Lobs and lout and lob and lolling and lolloping

As you can see from the date of this essay, I have now returned to my writing on the Collegiate Dictionary. I plan to enter the 2006 Senior Spelling Bees (Oregon on April 8 and the National in Cheyenne on June 17), and I need to turn to the dictionary again. Yet, as soon as I dive into my project--by focusing on unfamiliar words in a ten or twenty-page block--I am confronted with loads of interesting words that I want to explore in more detail. Such is the case today, and I will succumb to the temptation. That may doom my hope for victory again this year, but at least I will be having fun as I stray.

Lobscourse

The word that got me "off track" was lobscourse. Defined as a sailor's dish in the Collegiate, it receives a fuller explication in the Century and OED. See if you get a sense of what this dish consists of. From the Century:

"A dish made of pilot-biscuit, stewed in water with pieces of salt meat."

Appetizing? I don't think so, but I don't know exactly what pilot-biscuit is. The quotation given by the Century seems to praise such a dish:

"This genial banquet was entirely composed of sea-dishes;...the sides being furnished with a mess of that savoury composition known by the name of lob's course, and a plate of salmagundy."

But, then again, the quotation is from Tobias Smollett's Peregrine Princess, which is a lighthearted look at the adventures of a certain Gamaliel Pickle.

The OED adds some confusion to the definition when it calls it "A sailor's dish consisting of meat stewed with vegetables and ship's biscuit, or the like." I don't think I know (or maybe I don't want to know) what this dish really is, since the first attestation of its usage is in this 1706 quotation: "He has sent the Fellow...to the Devil, that first invented Lobscouse." But then, an 1867 Sailor's Word-book, defines "Lap's Course" as "one of the oldest and most savoury of the regular forecastle dishes."

Moving to Lobspound

But while I was munching on this uncertainty, my eye fell to the next word (in the Century--you see, I am already straying from the "straight and narrow" of the Collegiate), lobspound. A lobspound is "a pound for lobs or louts; a prison." In some eminently forgettable poetry we have: "Crowdero, whom in irons bound,/ Thou basely threw'st into Lob's pound." Jeremy Bentham, who seemed to use about every word in the English language in his voluminous works, could say, "From the sheriff the information would, in course, pass on to the defendant, when the time came for his finding himself in Lob's pound."

By looking at the two words, lobscourse and lobspound, then, we see that the crucial thing to know is what a "lob" was. Indeed, answering this question is so easy it is like lobbing a softball to Barry Bonds, who could then hit it out of the park even if he isn't on steroids. Lob as a noun has at least nine definitions in the Century, but he first one gives us what we want: "A dull, sluggish person; a lout." Then, the dictionary kindly tells us the use is obsolete, just before quoting Shakespeare, that most unobsolete of authors. From MND: "Farewell, thou lob of spirits [Puck]; I'll be gone." A 1661 quotation has: "This is the wonted way for quacks and cheats to gull country lobs." So a lob is, or used to be, a country bumpkin or a lout.

Other "L's"

Then it dawned on me. As I was studying the Collegiate, I ran into a series of uncomplimentary words beginning with "l," and I began to wonder what it was about the sound "l" that perhaps encourages the development of derogatory words. We have lob, and lout, and lummox and lunkhead and lunatic and lurdane, and that is only from just a brief skimming of the dictionary.

Let's close this essay with a brief exposition of "lout," and then dedicate the next essay to coming up with all kinds of derogatory words for a fellow, using the "l" words as a guide. The OED doesn't have a clue to the origin of the noun "lout," but defines it as an "awkward ill-mannered fellow; a bumpkin, clown." From 1821: "A more uncouthly lout was hardly seen." Or, from Carlyle, "Her particularly stupid huge lout of a son." Carlyle's derogatory reference to a very large person has to be understood in terms of the times (1871). A large person was, in those days, ungainly, clumsy, unattractive, unappealing. I wonder when it became fashionable to be large? Perhaps when athletic scholarships began to be awarded?

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