New Word

I liked that there was a word for the warmness of the sun in winter and curious that it came from the first dictionary ever, though I had never heard the word until a day ago. So I searched and found a copy of Cockeram’s book, the 1623 edition. The author never listed the word dictionary in his dictionary so we don’t know how he would have defined it, but the title is generous. Or you might say it was over generous or even prodigal with explanations and details about what’s inside a dictionary. That’s it, over there on the right.

If you’re not familiar with 16th century book titles and letter forms. or the ways of typesetters, here’s an updated version:

The English dictionarie: or, An interpreter of hard English Words. Enabling as well Ladies and Gentlewomen, young Schollers, Clarkes, Merchants, as also strangers of any Nation, to the understanding of the more difficult Authors already Printed in our Language, and the more speedy attaining of an elegant perfection of the English tongue, both in reading, speaking and writing. Being a collection of the choisest words contained in the Table Alphabeticall and English Expositor, and of some thousands of words never published by any heretofore. By H.C. Gent.

Apricity, the word I was looking for, appears in the Dictionarie sandwiched  between Aprication and Aquation.  

Aprication.  A beaking in the Sunne.
Apricitie. The warmness of the Sunne in winter.
Aquation. Abundance of raine.

Those are three words I’d not heard of or seen before. By the way, nowadays we spell beaking baking, and we tend to use basking instead of baking, when basking in the sun. Cockeram’s Dictionarie had two other parts. Part One was the alphabetical list with around 8,000 words, each with a definition, sometimes a single-word definition and nothing more. Part Two was a list of paired words, the first of the pair being a common word, the second being a more refined or elegant synonym – that’s what Cockeram believed, anyway. At best, the second or substitute word was recognizably English, but mostly it was a mutilated Latin word pretending to be English. According to Cockeram, using the more elevated vocabulary would improve the speaker’s standing in the eyes of the people he or she talked with.

Now, about 60 percent of our total English word hoard comes to us directly from Latin, or from Latin through French. In our ordinary speaking vocabulary, about half has a Latin source, and most of the rest comes from the Anglo-Saxon that was spoken and written in England before the French invaded in 1066. Henry Cockeram’s head was stuffed with Latin and he loved it. Some scholars suspect that Cockeram made up the word apricitie. I agree. Absolutely. I think he not only concocted apricitie, but a heap of other words, including aprication and aquation. It wasn’t beyond him to help elevate English by creating new English words from Latin, or by smuggling a Latin word into a list of English words. There are maybe 600 bogus words in Cockeram’s dictionerie By bogus, I mean no one has found those words written or printed anywhere before they appeared in Cockeram’s dicitionarie.

And that’s not all. In the title of his book, in those lines of really small type, he boasts that his work is “a collection of the choisest words contained in the Table Alphabeticall and English Expositor, and some thousands of words never published by any heretofore.” The Table Alphabeticall was a collection of words gathered by Robert Cowdrey in 1604, and the English Expositor was another such work composed by John Bullokar in 1616. Cockeram raided those works, selecting the choicest for his own book. There was no copyright protection for writers at that time (for printers, yes; for writers, no). So, what our man did wasn’t thievery, it was merely taking someone else’s best work and adding it to his own.

I’m really disappointed in Henry Cockeram. I like going out the morning after a snowstorm to feel the warmness of the sun on my cheek.  And I had thought, Ah! There’s a word for that! Because for a while I had imagined Cockeram himself had gone out one morning after a snowstorm and enjoyed it the same as I did. I had thought he knew the old forgotten word apricitie, so he plucked it out of obscurity and put it in his list and told us what it meant. But now he looks like a fraud, this salesman who called his book of word lists a dictionarie and boasted that it could improve your social life.

Or maybe he wasn’t. After thinking about it, I’m not sure what kind of man he was. That’s him, his initials, at the bottom of his book’s title. H.C. Gent. Henry Cockeram, Gentleman. When Cockeram signs himself H.C. Gent. he’s alluding to his rank in English society where a gentleman is the lowest rank of the landed gentry, below an esquire and above a yeoman. Writers of dictionaries are still ranked there. Novel writers, a little lower.

If you search for his biography, you’ll find that “he flourished from 1623—1658” which are the first and last publication dates of his dictionary. That’s sad, if you think about it, that his life was nothing more than a collection of word lists, and some of the words were fakes. One of the little poems of praise that introduce his book refers to him as Master Henry Cockeram of Exeter, so maybe he’s the Henrye Cockeram who is recorded there as having married Elizabethe Strashley on February 2, 1613. I’d like to think so. Happily married, maybe a handful of children, possibly a first grandchild by 1638. I’m sorry that, to me, the names Cockeram and Strashley have an unfortunate connotative sound, like fictional characters whose names signal what kind of person they are in a novel, so you wonder what kind of people Strashley and Cockeram are. But maybe it’s simply the way we pronounce those spellings nowadays.

In 1623, spelling was a creative art open to anyone who knew how to write. People spelled words phonetically, and as they pronounced differently, they spelled differently. Furthermore, they  weren’t  consistent. The same person could spell the same word five different ways, just as Cockeram spells his book’s title Dictionarie  with an ie ending, but spells the same word  Dictionary on the title page of his Part Three. Shakespeare spelled his own name at least three different ways – Shakespere, Shakesper, Shakspeare – and other writers offered even more variations on it. In these 1600’s the merging of French and Anglo-Saxon, plus lesser streams, had become a thriving, exuberant and unbelievably rich language, capable of the magisterial text of the King James Bible in 1611 and the more vernacular speech of a Ben Jonson comedy at the same time. Shakespeare was writing The Tempest when Cockeram was a youngster, and by the the time Cockeram began selling his word lists, Gentlewomen, Clarkes and Merchanats had a lively interest in their language. His dictionarie went through eleven editions.

By the way, type setting was a practical and expressive art, much like spelling. The Dictionarie’s title and descriptive phrases add up to eighty or more words, and a typesetter had to cram all those words, plus others,  onto the limited space of a single page.  You’ll notice that whoever set the type solved the problem by composing each successive line in smaller type. And to avoid having a dull black block of type on the title page, the typesetter arranged the length of the centered lines into the shape of a bowl and saucer. That way, you have more white space on the page and, occasionally, a pleasing or eye-catching design in the middle. This stylish type-setting reached a high level in the shaped poems of George Herbert a decade after Cockram’s Dictionarie. As you were reading the type-setters handiwork, you saw a number of letters which looked like an f, but those were the “long s” which was used unless the s came at the end of a word. The uses of v and u follow a different system – indeed, all of this leads to the impression that 17^th century typesetters came to work drunk or got that way on the job

For the third part of his Dictionarie, Henry Cockeram compiled an undefinable encyclopedia, a mishmash of random information, some bits factually true, some bits myth or legend or country lore, ancient fancies about animals or places or story-book kings found only in texts of antiquity. The heading of the third part says:

THE THIRD PART TREATING OF GODS AND GOD
desses, Men and Women, Boyes and Maides, Gi
ants and Divels, Birds and Beasts, Monsters and
 Serpents, Wells and Rivers, Hearbs, Stones, Trees,
 Dogges, Fishes, and the like.

I admire “and the like.” The third part is long and resists curiosity, even a curiosity searching for oddities and bits of misinformation which might amuse you. In 1930 the Huntington Press published a new edition of Cockeram’s Dictionarie printed on fine paper and limited to 999 copies for book collectors. It omits the second and third parts of Cockeram’s original.

We know essentially nothing about Henry Cockeram. The image of him that illustrates this little essay is the creation of an artificial intelligence program which was told to produce the portrait of a 17^th century Gentleman. It’s as bogus as the word apricity. The feeling of the warmth of the sun in winter is a good feeling. We must grant to Henry Cockeram that he was the first to express the concept of the warmth of the sun in winter, and the first to create a word for it.  Now, the word apricity or apricitie has been available for over 400 years and it hasn’t caught on. Cockeram derived his new English word from the Latin word apricus, which is an adjective meaning it’s-open-to-the-sun.  Roman writers is used apricus to describe a room open to sunshine, or an area outside that’s open to the sun, such as a garden or a field.  And apricus, in turn, is derived from the Latin verb aperire which means to open. Our English word aperture comes from that word.  Apricity has a family background that suggests openness, especially openness to the sun, but nothing connects it to the warmth of the sun in winter.  I don’t think that’s why we don’t use the word. There are other English words ending in icity, such as electricity, elasticity toxicity, felicity duplicity, that have in their spelling the quality they refer to, but apricity cannot be added to that list. I think apricity just doesn’t sound right for what it means.

Apricity is a rare word, rarely ever written and even more rarely spoken. But it’s still here. We will always enjoy the warmness of the sun in winter. In fact, we need it. The composer Roger Zare said that during the dark cold days of the COVID pandemic he “found increasing comfort in thinking about the meaning of apricity.” Ultimately, the result was the composition he named “Apricity,” which can be found on Youtube.com.  We’ve come a long way from the beautiful definition of apricitie. The warmness of the Sunne in winter.