The Clock Society
By David Christopher Pleiss
H.G. Wells
Baker Street, London
May 21, 1905
Greetings to my esteemed colleagues and lexicographers of the United States of America.
I must first apologize for busying myself too long and ignoring my good friends. I have been gathering the information that has been overdue now these past two years. The reconstructed time machine has indeed become a grand vehicle for scientific study in every discipline of learning.
This art icle of correspondence is only the first of thousands to come reflecting the ongoing research of both genus and differentia for the greater understanding of the English language. As announced in the spring of 1903, I did embark on a series of journeys to locate the greatest literary minds from the history of English speaking peoples, and did in fact receive commitments from a few of them to return with me and become members of a research team. They are Geoffrey Chaucer, Samuel Coleridge, Lord Byron, and Edmund Spenser. The mission of this board of brilliant writers, called the Clock Society, involves the clarification of our language, to the letter, for the dissemination of precise knowledge in the fields of English etymology and lexicography. When our job is completed, I will have the pleasure of returning my colleagues to their respective places and times. They have sworn an oath of secrecy that they shall not disclose their memories of this endeavor, in order to secure the permanence of the language history that we have worked tirelessly to define.
Through your generous grants and those of the London Historical Society, I have had the pleasure of locating for them several rental properties near my Baker Street home. By actually visiting the chronological and geographical coordinates in which words were changing, the society can reveal not only the alterations but the historical influences that coaxed them into existence. This process is enhanced through scientific discussion among the society members. I hope you will find this first installation illuminating. Please understand that I will preface my official society statements with short stories of the retrieval process. I would say that these prefaces are scientifically driven, but I am, as always, a storyteller at heart.
Many gracious thanks and may the light of progress shine upon you all.
Yours humbly,
H.G. Wells
PREFACE
At 9:00 p.m. on April 16, 1904 Mr. Unkempt climbed from the time machine as the Clock Society members stood from their seats at the library table. We peered past the bookcase to the steaming hulk that had reappeared in the corner of the room in a series of yellow and blue fireworks. “Mr. Wells,” Mr. Chaucer shouted, clapping his hands together, “you have done it again.” The traveler staggered from the apparatus and was leaning on the bookcase when I approached him to help him to the table. His hair was matted and tangled, his britches were held up by a knotted rope, and he looked, well…“Unkempt my good man!” Mr. Byron approached to embrace him, but Mr. Unkempt was delirious. “Don’t make me evil,” he was muttering, “Mercy, heaven, save me...” Mr.Byron and I carefully lowered him into a chair, and I made a snap decision. I begged pardon that my distinguished fellows should retire to their homes for the evening, and I summoned the maid to draw a bath and find clean garments for our weary friend. He was obviously delusional and exhausted. Without another word, he took a long night of rest.
At an hour past sunrise the following day, the Society eagerly reassembled in the library while our Honorary Adjective, Mr. Unkempt, took his breakfast in the dining room. The rest of us were soon whisp ering amongst ourselves about the legitimacy of this recent journey, the project having been protested by here-unnamed members who were concerned about its subjective nature. Mr. Unkempt’s motive was to find his roots, and some in the Society believed the matter was too personal. The outcome, they said, would be unscientific.
At the table, I recalled how Mr. Unkempt came to my desk as I wrote “The First Men in the Moon,” helping me characterize a space voyager as “dirty, unkempt, to an indescribable degree.” We got on famously, and by and by Mr. Unkempt assisted me as I wrote the autobiographical “Certain Personal Matters” and “War of the Worlds.” Everyone in the Society was fond of him and, when he had sunk into depression over his treatment in the human community, we wanted to answer his questions. Why was he an “un” word with no counterpart? Were his parents of the negative persuasion, or was he the victim of a dark recessive gene? As we sat waiting, Mr. Coleridge shared his memories of our friend, quoting a line of poetry that included “the mossy stone hillocks like unkempt brown hair.” Pursing his lips, he declared that this usage of the adjective was the most authentic, according to the word’s origin. Mr. Chaucer agreed with this usage, reminding us that, in his “Knight’s Tale,” the word was spelled “unkembed” and it described tangled hair, “but,” Mr. Chaucer confided, “there was something else…” Then Mr. Spenser chimed in. “Language.”
“What?” asked Mr. Chaucer.
“A rude, unrefined language.”
“I beg your pardon,” replied Mr. Chaucer in a hurt tone.
“No, no, my good man, the other definition of ‘unkempt.’”
“Ah.”
Mr. Byron screamed with a laughter that infectiously spread around the table and finally, wiping a tear from his eye, he said, “I’m afraid Unkempt was a more complex fellow in my time than he was in yours. In “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” I wrote of “Egypt’s plague, unkempt, unwashed.” “That’s dark,” jabbed Mr. Coleridge, and just as Mr. Byron was about to jab back, our man of the hour, Mr. Unkempt, entered and slumped into the chair at the head of the table. As usual, his hair was in disarray and he had even managed to wrinkle a perfectly pressed shirt from my wardrobe. There was a spot of tea on the collar. A hush fell over the group as he put his head down into his hands. I began to fear the worst. I began to worry that we should not have sent him, that he had fallen into some bad vocabulary and forever changed our language. But when he lifted his palms beside his ears and looked up with a mischievous grin, we all once again fell about laughing. “I found it,” he exclaimed, smiling around the table at us. “I found the origin, the seed of my existence.” “Well, out with it, man,” blurted Mr. Byron. No Society could ever have been as delighted as ours that morning, as the sun sparkled on the dew of the library windows.
And so, my fellow truth-seekers, here follows the final declarations of the Clock Society, as collected and refined by its members on that day.
DECLARATION OF THE CLOCK SOCIETY
All present this day, the seventeenth day of April, 1904, to record the etymology and continuing evolution of the word (and dear friend) “Unkempt.”
Presiding members:
Lord Byron
Geoffrey Chaucer
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Edmund Spenser
H.G. Wells, minutes
Resolved, that “Unkempt” is an adjective with a negative prefix, which is no reflection upon the accommodating nature of our friend, and that
Resolved, that “Kembed,” his birth mother, was an honorable adjective meaning “combed,” and that she lived in the Old English period, for perhaps 500 years or longer. The Society suspects this because Mr. Chaucer knew of Ms. Kembed’s human hair styling salon business, which failed miserably. Noted, that, based upon his journey to the twenty first century, Mr. Unkempt believes that his mother’s human hair business was 700 years before its time, and that she was therefore a genius.
Resolved, that his biological father, Un (not) , a prefix and therefore a morpheme, abandoned him at birth and went on attaching himself to other adjectives of the female persuasion, siring the bastard children Unruly and Uncouth. Like their half-brother Unkempt, these adjective-offspring have no positive counterpart in this world. Also, Un’s brothers (Mr. Unkempt’s uncles) In and Dis were equally detestable, having produced the bastard children Disconsolate, Ineffable, Unscathed, Indomitable, Innocent and Innocuous, all of whom are Mr. Unkempt’s cousins. They, too, have lived without a positive counterpart. Although the Society loathes the existence of Un, In, and Dis, it acknowledges the positive impact of morphemes in general upon the English vocabulary. After all, they create new meanings from established root words.
Resolved, that Mr. Unkempt’s family heritage can be traced thusly:
Gomphosis , the Greek noun for “tooth,” “peg” or “bolt,” married the goddess Athena, begetting Kambaz, the German noun for “comb,” who married Leif the Wordsmith and eventually sailed to England with him. There, the two begot a girl,
The German denominative Kamjan, meaning “to comb.” Kamjan married a Celtic native named Alfred Peasant and begot a boy, the noun Camb, meaning “comb,” who changed his name to Kemben (a more exciting version of “to comb”) as a teenager, having been a feisty bugger and as active as any verb. Kemben married into Germanic royalty when he married Edwina of Suffix, and they begot a girl, Kembed, meaning “combed.” Although this daughter was but a past participle, her father Kemben gave her everything, even financing her salon for human hair, which sadly attracted more concerned stares than actual business. Kembed was soon swept off her page by the forward advanc es of the misguided Un and, in 1390 A.D., the two begot our dear boy Unkembed, adjective and past participle “uncombed,” who, due to the spoken nature of his name, took on the nickname Unkempt. Going through a Mid-English crisis, Mr. Unkempt officially changed his name (just as his grandfather had done) and dropped his unappealing past participle position, which he now jokingly refers to as “the p.p. job,” retaining only his adjective duty.
Resolved, that Mr. Unkempt became distraught over the supposed death of his mother and hibernated for 200 years beginning in the first decade of the seventeenth century. He was disturbed during this era twice, as he recalls. The first instance was in the year 1742, when a Mr. Shenstone needed assistance for a school rhyme that described the unacceptable version of a student’s hair. In the second instance, Mr. Unkempt awoke to the knock of a writer named Mr. Thomson. By the time the society’s own Mr. Byron requisitioned him in 1812, Mr. Unkempt had become active in the Negative Adjective Board branch of the English Lexicon, in which he still holds a chair position in the efforts to retain legitimacy in the now independent English colonies of Africa and the Americas. The Clock Society applauds these efforts and has recognized them in the minutes of January 20, 1903.
Resolved, that the Clock Society recognizes Mr. Unkempt’s statements about future events, namely that
1. His participation in the English language shall continue beyond the twentieth century.
2.Note: In something called the “i nternet,” which makes use of such devices as those which I invented for the time machine, instantaneous mass communication (see minutes of April 24, 1904, following) will be possible. While visiting the future, Unkempt swam in a sort of ether of language and did not walk on pages of text. In this way, he discovered that his meaning will deservedly expand into the following definitions:
a.Wordnet.princeton.edu
i. Not neatly combed, “wild unkempt hair.”
ii. Not neat or cared for; slovenly; “his unkempt appearance.”
iii. Not properly maintained; “an unkempt garden.”
b.dictionary.cambridge.org
i. Adjective, disapproving, untidy; not cared for: An unkempt lawn.
c.answers.com
i. shabby, sloppy
ii. antonyms: kempt, neat, tidy, trim (The society applauds Unkempt’s discovery that his mother may only have been asleep these 400 years, and may well awaken in the twenty-first century.)
Notes: The Society is on notice that it will visit Mr. Wells’ inspiration, Mr. Jules Verne, at his home next week, as Mr. Verne is said to have taken ill and wants to meet the Society. He especially wants to see Mr.Unkempt, who helped him in writing “Journey to the Center of the Earth.”
Conclusion of these minutes occurring at 5:12 p.m., on this day of our Lord, the seventeenth day of April, 1904.
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David Christopher Pleiss is the editor of the Statesman newsletter at the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site, where he is also the Assistant Director of Education. He recently returned to college to finish his Bachelor of Arts degree at Indiana University, and dozens of his historical research essays have been published in the museum newsletter since 2001. Otherwise, writing and reading are his major hobbies.