No . 131 The Trusty Servant
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 .
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 its 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 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
PJ Fuller ( Coll , 04-09 ) takes meats
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 .
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 ?
My main theory is uninspired . Whenever we see teenagers acting differently we blame the bogeyman : technology . Not happy with turning the adolescents of today into slackjawed phone junkies chasing their next dopamine hit , it had to take notions from us as well !
In 2004 , aside from the occasional duty call to my parents , and lunchtime conversation with dons , I could pass weeks interacting only with people who knew their neish from their feish , their thunks from their brunks ; Winchester was its own universe and notions were its living , mutating language . New developments were matters of genuine interest : I can remember avidly following the development of the Furley ’ s voice in 2007 and speculating with friends over lunch about whether it would oust the already established Cook ’ s voice ( itself just an impression of Will Wapshott ( C , 01- 06 ) that had got wildly out of hand ).
However , with the advent of the iPhone and school internet that took under five minutes to load a jpeg came access to normal English . Winchester was no longer a linguistic goldfish bowl and within a decade the notions of the 2000s were all but dead .
Another theory recommends itself , however . Perhaps the seeds of the late-90s notions ’ demise were sown in their very success . They were born to mock those who used Win Coll slang but became ubiquitous ; they became the very thing they set out to satirise .
Perhaps to use naat in 2014 was as passé as saying bogle in 1998 ; perhaps , in an ironic twist of fate the user of these notions became the ultimate anal meatster .
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