I’ve just tried out a newly discovered term of abuse on my husband. ‘You’re nothing but a lol‑poop,’ I exclaimed as he sat, or almost lay, like a John Prescott, except with a glass of whisky resting on his stomach instead of a cup of tea.
I’ve just tried out a newly discovered term of abuse on my husband. ‘You’re nothing but a lol‑poop,’ I exclaimed as he sat, or almost lay, like a John Prescott, except with a glass of whisky resting on his stomach instead of a cup of tea.
He only laughed. But I think it might sting some of our ‘new generation’ of ‘front-line’ politicians more, since they prize activity so much. I found the term in Anthony Wood (1632–95), whose entertaining Life and Times I had inexplicably left unread till now. Wood, settling in to a new feud in 1661, with Thomas Clayton, Warden of Merton College, remarked that the fellows ‘knew him well to have been the very lol-poop of the University’.
It means, plainly, ‘an idle drone’, but what is its origin? It has nothing to do with lollipop, a word found no earlier than 1784. The element lol- in lol-poop evidently comes from loll. ‘This prince is not an Edward,’ says Buckingham in Richard III, ‘He is not lolling on a lewd love-bed.’ But loll, for as long as it has meant ‘to lean idly’, has also meant ‘to hang down’. Langland, our unread epic poet, uses it in both senses.
There is here a strange connection between lol-poop and liripoop. A liripoop is the elongated tail of an academic hood that hangs down behind the gown. Liripoops were all the rage at court. The liripoop, like some vestigial organ, was apparently wound round a hood when it was up, in the manner of a muffler. There is nothing so odd that fashion will not demand it.
No one knows where the word liripoop comes from, beyond the medieval Latin liripipium, but in 1903 the author of its entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, Henry Bradly, I think, became quite heated about earlier attempts to supply one. ‘Ménage’s ludicrous guess, that liripipium is a corruption of cleri ephippium, is repeated seriously in recent English dictionaries.’ That is a knock at Webster’s Dictionary. Cleri ephippium means ‘clergyman’s caparison’. The Ménage who is blamed was long dead, being Gilles Ménage (1613–92), who held Wednesday evening literary gatherings in Paris and was thrown out of the Academy for his sarcastic wit. His contemporary, Anthony Wood, would have understood, if not perhaps have sympathised.
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