The Wykehamist
Muny times( or indeed often many times, simply pronounced in the typical singsong voice to indicate its irony) was used to express a disinclination to do something often, e. g. Many times I would go tolling.
‘ Muny times as attractive’ therefore simply means‘ not as attractive’.
Things only get worse for Mary: naat is a corruption of not, a double negative therefore, meaning‘ certainly’, e. g. I will naat be going to KPO for some maaange.
‘ Naat muny times as attractive’ simply strengthens the assertion: Mary is certainly not as attractive as her putative rival.
However, a fourth negative is at hand! Queet is a perversion of quite.( This is quite in the intensifying sense, as in‘ The food in [ insert name of boarding house ] is quite inedible.’) So queet means not at all. Mary, therefore, when all is said and done, is not at all certainly not as attractive as her friend.
Whether the ante-diluvian tone of this exchange is true to life, I will leave to OWs of the time to decide.
has asked if we want to go and see his new play. It’ s set in space but it’ s an allegory for Brexit.’‘ GOIVE.’ This conversation really happened to me.
Asking friends for examples for this article, I received hundreds— naizeby, feish, laack and, of course, meats( a term so pervasive it perhaps requires its own Trusty Servant article [ Ed: please, God, no ])— and the pleasure people took in remembering them was evident. It is a well-observed linguistic phenomenon that minority dialects or languages help establish identity, and this seems to me just the case with notions, particularly this manifestation that so pervaded our everyday lives.
Mercifully, the meaning of most conversations was less arcane than this and vowel inversion gave rise to many of the best-loved notions of the time: bunter, naat and, the only notion to have stood the test of time to just about survive in today’ s Win Coll— goive.
Goive, as many readers will know, expresses unconcern and disdain, and has a glorious number of linguistic functions.
Noun:‘ Chemi is such a goive.’ Verb:‘ I totally goive Mathmā.’ Adjective:‘ Paddy set such a goive toytime.’
I would posit its etymology as a perversion of give as in the phrase‘ I don’ t give a damn’ or, presumably,‘ I goive a damn’. Its tenacity may owe something to the amount of not-damn-giving that has gone on at Win: Coll since its invention, but surely also owes something to it having no effective equivalent in the English language. I cannot be the only Wykehamist to have converted friends and partners to its use, as, once heard, it becomes the perfect word for plenty of real-life, non-Wykehamical situations:‘ John
PJ Fuller( Coll:, 2004-9) takes meats
The Basque country and Catalunya are fiercely defensive of their languages. In the subcontinent Hindi and Urdu, though both descended from Hindustani, go to separate sources when coining new words. Hindi uses Sanskrit and Urdu Arabic because India and Pakistan want their languages to be as mutually exclusive as possible to underline their political diversion from each other.
Notions, in the same way, were part of what made you a Wykehamist. Why then are they all but gone?
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