Mind your language
WE HAVE all noticed how newspapers often leave untold the end of a story; they report a cliffhanger or constitution- al crisis, but leave the fate of Pauline on the cliff or the government of Sierra Leone unrecorded. So let me do some tidying up.
First, whiskum-snivel, a compound noun found by the publisher Mr Tom Hartman in the life of Cowper by Lord David Cecil. The learned Mr Paul Din- nage writes to tell us that in the edition of Cowper's letters edited by Thomas Wright (1904) there is a letter from Cowper to Mrs Harriot Balls, a cousin with whom he had spent youthful holi- days in Norfolk: 'Oh when shall we ride in a Whiskum-Snivel again, and laugh as we have done heretofore? Should that day ever come, you must be the driver, for I have too great a value both for your neck and my own to aspire to that office myself. I have never excelled in it and have hardly been in a Whiskum since.'
Wright explains in a footnote: 'A name coined by Lady Hesketh for a gig — the old-fashioned gig with bow- springs.' And Mr Dinnage thinks, rea- sonably enough, that whiskum is but a variant of whiskey, a one-horse, two-seat gig. (Jeremy Bentham refers in 1770 to travelling in a Titiwhiskey). As for snivel, Mr Dinnage reckons it is a vari- ant of snaffle, the simple horse-bit. Yes, perhaps. Unless something better turns up, I am convinced.
As for the other piece of unfinished business, what Gladstone saw on his holidays, I think we can wrap that up too. Roy Jenkins in his biography of the GOM says that, when he went to Konigssee, he noticed near St Bartholomaus 'the beautiful waitress'. Surely that is a misreading; apart from anything else, the use of the definite article suggests the proper name of a static feature.
A reader suggests that the words Gladstone wrote were 'the beautiful Warteck', a mountain spur which he would have been able to see as a back- drop to the church. Yes, that sounds likely and I commend it to Lord Jenkins for the next edition of his excellent biography.
Dot Wordsworth
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