One of
the effective devices used in Arthur Machen’s renowned short story ‘The White
People’ (Horlick’s Magazine, 1904) is the use of words which apparently
mean something important to the nurse and the girl of the story but are not
from any known tongue. These include ‘Dôls’, ‘voolas’ ‘the Aklo letters’.
Elsewhere, Machen uses in his stories what at first appear to be harmless
child-like signs, a hand drawn on a wall, an arrangement of flints, or games, a
version of hopscotch, or being counted ‘out’: these prove to have a sinister
import.
In this interest in the peculiarities of children’s
rhymes, games and lore, even though he was using it for fictional purposes,
Machen was ahead of his time. Though it occasionally interested Victorian
folklorists and anthropologists, it was not until The Lore and Language of
Schoolchildren by Iona and Peter Opie (1959) that the subject of children’s
playground and street culture received significant attention. And Machen’s idea
of a child’s secret language, albeit of uncanny origin, was also shrewd, for
they do exist.
In one
of his journals, the architectural historian James Lees-Milne mentions a
private language used by the children of a particular family he knew, noting
they were still proficient in it as adults. He refers to it as 'eggy-peggy'. This
consisted of adding ‘egg’ before every vowel, or more specifically before the vowel-sound
in every syllable. Children could easily become so fluent in it that it was
incomprehensible to anyone not in the know.
A blog
post by the romantic novelist Elizabeth Hawksley is the best source I’ve seen
on the subject. She
calls it Ag, not egg, slang, and gives an example: ‘dago yagou spageak agag
slagang’ – do you speak ag slang. She can and does still speak it, as can her
brothers and cousins. She says it’s best learnt aged 7-9, as her mother taught
her, and she taught her children over a car journey, but is almost impossible
to learn as an adult.
From her
mother’s use of it she dates it to the interwar period, the 20s and 30s. She
notes that it is referenced by Nancy Mitford in The Pursuit of Love (a
novel about the Bright Young Things) and is therefore sometimes viewed as a
‘posh’ argot but stresses it is very much not: her own family’s background was
lower middle class. [It is actually in Love in a Cold Climate - thanks to a reader for spotting this].
People
commenting on her post say they used something similar but used ‘ab’ or ‘ga’.
Other versions elsewhere say ‘ig’ or ‘ug’ were used. It is suggested it was
primarily a schoolgirl playground language: however, sometimes boys also learnt
it. One online forum says it was still in use by school children of all ages in
the mid-1960s. It was a word-of-mouth tradition passed on especially between
siblings and schoolmates and still used, though not very much spoken about, by
some into adulthood.
Speculatively,
this made me wonder if the phrase ‘I am the eggman, they are the eggmen’,
followed by the nonsense syllables ‘goo goo’ajoob’ in the Lennon/McCartney song
‘I Am the Walrus’ (1967) could be an allusion to the Egg language: the song
does use other direct quotations and adaptations from the playground rhymes of
John Lennon’s childhood.
But then
there is always Humpty Dumpty, the patron saint of private languages: ‘ “When I
use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what
I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” (Lewis Carroll, Through the
Looking-Glass, 1871).
There
have been other ‘secret languages’ in Britain. A now quite celebrated and
well-studied one is Polari, used in gay and theatrical circles in London
(mostly) in the Fifties and Sixties, and deployed with comic effect by Kenneth
Williams and Hugh Paddick as the camp couple Jules and Sandy in the Sixties
radio programme ‘Round the Horne’. Another I have caught passing references to
is Cockalorum, which seemed to derive from harbour-side argot.
The
comedian Stanley Unwin perfected a unique patter involving mangling and
rearranging English words into picturesque neologisms, and contributed
interludes in this style to the Small Faces’ album Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake
(1968).
But I
suppose in specialist circles the Egg language isn’t technically a ‘language’
as such, since it doesn’t have its own words or private meanings, but is rather
a masking or obscuring of an existing language. Elizabeth Hawksley quotes the
Oxford Companion to the English Language, noting ‘it’s
pretty hazy about the subject – not to say snooty’. The OCEL calls this
technique ‘Infix’, a term dating back to the 1880s, which is where ‘the speaker
inserts a nonsense syllable before a vowel sound to make it difficult for
non-infix speakers to understand what’s being said.’
I have
chanced across other infix variations. One is Ssssh, which involved
mixing hushing and x sounds in with usual words to get a sibilant effect: another, similarly,
involves inserting ‘z’ between syllables. As well as insertions, there may be
some versions that use omissions. In Violet Trefusis’ Echo (1931) she
mentions that the twins of her story ‘communicated solely with each other in a
private language utterly devoid of consonants’: much of her book is
semi-autobiographical and this idea is possibly derived from some authentic similar
tradition.This would presumably be an 'Exfix'.
There
does not seem to be, so far as I can tell, any full study of these practices,
as distinct from other informal forms of language, such as slang, jargon,
dialect or cant, but some are referenced in Paul Beale, updating Eric Partridge,
A Concise Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1990). Do any
still survive as a living tradition anywhere among children today? How would we
know? They are supposed to be a secret. But
it could be the case that generational social media jargon, abbreviations and private
meanings now perform the same role.
(Mark
Valentine)
