Letter from my terrace in Palma 28 'Long live Pikey!'
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 or go for these are
coronavirus times.
No, I am not on my terrace today. I am also
housebound but from my confinement I am looking at the River Wye which rises and
falls with the tides twice a day and flows past 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 could 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 doing their accident-prone best to
protect their homes and families from invasion 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 at the head of his marching
platoon and saying, ‘Keep it up men. You’re doing very well!’ We need the ‘Dads
Army’ spirit in these uncertain times.
But back to the ‘y’. It’s not just for surnames.
First names can take it too. 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’. Try it. Make sure no one’s listening and then say the two
sentences out loud. You see?
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!
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