Time.com last week passed on valuable information for those interested in the Founding Fathers — how they talked:

alphabeted (adj.):arranged in alphabetical order. This is a prime example of a “verbed” noun that is more economical than spelling the whole thing out. Washington didn’t arrange ledgers in alphabetical order in 1771; he alphabeted them.blackguardism (n.):abusive or scurrilous language; swearing. Blackguard was shorthand for a villainous attendant or follower, so by extension bad language got this name. “The public,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1799, “wish to hear reason instead of disgusting blackguardism.”

Bloody Bones (n):a bogeyman or bugbear, especially invoked to frighten children. In some tales, Bloody Bones skulks in ponds, waiting to drown kiddies; he was often mentioned along with “Raw Head,” a scary skull-faced thing. TJ used the metaphor to talk about fellow politicos: “Hancock and the Adamses were the raw-head and bloody bones of Tories and traitors,” he wrote in 1817.

crapulous (adj.):characterized by gross excess in drinking or eating; intemperate, debauched. In the year that the U.S. Constitution came to be, Jefferson took time to write about other men’s “crapulous habits.” (We might reprise this today as a word meaning approximately “so bad, it’s good.”)

frowzy (adj.):ill-smelling, fusty, musty; having an unpleasant smell from being dirty, unwashed, ill-ventilated or the like. In all his various pursuits, Benjamin Franklin was bound to come across some frowzy — also frouzy — things. “It is the frouzy, corrupt air from animal substances,” he declared in 1773.

hatchet man (n.):a pioneer or axeman serving in a military unit. Back in Washington’s day, a hatchet man was exactly what it sounded like. Later, the term was used in the U.S. to refer to hired Chinese assassins. And today a hatchet man is typically a person employed to attack and destroy other people’s reputations.

huskanoy (v.):to subject someone to the ceremony, formerly in use among the Indians of Virginia, of preparing young men for the duties of manhood by means of solitary confinement and the use of narcotics. The real question, of course, is how such a thing ever fell out of practice. In 1788, Jefferson wrote that a man was “so much out of his element that he has the air of one huskanoyed.” …

milk-and-water (adj.):something feeble, insipid or mawkish. “I had heard him say that this constitution was a shilly shally thing of mere milk and water, which could not last,” Jefferson wrote in 1792. Shilly-shally means irresolute and undecided. Tomorrow, Americans will celebrate “him” being wrong on both accounts. …

red-heeled (adj.):wearing shoes with red heels, figuratively used to suggest foppishness or ostentatious display. In 1780, Franklin derided a “red-heeled” commissioner, who was presumably not wearing Christian Louboutin pumps.

Septemberize (v.):to murder for political reasons. “The warhawks talk of Septembrizing,” Jefferson wrote in 1798. The word comes from the French “Septemberists” who advocated the massacre of political prisoners that took place in Paris in September 1792.

tippling house (n.):a house where intoxicating liquor is sold and drunk; an ale house, a tavern. As far back as 1757, Washington was relating stories about “Instances of the villainous Behavior of those Tippling-House-keepers.” Villainous behavior notwithstanding, who would want to go drinking when you could go tippling instead?

I’m amused by this in part because, independent of the vocabulary, the less formal writings of the Founding Fathers strike me as similar to the Episcopal Church’s Rite 1 Mass. (Which has nothing to do with a “tippling house” except that, as the joke goes, where there are four Episcopalians, there’s a fifth. In a bottle, for those who don’t get the joke.) Rite 1 is the older, more formal form of Mass that dates back to the original Episcopal church Book of Common Prayer, published in 1789, and before that to the Church of England, to which more than half of the Founding Fathers belonged. (The Episcopal Church split off itself from the Church of England after independence. More presidents have been Episcopalians than members of any other religion, including, most recently, George H.W. Bush. The National Cathedral in Washington is Episcopalian.)

Many Episcopal churches that wouldn’t be caught dead using Rite 1 during the regular year (too traditional, you know) use that form of Mass during Lent, which is, after all, supposed to be a penitential season. And so when the priest says “The Lord be with you,” when the answer is usually “And also with you,” the Rite 1 answer is “And with thy spirit.” The preface to the Eucharistic Prayer begins with “It is right, and a good and joyful thing, always and everywhere” in Rite 2, but “It is meet, right and our bounden duty” in Rite 1.

I have threatened to try to write a column or blog in Rite 1 English, although I don’t know where I’d go beyond the likely opening of “It is meet, right and our bounden duty to …” whatever I’m trying to advocate. Most readers probably would wonder what the hell I was trying to do.