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

trades, a typical Victorian screever’s price list survives:
    Friendly letter 6d
    Long ditto 9d
    Petition 1s
    Ditto with signatures 1s 6d
    Ditto with forged names 2s 6d
    Ditto ‘very heavy’ (dangerous) 3s
    Manuscript for a broken-down author 10s
    Part of a play for ditto 7s 6d
    It is somehow comforting to know that there were broken-down authors even then.
    There’s something rather nasty about the sound of the word
screever
that makes it less than wholesome. It’s a mixture of
scream
and
grieve
and would not look good on the résumé. If you want a more high-flying term for a writer of begging letters, the Victorians also called them
high fliers
.
    Once you have screeved and flown high, the matter is up to the
answer jobber
, who is, as you may have guessed, a professional writer of answers. This is the way most of us spend at least the first half hour of our day at the desk, picking through the emails that have accumulated like dew in the night.
    It’s a shame that there are not, as yet, any particularly beautiful names for kinds of email. In the days of pen and paper, a little letter could be called a
notekin
or a
breviate
or a
letterling
, buta short email is a short email and nobody seems to be doing much about it. Some of the terms for letters can be saved, though. For example, an
omnibus letter
– one intended for several recipients – could easily become an ‘omnibus email’ and replace the tedious ‘group email’. In fact, here is a list of the possibilities, in which I have simply replaced ‘letter’ with ‘email’ and provided the old definition.
    Bread and butter email
– one saying thank you.
    Cheddar email
– one to which several people have contributed, just as several dairies contribute to a single cheddar cheese.
    Email of comfort
– one that assures a creditor that a debt will be paid, without being legally binding.
    Journal email
– one that talks about what you’ve been up to lately.
    Email of placards
– one that grants permission.
    Email of marque
– one that allows you to behave like a pirate. These should be sent sparingly. (Letters of marque would be sent out to ships’ captains when war was declared, allowing them to plunder the merchant ships of the enemy nation.)
    Laureate email
– one announcing victory.
    Email of Uriah
– ‘A treacherous email, implying friendship, but in reality a death warrant’, thus (almost)
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
. I send a lot of these. The name refers to the Second Book of Samuel: ‘And it came to pass in the morning, that David wrote a letter to Joab, and sent it by the hand of Uriah.And he wrote in the letter, saying, Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die.’
    Once the emails are finished with, there are all sorts of jobs for a busy
jobler
to do (a jobler is somebody who does small jobs). You could rearrange the stuff on your desk, update your status on the interweb, or you could work hard as a
nephelolater
(one who admires passing clouds). Whatever you do, though, don’t look at the accounts unless you have
audit ale
.
    Audit ale was a specially strong and tasty kind of ale to be drunk only on the day of an audit. You can’t buy it any more. You couldn’t even buy it back in 1823 when Byron wrote ‘The Age of Bronze’,
lamenting the fallen state of modern Britain and asking:
    Where is it now, the goodly audit ale,
    The purse-proud tenant never known to fail?
    And you can’t do an audit without an audit ale, because you should never look at your finances without a good strong drink in your hand. Bankruptcy looks so much better through the bottom of a bottle. If ale-sodden insolvency does beckon, all that you can do is grab what you can while you can. A pleasant little word for this is
deaconing
. A dictionary of Americanisms from 1889 has this helpful definition:
    To deacon land, to filch land by gradually extending one’s fences or boundary lines