Why twerking sounds so stupid

The Widow Twankey first appeared on stage in 1861. At that time daily papers listed on Boxing Day dozens of novelty-stuffed pantomimes. But as far as I can make out, Aladdin, or, The Wonderful Scamp, in which the widow, played by James Rogers, made her entrance, was not a Christmas pantomime but a burlesque, for which the Strand theatre was celebrated. She was first spelled Twankay, being named after a popular variety of green tea.

The origins of the tea’s name (spelled twanky on its first appearance in print in 1840), are as obscure as Chinese geography was then. It was attributed to a dialect version of two streams, a town or a region. In the pantomimic context it is notable that Twankay was Chinese in character, although in (the French version of) the tale from the Arabian Nights from which it derives, all the characters have Arabic names. Aladdin means ‘nobility of the faith’, the faith in question being Islam.

Twankey was easily taken up as a silly name in English because it fitted in with words such as twankydillo, used in folk songs as a refrain. The Oxford English Dictionary records twangdillo from the late 18th century as ‘the twanging of a stringed instrument’. But a song, ‘Jolly Roger Twangdillo of Plowden Hill’, appeared in a collection of earlier ballads published in 1723 by Ambrose Philips, the lampooned rival of Alexander Pope. (Philips gave rise to the term namby-pamby, used satirically of him by the witty Henry Carey, who mocked his dainty poems dedicated to the children of aristocratic patrons: ‘Namby-Pamby, pilly-piss,/ Rhimy-pim’d on Missy Miss.’) The fact is that Twangdillo suited Jolly Roger as a name because, so the great independent historian of slang Eric Partridge knew, twang was a common cant word in the 18th century, equivalent to the modern bonk.

In a song by John Gay, the author of The Beggar’s Opera, the refrain is not twankydillo but twinkum-twankum.