Faynights: I Predict A Riot

Thursday, June 16, 2005

I Predict A Riot - and I'm wrong

Once in a while, Radio 4 comes up with something fascinating that I didn't know about before. In the throwaway 11:30am slot today we had a nice hidden gem, The Riot That Never Was, a documentary about a 1926 spoof newscast by Ronald Knox that led to mass panic among listeners to the young medium, some twelve years before the more celebrated War Of The Worlds drama.
At the website you can, at present, hear both the documentary and a reconstruction of the original broadcast. And lest you fear the documentary itself to be a spoof, the incident is also mentioned in his biography at
Catholicauthors.com. Knox himself, as well as being a priest and theologian, also invented Sherlockian studies with a tongue-in-cheek lecture analysing Sherlock Holmes stories in obsessive detail. Not everybody got the joke there either.

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Perhaps the most important word in the schoolchild's vocabulary is his truce term. Certainly to the adult observer it is his most interesting word, for when a child seeks respite he uses a term to which there is now no exact equivalent in adult speech. If, when engaged in some boisterous activity with his fellows, a child is exhausted or out of breath, or cuts himself, or has a shoelace undone, or fears his clothes are getting torn, or wants to know if it is time to go home, he makes a sign with his hands, and calls out a word which brings him immediate but temporary relief from the strife .... It will be appreciated that uttering a truce term does not of itself imply that a child has given in or surrendered, although it may sometimes be used preparatory to surrendering. A London urchin when fighting may cry 'faynights', whereupon his opponent, on ceasing to belabour him, may inquire 'Wanna give in?' and the boy will perhaps do so ('Okay, you win, leave me alone'). But more often, if a boy says 'faynights' or 'faynights -- hang on a sec' in the middle of a struggle, he does so because he wants to take off his jacket or his glasses before continuing the combat. And before we ourselves appreciated that children were sensitive to the difference between making a truce and surrendering, we were puzzled by the number of boys who declared stoutly (and correctly) that they had no term for giving in.

-- Peter and Iona Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren (Oxford University Press, 1959)

Faynights

Thursday, June 16, 2005

I Predict A Riot - and I'm wrong

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