Turnham Clean!

On "Turnham Green, please" just saw this photo of "Turn'em Clean", a dry-cleaners there:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2012/dec/06/shit-london-awards

Don't, Fawcett (Cricketers' names IV)

Then there was that Aussie top four of Fawcett, Hackett, Mowett & Blewett ...

Ellis Edgar Achong

"A Chinaman": now there are variations on the origin of this cricketing term and even its present meaning can vary from speaker to speaker and country to country. Generally, though, it means a delivery by a slow left arm bowler that turns in the opposite direction from "normal". (This could be from leg to off for a SLA wrist-spinner as opposed to an orthodox one.)

One version of the story goes that E.E. "Puss" Achong, touring England with the West Indies in the 1930s, dismissed Walter Robbins of England with a ball that moved "the other way", that is, presumably, from off to leg. "Fancy being got out by a Chinaman!" Robbins is supposed to have remarked - or something a lot stronger, in some versions. "Do you mean the delivery or the player?" asked the West Indian captain, who had seen Achong's variations before. Apparently the term has stuck ever since.

Achong is reputed to have bowled both left arm orthodox finger-spin and the less common wrist-spin. The term "Chinaman" is sometimes used in a more restricted sense for the left arm wrist-spinner's googly, or "wrong un". He also, by the way, represented Trinidad and Tobago at football (or soccer, to all my transatlantic readers). Any questions?

Cricketers' Names III

The baseball joke I mentioned relied on using a foreign / ethnic minority name but I haven't dared go there yet (although I've got one myself): "Hoo's on first base". This is presumably a reference to a player of Chinese origin and there have no doubt been plenty of those in baseball, as well as some in cricket. Indeed, the inventor of the Chinaman delivery was reputedly a Trinidadian of Chinese ancestry. What was his name? (Oh, don't start that again. I'll look him up.) The joke continued with "I don't know" on third base, I think, which seemed even weaker, though I have met an Odonwo or two, if I remember right.

Well 'ard! Cricketers' names (cont.)

Harold Pinter wrote somewhere that his proudest moment was not receiving a theatrical ovation or a big literary award, but getting a curt "Well, batted, lad" from Arthur Wellard. I imagine that not even the Nobel Prize would have come close.*

Wellard played for Bexley CC, where I netted and failed to make the team as a shortsighted under-12. He went on to play for Somerset and England, picked mainly for his seam bowling but also for his lower order six-hitting. He also played for the Gaieties, Pinter's team, well into his seventies. Well 'ard: hard but fair.

*This was how I remembered it but on Pinter's website, still extant, he records Wellard's remark as "I was proud of you." Pinter scored a slow 25 and, with his partner, saved the match. Even better.

No Holding - Bowler's name?!

In the sort of cricket I used to play the teams often struggled to field eleven men and it was very rare to have a designated scorer. So it was common for the batting side to take it in turns to score and to have to shout out to the fielders "Bowler's name?!" at each change. Merriment could be had with some names, even apart from comical pretended mishearings. (I always hoped to tour the Netherlands where my name might be written down without comment for a change - but I never did.) Imagine if Jack Crapp of Gloucestershire and England had bowled for a pub team! It was bad enough with names like Dyer: "Oh, give him a chance. He might not be that bad!"

Although there are other unfortunate names like Cheetham or Crook, Pratt or Sidebottom - father and son sidle, unfairly, into my mind at this point - there have been many suitably or even poetically named players at first class and international level. By the by, baseball fans might think of the Abbott & Costello joke "Who's on first base?" This might work even better in Norfolk where Hugh and Hughes are pronounced without the yod, "Who" and "Who's".

Anyway, there have always been Fielders, Players, Bowlers, Stumpers, Batts and Balls. And Boots, Plimsolls, Insoles, Studds and even Boxes. Then there are the pastoral or agricultural names like Park(e)s, Mead(e)s, Meadows, Rivers, Forests, Woods and Underwoods, plus Hoggards, Shepherds and Oakmans (-men) to go with them.

In addition to those Bowlers, there have been Breakwells, Seamers, Throwers, Pitchers, Drivers, Hookers and Pullars, Cutts and Cutters, and other occupational names like Glover, Palmer and Shooter or Shuter. Birds and beasts of the field occur in the scorebook, too. Do you know your Hawkes from your Hansers? Preferable to Bulls and Hoggs, perhaps, though they both could be formidable, too.

And what about the lovely combination of Parfitt, Gentle and Knight? Somebody tell me they played together! And then I won't even mention the Willeys and Holdings!

Changin' the Gee

There's a lot of talk about new legislation, especially about Leveson and the Press. If commentators have to say the word several times they seem to find it tedious and change the g to a hard one - it seems less trouble, perhaps?

Now one or more of my distinguished linguist (good rhyming moniker just tossed away there) followers will tell me that this is "A very well-observed phenomenon, usually known in the literature as neopalataldroppification", or summat - then I'll feel silly, again!