I am told by the London teacher who sent me the West Indian school word panic, sexually exciting, that wicked is another word they have converted to their use. To them a wicked person is good, not evil, and with a touch of magic about him or her. Their use of wicked is interesting. The masculine of witch is the Old English wicca which comes from wiccian, to bewitch. From wiccian comes wicked, a word which once upon a time meant addicted to witchcraft. So, is the West Indian kid who calls his hero, Andy Cole, wicked, all that much offside?
Jack Hennessy from Waterford wrote to remind me of the days of our youth when a dance band, even when it played in rural halls lit by oil lamps, was called an orchestra. The difference between an orchestra and a band seemed to be that the former wore formal dress, and was conducted by a man who held a baton in a white-gloved hand while facing the dancers, not his musicians. Jack, like myself, remembers a Waterford maestro conducting his orchestra, the late edition of the Evening Mail on the podium in front of him in place of a score. Anyway, the word orchestra intrigues my nostalgic friend.
The Greek orchos meant a row of fruit trees. It is not related to orchard, as you might imagine. From a row of trees it was applied to a row of dancers, then to the semi-circular area in front of the stage where the chorus performed their ritual dances. Nowadays musicians, not dancers, sit in front of the stage if their services are needed: and so it came to be that we called a band by a name that was, long long ago, associated with dancers who capered in their ritual routines.
Ah yes, and what capers we ourselves had! Caper, by the way, is the Latin for a goat. A wild goat was called capreolus, from which the French made cabriole, a buck-leap, if you will, and afterwards, cabriolet, a springy two-wheeled carriage. Too long by far for the English and the Yanks, they shortened the French word to cab.
Oh dear, look how far I've rambled from Mr Hennessy's rural halls: dark, smoky, wicked places - wicked in the West Indian sense. I still vividly remember those white gloves waving in the light of dim lamps above the capering throng, like lilies in hell . . .