Mind your language
I’ve been reading such a funny book that even my husband has stirred fitfully in his chair when my laughter breaks into his stertorous breathing.
The book is nothing but a list of funny names. They are funny because they are true, supported by evidence from baptismal registers, census returns and the like. They become incrementally funnier in bulk.
Here are some from a section on mad names: Elizabeth Barmy, Lettuce Bedlam, Daft Coggins, Alice Crackers, Ada Crazy, Dick Daft, Loonie Fattelay, Edwin Headcase, Mania Hyman, John Idiot, Mad Looney, John Loopy, George Mad, Temperance Madly, Isaac Madman, John Mental, Edith Hard Nutter, Joyce Moody Nutter, Mad Parrott, Mary Ann Stupid, Batty Treasure.
The book is called Potty, Fartwell and Knob by Russell Ash (Headline, £6.99), and, as the title suggests, many of the silly names are rude. Some are so rude that I can scarcely mention them, and it is hard to credit that anyone ever went by them.
But Mr Ash is a learned man and, while he admits that census officials on occasion contrived or let through false names (such as the missionary John Santo, returned in the 1851 census as ‘John Santo Clause’), he insists there is evidence for some quite spectacularly obscene names.
After all, he argues, the name Twat is common in Orkney. It is true that Robert Browning mistook the meaning of the word as ‘a nun’s headdress’, and rhymed it with ‘bat’ (an error shared by most vulgar speakers today), but could anyone in England use such a name? Perhaps in Orkney the word was not used in the indecent sense.
The same ignorance could not be supposed of the two strongest four-letter words. But Mr Ash has kindly forwarded me part of a census return from 1891 for Hastings. What do you make this name out to be?
The obvious reading is surprising. It must be said that the census official’s handwriting is very bad — not just illformed but inconsistent. Sometimes, for example, he makes his capital a like a small a, only bigger; sometimes like a printed A. The woman in question is listed with four children — Ella, Alfred, Richard and Violet — but their surnames are recorded as ‘do’, i.e., ditto.
My opinion is still that no one has ever been called C***, or F*** either. But I’d welcome evidence either way.
Dot Wordsworth
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