"The Horologicon" by Mark Forsyth

A 'book of hours' in which every hour is illustrated with weird words from the farthest shores of the English language. But what makes this book special is intimate scrutiny of everyday life and the number of words for things you didn't know you needed a word for. Thus he lies awake before dawn and worries (uhtceare); dawn can be low (the sun on the horizon) or high (when it first appears later, above clouds) and the first sun is the dayening, lightmans, day-peep, or early bright.

There are far too many interesting words to list them all in a blog entry. Even keeping track of all of Forsyth's little jokes would be exhaustive. For he is an extremely witty man. Therefore I disagree with the critic  who suggests he was tempted to read this book in a single go. On the contrary, I found it extraordinarily putdownable. And then pickupable. This is a book that demands that you read a few pages every day until, the end. It is brilliant, eccentric, hilarious and wonderful, but like a damn good meal you need to take your time to allow your digestion to work. Otherwise you would feel stuffed instead of satisfied.

Below are just a few of the many moments of brilliance:

• "The world is, I am told, speeding up. Everybody dashes around at a frightening pace, teleconferencing and speed-dating ... like so many coked-up pin-balls." (p 2) 
• "Any slipper than can double up as a weapon with which to spank godlings has to be a good idea." (p 20)
• The word 'bumf' meaning paperwork is a short version of 'bumfodder' meaning toilet paper! (pp 24 - 25)
• "Of the seven deadly sins only three are enjoyable: gluttony, sloth and lust balance their lethality with fun." (p 96) 
• "Sinhala ... means 'blood of a lion', which is odd as there are no lions in Sri Lanka." (p 131) 
• "In the ancient Near East ... if you sat down to have a nice supper with a sinner, that made you a sinner too. It is this ... that makes Jesus' sitting down with the wine-bibbers and tax collectors such a prickly point in the gospels. A man could be judged by the company he kept at table." (p 149) 
• "If you drink alone it is much harder to avoid buying your round." (p 176) 
• "The tongue is often merely the thin end of the wedge." (p 210)
• And a wonderful story about philosopher A J Ayer, heavyweight chanmpion Mike Tyson and supermodel Naomi Campbell

Wonderful. February 2017; 238 pages

What is it with my mate Fred? Doesn't he read any books which are bad or even average? This is the latest in a strong of fantastic recommendations which have included:

• A Time of Gifts: a wonderful travel book about a man walking through Europe between the wars; beautifully written 
• The Mighty Dead: a superb analysis of the Iliad but an authro who writes like a dream 
• Dynasty: the story of the first Roman emperors by the wonderful historian Tom Holland 
• The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller 
• Defying Hitler, a superb memoir written by a German about the period between the first and second world war

"Fopdoodle and Salmagundi" selected by Edward Allhusen

This is a selection of words and their definitions from Dr Johnson's dictionary. Some of the words are no longer used and some are used rather differently then they are today. Sometimes a surprising definition of a word gives you insight into how we use the word today. For example, knuckle means to submit because of "the custom of striking the under side of the table with the knuckles, in confession of an argumental defeat." Nowadays we say 'knuckle under'.

There were lots of good words of which my favourites are:
above-board: because gamblers used to keep their hands above the table to show they weren't cheating
buxom: obedient
curtain-lecture: a kind of reproof given by a wife to her husband

July 2010: 208 pages

"Reading the Oxford English Dictionary" by Ammon Shea

This weird book describes the year that Ammon Shea took to read the entire, 20 volume, 21,730 page Oxford English Dictionary.

There are, unsurprisingly, 26 chapters. Each chapter gives a little background about events that happened during the year such as the Convention for Lexicographers he attended all of whom thought that reading the OED was mad. This autobiographical fragment is then followed by his favourite words for the appropriate letter.

It sounds like a dreadfully boring book but actually it is quite funny. Some of the words are delightful and some are bizarre. The little commentaries he gives on each word are often gems. Often he is delighted to find a word for something he did not think needed to be named. Sometimes the definitions are enthralling.

Favourite word: "Unbepissed (adj) Not having been urinated on. Unwet with urine." (p188). As Shea points out, one must live a strange life is being wet with urine is the norm.

A strange book with delights for vocabularians (p194) such as myself but beware: I started mentioning some of the words to my family and they did not want to know!

"The name of Isaac Bickerstaff Steele borrowed from his friend Swift, who, just before the establishment of the Tatler, had borrowed it from a shoemaker's shop-board, and used it as the name of an imagined astrologer, who should be an astrologer indeed, and should attack John Partridge, the chief of the astrological almanack makers, with a definite prediction of the day and hour of his death. This he did in a pamphlet that brought up to the war against one stronghold of superstition an effective battery of satire. " Isaac Bickerstaff, Physician and Astrologer by Richard Steele. Papers from Steele's Tatler by Henry Morley http://schulers.com/books/ri/i/ISAAC_BICKERSTAFF/ [Accessed 20th June 2009]


The book containing the collection of early Tatlers became known as The Lucubrations of Isaac Bickerstaff. Lucubration, which means to study or meditate, literally means to work by artifical light.

Later an Isaac Bickerstaffe was a playwright who had some success with The Hypocrite (1769), a play that starred a hypocrite called Mawworm. "Irish playwright whose farces and comic operas were popular in the late 18th century. There is no apparent connection between his name and the pseudonym earlier adopted by Jonathan Swift and also used by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele for The Tatler. " Encyclopaedia Britannica http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/64674/Isaac-Bickerstaffe [Accessed 20th June 2009].

June 2009, 223 pages