In my school years, if a group of kids were caught doing
something that necessitated a hasty exit, we would ‘scarper’. It was
it seems a London dialect expression, derived from the Italian scappare (to
escape) in the nineteenth century, but I suspect that its survival was
strengthened by the rhyming association with ‘Scapa Flow’, which would have
come into general consciousness after the end of the First World War, when the
German fleet was scuttled there in 1919.
This is connected to my interest in the persistence of
Franglais and other soldiers’ slang in the years following the end of the First
World War; I recently came across a cartoon in Punch from April 1919, two
labourers talking to each other:
Alf: Ain't you goin' to eat anyfink 'Erbert?
'Erbert: Well, my old fam ain't turned up with my bit of
dayjerny.
The questions I am thinking about are:
Which terms survived and for how long?
How did they correspond to the terms actually used in France
and Flanders by British soldiers – did they change their application over time?
And are there corresponding inter-language survivals in
other languages – particularly French, German and Flemish?
Cartoons, reflecting the speech of people, would appear at
first to be a good source, but of course they are in this case reflecting the
language (supposed) of one socio-economic group (labourers) to a different
group (middle class Punch- readers). Does this matter, since the joke depends
on recognising and understanding rather than actively using?
No comments:
Post a Comment