What Is The Origin Of (238)?…
A Richard Snary
Humour, I find, is a very personal thing. What appeals to one person often leaves another unamused. Humour down the ages doesn’t seem to travel well, either. You just need to think of the cartoons in Victorian editions of Punch magazine. At best, the jokes are convoluted and elaborately contrived. At worst, they just don’t seem funny at all, certainly not worth cracking the whalebone of a corset over.
I was musing about humour after I came across a reference to a phrase which left me momentarily baffled. What was a Richard Snary? After a bit of thought, I don’t do crosswords for nothing, I had cracked it. Of course, it was a dictionary. More importantly, it was a play on words which owes its origins to as far back as the seventeenth century, at least.
The first recorded reference, albeit a variant, appeared in John Taylor’s Motto or et habeo, et careo, et curo, which was published in 1621. He wrote of the word primogenitor, “in my English Latine Richard Swary, I finde or coynd this worthy word”. The meaning in the context is crystal clear. Taylor, the self-styled water poet, was an interesting character, apprenticed to a London waterman. He was then press-ganged into the navy, seeing service at the siege of Cadiz in 1596, and on his discharge “with a lame leg” plied his trade on the Thames, collecting the wine demanded of ships by the Lieutenant of the Tower of London. After about fourteen years in around 1622, he was fired because, according to his account, he refused to buy the wine.
William Hawkins wrote what was termed a lyric play in five acts, entitled rather inelegantly Apollo shrouing composed for the schollars of the free-schoole of Hadleigh in Suffolke. The scholars performed it on February 6, 1626, Shrove Tuesday. I hope they were rewarded with pancakes afterwards. Anyway, the play contains the following piece of repartee: “I had rather…hang our great dicsnary at they heele, for a clogge to keep thee from gadding to play/ Talke not to me of Dick snary, nor Richard-snary; I care not how little I come neare them”.
Again, the sense is unequivocal. What it also suggests is that the prevailing pronunciation at the time made dictionary a trisyllabic word rather than the four syllables it is now. It is left to the inestimable Francis Grose in his A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, published initially in 1785 and then revised in 1788, to give an apocryphal story as to the derivation of the joke. “A country lad”, he wrote, “having been reproved for calling persons by their Christian names, being sent by his master to borrow a dictionary, thought to shew his breeding by asking for a Richard Snary”. Collapse of stout parties.
Well it was not that funny but Dick is an abbreviation of the name Richard and once we realise that, the meaning is obvious. The trisyllabic pronunciation of dictionary hung around for a couple of centuries, at keast in the more rural parts of the country. The Shrewsbury Chronicle, in an article in its edition of November 28, 1845, entitled Dialect of the Bilston Folk. There it reports, with the same hint of disdain Shrewsbury folk still display to their eastern neighbours to this day, that “some of the better apparelled, who affect a superior style, use words which they please to term dicksnary words.” And even as late as May 5, 1905 the Devon and Exeter Gazette prints a letter from a correspondent who tells of “an ole dicksnary”.
Regrettably, I rarely use a dictionary these days but when I do, I shall delight in calling it a Richard Snary.
