Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore. Elizabeth Mary Wright
ben yet alive? If he’d ben yet up alive, or dead, how could there be any of ’en left vor his father to zee? That’s what I wants to know (I.W.). It must have been a more highly educated person who understood the coroner’s question: Did you take any steps to resuscitate the deceased? Ans. Yes, sor, we riped [rifled] ’ees pockets (Nhb.). An old woman once asked a neighbour the meaning of the word Jubilee. Ans. Why, ’tes like this, if yiew an’ yieur auld man ’ave ben marrid fifty years, ’tes a Golden Wedden’, but if the Lord ’ave took un, ’tes a Jewbilee. A local preacher expounding the Bible to a rural congregation in North Yorkshire told his hearers that the ‘ram caught in a thicket’, Genesis xxii. 13, meant: an aud teeap cowt iv a brier.
The Dame’s School
The quaintly-worded command, Ye mun begin an’ aikle nai (Chs.), has more significance than meets the eye of those who read it now, for it records a faint echo from the times of that ancient institution once common to every village, but now obsolete, namely, the Dame’s School, the theme of Shenstone’s poem, The School-Mistress (1742), wherein he sought to imitate the ‘peculiar tenderness of sentiment remarkable throughout’ the works of Spenser:
In ev’ry village mark’d with little spire,
Embow’r’d in trees, and hardly known to fame,
There dwells, in lowly shed, and mean attire,
A matron old, whom we school-mistress name;
Who boasts unruly brats with birch to tame.
The ‘Ye mun begin an’ aikle nai’ [you must begin and get dressed for going now] was the signal given by an old dame who kept a school near Wrenbury to her ‘little bench of heedless bishops’ that lessons were over for the day.
But now Dan Phoebus gains the middle skie,
And liberty unbars her prison-door;
And like a rushing torrent out they fly,
And now the grassy cirque han cover’d o’er
With boist’rous revel-rout and wild uproar.
An old Village Dame
Shenstone’s old dame kept a ‘birchen tree’ from which she cut her ‘scepter’; he does not mention the other weapon of torture wielded by these female tyrants, which was the thimble. The poor children were rapped on the head with a thimbled finger, and the operation was known as thimble-pie making. The old dame that I remember, who must have been one of the last of all her race, was of milder mood than these. Her name was Mrs. Price, and she dwelt in a remote and picturesque corner of Herefordshire called Tedstone Delamere. I cannot call it a village, or even a hamlet, for the houses were so very few and far between. Mrs. Price’s scholars were mere baby creatures, old enough to run about and get into mischief, or court danger, and yet too young to be sent to the parish school with their bigger brothers and sisters. So busy mothers were glad to pay a trifling sum to have these little ones tended by a motherly old widow-woman for a few hours every morning. But the time came when age and infirmity debarred her from even this light task, and her cottage no longer resounded with those noises which ‘Do learning’s little tenement betray’. I found her one day sitting all alone with an open Bible on the table beside her, and her spectacles lying idle in her lap. She looked tired and dispirited, and said her eyes were so bad that she had been obliged to stop reading, and sit doing nothing. Naturally I offered to read aloud to her awhile, and I inquired what had been engaging her attention. ‘Oh,’ said she, ‘I’d just got to where the frogs came up upon Pharaoh.’ I took the book, and read on and on, for each time I came to ‘the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart’, the aged Mrs. Price evinced such satisfaction over the prospect of yet another Plague, that I had not the heart to cut a long story short. At last when Pharaoh had finally bidden the Israelites ‘be gone’, I closed the Bible, and as I did so, the old lady exclaimed, ‘Ain’t that nice readin’!’ One would not have thought that the history of the seven Plagues of Egypt was exactly the portion of Scripture best fitted to cheer and comfort a lone and feeble old woman. Perhaps it stirred old fires in her blood, rekindling memories of the days when children deemed her ‘the greatest wight on ground’, when she held the reins of power, distributing rewards and punishments as the honoured head of a Dame’s School.
CHAPTER IV
CORRUPTIONS AND POPULAR ETYMOLOGIES
If we are to avoid on the one hand the danger of regarding a dialect as nothing better than a wilful perversion of standard English, we yet must not allow ourselves to be beguiled by the smooth-running course of true sound-laws, or the rural charm of quaint words, into the opposite error of supposing that irregularities and distortions do not exist. There are in the dialects numbers of words which can only be regarded as corruptions and mispronunciations of literary English, but considered relatively to the whole vocabulary the proportion of them is very small. Many even of the most obvious are not without a certain interest as examples of popular etymology, or of practical word-formation, as, for instance, when smother and suffocate are blended into the useful word smothercate (Not.), or bold and audacious into boldacious (Der. Cor.). Some apparent corruptions are in reality old forms which can be found in the literary language in the earlier stages of its existence. For example: abuseful (Yks. Lin. War. Shr. Hrf. Glo.) for abusive is not uncommon in seventeenth-century literature, though it must have died out later, as it is not noted by lexicographers such as Bailey and Johnson. The word fancical (gen. dial.) for fanciful occurs in 1676 in a work entitled Musick’s Monument, by Mace. Druggister (Yks. Lin. Pem. e.An. Som. Cor.) for druggist is registered in Sherwood’s Dictionary (1672), ‘A druggister, drogueur.’
Or again, the dialect form may not be directly taken from the standard language, but may be traced back through some other linguistic channel which has influenced its development, e.g. angish (Irel.) is not a mispronunciation of anguish, but it is developed from the Gaelic form aingis. Squinacy (Sc. Irel.), and squinancy in the compound squinancy-berry (Cum. Lan. Ess.), the black currant, are not corruptions of quinsy, but are from O.French squinancie, quinsy. But I shall reserve the treatment of historical forms such as these for a later chapter.
Latin Phrases taken into the Dialects
A few Latin phrases have made their way into the dialects, where they have assumed curious forms and meanings. For example: hizy-prizy (Nhb. Yks. Chs. Der. Som. Dev.), a corruption of Nisi prius, a law-term. It is used to signify any kind of chicanery or sharp practice, or, used as an adjective, it means litigious, tricky; and in the phrase to be at hizy-prizy, it means to be quarrelsome, disagreeable. The plural form momenty-morries (Nhb.), skeletons, stands for memento mori, remember that thou must die, the name given to a small decorative object containing a skeleton or other emblem of death, cp. ‘I make as good use of it as many a man doth of a Death’s-head or a memento mori,’ 1 Hen. IV, III. iii. 35. The Latin nolens volens appears as nolus-bolus (Wil.), nolum-wolum (Wil. Dev.), hoylens-voylens, oilins-boilins (Cum.). A mother sending off an unwilling child to school will say: Oilins-boilins, but thee shall go. Nominy (Nhb. Dur. Yks. Lan. Chs. Der. Nhp.) represents the Latin nomine in the formula In Nomine Patris, &c., the invocation used by the preacher before the sermon. It means: (1) a rigmarole, a long rambling tale, a wordy, tiresome speech; (2) a rhyming formula or folk-rhyme. A knitting nominy used by girls in Northamptonshire is as follows:
Needle to needle, and stitch to stitch,
Pull the old woman out of the ditch.
If you ain’t out by the time I’m in,
I’ll rap your knuckles with my knitting-pin.
Paddy-noddy, or Parinody (Yks. Lin.), a long tedious rigmarole, a cock and bull story, is a corruption of Pater noster. The form non-plush (many dials.), a nonplus, dilemma, surprise, usually