PORT TOWNSEND — Froonce: To frolic exuberantly with noise and energy.
Eyeservant: A person who works only when someone is watching.
Scaramouch: A braggart who is secretly a coward.
These are a few entries in Joe Gillard’s “The Little Book of Lost Words,” a colorfully illustrated compendium of terms people used back in the 16th through 20th centuries.
Gillard, who lives on a farm outside Chimacum with his wife, novelist and educator Nicole Persun, calls himself “a word nerd and a history buff” who researched “Lost Words” in college libraries, on the internet and in used bookstores.
He and Persun happen to be fond of the 17th century Scottish word flype.
According to Gillard’s book, it means “to roll up your socks before putting them on,” or “to fold socks inside out in pairs,” or just “to fold something back.”
As he does with each lost-and-found word, Gillard gives an example of how to insert flype in a sentence: “He was forty years old, but his mother still flyped his socks and laid them next to his folded underwear.”
The author hopes readers will just have a little fun with this.
The archaic words described a variety of specific feelings and behaviors, Gillard said, and some could come in handy today.
How about groke, 1800s Scottish dialect meaning to gaze eagerly at someone eating, hoping they’ll give you some of their food?
Or gongoozler, 20th century English slang for a person who stares and spectates instead of participating?
To illustrate the strange words, Gillard uses fine art from similar eras: Froonce, for example, has beside it the circa-1772 painting “Three Dancing Nymphs and a Reclining Cupid in a Landscape” attributed to Antonio Zucchi.
Obtaining permissions for scores of paintings was “definitely the hardest part of the process,” Gillard said.
He worked with institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City — where, he happily reports, his book is available in the gift shop.
Gillard is also a multi-tasker. His day job is at Centrum, where he orchestrates advertising and marketing for events such as the Ukulele Workshop Sept. 11-12 and the Creative Aging Conference on Dec. 10.
Online, he’s creator of HistoryHustle.com, a platform with lists, videos, articles, quizzes and teacher resources for history buffs. The website and its social media pages — Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest — have more than 600,000 followers, Gillard said.
His literary agent has expressed interest in another word book, he added, and if he were to embark on such a project, he’d want to do more exploring of languages beyond English.
Gillard sees publishing as a way to expand the History Hustle brand.
Author branding is yet another interest, and Gillard is slated to give a presentation on the topic during the San Miguel Literary Sala, a writers’ conference later this month from San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
He and Persun had initially planned to travel there. Instead, the conference will be online at sanmiguelliterarysala.org.
The life of a writer-marketer-website creator is a combination of two terms from “Lost Words,” perhaps: being a quaintrelle, 19th century English for someone whose existence is full of passion, leisure and enjoyment, and being quanked, again 1800s dialect for exhausted or fatigued from hard work.
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Jefferson County senior reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-417-3509 or durbanidelapaz@peninsuladailynews.com.
“Fabulosity” is one of the entries, illustrated by a detail of Alexandre Cabanel’s painting “Florentine Poet,” in Joe Gillard’s “The Little Book of Lost Words.”
