It’s 1903. Mary-Jacobine McRory, a young Canadian, is abroad enjoying “the London Season.” From Robertson Davies’s What’s Bred in the Bone (1985), the second volume of The Cornish Trilogy :
Monday, October 26, 2020
Deevie and diskey
But no diskey in the OED .
Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1970) glosses deevie/deevy/dev(e)y as a perversion (!) of divvy and gives the meanings “delightful, charming.” Partridge notes 1900–c. 1907 as the time of the word’s vogue.
But no diskey in Partridge.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang has deevie, “wonderful, excellent.” But here, too, no diskey.
You’ve probably already guessed what the adjective diskie must mean. But is it authentic slang, or something Robertson Davies made up? Because he does at times invent. Google Books has the answer. Here’s a small catalogue of slang words from the smart set:
[Sydney Brooks, “The Smart Set in England.” Harper’s Weekly, February 27, 1904.]I wish the scan were more readable. I will note that nightie, pals, and undies are still with us. And diskie, yes, means “disgusting.” And yes, twe-est is “dearest,” and my twee meant “my dear.” The mnystery here is cassies. Or is it cossies ?
One more source, pairing the words as Davies does:
[Clement Scott, “The Smart Set and the Stage.” The Smart Set, April 1900.]I don’t know how Davies came by his knowledge of deevie and diskey (maybe by reading The Smart Set ?), but I’d like to think he would admire a reader’s effort to track down both words.
Related reading
All OCA Robertson Davies posts (Pinboard)
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comments: 4
My admittedly uninformed guess at how RD came by his knowledge of deevie and diskey is that Ontario was still something a bastion of a certain type of Englishness - for good or bad - when he was a boy and young adult. He likely absorbed it from the local culture and from his travels abroad.
The only thing that would make me wonder about that is that the words seemed to enjoy only brief popularity. There’s so little evidence of diskie. Then again, I’ve learned very little of RD’s life.
I always liked "What's Bred in the Bone" best of that trilogy. I should go back to that. Pair the novel with Orson Welles' "F is for Fake" (Criterion Collection) and you've got yourself a weekend.
Davies dearly loved the theatre, loved acting, and would have stayed in England had he not been pulled home to the backwaters of Ontario to work on his father's newspapers as an editor. I think he viewed those years as a bit of a waste. His ambition was always to be a playwright but he never quite succeeded in that. He waited until his parents were dead before he started writing the really interesting books, starting with the Deptford Trilogy. He knew what he wrote would have upset them so he held back out of respect for them.
I think if you search on Robertson Davies on Youtube you'll find some interviews of him in his prime, full of his somewhat dandified pomp and cultivated presentation (the beard! the hair!).
He had a love of and nostalgia for, I think, the Victorian and Edwardian eras of literature and theater. He may have heard those words in England or maybe even in the backwaters of Ontario, and squirreled them away for deployment later. He said somewhere that people thought he was full of esoteric and antique knowledge as displayed in his novels, but he said it actually reflected how narrow his interests were.
During one of my periods of unemployment, I read all the Davies novels in sequence, then went on to his biography, his collected letters, and some of his essay collections. I don't know why!
Elaine and I are far enough along in the novel to have suspected that fakes will play a part. We’ll see. She read this trilogy thirty years ago but remembers very little of it, except that it was a pleasure. Maybe we’ll end up reading everything else too.
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