When my husband can’t put his chair-side whisky glass on the old familiar mat, he gets quite agitated. It seems like Asperger’s disorder. My own irritation is more rationally provoked, I hope. A recent irritant was the foolish philology that I came across in the Daily Mail: ‘Politicians and the Catholic Church have warned that singing The Hokey Cokey could land you in prison.’
The objection is to Rangers supporters offending Catholics by chanting to the tune at football matches. What annoyed me was the baseless claim that the song ‘originated from Puritans in this country before being taken to America by 18th-century religious refugees’, as the Mail said. ‘The Catholic Church claims the title derives from hocus-pocus, ridiculing the words used by priests in the Eucharist, hoc est enim corpus meum’. By ‘the Catholic Church’, it emerged, was meant Peter Kearney, a spokesman for the Cardinal Archbishop of St Andrews.
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