Friday 13th is unlucky in itself, but Friday 13th in the year one has turned 63 - what we now call the 64th year, but used to call the 63rd - is as bad as it gets. Dot Wordsworth:

I’ve been reading with unexpected pleasure The First English Dictionary (Bodleian, £12.99), an edition of a list of 2,500 ‘hard usual English words’ compiled by Robert Cawdrey and published in 1604.

He intended his book for ‘Ladies, Gentlewomen or any other unskilful persons’. The result is uneven. It would have been kinder of him not to give the meaning of carminate as ‘to card wool’, for even in his day it meant ‘to cause to break wind’ (the etymological reason being that medicine combed out wind as you’d comb wool). Aldous Huxley makes a joke in Crome Yellow of a poet who writes a line ‘And passion carminative as wine’, unaware of the true meaning, but that wasn’t Cawdrey’s fault.

Anyway, if those unskilful persons had not have heard that cider was a ‘drink made of apples’, surely they’d have learnt in church that cherubin is an ‘order of angels’, or heard that a cowslip was a ‘hearbe’.

There are plenty of hard words indeed, such as vauntcourers (‘forerunners’), nuncupatory (‘declaring any thing’), obnubilate (‘to make darke’), foraminated (‘holed or bored’). But a definition that puzzled me was for climactericall: ‘that which ariseth by degrees, as the sixtie third yeere is climactericall of the seaventie’. Certainly if you’re counting in sevens, 63 comes before 70, but how were the unskilful gentlewomen supposed to know that?

I knew from Thomas Browne, writing only 42 years after Cawdrey, that the 63rd year (or the 64th as we count) is the one in life to get over, or so people thought, which is why he put it in his book Vulgar Errors. But he does not quite elucidate what Cawdrey suggests.

Browne says that ‘the daies of men are usually cast up by Septenaries, and every seventh yeare conceived to carry some altering character with it, either in the temper of body, mind, or both. But among all other, three are most remarkable, that is 7 times 7 or forty nine, 9 times 9 or eighty one, and 7 times 9 or the year of sixty three; which is conceived to carry with it the most considerable fatality, and, consisting of both the other numbers, was apprehended to comprise the vertue of either: is therefore expected and entertained with fear.

Does Cawdrey mean that since 63 is the next stop before 70, the biblical threescore and ten, it is one rung down the ladder (climax)? I wish Mrs Cawdrey (in the gaps between bearing him eight children) had read his manuscript and made some sensible suggestions.