(h)oips

Greek is now very strong at Haileybury - last year we had something extraordinary like a third of all A Level Greek entries in the country. But how many members of the Haileybury community now remember (h)oips? It's Greek, and I can't work out how to get Blogger to let me type in Greek letters (answers in the comments please)*. It was the name for the junior pitch on XX Acre, now buried somewhere under the Sports Hall I suppose.

I had forgotten the name until I  came across it while leafing through RL Ashcroft's Random Recollections of Haileybury (more about that extraordinary volume another time). It is one of those bits of school slang which used to form a separate kind of language but have now largely passed into desuetude. (Words like groize and terms such as New Guv'nor also seem to have gone now.) I'm not now sure, but I think it was pronounced without the breathing - oips, not hoips.

The derivation of (h)oips was (h)oi polloi - the many -  and so you were not part of the elite, the few, the XV or the XXX, but one of the many, playing on the junior pitch. There is an explanation - which makes reference to the Haileybury usage here.
Strange in a way that in our egalitarian days the first team should still have on Terrace its dedicated pitch with its special name but the poor old (h)oi polloi just play any old where.


Update
Carole Gandon, Head of Classics, writes to correct my hyperbole - to have a third of the entries we would need the whole VI to take Greek but, she says: we do more than keep our end up Greek wise and our numbers would compare favourably with most, other than the Classical powerhouses of the likes of Winchester.