Officer Dibble? Don't be disgusting!

I’m sure that we’ve remarked upon the capriciousness of the English Language before. Considering its rather complex development it’s probably not all that surprising. Mind you, the particular linguistic feature I was thinking about earlier this week is not, I have learned, just confined to English. I refer to the contranym.

Contranyms are those strange words that can be used with two opposite meanings. Back in the mists of time I had a teacher who wished to explain the concept to my class – not trying to be disrespectful but he’d have been a lot better off sticking with noun, verbs and adjectives and giving up the rest as a bad job with a sizeable minority of the class.  Instead he decided to muddy the waters by using the word ‘cleave’ as an example. I mean, not many of us had ever used the word in the sense of to cut, let alone the archaic, well, frankly, even biblical meaning of cleaving unto someone else. The funny thing is that there are such better examples he could have used – dust – fast – left being just three that everyone would at least have heard of before.

You know, despite that, I can’t help being glad to have attended school back in the days when you were sometimes taught useless knowledge like this. I mean, it’s difficult to think of a context in which not knowing that such words have this property could have a seriously adverse effect on your life. Although I can imagine a situation where asking someone to cleave to you could have potentially disastrous consequences.

I’ll be honest, I do quite like using an archaic word like cleave from time to time. Let’s take the word placket, shall we? If you’re a fan of TV shows like the Great British Sewing Bee you’ll probably know that it is, today, a perfectly innocuous term meaning a type of deliberate slit in a garment. However, when Shakespeare, for example, used the word in his plays, he was not trying to give dressmaking tips. No, he was using a term for an intimate part of one’s anatomy. No names, no pack drill – you can look it up if you’re that interested. I will state now that I never called a child that I taught a placket, but it’s a word I would use when I had the odd occasion to do so. The first time I heard it in that context was in a sketch by Dick Emery. You hardly ever hear his name mentioned now, but he was a hugely popular TV comedian in the 1970s, and had a TV sketch show in which he played a range of characters. He was a product of his time, and derived humour from material that you just wouldn’t see today – if you know much about Britain in the 70s it won’t surprise you that he regularly used racist and homophobic material, as did the majority of ‘family’ entertainers of that time.

In the sketch in question Dick Emery was playing one of his stock characters, an aging vicar with prominent buck teeth. In the sketch his daughter had brought her new boyfriend home to meet Daddy. The point of the sketch was that the vicar had a huge aversion to any word or phrase that could have a slightly risque meaning. OK, quite funny. But he twist in the sketch was that the words the reverend had taught his daughter to use in their place were all archaic terms that were far, far ruder than the modern words they avoided.  Hence, instead of offering the boyfriend a mince tart, he offered him a mince placket. The vicar becomes more and more annoyed with the boyfriend. It doesn’t help that he is a bit of an English expert who knows what these terms mean. To placate the vicar he apologises for making these errors – but he calls them boobs. “STRUNTS!” – thunders the Vicar, not knowing that he is fact using an archaic term for penis.

Two other words in the sketch are pizzle and dibble, both of which also mean strunt. I knew pizzle because I had heard it used in the context of a bull’s organ. Yes, the things we learned in Oaklands Junior School could make your hair curl. But Dibble? Prior to this, my only understanding of the word was as a surname, as in Top Cat’s Officer Dibble. Did, I wonder, the writers at Hanna Barbera have any idea of the original meaning of the slang term dibble? I’m guessing not, but I will admit that the thought of the writers’ room at Hanna Barbera giggling away at the name that they’d sneaked past the censors is a pleasing one.