On whim-whams, whim-woms and wing-wongs 

‘The festive decoration of my childhood Christmases,’ wrote Geoff Cunnington (Letters, 26 September), ‘featured a concertina-like, bell-shaped paper object which my mother called a “whim-wom”.’ This fits in with the use of whim-wham as ‘a trifling ornament’ (12 September). That was in the 17th century, but it has survived in a deliberately obscure context: an answer to children asking what you are making.

In the form a wing-wong for a goose’s bridle, it was investigated by the brilliant Michael Quinion in his World Wide Words blog. Subscribers reported its use in Australia, though it was not invented there. Since the original term whim-wham was unfamiliar, it was sometimes turned into wigwam. Variants include a whim-wham for a treacle mill, a whim-wham to wind the sun up, a whim-whom for grinding smoke and a swinkle-swankle for a goose’s nightcap.

I mentioned here (10 December 2011) a similar formula to use when a child asks what there is for dinner. My grandmother’s stock response was: Bread and pull it. It did not matter whether the child recognised the word-play (on pullet). An alternative was air pie and windy pudding – and in dialects that drop initial aspirates, air pie sounds the same as hare pie.

Another phrase to put off such questions was shim-sham for meddlers. Shim-sham is a version of sham, a word of unknown origin Wycherley introduced in 1676 in The Plain-Dealer: ‘Shamming is telling you an insipid, dull Lye, with a dull Face, which the slie Wag the Author only laughs at himself.’

Other answers emphasise the unpalatable. In slumgullion and beans, the term for ‘watery stew’ was used mostly in America. John Dos Passos, in 1919, describes a passage in the steamer Arple: ‘Bedbugs in the bunks in the stinking fo’castle, slumgullion for grub, with potatoes full of eyes and mouldy beans, cockroaches mashed on the messtable, but a tot of limejuice every day in accordance with the regulations.’