Pisco, chicha, fankle and all that jizz

WHEN you are buying someone a dictionary, there always comes that dreadful moment in front of the gleaming reference shelves when you ask yourself: how do I pick the best? Do I go for one that proudly boasts its number of definitions? One that has a clearer pronunciation policy? One with all sorts of new words in it? The one with the nice cover?

None of these. What fun is there in being logical? What you do is look up the most obscure words you know and try to beat the dictionary. In my case the word is 'pisco', a fiery Peruvian drink rather like marc, which can be mixed with egg white, lemon juice and a touch of cinnamon to make a pisco sour, one of the world's great cocktails. You can occasionally buy pisco in Soho, though it is usually exported from Chile, Peru's ancestral enemy. Wake up, Peru]

Well, of the three current dictionaries I have to hand, Cassell's, Collins and Chambers (I only use dictionaries beginning with C), I regret to say that none of them mentions pisco. This is a pity. Not only might I some day want to use pisco in a game of Scrabble, but it deserves mentioning, as there is no drink quite like it. Just as there is nothing quite like chicha, the rather horrible Peruvian drink made from maize, which, so it is said, is first chewed by Peruvian grannies to make fermenting easier. Hold on, let's look up chicha . . .

Yes, it's there in Cassell's and Chambers, but not in Collins. Right. Let's move on to another horrible concoction, this time French. Recently in Provence I came across some stuff called 'epeautre', which is a kind of grain you can make into rock-hard bread, into 'creme d'epeautre' (which is a soup-like porridge), or even into a pudding. It's the sort of stuff we forget about when we say how good French food is. I looked it up when I got back. The only English word for this barbaric and ancient grain is 'spelt', which I had never heard of. I am now going to look up 'spelt' in the three Cs. . . . They have all got it. I am impressed.

But I have a new word up my sleeve. It is 'fankle'. This is a word I met for the first time last week in an article in the Scotsman, where the writer said that things were getting into a fair old fankle. I didn't know what on earth he was talking about. In England, you'd know that it was a misprint, but in Scotland they still have words we know nothing about. Still, if they get into the national paper, they must be in current usage, so let's have a quick look . . .

Nothing in Cassell's, but there it is in Collins and Chambers. Good for them. (Both Scottish firms, of course.) Collins says 'tangle, confusion'. Chambers says 'tangle, muddle'. They both say it is from 'fank a coil of rope'. But only Chambers adds that 'fank' can also mean a 'sheep fold'. Shall we give a bonus point to Chambers? I think so. They both, incidentally, give 'fango' as a kind of Italian thermal mud that does you lots of good, and 'fanion' as a surveyor's flag. Did you know that? I didn't. I'm afraid Cassell's doesn't. Mark you, Cassell's aims to be concise, and thermal mud and surveyor's flags do look like prime candidates for non-inclusion in the final squad.

This is where we get into the second phase of dictionary testing, of course: the browsing test. It is axiomatic that whatever word you start looking up in a dictionary, you end up looking at the words either side. That's how I came across 'jizz'. I was looking up 'jo', the word always used by my friend Andrew in Scrabble games. Indeed, it is the main reason I have given up playing Scrabble with Andrew.

He has a long, mental list of short words useful in Scrabble, and whenever he uses 'jo' I ask him what it means and he says it's a Scots word for sweetheart, and I ask him if he has ever heard it used as such, and he says no, but it's in the dictionary, and I say, well, if you have never heard it used I don't think you're entitled to use it, but he says the acid test is whether it's in the dictionary, and he's right, and unfortunately I know it's in the dictionary because every time I see a dictionary and have looked up 'pisco', I then look up 'jo', hoping it won't be there. But it always is.

Still, that's how I found out about 'jizz'.

Tomorrow we explore jizz, timeous, dreich and pingo and come to the tentative conclusion that the 'Concise Scots Dictionary' might be the best buy after all, were it not for the omission of pisco and chicha.