Schoolboy slang
Leader (Melbourne), Saturday 15 June 1901, page 31
We are frequently told that the English language is in a bad way, that its birth rate of words is falling, and that it has come to depend mainly upon alien immigration. We are reminded that the English language has to look to ancient Rome to name its omnibus (in spite of the late Mr. Barnes’s pathetic plea for “folk-wain”), and has to combine Greece and Italy in unholy alliance to make an automobile. These pessimists over look one spring which bubbles with words through a score of outlets. England has still her slang to draw upon. And there are many slangs. There are thousands of men in London who could talk for an hour together in thieves’ patter, back-slang, rhyming slang, and never give a respectable citizen a clue to their meaning. But neither rhyming slang nor hack slang is more than a perversion of ordinary speech, and these provide useful words. But there is the special vocabulary of the public schools and the universities, institutions which have a delightful knack of coining words that pass, or are worthy to pass, into ordinary currency. To lake the first instance that occurs. Everybody knows somebody who is a “dab at” something. The phrase belongs to Harrow. “Dab”— its origin is obscure to us— is the entrance examination at the beginning of a term. “Skew” is the examination at the end. The candidate who depends on the “dab” is confident of his abilities, for he has no second chance. But this is only a stray example of school words which have passed into ordinary speech. Other phrases remain cryptic to the uniniated. The Eton boy who announced that he was about to “brozier his dame” would scarcely convey in the cleverest, manner that he and his fellows had agreed to eat their tutor out of house and home on a particular day in revenge for an unsatisfactory table. And how many outside of Winchester would understand what is meant by “going up to book ex trumps” or “he pi-jawed me for thoking”? But “thoking” is a word wanted to express un-get-up-in-the-morningness, and “pi-jaw” is already making its way.
Perhaps the most curious development of public school slang in the last two decades is the “er” termination. To-day somebody in every corner of the world sits down to “brekker” in the morning, and turns up the latest news of “Soccer,” “Rugger,” too, has not shared the eclipse of Rugby football, and has begotten analogies. Else why “Togger” for the Torpid, and “Quaggers” for Queen’s Coll.: Oxon? On searching further we find the “Ducker,” which was the name of the Harrow bathing place beyond the Footer Fields forty years ago. It seems that the Duck-Puddle evolved the “er” termination, which has turned a Canadian canoe into a Canader, an unattached student into a Tosher, and Canon Scott Holland into the Scotter.
There are other words with the same termination, which are not merely perversions. “Bounder” for example. It is not an easy word to define, though you know a “bounder” when you see him as surely as you know a “yorker” a second later. “Bounder subs. (University) a dog cart.” If not incorrect, is quite inadequate. And searching for “yorker” we find that it is not there. However, we discover a less known term for an equally common ball — a half-volley. At Winchester it is called a Barter, after a warden in the late century, who had a special way of punishing so tempting a delivery. Of the “yorker” we would be glad to have some philological account, having so far never got beyond the knowledge of the professional who asked, “Well, what else would you call it?” Further search rewarded us, and gave the answer to the question we had thought unanswerable. Winchester, the home, of “notions,” has a language of its own; even “squish,” which is marmalade in the rest of the civilised world, is weak tea at Winchester. And wo find “yorker” casually tucked away under “Lob (Winchester),” where a “lob” is “a yorker.” Now the world is against Winchester in its conception of a lob. It is not a delightful instance of the pride of the oldest foundation?
One may browse at large— “browse” is the Marlborough word for enjoyment — through this dictionary of slang words, picking the words one has loved and used, as well as those one wants. To “snook,” which is Shrewsbury, is swifter and neater than to “score off” a man; and it is odd that at the “shop” at Woolwich a “snooker” is “a newly joined cadet of the fourth class.” Is it from Shrewsbury or from Woolwich that “snooker pool” derives its name? “Cosh,” too, is oddly doubled. At St. Edward’s, Birmingham, it mean a caning. Readers of Mr. Morrison’s “Child of the Jago” will remember the “cosh” as the weapon one of the most degraded parasites of the East End. And not only do our public schools invent words, but they enshrine them, preserving their original meanings. “Mad,” in the sense of “vexed,” is generally considered an Americanism. Winchester holds to the sense of Shakspeare and Ben Jonson.