796-1: Feedback, Notes and Comments

Dint Susan Bradley wrote from Australia to provide an intriguingly different view of the word: “Brass players routinely refer to a small indentation on their instrument, usually caused by our own clumsiness or sometimes that of others, as a dint. You can get your instrument either dedented or dedinted by a specialist repairer. There’s a whole hierarchy in size of dents: dint, knock, crease, dent. None of this is written down anywhere that I know of, but any brass player in Australia at least, and probably in the English-speaking world would understand it (I’m a Pom, but Aussie resident for a long time, to validate my language opinion!)”

Variations on a theme: “Just wanted to add,” Ian McLoughlin wrote, “that my mum — who died last year aged 88 — always referred to any indentation on a surface as a dinge, particularly if it was on a body part such as a shin or a part of the head. Being born and bred in Wigan such dinges were quite a common sight as a result of mill-work and mining.” Other readers noted that dunt is still used in Scotland. Bruce Napier pointed out the Scots proverb “Words are but wind, but dunts are the devil.” Or, as we English would say, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me”. Miles Irving recalled a memorable moment: “It put me in mind of student days in Edinburgh. The landlady of my local pub had a stave behind the bar with which she cheerfully threatened patrons at closing time; affectionately referring to it as her punter dunter.”

Several readers who thoroughly know their Christmas carols pointed me to the last verse of Good King Wenceslas, in which the lyricist, John Mason Neale, included the word:

In his master’s steps he trod

Where the snow lay dinted

Heat was in the very sod

Which the Saint had printed.

Correction A poem last time was attributed to Alaric Attila Watts. His supposed middle name was a satirical invention in an article in Fraser’s Magazine in June 1835 as the result of a literary feud. He was baptised Alaric Alexander Watts. Apologies for confusing the fictive with the real. The piece noted, in the ponderously humorous style of the times, “We feel bound to add, however, that it is not very likely, in the usual chances of events, that such names as Alaric Attila Watts should have met in matrimony with those of Zillah Madonna Wiffen; an unkind world may suggest a mystification somewhere, if the scraggiest part of the neck of the world should trouble itself about such things.” Watts had married Priscilla Maden Wiffen, always known as Zillah. Tony Augarde, author of The Oxford Guide to Word Games, tells me the abecedarian poem had previously appeared in The Trifler in May 1817.