Public-school slang continues to thrive, particularly in rural boarding schools

‘Give me a child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man,’ said St Francis Xavier, co-founder of the Jesuit order. Public schools are given children until they’re 18 — it’s no surprise they can control their world view for the rest of their life.

And their language, too. When Prince William teased his new-born son for his ‘tardiness’ in arriving some time after his due date, he was unconsciously unearthing the memory of Eton’s ‘Tardy Book’ for boys who were late to lessons — erm, I mean divs.

Twenty-five years after leaving Westminster School, I still think of its main hall as ‘Up School’, of afternoon sport there as ‘station’, even of my own clothes — rather than school uniform — as ‘shag’. Yes, really.

That’s the funny thing about school slang. Hypersensitive teenagers, terrified of saying something silly, let alone something sexual, are set free by the conventions of slang to speak a nonsense language without fear of embarrassment.

You’re safe from ridicule because you’re sanctioned by the universal use of slang by everyone around you. Public schools — particularly boarding schools, particularly remote, rural boarding schools — are like undiscovered islands in the far reaches of the Pacific. The tiny group of indigenous pygmies speak and develop their own language, untouched by the outside world. Identical words have different meanings on different islands. In ancient Winchester slang — or ‘notions’, as slang is called there — a ‘bob’ is a big, white beer-jug. At Eton, a ‘wet bob’ rows; a ‘dry bob’ plays cricket; and ‘slack bobs’ do neither.

In these exotic bubbles, archaisms linger on for ever. The Lower and Upper Shell — junior years at Westminster — derive from the semicircular apse at the end of Up School, where the boys were taught several centuries ago.