The Wykehamist
Notions of the Naahties: Brunksters Revisited
RJHM( Coll:, 2004-9; Co: Ro:, 2018-) recalls a vanished language
When Nick MacKinnon offered me a place in Chawker’ s in 2002, the Mercer family was delighted but unprepared. Winchester, we were told, was unique and the greatest evidence of this was that it had its own language, Notions.‘ No fear,’ I thought.‘ Happy hours spent with Latin vocabulary lists have prepared me for precisely this eventuality. My friends may have mocked me then, but who is laughing now?’
A tea towel was purchased from Cornflowers, emblazoned with all the vocab I would ever need: I would be a Wykehamist; go tolling; hand up( not in) toytime( not prep) to my don( not teacher); ride a bogle. I was ready.
Alas, this illusion was soon shattered. I arrived in College in 2004 to discover that my revision had come to nought. Indeed, not only was my preparation useless, but it was saaaaw aaaanal. I was a meatbag, a feishy geishster( or perhaps a geishy feishster; the memory is a little hazy on the finer distinctions between the two).
What the towel-designers of Cornflowers were unaware of was that at that time Notions was transforming from a mere jargon, or perhaps argot, to something closer to a dialect, replete with its own grammatical structures.
To find out how this happened, your correspondent conducted at least 25 minutes of investigative journalism( sending WhatsApps) and traced its origins.
Freddie Bjorn( H, 1995-2000) was a Trantite at the time and attributes the innovations to a backlash against‘ anal’ culture.( This might be the moment to explain to older, younger and non-OW readers that this term was used specifically in its Freudian sense of‘ anally retentive’. I’ m not sure we knew this at the time.) The traditional notions( those I had pored over!) were the preserve of the anal: dons and swots. The new dialect was originally intended as a lampoon, hence the nasal, nerdy singsong voice in which it was delivered. The irony, Freddie told me, was, however, soon lost; the new dialect mutated and spread and what had once been a satire became modish, rather like the Green Flash plimsol being saved from the depths of uncool by a few celebrity adopters.
So what made these new notions spread so fast? Well, mainly they sounded funny. Any OW reading this will have felt his throat tighten at the memory of certain terms, pressing the sound backwards into a strangled, adenoidal drawl. In addition, however, the grammar was deceptively simple: one had only to alter the vowel sound in a word to utterly reverse its meaning. This made it close to unintelligible to the unpractised speaker( crucially including the dons: a don using quaat would have been like seeing your dad in high-tops after his divorce) but transformed every sentence into a delightful labyrinth of double and triple negatives for those that could negotiate them.
A blog post by an OW who goes only by HamsterMan( a name that Chawkerites of my era would have altered to HamsterWaant almost the minute it was out of his mouth) illustrates this well. It imagines an illuminating exchange on the relative attractiveness of two Swithunites( surely a notion in its own right), which climaxes with the immortal phrase,
‘ Mary is queet naat muny times as attractive!’ Clearly this requires analysis!
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