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28 ISSUE 60 // MAY 2015
In the country out past Deniliquin
is a farmhouse that was once, and
possibly still is, occupied by a group
of young men. They had a good
system of storing their clothes.
No need for wardrobes and clothes
hangers. No, they washed their
shirts and then threw them onto the
floor of a room. When they wanted
a shirt they rummaged through the
assortment on the floor, found a
shirt they owned and wore it – often
unironed.
My wife took me to see this room
one day and said something like
“that’s what our house would look like
if…” I don’t remember the rest. I was
thinking “what a great idea”.
It reminded me of a street that I
walked along one day in, I think, York.
The street was called The Shambles.
I don’t know why I thought of that.
Actually, storing the shirts in
a room set aside for this purpose
sounded to me like a good
arrangement. It certainly did away
with the need for wardrobes, and
these men were not flushed with
money. I remember they had a
poker machine in the house and they
encouraged all visitors to try their
hand at this machine. It was a good
little earner.
Anyway, back to shambles.
I can’t remember how many shirt
shops were in the street down which I
walked in York, but I reckon the street
many years ago would have had a lot
of butcher shops – not as hygienic as
those we now know, of course.
The word started out spelt many
ways, often scamel (possibly from the
Latin scamellum), meaning a table
displaying goods, but quickly took
the meaning of a meat market, where
meat was displayed for sale. The first
reference I could find was in the year
825 and the word was spelt scomul.
Sometimes shamble without the
final S was used to refer to people
who were bow-legged and ambled
down the street with seemingly no
purpose. I don’t know if this led to the
word depicting the table on which
meat was displayed. Samuel Johnston
in his 1755 dictionary said shambling
was a “low, bad word” and referred
to people moving awkwardly and
irregularly. He spoke about a bloke
with “ambling legs”.
From 1593 the word, usually by
this time spelt shambles, meant a
place of wholesale slaughter. My big
dictionary tells of “a shambles of
dead bodies”, but the word also was
directed at animals, such as sheep,
driven to the shambles to be killed.
How would you describe shambolic?I
keep thinking of that room near
Deniliquin. Shambolic has been used
in a few places, but it hasn’t caught
on as much as shambles has. My big
dictionary mentions a 1967 use about
“the standard image of shambolic
newspaper offices”. I know exactly
what is meant by that description.
Remind me to tell you about some of
them some day.
Linda and Roger Flavell in their
Dictionary of Idioms allege shambles
is a favourite word of politicians with
nothing good to say about the other
side. I haven’t heard the word used
much in that sense. By the way, some
politician s have good legs, but don’t
let me start on that.
HAWKESBURY DISTRICT INDEPENDENT NEWS www.hdinews.com.au