792-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

Hopping the wag Following last week’s piece, readers supplied more slang terms for playing truant. Gerard M-F Hill: “I went to school in Cardiff, where it was called mitching, and then in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where it was laiking, which also means ‘playing’.” Tony Morris likewise mentioned mitching, which his wife uses, who comes from County Tipperary. Tom Kavanagh added another: “When I was growing up in Newfoundland (longer ago than I care to remember) the word used for playing hookey was slinge. I believe it’s of Irish origin.”

Michael Grosvenor Myer mentioned, “In Northampton, where I lived for a couple of years during the Second World War, the form for truancy was always playing waggy, rather than simply wag.” Australians and New Zealanders say that wag is common in their counties, but never wag off or other compounds. Val Hope e-mailed, “If you’re looking to extend the list of terms, in my Blackburn schooldays in the 1970s we always used the phrase to nick off school. Not that I ever did it.” Carolyn Barnes confessed that “during the 1960s my classmates and I skipped out of our Canadian high school classes.”

Other writers discussed skiving, I think familiar to Americans from the Harry Potter stories. This is a well-known British and Commonwealth slang term in the general sense of avoiding duties of any kind, not just truanting, usually by ensuring one is somewhere else at the time. Its origin is uncertain, but it may be from French esquiver, to slink away. As skive is first recorded in 1919 in an army context, it may be yet another term adopted by soldiers in France during the First World War.

Grandstanding At the beginning of the piece on gamp last week, I was groping for a link between g and thousand. My ageing memory failed to throw up grand for a thousand dollars, an omission thoroughly corrected by readers, who were curious about its origins. None of my references even hazard a guess. The alternatives of big ones or large ones (also in expressions such as “You owe me ten large”) suggest it may have at first have been grand one or something similar. Against this is that the earliest examples on record, around 1900, used it in the plural, as in “A hundred and fifty grands”. A connection with French grand, large, seems improbable from this period.

A name, a name Last week I omitted to correct the name of one of my favourite authors, Jerome K Jerome (the middle initial is short for Klapka, by the way, though he was christened Clapp, which was his father’s original surname; both father and son found good reasons to change it). The error provides an excuse to reproduce a little verse Harry Campbell sent me — Mutual Problem, composed by William Cole:

Said Jerome K Jerome to Ford Madox Ford,

”There’s something, old boy, that I’ve always abhorred:

When people address me and call me ‘Jerome’,

Are they being standoffish, or too much at home?”