'I'd never realised that!'

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: Gurney
Date: 20 Jul 11 - 06:48 PM

Doug, Shake hands. I've sung 'Villikins and his Dinah' which incidentally contains the line 'as Villikins vas valkin' the garden about...' depending on who you learned it from.

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: banjoman
Date: 20 Jul 11 - 05:35 AM

I never realised until recently that kettles were not knitted from steel wool or that Santa Clause was invented by Americans

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: David C. Carter
Date: 20 Jul 11 - 05:24 AM

In "Piers Plowman" (1362)the word'cockney'refers to a misshappen egg-as if laid by a cock.Chaucer used the word to mean a mother's favorite.
By the Sixteenth century a cockney was a town-dweller in general and by the early seventeenth century specifically someone born in London-within hearing distance of the Great Bell in Bow.

From: The Tribes Of Britain.
David Miles.



David

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 20 Jul 11 - 02:55 AM

Jennie G ~ That is a fascinating ref to Tom Jones: I had completely forgotten it & it does give an unexpected gloss to the age of the song, which, acc to Wiki, was the first sung by George Leybourne, the famous music-hall singer ~ best known for song 'Champagne Charlie is my name'. I had clerly missed the ref in Fielding & assumed it to be an early cockney music hall piece of the early-ish C19. Have you by any marvellous chance a chapter ref to Tom Jones ~ it's too vast a work to try and locate a ref by skimming & I haven't succeeded in finding it by googling.

~M~

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: Doug Chadwick
Date: 20 Jul 11 - 02:38 AM

The Villikins & Dinah tune, along with John Browns Body, about the best-known & most widely-used tune in folk …..

I looked it up on the net and you're absolutely right!

I know several different songs using that tune. "Villikins & Dinah" is not amongst them, however. In fact, there are many more songs, using this tune, that I don't know than those that I do. I'd never realised that!


DC

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: Doug Chadwick
Date: 20 Jul 11 - 02:03 AM

I must have led a sheltered life.

DC

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: Jim Dixon
Date: 20 Jul 11 - 01:38 AM

I have often seen statements like this at Mudcat:

"That song was recorded by Eric Clapton, IIRC."

For a long time I thought "IIRC" must be one of those honorific abbreviations that some British people put after their names, like OBE or KBE.

Eventually it dawned on me that IIRC means "if I remember correctly."

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 19 Jul 11 - 11:51 PM

DC ~ The Villikins & Dinah tune, along with John Browns Body, about the best-known & most widely-used tune in folk: with the torralay chorus, Sweet Betsy from Pike, Tinned tomatoes. I know of at leat one thread on all the songs anyone could think of set to it.

~M~

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: gnu
Date: 19 Jul 11 - 06:46 PM

"I thought ya had to be born within the sound of the Bow Bells to be a true Cockney."

Once, aye, but they spread eh?

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: JennieG
Date: 19 Jul 11 - 05:47 PM

In the book "Tom Jones" by Henry Fielding, written in the mid 18th century - 1745 or thereabouts - the squire asks his daughter Sophie to sing an old song, the one about Villikins and Dinah.

So the pronunciation is older than 19th cent, and the song well enough known that Fielding could assume his readers were familiar with it.

Cheers
JennieG

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: Doug Chadwick
Date: 19 Jul 11 - 05:24 PM

I have frequently met people who, when I mentioned that 'Villikins' was a C19 cockney pronunciation of Wilkins, have exclaimed,"Good heavens; I have been singing the song for years ......

What I have come to realise is that I don't frequently meet people who sing cockney songs, from whatever century. In fact, I think it is fair to say that I have never knowingly met anyone who sings a song with the name 'Villikins' in it.

DC

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 19 Jul 11 - 11:16 AM

That was once the case, Bruce, but no longer ~~ the wiki entry on Cockney is informative on this matter. The term Bow Bells was always in dispute anyhow: some thought it meant the Church of St Mary le Bow in the City of London, which had a famous peal of bells, others Bow Church in the suburb of Bow further east along the Whitechapel & Mile End Roads {the A11}.

Anyhow, to return to OP, hands up who else had never realised that Dinah's father Villikins was actually called Wikins? & who has any
examples of comparable misunderstandings?, which was what I was after.

Did you know, BTW, that Dinah, the name of Alice's cat in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, was actually the name of one of the cats owned by the Liddell family - Alice Liddell, the daughter of Dr Liddell the Dean of Christ Church Oxford where Dodgson {Carroll} was also a Fellow, being the original Alice to whom he told the stories in the first place; and they actually had another cat called Villikins? One of those time perspectives which blow my mind is that she & I were alive at the same time: I was born in 1932, Alice Liddell died in 1933.

~Michael~

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: GUEST,999
Date: 19 Jul 11 - 09:53 AM

I thought ya had to be born within the sound of the Bow Bells to be a true Cockney.

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 19 Jul 11 - 09:50 AM

You aren't thick, Don. I thought 'C19 cockney' was referring to the postal code where a real cockney would live.

The posh people live in W1, I believe.

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 18 Jul 11 - 01:16 PM

Yes I can remember the duo Cosmotheka doing music hall songs with that Sam Veller thing. I guess at sometime in the 19th century people stop pissing themselves with jollity every time someone substituted a 'V' for a 'W'.

It must have been a fad.

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: Doug Chadwick
Date: 18 Jul 11 - 12:57 PM

Or he my have had his tongue in his cheek.

No. I really am that thick!


DC

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: GUEST,999
Date: 18 Jul 11 - 08:44 AM

"Dangerous case of thread hijack here."

I never realized that!

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: Kevin Sheils
Date: 18 Jul 11 - 08:41 AM

Dangerous case of thread hijack here.

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 18 Jul 11 - 08:32 AM

'Er farver caught rats, an' she sold sprats, all round abaht that qwartah.

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: Kevin Sheils
Date: 18 Jul 11 - 07:37 AM

Well she didn't quite live in Vestminister but on the uvver side of the vater.

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 18 Jul 11 - 07:06 AM

Not long ago in Vestminister, there lived a little ratcatcher's daughter

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: Bert
Date: 18 Jul 11 - 05:53 AM

Ah yes,

I remember my Dad singing..

I live over the widuct
down by the winegar woiks

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: Kevin Sheils
Date: 18 Jul 11 - 03:50 AM

Or he my have had his tongue in his cheek.

Or did you never realise that! ;-)

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 18 Jul 11 - 03:08 AM

Thank you Sandra. I never realised that that was what Doug had never realised...

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: Sandra in Sydney
Date: 18 Jul 11 - 02:54 AM

C19 = 19th century

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 18 Jul 11 - 02:50 AM

Doug

In C19 cockney, the v & the w were transposed at the beginnings of words, so 'very well' would be pronounced 'werry vell"

~~ see dialect of Sam Weller and his father in Dickens' Pickwick Papers. At one point, when Sam gives his name in court as "Sam Veller" and is asked by the judge if that is spelt with a W or a V, old Weller cries out "Spell it with a wee, Me Lord, spell it with a wee."

~M~

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: Doug Chadwick
Date: 18 Jul 11 - 02:43 AM

"cockney", I understand; butI think that if you could explain to me what a "C19" cockney is then my reply will probably be "I never ......"


DC

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: Gurney
Date: 18 Jul 11 - 02:42 AM

I remember the moment when I realised that the River Tems that I'd heard about, and the River Thames that I'd read about, were one and the same. Duh!

I wasn't very old, but I was a regular reader.

Subject: RE: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: Anglo
Date: 18 Jul 11 - 02:08 AM

Ah, yes. Learning from a lute player many years ago, who sang renaissance songs, that "foster" was "forester."

Subject: 'I'd never realised that!'
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 18 Jul 11 - 01:29 AM

Obvious things that folk had never realised ~~

For example, I have frequently met people who, when I mentioned that 'Villikins' was a C19 cockney pronunciation of Wilkins, have exclaimed,"Good heavens; I have been singing the song for years and had never realised that!"

Other examples of such?

~Michael~