Dear Word Detective: I’m reading “Absolute Friends” by John le Carre. He uses the phrase “… one copy of Selected Readings from the Works of Rudyard Kipling, foxed and much thumbed; ….” (pg 52, paperback edition). I can’t find that sense of “foxed” in my favorite dictionary. Can you shed any bright and piercing light on this meaning of the word? (Could it be a typo for “boxed”? British usage?) — William E. Blum.
Bright and piercing might be a bit of a stretch, but I’ll give it a shot. Incidentally, I also started reading that same book a few months ago, and had gotten about a half-inch into it (that’s how I measure such things) when it just up and disappeared. Perhaps one of the dogs borrowed it. Although I’ve been a big John le Carre (nom de plume of David John Moore Cornwell) fan for years, I had not realized until I looked up his real name just now that le Carre’s career in MI6 (the British foreign intelligence service) ended when his cover, along with those of hundreds of other agents, was blown to the Soviet KGB by double-agent Kim Philby.
Le Carre’s use of “foxed” in that passage is not a typo, but the term is probably more common in Britain than in the US, so I’m not surprised that it doesn’t show up in your dictionary. A page of a book that is “foxed” is yellowed and discolored with age, possibly stained and perhaps brittle. The pages of many books, especially those printed on cheap paper (such as paperbacks), tend to decompose in this fashion over time, leaving, eventually, just a pile of dry and faded chaff where once a best-seller stood. “Foxed” has been used in this sense since at least the mid-19th century.
As a verb, “fox” has long meant to operate in a devious fashion, to trick or delude, in tribute to the legendary cleverness of the fox as reflected in centuries of legends and folktales. Since the 17th century, “foxed” has also meant “to be confused or deluded” or “to be intoxicated,” apparently carrying the “deluded” sense into the realm of self-inflicted disabilities.
The exactly logic of “foxed” in the “yellowed pages” sense is, alas, a bit unclear. Perhaps significantly, “foxed” has also been applied to wood in the initial stages of rotting since the 19th century and to beer when it has gone sour from age since the 18th. It seems likely that the “drunk” sense of “foxed” was generalized to mean “broken down, impaired, the worse for wear” and then applied to rotting wood, beer gone bad, and books past their prime.
