pumpkinstrokemarrow

Just finished 'A Walker in the City' by one Alfred Kazin, noticed above. Rather a splendid (short) memoir of a second generation immigrant from Poland (that is to say, born in the US of parents born in Poland) growing up in somewhere called Brownsville, then on the inhabited margins of New York. There was even the odd chicken wandering about at that time. Made more interesting for me by having been to New York, albeit briefly and not to Brownsville, although I may have passed through it on the way to Far Rockaway, a subway terminus which caught my eye on my last day. On the same visit I did go to Hester Street, prompted by a rather good film of the same name, to find that the street had been taken over by, I think, Koreans and Vietnamese. Not a trace of the Jewish community which had thrived there between the wars. So maybe I would not have found too much of the community in Brownsville either. Who it seems, were prone to poke fun at people who came from different parts of Poland than they did, with their funny accents. People from Warsaw, for example. Kazin was striking for the way he devoured books from the well stocked public libraries of his day. I have read plenty of books in my time but I never had a passion for books of the sort that he describes. I read books in the first place because my parents told me that it was good for me and came to like them later; but no passion.

But I do have a fascination with words, something my mother used to say that she had although I cannot remember any evidence of this fascination. So yesterday, it was claimed in TB that the word pikey, in Epsom an abusive word applied to persons, with traveller or gipsy undertones, came from the pikemen who protected the longbowmen in our battles against the French. At the time I thought this all sounded a bit unlikely and so this morning I checked. Meaning 1 of piker is a chap who weilds a pike, from the French. Meaning 2 is a thief, a variant of picker, someone who picks things up that he or she should not. Meaning 3 is slang for a turnpike and by extension perhaps someone who hangs around the turnpike, a vagrant or gypsy. Variant pikey.

We then turn to turnpike which turns out to be a wooden contraption used as a barrier against cavalry. A central horizontal spar, maybe 15 feet long and 6 inches in diameter, with spiked posts maybe 5 feet long socketted into it at short intervals, arranged in an outward facing spiral, which could then be rolled around the battlefield. Not something a horse would want to charge into or attempt to jump over. No mention of these things being used at Agincourt or anywhere like that, but we are headed for TB's allegation. Then by extension to name the barriers put across toll roads, aka turnpike roads, so that you could collect the tolls.

So while I now think that the TB allegation is a bit wide of the mark, it is not as silly as I first thought. I wonder where it came from? Some television quiz show? A pub quiz? I shall have to see my source again.