THE JEWELLER'S WINDOW Fancy Spelling

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30230, 7 September 1963, Page 8

THE JEWELLER'S WINDOW Fancy Spelling

[Specially written for "The Preu" by

ARNOLD WALL)

ALL children and many grown-ups love getting into fancy dress, "dressingup." Now spelling is really a giving of clothes to sounds so that writers, like dressers, often welcome a change. It is well known thaj most people enjoy the re-spelling •f their language when they learn to spell phonetically. This is because they, like the fancy dressers, are welcoming a break from every-day, | monotonous fashion. No doubt this is one of the: reasons why the spelling of English was so irregular, capricious, inconsistent and illogical, even after the "fixing" of the standard as a result of the invention of printing. So, throughout the sixteenth century, the spelling of English was elastic enough to give plenty of latitude to the "bad speller” and a chance to the innovator or the fancy dresser. H. G. Wells wrote a playful, whimsical little essay on this subject, remarking, if I remember rightly, how pleasant it would be to be allowed to address your lady love “My verrie deare wyfe,” and so on. Let me give an example of fancy spelling to illustrate my thesis. It is from the “Merye Tales of Skelton, Poet Laureat.” published in 1566. The story is headed “How the fryer asked leave of Skelton to preach at Dys.” In that title, you see, the spelling is "fryer.” In the course of the little story the word appears next as “freere,” then as “frere” and lastly as “fryere,” so the writer gave the word four distinct forms Either the writer was a really bad speller or he was purposely varying the spelling for the reasons just described. Possibly "a bit of both.” It may be noted that the spelling "friar” which we now use was not used here. As a surname we still have “Frere” and “Fryer.” A little fancy spelling is not I think, out of place in popular comic tales of the kind here spoken of. Jew’s Harp Why Jew's harp? Nobody seems to know. “It is not known,” says a standard book of reference, “how or why it got its name, known from the sixteenth century; it has no special connexion with the Jews and is not a bit like a harp or a trumpet.” It was called by Bacon “jewtrompe,” by Beaumont and Fletcher “jewtrump,” and in Hakluyt's “Voyages” (1595) "jew's harp.” Oxford supplies little more information. The term dates from 1584, “Called also Jew’s trump." So we have here a little problem; it does not, however, seem insoluble to me. The sound made by this instrument is a sort of metallic buzz which accompanies the tune provided by the player’s own humming. It has a strong nasal “twang." I thing it is likely that it was in Shakespeare’s mind when he made Caliban say “Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about my eares”; the thing was known in Shakespeare's time. The name “trump" is quite appropriate in expressing something similar to the sound cf a trumpet, and “harp” is also not inappropriate because of the “plucking" action by which the sound is produced. But that does not explain the attribution to the Jews. The term “twang" is used to describe nasal speech, as, for instance, in reference to the peculiar whining tone adopted in the time of the Commonwealth and to the predominant character of "American" speech in our day. The name Jew’s harp was adopted at a time when anti-semitic feeling ran fairly high. Raconteurs telling funny Jewish stories, of which there must be thousands, always give the Jews a twangling nasal dialect, a sort of imitation Yiddish, and my conjecture is that the instrument’s name was a satirical-jocular anti-Jewish gesture. I would compare the term "catgut" for

the violin-string, the suggestion being that the sound of the fiddle badly played resembles the common caterwauling of the tom-cat, for, of course, it is not “pussy’s bowels" that forms the string. Possibly, too, the prominence of the trumpet in Jew .th ceremonial, as in the Feast of Trumpets, may have suggested the term “trump" as a kind of nickname.

By Jingo As an oath or lively exclamation, this is mild and harmless; as a political "slogan’’ it threatened grim possibilities in 1878. “We do 1 not want to fight, but by Jingo if we do!" There is some conflict of opinion about its etymology though the early histry of Its use is well known. It dates from 1670 as a bit of conjuror’s patter, it appeared as Hey or High Jingo announcing the appearance of something as the opposite of Hey presto, hence it was used as an exclamation of surprise from 1730. By 1694 it had come into colloquial or vulgar use as a strong form of asseveration and then it achieved great popularity in the music-hall song and became a synonym for a blatant patriot, a Chauvinist,

All this is clear, but what was the origin of the conjuror's bit of gibberish? What may be called the official and generally accepted view is that it is a mere perversion of God” like Gosh. Golly, Jabers, etc., which does sound rather feeble; I note that Webster. United States, hazards no explanation at all. The other and more plausible explanation is that it is the Basque word for God. Jinko, Jainko. It is suggested that the word was picked up from Basque sailors who were often employed by the early whalers. That sounds very probable to me. The English were always a seagoing people and numbers of nautical idioms have established themselves in our language, as we all know. Many of these are of foreign origin, especially from the French amd the Dutch, so it is not, on the face of it. improbable that a foreign sailorman’s explosive call upon the deity should have been adopted by the British tar. The conjuror would pick it up and use it as a bit of I sham magic like the proverbial abracadabra and mumbo jumbo.