Mind your language
ITS TIME for some Advent season con- gratulations to you for solving the great bumtaffy conundrum. If that seems familiar, I can assure you that we have made astonishing progress since my last report.
It started when I quoted a sentence from Smollett in illustration of the phrase spend a penny. By the way it chanced that we stumbled over this other puzzling word bumtaffil. Smollett had put it in the mouth of the character Tabitha Bramble, a Welsh servant. That she is Welsh is relevant, since she tends to render the letter d as a 1; and, as a servant, the unkind Smollett makes her guilty of malapropisms, as they weren't yet called in 1771.
Mr Richard Rose wrote in with the suggestion that the word was a version of baume de vie, but he could not say if such a phrase existed. The OED had no citation, but some readers in France then found it in a French dictionary.
Now Mr Robin Vick has found an advertisement in the Oxford Gazette for 26 May 1788, which he says he just hap- pened to be reading. The baume de vie was a panacea, of course: 'This celebrat- ed and long established Medicine forti- fies the stomach and bowels, purifies the blood and juices, and gives to the whole system its natural equilibrium. To these qualities we attribute its having [note the gerund] proved so eminently serviceable in Gouty, Rheumatic, Bil- ious and Scorbutic habits. From the same principle it has never failed to relieve in languid, nervous, and hypochondriac cases; and in female dis- orders it has been found particularly beneficial.' All for 3s a bottle.
The selling point of this brand of baume de vie, sold by Dicey and Co. (of Bow Church-yard) and T. Becket (of Pall-Mall), was that it carried not only an engraved label, which paid stamp duty, but also the handwritten signature of T. Becket himself pasted on the side of each bottle.
In the advertisement, marked by one of those little pointing hands, comes the note: 'Observe — the counterfeiting of either the Stamp-office engraving, or the handwriting is a capital offence.' A patent medicine to die for.
Dot Wordsworth
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