29 April, 2020
Today I am not on my terrace looking at the planes approaching the airport of Palma or watching the massive cruise ships making their way into the harbour. In Palma everyone is confined to their home as they have been for the past two months. No planes or ships 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 match exactly. “ 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.” In lockdown we are now in Kid 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 the old soldiers in the Home Guard called Private Pike, Pikey, and Sergeant Jones, 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.
It is one of the mysteries of language that native speakers add this ‘y’ consistently and systematically. They never add it to a word of two syllables. How do they know? A foreign learner would try to follow some rule such as ‘Only add the suffix ‘y’ denoting affection to names of one syllable not to those of two or more.’ How difficult it is to learn a language! How little do rules actually help!
‘Dad’s 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 times.
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 platoon, marching along and saying, ‘Keep it up men. You’re doing very well!’ We need the ‘Dad’s 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’. For example, Andrew –Andy, and Edward – Eddy.
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 more pleasing 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 used when we’re at a loss for a word. ‘Where’s that thingy I bought yesterday?’ Biscuit can become ‘bicky’. We do 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 use 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.
Well, these are a few thoughts that came to me during the coronavirus lockdown. Perhaps they don’t matter very much but at least I haven’t spent an hour or so trying to get my shoelaces to even lengths.
Anyway, there we are.
Long live the ‘-y’! Long live Pikey!