The podictionary word for today is a favorite one of an author whose work I really enjoy. I caught Jasper Fforde during a book signing in a cavernous and reverberant hall which accounts for the sound of this:

“This is Jasper Fforde and my favorite word is linoleum, linoleum.”

Earlier, during his book reading, he had explained how hard it had been for him to describe his books to agents and publishers when he was getting started. And now that difficulty also falls to me in trying to tell you what he writes about. It’s kind of hard to describe. These are detective stories, except the detectives are able to move in and out of literature. Just like special features in movies might give you insight into the back-story behind the movie and something of the real lives of the actors, Jasper Fforde’s books give you insight into the back-story of the real lives of the fictional characters in books.

He’s very imaginative. I particularly liked how he developed a theme around an operating system for books and how some evil giant corporation was going to take over the book-world with an operating system upgrade. See I told you it was hard to explain.

Anyway, Jasper Fforde really does like the word linoleum. In one of his books the cops work out of a shell corporation that is a retail flooring outlet so the word linoleum fits in quite nicely. In another book two people are killed in a freak linoleum related accident. But don’t judge his books by their flooring.

He also said that one of the reasons he liked the word was the way it slipped off the tongue. I guess anything with an etymology based on the Latin word for “oil” should do that. Linoleum is based on two Latin roots; linum and oleom. Linum means “flax” and that’s why we call linen napkins linen, they have fibers of flax in them. In fact that’s why we call the lining of our coats lining and why we call a line a line; because coat lining and threads that lines are named after were often made with flax fibers.

There are in fact fibers in linoleum but that’s not why it’s called linoleum, those fibers are usually cotton. This is where the oleum part comes in because it’s linseed oil that makes linoleum linoleum.

If it hadn’t been for a guy named Frederick Walton, instead of thinking of old kitchen floors as linoleum, we’d have to twist our tongues around a totally different kitchen flooring called kamptulicon. But I’ll step back a little further if I might.

In London back in the 16- and 1700s it was the posh thing to do to hire a couple of strong guys to come by your house with a sedan chair in which you would sit while they carried you across town for all your important social or business meetings. One very important reason that these human mules were necessary was that the streets were a muddy mix of ruts and horse droppings into which the upper class foot objected to sink up to the ankle. Because sedan chair carriers and others must needs step into the front hall when picking up or delivering their clients, it was important to protect the floor from their mucky feet with something called a floorcloth. These were fabric coverings that were coated in multiple layers of paint in an effort to make them waterproof. In the early 1800s as the use of sedan chairs was falling off Elijah Galloway came up with a better product that embedded cork crumbs in rubber on the fabric backing. He called it kamptulicon from the Greek words for “thick” and “flexible.” It was all the rage and it even graced the floors of the British houses of parliament.

I think we need to doubly thank Frederick Walton since he saved us from having to remember the name kamputicon. Walton filed his linoleum patent in 1860, although the Oxford English Dictionary for some reason dates the first citation for linoleum 18 years later. I can’t figure out how his linoleum was so much more economical than the rubber stuff because it took weeks and weeks to prepare; but it was.

Frederick Walton took out dozens of patents on his inventions but he never bothered to trademark them so as his flooring became wildly popular his patents were running out; and when they did other companies jumped into the market. He tried to sue but the courts found that the word linoleum was so common by then that it had become generic and any company was free to use it. He tried to expand his market by opening shop across the pond in America.

You’ll likely recognize the flooring brand Armstrong. Armstrong got big into linoleum but only as a side effect of prohibition. Armstrong had originally manufactured corks for bottles and as prohibition came on they were wondering first of all what to do with all that cork, and second of all what to do to make a living. Since linoleum recipes called for wood dust or cork dust, they jumped into the business. The reason you recognize their name is because they were the first to figure out that advertising flooring to potential customers might be a good idea. Here’s an image of their very first ad.

Back in England linoleum was seen as such wonderful stuff everyone had to have it. Even the Royal Navy found that it was good to cover the decks of ships with. It was waterproof, it almost never wore out and it gave good traction even when wet. That’s why you hear institutional flooring sometimes referred to as battleship linoleum. You won’t see much linoleum on warships any more though. A few battles revealed that flooring made of linseed oil and wood dust has an incendiary tendency incompatible with a theatre of combat.

I think it was very appropriate for Jasper Fforde to have chosen linoleum as our word for today because before Frederick Walton invented the stuff he had failed in another invention. That might have changed the course of history in book-world; it was a linseed oil based quick drying varnish for book covers.

Who knows what that might have done to the operating system.