'Call the Clotpoll Back'

What does it tell us that English is so rich in words for the foolish and slow-witted? Reading Cymbeline again, I found in Act IV, Scene 2 Guiderius asking Belarius: “Where’s my brother? / I have sent Cloten’s clotpoll down the stream . . .” 

Clotpoll? Dr. Johnson defines its as “thickskull; blockhead.” Immediately preceding it in his Dictionary is a related word, clodpate, meaning “a stupid fellow; a dolt; a thickscull [sic].” Variants include clot-poll, clot-pole and clod-poll.

 

Shakespeare is so profligate with vocabulary, he defies the reader’s memory. I routinely come upon words in the plays I swear I never saw before. In his collected works he used 31,534 different words -- 14,376 of them only once. The OED credits him with introducing almost 3,000 words to the language, more than some Ph.D.’s will use in their entire life.

 

The title character in King Lear, in Act I, Scene 4, asks, "What says the fellow there? Call the clotpoll back.” The modern usage is shortened to clod, a word I knew in childhood to mean a dumb guy, yes, but not one dangerously or malevolently stupid. It was a gentle version of a word Hamlet uses, asshead. In Bleak House, Dickens gives us “Jolter-headed clods.”

Among its definitions of clod, the OED gives “blockhead, clodpate; a clodhopper.” Finally I looked up clodhoppers, a word I’ve known since I was boy, when it referred to rough-looking, heavy shoes or boots. The OED agrees. The first definition of clodhopper is “one who walks over ploughed land; a ploughman or agricultural labourer; a country lout; hence, a clumsy awkward boor, a clown,” followed by “a ploughman’s heavy shoes.” All of which confirms the old simile, “dumb as dirt.”