Letter from my Terrace in Palma 'Long Live Pikey!'

                                                                       Tutshill,

                                                                        Chepstow

29 April, 2020

Long live Pikey   

Today I am not on my terrace looking at the planes approaching the airport of Palma. In Palma everyone is confined to their home as they have been for the past two months. No planes come and go for these are coronavirus times.

No, I am not on my terrace today. I am also confined but from my confinement I am looking at the River Wye which rises and falls with the tides twice a day and has England on one bank and Wales on the other. Try as it might, coronavirus can make no difference to the tides or to the beauty of the river.

While staring at the water thinking of nothing in particular, I fell ‘into a brown study’ as Dr Watson would have said. In these strange times we have few deadlines to meet and we have time to muse.  There is a suspension of hurry and of duties. We have gone back to Kid World as Bill Bryson calls it in his account of his childhood. Kid World is a place where time passes very slowly. Bryson describes spending a whole morning getting the laces of his shoes to exactly equal lengths. “ No matter how painstakingly you shunted the laces around the holes they always came out at unequal lengths...When by some miracle you finally got them right, the second lace would always snap, leaving you to start again.” Now we are in Kids World again and we have time to let the mind wander. For some reason I started to think about ‘Dad’s Army’ and wondered why Private Pike is often called Pikey and Sergeant Jones is called Jonesy.

The ‘y’ must be a diminutive of affection. We add it to the names of people we like. But have you noticed that it can only be added to names of one syllable? Private Walker cannot be called Walkery and the great Captain Mainwaring would never be Mainwaringy. Anyway the ‘y’ ending signifies closeness and camaraderie, so the platoon would never have dared to use this for their leader.

‘Dads Army’, by the way, is a well-loved and much watched series about a platoon of old men trying to protect their homes and families in a town on the south coast of England in the Second World War. Their exploits are now part of the soul of Britain. For example, nowadays they appear in a poem on TV urging courage to all in these coronavirus tines.

The poem begins:

“When things go wrong

As they sometimes will…”

We fall back on poems when we are in need and people here in the UK now know this one by heart.  In this poem, then, there are various clips of people doing their bit and one is of Captain Mainwaring leading his platoon and saying, ‘Keep it up men. You’re doing very well!’ We need ‘Dads Army’ in these uncertain times.

First names, too, can take the ‘y’. So Thomas becomes Tom and then Tommy. There is Robert – Bob – Bobby.  A name that is already short can also add the ‘y’: John – Johnny. But for some reason Paul can’t become Pauly. Some names change their second syllable for ‘y’. Andrew –Andy and Edward – Eddie.

We like the two syllables with the firm stress on the first and the light ‘y’ sound in the second. It sounds right. It fits in with the rhythm of the sentence. ‘Johnny will do it’ has a better rhythm than ‘John will do it’. ‘Johnny’ has more melody than ‘John’.

This doesn’t only work with names. ‘Thing’ can become ‘thingy’, often when we’re at a loss for a word. ‘Where’s that thingy I bought yesterday?’ Biscuit can become ‘bicky’. We like these ‘y’ words. Of course a lot exist ready made such as  ‘happy’ and ‘lucky’, which we like so much we have made a phrase to have both at once ‘happy go lucky’.

When a foreign student of English starts to add the ‘-y’ to names or words and does this without thinking too much then they are beginning to have a feel for the language. They are beginning to sound like a native speaker.

Long live the ‘-y’!  Long live Pikey!