Lift Up Your Hearts

This week's thought for Saturday evening to take into Sunday is a quotation from the speech given by the Master, Wynne-Wilson on Speech Day 1908 in the newly built Big School. He speaks of men and boys, but the ideal he proposed to a male audience is no less true for today's coeducational school.

In School we try to train the character by making the boys fit to become men of affairs and to take positions of authority, whether they are to be soldiers, lawyers, doctors, or engineers, or the like. Out of School we try to train the boys' characters by making them learn to conform to rules and obey authority, and in Chapel we try to train their characters by holding out to them that without which life is ineffective, sterile, and uninspired: the great illimitable ideal." 

The great illimitable ideal

Day off activity

The things you can find on You Tube!

Maths in Education or When does 6 = 13?

Just back from a meeting of the Education Committee of the Haileybury Council. Educationalists from other places and working in both a Haileybury and a wider context illustrate perfectly the point I made a day or two ago about the decline of slang and local names for things. We can't just use the Haileybury terminology if we wish to be understood and to be able to use information from the wider world of education.

As many will know school years are now counted from one to twelve. The first year with a number is the first year of compulsory education, so Nursery (the year children are 3) and Reception (when they turn 4) are followed by Year 1, Year 2 and so on.

For Haileybury this means that in the Education Committee we have to be able to count, and we do maths in a very special way. In the rest of the world Removes are Year 9. This means that the Fifth is in fact 11 and that Six therefore equals 13.

QED

Commonplace

In the Lent Mission of 1982 Bishop Frank Cocks (BFr 1927) suggested to us that we should start commonplace books. He did not use that phrase, and his suggestion was for rather more specifically devotional or theological notes than many commonplace books.

I still use mine - it is a hard backed exercise book I bought in the bookroom. I find I use it in fits and starts. Sometimes I will not make an entry for years, and then I take it up again and use it rather a lot. I remain grateful to Bishop Cocks for the suggestion. I wonder if others also keep commonplace books following that mission?

In his published Commonplace Book (1993) Mgr Alfred Gilbey commented acerbically that "The Indian Empire was lost on the playing fields of Haileybury." A bit unfair, but he would have ben no supporter of Mr Attlee's government.

Gilbey's family came from Harlow. A contemporary of mine from seminary served there and tells a story of conducing a family funeral and being rewarded with a fine bottle of gin. Despite the near geography, I do not know whether Mgr Gilbey ever came to Haileybury or walked across XX Acre.

Norman Wisdom

Some day in 1979 a bloke in the Middles called Nigel Scorgie (Ha 1978) looked me up and down and said, "You're name is Norman." I was Norman - or Norm -  from that day on to almost everyone at school. 'Scorge' (whom I met last year at a reunion having not seen him since he left Haileybury 27 years previously) said later that he gave me the name as he thought I looked like Norman Wisdom, a personage of whom I then knew nothing. I vividly remember the moment when on my first day at University I made the decision on being asked my name that I would choose to be called Luke by my contemporaries, and put childish things away. Norman Wisdom died today. You make up your mind on the similarities - or lack of them.

Translation

"All striders must be checked" is American English for

"You must leave your push chair at the desk"

ie don't push your child's pram round the place but check it in.

Translation Please

Translate from American into English:

"All striders must be checked." [Answer tomorrow.]

Words words words Hamlet 2:2

There has been a correspondence in the papers about slang and bad English and I caught the discussion getting into Any Answers on the wireless in the car on the way to collect boys from school on Saturday. Haileybury slang seems to change all the time. The Grubber is still current. The San is now officially the "Health Centre" but generally called the San among the young. Chits are still given by San and Bookroom. But groize is no longer served in the dining hall. I am told that word for butter was current only in some Houses anyway. We used to 'keep chips' at the door of DC or dormitory - other schools called that 'keeping cave' - meaning a lookout. Oips, as I have noted before is now defunct. But what of other words?

The great compiler of English slang was Eric Partridge. His Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English has recently been updated. I am the happy owner of a little book by Morris Marples called University Slang. I have never been able to find the companion volume of Public School Slang, but maybe Amazon - which has taken so much of the fun out of scouring second hand bookshops - will help. I was sure that University Slang had a mention of Haileybury but I cannot find it now. Marples, writing in 1950 notes that transport and communications mean that 'the days when schools, colleges and universities could develop a peculiar speech almost in isolation' were coming to an end. But he is no less right to observe that any group will develop their 'own distinctive vocabularies… tending to hold the group together and by emphasizing its individuality.'

So - what words do you use? And can you work out my translation test?