Mind your language
`WRONG again,' said my husband, plumping down on the kitchen table The Spectator open at the letter from Sir Julian Critchley (18 April) about my speculations on the origin of the word doul, 'to skivvy or to boss about'.
I had ventured that an origin in the Greek word doulos 'a slave' was unlike- ly, given that the context was a letter from a trainee nurse to her father, a farmer in Shropshire. But Shropshire was the key, and while I had been set off on a wild-goose chase through dialect dictionaries, I should have focused on public-school slang — in this case from Shrewsbury school.
Many Old Salopians wrote to tell me of the cry `Doull', the equivalent of Tag!' in other schools. Indeed at Shrewsbury itself scum was used as an alternative. Swot was used for 'angry', while for 'swot' the word was jew-sap. (I don't suppose that is still current.) Twirp was 'cheek' while 'swank' was lift. I rather like puker for 'disapproval, or rather a thing disapproved of. All these come from M. Marples's Public School Slang (1940), to which the diligent Paul Dinnage directed me.
Who knows what boys say now? The whole point of a private language is not to use it to adults. But Mr John Thorn, for 20 years headmaster of Winchester, tells me that in the 1970s scholars of the College used doul for `fag'; com- moners did not. That is typical of Wykehamical 'notions% Mr Thorn (who went to school at St Paul's) wisely kept out of it all.
Perhaps I should have too; I was just about to have suggested to Dr T.H. Hugh-Davies, who originally enquired about doul, that in the context he men- tioned it might have been a phonetic spelling of do-all — a maid of all work. That would certainly have demonstrat- ed that I am not a know-all.
Dot Wordsworth
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