Handfuls, treadmills, and a last minute tidy-up

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A SHOW OF HANDS

Most popular on HH this week was the word gowpen, the name of the bowl formed by cupping your hands together. The amount that you can hold in a gowpen, meanwhile, is a yepsen.

That being said, both those words have long been used interchangeably: although the definitions above are those given by most dictionary entries, over the centuries gowpen has been used to refer both the bowl formed by cupping your hands together, and to the quantity, or yepsen, that it holds. And vice versa.

So why the overlap? Well, it’s all to do with the words’ shared histories. Both gowpen and yepsen are believed to have their roots in an ancient Germanic word, gaup or gouf, that meant simply “hand” or “handful”. 

The plural of gaup, “hand”, would have been something along the lines of gaupen, “hands”. From there, it’s believed gaupen ventured north into Scandinavia, became gaupn in Old Norse, and was likely borrowed into the language via Scotland as gowpen sometime around the early fourteenth century. Going an opposite route, gaupen shifted southwards and westwards, was presumably borrowed into Old English as giepsen, and became yepsen in the Middle English period.

Both words would once have been used with both meanings, before gowpen later came to be more closely attached to the “bowl” formed by the hands, and yepsen the quantity it holds:

Gowpen, the hollow of both hands placed together.

Northumberland Words (1892)

A Yaspen or Yeepsen: in Essex signifies as much as can be taken up in both hands joyn’d together.

A Collection of English Words, Not Generally Used (1674)

Neither of these words are particularly well known nor widely used today, however, and both are seldom encountered outside of dialect dictionaries and regional varieties of English. Nevertheless, they’re both obviously very useful—a yepsen of pasta must be about the perfect quantity for two people, surely?

Elsewhere this week we found out that: 

• if you’re obsessed with making lists, then you might just be a glazomaniac
• a nightraker is someone who likes to walk or wander around after dark
• the Mayor of Falmouth was once a proverbially, bittersweetly happy character
• if you have a sneaking notion then you have a secret crush
• and hands up if you were “born a bit tired” (if you can be bothered to raise them...)

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TREADMILL

The fact that treadmills were originally nineteenth century instruments of penal torture cropped up on HH this week. Depending on your views of exercise, you might think not much has changed. But how did we get from an instrument of prison punishment to an instrument of PT punishment training equipment?

Well, as we’ve blogged before over on the HH website (which is in the process of getting a lick of paint at the minute—apologies for any glitches in the meantime) the original treadmill was the work of English engineer William Cubitt.

Cubitt was born in Norfolk in 1785. The son of a local miller, he grew up in an agricultural community and dedicated much of his early life—and his unending enthusiasm for design and invention—to producing machinery aimed at easing the tough manual labour he had grown up around. In fact, Cubitt’s long list of inventions included everything from a new design for an agricultural thresher to a set of self-regulating windmill sails. Boons, the both of them. 

In later life, Cubitt moved to London and applied his engineering know-how to much larger projects like canals, bridges, railways and docks; the Oxford Canal, the old coal-loading docks at the mouth of the river Tees, and part of the London to Brighton railway line are all examples of his work.

For all that, he was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1851. But out of a lifetime of innovation and accomplishment, one of Cubitt’s inventions stands out above all others: in 1818, he invented the treadmill.

If legend is to be believed, supposedly Cubitt one day noticed the prisoners in one of London’s jails merely idling away their time in the prison yard. Sensing a wasted opportunity, he conceived of a device that would not only stir them from their lassitude and allow them to pass their time in prison more actively, but could harness this activity to provide a useful service—albeit an arduous and unpleasant one.

The design he came up with involved an enormous cylinder, surrounded by a series of loops or belts, each fitted at regular intervals with steps or rungs. Pushing down on the first step with your foot would move the belt around the cylinder, and bring another step around to take its place, essentially forming a never-ending staircase. In a gruelling eight-hour shift on one of Cubitt’s devices, a prisoner stepping in this manner would climb the equivalent of more than 7,000ft.

This huge man-powered mill could then be adapted or connected up to some other piece of machinery, harnessing the men’s labour to do anything from grinding grain to crushing rocks to produce grit for the construction industry.

Cubitt initially referred to his invention as the “tread-wheel”, but in a description published in 1822 it is referred to as “the tread-mill invented by Mr William Cubitt ... for the employment of prisoners”. And this—a hard-labour punishment in nineteenth century jails—was the first recorded treadmill in the English language.

Cubitt’s treadmill remained in use in English prisons right through to the turn of the century, when prison reform and the increasing industrialization of society made the work the prisoners were performing a thing of the past. As they disappeared, so too did the word treadmill itself, until it was rescued from obscurity in the 1950s—during the post-war vogue for fitness and exercise—and applied to a piece of gym equipment that used a similarly unending, foot-powered, rotating belt.

Although which of the two provides the least pleasant experience is up to you to decide...

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SCURRYFUNGE 

Another popular word this week was scurryfunge, defined as a verb meaning “to hastily tidy a house”.

That being said, when it first appeared in the language in the late eighteenth century, scurryfunge originally meant “to beat” or “lash”, and later “to rub” or “to scrub clean”. These two apparently unrelated meanings are perhaps connected through allusion to someone working hard enough or with enough power or elbow-grease to wear away or abrade a surface; in that sense, etymologically scurryfunge may be in some way derived from scour. Precisely where the funge part comes from, however, is a mystery.

By the early twentieth century, scurryfunge had largely fallen out of widespread use in the language, apparently surviving only in a handful of regional dialects. But by then, its meaning had altered—perhaps through later confusion with the word scurry, which has been used to mean “to move rapidly” since the early 1800s:

Scurryfunge. A hasty tidying of the house between the time you see a neighbor coming and the time she knocks on the door.

John Gould, Maine Lingo (1950) 

ANAGRAMS No. 1

A new game this week: the letters of each of these words can be rearranged to make another dictionary word. What are they?

IMPART

THICKEN

THOUSAND

ARGENTITE

[Answer to last week’s puzzle: SIXTIETH, SEXTUPLE, DEXTROUS, AMBIDEXTROUS]