Mind your language
I am looking forward to reading The Floating Prison, the memoirs of a French prisoner, Louis Garneray, who became an artist while captive in the hulks in Portsmouth harbour between 1806 and 1814, It is edited by the learned Richard Rose, who has just written to me about rafales — insane and insatiable gamblers in the scuppers, as it were, of hulk society.
But before I forget, did you see that play in London, See You Next Tuesday? It is a version of Le Diner de Cons by Francis Veber. I was wondering why Steven Spielberg had decided to call his film version Dinner for Schmucks (Mind your language', 16 August). Since then I have come across a dubbed version on Spanish television entitled Cena de Idiotas, which answers for the denotation of the original. See You Next Tuesday is a slightly coy locution (like es-aitch-onetee) that I haven't heard for 20 years.
But back to the hulk. These rafalis would gamble away their clothes and hammocks and mortgage their future rations — so that many died of hunger and cold. Mr Rose thinks that their name came from rafale, a squall. But he notes the possible connection with raffle.
The missing link between English raffle and medieval French rafle in the same sense was once thought to be rafler, 'to make a clean sweep', hut the good old OED is against it. Raffle, meaning 'a game of dice', is used in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale (in which Death surprises the gamesters). But there is another word also derived from French, rifle, with the same meaning. And there is an Old French phrase ne rifle ne rafle, meaning 'nothing at all'. One cannot help connecting this with riff-raff, the first occurrence of which is recorded from 1470, although in the variant nff and raff it has been found from a chronicle written in 1338.
Lexicography is sometimes unreliable in collecting evidence. The OED's first citation for raffle ticket, for example, is 1976, though I am sure I remember such things far earlier. So I think we have found a nice semantic pie with these rafales, whether they be clean swept by squalls, rifled by creditors, as desperate dicers or mere riff-raff.
If the waters weren't ruffled enough, Mr Rose asks about the word smockraffle, which his grandmother (from Rotherham) employed to mean 'eat hastily'. Wright's Dialect Dictionary gives smock-raffle or smock-ravel to mean 'perplex'. Does anyone still use it?
Dot Wordsworth
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