want, you should turn to dictionaries of cant ? the thieves? and highwaymen?s slang of the 17th and 18th centuries. At a time when hanging was the punishment for even petty crime, highwaymen had a thousand euphemisms for the place they might end up. When the trapdoor opened they were left ?dancing on nothing?, a dawn execution was ?having a hearty-choke and caper sauce for breakfast?, where the caper again refers to the twitching feet of the hanged man. You also get fascinating glimpses into their sex lives: the number of terms and fine distinctions between different types of prostitute is enough to make a cinqasept seem positively tame.

Some of the words you find in old dialect dictionaries make you want to build a time machine and head straight off. Given the choice, I would emigrate to 19th-century Roxburgh, where they had a single word ? sprunt ? meaning to run after girls among the haystacks after dark. The idea of a place where that activity was so common that they needed a one-syllable word for it makes me feel that I was born too late.

Every old dialect dictionary contains a lost world, but it?s never a paradisiacal Merrie England. There are rustic dances and moonlit coppices, but because it?s a dictionary, these sit side by side with skin diseases that make you thank God for modern medicine.

That?s why the Chinese have made a mistake in leaving out the term shengnu, or unmarried woman in her thirties. The editor?s reasoning is sweet ? he didn?t want to be nasty to single ladies ? but a lexicographer shouldn?t pick and choose. Every dictionary is a record of a world, and it?s a terrible shame to make that picture incomplete.

Of course, you can get carried away with an analysis like this. People like to say that there?s no English equivalent of Schadenfreude, but there is: gloating. You need to indulge in a bit of fair play ? or, as the French would call it, l?esprit sportif.

Mark Forsyth is the author of 'The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language? (Icon Books). His next book, 'The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt Through the Lost Words of the English Language', is published in November.

Source: http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/570666/s/2166cbe7/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cculture0Cbooks0Creferenceandanthologybooksrevie0C940A33670CBradley0EWiggins0Etin0Etacks0Esyntax0Eand0EChinese0Esensibility0Bhtml/story01.htm

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