Letters to Ambrose Merton

No Go, The Bogeyman

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Véronique Campion-Vincent | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 22, 2000

Marina Warner, No Go the Bogeyman. Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock, London, Chatto & Windus, 1998; New York, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1999, 435 p.

Marina Warner (novelist and historian, whose previous studies link cultural studies and folklore Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary, 1976 From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, 1995) gives here a very rich study on the figures of fear, mostly male, always very present in contemporary culture. This book has received the Katharine Briggs Award, in 1999.

Myths and lullabies, stories and songs, pictures and movies, all the expressions of learned and popular cultures are reviewed during the three parts of this book: Scaring, Lulling, Making Mock. MW takes the reader on a tour to the lands of fear, through cultures, eras and levels.

The chapters of the first part ‘Scaring’ review the themes of terror, emphasizing their extensions on the side of cannibalism: ‘Here comes the bogeyman’ (23-47), ‘My father he ate me’ (53-77), ‘The Polyp and the Cyclops’ (82-93), ‘The devil’s banquet’ (95-115), ‘Hoc est corpus’ [Corpus Christi feast] (126-135) ‘Now… we can begin to feed’ (136-159) ‘Terrors properly applied’ [Fear-based education] (160-183). They are intertwined with three interludes called ‘Reflections’, where MW comments a painting by Goya, ‘Saturn devouring his child’ (48-52), a sculpture representing the antique monster Scylla seizing Odysseus’s men (78-81), the feast ‘Patum’ a carnival filled with monsters, devils and frightening masks, of the small mountain town of Berga, Catalonia, in 1996 (116-125).

A detailed presentation of the first chapter ‘Here comes the bogeyman’ will show the extreme diversity of the themes approached in this book: an evocation of Goethe’s King of the Alders poem (1782), is followed by the presentation of a contemporary folkloric version in Devon (Dartmoor): the demon huntsman Dewer, and an evocation of one of Angela Carter’s tales in The Bloody Chamber (1975). Several tales and figures of “child-stealers, night-raiders, cradle-snatchers” are then reviewed (from the omo nero to the Baba Yaga going through the Pied Piper, the Sandman and, of course, the Bogeyman), MW discussing in parallel Classical myths, characters of folklore, and the multiple literary elaborations built upon them (Hoffmann’s fairy tale The Sandman (1817), Charles Perrault, Lewis Carroll, but also Michel Tournier (1970 Le roi des Aulnes revisiting the King of the Alders legend in a wartime German setting), Doris Lessing (1988, The Fifth Child), David Lynch (Blue Velvet) and Angela Carter). After a linguistic and phonologic detour upon the origin and evolution of ‘Bogy’ and ‘Bogeyman’, MW recalls that several folktales stage heroes that triumph over monsters, from Odysseus to ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ through Tom Thumb. The chapter closes upon a picture of the fictional cannibal serial killer Hannibal Lecter (hero of “Silence of the lambs”). [This description had to leave out several of the references alluded to by MW].

‘Lulling’ opens with ‘Reflections’ commenting Caravaggio’s painting, ‘The rest on the flight into Egypt’ (186-191). This part is fully dedicated to lullabies and their multiple functions, studied in the three chapters ‘Sing now mother… what me shall befall’ (192-207), ‘Herod the king, in his raging’ (208-233), ‘And thou, oh nightengale’ [Myths of the childish or adult female victim’s return as a nightingale] (224-237).

The five chapters of the third part ‘Making Mock’ will bring discoveries to the reader, especially in the cultural history dimension of the book. This part opens upon ‘Reflections’ commenting Desprez’s engraving of ‘The Chimera’ (1777), and another set of ‘Reflections’ on the well-known series of Albert Eckhout’s Brazilian portraits introduces the last chapter. ‘In the genre of the monstrous’ (246-261) reflects upon the promotion of the horrible and the monstrous, which have become entertainment in contemporary mass culture. ‘Circe’s swine: wizard and brute’ (262-283) evokes animal metamorphoses and presents the character of Gryllus, created by Plutarch, victim of Circe become swine who energetically refuses the return to human shape he is offered. Gryllus reappears in ‘All my business is my song’ (284-301), but under the shape of the cricket, perpetually singing animal, minute grotesque carved in antique gems endowed with magical powers, and also present in the edges of ancient manuscripts where it parodies men. The happy little singing animal has been utilized in literature, from La Fontaine’s cicada to il grillo parlante of Collodi’s Pinocchio (1883). These utilizations are detailed in this chapter that enlarges on to the role of monstrous characters in the fantastic genres. ‘Fee, fie, fo, fum’ (302-325) returns to folklore with an evocation of the folktales ogres and of the part they play in Basile (1633-36 Il Pentamerone) and Perrault (1697 Contes du temps passé) where they are frequently outwitted and killed by young heroes, male and female. At the beginning of the 19th century, the adaptations and commentaries of folktales by radical rationalist atheist philosopher William Goodwin (father of Mary Shelley) are, tells MW, an early example of political correctness, a strategy “to use fiction and fantasy to introduce children to ideas and thinking and to rationalize their fears”. ‘Of the paltriness of things’ (326-339) develops the figures of mockery and humour that set the ogre and the bogeyman in a ridiculous posture, reduced to nothing by laughter and ruse. The frequent identification ogre/stranger takes MW to examine racist humour, insults and jokes, and the replicas reversing the situation when the blacks accused of cannibalism “take the insults and turn them into a means of defiance” posing as cannibals in calypso songs for example. ‘Going bananas’ (340-373) follows the meanders of parodic inversion through the theme of the banana in contemporary humour. A multiple symbol: phallic signifier, epitomizing the natural plenitude assigned to the tropics (to their bountiful nature as well as to their oversexed inhabitants), the banana has been utilized since the twenties in music hall (they constituted Joséphine Baker’s costume in the Revue nègre of 1926) and the reader will discover the multiplicity of its contemporary uses: racist insult (some English football fans through bananas onto the pitch in abusive mockery at a rejected black player) but also elective food for athletes, base of an economical activity basic to the Caribbean and Central America, emblem of the tropical and musical movie comedies of the forties illustrated by Busby Berkeley and Carmen Miranda, etc.

The ‘Epilogue: Snip! Snap! Snip!’ (374-387) first discusses the mutilations inflicted to the devils in Uccello’s predella ‘The miracle of the profaned host’ (brought by a poor woman to a Jewish usurer and that miraculously resists the affronts he inflicts on the host, a theme close to that of the ritual murder) and cases of destruction of scaring images. Then childish terrors are evoked, especially those raised by the Struwwelpeter of Heinrich Hoffmann (1845) and its castrating character the scissor-man, who cuts the thumb of the child that persists to suck it. Hoffmann intended to mock the cruel and rigid educators of his time, but his books have terrorised generations of children unaware of his ironic intentions. [MW, who still sucked her thumb at seven, had personally asked her father to destroy the menacing book.]

After the austereness and the refusal of images of protestantism, our era is that of the return of the power of images, of the abandonment of verification for the acceptance of their magic and powers; of the raising to star status of great criminals, which incarnate the fears raised by the ogre or bogeyman in their atrocious actions.

The Crocodile from Paris again

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Veronique Campion-Vincent | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 6, 1996

Veronique Campion-Vincent has sent us an unidentified clipping from a French newspaper, dated January 1996. It concerns the crocodile rescued from the sewers of Paris, discussed in Dear Mr Thoms 36: 13-15. The crocodile, captured in 1984, now resides in the aquarium at Vannes in Britanny and the story concerns the need to move it into a larger tank. Initially it was about 80 centimetres long and was put in a tank with turtles. However, it has grown considerably since then. The article claims that it could reach seven metres when fully grown.

The article describes the difficulties faced by the biologist, Pierre-Yves Bouis, who was in charge of the crocodile’s tank. He had twelve tries at lassoing the crocodile’s jaws shut before managing to hoist it onto a stretcher to make the move.

S.H. notes: This tells us little more than that the aquarium probably has quite an effective press officer. However, most interesting from the point of view of contemporary folklore is the brief account given of the crocodile’s origins. He was “saved by firemen from the sewers of Paris, near the Pont Neuf, where his previous owner had got rid of him”.

In reality, we do no know how the crocodile got into the sewer. It may have been abandoned by its owner. However, describing the location as “near the Pont Neuf” conceals another possibility, namely that it was an escapee from a pet shop. The sewer ran under the Quai de la Megisserie, renowned as a centre for the sale of exotic plants and animals.

The Devil in an Early Victorian Ball-Room

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Michael Goss | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 7, 1996

Satan is stylish, sexy, fashion-conscious. He likes to wear sharp suits and to dance all the latest dances – and know these are what the young ladies like, as well. He catches their eye in a Texas dance hall by rigging himself out as a handsome young man in a dashing vaquero cowboy outfit; selects as his partner the prettiest, proudest girl in the room and struts out a master-class version of the polka. She is completely captivated until she notices that his flying feet do not belong on a human being. They are the feet of a chicken. At this point the Devil vanishes (into the men’s room) leaving behind him a cloud of smoke, a sulphurous smell and his unhappy partner fainting prostrate on the floor.

This is how Jan Harold Brunvand represented “The Devil in the Dance Hall for a brief section of his The Vanishing Hitchhiker. His closing and prophetic comment on the legend was that:

“Next, I suppose, we could hear of “The Devil in a Disco” if this Hispanic tradition should enter Anglo folklore.”

Which is precisely what happened, of course. Judging from the existence of an unsigned short story in Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal for 3 July 1847, however, the Devil had stepped into Anglo folklore and out onto the dance-floor long before he considered cutting a few polka fancy steps as a Texas vaquero.

“The Stranger Of The Ball is the earliest version of the “Devil in Dance-Hall” type that I have found so far; which superficial honour aside, it impresses by virtue of its confident subversion of the expected plot. Set in a small country town on the west coast of Scotland in the “time when our respected grandmothers were young ladies”, the tale opens with those same young ladies jostling for the services of the only available hairdresser. A ball was to be held and, as the narrator explains, on such occasions it was inevitable that women should experience more anxiety over the state of their heads than about what they put on their feet.
So great was the demand that the local barber had to take on a temporary assistant This individual was a “smart, vain, ignorant young Cockney” and he soon fell foul of the story’s heroine, who much resented having to wait her turn for his attentions;

“Now Miss Bella, though an angel in beauty, was the very opposite in temper. She was proud, arrogant, and imperious…”

In addition, as the next paragraph informs us:

“She was not at any time very condescending to her inferiors in station; but on the present occasion she discharged all the vials of her pride upon the unfortunate young man, till she nearly sent him crazy, vanity and all.”

When the ball commenced, Bella’s temper did not improve for the lack of eligible dancing partners. The few present consisted of her former discarded or rejected suitors “and these, either in spleen or mortification, kept out of her way”. But when her friends plagued her with their sympathtic concern, she replied “wih a gay fierceness” that:

“I will dance tonight if my partner should be the –.”

No-one could tell how Bella meant to finish the sentence, declares the narrator… but surely we can. Here is what happend next:

“…there was a wild gleam in her eye while she spoke which frightened her audience, and they drew back with a faint scream. In drawing back, some of them nearly trod on the toes of a gentleman who had just entered the room at least no one had observed him till that instant. He was a young and handsome man, with the most exuberant curls and whiskers in the world, of a jetty blackness and contrasting strangely with the waxen colour of his cheek. The eyes of the stranger…were fixed admiringly upon the beautiful Bella; and walking straight up to her, he asked her to dance. He had not been presented to her; she did not know his name; and yet – with an obliviousness of conventional rule quite foreign to her character – she at once accepted his arm, and in another moment they were whirling together through the dance.”

The spectacle of this handsome couple – and the narrator stresses that they make up the handsomest couple in the room – excited considerable comment, most of which took the form of speculation about who the stranger was and where he came from. We cannot help but notice the dangerous departure from “conventional rule” here; Bella has shown marked favour to someone unknown to herself and to everyone else, emphasizing her lapse by continuing to dance with him when social mores warned that a young woman dancing successively with the same partner was giving him amorous encouragement. So it isn’t surprising that when Bella’s uncle made his belated appearnace, he insisted on knowing the identity of this stranger.

“‘Niece,’ said the old gentleman, ‘I shall request the pleasure of being introduced to the gentleman you have danced with.’

‘I did not catch his name,’ replied Bella; ‘the master of ceremonies will doubtless do what is necessary, unless the gentleman himself – where is he?'”

The gentleman had vanished completely, just as we – just as readers of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, too – must have expected he would So far the plot has taken a famliar and very moral course, promising to conform with the popular mode wherein pride and vanity are reproved by a Satanic stranger in the sable but alluring guise of a handsome young man. And we are told that, thanks to Rumours way of embellishing simple facts, this is precisely how a good many of the folk presen~ at the ball interpreted events.

“.. at last it was reported and believed that Bella, in despairing of a partner, had summoned up a certain very old young gentleman to dance with her, who had come at her bidding, and at length vanished in smoke.”

The Old Gentleman has neither horns nor hooves – and certainly does not have chicken’s feet such blatantly diabolical detail would have closed off the story, making only one interpretation possible. The author does not want nor permit that to happen. Having undermined the Satanic element slightly by treating the clearest expressions of it as mere rumour or “report”, he or she proceeds to give sceptics in the audience a way out of the dilemma. Not long after the ball, ‘another wonder’ captured the attention of the small town. The Cockney barber had vanished from thc neighbourhood and prominent on a wax display bust in his temporary employer’s window was a set of jet-black curls and whiskers – an artificial hair-piece, in other words – which was “said to bear an astonishing resemblance to the decorations of the stranger at the ball”‘

Plainly enough, we are being invited to think the dancing devil was none other than the Cockney hairdresser in false wig and whiskers, bent upon avenging himself for all the insults that too-proud Bella had offered him. Of course, there is the inconvenient detail of how he could arrive at the ball and (more particularly) vansih from it without anyone registering those facts. The writer ignores such awkward questions, pretending that the real marvel is the permanent alteration wrought in Bella:

“Some old ladies…were still diposed to adhere to the supernatural theory; for how otherwise was it possible to account for the change which took place in the haughty beauty? Miss Bella became, from that day, an absolute personification of meekness and gentleness; and acquiring a perfect horror of the vanities of fashion, ever afterwards appeared in a plain crop of curls!”

In general stylistics – in refusing to endorse “the supernatural theory”, thereby injecting a certain interpretative ambiguity which weakens the exemplum-aspect of the narrative – “The Stranger Of The Ball” is well removed from being a folk-tale. That much is obvious, but not more so than the fact it is plainly based upon a folk-narrative type. Its author understands the conventions of such material and uses them to create something which is arguably more in keeping with modern (early Victorian) taste.

Narrators of traditional folk-tales were accustomed to accommodate the likelihood that the audience knew the plot of the story as well as they themselves; knew, that is, how the story would turn out and how it would be resolved, most of them having already heard it a dozen times or more. Accepting this and perhaps introducing no more than a few minor variations of his or her own, the performer met those audience expectations by providing both expected plot ond predicted ending. What we might see as a further constraint on the performer – the possibility that the narrative might predicate or canvass a belief in the supernatural – was actually not much of a constraint at all since the issue of strict credibility does not seem to have arisen. Regardless of the degree to which our ancestors “believed” in the supernatural once within the storytelling circle they could achieve temporary suspension of any scepticism they may have harboured about it with little effort, especially when guided by the narrator’s use of certain motifs associated with tales of the uncanny and magical.

But the Chambers’s Journal writer was an early Victorian writer. She may have been unhappy about the restrictions imposed by working with a standard plot whose action demanded a fixed ending, one that imposed a solitary (supernatural) reading upon the story. Equally, he or she may have felt that a relatively sophisticated audience would reject a tale too flagrantly glued to a hoary, credulity-stretching folk superstition concerning a materialized Devil, whereas it might appreciate a plot which enable them to retain a measure of scepticism. One major strength of the best Victorian ghost stories is the delicate management of the desire to believe and the desire to rationalise; their authors create a series of events which appear to lay beyond the possibility of explanation in real-world terms, yet simultaneously pretend that of course there must be some such explanation. Frequently, the success or failure of the story depends on this balance, recognizing the width of the gap between supernatural interpretation and rational exegesis.

Besides, the ostensible disadvantages inherent in working with an old, rigid plot structure can prove to be a strength. Any variation upon that plot, but especially a variation in how it is finally resolved, becomes more striking; the piece as a whole will seem more ingenious, more entertaining. The salient point here is that “The Stranger Of The Ball” was written with the assumption that readers would guess what is coming next. We are expected to pick up Bella’s ripeness for punishment, particularly when she utters the unwise promise that she will dance with the – (and here we automatically fill in the unspoken word, “Devil”). Just as certainly will be guess who the handsome mystery-man invoked by her words is meant to be. All this would only be feasible if the audience was already familiar, very familiar, with The Devil on the Dance-Floor prior to reading the story.

The ending’s divergence from expectation threatens to turn Satan in to a set of false whiskers and a Cockney joke, indicating perhaps that the writer is mocking the Dancing Devil legend – at least in part. Alternatively, this comically bathetic gesture towards rationalisation may be mocking itself and the “mystery explained” ending at the same time: as though the writer wanted to say “You’re too sophisticated to believe in the Devil aren’t you? You knew I’d come up with a rational explanation didn’t you? Well, here it is – and isn’t it feeble!”. Either way, this early Victorian short story is wholly dependent on – makes no sense without it – the older legend-type and moreover an audience which was familiar with it. All this evidence that the Devil must have been on the Dance Floor some time – and perhaps a long time – before he put in an appearance as The Stranger Of The Ball in 1847.

Note

  1. Jan Harold Brunvand, The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings. (New York: Norton; London: Pan paperback edition, 1981). See pages 135-136 of the latter. Prof. Brunvand takes his version of “The Devil in the Dance-Hall” fromn Joe Nick Patoski’s “GGGhost Stories” in Texas Monthly (October 1978) pages 134-130. If I omit to mention here the numerous papers on this subject by Mark Glazer, it is chiefly because I suspect that any reader who is seriously interested in this topic will already be family with them. If not, see his “Continuity and Change in Legendry: Two Mexican-American Examples”, in Perspectives on Contemporary Legend: Proceedings of the Conference on Contemporary Legend Sheffield, July 1982, edited by Paul Smith (Sheffield: Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language, University of Sheffield, 1984) pages 108-126. Similarly there is Maria Herrera-Sobek’s “The Devil in the Discotheque: A Semiotic Analysis of a Contemporary Legend”, in Monsters with Iron Teeth: Perspectives on Contemporary Legend III, edited by Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1988) pages 147-157. The footnotes to this paper suggest a number of furthe references which might be followed up.

Sex stories told in pubs

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Brian McConnell | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 1, 1995

Sex stories told by men in public houses are often suspect. Even when there is some public published record of an extrordinary sexual occurrence, there is a suspicion of embroidery by the story-teller.

My elders always assured me that during the 1920s and 1930s the following two stories were witnessed in courts.

An Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was charged with an act of indecency in Hyde Park. The magistrate found him guilty and had an undoubted duty to inquire into any previous criminality by the prisoner before passing sentence. Even so, the police must have been surprised to hear the beak ask, “Anything previously known about the prisoner?”

Another magistrate died while having sexual intercourse with a prostitute. At a subsequent inquest, the coroner asked the doxy, “When did you first think that there was anything wrong with the deceased?” Through her tears, the lady replied, “Just as I thought he was coming, he was…”, sob, sob, “going”.

Stories about people dying during the sexual act, usually couple with a pay-off line, “What a way to go!” are seldom believed. Nor are stories about couples being inescapably joined in the sexual act and taken together on one stretcher by the ambulance men to the hospital to be separated. Perhaps someone should compile a list of such stories and legends in the hope the veracity can be checked.

Before we dismiss all stories of sexual oddities as fiction, however, I offer the attached story from my journalistic alma mater with the old-fashioned mandatory quotation from a named authority to substantiate the account.

South London Press, 18 February 1994.
FREE WILLY! PERVERT PADLOCKS PRIVATES
EXCLUSIVE by RICHARD ALLEN

A red-faced patient found himself in a bit of a tight spot when he limped into hospital – with a padlock stuck on his private parts. Staff at St Thomas’ Hospital, Waterloo, called in firefighters on Tuesday morning after they failed to find a delicate way of freeing the elderly man’s manhood.

But after a bit of trial and error the Lambeth fire crew found the right key in their spare set.
A fire brigade spokesman said, “He was obviously some kind of masochist who put this thing on and then found he didn’t have the key. “He was lucky it was a standard lock, otherwise we would have had to use the cutting equipment.”

Dr Caroline Bradbeer, of St Thomas’ genito-urinary medicine department, said the case was not unusual. She said, “Sometimes people do it because they are trying to improve their erection – but then they find it wont go down again.” “Bathing it in ice cubes can work, if it hasn’t gone to far.”

Three years ago, Lewisham firefighters were called to Queen Mary’s Hospital, Sidcup, to free a 55-year-old man who had a steel ring stuck in a similar way.

In a 90-minute operation a medical team managed to cut him free using an air-driven surgical saw while firefighters held the ring with a mole grip and doused the metal with water to keep it cool.

Folklore in the Third Reich

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Bill Nicolaisen | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 1, 1995

The Nazification of an Academic Discipline: Folklore in the Third Reich. Edited and translated by James R. Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994. xx + 354, bibliography, name index. Obtainable from Open University Press, Celtic Court, 22-26 Ballmoor, Buckingham, MK18 1XW. £32.50. ISBN 0-253-31821-1.

In the late ’forties and early ’fifties, the study of folklore at German academic institutions was in crisis. Hardly any courses were on offer because many of the professors and lecturers who should have been teaching them had, if they had survived the war, not yet been cleared by the “denazification” panels. The crisis did, however, have deeper roots than a temporary lack of qualified instructors; it was a crisis of the very discipline itself which, during the years 1933-1945, and to a certain extent perhaps even earlier, had been hijacked by political ideologists who has successfully seized the element Volk- in Volkskunde to identify it with their notion of their term, as in the slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer” which was used to hammer home their aspirations for one people in one nation under one leader, with all the consequences of territorial acquisition, ethnic cleansing, and the derogatory stigmatisation of “others” which this implied. Immediately after the war, there had even been calls for the removal of the discipline from the academic curriculum.

In English, the word “folk” has never had the connotation of nationality (natio) and chauinistic worldview although when Thoms first coined the term “folklore” in 1846, the concept was not completely free from anti-classical bias and purifying prejudice. Any political baggage which it may have been given to carry since then has been derived generally more from class-conscious and anti-elitist thinking than from narrow-minded, simplistic nationalism. If one wants to understand both the power and the vulnerability of the German Volk therefore, English folk is not a good starting point because it is likely to puzzle and confuse rather than clarify. In this respect, it is also significant that several of the Departments or Institutes of Volkskunde in German universities have in the post-war years changed their names.

The enforced appropriation of both Volk and (to such an extent that an ordinary citizen of the Third Reich was addressed as Volksgenosse or VG, roughly “folk-comrade”) and Volkskunde for arrogant, xenophobic, political purposes in national-socialist Germany left the discipline so tainted that it took many years to imbue it with unchallengeable qualities of academic respectability again, often not surprisingly in a kind of ideological rebound via leftist and Marxist leanings, and it was not until 1986 that the German Folklore Society chose “Volkskunde und Nationalsozialismus” as the central topic of one of its biennial congresses. The German originals of the papers included in the anthology under review were also, with two exceptions, not published until the late ‘eighties or early ‘nineties, with several of them deriving from the congress just mentioned. It takes a considerable amount of temporal distance to create an atmosphere conducive to a constructive intellectual confrontation of such a phenomenon as the coercive, starry-eyed but morally brutalising take-over and conversion of a whole discipline and the materials it studies for the purposes of political advancement and cultural subversion. Evem when much water has flowed under the bridge, objectivity has become a slippery commodity and the emotional response to appalling horror and academic debasement, intermingled with the seduction of good minds and of personal tragedy (the folksong scholar Kurt Huber was shot in 1943) keeps simmering under the surface.

The authors whose articles are included in this volume know this, and it is to be regarded as an act of courage on their part rather than of defensiveness that they have been prepared to tackle problems caused by an as yet mostly unaddressed past. Most of them belong to that articulate group of eminent German and Austrian folklorists who have given the discipline of Folklore a fresh start in great adversity and a new standing in German universities; it is probably also worth mentioning that their presentations and arguments were, in the first place, intended for a German or Austrian audience, and that by having made these papers available in English, Dow and Lixfeld have allowed outside spectators to observe these sensitive and sometimes painful intra-German processes. “It couldn’t happen here” would, however, be a short-sighted and completely inappropriate response. The urge to please one’s political masters, especially if they also hold the purse-strings to finance research and the key to professional appointment and promotion, is not confined to Hitler’s Germany, quite apart from the sad fact that some of the practitioners of Volkskunde in the Third Reich Reich may have shared their masters’ ideologies (“ideological drummers”, as Bausinger calls them).

It is gratifying to see that what we have in the volume under review is not a series of general accusations and denunciations from the safety of time-encrusted positions, of their misguided, perhaps even infamous predecessors by the generation who followed them and had to pull the disciplinary cart out of the mire in which it had been left for them irresponsibly, but a set of genuine, cogently argued expositions by their successors, not so much to come to terms with a disturbing past as to begin to understand it. The authors, many of them now in their fifities and sixties, although some of them are younger, do not, it seems, interpret their task as the apportionment of blame or the condemnation of those most guilty in the intellectual rape of a discipline but as a quest to uncover the fundamental causes in what went wrong, and to elucidate the personal and institutional involvement in this development of tendentious distortion.

The tone for such an outlook was set by Hermann Bausinger, himself only in his teens at the end of the war, as early as 1965 in his article “Nazi Folk Ideology and Folk Research” (pp. 11-33) which to this day has remained the most telling contribution to the subject. The basis of Bausinger’s careful analysis and thoughtful argumentation is the realisation that, in contrast to other disciplines, in Volkskunde the National Socialist phenomenon was not an assault from outside, and introduction of foreign elements or a strengthening of the fringe but a perverting emphasis of the primary ideas within the discipline itself. He also points out that the stress on the national and racial aspects of folk-cultural research and the glorification of peasants and their culture did not begin just in 1933 although the National Socialist Volkskunde did not only continue what the leading representatives of the discipline had developed in the previous decades, either. What was important to the practitioners of National Socialism was, according Bausinger, “the absolute priority of political-ideological practice over any attempt at theoretical, neutral, or objective understanding” (p. 28).

That the seduction of folklore studies and of folklorists did not begin in 1933 is the main point of Hermann Strobach’s paper the title of which asks provocatively: “… but when does prewar begin?” (pp. 55-68). For readers familiar with some of the names and figures involved in Volkskunde in Germany in the late ‘twenties and early ‘thirties this is a fascinating account of personal interactions, maintained or shifting positions, and institutional actions and reactions. For the outsider, judging the scene from a more impersonal and external perspective, the almost unstoppable inevitability of the developments and of the events to come is frightening when viewed with hindsight. — The status of one particular collection, the “Weigel Symbol Archive” of over 50,000 photos and index cards, which was made over to the Folklore Department in the University of Gottingen after World War II, is examined by Rolf Wilhelm Brednich (pp. 97-111). Symbols played an important part in the Third Reich, and Brednich’s article highlights the nature, accretion, and ultimate institutionalisation of symbol research in that period. — The late Peter Assion (pp. 112-134) investigates the role of one of the most notorious Nazi scholar-ideologists, Eugen Fehrle, who was appointed Professor of Folklore at the University of Heidelberg in the mid-thirties, openly promoted the nationalistic policies and racial concepts of the Third Reich, and was intered in a camp for political prisoners from 1946 to 1948 – a biography that was unfortunately not exceptional.

For lack of space, it must suffice to list the authors and titles of the remaining papers: the latter are usually self-explanatory: Helge Gerndt, “Folklore and National Socialism” (pp. 1-10); Wolfgang Emmerich, “The Mythos of Germanic Continuity” (pp. 34-54); Christoph Daxelmuller, “Nazi Conceptions of Culture and the Erasure of Jewish Folklore” (pp. 69-86); Hermann Bausinger, “Folk-National Work during the Third Reich” (pp. 87-96); Olof Bockhorn, “The Battle for the ‘Ostmark'” (pp. 135-155); Helmut Eberhart, “Folklore at the Universities of Graz and Salzburg at the time of the Nazi Takeover” (pp. 156-188); Anke Oesterle, “The Office of Ancestral Inheritance and Folklore Scholarship” (pp. 189-246); Wolfgang Jacobeit, “Confronting National Socialism in the Folklore of the German Democratic Republic” (pp. 247-263); and James R. Dow and Hannjost Lixfeld “Epilogue: Overcoming the Past of National Socialist Folklore” (pp. 264-296). The last of these, written especially for this volume ties many strands together and offers pragmatic and theoretical outlooks for the future. It also makes it clear that German post-war folklorists have not been united in their stance and that a few attempts not so much at “white-washing”, but at deflecting, or softening the criticism of, the past have occurred, although these can be described as minority positions. (This reviewer was present on one of these occasions.)

For anybody interested in the fate of German Volkskunde as an academic subject in the Nazi-period the extensive “Bibliography” included in the volume under review (pp. 308-345) is particularly useful; as is to be expected, most of the items it lists are in German. Dow and Lixfeld have done non-German speaking folklorists a great service by making so many of these seminal papers on the subject available in translation. For anybody familiar with the German originals reading them in English is a somewhat schizophrenic experience and, without wishing to detract from the very real merit of this volume and the hard work the translators have put into it, one cannot help suspecting that, in places, knowledge of the original German is beneficial in sensing some of the fine nuances and delicate verbal variations involved in the treatment of such a sensitive and volatile topic. This is particularly true of the translations of some of the official names of National Socialist institutions and titles. What does anybody, for example, make of “Cultivating Bureau for South German Folk Goods” (Pflegant fur suddeutsches Volksgut) or of “Reich Farmer Bank” (Reichsnahrstand) when the German titles are practically untranslatable, as are concepts like Volklstum, Volkhaftigkeit, or Volksmensch, and the like, which are so central to those aspects of National Socialist ideology which affected German folklore scholaship between 1933 and 1945 most; in their period- and ideology-specificity they are also part of a language which, instead of reflecting reality, became a substitute for it. These almost unavoidable minor flaws apart, Dow and Lixfeld have, through the publication of this anthology, issued an invitation to those who were not there at the time or are not directly affected by the consequences of what happened, to take a closer look themselves and to abstain from simplistic, uninformed, generalised judgements.

Folk Initialese

/ kevinhobbs

Jean-Bruno Renard | Letters to Ambrose merton # 11, 1997

In March 1997, my friend and colleague, Frederic Monneyron, Professor of Comparative Literature at Universitie Stendhal, Grenoble, and an experienced globetrotter, sent me a little list which plays on the initials or names of airline companies. They are all in English and, in all probability, their invention has been spread over a period of thirty years.

  • TAP (Transportos Aeros Portugues: Air Portugal): Take Another Plane.
  • PIA (Pakistani International Airlines): “Please Inform Allah”.
  • BOAC (British Overseas Aircraft Corporation): “Better On A Camel”.
  • El Al (Israeli Airlines): “Every Landing Always Late”.
  • SAS (Scandanavian Air System): “Sex And Sun”.
  • Lufthansa (German Airlines): “Let Us Fuck The Hostesses As No Steward Available”.

If we regard these word plays as ironic, they can be seen as on the one hand critical of flight safety, of their speed and of their respect for timetables, and on the other hand as bawdy. The themes correspond to the popular image of aircraft, the black image of malfunction and danger, the rosy image of exotic eroticism. One finds these themes in narrative folklore, comic stories, rumours, contemporary legends. Airlines and the wordplay on initials share a common feature, they are international, a fact which is reinforced by their use of the language of world transportation, English.

This list set me thinking about “twisted initials” and here is the result.

To begin with some French examples.

  • VFD (Vehicule Ferroviaire du Dauphine: a transport company): “Veritable Feraille Dauphinoise” (Grenoble, 1980-1990). A “ferraille” here means a vehicle ready for scrap. This play on the initials is known only in the region of France where these coaches operate.
  • TATI (a chain of bargain stores): “Tous les Arabes Trainent Ici” (All the Arabs hang about here) or “Trop d’Arabes Trainent Ici” (Too many Arabs hang about here). This xenophobic wordplay alludes to the presence of North African workers in TATI shops.
  • CRS (Compagnies Republicaines de Securite): “Camions/Cars Remplis des Singes” (Lorries/coaches full of monkeys). The CRS is a mobile police unit charged with maintaining public order. They are mainly involved with the surveillance of, and sometimes the repression of, street demonstrations. This twist expresses the classic disparaging attitude of the French people to police authority. The attitude was sometimes expressed in a tougher form in May 1968 with the slogan “CRS = SS”.
  • PTT (Postes, Telegraphes et Telephone, French postal service): “Petit Travail Tranquille” (Quiet little job). A classic quip to mock the employees of PTT, who have the status of civil servants. (Date? The acronym PTT was introduced in 1899.)
  • RATP (Regie Autonome des Transports Parisiens, Paris regional transport authority): “Rentre Avec Tes Pieds” (Go home on foot). Heard in Paris in the 1960s, this gives comic expression to the irritation felt by Parisians in the face of bus and metro strikes.
  • CD (Corps Diplomatique, the distinguishing letters appearing on the registration plates of cars driven by the staff of foreign embassies): “Cornichon Diplome”. In French, “cornichon” literally means a gherkin but it is used figuratively to mean idiot or imbecile. Thus this wordplay can be translated roughly as “Certified idiot”. A handy oath for drivers upset by the behaviour of cars with CD plates.
  • URSS (Union des Republiques Socialistes Sovietique, in English, USSR): “Union Ratatinee des Saucissons Secs” (A shrivelled up union of dried sausages). This joke has given joy to several generations of French school children. I heard it myself in the 1950s. After the fall of the USSR in 1991, this joke is no doubt destined to disappear.

A play on initials was witnessed in the Second World War in Alsace, the region of France annexed by the Third Reich in 1941. Around 130,000 Alsatians were forced to wear German uniforms and serve in the Wehrmacht. These Alsatians turned NSDAP (National Sozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiter Partei) into “Nous Sommes Des Allemands Provisoire” (We are temporary Germans).

Another celebrated play on initials is that concerning the word Nylon. This new textile material was invented in 1937 by chemists from the firm Du Pont de Nemours. The discovery was made public in 1938. Here are two versions of the origin of the name. According to the first, the term was originally “no run”, then distorted phonetically in “nolen”, then “nolon” and finally “nylon”. According to the second version, which is more poetic, the word “nylon” was an acronym forded from the initials of the names of the wives of the chemists who worked to produce it: Nancy, Yvonne, Louella, Olivia, Nina. Whichever it is, the American people twisted “nylon” into the phrases “Now you lousy old Nippons” or “Now you lost old Nippons”. These twists were naturally the expression not only of a feeling of economic and technical victory, since nylon would replace the silk manufactured in the Far East, but also of a deeper anti-Japanese feeling which was very strong in the years up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

The famous morse code signal of distress used throughout the world (three dots, three dashes, three dots) was chosen because of its extreme simplicity. It was not because it corresponded to the letters SOS in the morse alphabet and, not widely known, it was not until much later that it was translated as “Save Our Souls”.

The most recent manifestation of twisting initials as a folklore activity is in the naming of the “crews” of “writers” responsible for the graffiti appearing in the big cities of America and Europe in the 1970s. Here are a few examples:

In New York:

  • CIA: “Crazy Inside Artists”.
  • TNT: “The Nation’s Top”.

In Paris:

  • BBC: “Bad Boys Crew”.
  • COP: “Controle of Paris”.
  • CRS: “Crew Return Style”.
  • DCA: (Defense Contre Avions, Anti-aircraft defence): “Da Criminal Artists”.
  • FBI: “Fabulous Bomb Inability”.
  • MOS (Metal Oxide Semi-conductor): “Master Of Style”.
  • MST (Maladies Sexuellement Transmissibles, Sexually transmitted diseases): “Massacre Sans Tronconneuse” (Massacre without a chainsaw).
  • SAS “Sex And Shit”.
  • SOS “Secret Of Style”.
  • TCA (Taxe sur le Chiffre d’Affaires, Turnover tax): “The Chrome Angelz”.
  • TSA (Technologie de Systemes Automatises): “The Stoned Angelz”.
  • TVA (Taxe a la Valeur Ajoutee, in English, VAT): “The Vaginal Art”.

However, it must be stated that many of the initials used by these groups of “writers” do not correspond to acronyms already in existence. Consequently, it is possible that in some cases, the similarity between the initials used by a “crew” and a pre-existing acronym was simply a coincidence (for example, MOS, TCA or TSA, which are little known and little used acronyms, in contrast to BBC, FBI or MST). Note, by the way, the attraction to Parisian groups of American English, especially employing its slang, in imitation of American popular culture. Note too the appeal of three letter acronyms. As is well known, a ternary rhythm is common in folk products such as tales and songs.

Initials have been known since antiquity. The Hebrews, Greeks and above all the Romans often used abbreviations texts, public or private. Their misuse caused such difficulties in understanding that the emperor Justinian (5th Century A.D.) forbade their use in the Byzantine Empire. Today the abuse of abbreviations is proclaimed by the English expression “alphabet soup”. Specialists in ancient history have concluded that wrongly deciphered initials have caused errors in historical interpretation. It is now established that the Frenchman Jean-Jacques Boissard (1558-1602), who was one of the founders of epigraphy (the science of ancient inscriptions) completed in an erroneous manner numerous incomplete or abbreviated Latin inscriptions which he collected on Roman monuments in Italy.

There also exist anecdotes, real or legendary, about erroneous interpretations of pseudo-antique inscriptions, either made accidentally or provoked by deliberate hoaxers. Larousse’s Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIX siecle recounts some in its article “Inscriptions”.

The Montmartre inscription merits a mention. It was an old block on which the following characters had been engraved:

CHEMI
NDESA
NES

An illustrious scholar, after much patient research, succeeded in producing this brilliant interpretation:
“Carmina Homeri et maronis illustrata nominibus ducum et scriptorum arte nullo exstinguentur saeculo”.
However, a local worthy took the block and read with ease:
“Chemin des anes” (Road for donkeys).

A mistake of the same kind was made by an archaeologist who came across an old crockery plate with the letters POMANS is large capitals. He judged its provenance to be Roman. In order to interpret the inscription, he believed it was necessary to add punctuation; P. O. MANS. S. This he deciphered as “Publii Ovidii manibus sacris” (To the sacred shades of Publius Ovidus). He was beside himself with joy to see, in our part of the world, a monument commemorating Ovid, the author of Metamorphoses. Imagine his mortification when he learned that this piece of pottery was quite simply manufactured in the Champagne region by a certain Monsieur Pomans.

One time, when a member of l’Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres was being examined, he was asked to be so good as to explain a curious little pot, elegant in form, and decorated with the letters M.J.D.D. in relief. The solution was readily apparent. This pot had without a doubt been consecrated to Jupiter and the four letters signified “Magni Jovi Deorum Deo” (To the great Jupiter, god of gods). “Good lord, no”, replied the hoaxer, “That should just read, Moutarde jaune de Dijon!” (Yellow Dijon mustard.)

A learned school was shown the copy of an inscription picked up, so it appeared, from an old Roman fountain. It looked like this:

RES
ER
VO
IR

The explanation is easy, said our scholar after a moment’s reflection. This was an abbreviated inscription which should be read thus: RESpublica ERigere VOluit ad IRrigandum. In other words; The Republic has decided to erect (this monument) for irrigation. Then it was pointed out to the scholar that if one were to read the inscription perpendicularly, one got the French (and indeed, English) word, RESERVOIR. But when did a scholar ever seek a simple interpretation?

With regard to abbreviation, without some knowledge of the background, initials are incomprehensible. No recourse to etymology helps to penetrate the secret of the meaning. The invention of a second meaning for the initials, a hidden message, fits a variety of motives. It may perhaps be a simple play on words intended to amuse. That is the case of the majority of twisted initials which one tells like a riddle, “Do you know what the initials […] stand for?” It may also be a play on words intended to create a secret recognition sign, for erxample, the initials of the “writer” groups in cities. This was no doubt the motivation for the early Christians when they invented the monogram for Christ “Ichthus”, which means “fish” in Greek but which is also the initials “Jesous Christos Theou Uios Soter” (Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour).

I hope that this short note will encourage folklorists, amateur and professional, to collect “twisted initials” and explore this curious form of popular creation.

Note

Sandy Hobbs writes:

I have three points to add. The first is another suggestion I have heard as to the origin of the word “nylon”. Since it was developed as a result of the joint efforts of American and British scientists, it was decided to name it after the two major cities: New York, providing the NY, and London, providing the LON.

My second contribution is to recall, from the 1950s, the suggestion that the letters SPQR found on the standards of Roman legions did not stand for Senatus Populusque Romanus, the senate and people of Rome, as the textbooks claimed. The alternative explanation offered by my Latin teacher was “Small Profit, Quick Returns”, the Romans having been a nation of shopkeepers long before the British. I had the impression that this was an old joke.

Thirdly, may I suggest that “Massacre sans tronconneuse” for MST is a reference to the film Texas Chainsaw Massacre, known in France as Massacre a la Tronconneuse. If so, it must date from 1974 at the earliest.

A Special Harley Davidson

/ kevinhobbs

Sandy Hobbs | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 7, 1996

According to the Dutch newspaper, de Volkskrant, 23 October 1996, the following story had recently been circulating on the Internet. The newspaper refers to it as a “broodje aap“, the name by which contemporary legends are known in the Netherlands. Translation by Lois Hobbs.

A biker rides across the New Hampshire plain and sees, standing by a farm building, an old Harley Davidson. He rings at the adjoining house to ask if the owner of the motorbike wants to sell it. The owner will sell the bike for 800 dollars. Once home, the new owner cannot find the number necessary for a registration certificate. He rings a local Harley dealer and asks which places he should look. That leads to nothing.

As a last resort, he telephones the manufacturer and asks the person on the line to give him details about the performance of the motorcycle, especially about the saddle. He is surprised when the Davidson man asks “Can you look under the bike? See if there is anything written on the under side.” The biker confirms that he can see an engraving “To Elvis, Thanks. Harley Davidson”. Whereupon the Davidson company offer him 350 thousand dollars for it. The owner replies, “I just want to think it over”.

Afterwards, he phoned the Elvis Presley museum at Graceland in Memphis, and asked if the rock star ever had had a Harley. It is explained to him that the Harley Davidson firm had built him four special models by way of a present. Three already stand in the museum. “I have the fourth”, says the new owner. Graceland offers him three million dollars for it.

“I have to think it over.”

Funerary customs among the Nepa

/ kevinhobbs

Bill Ellis | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 19, 1999

There have been some postings recently on the contemporary custom of commemorating those who had died in auto accidents with impromptu roadside shrines. This article appeared in the Hazleton Standard Speaker recently and documents some memorial practices that seem to be related to this complex. Northeastern Pennsylvania (NEPA) is truly an interesting place for folk culture.

Vigil Honors Memory of Edward Speshock Jr.

[Hazleton Standard Speaker, 9 January 1998: 19, 28.]

After 10 years, the memory of Edward Speshock Jr. lives on in the hearts of his family and friends. A candlelight memorial service held Thursday in honor of the Hazleton man proved it.

Nearly 20 people gathered in the Transfiguration Cemetery in West Hazleton to remember Speshock, who was killed Jan. 8, 1988 in an automobile accident. Thursday marked the 10?year anniversary of his death.

The evening service, which lasted about 20 minutes, was conducted by the candlelight each participant held. Several songs, including Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild,” were performed with the help of an acoustic guitar.

Several friends and relatives shared personal stories about “Eddie” and told what they remember most about him. A prayer was also recited.

A number of those gathered ritualistically drank half of the alcohol from a shot glass, and poured the rest on the grave.

But most notably, Evelyn, Speshock’s mother, knelt down and kissed the headstone of her son.

People of all ages attended the service. One young girl at the ceremony was merely a toddler at the time of Speshock’s death, but her age did not stop her from honoring a loved one.

At the end of the service, the friends and family of Edward Speshock Jr. left the cemetery the same way they had arrived: together.

Lost Lives

/ kevinhobbs

Sandy Hobbs | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 22, 2000

David, McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney and Chris Thornton. Lost Lives: The stories of the men and women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles. Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1999, 1630 p. Index.

This is a most unusual book. The authors set out to give an account of every person who has died as a result of the “troubles” in Northern Ireland since the 1960s. The entries are chronological, starting with a first death in June, 1966 and ending with case number 3637 in July 1999. Regrettably this means the work is not definitive, since the deaths continue. The authors seek to set out the facts in calm and measured terms. The book contains statistically analysis classifying both the dead and those responsible for the deaths by religion and other categories. Yet, one can well believe that the authors “shed tears while researching and writing” the book (p. 13) and I cannot imagine any reader failing to be moved by some of the stories which are told in these pages.

This book could be read as a sociological, historical or political document and reviewed accordingly. However, for readers of Ambrose Merton, I wish to draw attention to the fact it contains a great deal of material bearing on the popular culture of Northern Ireland. The deeply felt traditional beliefs which are part of the conflicts in Northern Ireland are in certain respects obvious. They had to be taken into account by David McKittrick and his fellow authors when preparing the book:

“We produced a style guide which, with its regulations and examples, grew into a 12,000-word document. We tried to avoid contentious or disputed words, seeking always usages which would give offence to no one. In this context Northern Ireland’s second largest city defeated us, and we sought refuge in a mixture of an uneasy compromise and random use. In introducing victims we use the word L/Derry; after that, we simply use Londonderry and Derry interchangeably” (p. 19).

The problem they faced was that “Londonderry” is the name favoured by members of the Protestant, Loyalist community and “Derry” is preferred by the Catholic, Republican community. The point may seem trivial to outsiders but not to many of the inhabitants of Northern Ireland. A cultural dispute of this sort lies on a continuum which includes a belief, testified to by many of the cases in the book, that merely to be a member of one or other of these communities would make a person a legitimate target for an assassin.

Many of the entries take for granted an awareness of the assumption made by paramilitary groups that they had a right to enforce “law and order” in their communities. Some deaths appear to have been “punishments” for activities such as drug-dealing or informing. The small photographic sections includes a number of commemorative murals, this form of outdoor art being a prominent feature of the Northern Ireland troubles. There is also a striking photograph of a wake for a man killed while attending a funeral. {Murders committed while the victim is mourning or worshiping have a particular cultural resonance.) His coffin is open and a young child is being shown the corpse.

One of the first victims described in the book (Case No, 3, pp. 28-29) was Matilda Gould, a 77 year old widow, who was a Protestant. It appears that members of the Protestant para-military group, the Ulster Volunteer Forces, intended to set fire to a Catholic owned bar. However, they accidentally fire-bombed the home of Mrs Gould, who happened to live next door. A statement attributed to a man convicted of the murder of a Catholic barman is worth close examination. He was reported as having later pointed to the bar next to Mrs Gould’s home and saying:

“That’s a job I done, but I done a funny wonder. I threw a petrol bomb through the wrong window and an old lady got burned. That’s the window, I put it through there.”

Here we have him acknowledging responsibility for a death. It seems probable that he knew that she was a member of his own religious community. Yet his language habits are so taken for granted that he can use the rhyming slang “funny wonder”, meaning blunder, to refer to his own actions.

Tae a Fert

/ kevinhobbs

Sandy Hobbs | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 22, 2000

Sandy Hobbs
LTAM 22, 2000

This poem has been circulating recently in Paisley as a piece of photocopylore. The first line was missing from the copy supplied to me. However, since this is evidently a parody of Robert Burns’s address to a mouse, it seems likely that it ended in the word “beastie”.

Lurks in yer belly efter the feastie
Just as ye sit doon among yer kin
There sterts to stir and enormous wind*

The neeps and tatties and mushy peas
Stert working like a gentle breeze
But soon the pudding wi sauncie face**
Will have ye blawin all ower the place

Nae matter whit the hell ye dae
A’bodys gonnae have tae pay
Even if ye try to stifle
It’s like a bullet oot a rifle

Hawd yer bum tight tae the chair
Tae try and stop the leakin air
Shifty yersel fae cheek tae cheek
Prae tae God it doesnae reek

But aw yer efforts go assunder
Oot it comes like a clap a thunder
Ricochets aroon the room
Michty me a sonic boom

God almighty it fairly reeks
Hope I huvnae shit ma breeks
Tae the bog I better scurry
Aw whit the hell, its no ma worry

A’body roon aboot me chokin
Wan or two are nearly bokin
I’ll feel better for a while
Cannae help but raise a smile

Wis him! I shout with accusin glower
Alas, too late, hes just keeled ower
Ye dirty bugger they shout and stare
A dinnae feel welcome any mair

Where e’re ye go let yer wind gan’ free
Sounds like just the job for me
Whit a fuss at rabbies perty***
Ower the sake o’ won wee ferty***

* “and” should presumably be “an”.
** the haggis
*** Rabbie’s party, i.e a Burns Supper
**** “won” should presumably be “one”