An intelligent reader is annoyed by whimsy. ‘Clothes, interiors, children’s birthdays… it’s everywhere!’ she exclaims. ‘What is whimsy anyway?’
It is indeed everywhere. ‘Whimsy has been institutionalised,’ wrote James Marriott in the Times, its symptoms including Larry the Downing Street Cat and the saintly Paddington Bear.
This recognises a modern side to whimsy that is sentimental and twee. But to me its historical side acquires interest from a remark in the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘Whimsy may be related to whim-wham as flimsy to flim-flam.’ Flim-flam was only one such reduplication with a vowel variation expressive of contempt. A pamphlet from 1692 against ‘Scotch Presbyterian eloquence’ talks of ‘criticks with their frim frams and whytie whaties’. In 1725, in a letter to Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift mentioned ‘flams’ written about Grace Carteret, the daughter of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, by Ambrose Philips, mocked by their circle for writing in a Namby Pamby style.
At that time, a whim-wham was ‘a trifling ornament’, and John Taylor (called ‘the Water Poet’ from his job as a Thames waterman) used whim-wham to mean ‘genitals’.
Meanwhile, whim and whimsy had been developing in parallel, often with the same meaning. ‘Walking in the park’, says Lady Fanciful in The Provok’d Wife (1697), ‘a whim took me to sing Chivy-Chase’.
But whimsy took over from whim the meaning of ‘fanciful creation’. In 1906, the light writer E.V. Lucas thought the lodge of the Public Record Office in London might be ‘an enchanting residence for a dwarf or gnome, or even a sugar-plum fairy’. That’s whimsy all right. Bertie Wooster correctly noticed that Madeline Bassett was ‘riddled from head to foot with whimsy’. Not only did she hold the view that the stars are God’s daisy chain, but ‘that every time a fairy blows its wee nose a baby is born, which, as we know, is not the case’. We thought that the Wooster critique had triumphed, but the Bassett bilge has made a late surge for the winning-post.
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