What Is The Origin Of (236)?…
Dandiprat
One of the great strengths of the English language is that it is dynamic and constantly evolving, acting like a sponge to absorb influences and words from other cultures and tongues. Even the most ardent logophile would be hard pressed to keep track on every word let alone find the opportunity to use them all. Inevitably, some words fall out of fashion and languish in ill-deserved obscurity. I see it as part of my mission to resurrect some of them and get them in front of a twenty-first century audience.
Take dandiprat. It is defined in Samuel Johnson’s magnificent but unreliable Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, as “a little fellow; an urchin: a word used sometimes in fondness, sometimes in contempt”. He even ventures a derivation of the term, from the French dandin. Randle Cotgrave in his bilingual dictionary of 1611, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, defined dandin as “a noddie or a ninnie; a hoydon, sot, lobcocke; one that knows not how to looke, and gapes at everything he knows not.” In defining the French noun nambot, he wrote, “a dwarf, elfe, a dandiprat”. There is some circularity here, but Johnson does seem to have got the meaning of dandiprat right and possibly even the derivation.
But the word may have an earlier provenance, from the world of numismatics. The English economy hit hard times in the late 15th century to such an extent that the treasury was depleted, the church coffers had been empties and the poor workers and serfs were on their uppers. The king at the time, Henry VII, hit on the bright idea of adding a new silver coin to the coinage in circulation to the value of three halfpennies. The antiquarian, William Camden, noted in his Remaines of a Greater Worke Concerning Britain, published in 1605, that “K. Henry the Seuenth stamped a small coin called dandyprats”.
The coin barely lasted his reign but its more lasting legacy is to provide a word for something slight, insignificant and insubstantial. As a word, its hey day was the seventeenth century, appearing in Anthony Brewer’s Lingua or The Combat of the Five Senses for Superiority, from 1607: “the vile dandiprat will overlook the proudest of his acquaintances”; and in the Jacobean tragedy, The Virgin Martyr, written by Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger in 1622, a play seen by Samuel Pepys in 1668; “the smug dandiparat smells us out, whatsoever we are doing”.
In 1650, the English physician, John Bulwer, used it in his Anthropometamorphosis; or The Artificial Changeling in a context that is suggestive of something slight and slender; “sometimes with lacings and with swaiths so straight./ for want of space we have a Dandiprat”. William Beloe’s Anecdotes of Literature and Scarce Books, published in 1814, it has the meaning of something with no value or consequence; “beware a rolling ey, which wayerynge thought make that,/ and for such stuffe passe not a Dandy Pratt”.
However, it is clear from a letter written by the Irish novelist, Maria Edgeworth, in April 1795 that Beloe’s usage was that of an antiquarian. Commenting on a book she had recently read, Edgeworth noted, “it is a scarce and very ingenious book; some of the phraseology is so much out of the present fashion, that it would make you smile: such as the synonym for a little man, a Dandiprat”.
Alas, dandiprat has never returned to present fashion but from starting out as the name of a small coin, it had a century in the sun, a useful portmanteau word to describe something small and insignificant. Time for a revival, methinks.
