What is "Heal cum Lenigen?"

[BeProudDuck]

In this quote from 'Highland Fling' by Nancy Mitford:

"that Heal cum Lenigen complex so prevalent among the British aristocracy"

From Chat gpt:

"Heal cum lenigen" Is a phrase that combines English and Latin. Here's a breakdown:

1. Heal: English, meaning to recover or restore health.
2. Cum: Latin, meaning "with."
3. Lenigen: This word isn't standard in English or Latin, but it closely resembles "lenigen," which could be a variant or a mistaken form of "lenigen," from Latin roots. The Latin word "lenis" means gentle, soft, or mild.

If we interpret "lenigen" as related to "lenis," the phrase "Heal cum lenigen" could be understood as "Heal with gentleness" or "Healing with mildness." Like the previous phrase, it is not standard, so its meaning would depend on the specific context in which it was used.

Per Chat GPT 4o:

In Nancy Mitford's novels, particularly The Pursuit of Love, the phrase "heal cum lenigen" is a humourous take on Latin, used to refer to a quick recovery from illness. The phrase is pseudo-Latin, playing on the mix of "heal" (English) and "cum lenigen," which loosely mimics Latin grammar but isn't proper Latin.

Mitford often used this kind of playful language in her works, especially to add a touch of humour and to reflect the eccentricities of her characters. The phrase is used in the context of someone recovering swiftly and effectively from an illness or ailment.

I wouldn't trust chatGPT, there was a thread on here recently asking where a quote came from and chatGPT came up with a different answer each time it was asked.

From the context, it looks like Heal and Lenigan were designers or decorators of the time - 1930 - but I can't find any other references to them, which seems odd.

*Lenigen

Interesting! I think I originally read it as suggesting something like achieving health or improvement by replacing dark furnishings with lighter colours, as in the pickled wood.

But now on googling I see that Heal’s is a long-running furniture store founded in 1810.

I googled for lenigen and it is a Dutch word for alleviate, so maybe it’s a pun on lightening a burden v lightening a colour, but I can’t find anything else relevant. Perhaps given Heal’s it was another furniture brand.

I wonder if there is somewhere an annotated edition of Highland Fling or if there is a translation that might shed some light?

Google says that there was a Le Nigen company in France in the 90s which made cleaning products and other industrial chemicals - it might just be possible that a precursor family business of the same name made the products used for stripping old varnish and pickling Victorian panelling?

I don’t know whether ‘cum lenigen’ is cod Latin, but Heal’s, as you say, is a long-established furniture brand, with its main store still now on the Tottenham Court Road. In the 1930s, Ambrose Heal was designing and producing Arts and Crafts/Art Deco/ trending towards Bauhaus-ish modernist furniture, at prices that made it affordable for the middle classes. In some ways it was a kind of forerunner of IKEA in terms of ‘mass-produced, affordable design’.

Rebecca West has a snide reference in one of her Aubrey novels to a newly-furnished marital home that has some nice Victorian furniture and some ‘Tottenham Court Road- style.’

In your quotation, the implication seems to be that the speaker approves of antique furniture and is horrified at aristocrats who ‘modernise’ their drawing rooms via furnishing them from Heal’s.

That is certainly the implication. The speaker, the delightfully awful Albert Memorial Gates, goes on to publish a well-received monograph on Victorian treasures of the castle they are visiting.

I started reading Pigeon Pie as a result of searching around on this, and there are references to Heal’s as a furniture shop in that book as well.

Heal's is very upmarket now. The snobby reference to Tottenham Court Road is a lot more likely to refer to Maple's at the top end of Tottenham Court Road, which was not modernist (in its later days anyway - I dimly remember it from the early 1980s). It sold rather staid dark brown dining suites and overstuffed chintzy three piece suites, IIRC. The arrival of Habitat and MFI probably sealed its doom. Habitat was the place to go if you wanted something modern and MFI was for the cheap and cheerful option, usually made of MDF and proud of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maple_%26_Co.

Heals isn't upmarket in the context. What did the aristocratic Alan Clark say about Michael Heseltine? 'The trouble with Michael is that he had to buy all his furniture'. If you have to buy your furniture, however rich you are, it means you are new money. Aristocrats inherit their furniture. It's a U vs non-U putdown.

Yes, only in the quotation the OP gives (I haven’t read Highland Fling, though I must), it’s wrong-headed, ‘modernising’ aristocrats who are apparently throwing the ancestral furniture in the attic and and buying from Heal’s. The horror!

Do read Highland Fling, it’s hilarious :)