SOSSIDGE

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30633, 26 December 1964, Page 5

SOSSIDGE

[Specially written for “The

Press” by

ARNOLD WALLI

JJOW vulgar it looks when you spell it this way instead of the genteel “sausage”; and the “sossi.j” 'of the dictionary is not much better. The word has been pronounced in three ways: “sawsidge,” “sassidge” and the modern “sossidge,” which did not appear until the nineteenth century.

The authorities of the eighteenth century wavered between “sawsidge” and “sassidge” but the best of them would condemn “sassidge” as vulgar. As a vulgarism “sassidge” carried on well into the nineteenth century. At least three of the old lexicographers preferred “sassidge,” one of them was the Irishman Sheridan (1780). Though “sawsidge” is not recorded in the nineteenth century, I have heard it from some speakers who seemed anxious to avoid the presumed vulgarity of “sos-l sidge.” Will the "sossidge” taste any different, I wonder, if, and when, phonetic spelling is adopted, and it becomes “sosidg” with a sort of “g”. It would certainly have a different “image” in the mind of the consumer. Corkscrew Joke Nothing very mirth-making in the corkscrew, is there? Yet for a few years during the eighteenth century it! figured prominently in the “literature” of fun. It was found useful especially by critics and mockers of the' clergy, a favourite butt of the wits of that day. Two examples come to mind. Fielding told the story of a convicted pickpocket in ■ whom the “ruling passion”! was so strong that even on the scaffold awaiting execution he could not resist the temptation to pick the chapplain’s pocket while receiving his ministrations and what he got out of the parson’s pocket was what was then called a bottle-screw. I Another story is told us of (Lord Sandwich, the hero i whose name is still so {familiar to us as a common noun. At some gathering I Lord Sandwich wagered, first, that there was not a single prayer-book in the pocket of any one of the parsons present. He won his wager, a call for a prayerbook brought no result. He went on to wager that every one of the parsons had a cockscrew in his pocket. He won that wager too, a call for a corkscrew proved that ' every parson in the company (could produce one. By the