Mind your language
THE arrival of the Daily Telegraph at Noosa Heads, Queensland, causes something of a stir among the Spectator- reading classes there, if my informant in that pleasant seaside settlement is to be believed, as he surely must.
In its crossword, Wayzgoose was the answer to 11 across the other day, as it has been every few months for many a surf-pounding year. It does not matter that the word never existed, except as a hapaxlegomenon in the fevered lexico- graphical imagination of Nathan Bailey, who put it in his dictionary in 1731.
The OED goes to town on it in an outbreak of small type: 'The eccentrical- ly spelt form wayzgoose,' it begins stern- ly, 'which, although established in recent use, has not been found, except in Bai- ley's Dictionary, earlier than 1875, is probably a figment of an etymological conjecture.'
Poor Bailey's conjecture is this: `Wayz, a Bundle of Straw. Wayzgoose, a Stub- ble-Goose, an entertainment given to Journeymen at the beginning of Win- ter.'
But the goose bit has nothing to do with geese, the plural of wayzgoose being wayzgooses. And, when given by master-printers, it was usually on St Bartholomew's Day, August 24, hardly the beginning of winter. And in any case all earlier examples give the form as waygoose, not wayzgoose. In the 17th century it is described as a feast given at the time of year when the printers begin to do work by candlelight. In the 19th century it is said to have been current among silk-workers in Coventry.
For all that, ingenious etymologies have their own irresistible momentum, and I have only ever heard it in modern use in the wayzgoose form. In newspa- pers, when printers were printers and used to make themselves paper hats and be bloody-minded towards the manage- ment, the wayzgoose — a jaunt, jolly or blind — would be on Maundy Thursday, because there was no paper to bring out for the next day, Good Friday.
Now that the wicked Mr Murdoch has broken the print unions, and papers do come out on Good Friday, there seem not to be any wayzgooses any more, least of all in Noosa Heads, except in the Telegraph crossword.
Dot Wordsworth
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