The Horologicon: A Day's Jaunt through the Lost Words of the English Language by Mark Forsyth

their favourite tobacco may be to you little more than
mundungus
, which is ‘bad, or rank tobacco’, also called
old rope
.
    Now that you have something tobaccical, look around for a
salamander
, or ‘red hot iron used for lighting tobacco’. If none has been provided, you may settle for an entry inDr Johnson’s dictionary:
    Sponk . A word in Edinburgh which denotes a match, or any thing dipt in sulphur that takes fire: as,
any sponks will ye buy?
    Once you have a sponk you may
cock your organ
(light your pipe) and begin to
funk
. Funk was the standard term for smoking from the late seventeenth century through to the early nineteenth, when it suddenly started to mean a panic attack, and then in the twentieth century it became a kind of music. Funk was also, by association, a term for tobacco smoke, which means that you are currently smelling rather
funky
.
    Ashcan
used to be a slang term for wasted time. So unfortunately you must funk as fast as you can and then remember the poor of the parish. This from a dictionary of Victorian slang:
    HARD-UPS, cigar-end finders, who collect the refuse pieces of smoked cigars from the gutter, and having dried them, sell them as tobacco to the very poor.
    So don’t whatever you do stamp out your stub. Remember the hard-ups, and remember those devilish Red Indians that James I hated. But why rely on his misocapnist claptrap? Instead we can use an actual account of tobacco in the New World: the very first written record of the human smoking. It’s from Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, who visited Hispaniola in 1535 and recorded how the native chieftain would smoke until he passed out and then ‘his wives, who are many, pick him up, and carry him to his hammock’.
    But not for you! Back to your desk, and pretend to work.
    1 In the eighteenth century they used to mix tea and coffee together and call it
twist
. In the interests of scholarship I tried this myself and do not recommend that anybody else does.
    2 The second half of that entry is irrelevant, but much too much fun to leave out.

Chapter 7
Noon – Looking as Though You’re Working
Effortlessness – sales and marketing – emails – approaching bankruptcy – asking for a raise

Sprezzatura, or the nonchalance of the perfect office worker
    Itis probably time to do some work, or at least appear to. Work, like justice, must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. Appearances are everything, reality an inconvenience.
    In the Renaissance, there was an exquisite idea named
sprezzatura
, the nonchalance of the perfect courtier. It was the newest and most fashionable thing once. You see, all through the medieval period, knights had known what they had to do: they had to be knights in armour. They had to be chivalrous to ladies of course, but they also had to be warlike and violent and bloodthirsty. When the Renaissance came along the bar was raised somewhat. Skill at arms was still valued, but suddenly a man was expected to stop being medieval and be Renaissance, which meant learning to do all sorts of things like read, write, paint, play a few instruments, speak Latin, appreciate sculpture and whatnot.
    Thesenew requirements were handily laid out in a sort of textbook by Baldassare Castiglione. Castiglione was the very model of a modern courtier and peregrinated around Italy being a friend of Raphael and the Medicis. He was an ambassador, a classicist, a soldier and a sonneteer. And he wrote a book about how you too could be like him. It was called
The
Book of the Courtier
, was translated into every language anyone could think of, and for centuries afterwards was the European definition of the Perfect Man. However, there was one word in it that could never quite be translated properly:
sprezzatura
.
    Sprezzatura sort of means nonchalance, but more precisely it means the appearance of nonchalance – the effort made to disguise the fact that you’re making an effort. So you should be a brilliant musician, for example, but