Mind your language | 29 April 2006

There has been a dramatisation of some Jeeves stories on the wireless. The great flaw has been presenting them as slapstick, which hardly works without pictures and ill serves Wodehouse’s writing, which depends so much on playing with language.

In what must have been additional dialogue, I heard some annoying anachronisms. Wodehouse’s books have acquired a period flavour that is part of their attraction. They were always old-fashioned, for their author’s fictional world drew on the days of his boyhood, or even upon those before his birth in 1881. But in the broadcast version a little rhyme about the newt included the word dinner-suit.

I doubt that Wodehouse would have used the word. Often Bertie Wooster refers to the old soup and fish. This I take to be white tie, with a swallow-tail coat. To him a dinner jacket was a garment of informality, to be worn en famille.

The Oxford English Dictionary does not record dinner jacket from before 1890, although I do not know how diligently they searched for earlier occurrences. In America the item was called a tuxedo after the country club at Tuxedo Park, New York, where it was introduced in 1886. Wodehouse first visited America in 1904 and enjoyed early success there.

The OED does not record dinner suit at all. It sounds to my ears a modern phrase, like train station, that has become popular in the current generation. I suppose it overcomes ignorance of the synecdoche (rather than metonymy, metalepsis or antonomasia) by which dinner jacket, like black or white tie, stands for the whole outfit.

I was also surprised to hear Bertie exclaim ‘Crikey!’ It seems to conflate him with William Brown, Billy Bunter and Boris Johnson. Crikey probably originated as a substitute for Christ.