All about Jacks
On a day when I can’t think of anything to write about, I turn to my bookshelf and pull down a copy of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable for inspiration. As the cat, Jack, is sitting at my feet I decide to look that name/word up and see what Dr Brewer has to say about it. There are 49 entries and then 19 other side references. Deciding not to bore you with every single one (you can, after all, go and buy your own copy of this invaluable tome), I have picked out a few choice entries that might interest you and interspersed them with equally random images from my ‘to post’ collection.
For example, did you know that a Jack Adams was a fool? I didn’t, and there was no other explanation, so, like a fool, I Googled it and what came up first? ‘Jack Adams Underwear and active wear for men’ and a host of images of semi-clad men the likes of which not even the Grattan catalogue could run to. It’s also an annual hockey league award apparently, but mainly it’s about underwear. Moving on.
Jack-a-dandy (a foppish, bright little fellow – there are a few of them around here) was followed by Jack-a-Lent. The explanation for this is ‘a kind of Aunt Sally thrown at lent.’ So if you have an aunt Sally you now know what to do with her in the run up to next Easter. Apparently there is a reference to this in act III of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Next came Jack among the maids a ladies’ man (quite a few of them around here as well), and Jack-in-a-bottle, a long-tailed titmouse so called because of the shape of its nest. (I am more interested in how a mouse became to be called a tit, but that’s another story). Moving on.
Ah ha! There are plenty of these around the world right now too, a Jack-in-office, a ‘pompous overbearing official who uses his powers unimaginatively’ is how Dr Brewer politely puts it. I just call it Farage and have done.
Here’s my favourite so far, a Jack-in-the-green: ‘A youth who moves about concealed in a wooden framework covered with leaves and boughs as part of the chimney-sweep’s revels on May Day.’ Conjures up all sorts of odd images, mainly ones of military cadets getting up to no good in camouflage gear up chimneys. You may be either saddened or pleased to note that this custom is now obsolete. Oh look, a Jack of Dover is some unidentified ‘eatable’ mentioned by Chaucer in The Cook’s Tale – probably a pie that has been cooked more than once, apparently. Well, if you will eat at motorway service stations…
A couple more: Jack-o’-the-clock, is the carved/painted human figure that, in some old public clocks, used to (or still does) come out to strike the hours on the bell. I didn’t know that. There’s one at Wells Cathedral I am told, where two quarter-jacks strike the quarter-hours and Jack Blandfier strikes the hours. And finally, a Jack out of office – one dismissed or no longer in office which happily brings me back to Farage, though he’s not quite gone yet, he’s still taking EU money for telling it that it’s rubbish. There are a few Jack words I’ve not used that I could use in order to describe that particular dunty, bruss, buffle-head – as they would have said in Kent some time ago. I’ll leave the translation up to you.
