Obscure words7/2/2023 ![]() ![]() “To get the bull down,” ultimately, is to complete a last-minute rush of work ahead of the Christmas break. The EDD also lists such eminently useful festive fayre as kirsmas-glass (a toast to a house given at Christmas), sonrock (a cosy fireside chair), fyole (a dusting of snow), whullup (to give a gift to someone in an attempt to curry favour with them) and bull week, the week leading up to Christmas Day, when workers had to tie up all their loose ends ahead of the holidays – and, according to tradition, were duly rewarded by their superiors with a whole roast bull. In the sense of something increasing in size as it spirals outwards from a central core, that’s a word that began life as a local name for the shell of a snail. The ball of snow you use to start off a snowman – by rolling a smaller snowball through a snowfield, so it gradually becomes bigger and bigger – is called a hogamadog, for instance. The EDD in particular is a festive goldmine. Look ever closer into the dustier corners of the dictionary and you’ll find even more forgotten gems. But one of its later, more specific senses was to make ready by dressing or decorating, and it is from there that this more festive application of it appeared, sometime around the 1800s. Boun in 14th-century Middle English meant to prepare or make ready (incidentally, it’s the origin of the word “bound” as in Outward Bound). Listed in the English Dialect Dictionary (EDD), to boun is to decorate a home with evergreen branches. While looking up Christmas-themed words, for instance, I rediscovered an underappreciated favourite of mine – boun. I collect and read old dictionaries, post the most interesting words I find online and write about their histories and origins. ![]() A blog, a word-of-the-day Twitter account and a series of books all followed and now, a decade later, I’ve somehow engineered for myself the perfect career for that dictionary-devouring seven-year-old. So I combined my two interests and began writing about words, their origins and language just for fun. I read the dictionary cover to cover, as you would a novel I resolved to tap into that shared interest and open this wonderful subject up to everyone, regardless of their background or academic experience. After all, just like art and sport and music, language is one of the few things found in every culture on the planet. I realised that what I truly enjoyed – and what I believed I excelled in – was taking what I had learned and repackaging it in such a way that anyone could appreciate it, and find our language and its origins as fascinating as I do. “The most highly qualified waiter in Newcastle,” as my mates knew me. I completed my course, told my tutor I’d had enough (an interesting conversation, to say the least), and went back to waiting tables. I wanted to tell everyone about everything I was learning and discovering, but, instead, here it was, locked away in rooms and classrooms that only those who already found language interesting would ever think to enter. It felt as if all the most interesting aspects of it were being kept behind glass, like rare artefacts in a museum that no one visits any more. Everything I had loved about language – about sharing my love of language – was gone. Towards the end of my course, it struck me that there had been something joyless about it. It should have been unendingly fascinating – and yet I absolutely hated it. From school to university, my love of language grew until eventually I found myself on a postgraduate linguistics course, studying the history and psychology of our language in more detail than ever before. A love of language had been sparked and over the years and decades that followed I took that interest and ran with it. But looking back, there’s no denying that the gift changed my life. I really have no idea why I became so immediately enamoured. I wrote down all the words I came across that I didn’t know, starred and highlighted all those I liked and made lists of all those that seemed truly bizarre to me in sound, shape or spelling. For the next day or two I sat and read it, cover to cover, as you would a novel. It’s fair to say I became obsessed with it. ![]()
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