768-1: Feedback, notes and comments

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Yedsirag Australians and New Zealanders wrote following this piece, with its mention of the old British colloquial expression head sir-rag, to ask about a local expression that looks hauntingly similar: head serang, or head sherang, for a person in charge or a boss. It is known mostly among older people. Beth Shaw commented that "The Head Serang was anyone in charge of anything, not necessarily something terribly important; if you were setting up tables for the Sunday school picnic and didn't know where to put yours you might be told to go and find the Head Serang. It was used in a slightly mocking or ironic way — an important-sounding title for a less important position."

It has a very different origin, from the Anglo-Indian serang (the form that appears in the Macquarie Dictionary), originally from the Persian sarhang, commander. Yule and Burnell defined it in Hobson-Jobson, their huge compilation of Anglo-Indian expressions, as "a native boatswain or chief of a lascar crew; the skipper of a small native vessel." However, the similarity to the older British expression, which would certainly have been known to nineteenth-century migrants, is so striking that it must surely be linked and presumably accounts for the addition of head to the Anglo-Indian word.

Mark Whitehead remembers its use in England: "My first career after leaving school, in the early 1970s, was in textile dyeing. The first company I worked for was in Basford, Nottingham, and the word was often used there. Sometimes it would refer to the Dyehouse Foreman for the shift — not a technical man (that was the Dyer — me, after a while), but a very experienced operator with extra training. It was pronounced without the 'y' and often with the 'i' silent; 'eds'rag'. It was also used sarcastically. 'Look at 'im — thinks he's the 'eds'rag.' With some of the younger operators who had obviously not heard this term before, it soon became the ''Ed Scrag' — which showed how they felt about their foreman!"

Several readers commented on Mont Abbott's use of what looked like the plural form of the past tense of to be ("Chisel were the only true ringer among us") when the singular would be used in standard English. This verb is notoriously complicated and irregular, as the result of the historical fusion of elements from four distinct older verbs. It's unique in that the past tense has different singular and plural forms (was, were). All other verbs make do with just the one ("he taught", "we taught", "they taught"). As a result, there has long been a tendency for speakers of non-standard Englishes to settle on one form or the other. Some dialects use was all the time ("we was", "they was"), but others employ were ("I were", "he were").