“Are you feeling groggy after a few wool staplers or are you on tenterhooks that you are neither dressed up to the nines nor gussied up in your best togs before receiving your green jacket and not a green coat? Then keep your shirt on and wear the old school tie with your Sunday suit so you will not be mistaken as a candidate for a man of the cloth”. The terms italicised here in this text from the back cover remind us how much of everyday British English derives from clothing and textile manufacture. Groggy, feeling unwell, comes from Admiral Edward Vernon, who was the first recorded naval officer to serve his men with a concoction of rum and water. Its popularity with the crew earned him the nickname of grog after the grogam cloak he habitually wore; grogam being a coarse fabric constructed from silk, mohair and wool. In Leeds, half‐a‐pint of beer served in a pint glass was referred to as a woolstapler, probably due to the fact that woolstaplers (wool merchants) usually ordered half measures. And candidate? This comes from the Latin candidatus, the loose white toga worn by those who solicited the office of questor.
Eugene Nicholson, formerly Keeper of Industrial Technology at the Bradford Industrial Museum, has compiled a handy little collection of terms and phrases that originate from the manufacture and trade of textiles. Some terms come from the manufacturing process itself (such as reel off – rewinding yarn onto a revolving reel), the trade (the full Monty – “the full Montevideo”, referring to bales of Uruguayan wool shipped through the port of Montevideo), the materials produced (corduroy=corde du roy; velco=velour croch, hooked velvet), and the majority from clothing terms (to be in mufti; to wear glad rags).
Photographs of some of the textile processes, cartoons and amusing anecdotes and asides add interest. I frequently see a mill chimney with fading white lettering: “Shoddy and Mungo Manufacturers”. Shoddy is a term with many meanings depending on place, but generally refers to waste fibres. Mungo comes, it is said, from a Yorkshire West Riding woollen‐rag processor who asked whether a tightly‐woven cloth could be reduced to a fibrous state. His workforce said “It wouldn't go”, to which the reply, in dialect, was “It MUN go!”
Some of the definitions are a touch cursory, thus we are not told why a blue stocking is so called, and I would quibble that it “… describes a lady librarian, clerk, secretary, etc”. This is both wrong and uninformative. Sometimes the choice of key words in unhelpful, though there is an index that picks up some of the alternative terms. But although not an academic or specialist work, the book is interesting, and fun. Among the many words and phrases listed which we may not realise had a textile origin are: All my eye and Betty Martin (St Martin gave half his cloak to a beggar); In fine fettle (fettling is cleaning the fluff out a carding machine); the Distaff side (from the staff from which flax is carefully drawn out, a woman's occupation); To go berserk (“bear to the shirt” as warlike Vikings did when entering battle with a bear skin); Going batty(drowsiness caused by the rhythmic action of beating washing against a board); sartorial (derived from the Latin “sartor” meaning “tailor”); life on the seamy side (reference to the seams on the “under side” of clothes); and To put a sock in it (put a sock down the horn of a gramophone to quieten the volume). And then there are grinning stitches; a wuzzer; and zoot suits! But, to return to the cover blurb: “Don't go batty or use cloak‐and‐dagger methods to discover what is meant by wearing sack cloth and ashes, just remember to always cut your coat according to your cloth before going out”. Or buy this book! As a popular compendium it will be enjoyed by many, though it will also have value on the dictionary and textile shelves.
