NO SHORTAGE OF DELIGHTS

If you look up “frip” in the dictionary, you will not find it. But if you purchase a razor, a glue stick, a magnifying glass, and a smooth stone, and then turn to the page with headwords “fricassee - fritillary,” you can add it in and remedy a historical injury. Frip is a verb that means to briefly consider and then discard, and while it is generally used in connection with an idea (“As a youth, he read Marx and fripped Communism”), it can also be employed in a material context (“He fripped a steak but instead opted for a salad”). The word was originally coined in the late 1920s as a portmanteau that combined elements of “flip” and “grip,” and was most famously used in the speech that Gilbert Broad delivered to the nation (and the world) on the eve of our entry into the Second World War: “Peace, briefly in our sight, was fripped then lost, and we are the worse for it.” The word fell away through the late forties, when it was often confused for a profanity, and today it is nearly forgotten.  “Frip” is but one of many delights in the new Oracle Dictionary of Lost Words, published by Murray/Young Partners, the reference house also responsible for the  Encyclopedia of Mathematics and the Illustrated Treasury of Botanical Oddities. Even before reading this dictionary, one presumes from Murray/Young’s other books that it is unlikely to fall into dullness, and it does not disappoint. From the first word here (“Abix,” which referred to the space in a church between the narthex and the nave, particularly if it contained a low railing) to the last (“Zultona,” a corruption of “sultana” that came to mean any gesture made in wasteful wealth, as in “That diamond-encrusted coffee mug is quite a zultona”). There is no shortage of delights here, though there are some conspicuous omissions: the editors give out “locturne,” a one-person rowboat, and “miyation,” the state of shivering; but miss some of the most fragrant terms from the past century, including but not limited to “trampage,” “kabill,” “dight,” and “johntressing,” all of which were held dear by language enthusiasts and then let go: in a (lost) word, fripped.

©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas