Old English

This is an historical piece with a touch of sci-fi and deals with words in the English language that are no longer used.

Alvertos Onesimus had been the senior professor of English at Muchalls University in Aberdeenshire for over ten years and his retirement age was creeping forward, he thought at an alarming rate. It was two years since he’d lost his wife, Ergronia, in a frightening incident.

They were both on holiday at the time, in Thailand when hurricane Andrea swept in; Ergronia was taking her early morning walk along the deserted golden sands and the Professor was in bed nursing an overdose of the local rum he had consumed the previous evening. 

Ergronia would have called him well-fuzzled, using a word from the early nineteen-hundreds, to describe someone who was well and truly intoxicated. She too was a professor of English and gained her doctorate in a thesis that looked at old English words that were no longer used in the twenty-first century.

She had started her day at six o’clock in the morning, with the weather being very appricitic, which was the word the people living in sixteen-twenty would have described it. A winter’s day but with gloriously hot sunshine. It was about an hour later when the dark clouds started to gather, the sky darkened, and it started raining. Fifteen minutes later it began lumming down, as the populace of eighteen-eighty described it when heavy rain poured down.

The storm was without warning, and the lummation occurred while Ergronia was briskly walking back to the resort. The inquest, held after the disaster, declared that she was presumed dead, as her body was never found. It was assumed she was washed away in the terrible flooding, along with the other six hundred and sixty-six recorded fatalities, that occurred all along the coast and at their resort, Aonang Phu Petra, close to the town of Krabi.

They had chosen the place after nights of google searching and using Trivago searching for the most comfortable resort at the lowest cost on offer. They were both in their early sixties when they visited Thailand and they thought of their holiday as a preretirement gift to themselves. They had both been given an unexpected Christmas bonus by Muchalls and neither had close relations to bequeath their meagre assets to. A holiday in the sun would do them good and perhaps bring back their more riotous days of their youth in the nineteen sixties.

They would get totally crapulous, eating excessive amounts of foods they had never even tasted before, and they swore they would never have a grumpish day. Ergronia used to hate being sullen and was always annoyed when Alvertos behaved like a sluberdegullion and spent the entire the weekend sprawled on the sofa and had no intention of moving. She was using the word commonly used in the sixteen-hundreds to describe slovenly behaviour.

One day when he’d spent the whole of a Sunday reclined on the sofa in their parlour she burst into the room screaming, “Zenzizenzizenzic!” at the top of her voice using as much inter-costal-diaphragmatic air she could muster from her slender frame.

“Ah, ah,” he replied, “thought you’d catch me napping with to the power of eight, did you?”

She was a trifle dumfounded that he knew the meaning of her outburst and screamed again, “Zenzizenzisenzic!” after she realigned her inter-costal muscles.

“Yes, yes, I heard you the first time my dearest,” he softly replied, “I’ve just been reading Christopher Marlowe’s play the Jew of Malta, marvellous work, the passage where Barabas, the Jew, explains his interest in mathematics, brilliant! It doth represent the square of squares quite squarely.”

“Exactly.” she replied, “It’s amazing what they knew way back then.”

“The Jew goes on to explain to the judge why he thinks the prosecutor should not be female because she is too callipygian.”

Ergronia grinned mischievously, “You said my buttocks were beautifully shaped when you married me, and that wasn’t in sixteen forty either.”

They both laughed, and she moved closer to him, bending down and gave him a soft peck on the cheek, “Some tea my quockerwogger?”

“Divine idea,” he replied, “with perhaps a scone, strawberry jam and cream and I’m not a wooden puppet hanging on a string!”

“Oh no! can’t have you turning into a jollux!”

“Me? Get fat? Come on, I’m the same weight as when I was a snoutfair.”

“Yes, yes I know you’ve always been good looking and handsome.”

It was then that a most unusual occurrence transpired. The door bell rang and on a Sunday of all days. In the quiet tranquil town of Muchalls in the middle of eastern Scotland this was an infrequent event, unless of course it was the town’s Presbyterian minister who was normally on the prowl for further converts on Sunday afternoons after he had such a poor attendance at his morning service.

Ergronia said, “I’ll get it.” And off she went to answer the door.

While Alvertos picked up and reopened his copy of the Jew of Malta, Ergronia approached their front door with the bell giving a second even louder chime. She opened the door to the university’s Vice Chancellor, a small man in stature but he held a high opinion of himself. Ergronia escorted him in to the parlour.

“It’s our Cockolorum, my dear, he wants a word about tomorrow’s meeting. I’ll put the kettle on and make some tea. Excuse me Vice Chancellor,” she said graciously as she backed herself out of the parlour and headed for the kitchen.

The professor rose from the sofa and asked the Vice Chancellor to take a seat, which he did in the aqua ornate green-blue upholstered Versailles armchair made from solid mahogany and finished with Gold Leaf. It was an heirloom left to Alvertos and Ergronia on their wedding day by Alvertos’s late great-aunt. Alvertos grunted as the Cockolorum sat down and thought what a Pismire!

That’s exactly what the Vice chancellor was, thought the professor, a small little man who looked like an ant who had a high opinion of himself.

Having plonked his minute frame in the priceless armchair the Vice Chancellor pulled out his pipe and without requesting if he could light up. Alvertos thought the Vice Chancellor should either have requested or gone outside to have his Lunt.

“Tomorrow is going be an ordeal Onesimus, the whole damm tribe will be there. Accountants, bankers, politicos, the bloody Minister for Education and that arsehole from the local constabulary what’s ’is name?”

“Chief Constable MacPherson, I think, he was in charge of the last royal visit we had about ten years ago.” Replied the professor refusing to put off by the Vice Chancellor’s use of his surname, Onesimus, which he hated, as he refused to accept his ancestors had any connection to an imprisoned slave who became a saint. He continued, “So you want me to support the arrangements you’ve made Sir?”

“Quite right! That’s exactly what I want you to do, we can’t let those outsiders get their bloody way. They’ll get us spending our entire years budget! And the damm girl’s only ninth or tenth in line to the throne! Waste of time and money if you ask me!”

“Yes sir, it does seem to be a rather farcical affair and you can be assured of my cooperation Vice Chancellor,” said Alvertos rising from the sofa and indicating that the discussion was over he guided the Vice chancellor to the parlour door just as Ergronia came in carrying a tray with tea and scones.

“Oh, Vice Chancellor, you must stay for tea, scones, home-made strawberry jam with inulin as a sweetener, Alvertos is on a diet so we eat and use a lot of Jerusalem Artichokes, and of course cream, so you can curmure at tomorrow’s meeting.”

Alvertos grinned as he acknowledged his wife’s desire to see the Vice chancellor break wind all through the meeting. The vision of a farting Vice Chancellor caused his grin to explode into a loud guffaw of raucous laughter.

The Vice Chancellor was disturbed by the almost doubled-up figure of the professor who was in joyous mirth with his wife’s joke, so he quickly made haste to the front door which Ergronia held open.

The Vice Chancellor made a fast retreat through the garden to the gate.

Ergronia turned to her husband and said, “I wish he’d become lethophobic so that his fear of oblivion swallows him up. Shall I get our Houppelanders from the wardrobe, so we can cloak-up and fly away from all these beef-witted, stupid students who spend ninety percent of their time during our lectures glued to their smart-phones and tablets and pay no attention to the knowledge we are trying to pass on?”

“Yes enough!” Alvertos replied, “a brilliant Excogigation! You have gorgonized me”

And they skidaddled back to their own dimensional universe with Alvertos completely mesmerized by his wife’s sagacity!