No . 131
The Trusty Servant
Notions of the Naahties : Brunksters Revisited
Rupert Mercer ( Coll , 04-09 ; Co Ro , 18- ) 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 naught . 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 were 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 , 95-00 ) was a Trantite at the time and attributes
RJHM – feishy geishter , perhaps moments before an aerial geish
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 plimsoll 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 !
Muny times ( or indeed often many times , simply pronounced in the typical sing-song 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
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