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

neither the virtue of truth nor the fun of falsehood, and is merely old. A standard riposte to hearing old news is to say ‘Queen Anne is dead’. The phrase is first recorded in 1798 (Queen Anne having died in 1714), but it’s still used in British journalistic circles. It’s a slightly out of date expression for being out of date, but it does have the virtue of finality. And having informed your colleagues of the monarch’s demise, you may sneak off for a cigarette.
Cigarettes
    James VIof Scotland and I of England was a
misocapnist
, i.e. he didn’t like smokers or smoking one little bit. In 1604 he wrote a pamphlet about how much he didn’t like smokers called
A Counter-Blaste to Tobacco.
A few years later the Bishop of Winchester translated
Counter-Blaste
into Latin. Why anybody would have bothered translating an anti-smoking tract into Latin is beyond me, but that didn’t stop the Bishop of Winchester. He called the translation the
Misocapnus
, which is Latin for ‘against smoke’, and the word blew gently into the English language as
misocapnist
(the noun) and
misocapnic
(the adjective).
    The primary reason that James I didn’t like tobacco was that it was a habit newly imported from the American Indians, whom he thought simply horrible. He asks his subjects:
    … shall we, I say, without blushing, abase our selves so farre, as to imitate these beastly Indians, slaves to the Spaniards, refuse to the world, and as yet aliens from the holy Covenant of God? Why doe we not as well imitate them in walking naked as they doe? in preferring glasses, feathers, and such toyes, to golde and precious stones, as they do? yea why do we not denie God and adore the Devill, as they doe?
    Does that put you off your ciggy? No? Then off we go to our fag break (or
smoko
as the Australians call it). But first, it would be only polite for you to ask some of your co-workers if they wish to come along for a puff. The best way to word such an invitationcan be found in a dictionary of highwayman’s slang from 1699:
    Will ye raise a Cloud , shall we Smoke a Pipe?
    It’s best to ask this in a raspy, piratish voice and, if possible, to carry a blunderbuss. But you can’t smoke here. The misocapnic ghost of James I still haunts us all with smokeless restrictions and rules, and so you will probably not be able to raise a cloud at your own desk and must instead retreat to a designated smoking area, an indignity that was never suffered by highwaymen.
    ‘Designated smoking area’ is an unnecessarily wordy and official name for a
fumatorium
or even better, a
coughery
, which is a place where people go to cough. Sir Thomas Urquhart wrote that before a service, priests:
    … dunged in the dungeries, pissed in the pisseries, spit in the spiteries, coughed in the cougheries and doted in the doteries, that to the Divine Service they might not bring any Thing that was unclean or foul.
    Even though Urquhart wasn’t being thoroughly serious about that, coughery is still as good a name as any for the little yard by the office’s back door where a forlorn but persistent
tabagie
still holds out like the last remnants of a dying Amazonian tribe. A tabagie, by the way, is the technical term for a group of smokers, although the collective noun (as in a
pride of lions
or a
murder of crows
) is a
parliament of smokers
. Both words emerged in the nineteenth century, the high-point of fumious vocabulary. For the Victorian, a smoker was not merely a smoker, he was a
tobacconalian
or a
nicotinian
.So if you don’t feel like using ‘coughery’ and ‘raising a cloud’ you could always escape from the misocapnists by taking ‘a voyage to the Land of the Nicotinians’.
    The Land of the Nicotinians would be a fabulous place: shrouded in impenetrable clouds and dotted with naturally occurring humidors. There the obedient Nicotinians would do homage before their goddess Nicotia, and no, I didn’t just make her up. Nicotia too is an invention of Victorian