Friday, Aug. 17, 1962
Squishops & Jobbernowls
You ENGLISH WORDS (254 pp.)--John Moore--Lippincoft ($4.75).
If a man must go soppy about something--and no doubt a man must--what better object could there be for his daft, uncritical, wife-maddening, friend-alienating affection than the English language? John Moore, a Gloucestershire man who writes light novels (Dance and Skylark, September Moon), keeps pigs and calls himself an amateur of words, writes agreeably of his lifelong addiction. His most easily recognizable symptom is the logophile's tendency to open his dictionary, innocently intending to check the exact meaning of a word he intends to use to intimidate his publisher, and to become lost there until, hours later, he is discovered grazing happily between scurvy grass (a grassicaceous plant) and scutellate (having scutes). With imperturbable pride the author displays his specimens: among the most resplendent are quocker-wodger, umblegumption, skilligolee, cali-bogus and jobbernowl.*
In its pleasantly meandering way, Moore's work is an offhand introduction to etymology, a tribute to the language's first lexicographer. Dr. Johnson and a bright rag bag of quotations Moore happens to like. He ridicules the late George Bernard Shaw for his obsession with simplified spelling, correctly observing that tidied spelling would sterilize English of the still traceable ancient origins visible in its words.
Moore writes of joke-words (squarsons and squishops are clerics who are also squires), long words (honorificabilitudinity, meaning merely "honor"), and grim words (heresy originally meant merely "private opinion," and in the shift of meaning to "private, sinful error" can be read a whole history of religious persecution). Sometimes he errs; the grisly U.S. neologism "finalize" means to confirm a tentative decision--not to finish. But the book is delightful, and to say more of its faults would be to make mountains of oontitoompses (Gloucestershire rural slang for molehills).
*Respectively, a puppet, and hence "a politician acting under an outsider's order"; a Scottish word for common sense; a soup for prisoners or sailors; a mixture of rum and spruce beer; and a blockhead.
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