Inkhorn (pronounced ingk-hawrn)
A small container of horn or other material (the early
version would literally have been hollowed-out horns from animals), formerly
used to hold writing ink.
1350-1400: From the Middle English ynkhorn & inkehorn
(small portable vessel, originally made of horn, used to hold ink), the
construct being ink + horn. It displaced the Old
English blæchorn, which had the same
literal meaning but used the native term for “ink”. It was used attributively from the 1540s as
an adjective for things (especially vocabulary) supposed to be beloved by
scribblers, pedants, bookworms and the “excessively educated”). Inkhorn, inkhornery & inkhornism are nouns, inkhornish & inkhornesque are adjectives and inkhornize
is a verb; the noun plural is
inkhorns.
Ink was
from the Middle English ynke, from the
Old French enque, from the Latin encaustum (purple ink used by Roman
emperors to sign documents), from the Ancient Greek ἔγκαυστον (énkauston)
(burned-in”), the construct being ἐν (en) (in) + καίω (kaíō) (burn). In this sense, the word displaced the native Old
English blæc (ink (literally “black”
because while not all inks were black, most tended to be). Ink came ultimately from a Greek form meaning
“branding iron”, one of the devices which should make us grateful for modern
medicine. Because, in addition to using
the kauterion to cauterize (seal
wounds with heat), essentially the same process was used to seal fast the
colors used in paintings. Then, the
standard method was to use wax colors fixed with heat (encauston (burned in)) and in Latin this became encaustum which came to be used to
describe the purple ink with which Roman emperors would sign official
documents. In the Old French, encaustum became enque which English picked up as enke & inke which via
ynk & ynke, became the modern “ink”. Horn was from the Middle English horn & horne, from the Old English horn,
from the Proto-West Germanic horn,
from the Proto-Germanic hurną; it was
related to the West Frisian hoarn, the
Dutch hoorn, the Low German Hoorn, horn, the German, Danish & Swedish horn and the Gothic haurn. It was ultimately
from the primitive Indo-European ḱr̥h-nó-m, from ḱerh- (head, horn) and should be compared with the Breton
kern (horn), the Latin cornū, the Ancient Greek κέρας (kéras), the Proto-Slavic sьrna, the Old
Church Slavonic сьрна (sĭrna) (roedeer),
the Hittite surna (horn), the Persian
سر (sar) and the Sanskrit शृङ्ग (śṛṅga) (horn
Inkhorn
terms & inkhorn words
The phrase “inkhorn term” days from the 1530s and was used to criticize the use of language in an obscure or way difficult for most to understand, usually by an affected or ostentatiously erudite borrowing from another language, especially Latin or Greek. The companion term “inkhorn word” was used of such individual words and in modern linguistics the whole field is covered by such phrases as “lexiphanic term”, “pedantic term” & “scholarly term”, all presumably necessary now inkhorns are rarely seen. Etymologists are divided on the original idea behind the meaning of “inkhorn term” & “inkhorn word”. One faction holds that because the offending words tended to be long or at least multi-syllabic, a scribe would need more than once to dip their nib into the horn in order completely write things down while the alternative view is that because the inkhorn users were, by definition, literate, they were viewed sometimes with scepticism, one suspicion they used obscure or foreign words to confuse or deceive the less educated. The derived forms are among the more delightful in English and include inkhornism, inkhornish, inkhornery inkhornesque & inkhornize. The companion word is sesquipedalianism (a marginal propensity to use humongous words).
Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December 2011.
Inkhorn
words were in the fourteenth & fifteenth centuries known also as “gallipot
words”, derived from the use of such words on apothecaries' jars, the construct
being galli(s) + pot. Gallis was from the Latin gallus (rooster or cock (male chicken)),
from the Proto-Italic galsos, an enlargement
of gl̥s-o-, zero-grade of the primitive Indo-European gols-o-, from gelh- (to call); it can be compared with the Proto-Balto-Slavic galsas (voice), the Proto-Germanic kalzōną (to call), the Albanian gjuhë (tongue; language), and (although
this is contested) the Welsh galw (call). Appearing usually in the plural a gallipot word was
something long, hard to pronounce, obscure or otherwise mysterious, the
implication being it was being deployed gratuitously to convey the impression
of being learned. The companion insult
was “you talk like an apothecary” and “apothecary's Latin” was a version of the
tongue spoken badly or brutishly (synonymous with “bog Latin” or “dog Latin”
but different from “schoolboy Latin” & “barracks Latin”, the latter two
being humorous constructions, the creators proud of their deliberate errors). The curious route which led to “gallipot”
referencing big words was via the rooster being the symbol used by apothecaries
in medieval and Renaissance Europe, appearing on their shop signs, jars &
pots. That was adopted by the profession
because the rooster symbolized vigilance, crowing (hopefully) at dawn,
signaling the beginning of the day and thus the need for attentiveness and
care. Apothecaries, responsible for
preparing and dispensing medicinal remedies, were expected to be vigilant and
attentive to detail in their work to ensure the health and well-being of their
patients who relied on their skill to provided them the potions to “get them up
every morning” in sound health. Not all
historians are impressing by the tale and say a more convincing link is that in
Greek mythology, the rooster was sacred to Asclepius (Aesdulapius in the Latin),
the god of medicine, and was often depicted in association with him. In some tales, Asclepius had what was, even
by the standards of the myths of Antiquity, a difficult birth and troubled
childhood.
The quest for the use of “plain English” is not new. The English diplomat and judge Thomas Wilson (1524–1581) wrote The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), remembered as the “the first complete works on logic and rhetoric in English” and in it he observed the first lesson to be learned was never to affect “any straunge ynkhorne termes, but to speak as is commonly received.” Wring a decade earlier, the English bishop John Bale (1495–1563) had already lent an ecclesiastical imprimatur to the task, condemning one needlessly elaborate text with: “Soche are your Ynkehorne termes” and that may be the first appearance of the term in writing. A religious reformer of some note, he was nicknamed “bilious Bale”, a moniker which politicians must since have been tempted to apply to many reverend & right-reverend gentlemen. A half millennium on, the goal of persuading all to use “plain English” is not yet achieved and a fine practitioner of the art was Dr Kevin Rudd (b 1957; Australian prime-minister 2007-2010 & 2013): from no one else would one be likely to hear the phrase “detailed programmatic specificity” and to really impress he made sure he spoke it to an audience largely of those for whom English was not a first language.
Animal horns were for millennia re-purposed for all sorts of uses including as drinking vessels, gunpowder stores & loaders, musical instruments and military decoration and in that last role they’ve evolved into a political fashion statement, Jacob Chansley (b 1988; the “QAnon Shaman”) remembered for the horned headdress worn during the attack on the United States Capitol building in Washington DC on 6 January 2021. Inkhorns tended variously to be made from the horns of sheep or oxen, storing the ink when not as use and ideal as a receptacle into which the nib of a quill or pen could be dipped. Given the impurities likely then to exist a small stick or nail was left in the horn to stir away any surface film which might disrupts a nib’s ability to take in free-flowing ink, most of which were not pre-packaged products by mixed by the user from a small solid “cake” of the base substance in the desired color, put into the horn with a measure starchy water and left overnight to dissolve. The sharp point of a horn allowed it to be driven into the ground because the many scribes were not desk-bound and actually travelled from place to place to do their writing, quill and inkhorn their tools of trade.
A mid-Victorian (1837-1901) silver plated three-vat inkwell by George Richards Elkington (1801–1865) of Birmingham, England.
The cast frame is of a rounded rectangular form with outset corners, leaf and cabuchons, leaf scroll handle and conforming pen rest. The dealer offering this piece described the vats as being of "Vaseline" glass with fruit cast lids and in the Elkington factory archives, this is registered, 8 Victoria Chap 17. No. 899, 1 November 1841. “Vaseline glass” is a term describing certain glasses in a transparent yellow to yellow-green color attained by virtue of a uranium content. It's an often used descriptor in the antique business because some find the word “uranium” off-putting although inherently the substance is safe, the only danger coming from being scratched by a broken shard. Also, some of the most vivid shades of green are achieved by the addition of a colorant (usually iron) and these the cognoscenti insist should be styled “Depression Glass” a term which has little appeal to antique dealers. The term “Vaseline glass” wasn’t used prior to the 1950s (after the detonation of the first A-bombs in 1945, there emerged an aversion to being close to uranium) and what's used in this inkwell may actually be custard glass or Burmese glass which is opaque whereas Vaseline glass is transparent. Canary glass was first used in the 1840s as the trade name for Vaseline glass, a term which would have been unknown to George Richards Elkington.
English silver plate horn and dolphin inkwell (circa 1909) with bell, double inkwell on wood base with plaque dated 1909. This is an inkwell made using horns; it is not an inkhorn.
So
inkhorns were for those on the move while those which sat on desks were called “ink
wells” or “ink pots” and these could range from simple “pots” to elaborate
constructions in silver or gold. There
are many ink wells which use horns as part of their construction but they are
not inkhorns, the dead animal parts there just as decorative forms of
structure.
Horns
are also a part of the “biodynamic” approach to agriculture founded by the Austrian
occultist & mystic Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), an interesting figure
regarded variously as a “visionary”, a “nutcase” and much between. The technique involves filling cow horns with
cow manure which are buried during the six coldest months so the mixture will
ferment; upon being dug up, it will be a sort of humus which has lost the foul
smell of the manure and taken on a scent of undergrowth. It may then be used to increase the yield generated
from the soil. It’s used by being diluted
with water and sprayed over the ground.
Dr Steiner believed the forces penetrating the digestive organ of cows
through the horn influence the composition of their manure and when returned to
the environment, it is enriched with spiritual forces that make the soil more
fertile and positively affect it. As he
explained: “The
cow has horns to send within itself the etheric-astral productive forces,
which, by pressing inward, have the purpose of penetrating directly into the
digestive organ. It is precisely through the radiation from horns and hooves
that a lot of work develops within the digestive organ itself. So in the horns, we have something
well-adapted, by its nature, to radiate the vital and astral properties in the
inner life.” Now we know.
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