Ernest Weekley and standard English

Many people who are interested in word origins know Ernest Weekley’s English etymological dictionary. I am sorry that we cannot post his photo: for some mysterious reason, all his portraits on the Internet are copyrighted. He wrote many excellent books on English words. Scholarly and accessible to non-specialists, they are “popular” in the best sense of this term. Among etymologists, only Walter W. Skeat (1835-1912) excelled in this genre, but Skeat’s circle was not so wide. Weekley (1865-1954), most of whose books appeared in the nineteen-twenties, could rely on readers who knew more about “the romance of words” than did Skeat. He also wrote quite a few essays, which are truly brilliant. I am planning to discuss several of them. My choice for today is “Mrs. Gamp and the King’s English” (The Cornhill Magazine 125, 1922, 565-76). Few American readers, unless they are professional literary scholars, will have heard about that magazine, which existed for more than a century (1860-1975) and in which some of the greatest novelists published their works. Consequently, Weekley’s essay appeared in a truly prestigious periodical. (Corn in Cornhill of course means “grain.”)

It is curious that Weekley does not explain who Mrs. Gamp is. Should we assume that in 1922 every educated person in Great Britain knew the answer? We live in a different epoch, and I am afraid that today, Mrs. Gamp is as little remembered as The Cornhill Magazine, at least in the United States. I’ll be happy to be reassured. Be that as it may, Mrs. Gamp was a nurse (or nuss, as she called herself), and a disreputable nurse was she. This lady is a character in Dickens’s novel Martin Chuzzlewitt (1843-1844). It may not be the greatest of his novels, but, among other things, it contains the most memorable satire of the United States ever written by a Britisher. Though American readers adored Dickens, American publishers, who reprinted his works by the ton, refused to pay the author, because there was no copyright agreement between the two countries. The American scenes were Dickens’s revenge. It took a long time to heal the rift between Dickens and the US. The names of three characters from Martin Chuzzlewitt became proverbial: Mr. Pecksniff, a mealy-mouthed hypocrite and scoundrel; Mrs. Gamp, and Mark Tapley (the latter for his unbeatable optimism).

Mrs. Gamp is unforgettable, and so is her huge umbrella, now known in British English as a gamp. Word history informs us that umbrellas were invented to protect people from the sun: umbrella refers to umbra “shade,” and parasol to sol “sun.” French parapluie and German Regenschirm were coined on the analogy of the compounds whose first component meant “sun.” But “Sarei” Gamp lived in London and needed protection from rain. For some reason, umbrellas and etymology tend to cross paths more than once. In British English, the very word umbrella has been changed into brolly (in the same way in which the American word freshman has been changed into frosh). Why? However, today’s subject has nothing to do with umbrellas, parasols, or freshmen. It deals with the way Mrs. Gamp spoke Cockney.

In Weekley’s opinion, not old-fashioned Cockney is “corrupt English” but “standard English” is “corrupt dialect.” This is his key statement: “Of all those historic dialects which still distinguish… the speech of most Englishmen, none is of such interest as Cockney, that noble Mercian, Kentish, and East Anglian, which was written by Chaucer, printed by Caxton, spoken by Spenser and Milton, and surviving in the mouths of Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp, has in a modified form and with an artificial pronunciation, given us the literary English of the present day.”

I’ll reproduce only a few statements from the essay. Weekley says that his students (he taught in Nottingham, East Midlands) pronounce t in often and insist on making forehead rime with hoar head. Most of those whom I know (I live in the American Upper Midwest) do the same, and it turned out that Weekley tried to fight the spelling pronunciation of forehead with my favorite verse about the girl who had a little curl in the middle of her forehead. “When she was good, she was very, very good, and when she was bad, she was horrid.” Longfellow, the author of the poem, did not say fore-head. Other than that, Weekley pointed out that what we regard as vulgarisms are usually older pronunciations which have been gradually expelled by the printed word. Such are ax for ask and waps for wasp. He of course did not say ax and waps: he just stated the fact. In his opinion, Mrs. Gamp spoke English very much after the fashion of a lady of quality of 1700-1750. She “talked like an early Georgian duchess, and Sam Weller like a town ‘blood’ of the same period.” And now back to etymology.

The origin of the verb forge (ahead) is not quite clear. “Perhaps an aberrant pronunciation of the verb force.” Weekley cites Mrs. Gamp’s Jonadge’s belly (= Jonas’s belly) and fiery furnage, that is, furnace, to illustrate the voicing of the sound s in this position. He says the same in his dictionary and even refers to Mrs. Gamp in the entry, but there, both the suggestions and the reference are lost, and today who will recognize his “authority”? He was sure that wear “to change to an opposite tack by turning the stern to the wind” was identical with veer, a synonymous nautical term, because the interplay of v and w is famous in Cockney (wery vell). The Wellers, father and son, of course called themselves Vellers.

Of special interest to American speakers is the history of words like porridge. Porridge goes back to pottage, remembered today only from a mess of pottage “lentil stew.” Pottage meant something “put in a pot.” The word surfaced in English in the thirteenth century. The consonant t was usually voiced between vowels, and American settlers brought this pronunciation to the New World. That is why they still fail to distinguish between writer and rider, futile and feudal, along with seated and seeded (as I know from my students’ papers). In the same way, pottage turned into poddage, but in some dialects d became r (“rhotacism”); hence porridge. Weekley cites impurent “impudent,” moral “model,” and blurry for the once unpronounceable bloody. (Eliza Doolittle’s not bloody likely is of course proverbial.) Weekley pointed out that paddock “a small enclosure of parkland” for the obsolete parrock “park” illustrates the reverse change (r to d), and such is the accepted etymology of this word.

Ernest Weekley could both write and listen well. For a final flourish, I’d like to quote his statement about the old days: “One of my earlier subjects, some forty years ago, for phonetic experiment was a venerable London busman, an admirable specimen of a type now replaced, to the infinite loss of Cockney humour, by a race of smudgy-looking misanthropists. This sage opined that a man who was in a hurry to get to the ‘cimetery’ would do well to take a ‘drop o’ sperrits’ of a cold morning rather than the cup o’ cawfey’ recommended by benighted teetotalers. … The first lexicographer (seventeenth century) to register ‘coffee’ spells it ‘cauphè,’ the vowel sound having been gradually shortened….” For more information on coffee see my post of August 21, 2024. Other than that, enjoy Weekley, his books, his essays, coffee, and occasionally “a drop o’ sperrits.” At one time, spirit was pronounced sprit.

_{Featured image via PxHere, CC0.}

*An error has been corrected in this blog post (the misspelling of “Ernest” as “Earnest”)