"SHIK SHAK DAY"
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
SIR,—There is plenty of information about the name and the observances connected with the day, both in Professor Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary and in the great Oxford. New English Dictionary (in a part of that work for which the late Dr. Henry Bradley was responsible, published in 1914).• Your correspondent wants to know why the day is so called, and the best answer Dr. Bradley could give was that it is a (euphemistic) corruption of an " opprobrious appellation by which the Nonconformists were vulgarly distinguished." The quotation is from James Granger's Biographical History of England (1769), IL, 224, and index. The term was appar- ently applied abusively to persons who were found not wearing the customary oak-apple or sprig of oak on May 29th. In Hampshire, as described in Notes and Queries (1855), wearers of the oak solicited beer at the house-doors of the wealthy,. and, if refused, were accustomed to retort with " Shig-shag, penny a rag, Bury his head in Crommell's bag, All up in a, bundle." In some places shick-shack became the name for the oak-apple or oak-sprig itself.--I am, Sir, &c.,
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