His name was mud

If you are told your name is mud you would assume that the origin of the phrase was something to do with soft, wet earth. In practice a second potential origin is claimed by some folk. When John Wilkes Booth shot the President of the United States Abraham Lincoln he broke his leg escaping.


He was treated by Dr Samuel Mudd. Mudd was a Maryland physician and he was later implicated and imprisoned for aiding and conspiring with Booth in the assassination. Hence, it was said of someone who was unpopular or the victim of defamatory charges “His name is Mudd.”

However, 'mud' in the sense of scandalous or defamatory charges goes back much earlier. There was an expression, 'the mud press,' to describe newspapers that besmirched people's reputations by throwing mud, as long ago as 1846. And the phrase itself first appeared in print in 1820, 45 years before Lincoln's assassination.

But the American explanation was fun while it lasted!

Kempt

I always thought the word unkempt didn’t have a positive antonym but it seems I was wrong. “His features were good deal like those of Leonardo da Vinci; moreover he was kempt, looked in vigorous health, and was of a ruddy countenance.” Samuel Butler – “The Way of All Flesh”.

Kempt, as one would assume from its opposite, means neat and tidy; especially used of hair.

Belladonna

In Italian, a beautiful lady; in English a deadly poison. A striking example of the similarity of the two languages.


Belladonna, the Deadly Nightshade or Atropa belladonna, was the Devil's favorite plant. It has purple bell-shaped flowers and poisonous black glossy berries. An alkaloid extracted from this plant, sometimes used medicinally, contains atropine and was used as eyedrops to widen the pupil and hence make women look more attractive.

Vicar

In the broadest sense, a vicar (from the Latin vicarius) is a representative, anyone acting "in the person of" or agent for a superior (compare "vicarious" in the sense of "at second hand"). In this sense, the title is comparable to lieutenant, literally the "place-holder". Usually the title appears in a number of Christian ecclesiastical contexts, but in the Holy Roman Empire a local representative of the emperor, perhaps an archduke, might be styled "vicar".

A priest employed as a substitute for a parish rector or for a member of a religious house, monastic, cathedral or collegiate, which had appropriated the revenue for the position.

It was interpreted somewhat differently by the satirist Samuel Butler -
“...this is why the clergyman is so often called a vicar – he being the person whose vicarious goodness is to stand for that of those entrusted to his charge.” – “The Way of All Flesh”

Sporting the Oak

A knock, as of a visitor and not a postman, was heard at my door. “Goodness gracious,” I exclaimed, “why didn’t we sport the oak?” Samuel Butler – “The Way of All Flesh”

"Sporting the oak" refers to the open or closed state of the outer door,
indicating the inhabitant's readiness to be disturbed.

“In my Oxford days, to "sport the/one's oak" meant to close the (outer) door of one's set of rooms in college as a sign that one was engaged and did not want to be disturbed. To bang on a fellow student's door when the "oak was sported" would have been regarded as a gross solecism. The expression "to sport the oak" is attested as far back as the eighteenth century (see OED).” F.W.Langley - Hull University

Crotchet

A crotchet is the name of a musical note, often worth one beat or pulse.

What I didn’t know until I read “The Way of All Flesh” was that it also meant a whimsical fancy, a peculiar notion held by an individual in opposition to popular opinion.
...he inflicted them on his old friends, week by week becoming more entête with himself and his own crotchets. - Samuel Butler

Another definition for a crotchet is a hook: a sharp curve or crook; a shape resembling a hook or a small tool or hooklike implement.

Hortus siccus

From the Latin meaning dry (or dried) garden - a collection of specimens of plants, dried and preserved, and arranged systematically; an herbarium.

“He has also taken to collecting a hortus siccus, and through the interest of his father was once mentioned in the Saturday Magazine as having been the first to find a plant, whose name I have forgotten, in the neighbourhood of Battersby. This number of the Saturday Magazine has been bound in red morocco and is kept upon the drawing-room table.” Samuel Butler – “The Way of All Flesh”

Nerve fart

Brain fart is described as being when your train of thought goes off at tangent or you cannot remember something which should be obvious. It is also used for when someone does not perform an action that obviously should have been done, especially when you are under pressure and must think quickly.

So I have invented the concept of nerve fart for my neurological disorder. Apart from my nerves dying my sensory and motor nerves also do weird things and go off at a tangent.

For example, sometimes I fail to register pain when I pick up something hot and only the smell of burning flesh alerts me that there may be a problem somewhere. On the other hand, I get pains from things that are not there – indeed, just half an hour ago I felt as though I had a drawing pin sticking in my heel. Even more weird is getting toothache – I haven’t had any teeth for years now but I still occasionally get toothache. How unfair is that. Oh well, it’s just nerve fart.

Bacn

Bacn (pronounced bacon) is the term given to electronic messages which have been subscribed to and are therefore not unsolicited but are often unread by the recipient for a long period of time, if at all. Bacn has been described as "email you want but not right now."

Bacn differs from spam in that the emails are not unsolicited: the recipient has somehow signed up to receive it. Bacn is also not necessarily sent in bulk. Bacn derives its name from the idea that it is "better than spam, but not as good as a personal email".

I have a way of dealing with my bacn. I send it straight to a separate frying pan, I mean folder. Because I use Outlook I can create rules which allow me to send e-mails from a particular sender or with a particular word in the title to its own folder. That way I don’t clog up my inbox but when I want an e-mail with some good quotations I can go to my ‘Daily Quotes’ folder. The same applies to mail from Photojojo and the like.

In other words, I like bacn, but I don’t want it for breakfast every day!

Did you know there are various other meat related e-mail terms. Spam (from the Monty Python sketch) is all too well known but were you aware there is Ham – legitimate e-mail messages which are real, as is the meat. Then there is Meatloaf which is unsolicited mail from one person which is then forwarded to a large number of individuals. And now we also have FakinBacn which is Spam disguised as bacn.

Biscaree

d from Quincy, Massachusetts, runs a daily blog on which he posts a word game involving Word Verification words and what they might mean. It's a sort of 'create your own sniglets'. One of the latest ones was “biscaree”. I suggested -
bisceree (noun) The crumbs from a biscuit. Usually used to describe the debris of an attempt to eat a very crumbly biscuit while balancing a cup of tea on your knee in posh company.

He smiled self-consciously as he tried to hide the biscaree spilling from his lap onto the Persian rug.