The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the Coronavirus crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored…..
Book-Keeper
I really like the definition of this term, not anything about accountants, but “one who never returns borrowed books”. As a side issue, there’s a small debate about why book-keeper is hyphenated, with a few people suggesting that in this case it would really be bookskeeper, which is a clunky term, hence why a hyphen developed. This interested me, and going back to the late seventeenth century, the word is usually spelt book-keeper. There must be a whole field of study about the evolution of the hyphen, which I suspect is more intriguing than it might at first sound. I do need to get out more…..