Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 28 June 2003

A Lexicographer writes

issue 28 June 2003

Mr John Ross, a reader from Derbyshire, was struck by the strange juxtaposition of two phrases of different flavours in the second chapter of Scott’s Kenilworth. On the same page the host says ‘I wot not’ and another character, Mr Goldthread the mercer, says in answer to a question, ‘That I have, old boy.’ Mr Russ associates old boy with public schools, not with the England of Elizabeth I.

Scott is a far from reliable authority on the historic use of language. He was writing fiction, after all, and he sprinkled the page with god wots and forsooths on a suggestive rather than an accurate principle. His magpie antiquarianism sometimes tempted him into error, though never in such a spectacular way as Browning with his celebrated misapprehension of the meaning of twat as ‘a nun’s headdress’.

But Scott was not wrong to think that an Elizabethan might have addressed an equal or slight inferior as old boy.

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