THE JEWELLER’S WINDOW

Press, Volume C, Issue 29709, 30 December 1961, Page 8

THE JEWELLER’S WINDOW

Is there la existence anywhere, I wonder, a copy of Butter’s Spelling? Hardly, I should guess, in New Zealand. Elementary schoolbooks are a rather repulsive form of provender but this one did offer us nine and ten-year-olds a modicum of amusement to sweeten the dreary hours. Not that the pabulum it offered was at all tasty or indeed nutrative, but for the good Dr. whose portrait, if I remember rightly after eighty years, adorned an early page, complete with fine old Victorian beard. The fun, if you could call it that, which we found in it was purely unintentional or so I suppose. It sprang from two sources. The first was merely a tantalising sort of mystification we were not amused so much as sorely puzzled by the wording of the prefatory remarks in which Dr B complained bitterly that the American publishers pirated his book “without asking leave or paying a dollar.” What could we nine-year-olds know of the law of copyright and what on earth was a dollar? "Our transatlantic cousins” were a bit of a mystery, too. f Shunning The Pun The other kind of amusement provided by Dr. B. was meant to be funny or so it would appear. Prefixed to the lists of words to be spelt which form the marrow of this masterpiece was a set of doggerel verses composed by Di B. as a stern warning to young and old. It opened thus, but I am not quite sure ot the first few words:— “Now boys and girls, and parents all. pray early learn to shun That very silly thing indeed which people call a pun: For instance, ale may make you ail. your aunt an ant may kill. You in a vale may buy a veil and Bill may pay the bill” It went on like this for a whole page and offered to our simple minds certain dark problems. This gem also remains with me: “A peer appears upon the pier who, blind, still goes to sea ” Whether this poetic warning bad any effect I am not sure. I suppose that it had

[Specially written for "The Pre»" by ARNOLD WALL] Professor Arnold Wall, in the present series of articles, discusses the origin of many familiar names, expressions, and phrases. He wishes to make it clear that he cannot undertake to reply personally to readers who may comment on any of them. This article is the twentieth of the series.

none upon myself for I remember one of my Lincolnshire school-fellows saying to m- what sounded like “dawnt meeak bahd poons," but I cannot recall what my "bahd poons” were. Affinities Two adjectives, meeting by chance and talking over their ancestry discover, to their great surprise, that they are related; probably they then adjourn to the nearest bar. So it is with “jaunty” and “gentle.” Who but some inquisitive philologist would suspect them of being related? But so they are. “Gentle” is from Latin “gentilis,” from “gens,” a race, and we have it unmistakably in “genteel" and “Gentile " "Jaunty" was formerly also spelt “janty” and this was intended to represent the French "gen-” pronounced with the nasalised The meaning has so far changed as to help with this clever disguise for the connexion in meaning betwee “gentle" and “jaunty” is not at all obvious A bridge between them is possibly provided by "genteel” in its earliest sense but really it is difficult to define whet “jaunty” means and the dictionary has to go a long way round about in its effort to pin it down- “having or affecting sprightliness, airy self-satisfaction" Not simple is it? Other wordr tn which we have represented the French nasalised e as a or an are "pansy” for “peneee”; the "don” of “dandelion” for “dent,” "Gaunt” for "Ghent” (John of Gaunt), ••taunt” for “tenter.” As a companion to this remotely connected pair look at the “codlin moth” and observe the great distance between this mischievous insect and the great crusading monarch Richard Coeur de Lion. The apple takes its name from the original grower of it, one Codlin, and he most probably owed his to some ancestor “of a lion heart" and there go the moth and the monarch in a sort of odd partnership. On another occasion more examples of such unexpected relations may be put on record.