SHERWOOD SLANG

There is a large body of students who have passed out from Sherwood who have peculiar to them a vocabulary of words taken from all aspects of Indian and Occidental life. One wonders how this vocabulary developed and it seems that it is a dynamic process, with evolution still progressing. However I have no knowledge of the current developments of this vocabulary but conversations with contemporaries suddenly shows up snapshots frozen in time, with the usage of the archaic slang of our school-days.

The word that recently struck me as being seriously an anachronism was “dame”. It describes a young girl/ woman of desirable attributes. The current equivalent of this word is “chick”. The African American equivalent, less parliamentary, of course would be “ho”. Where did “dame” come from? Is it a hangover from the old British schoolboy slang. The likelihood that young boys anywhere would be familiar with a word of this nature today is unlikely, as much as the likelihood of them addressing each other as “sir” and ending conversations, “your servant”. Or could it have come from a corruption of “madam”, which etymologically came from “my dame”. While the word is not offensive, I haven't heard it used anywhere else but at Sherwood.

The origin of the slang for money is from too many Hollywood gangster movies based on 50's USA, which is “dough”. In my younger days that was always stuck in some corner of my mind as being spelled “doe”. Corruptions then were “dosh”, “duff”, “duk” and so on. The girls school neighbouring ours, The All Saints School, our sister school (not much by way of sisterly feeling there) had a different version for the same thing. They called it “chang”, obviously a derivation from “change”.

A cute word from the past is “chunti”, pronounced chu-nn-ti. This is means small so obviously derived from the Hindi word for ant which is also pronounced similarly. The idea of using ants as a comparison is indeed ingenuous.

The word “dhaap” in school was quite straightforward. It just meant a slap, but of generous proportions. The word was used in singular as the implication was that one “dhaap” was suffcient to settle the matter finally in most arguments. Later in life, in college the meaning of this word changed to mean a fib. However, that the fib was a large one was implied and the singularity of the subject was still maintained. I suppose the word may be in dual use, as in “housewife”, as female and as sewing kit.

Any more suggestions of Sherwood slang?