Undergragger Talk

In one sense, Oxonian Morris Marples had noted, English university students were no different from thieves, gangsters, soldiers, sailors, tramps, showmen, costers, churchmen or lawyers. Whatever century they lived in, they were apt to speak a language all their own.

The language so fascinated him that, in his spare time, Headmaster Marples of Wolstanton Grammar School at Newcastle under Lyme has been jotting down campus words and finding out how they came to be. Last week Britons were chuckling over the result: a thin, bright little book entitled University Slang.

The Swot. "Slang," decides Marples, "is a form of youthful ebullience," and nothing, no matter how sacred, is safe from its inventiveness. At Oxford and Cambridge, short academic gowns have been known as rags or cover-arses, bum-curtains or tail-curtains. In the 17th Century, venerable dons were called pupil-mongers, and in the 18th they were gerund-grinders. The heads of colleges were skulls ("a skull being an ancient and desiccated head"), and their meeting place was Golgotha.*

Over the centuries, students have always regarded earnest study with deep displeasure. The deskbound undergraduate has been variously damned as a swot, a brown-bagger or a mug. Chemistry is still stinks, Thucydides is Thicksides, and studying education is doing Eddyoo. To be failed in an examination has traveled from being gravelled (after Marlowe's Faustus, who "gravelled the pastors of the German church") to being gulphed, ftoor&d, knocked out, pilled, pipped, ploughed or plucked.

The Jowler. Like anything else, university slang has had its contagious fads. In the 17th Century, students ranged their drinking companions in a sort of academic hierarchy. A Bachelor meant a lean drunkard, a Bachelor of Law was one "that hath a purple face, inchac't with rubies," a Doctor was one that "hath a red nose." In the igth and soth Centuries, the fashion has been to add the suffixes -agger, -ogger, and -ugger to the initial consonants of all titles of dignity. Thus Queen Victoria was dubbed The Quagger; the Princes of Wales (in the case of both Edward VII and Edward VIII) found themselves Pragger-Waggers; and in 1890, the Rev. Talbot Rice, Rector of St. Peter le Bailey, became The Tagger Ragger of St. Pagger le Bagger. Meanwhile, an Oxford specialty was adding -er to everything: eccer (exercise), fresher (freshman), roller (roll call) and The Jowler (Greek Scholar Benjamin Jowett).

Now & then, Marples notices, a don was apt to leave his mark upon the language. Mathematician C. L. Dodgson (Lewis

Carroll) fostered the fad of the portmanteau word (samples: chortle, combining chuckle and snort; galumph, to gallop triumphantly). But by & large, students have always been the real wordmakers. Sometimes, indeed, their words have become English. Among them: blazer, sophomore and constitutional--originally a bookworm's form of exercise.

*I.e., "place of a skull"--from the Gospels, e.g., Matthew 27:33.

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