Two interesting word-coinages have come to my notice this week.
Worridicule was used in the 1919 Report on the Domestic Service Problem by the government’s Women’s Advisory Committee (initially set up to consider the question of pay after the first Equal Pay strike of women tramway workers) to describe the contemptuous view which the press daily demonstrated for servants.
The book “Not in Front of the Servants” by Frank Dawes, from where I take this quote, provides plenty of examples of contemporary cartoon representations of stupid, ignorant or idle illustrations of the ‘breed.’
Worridicule however does not show up in the Oxford English Dictionary nor anywhere on Google.
Speaking on Woman’s Hour yesterday the parents of Britain’s first “saviour sibling” described themselves as having been on tenderbricks during one stressful period.
Presumably a bit of a mux-up between the idea of being on tenterhooks with that of being a cat on hot bricks.
In this case the Oxford English Dictionary did provide a nice Byronic play on tender/tenter in the sense of something that causes suffering or painful suspense.
Canto XIV, verse xcvii of Byron’s long poem Don Juan deliberately leaves us hanging:
Whether Don Juan and chaste Adeline
Grew friends in this or any other sense,
Will be discuss'd hereafter, I opine:
At present I am glad of a pretence
To leave them hovering, as the effect is fine,
And keeps the atrocious reader in suspense;
The surest way for ladies and for books
To bait their tender, or their tenter-hooks.
