From Website to Blog

I expect to be closing down my website 'The Merry Pedant' shortly, but plan to transfer to this blog, every now and then, certain items that were published in it four years ago. Here is the first one:

The Wootz and the Slughorn

DID YOU KNOW THAT the word WOOTZ, first recorded, says my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, in 1795*, is actually a misprint for WOOK ? In case you are thinking of using the word, in whichever spelling (perhaps to impress your friends as the Readers Digest frequently recommends -'Increase Your Wordpower'), let me remind you that it describes a crucible steel made in southern India by fusing magnetic iron ore with carbonaceous matter. WOOK, as you will no doubt have guessed by now, is a clumsy representation of the Canarese word ukku, which looks as if it should be cogn with E yukky and puke, but I haven’t had time to check it.

* Recorded where ? I wonder. If you can spare the time, follow up this lead and let me know.

This reminds me of another misinterpretation - though not, I think, due to a misprint - that originated in the eighteenth century. The teenage poet and forger Thomas Chatterton (Wordsworth’s ‘marvelous boy’ – see below) was brought up in Bristol and became hooked on the romance of medieval literature: he had been allowed to study some ancient manuscripts kept in the library of St Mary Redcliffe church in that town. Among them he came across some old reference to primitive Scots sounding the ‘slogharn’ (or so he appears to have read it), and introduced this seemingly fine archaic term into one of his own imitation antique poems**. “Methynckes”, he wrote, “I heare yer slugghornes dynn”. (Not dissimilar to the pseudo-antique phrase ‘Ye Olde Teashoppe’; it is amazing that so many of his contemporaries swallowed this pastiche as genuine.)

** These were both retro and faux, to use a couple of up-to-date marketing terms, fine-sounding twenty-first century euphemisms for ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘imitation’.

The nineteenth century poet Robert Browning, who was himself fond of antiquated terminology, borrowed the word to use in his period piece Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. “Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set, and blew”. But the ‘slughorn’ was no kind of war trumpet. The original words that Chatterton had misinterpreted were the Gaelic ‘sluagh’ meaning ‘people’ and ‘gairm’ meaning (so my copy of MacAlpine’s Gaelic-English Dictionary tells me) ‘a call to do something’. Put the two together and what is being sounded is not some sort of bugle, but a ‘call to the people’ or ‘of the people’, a rallying cry or a war cry.

But, perhaps unrecognised by these two poets, the Gaelic term ‘sluaghgairm’ had since the sixteenth century become our E word ‘slogan’, denoting, rather tamely, the sort of motto a gentleman might add to his coat of arms; then a little later, a political catchphrase rather than a motto, and eventually an advertising catchphrase rather than a political one.

Wordsworth’s feelings about the life and work of Chatterton he recorded in his poem Resolution and Independence: “I though of Chatterton, the marvellous boy, The sleepless soul, that perished in his pride”. Thomas Chatterton, a Bristol lad whose early work suggested genius, had been rash enough to try and pass off his ‘antique poems’ as newly discovered manuscripts written by a 15th century poet whom he named Rowley. At first they were received with amazement and delight, but when he tried to get them published they were recognised by the more perceptive of contemporary scholars as forgeries. At the age of eighteen, alone in London, humiliated and unable to find work, he took arsenic and died.

The Wootz and the Slughorn