Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 26 February 2005

A Lexicographer writes

‘Chalk’n’cheese, hole in one, salt’n’pepper, three-in-one oil, sheep’n’goats, eyeless in Gaza, Swan’n’Edgar,’ said my husband, not pausing for breath, so that nature took over, and a sharp inhalation whisked some whisky into his trachea, bringing on a fit of coughing that turned him a plum colour. I hadn’t heard anyone say ‘Swan and Edgar’ for some time. It is the only familiar coupling from those lines in Princess Ida: ‘Let Swan secede from Edgar — Gask from Gask;/ Sewell from Cross — Lewis from Allenby!’ Gask and Gask, I learn from more reliable inquiry than asking my husband, were in Oxford Street; Lewis and Allenby in Pall Mall; and Sewell and Cross on the corner of Old Compton Street and Frith Street. I think they were all kinds of drapers.

Once his plumminess had faded my husband remembered a bit in a short story by P.G. Wodehouse which invokes Swan and Edgar too. It was in one of those golfing stories, with which I am not familiar, ‘A Woman is Only a Woman’: ‘Who can trace to its first beginnings,’ [said the Oldest Member], ‘the love of Damon for Pythias, of David for Jonathan, of Swan for Edgar? Who can explain what it was about Crosse that first attracted Blackwell? We simply say, “These men are friends,” and leave it at that.’ Yes, thank you.

The occasion for the husbandly outburst was my voicing the question whether it should be ‘a hole-in-corner affair’ or ‘a hole-and-corner affair’. My husband, before his death-defying Grouse-breathing, was trying to demonstrate that and and in are pronounced much the same way in such a couplet.

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