When I mentioned the other day that boarding fees at England’s Winchester College are “£20,000” (nearly €23,000), I should probably, as reader Angela Murray points out, have added “per term”.
If you send your offspring there for a full year, it will cost a swaggering £60,000. So well might even the middle classes need help from Paddy Dear, the interestingly named philanthropist who, as we noted, has donated £10 million to his alma mater, to enable financially challenged others enjoy an education like the one he got back in the 1970s.
While I’m on the subject again, and although I know little else about Dear, I feel safe in suggesting he may be a man with “notions”. No, not in the pejorative sense in which we use the word in Ireland, where having notions is an early symptom of the progressive psychosocial disorder known as “losing the run of yourself”.
For students and graduates of Winchester, “notions” are a sub-language of specialist terms, built up over the centuries since the college’s foundation in 1382. Most are obsolete but there was a time when they were the subject of dictionaries, to be learned by rote if you were enrolling, and when students failing the annual “notions test” were at risk of a thrashing from the house prefect.
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The vocabulary included, for example, continent, an adjective meaning “confined to the sick-room”, and continent’s opposite: abroad. Bulky meant “rich” or “generous” (like Paddy); huff was a kind of beer; squish was “weak tea”; and straw was “clean sheets” (a reminder of the college’s humbler days, when bedding consisted of actual straw).
Of special interest to Irish readers is the notion kill, which as one Winchester dictionary points out, did not mean to deprive of life but merely “to hurt badly”. The lexicographer added that “the word is used in our sense in Ireland” and went on to quote from Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, where the Hiberno-English verb’s past participle (kilt) features a lot.
Edgeworth herself included a glossary for English readers, which explained the non-fatal condition of being kilt in these parts, with allusion to Shakespeare: “In Ireland not only cowards, but the brave ‘die many times before their death’. There, killing is no murder.”
Having notions in the Irish sense is not usually fatal either. The worst it may earn you is an unlimited period of community service (the community service of giving your neighbours something to complain about). Even so, it would be an act of philanthropy towards the unwary if someone were to compile a Winchester-style glossary of the various kinds of notions you can be accused of having here. It’s the sort of thing I’d do myself if I had time.
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I’m reminded in passing of a failed 16th- century English monk, Andrew Boorde (c 1490–1549), who was once the subject of an unusually long and admiring column by Myles na gCopaleen of this parish, back in 1941.
It’s said that even in later years, after being released from the Carthusian order, Boorde continued to observe some of its rules, such as fasting and wearing a hair shirt. On the other hand, the degree to which he had struggled with religious life may explain why, in 1547, he was convicted at Winchester of “keeping in his house three loose women” (whether he kept them on full Boorde or half is not stated).
I apologise for that last pun, from which Myles has asked to be disassociated. The reason for our former columnist’s interest in Boorde was the latter’s post-monastic adventures as a traveller, visiting almost every country in Europe, which resulted in his prototype travel guide of 1542, titled The Fyrst Boke of the Introduction of Knowledge.
This extraordinary work (for the text of which I’m indebted to the Internet Archive) included an “introduction to Ireland”, a country then as now divided in two: the “Englysh pale” and the part inhabited by “Wilde Irysh”. Of the latter, Boorde wrote the inhabitants appeared to have little interest in wealth:
“For in many places they care not for pot, pan, kettyl, nor for mattress, fether bed, nor ... implementes of household. Wherefore it is presuppose[d] that they lak manners & honesty, & be untaught & rude; the which rudeness, with theyr melancholy, causeth them to be angry & testy ...”
But what most fascinated Myles about Boorde was his Lonely Planet-style glossary of basic phrases, translated into Irish, or rather a phonetic approximation of Irish, for English readers.
Some of his phrases you wouldn’t be advised to try today, such as “Wyfe, gyve me bread!” (Benytee, toor haran!) or “Mayden, gyve me cheese!” (Kalyn, toor case). Others have aged better, eg: How do you fare?” (Kanys stato?) and “I do fare well, thank you” (Tawm agoomawh gramahogood).
Myles was impressed. “The perfectly modern character of the Irish is surprising when one considers the comparatively archaic tone of contemporary literary Irish,” he lectured. Mind you, he may have been exaggerating, even in 1941, when he suggested Boorde’s phrase guide would still “bring you safely through Connemara to-day”.
