English

‘How many letters?’ asked my husband, as though it were a crossword we were doing together. ‘Five,’ I replied. ‘Begins in b, ends in h.’ The clue, according to the Daily Telegraph, was that the head of Norfolk county council had told opponents not to ‘b---h and moan’. ‘Belch?’ asked my husband optimistically, adding at intervals, in exactly the same hopeful tone: ‘Blush? Birch? Bunch? Bleach?’ ‘Too many letters,’ I replied to the last suggestion. Obviously the intended word was bitch. But I wondered why it had to be blanked out. Is bitch taboo in every sense? Would it be blanked out in the Crufts sense of a female dog? The doublet ‘bitch and moan’ is quite common.

“‘I am not screwed,’ replied the Caterpillar, solemnly. ‘Whisky and potass does not agree with everybody; but I am not screwed, not at all.’ So speaking he sat down rather suddenly.” By screwed he meant “drunk” of course. The Caterpillar is the nickname of a pupil in The Hill (1905) by Horace Annesley Vachell about boys at an English boarding school, more particularly the love between them. The Caterpillar was drunk on whisky, then sometimes mixed with potassium bicarbonate water. In Doctor Claudius (1883) by F. Marion Crawford, in a scene in Baden-Baden, we hear of an English duke drinking “curaçao and potass water.” Crawford was an American man who settled in Italy.